The "implicit assumption" here is the goal of surviving as a technological species long enough so that we eventually are able to overcome the limits of this single planet and put down roots elsewhere.
This won't stop us worrying. When we've colonised the galaxy we'll stop worrying about threats to single planets and start worrying about threats to the galaxy as a whole.
The problem is that the author sees a PDA and thinks it's a phone with extra features. He could just as well have seen a phone and thought it was a watch with extra features - after all it's the method most of us use to keep track of time. But if he'd told us to get rid of our expensive mobile phone and just use a cheap watch we'd have reacted... well, a lot like how we have.
There is absolutely no proof Iran took control of the drone remotely. None-Nada-Zip. Please provide any evidence that supports your statement.
The facts we have so far are:
The US has lost a drone over Iran (confirmed by both sides, so very likely true).
The Iranians have shown a drone-shaped object on television, at least superficially intact.
The Iranians claim that they captured the drone by electronically hijacking its command codes.
There are other explanations for these facts, but I can't think of one that is more likely than the naive explanation: that Iran did exactly what it says it did. So while it's far from certain they are telling the truth, it's also probably misleading to say there is no evidence. I would score this as medium-weak evidence, it's certainly more than nothing.
mobiles are becoming powerful enough to do most of the tasks that desktops used to do.
No, they're not. They're becoming powerful enough to check your email and play Farmville, which is all that many people used to do with their PCs; they're not much good for actual productive work.
Most actual productive work needs very little processing grunt. If you can edit a Word document, make a PowerPoint presentation and turn data into a chart in Excel then a lot of people's jobs are covered. The bottleneck is input and output - mostly screens and keyboards - rather than CPU.
That said, laptops permanently tethered to a particular desk are every bit as funny as four-wheel-drive vehicles that never leave suburbia.
Most modern cell phones can be remotely turned on, often without telling the user it's on.
If I understand correctly, what you mean is that most/all modern cell phones can easily be modified to make that possible, but that the vast bulk of cell phones have not been so modified.
the purpose for knowing Latin was that is was supposed to be the universal language of scholars
Those days were long gone by 1869. The Latin and Greek classics are in that exam because they were seen as valuable in themselves, the same way Shakespeare is taught in our schools.
The focus on specifics is interesting - you're expected to be able to reproduce a map of Anabasis. Some non-English-speaking countries, Japan for instance, still have exams like this, where you reproduce slabs of information about a book rather than analysing it.
I don't think there was an international language for scholars in 1869. French was the language of international affairs and maybe of literature. German would become very important in science but maybe wasn't there yet. Italian and German both had deep roots in music and Italian, at least, in the arts. English mattered but I'm not sure how. I don't think any of them was dominant, it's a sort of interregnum for lingua francae, after the dominance of French had faded but before English replaced it.
There's an account written about 1800 of the War of the Spanish Succession (around 1710), which mentions Marlborough and the French general had to use an interpreter for their parley because Marlborough didn't speak French. It remarks that this feels amazing from the viewpoint of 1800, because in 1800 anyone educated and civilised speaks French. We've been through that cycle one more time since 1800. 1710 and 1869 are the troughs of the cycle.
Sounds like the real problem here was an inability to appeal. Ideally she should have been able to ask why she was being excluded and contest it, in which case the crime would have quickly shown up. The reason given for exclusion in TFA is absurdly vague, but I hope and believe something more specific appeared in her file. Problems like this often arise because of security, if that happened in this case then this is yet another parable about transparency.
I wonder what they can hit this guy with in a criminal case. Perjury?
The article illustrates why we don't love Stephenson for his engineering.
These rockets, which were known as V-2s, were worse than useless from a military standpoint
True enough, but rocket development doesn't depend on the V-2 alone. On the other side of Europe, for instance, we have the Russians hurling Katyushas. The V-2 was a direct development of German Army experience with rocket artillery.
Atomic bombs turned out to be expensive, dirty, controversial, and of limited military use
Really? There's no military use for an explosion in the kiloton range? How about, just as an example, dropping it on an enemy army headquarters?
The rockets of the 1950s and 1960s were so expensive, and yet so inaccurate, that their only effective military use was lobbing bombs of inconceivably vast destructive power in the general direction of large urban areas.
Katyusha again.
because those bombs were so destructive (making it tricky to drop them out of a manned aircraft without killing the crew)
Again, preposterous. Piston-engined propeller planes dropped atomic bombs without serious issue. Turbojets and turbofans just made it even easier.
I love a lot of what Stephenson does, but societal and technological reasonableness isn't his focus. This article reads a lot like his books.
What happened was that Hitler went to his scientists and said, "How do I turn London into rubble?" And the scientists who worked for the Luftwaffe said, "Pilotless planes!" because that was the sort of technology they had and if it was chosen they would be in charge. And the scientists who worked for the Army said either, "A giant rocket!" or "A giant gun!" for the same reasons. And Hitler said, "Good, good, do all of those things." So instead of focus on one solution the Germans built the V-1, the V-2 *and* the V-3. And they all worked, more or less, though maybe none of them was a really good idea.
In reality, what difference is there between Communism and Fascism? Does it make a difference whether a small elite group rules the state which rules commerce, or whether a small elite group rules commerce which rules the state?
I don't think this is a good description of fascism. At least none of the well-known fascist states (Third Reich, Mussolini's Italy, Franco's Spain) seems to fit this model. Two were led by demagogue politicians, one by a general. In none of them was the government composed of wealthy industrialists. The industrialists might be co-opted but they were junior partners to political leaders. I think these statements also apply to less successful fascist groups, e.g. Moseley's BUF.
As suggestions of fascism's defining characteristics, how about authoritarianism (unaccountability), totalitarianism (they take over many aspects of life that in other systems are outside government control), nationalism (they want their particular state and people to be strong - add religion for Spain) and social conservatism.
Communism is the first two but often isn't the last two. The USSR, for example, switched from not particularly nationalist in 1940 to much more nationalist in 1942.
Explain the Soviet Union's sojourn in the deserts of Afghanistan, then. They didn't seem to have a problem with civilian casualties.
And they won. Well, more or less. It depends what "win" means to you, and Clausewitz's ghost must be bitterly disappointed how rarely that's mentioned.
But the Soviet Union managed to establish a friendly government in Afghanistan which could survive without Soviet troops needing to do its fighting. Which is pretty much what the USSR wanted. So I think it's fair to say the USSR did eventually win that war.
Two issues tarnished that victory. First, it cost way more than they'd expected it would, hastening the USSR's collapse. Second, the state they set up depended on the Soviet Union for trade etc. so when the USSR went belly-up it took Afghanistan with it.
But the "No one can win in Afghanistan" paradigm is bogus. It's been done.
All the Australian robots realised they were in Adelaide and were quite happy to let the place get blown to bits.
Nonsense! Robots love Adelaide. You didn't think the place was designed for humans, did you? The city's laid out in a nice rational square, the nasty rust-making river is damn-near non-existent and nothing ever happens. It's the sort of place an AI can sit back, chill out and let its hard drive spin down because it knows it won't be needing to make note of anything.
1. PowerPoint is at least broken up into pages shaped like the display screen. Unlike PDF, which normally is broken up into portait pages and displayed on a landscape monitor.
2. What PowerPoint and PDF have in common is that they don't expect the viewer(s) to have any control over the presentation (font, font size, etc.). Because neither is intended for a single person to read through a document.
3. PowerPoint inherited the paradigm of the overhead projector. PDF inherited the paradigm of the printed document.
I guess I was imprecise and thanks for pointing that out.
I can't see how anyone can look at PDF and think its designer thought on-screen display was its main application. It's comically ill-suited, compared even with HTML or Word format. Its only real "advantage" is the inconvenience of editing it.
I'm sure Adobe's happy at PDF's wide use and I'd be surprised to hear them discourage it. But inspection of the PDF format strongly suggests the designer imagined it being printed. If it was intended for screen viewing, why would it be broken up into pages?
I don't think PDF was ever intended to be an editable format, that's trying to pound a square peg in a round hole. It's supposed to be a distribution format.
PDF's principal raison d'etre is distribution for printing. It's used as distribution for on-screen viewing which is definitely round peg in square hole. In fact it's practically triangular peg in hole shaped like Kim Kardashian. I think the reason it's popular is security by inconvenience - most people don't have the tools to edit a PDF. It's probably the most overused format in the world.
Early C20 anarchists mostly focused on heads of state, or at least power elites. They weren't like early C21 al-qaeda, which engages in assassination but is also interested in killing basically ordinary people. Unless the steamer was carrying very important people a pat-down sounds like security theatre.
it probably relates to a previous crime the we do not know.
Doesn't sound like it to me. The appellate judge writes, "...absent any connection between J.J.'s criminal history and the blanket Internet ban, there is no support for the People's claim that it is properly related to future criminality" and "There is nothing in the undisputed record to suggest J.J. used instant messaging or social networking sites to obtain the stolen motorcycle or drugs."
It sounds more like someone's idea of a standard operating procedure - perhaps they've noticed a correlation between chat room use and future criminality, so they've decided to ban it every chance they get, in the tradition of zero tolerance policing.
The probation conditions seem quite unreasonable to me. I'm surprised the court struck down as little as they did.
The US government wants to encourage as much domestic production as is reasonably possible
It's not obvious to me the US government should want to maximise production. If we extract oil as soon as it's economical at zero royalty then we're effectively throwing the oil away because we're paying as much to extract it as it's worth to us when we have. If we wait, perhaps technology will make that oil extractable at lower cost and we'll be able to get real value from it. Perhaps they should be striving to maximise some other metric.
Slashdot Mirror
there are plenty of "devices running cold fusion"
Well, yes, muon catalysis. But the NASA page mentions palladium. So it isn't talking about muon catalysis and Oligonicella has a point.
The "implicit assumption" here is the goal of surviving as a technological species long enough so that we eventually are able to overcome the limits of this single planet and put down roots elsewhere.
This won't stop us worrying. When we've colonised the galaxy we'll stop worrying about threats to single planets and start worrying about threats to the galaxy as a whole.
The problem is that the author sees a PDA and thinks it's a phone with extra features. He could just as well have seen a phone and thought it was a watch with extra features - after all it's the method most of us use to keep track of time. But if he'd told us to get rid of our expensive mobile phone and just use a cheap watch we'd have reacted ... well, a lot like how we have.
is anyone so naive that they believe the drones with advanced technology do not have self-destruct capabilities
A few answers spring to mind:
There is absolutely no proof Iran took control of the drone remotely. None-Nada-Zip. Please provide any evidence that supports your statement.
The facts we have so far are:
There are other explanations for these facts, but I can't think of one that is more likely than the naive explanation: that Iran did exactly what it says it did. So while it's far from certain they are telling the truth, it's also probably misleading to say there is no evidence. I would score this as medium-weak evidence, it's certainly more than nothing.
mobiles are becoming powerful enough to do most of the tasks that desktops used to do.
No, they're not. They're becoming powerful enough to check your email and play Farmville, which is all that many people used to do with their PCs; they're not much good for actual productive work.
Most actual productive work needs very little processing grunt. If you can edit a Word document, make a PowerPoint presentation and turn data into a chart in Excel then a lot of people's jobs are covered. The bottleneck is input and output - mostly screens and keyboards - rather than CPU.
That said, laptops permanently tethered to a particular desk are every bit as funny as four-wheel-drive vehicles that never leave suburbia.
Most modern cell phones can be remotely turned on, often without telling the user it's on.
If I understand correctly, what you mean is that most/all modern cell phones can easily be modified to make that possible, but that the vast bulk of cell phones have not been so modified.
the purpose for knowing Latin was that is was supposed to be the universal language of scholars
Those days were long gone by 1869. The Latin and Greek classics are in that exam because they were seen as valuable in themselves, the same way Shakespeare is taught in our schools.
The focus on specifics is interesting - you're expected to be able to reproduce a map of Anabasis. Some non-English-speaking countries, Japan for instance, still have exams like this, where you reproduce slabs of information about a book rather than analysing it.
I don't think there was an international language for scholars in 1869. French was the language of international affairs and maybe of literature. German would become very important in science but maybe wasn't there yet. Italian and German both had deep roots in music and Italian, at least, in the arts. English mattered but I'm not sure how. I don't think any of them was dominant, it's a sort of interregnum for lingua francae, after the dominance of French had faded but before English replaced it.
There's an account written about 1800 of the War of the Spanish Succession (around 1710), which mentions Marlborough and the French general had to use an interpreter for their parley because Marlborough didn't speak French. It remarks that this feels amazing from the viewpoint of 1800, because in 1800 anyone educated and civilised speaks French. We've been through that cycle one more time since 1800. 1710 and 1869 are the troughs of the cycle.
Sounds like the real problem here was an inability to appeal. Ideally she should have been able to ask why she was being excluded and contest it, in which case the crime would have quickly shown up. The reason given for exclusion in TFA is absurdly vague, but I hope and believe something more specific appeared in her file. Problems like this often arise because of security, if that happened in this case then this is yet another parable about transparency.
I wonder what they can hit this guy with in a criminal case. Perjury?
The article illustrates why we don't love Stephenson for his engineering.
These rockets, which were known as V-2s, were worse than useless from a military standpoint
True enough, but rocket development doesn't depend on the V-2 alone. On the other side of Europe, for instance, we have the Russians hurling Katyushas. The V-2 was a direct development of German Army experience with rocket artillery.
Atomic bombs turned out to be expensive, dirty, controversial, and of limited military use
Really? There's no military use for an explosion in the kiloton range? How about, just as an example, dropping it on an enemy army headquarters?
The rockets of the 1950s and 1960s were so expensive, and yet so inaccurate, that their only effective military use was lobbing bombs of inconceivably vast destructive power in the general direction of large urban areas.
Katyusha again.
because those bombs were so destructive (making it tricky to drop them out of a manned aircraft without killing the crew)
Again, preposterous. Piston-engined propeller planes dropped atomic bombs without serious issue. Turbojets and turbofans just made it even easier.
I love a lot of what Stephenson does, but societal and technological reasonableness isn't his focus. This article reads a lot like his books.
What happened was that Hitler went to his scientists and said, "How do I turn London into rubble?" And the scientists who worked for the Luftwaffe said, "Pilotless planes!" because that was the sort of technology they had and if it was chosen they would be in charge. And the scientists who worked for the Army said either, "A giant rocket!" or "A giant gun!" for the same reasons. And Hitler said, "Good, good, do all of those things." So instead of focus on one solution the Germans built the V-1, the V-2 *and* the V-3. And they all worked, more or less, though maybe none of them was a really good idea.
In reality, what difference is there between Communism and Fascism? Does it make a difference whether a small elite group rules the state which rules commerce, or whether a small elite group rules commerce which rules the state?
I don't think this is a good description of fascism. At least none of the well-known fascist states (Third Reich, Mussolini's Italy, Franco's Spain) seems to fit this model. Two were led by demagogue politicians, one by a general. In none of them was the government composed of wealthy industrialists. The industrialists might be co-opted but they were junior partners to political leaders. I think these statements also apply to less successful fascist groups, e.g. Moseley's BUF.
As suggestions of fascism's defining characteristics, how about authoritarianism (unaccountability), totalitarianism (they take over many aspects of life that in other systems are outside government control), nationalism (they want their particular state and people to be strong - add religion for Spain) and social conservatism.
Communism is the first two but often isn't the last two. The USSR, for example, switched from not particularly nationalist in 1940 to much more nationalist in 1942.
Everyone's goal should be to produce more quality stuff/experience/knowledge/wisdom than they consume.
Are you seriously suggesting everyone should, e.g., write more than they read?
It's unclear to me what "consume" means in the context of e.g. wisdom, anyway.
The argument falls down because culture is WORM - written once but potentially read by many.
Explain the Soviet Union's sojourn in the deserts of Afghanistan, then. They didn't seem to have a problem with civilian casualties.
And they won. Well, more or less. It depends what "win" means to you, and Clausewitz's ghost must be bitterly disappointed how rarely that's mentioned.
But the Soviet Union managed to establish a friendly government in Afghanistan which could survive without Soviet troops needing to do its fighting. Which is pretty much what the USSR wanted. So I think it's fair to say the USSR did eventually win that war.
Two issues tarnished that victory. First, it cost way more than they'd expected it would, hastening the USSR's collapse. Second, the state they set up depended on the Soviet Union for trade etc. so when the USSR went belly-up it took Afghanistan with it.
But the "No one can win in Afghanistan" paradigm is bogus. It's been done.
All the Australian robots realised they were in Adelaide and were quite happy to let the place get blown to bits.
Nonsense! Robots love Adelaide. You didn't think the place was designed for humans, did you? The city's laid out in a nice rational square, the nasty rust-making river is damn-near non-existent and nothing ever happens. It's the sort of place an AI can sit back, chill out and let its hard drive spin down because it knows it won't be needing to make note of anything.
A few answers to this.
1. PowerPoint is at least broken up into pages shaped like the display screen. Unlike PDF, which normally is broken up into portait pages and displayed on a landscape monitor.
2. What PowerPoint and PDF have in common is that they don't expect the viewer(s) to have any control over the presentation (font, font size, etc.). Because neither is intended for a single person to read through a document.
3. PowerPoint inherited the paradigm of the overhead projector. PDF inherited the paradigm of the printed document.
I guess I was imprecise and thanks for pointing that out.
I can't see how anyone can look at PDF and think its designer thought on-screen display was its main application. It's comically ill-suited, compared even with HTML or Word format. Its only real "advantage" is the inconvenience of editing it.
I'm sure Adobe's happy at PDF's wide use and I'd be surprised to hear them discourage it. But inspection of the PDF format strongly suggests the designer imagined it being printed. If it was intended for screen viewing, why would it be broken up into pages?
I don't think PDF was ever intended to be an editable format, that's trying to pound a square peg in a round hole. It's supposed to be a distribution format.
PDF's principal raison d'etre is distribution for printing. It's used as distribution for on-screen viewing which is definitely round peg in square hole. In fact it's practically triangular peg in hole shaped like Kim Kardashian. I think the reason it's popular is security by inconvenience - most people don't have the tools to edit a PDF. It's probably the most overused format in the world.
Early C20 anarchists mostly focused on heads of state, or at least power elites. They weren't like early C21 al-qaeda, which engages in assassination but is also interested in killing basically ordinary people. Unless the steamer was carrying very important people a pat-down sounds like security theatre.
Perhaps they are from the distant future and think mobile phones are more or less the right level of technology, so they brought one to blend in.
And if you're talking to someone and they don't say anything for a while, you might ask, "Are you shitting me?"
it probably relates to a previous crime the we do not know.
Doesn't sound like it to me. The appellate judge writes, "...absent any connection between J.J.'s criminal history and the blanket Internet ban, there is no support for the People's claim that it is properly related to future criminality" and "There is nothing in the undisputed record to suggest J.J. used instant messaging or social networking sites to obtain the stolen motorcycle or drugs."
It sounds more like someone's idea of a standard operating procedure - perhaps they've noticed a correlation between chat room use and future criminality, so they've decided to ban it every chance they get, in the tradition of zero tolerance policing.
The probation conditions seem quite unreasonable to me. I'm surprised the court struck down as little as they did.
It's not the same concept but "malcontent" deserves to be coined.
Stop making it bigger! Start making it faster!
What about harder and stronger?
How about a compromise? We'll make it faster and stronger, I'll throw in better, and it will only cost you six million dollars.
The US government wants to encourage as much domestic production as is reasonably possible
It's not obvious to me the US government should want to maximise production. If we extract oil as soon as it's economical at zero royalty then we're effectively throwing the oil away because we're paying as much to extract it as it's worth to us when we have. If we wait, perhaps technology will make that oil extractable at lower cost and we'll be able to get real value from it. Perhaps they should be striving to maximise some other metric.