he was sitting at a stop sign with his foot in the brake when the engine revved. it was NOT the floor mat.
It can still be a mechanical failure, rather than a software one. For example, you could get a short circuit in whatever sensor reads the accelerator position. "Floor mat" makes for a convenient shorthand for all such possible problems.
Seriously, software has bugs. Mecanical throttle linkages can stick, too. Life has risks.
Life has risks. That in no way justifies bad workmanship on a vital item. And if enough people try to use such an excuse, the end result will be regulation.
As long as people continue to give the terrorists a free pass on their violence by blaming the victims it will never stop. Every terrorist group or totalitarian leader on the planet is always given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the atrocities they commit.
When the Allies deposed Hitler, they did so with violence. Were they terrorists? No, they were military forces waging one of the most justifiable campaigns in human history. What about French Resistance, who posed as civilians and tried to oust a foreign conqueror from their homeland? Probably not. What about the commando who sank a passenger ferry carrying heavy water for German atomic bomb program in Norway? Sure, civilians died, but denying Nazis the atomic bomb was kinda important. So how about Iraqi insurgents, who posed as civilians and tried to oust a foreign conqueror from their homeland? Or Obama and the drone assasinations? Or the people rioting in Ukraine
It doesn't help that "terrorist" is used as the boogeyman nowadays, so you can't know if it refers to someone committing atrocities or someone airing your dear leaders dirty laundry.
There is a new technology that makes it impossible to lie in court or when interviewed by police.
Again?
It seems that the muscles that control the voice box move even when you only think a thought instead of speaking it outloud.
So learn to meditate and let your mind be as still as a crystal lake. Or a stagnant cesspool. Depends on what you're questioned for and whether you're guilty, I guess.
I wonder how society would do if the truth were always available for all to see.
It is, usually. Some details might be less than obvious sometimes, but most social interactions where power is involved are a morbid little dance where everyone knows exactly what's going on and do their utmost to avoid admitting it.
This is going to compete with hydraulic cylinders and pumps or winches and cables, not human muscles.
No, it won't. One of the nice things about hydraulics is that when you get the load where you want it, just shut the valve and it stays right there. And cables are easy to secure with a simple brake. This thing, on the other hand, requires you to keep pumping heat - and actively regulate it - to stay at the desired length.
There might be use for this thing, for example in a mechanically simple heat engine, but it doesn't even remotely compete with hydraulics.
My thing is, why do we complain at all about who makes how much?
Because if you indoctrinate people into believing income should be earned, they don't conveniently forget all about that when it comes to your income. CEOs are not perceived as pulling their weight, producing nothing but seemingly endless bankruptcies and layoffs, so all that "welfare queen" rhetoric is now turning against them.
I mean, it isn't really a zero sum game.
Of course income is a zero-sum game. Economy produces a certain amount of value per year. If your share of the pie grows, mine must shrink. And if your share is perceived to be unfairly large, then you can expect other people to act against you, driven by both self-interest and a desire to right an apparent wrong.
Of course it's possible to justify larger share as an incentive to grow the pie a a whole. The problem is, the CEOs haven't done so. The 1% are the modern nobility; the accusations about overcompensation are simply the warning rumbles of a good old peasant revolution every king who fails continuously risks facing.
whats.app had absolutely no intellectual property and it would take less than 1 million dollars to produce a polished work-alike. All the Facebook bought was it's customer list, nearly all of which probably already use facebook.
No, what Facebook bought was a lack of a competitor. Facebook is, at the core, a wiretapped communication medium that sells analyses of the aggregate wiretapped data. Every alternative communication channel competes with them.
What worries me about this sort of knowledge, is that it could make it possible for political leaders to keep the masses working their asses off just above the breadline.
"Just above breadline" is also known as "living wage", and is a bleeding heart liberal position, verging on outright communism. Why do you hate freedom so much, comrade?
But they can avoid pushing it so far that they get the kind of political activism that might result in regime change.
I wouldn't worry about it too much. There are plenty of malicious imbeciles, both in Washington and here on Slashdot, who oppose welfare and/or minimum wage on ideological grounds and apparently think people who can't afford food will simply quietly die.
I'm all for privacy on your property. But if you're in public, assume you're taped. Chances are you already are, and you just don't realize it.
And because you must assume you are under constant surveillance, you must refrain from doing or saying anything. After all, you never know what political opinion a potential employer might take offence at when it pops out of Google search, or might be grounds to deny you security clearance, or make you a suspected potential terrorist, or whatever. An atmosphere of fear that chills any dissent is pretty much the definition of tyranny.
Industrial Age saw some truly horrible things that resulted from applying concepts from an earlier era into the new one without considering how the new capabilities expanded the potential for horror exponentially. We stand at the dawn of the Information Era; perhaps it might make sense to learn from past mistakes and adapt our concept of privacy pre-emptively rather than go through something like Fascism or Communism again?
Then why are towns that set up their own ISP getting it shut down?
Because if an area deemed unprofitable by a cable company shows it can be done, then maybe the residents in a profitable area want one as well - at which point they'd no longer be a captive audience.
And of course there are the types who are against any services provided by the public sector for ideological or economic reasons. They have a vested interests to sabotage even - or especially - succesful public projects, since those might be used as examples when arguing for future projects.
I would add -- internet "trolling" is often the result of an anonymous or pseudonymous environment, where you are held less accountable for your actions.
Thus you feel safe to express your actual view on the matter without fear of (meaningful) retaliation from powers that be. The label "troll" is then used as an attempt to discredit this view, either to squash any perceived threat by the higher-ups or to protect their personal worldview from challenge by the grassroot members. This is typical, if primitive, human social behaviour.
Because the truth is that even truly anonymous *chans on Tor have surprisingly little trolling, despite being Vein diagram intersection of every possible contributing factor. It's spam that's the problem, and while that certainly requires indifference to the results to others as an enabler, it's not motivated by it.
Well, ok, but how many PHB positions can you create before the economy can't carry them anymore?
Put them into a ring. With enough layers of PHBs managing PHBs, you can have the "lowest" layer mange the "highest". The game of broken phone inherent in disorganizations makes sure orders and reports are utterly unrecognizable when they pass by the same person again.
But maybe you want to run slow memory hogs with pointeritis?, like interpreted dynamic languages and their runtime.
If you do, and still care about pointer-size optimizations, then clearly your quest for performance is extremely serious and well-informed and should be treated that way by kernel and distribution makers.
There is little attention given to the idea because it's a bad idea. The only advantage x32 gets you is smaller pointers. That's nice, but unless your data structures have a fatal case of pointeritis it's pretty much pointless, and if they have, your program is going to be a slow memory hog no matter what.
Also, 64-bit virtual memory space allows such niceties as memory mapping large files, thus working on them directly on the cache rather than duplicating data in an in-application buffer.
But there will always be luxury items that will NOT be free.
No, there won't. Not when it's impossible to discern them from copies.
So basically, we'll finally be able to download a car. Or would be, if the MAFIAA didn't stand in the way. Not that that makes much difference, judging by how ineffective they have been this far...
So, to get a realistic picture of how a future with replicators will work, look at the Internet: prestige is everything, and you get prestige by creating things. So... pretty much Star Trek.
If a robot can automatically replicate, it can automatically replicate completely out of control.
No, because replication requires energy. A self-replicating robot can't just convert sand into new parts for the same reason the self-replicating nanobots you consist of can't: it requires absurd amounts of energy. A rogue robot invasion can only occur in an environment where energy is supplied externally, and dies off the second it breaks the power systems, which is why cancer patients don't leave behind Lovecraftian monster tumours which then proceed to eat cities.
This is something these horror scenarios always ignore: the planet is full of self-replicating machines. The planet has been full of self-replicating machines waging an outright war on each other for billions of years. You are a self-replicating machine made of smaller self-replicating machines. An attack of self-replicating machines isn't a doomsday scenario; it's a job for pest control.
Imagine the first malware to cause that to happen and the chaos it could cause. Having humans involved at some point in the process is a desirable idea.
Humans are best involved in the process by making robots who's job is to find and disable malfunctioning robots. In fact that's the only effective place humans can occupy in the process, because what's stopping our malware author for designing a fully self-replicating robot, for example a walking 3D printer with an assembler arm? It'll get easier all the time as the technology processes.
Perhaps more importantly, why would the category 'interactive movie' even get to exist when the category 'game' already does?
Because "game" implies you have a challenge to overcome. An "interactive movie" doesn't necessarily have any, but simply gives multiple-choice questions to determine how things will go. A more advanced one might have a "drama engine" like current games have physics engines, putting together the story as it goes and incorporating unforseen developments.
Heck, even Dwarf Fortress isn't really a game - since we all know how it'll end - so much as an interactive horror movie.
Being a male gamer, I can not get enough of uncanny valleys. The deeper the better, lots of bounce doesn't hurt.
Funny, but simulating how a bunch of flexible tissues of varying density connecting to each other in complex ways move is actually extremely difficult. Especially since, if you truly want to get it perfect, you have to simulate the motion cortex - basically, you need the character to be a robot in a physics simulation. And at that point we're starting to look at computing power comparable to a human brain for every character.
In other words, we aren't going to get over Uncanny Valley anytime soon, and possibly never.
So you have a poster of Stalin on your wall at home?
This is modern times. You can presume he has a digital pane which can display an icon of evil that best stereotypes opposition to your political ideals in your mind. However, we might wish to extend beyond mere mortals - has anyone mapped Azathoth on the political compass?
At least not all of us will have to suffer the consequences of all the left wing bleeding heart socialists that brussels is infested with.
I honestly can't tell if posts like yours are supposed to be straight arguments or parodies. It's worrisome for democracy that Poe's Law applies to politics just as much - or perhaps even more - than it does for religions.
I suspect that people would love to get away from scarcity in whatever areas they feel are out of their grip right now(whether they are super poor and that is food and shelter, middle class and that is healthcare and college, and so on); but, in our perversity, we seem to still crave the exclusive, the unique, the rare, in whatever nonessentials are relevant.
But is this really a problem? If some people derive pleasure from owning a numbered copy of The Hyphae Horror, does this negatively affect anyone else? The rest of us still have food, shelter and non-numbered copies; let the lucky few have their fun.
I mean, we can't all have 6-digit Slashdot IDs, but does my obvious superiority in this matter make you any worse off:^) ? Much less be a "major issue" to anyone even remotely sane, or in any way comparable to having your home repossessed or something?
Give them a choice - Nuclear in their back yard, Coal burning in their back yard or this. The choice of None Of The Above is only an illusion.
The choice is real, it's consequences - rolling blackouts - are fantasy. You regard whatever you're used to as normal, the default state of affairs, even if that something is a grid of social and physical infrastructure that costs billions per year to upkeep. And, regarding it as the default, the idea that it needs to be actively upkept is rejected by the mind - a world without roads and electricity is put to the same category by the brain as worlds with elves or dragons. It's not regarded as something that can actually happen, thus the upkeep cost is classified as "waste" at the emotional level - which is why governments like to "save" by letting the very basis of the economy to slowly crumble - and the idea that you actually need to make new construction to keep the lights on is rejected as absurd.
This happens all the time, and is the main reason why humans suck at making rational choices.
If everyone were using TOR it might be a different matter, but we all know that most people using TOR are hiding something, and the intelligence agencies do not like things hidden except what they want to hide...
I use TOR. Every single thing I do is hidden for the reason that it's not your copulating business what I do. Congratulations, you Flying Dutchmen and the Three-Letter Evils, for inspiring another permanent TOR node. And a Freenet one.
In any religious tradition that has an omnipotent God... yes. And us mere mortals can only decide how to deal with these challenges we're presented with. And blaming each other for acting like flawed mortal beings we all are is probably the least productive way imaginable of doing so.
Slashdot Mirror
It can still be a mechanical failure, rather than a software one. For example, you could get a short circuit in whatever sensor reads the accelerator position. "Floor mat" makes for a convenient shorthand for all such possible problems.
Life has risks. That in no way justifies bad workmanship on a vital item. And if enough people try to use such an excuse, the end result will be regulation.
When the Allies deposed Hitler, they did so with violence. Were they terrorists? No, they were military forces waging one of the most justifiable campaigns in human history. What about French Resistance, who posed as civilians and tried to oust a foreign conqueror from their homeland? Probably not. What about the commando who sank a passenger ferry carrying heavy water for German atomic bomb program in Norway? Sure, civilians died, but denying Nazis the atomic bomb was kinda important. So how about Iraqi insurgents, who posed as civilians and tried to oust a foreign conqueror from their homeland? Or Obama and the drone assasinations? Or the people rioting in Ukraine
It doesn't help that "terrorist" is used as the boogeyman nowadays, so you can't know if it refers to someone committing atrocities or someone airing your dear leaders dirty laundry.
Again?
So learn to meditate and let your mind be as still as a crystal lake. Or a stagnant cesspool. Depends on what you're questioned for and whether you're guilty, I guess.
It is, usually. Some details might be less than obvious sometimes, but most social interactions where power is involved are a morbid little dance where everyone knows exactly what's going on and do their utmost to avoid admitting it.
Unless you take a guided tour.
However, this demonstrates nicely the factual level anti-nuclear lobby operates at.
No, it won't. One of the nice things about hydraulics is that when you get the load where you want it, just shut the valve and it stays right there. And cables are easy to secure with a simple brake. This thing, on the other hand, requires you to keep pumping heat - and actively regulate it - to stay at the desired length.
There might be use for this thing, for example in a mechanically simple heat engine, but it doesn't even remotely compete with hydraulics.
Because if you indoctrinate people into believing income should be earned, they don't conveniently forget all about that when it comes to your income. CEOs are not perceived as pulling their weight, producing nothing but seemingly endless bankruptcies and layoffs, so all that "welfare queen" rhetoric is now turning against them.
Of course income is a zero-sum game. Economy produces a certain amount of value per year. If your share of the pie grows, mine must shrink. And if your share is perceived to be unfairly large, then you can expect other people to act against you, driven by both self-interest and a desire to right an apparent wrong.
Of course it's possible to justify larger share as an incentive to grow the pie a a whole. The problem is, the CEOs haven't done so. The 1% are the modern nobility; the accusations about overcompensation are simply the warning rumbles of a good old peasant revolution every king who fails continuously risks facing.
No, what Facebook bought was a lack of a competitor. Facebook is, at the core, a wiretapped communication medium that sells analyses of the aggregate wiretapped data. Every alternative communication channel competes with them.
"Just above breadline" is also known as "living wage", and is a bleeding heart liberal position, verging on outright communism. Why do you hate freedom so much, comrade?
I wouldn't worry about it too much. There are plenty of malicious imbeciles, both in Washington and here on Slashdot, who oppose welfare and/or minimum wage on ideological grounds and apparently think people who can't afford food will simply quietly die.
And because you must assume you are under constant surveillance, you must refrain from doing or saying anything. After all, you never know what political opinion a potential employer might take offence at when it pops out of Google search, or might be grounds to deny you security clearance, or make you a suspected potential terrorist, or whatever. An atmosphere of fear that chills any dissent is pretty much the definition of tyranny.
Industrial Age saw some truly horrible things that resulted from applying concepts from an earlier era into the new one without considering how the new capabilities expanded the potential for horror exponentially. We stand at the dawn of the Information Era; perhaps it might make sense to learn from past mistakes and adapt our concept of privacy pre-emptively rather than go through something like Fascism or Communism again?
Because if an area deemed unprofitable by a cable company shows it can be done, then maybe the residents in a profitable area want one as well - at which point they'd no longer be a captive audience.
And of course there are the types who are against any services provided by the public sector for ideological or economic reasons. They have a vested interests to sabotage even - or especially - succesful public projects, since those might be used as examples when arguing for future projects.
Thus you feel safe to express your actual view on the matter without fear of (meaningful) retaliation from powers that be. The label "troll" is then used as an attempt to discredit this view, either to squash any perceived threat by the higher-ups or to protect their personal worldview from challenge by the grassroot members. This is typical, if primitive, human social behaviour.
Because the truth is that even truly anonymous *chans on Tor have surprisingly little trolling, despite being Vein diagram intersection of every possible contributing factor. It's spam that's the problem, and while that certainly requires indifference to the results to others as an enabler, it's not motivated by it.
Put them into a ring. With enough layers of PHBs managing PHBs, you can have the "lowest" layer mange the "highest". The game of broken phone inherent in disorganizations makes sure orders and reports are utterly unrecognizable when they pass by the same person again.
If you do, and still care about pointer-size optimizations, then clearly your quest for performance is extremely serious and well-informed and should be treated that way by kernel and distribution makers.
There is little attention given to the idea because it's a bad idea. The only advantage x32 gets you is smaller pointers. That's nice, but unless your data structures have a fatal case of pointeritis it's pretty much pointless, and if they have, your program is going to be a slow memory hog no matter what.
Also, 64-bit virtual memory space allows such niceties as memory mapping large files, thus working on them directly on the cache rather than duplicating data in an in-application buffer.
So basically, we'll finally be able to download a car. Or would be, if the MAFIAA didn't stand in the way. Not that that makes much difference, judging by how ineffective they have been this far...
So, to get a realistic picture of how a future with replicators will work, look at the Internet: prestige is everything, and you get prestige by creating things. So... pretty much Star Trek.
No, because replication requires energy. A self-replicating robot can't just convert sand into new parts for the same reason the self-replicating nanobots you consist of can't: it requires absurd amounts of energy. A rogue robot invasion can only occur in an environment where energy is supplied externally, and dies off the second it breaks the power systems, which is why cancer patients don't leave behind Lovecraftian monster tumours which then proceed to eat cities.
This is something these horror scenarios always ignore: the planet is full of self-replicating machines. The planet has been full of self-replicating machines waging an outright war on each other for billions of years. You are a self-replicating machine made of smaller self-replicating machines. An attack of self-replicating machines isn't a doomsday scenario; it's a job for pest control.
Humans are best involved in the process by making robots who's job is to find and disable malfunctioning robots. In fact that's the only effective place humans can occupy in the process, because what's stopping our malware author for designing a fully self-replicating robot, for example a walking 3D printer with an assembler arm? It'll get easier all the time as the technology processes.
Because "game" implies you have a challenge to overcome. An "interactive movie" doesn't necessarily have any, but simply gives multiple-choice questions to determine how things will go. A more advanced one might have a "drama engine" like current games have physics engines, putting together the story as it goes and incorporating unforseen developments.
Heck, even Dwarf Fortress isn't really a game - since we all know how it'll end - so much as an interactive horror movie.
Funny, but simulating how a bunch of flexible tissues of varying density connecting to each other in complex ways move is actually extremely difficult. Especially since, if you truly want to get it perfect, you have to simulate the motion cortex - basically, you need the character to be a robot in a physics simulation. And at that point we're starting to look at computing power comparable to a human brain for every character.
In other words, we aren't going to get over Uncanny Valley anytime soon, and possibly never.
This is modern times. You can presume he has a digital pane which can display an icon of evil that best stereotypes opposition to your political ideals in your mind. However, we might wish to extend beyond mere mortals - has anyone mapped Azathoth on the political compass?
I honestly can't tell if posts like yours are supposed to be straight arguments or parodies. It's worrisome for democracy that Poe's Law applies to politics just as much - or perhaps even more - than it does for religions.
But is this really a problem? If some people derive pleasure from owning a numbered copy of The Hyphae Horror, does this negatively affect anyone else? The rest of us still have food, shelter and non-numbered copies; let the lucky few have their fun.
I mean, we can't all have 6-digit Slashdot IDs, but does my obvious superiority in this matter make you any worse off :^) ? Much less be a "major issue" to anyone even remotely sane, or in any way comparable to having your home repossessed or something?
All scarcities are not created equal.
The choice is real, it's consequences - rolling blackouts - are fantasy. You regard whatever you're used to as normal, the default state of affairs, even if that something is a grid of social and physical infrastructure that costs billions per year to upkeep. And, regarding it as the default, the idea that it needs to be actively upkept is rejected by the mind - a world without roads and electricity is put to the same category by the brain as worlds with elves or dragons. It's not regarded as something that can actually happen, thus the upkeep cost is classified as "waste" at the emotional level - which is why governments like to "save" by letting the very basis of the economy to slowly crumble - and the idea that you actually need to make new construction to keep the lights on is rejected as absurd.
This happens all the time, and is the main reason why humans suck at making rational choices.
I use TOR. Every single thing I do is hidden for the reason that it's not your copulating business what I do. Congratulations, you Flying Dutchmen and the Three-Letter Evils, for inspiring another permanent TOR node. And a Freenet one.
Because the alternative is no middleman, 0% markup.
In any religious tradition that has an omnipotent God... yes. And us mere mortals can only decide how to deal with these challenges we're presented with. And blaming each other for acting like flawed mortal beings we all are is probably the least productive way imaginable of doing so.