Ah yes but he was sending the wrong rude message, it was "I'm so bored listening to you it seems time is standing still and I keep checking my watch praying this will soon be over" instead of the "I'm far too busy and important to devote all my attention and energy to interacting with you, so I'll casually show it by doing other things at the same time" rude.
Except, of course, the point of the activity was not to send a message, it was to check if he had received any. The social message of rejection was an uninteded side effect.
And yes, I actually am far too busy and important to devote all my attention and energy to interacting with you. Every single person in the world who isn't you is. And it isn't the least bit of rude of them to not put all other activities aside just because you want to talk to them. It is, however, rather narcissistic to demand they do so.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of narcissistic persons out there. They aren't necessarily malicious, but they are apparently unable to comprehend that others have lives and priorities of their own. Thus, if I glance at the clock, it's not me checking the time, it's me sending you a message that I'm bored. If I do anything at all, I'm not doing it because I want it done, I'm doing it to show you I don't want to talk with you. Everything I do is about you, at least in your twisted mind.
So, that's a critical design feature for a wearable computer: allow me to use the thing without sending any kind of messages to anyone except the intended receiver.
Good motion controls (haven't seen this yet) would be real progress, though. It a worthwhile goal.
Is it possible, though? As I see it, there's three main problems to overcome:
1. It takes less time to move my finger than my arm, or even my wrist. This means that that a motion controller has less time precision than a button controller. The problem can be lessened by makign the control more sensitive to small movements, but that gets us to the next problem:
2. A button press is less likely to be triggered by accident than a motion control. I dunno about the rest of you, but I can't stay completely motionless except when I want Mario to spin.
3. I'm not a ninja. That means that a game that has me control a ninja can't use one-one mapping of my movements and character movements. This, in turn, means that the control is really using gestures to trigger pre-defined action sequences - in other words, it's imitating pushing buttons, but with me having to devote far more of my attention to coordinating my body rather than the on-screen events. Not only does this kill immersion, but it also poses a potential danger to my surroundings with all the distracted arm-swinging.
Give it time - we'll have a real lightsaber game eventually.
But you are not a jedi, thus you can't actually use a lightsaber (problem 3 above). You don't have the Force, and can't sense incoming projectiles and swings in time to block them. The game could block them for you, but then you lose synch between you and the game character. Which also happens if someone blocks your blade.
Though the classic consoles are getting reboots this fall, there is no guarantee that new models will permanently revive the format's fortunes.'
No, they probably won't. The main "feature" of these reboots is to tie the consoles to Internet-based DRM and add always-on spy cameras whose official use is turning precise and effortless button-pushing to spastic, inaccurate and space-demanding motion controls. They're far worse than the previous generation, so why switch?
But the prisoner's dilemma should only apply when the prisoners are separated, and cannot negotiate an agreement to their mutual benefit.
Why should negotiation matter? It's a multiple-choice question with only one that could be considered mutually beneficial. The important thing is whether the prisoners trust each to not betray the other. And, thanks to realpolitiks, that trust does not exist between nations, thus bad outcomes prevail.
The power savings and performance benefits come from not having to burden the video RAM by continuously reading x*100 Mbyte/s of screen memory to generate the display signal when there's little or nothing happening on the screen.
And instead you would burden the main CPU and RAM, preventing them from ever entering power saving mode and adding lag to every screen update. And it wouldn't even work, because the doesn't know what parts of the screen have changed. The relationship between various buffers and the parts of screen they ultimately affect is anything but simple, especially since modern GPUs can update the buffers themselves on the GPU (think OpenCL). You'd end up logging graphics API calls and emulating the GPU on the CPU, all to save a simple memory read - which will happen anyway, since volatile RAM needs to be refreshed constantly, which basically means that it is read and rewritten.
In [i]that[/i] particular case we're back to square one, where we are now, but in all other cases there are power- and memory bandwidth savings.
Would there? The GPU actually requires more memory bandwidth, since it needs to retrieve the previous frame for a pixel-for-pixel comparison. And both the encoding and decoding require circuitry, which needs power - probably more power than just sending the raw frame over a 1-meter link in the first place. That's worth remembering: we aren't talking about a trans-Atlantic cable here.
How much debt is too much? 17 Trillion? 20 Trillion? 50 Trillion?
A dollar does not have fixed value, and is in fact constantly and exponentially devaluing, so neither does the expression "17 trillion dollars".
When does it stop? How much money do we continue to borrow from foreign creditors before we realize this model is NOT workable long-term? How much do we borrow before other countries refuse to lend any more to us?
Whether or not it's workable in long-term doesn't really matter. Like I said, upkeeping a society requires money and like you demonstrated below, Americans don't like taxes. So it's either borrow or die.
And, frankly, it's the apparent insanity of half your politicians (the Republican half) that's more likely to make anyone hesitant to give you credit, rather than the amount of debt you already have.
Unless your plan is to significantly raise taxes. And if you think THAT won't have a negative impact on the world's economy, try it and see...
Like you said below: someone has to pay for things. Modern society - or any kind of society, for that matter - is a thing. So you get to choose: rise taxes, keep on borrowing money, or let infrastructure rot. Of these, taxes are likely to have the least negative impact.
Or maybe the plan is to collapse the entire system and start fresh with a new one in which the government provides for all, but that's not sustainable long-term either.
Get on with the times. Soviet Union is long dead. The boogeyman of the day is terrorism.
And if the people who normally work to pay for things realize that they don't really have to work and can just live off the government and thus decide to stop working, then what?
Unemployment goes down? You do realize that for all the fearmongering about moral hazards, all industrial countries have a surplus of people looking for jobs, rather than a deficit?
I had a problem with that line: the ventricles of the brain are ALWAYS full of that fluid. That's what they take during a spinal tap. You don't need to be asleep for that.
According to Wikipedia, spinal tap involves taking fluid from the spine in the lower back area, not brain. Why would having fluid there imply that the same fluid is also present in the brain at the same time?
So as new coins become rarer with the diminishing rate, there will be fewer miners, and that means more validating workload dumped on the miners still running, increasing their costs as their expected profit diminishes, right?
Actually, miner workload stays the same while profit increases, due to collecting transaction fees from more transactions.
I have not paid much attention to the implementation of Bitcoin, rather focusing on the economic implications.
Well, as we're demonstrating here, you can't predict the economic implications of a thing without having at least some idea of how the thing functions. So maybe you should start researching the things you want to make predictions about, be they Bitcoin or anything else.
What happens as miners drop off the network?
If miners drop off the network, the total hash rate of the network goes down and blocks start taking longer to find, causing their difficulty to drop, making it easier for a blockchain fork to supplant the current one, making cancellation of transactions with many confirmations somewhat less implausible. But not so much that scammers would bother - it still makes more economic sense to try to collect transaction fees through honest mining even when coinbase reaches zero.
I've seen other articles where people consider Bitcoin evidence of some kind of post-singularity intelligence at work.
Well, we're living creatures so we have almost ridiculous amount of interal complexity compared to nonliving things. We are sapient, so we've gone past evolutionary singularity too. And a large and rapidly increasing number of us live in an utopia of wealth, peace and equality that resembles heaven on earth from the point of view of, say, a medieval peasant.
So, we've already past two singularities and on our way through third. And of course the universe itself has gone through number of phase shifts in the past. So Bitcoin is a work of a post-singularity intellect. It's just that developmental singularity is like an onion: once you're inside it's just business as usual to you, and there's always another one ahead.
It's like having a $10,000 credit card limit that you've maxed out. You want to go buy a new TV with money you don't have, but the banks won't increase your credit limit. So you can't buy the TV, but you can still afford the $35/month minimum payment on your credit card so the banks don't come to repossess your shit.
What if you need the credit to buy gas so you can go to work and earn money? You don't get credit -> you can't go to work -> you lose your revenue and end up bankrupt.
That is the situation in the US: modern economy requires modern infrastructure, which requires maintenance and development, which requires income. Since Americans don't want to pay for it with taxes, that leaves private sector (which usually demands subsidies, so the government ends up paying anyway, and then also bills their captive audience for profits) or credit. So a debt ceiling doesn't mean "living within your means", it means collapse - a spiral of cuts resulting in decreased means resulting in more cuts. Which would be bad enough if it was just Americans learning the difference between Randian ubermensch fantasies and reality, but it's likely to drag the rest of the world at least partway down with it.
Gold is useful if the rest of the world keeps going, but your country/region/etc is in a bad crisis.
Wouldn't it be even better to have cash from various countries? Because to use your gold, for example to import stuff, you need to convert it to currency anyway, which might be difficult to do in a crisis. On the other hand, foreign currency might help keep the local economy going, by being a medium of exchange backed by the rest of the world economy.
Economics. The science of explaining tomorrow why the predictions you made yesterday didn't come true today.
They didn't come true because making predictions about the behaviour of an economic system changes the behaviour of the economic system, because the economic "particles" are self-aware, are trying to outsmart every other particle and can read your predictions.
This approach came along a long time ago with the advent of integrated circuits. The IC is a "black box". Give it input meeting certain specifications, get output of certain specifications.
So in other words, "black box programming" is a marketing term for using libraries.
Does it matter? The economy exists to serve human needs, and getting healthcare while avoiding personal bankruptcy is one of them.
On the other hand, holding your country - and, arguably, the world economy - hostage in a bid to further your political ideology is a weird combination of pitiful and evil. And it will end up costing far more than $24 billion, for example by giving credibility to China.
But I guess every country has the leaders it deserves.
the difference being todays muckrakers have the internet. its much harder, although not impossible, to silence a glen greenwald or a julian assange if they so choose to expose your corruption.
But if they do, so what? Have people gone to jail over what Wikileaks revealed? Have people gone to jail over what Snowden revealed? People are in trouble over exposed corruption, but they're not the corrupt but the whistleblowers.
In this situation, does investigative journalism actually matter at all? Investigate all you want, prove everything you want, publish all you want - you are the one who gets punished, not the corrupt.
And if the rot has truly set so deep that being exposed to light no longer destroys it, is there any reason the infection won't spread till it kills the patient?
There's are simple solutions to all the problems you mention: Don't use Facebook or G+ or any other social networking site.
And while you're at it, stay out of the streets too, rather than whine they should be safe. Because clearly, if one gets mugged, it's their own damn fault for daring to assume they have a right to walk unmolested. And heaven forbid the culprit should be brought to justice.
It's always the victim's fault for being a potential target. Never the perpetrators.
And let's charge children with felonies if they dare be mean to one another!
Well, if the parents fail to socialize their kids and teach them what is or isn't acceptable behaviour, that doesn't exactly leave many alternatives, now does it?
Except there's a market for bonds, and I'm sure that China will have bought and sold hundreds of billions of dollars worth of bonds in that market, even if just to ensure that catastrophic systemic failure would result from a repudiation like you suggest - thus taking that option off the table.
Except that there's plenty of political forces in the US that want a catastrophic systemic failure due to either economic ludditism (crash fiat currency, return to gold standard) or outright madness (wanting an end-of-the-world scenario for religious reasons). So while the option would be off the table in a sane country, it's not so in the US - and that is why I find myself agreeing with China's state press in this matter.
Driving at night with headlights doesn't offer a 100% guarantee of avoiding an accident but it certainly lowers the chances of having one. Wearing a seat belt doesn't offer a 100% guarantee you'll survive an accident but it certainly increases the chances of survivability . So I would hope most people would exercise common sense and do both things.
Given that seatbelt alarm apparently saves enough people to be worthwhile, I think it's rather irrational to assume people are rational.
Whenever a politician says "We need to have a conversation" it means that they want to avoid taking a position on the issue until they know which way the wind is blowing. It is easier to bend when you have no spine.
Now now, let's not be hasty. It could also be an attempt to get everyone who might be opposed to the police state to expose themselves so the NSA can record their identities, thus focusing the surveillance and saving it a lot of work. Or at least that was the first thing I thought when reading the summary.
It's almost as if they don't realize or accept the most basic of truths; that we are animals, born naked, due to the instinct-driven activities of naked animals. Religion, on these issues, is a psychological problem, with a strong denial of reality aspect.
Imagine you're in a semi-sapient proto-human in a savannah, and see a bush wiggle. The possible interpretations, in descending order of importance, are:
1. There's a predator in the bushes, waiting to eat you.
2. There's prey in the bushes, waiting to be eaten.
3. It was just the wind.
Basically, people are programmed to see purposes behind every event because it leads to higher evolutionary success. And this got even more so when we kept getting smarter and make our societies more complex; in today's world it's more important than ever. And that means religion is not going anywhere: people are going to keep seeking purpose behind seemingly random events because that tendency pays of in cases where there actually is some agent involved. If anything, we're getting more religious over time.
If true, that would put Dawkin's crusade into a rather ironic light, since his own discipline is saying he can't succeed. And it also means that religion is actually an attempt to manage the underlaying psychological problem - rather than just let everyone do pattern-matching and modeling their behaviour on presumably random data, create a dogma that unifies expected behaviour and allows somewhat rational analysis. And then you run into problems again when said dogma picks up cultural memes and preserves them way past their useful life, assuming they ever had any, as both Christianity and Islam have. Still, the alternative is leaving people vulnerable to the likes of Hubbard and Jim Jones.
Heck, the current US government shutdown is a fine example of a religious fight, a battle between two groups of people who believe in incompatible versions of reality, and - typically of such fights - are also convinced that theirs is the only possible and the other side is just lying for the sake of being evil. It's also a good example of what happens in a society when a unifying dogma breaks down and leaves members with too little common ground to really function together.
The essence of true competence is to avoid getting into situations where continuous high levels of competence are needed; by not backing yourself into a clusterfuck of a system that is always one false move away from doing something dangerous; but if you've fucked up and done that, it's really just a matter of time until somebody gets tapped as the fall guy by the pitiless gods of blind chance.
Unfortunately, this means that you get the credit for savings due to doing the bare minimum of maintenance to keep things running until tomorrow, and whoever gets caught holding the damn thing when luck finally runs out gets the blame. That's how industrial systems are run, because that's how the incentives are set up.
These guys are also murderers. Still not interested?
See, that's just it: that sounds exactly like something you'd tag on to make DPR look bad a la Assange. Do we actually have a reliable source - that is, one that doesn't have a reputation for lying and obvious motive for character assasination?
Slashdot Mirror
Except, of course, the point of the activity was not to send a message, it was to check if he had received any. The social message of rejection was an uninteded side effect.
And yes, I actually am far too busy and important to devote all my attention and energy to interacting with you. Every single person in the world who isn't you is. And it isn't the least bit of rude of them to not put all other activities aside just because you want to talk to them. It is, however, rather narcissistic to demand they do so.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of narcissistic persons out there. They aren't necessarily malicious, but they are apparently unable to comprehend that others have lives and priorities of their own. Thus, if I glance at the clock, it's not me checking the time, it's me sending you a message that I'm bored. If I do anything at all, I'm not doing it because I want it done, I'm doing it to show you I don't want to talk with you. Everything I do is about you, at least in your twisted mind.
So, that's a critical design feature for a wearable computer: allow me to use the thing without sending any kind of messages to anyone except the intended receiver.
Is it possible, though? As I see it, there's three main problems to overcome:
1. It takes less time to move my finger than my arm, or even my wrist. This means that that a motion controller has less time precision than a button controller. The problem can be lessened by makign the control more sensitive to small movements, but that gets us to the next problem:
2. A button press is less likely to be triggered by accident than a motion control. I dunno about the rest of you, but I can't stay completely motionless except when I want Mario to spin.
3. I'm not a ninja. That means that a game that has me control a ninja can't use one-one mapping of my movements and character movements. This, in turn, means that the control is really using gestures to trigger pre-defined action sequences - in other words, it's imitating pushing buttons, but with me having to devote far more of my attention to coordinating my body rather than the on-screen events. Not only does this kill immersion, but it also poses a potential danger to my surroundings with all the distracted arm-swinging.
But you are not a jedi, thus you can't actually use a lightsaber (problem 3 above). You don't have the Force, and can't sense incoming projectiles and swings in time to block them. The game could block them for you, but then you lose synch between you and the game character. Which also happens if someone blocks your blade.
It's a hard problem.
No, they probably won't. The main "feature" of these reboots is to tie the consoles to Internet-based DRM and add always-on spy cameras whose official use is turning precise and effortless button-pushing to spastic, inaccurate and space-demanding motion controls. They're far worse than the previous generation, so why switch?
Why should negotiation matter? It's a multiple-choice question with only one that could be considered mutually beneficial. The important thing is whether the prisoners trust each to not betray the other. And, thanks to realpolitiks, that trust does not exist between nations, thus bad outcomes prevail.
And instead you would burden the main CPU and RAM, preventing them from ever entering power saving mode and adding lag to every screen update. And it wouldn't even work, because the doesn't know what parts of the screen have changed. The relationship between various buffers and the parts of screen they ultimately affect is anything but simple, especially since modern GPUs can update the buffers themselves on the GPU (think OpenCL). You'd end up logging graphics API calls and emulating the GPU on the CPU, all to save a simple memory read - which will happen anyway, since volatile RAM needs to be refreshed constantly, which basically means that it is read and rewritten.
I'm sorry, but this idea is just stupid.
Would there? The GPU actually requires more memory bandwidth, since it needs to retrieve the previous frame for a pixel-for-pixel comparison. And both the encoding and decoding require circuitry, which needs power - probably more power than just sending the raw frame over a 1-meter link in the first place. That's worth remembering: we aren't talking about a trans-Atlantic cable here.
A dollar does not have fixed value, and is in fact constantly and exponentially devaluing, so neither does the expression "17 trillion dollars".
Whether or not it's workable in long-term doesn't really matter. Like I said, upkeeping a society requires money and like you demonstrated below, Americans don't like taxes. So it's either borrow or die.
And, frankly, it's the apparent insanity of half your politicians (the Republican half) that's more likely to make anyone hesitant to give you credit, rather than the amount of debt you already have.
Like you said below: someone has to pay for things. Modern society - or any kind of society, for that matter - is a thing. So you get to choose: rise taxes, keep on borrowing money, or let infrastructure rot. Of these, taxes are likely to have the least negative impact.
Get on with the times. Soviet Union is long dead. The boogeyman of the day is terrorism.
Unemployment goes down? You do realize that for all the fearmongering about moral hazards, all industrial countries have a surplus of people looking for jobs, rather than a deficit?
According to Wikipedia, spinal tap involves taking fluid from the spine in the lower back area, not brain. Why would having fluid there imply that the same fluid is also present in the brain at the same time?
Actually, miner workload stays the same while profit increases, due to collecting transaction fees from more transactions.
Well, as we're demonstrating here, you can't predict the economic implications of a thing without having at least some idea of how the thing functions. So maybe you should start researching the things you want to make predictions about, be they Bitcoin or anything else.
If miners drop off the network, the total hash rate of the network goes down and blocks start taking longer to find, causing their difficulty to drop, making it easier for a blockchain fork to supplant the current one, making cancellation of transactions with many confirmations somewhat less implausible. But not so much that scammers would bother - it still makes more economic sense to try to collect transaction fees through honest mining even when coinbase reaches zero.
Well, we're living creatures so we have almost ridiculous amount of interal complexity compared to nonliving things. We are sapient, so we've gone past evolutionary singularity too. And a large and rapidly increasing number of us live in an utopia of wealth, peace and equality that resembles heaven on earth from the point of view of, say, a medieval peasant.
So, we've already past two singularities and on our way through third. And of course the universe itself has gone through number of phase shifts in the past. So Bitcoin is a work of a post-singularity intellect. It's just that developmental singularity is like an onion: once you're inside it's just business as usual to you, and there's always another one ahead.
What if you need the credit to buy gas so you can go to work and earn money? You don't get credit -> you can't go to work -> you lose your revenue and end up bankrupt.
That is the situation in the US: modern economy requires modern infrastructure, which requires maintenance and development, which requires income. Since Americans don't want to pay for it with taxes, that leaves private sector (which usually demands subsidies, so the government ends up paying anyway, and then also bills their captive audience for profits) or credit. So a debt ceiling doesn't mean "living within your means", it means collapse - a spiral of cuts resulting in decreased means resulting in more cuts. Which would be bad enough if it was just Americans learning the difference between Randian ubermensch fantasies and reality, but it's likely to drag the rest of the world at least partway down with it.
Wouldn't it be even better to have cash from various countries? Because to use your gold, for example to import stuff, you need to convert it to currency anyway, which might be difficult to do in a crisis. On the other hand, foreign currency might help keep the local economy going, by being a medium of exchange backed by the rest of the world economy.
They didn't come true because making predictions about the behaviour of an economic system changes the behaviour of the economic system, because the economic "particles" are self-aware, are trying to outsmart every other particle and can read your predictions.
So, do I win an economic Nobel?
So in other words, "black box programming" is a marketing term for using libraries.
Does it matter? The economy exists to serve human needs, and getting healthcare while avoiding personal bankruptcy is one of them.
On the other hand, holding your country - and, arguably, the world economy - hostage in a bid to further your political ideology is a weird combination of pitiful and evil. And it will end up costing far more than $24 billion, for example by giving credibility to China.
But I guess every country has the leaders it deserves.
But if they do, so what? Have people gone to jail over what Wikileaks revealed? Have people gone to jail over what Snowden revealed? People are in trouble over exposed corruption, but they're not the corrupt but the whistleblowers.
In this situation, does investigative journalism actually matter at all? Investigate all you want, prove everything you want, publish all you want - you are the one who gets punished, not the corrupt.
And if the rot has truly set so deep that being exposed to light no longer destroys it, is there any reason the infection won't spread till it kills the patient?
And while you're at it, stay out of the streets too, rather than whine they should be safe. Because clearly, if one gets mugged, it's their own damn fault for daring to assume they have a right to walk unmolested. And heaven forbid the culprit should be brought to justice.
It's always the victim's fault for being a potential target. Never the perpetrators.
Well, if the parents fail to socialize their kids and teach them what is or isn't acceptable behaviour, that doesn't exactly leave many alternatives, now does it?
Except that there's plenty of political forces in the US that want a catastrophic systemic failure due to either economic ludditism (crash fiat currency, return to gold standard) or outright madness (wanting an end-of-the-world scenario for religious reasons). So while the option would be off the table in a sane country, it's not so in the US - and that is why I find myself agreeing with China's state press in this matter.
Hey, selfishness is good, Ayn Rand said so and rich people believe it so it's gotta be alright.
Given that seatbelt alarm apparently saves enough people to be worthwhile, I think it's rather irrational to assume people are rational.
Now now, let's not be hasty. It could also be an attempt to get everyone who might be opposed to the police state to expose themselves so the NSA can record their identities, thus focusing the surveillance and saving it a lot of work. Or at least that was the first thing I thought when reading the summary.
Who says the government can't be efficient ?-)
Imagine you're in a semi-sapient proto-human in a savannah, and see a bush wiggle. The possible interpretations, in descending order of importance, are:
Basically, people are programmed to see purposes behind every event because it leads to higher evolutionary success. And this got even more so when we kept getting smarter and make our societies more complex; in today's world it's more important than ever. And that means religion is not going anywhere: people are going to keep seeking purpose behind seemingly random events because that tendency pays of in cases where there actually is some agent involved. If anything, we're getting more religious over time.
If true, that would put Dawkin's crusade into a rather ironic light, since his own discipline is saying he can't succeed. And it also means that religion is actually an attempt to manage the underlaying psychological problem - rather than just let everyone do pattern-matching and modeling their behaviour on presumably random data, create a dogma that unifies expected behaviour and allows somewhat rational analysis. And then you run into problems again when said dogma picks up cultural memes and preserves them way past their useful life, assuming they ever had any, as both Christianity and Islam have. Still, the alternative is leaving people vulnerable to the likes of Hubbard and Jim Jones.
Heck, the current US government shutdown is a fine example of a religious fight, a battle between two groups of people who believe in incompatible versions of reality, and - typically of such fights - are also convinced that theirs is the only possible and the other side is just lying for the sake of being evil. It's also a good example of what happens in a society when a unifying dogma breaks down and leaves members with too little common ground to really function together.
Unfortunately, this means that you get the credit for savings due to doing the bare minimum of maintenance to keep things running until tomorrow, and whoever gets caught holding the damn thing when luck finally runs out gets the blame. That's how industrial systems are run, because that's how the incentives are set up.
See, that's just it: that sounds exactly like something you'd tag on to make DPR look bad a la Assange. Do we actually have a reliable source - that is, one that doesn't have a reputation for lying and obvious motive for character assasination?