It was pretty disappointing that a lot of tech issues didn't make the appearance that I would hope they would. Things like how our telecommunications industry has us over a barrel and we enjoy the most expensive experience in the developed world.
There were a few tech issues that were touched upon during the long campaign, however most of them got over shadowed by BS topics used to distract.
1) The first is about the future of Bill 51. Which is a draconian privacy invasion government spying bill under the pretense of "OMG TERRORISTS!". It was introduced by the Conservatives and supported by the Liberals prior to the election. Only the Conservatives were all fantastic about it. The Liberals said they would repeal *parts* of the bill to be re-worded, specifically changing it so that it would require warrants. Which to me is a bit confusing as I was pretty sure the government already had the power to go after just about any information using warrants anyway... The NDP said they would scrap the entire thing. So the real test will be in the details on how far the Liberals will go to castrate Bill 51, a little or a lot. If they are smart, they will realize that a lot of people voted NDP on this very single issue, many of them former Conservatives even, so politically they could win a lot of points by cutting deep with the knife on this one for the eventual next election.
2) The second issue, was in fact introduced by the Conservatives as a distraction, as was initiated with a YouTube video about how they didn't support a "NetFlix Tax", which absolutely no one had heard about until watching that video. What this was actually alluding to was a issue that was brought up by the CRTC about a year ago with NetFlix, which I believe NetFlix basically told them to go take a hike. It was about the release of subscriber information, the amount of Canadian content being distributed, and the fact that they do not charge tax on the service (not being physically located in Canada). It is also sort of about the CRTC trying to fit the TV model on the Streaming service which isn't quite the same. It also has to do with likely complaints by our aforementioned barrel buddies the Canadian telecommunication Industry having a monopoly of sorts and a cozy relationship with regulators. and the fact they all of them are launching their own competing streaming services, which they however must charge tax, probably because they want to sell it to you as part of a package like normal TV, and with bundles of internet, phone, etc... Anyway it is pretty much a non-issue, that likely has more to do with courts than anything else. Despite Conservative warnings, I don't think any of the other parties actually planned this, nor is it really on their radar. As I said this is more about industry pressuring regulators to do something which will eventually end up in court anyway, so little political impact excepting in what the CRTC might decide prior to a court decision.
3) The last issue really talked about came up late in the campaign, and was not talked about in much detail, which was the TTP. The TTP does have some provisions such as copyright and some tech trade related type things to worry about. Unfortunately because of all the secrecy most of what was said either way was pretty ambiguous. Most of the real talking points seemed more concerned with things like the milk industry of all things and car manufactures and the like...
The idea of the amendment being to maintain a militia against the tyranny of government...
1) Might have made sense when the technology basically consisted of muskets and cannons. What are your handguns going to do against a tank? plane? drone? Anything military? They are pretty much only good against civilians, which is probably why police are equipped with them.
2) How many modern armies use a handgun as its primary armament? Zero. You would be better off with a rifle.
Anyway it hasn't made sense in a long time if it ever did in the first place.
Most dog owners pick up after their dogs. There is a minority that does not. However because there are an awful lot of dog owners, the urban park next to my house is basically an open toilet.
Whenever the topic is brought up amongst dog owners they will wail about how responsible most dog owners are, and how it is only a minority that are setting a bad example. That doesn't change the fact that the urban park next to my house is basically in open toilet.
Sorry for the Star Trek lingo, but might it not be something dampening the nuclear processes at work, actually dimming the star, rather than something having to occlude it to describe its variable nature? Is such a thing possible without the destruction of the star? Perhaps something like a blackhole with a very elliptical orbit around the star, where at times it comes close enough to suck up much of the stars output?
People like to drink the cool-aid. Wind does have a part to play, just that its a pretty minor one. If they found some magic way to actually efficiently store the energy from Wind and Solar, then they would be in big business. Solar might play a larger role in a huge distributed network of residential generation and storage, however wind can't even do that. Bottom line is an electrified grid needs base power, the big 4 do not have a renewable replacement for that function.
Like many slashdotters at one time I unintentionally collected a lot of old obsolete computer hardware. I've cut it back a lot in recent years, but it was fun for a time to have a bunch of really old systems and to try and use them for something...
So two hacks:
The first was I got an old laptop from my grandmother (which I only threw anyway this past year lol!). It was an old 386. It ran GEOS. for useful things I did all my COBOL programming in university on it (don't need a lot of power for that), I also did some C coding. Anyway at one point I decided that I wanted to try and throw Linux on it. The problem was that the HD on it was TINY. I can't remember exactly but it was probably something like 5-20MB in size. The smallest current distro of Linux at the time was DSL (Damn Small Linux), however even that was a monumental 50MB in size, far too large for the HD... However I DID have old parallel Zip drive collecting dust also. So I managed to hook it all up and install DSL onto the Zip drive across the parallel port. I tried to boot it, and it was successful. Sort of. Two things, one was that the boot time was 20+ hours until it managed to work its way through the boot process and post an active command prompt. Second was while you could enter commands, and it would process them, each entry would take a couple minutes to work (was probably more like many seconds, but seemed like forever), It was if anything like a simulator of remotely computing on the moon with a time delay. Anyway I was kind of please that I got it to work and I thought it was pretty funny, though it was pretty unusable for any real purpose so it didn't really last very long. Though DSL was probably still loaded on that Zip disk when I finally threw that anyway also.
The second thing was again using obsolete hardware that I just had hanging around. This time in comparison a massive P3 800mhz processor attached to an anchor of a computer in a DELL 4200 Dimension (back when Dell actually made over engineered quality computers). Anyway being one of the guys that was more technically capable I had a friend that had an old computer that had died, and wanted me to grab all their photos and such off the two hard drives and dump them on a newer 1TB external drive. I said sure, thinking it would be easy, I'd just unhook the drives, connect them to my new computer (a Core 2 Duo E4200 at the time I think), and Bob's your uncle transfer the files and done. However of course the drives in question were ATA not SATA, so that wouldn't work. However the old Dell still worked, so I figured I would just do the same, I forgot that I had also messed around with Linux on it as well using the new to then LiveCD's... So I actually didn't have an OS installed on the thing. Not wanting to bother installing an actual OS on the thing, I just hooked up the drives, and booted to the LiveCD. Two things to note, the dives in question were actually pretty large for the time, one was probably 160GB and the other a huge 320GB and they were more less full of crap. The other is that my Dell had (with an upgrade) 256MB of RAM, which combined with probably a 2x CDROM LiveCD OS didn't help much. Anyway, I booted it up, set up the copy process, and waited.... and waited... and waited... and got sick of waiting. So it had a progress bar (two, as I did both at once, also probably didn't help), that very very slowly progressed. I kept waiting for it to fail, but it didn't. I would check on it when I got home from work. In any case about 48 hours later, it finished successfully... So again I was kind of pleased with myself and had a bit of a laugh at the same time and my buddy got to recover whatever crap he had on his old PC...
Perhaps unsurprisingly that sounds about exactly the same for Canada.
Bans are not necessary, you just need to make them harder to get a hold of. Also regulation such as making clips/magazines larger than 5 rounds/bullets illegal also makes such events more difficult. Canada also has a high gun/population ratio, however almost all fall into the shotgun or hunting rifle variety. Handguns are rare and regulated (literally) to the gun range.
You can never totally prevent this sort of thing, however making guns harder to get would certainly reduce it, and regulating what kinds of arms you can get could limit the severity of it. In the US where you can probably trip over guns, it is just too easy. When it is hard, you really have to plan and deliberate and follow through over a lengthy period, when it is easy, you go nuts or are mad and grab your nearest 8 guns and 200 rounds and go to town in the next 10 minutes.
About the only thing I would say about Canada in the same vein that needs some improvement, is that while there are mental health services and medication availability, Canada does have a homeless mental health issue, which I see every day. We really need to do more there in that regard.
OK, I'm assuming this all happened in the middle east, were all this stuff was supposed to go down... Do they even have bears over there? I really don't know. It isn't an animal I really think of existing over there... or did they strictly import the bears for child mauling purposes?
Not to mention how well those batteries perform when it is between -10 and -30 degrees... Someone mentioned ebikes as well for urban commuters... I know some that do, but in the winter you'll be rolling the Darwin dice every day...
If you are a professional engineer who is part of the association yes. From my understanding this was a software issue. There is a thing called a "Software Engineer" however they are not part of the association, pay no dues, have no oath. I'm kind of surprised that they simply didn't outsource it to India, and blame some poor Indian coder for the whole mess claiming ignorance.
Why not? I doubt China would mind. Cars are already built in Germany, Italy, Mexico, Korea, Japan, et al. Why not China. In fact cars *are* built in China right now, just not normally for the US market....
Particularly if they initially go for a small niche market, like say electric cars?
Or do you think all the buy "American Made" cars motto is really holding up with the public? How much will that complete with a shiny Apple logo?
Other than as a PR stunt, people on Mars is pretty stupid. The amount of resources required to maintain humans, could be much better spent on other things. Humans with physical limitations, and restrictions won't be all that more useful if they were not there at all. Send up more robotic rovers. Send up some experiments. Lets push the limits of robotic exploration, particular autonomous.
You don't need an actual X-Ray trigger. You just have to tell them that you have one... How are they going to find out otherwise?
Though I would bet that the standard procedure for this sort of thing will be: 1) Evacuate people 2) Robot Delivered explosive device to set off bomb 3) Let the insurance company sort out the rest
If I'm honest, the only game I really plan anymore is DOTA 2... I think they probably already have a linux version... Other than that, I am eagerly awaiting the release of Fallout 4. Will that be out in Linux at the same time?
I suspect it would be much easier to transition to linux now from a game perspective than years ago.
The whole basic income idea has two precepts, one moral, another financial: 1) Moral: Society has an obligation to look after those who cannot look after themselves. 2) Financial: It would be cheaper to just give everyone a flat rate than to administer multiple programs and their eligibility criteria.
These would seem at odds from a conservative standpoint. On one hand many conservatives have more an eye for an eye, survival of the fittest sort of morality. On the other hand they like to think they are tight fiscally. They also like markets to run things, and smaller government.
That is exactly what basic income is. You scuttle the idea that some people deserve help, while others do not. You understand that there will always be those people that game the system. You settle on the idea that everyone needs a basic amount to just get by. You eliminate multiple massive government programs that try manage to only dole out money to those that meet specific criteria, and you don't try to enforce or audit any of those criteria over time. The government at the same time are not providing services, simply money. Which how people spend it is entirely up to them. Need child care, buy some, need food, buy that also. The market will provide so to speak.
Anyway it is an intriguing idea. There could even be more fiscal and societal spin offs. Like for example, some crime is financial desperation motivated, which if provided with a minimal stipend, could eliminate those crimes, the ensuing police costs, court costs, incarceration costs, etc...
It is an idea that is strangest in its simplicity as well as its applicability to both left and right ideologies, which lends itself however radical to actually getting done,
The reason is changing product uses. The reason there has been little progress in performance is that chips today are being optimized for power rather than performance. The reason is most people buy laptops now, which have a battery, which means power conservation is a bigger priority than ever increasing performance to which only a very small subset of users actually ever utilize.
Back in the day, you just poured more power into the chip, and so long as you could cool it enough from melting you didn't really care how much power it sucked down as you were typically plugged into a wall outlet.
Now with most consumers using laptops it just isn't a priority anymore. Considering for most performance hungry users the end use was computer games, and on a laptop you likely aren't going to have a discrete GPU except at the very upper end, there is little use for CPU performance either.
I don't think it is because they *can't* achieve greater performance, it's just that it isn't the market they are building these things for. And before you start talking about various product lines, these things are all designed at the same time, and the overarching goal is reduced power consumption while keeping a reasonable amount of performance. As a desktop user it's depressing. The same can be said for all the emphasis on CPU/GPU integration and its marginal gains, all driven by the ubiquitous laptop.
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It was pretty disappointing that a lot of tech issues didn't make the appearance that I would hope they would. Things like how our telecommunications industry has us over a barrel and we enjoy the most expensive experience in the developed world.
There were a few tech issues that were touched upon during the long campaign, however most of them got over shadowed by BS topics used to distract.
1) The first is about the future of Bill 51. Which is a draconian privacy invasion government spying bill under the pretense of "OMG TERRORISTS!". It was introduced by the Conservatives and supported by the Liberals prior to the election. Only the Conservatives were all fantastic about it. The Liberals said they would repeal *parts* of the bill to be re-worded, specifically changing it so that it would require warrants. Which to me is a bit confusing as I was pretty sure the government already had the power to go after just about any information using warrants anyway... The NDP said they would scrap the entire thing. So the real test will be in the details on how far the Liberals will go to castrate Bill 51, a little or a lot. If they are smart, they will realize that a lot of people voted NDP on this very single issue, many of them former Conservatives even, so politically they could win a lot of points by cutting deep with the knife on this one for the eventual next election.
2) The second issue, was in fact introduced by the Conservatives as a distraction, as was initiated with a YouTube video about how they didn't support a "NetFlix Tax", which absolutely no one had heard about until watching that video. What this was actually alluding to was a issue that was brought up by the CRTC about a year ago with NetFlix, which I believe NetFlix basically told them to go take a hike. It was about the release of subscriber information, the amount of Canadian content being distributed, and the fact that they do not charge tax on the service (not being physically located in Canada). It is also sort of about the CRTC trying to fit the TV model on the Streaming service which isn't quite the same. It also has to do with likely complaints by our aforementioned barrel buddies the Canadian telecommunication Industry having a monopoly of sorts and a cozy relationship with regulators. and the fact they all of them are launching their own competing streaming services, which they however must charge tax, probably because they want to sell it to you as part of a package like normal TV, and with bundles of internet, phone, etc... Anyway it is pretty much a non-issue, that likely has more to do with courts than anything else. Despite Conservative warnings, I don't think any of the other parties actually planned this, nor is it really on their radar. As I said this is more about industry pressuring regulators to do something which will eventually end up in court anyway, so little political impact excepting in what the CRTC might decide prior to a court decision.
3) The last issue really talked about came up late in the campaign, and was not talked about in much detail, which was the TTP. The TTP does have some provisions such as copyright and some tech trade related type things to worry about. Unfortunately because of all the secrecy most of what was said either way was pretty ambiguous. Most of the real talking points seemed more concerned with things like the milk industry of all things and car manufactures and the like...
It does seem to bare a striking resemblance to this:
http://images.static-bluray.co...
and this:
http://sayforward.com/sites/de...
and eventually this:
https://cinema1544.files.wordp...
leading to this:
https://unshavedmouse.files.wo...
Hope it works out well! :)
Which are what are loaded into those boxes, and are probably what designed their size in the first place?
The idea of the amendment being to maintain a militia against the tyranny of government...
1) Might have made sense when the technology basically consisted of muskets and cannons. What are your handguns going to do against a tank? plane? drone? Anything military? They are pretty much only good against civilians, which is probably why police are equipped with them.
2) How many modern armies use a handgun as its primary armament? Zero. You would be better off with a rifle.
Anyway it hasn't made sense in a long time if it ever did in the first place.
I liken gun owners to dog owners...
Most dog owners pick up after their dogs. There is a minority that does not. However because there are an awful lot of dog owners, the urban park next to my house is basically an open toilet.
Whenever the topic is brought up amongst dog owners they will wail about how responsible most dog owners are, and how it is only a minority that are setting a bad example. That doesn't change the fact that the urban park next to my house is basically in open toilet.
Sorry for the Star Trek lingo, but might it not be something dampening the nuclear processes at work, actually dimming the star, rather than something having to occlude it to describe its variable nature? Is such a thing possible without the destruction of the star? Perhaps something like a blackhole with a very elliptical orbit around the star, where at times it comes close enough to suck up much of the stars output?
People like to drink the cool-aid. Wind does have a part to play, just that its a pretty minor one. If they found some magic way to actually efficiently store the energy from Wind and Solar, then they would be in big business. Solar might play a larger role in a huge distributed network of residential generation and storage, however wind can't even do that. Bottom line is an electrified grid needs base power, the big 4 do not have a renewable replacement for that function.
Like many slashdotters at one time I unintentionally collected a lot of old obsolete computer hardware. I've cut it back a lot in recent years, but it was fun for a time to have a bunch of really old systems and to try and use them for something...
So two hacks:
The first was I got an old laptop from my grandmother (which I only threw anyway this past year lol!). It was an old 386. It ran GEOS. for useful things I did all my COBOL programming in university on it (don't need a lot of power for that), I also did some C coding. Anyway at one point I decided that I wanted to try and throw Linux on it. The problem was that the HD on it was TINY. I can't remember exactly but it was probably something like 5-20MB in size. The smallest current distro of Linux at the time was DSL (Damn Small Linux), however even that was a monumental 50MB in size, far too large for the HD... However I DID have old parallel Zip drive collecting dust also. So I managed to hook it all up and install DSL onto the Zip drive across the parallel port. I tried to boot it, and it was successful. Sort of. Two things, one was that the boot time was 20+ hours until it managed to work its way through the boot process and post an active command prompt. Second was while you could enter commands, and it would process them, each entry would take a couple minutes to work (was probably more like many seconds, but seemed like forever), It was if anything like a simulator of remotely computing on the moon with a time delay. Anyway I was kind of please that I got it to work and I thought it was pretty funny, though it was pretty unusable for any real purpose so it didn't really last very long. Though DSL was probably still loaded on that Zip disk when I finally threw that anyway also.
The second thing was again using obsolete hardware that I just had hanging around. This time in comparison a massive P3 800mhz processor attached to an anchor of a computer in a DELL 4200 Dimension (back when Dell actually made over engineered quality computers). Anyway being one of the guys that was more technically capable I had a friend that had an old computer that had died, and wanted me to grab all their photos and such off the two hard drives and dump them on a newer 1TB external drive. I said sure, thinking it would be easy, I'd just unhook the drives, connect them to my new computer (a Core 2 Duo E4200 at the time I think), and Bob's your uncle transfer the files and done. However of course the drives in question were ATA not SATA, so that wouldn't work. However the old Dell still worked, so I figured I would just do the same, I forgot that I had also messed around with Linux on it as well using the new to then LiveCD's... So I actually didn't have an OS installed on the thing. Not wanting to bother installing an actual OS on the thing, I just hooked up the drives, and booted to the LiveCD. Two things to note, the dives in question were actually pretty large for the time, one was probably 160GB and the other a huge 320GB and they were more less full of crap. The other is that my Dell had (with an upgrade) 256MB of RAM, which combined with probably a 2x CDROM LiveCD OS didn't help much. Anyway, I booted it up, set up the copy process, and waited.... and waited... and waited... and got sick of waiting. So it had a progress bar (two, as I did both at once, also probably didn't help), that very very slowly progressed. I kept waiting for it to fail, but it didn't. I would check on it when I got home from work. In any case about 48 hours later, it finished successfully... So again I was kind of pleased with myself and had a bit of a laugh at the same time and my buddy got to recover whatever crap he had on his old PC...
Perhaps unsurprisingly that sounds about exactly the same for Canada.
Bans are not necessary, you just need to make them harder to get a hold of. Also regulation such as making clips/magazines larger than 5 rounds/bullets illegal also makes such events more difficult. Canada also has a high gun/population ratio, however almost all fall into the shotgun or hunting rifle variety. Handguns are rare and regulated (literally) to the gun range.
You can never totally prevent this sort of thing, however making guns harder to get would certainly reduce it, and regulating what kinds of arms you can get could limit the severity of it. In the US where you can probably trip over guns, it is just too easy. When it is hard, you really have to plan and deliberate and follow through over a lengthy period, when it is easy, you go nuts or are mad and grab your nearest 8 guns and 200 rounds and go to town in the next 10 minutes.
About the only thing I would say about Canada in the same vein that needs some improvement, is that while there are mental health services and medication availability, Canada does have a homeless mental health issue, which I see every day. We really need to do more there in that regard.
"keep nubile women for themselves"
Pretty sure someone just made that one up...
"Killing children by mauling them with bear"
OK, I'm assuming this all happened in the middle east, were all this stuff was supposed to go down... Do they even have bears over there? I really don't know. It isn't an animal I really think of existing over there... or did they strictly import the bears for child mauling purposes?
Not to mention how well those batteries perform when it is between -10 and -30 degrees... Someone mentioned ebikes as well for urban commuters... I know some that do, but in the winter you'll be rolling the Darwin dice every day...
If you are a professional engineer who is part of the association yes. From my understanding this was a software issue. There is a thing called a "Software Engineer" however they are not part of the association, pay no dues, have no oath. I'm kind of surprised that they simply didn't outsource it to India, and blame some poor Indian coder for the whole mess claiming ignorance.
Though it is slightly funny...
FBI Agent: This devious device, how can we disarm it without it blowing up?
Bomb Squad Guy: Well... we could blow it up?
FBI Agent: Genius!
When all you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail.
Why not? I doubt China would mind. Cars are already built in Germany, Italy, Mexico, Korea, Japan, et al. Why not China. In fact cars *are* built in China right now, just not normally for the US market....
Particularly if they initially go for a small niche market, like say electric cars?
Or do you think all the buy "American Made" cars motto is really holding up with the public? How much will that complete with a shiny Apple logo?
Which happened anyway. I'd say that the authorities would be more concerned with casualties than property damage.
Other than as a PR stunt, people on Mars is pretty stupid. The amount of resources required to maintain humans, could be much better spent on other things. Humans with physical limitations, and restrictions won't be all that more useful if they were not there at all. Send up more robotic rovers. Send up some experiments. Lets push the limits of robotic exploration, particular autonomous.
Agreed, 18Billion is completely fictional. Also this will be in the courts for about a decade first anyway,
Probably a lot lighter even with 800lb of explosives in it...
With an IED type thing perhaps.
This guy had 800lb of construction explosive. You're not going to be able to reasonably contain that amount of force.
You don't need an actual X-Ray trigger. You just have to tell them that you have one... How are they going to find out otherwise?
Though I would bet that the standard procedure for this sort of thing will be:
1) Evacuate people
2) Robot Delivered explosive device to set off bomb
3) Let the insurance company sort out the rest
Actually the article says that the case was sandwiched with layers of foil, which if you tried to drill, would push inwards to complete the circuit.
If I'm honest, the only game I really plan anymore is DOTA 2... I think they probably already have a linux version... Other than that, I am eagerly awaiting the release of Fallout 4. Will that be out in Linux at the same time?
I suspect it would be much easier to transition to linux now from a game perspective than years ago.
Sounds more like he discovered the art of re-branding electronics... His future is bright it seems.
The whole basic income idea has two precepts, one moral, another financial:
1) Moral: Society has an obligation to look after those who cannot look after themselves.
2) Financial: It would be cheaper to just give everyone a flat rate than to administer multiple programs and their eligibility criteria.
These would seem at odds from a conservative standpoint. On one hand many conservatives have more an eye for an eye, survival of the fittest sort of morality. On the other hand they like to think they are tight fiscally. They also like markets to run things, and smaller government.
That is exactly what basic income is. You scuttle the idea that some people deserve help, while others do not. You understand that there will always be those people that game the system. You settle on the idea that everyone needs a basic amount to just get by. You eliminate multiple massive government programs that try manage to only dole out money to those that meet specific criteria, and you don't try to enforce or audit any of those criteria over time. The government at the same time are not providing services, simply money. Which how people spend it is entirely up to them. Need child care, buy some, need food, buy that also. The market will provide so to speak.
Anyway it is an intriguing idea. There could even be more fiscal and societal spin offs. Like for example, some crime is financial desperation motivated, which if provided with a minimal stipend, could eliminate those crimes, the ensuing police costs, court costs, incarceration costs, etc...
It is an idea that is strangest in its simplicity as well as its applicability to both left and right ideologies, which lends itself however radical to actually getting done,
The reason is changing product uses. The reason there has been little progress in performance is that chips today are being optimized for power rather than performance. The reason is most people buy laptops now, which have a battery, which means power conservation is a bigger priority than ever increasing performance to which only a very small subset of users actually ever utilize.
Back in the day, you just poured more power into the chip, and so long as you could cool it enough from melting you didn't really care how much power it sucked down as you were typically plugged into a wall outlet.
Now with most consumers using laptops it just isn't a priority anymore. Considering for most performance hungry users the end use was computer games, and on a laptop you likely aren't going to have a discrete GPU except at the very upper end, there is little use for CPU performance either.
I don't think it is because they *can't* achieve greater performance, it's just that it isn't the market they are building these things for. And before you start talking about various product lines, these things are all designed at the same time, and the overarching goal is reduced power consumption while keeping a reasonable amount of performance. As a desktop user it's depressing. The same can be said for all the emphasis on CPU/GPU integration and its marginal gains, all driven by the ubiquitous laptop.