The kind of retarded shit that also pays 40% more for everything else they have to buy. $200k on $50k in Ohio?
That is not true. I live in Silicon Valley (San Jose). Housing is hecka expensive here. But everything else costs about the same here as it does anywhere else. The grocery prices in San Jose are no higher than they are in Gilroy or Tracy.
If you can keep your housing cost down, you can save up a ton of money here. When I first moved here, I lived out of my van for two years, and save enough for a down payment. Plenty of other people rent a place and bunk two or four to a room while they build their nest egg. That is no worse than living in a college dorm or a military barracks. The house next door to me has 16 Filipinos living in it. It is absurd to call these people "homeless".
Do you think that maybe, possibly, perhaps the costs of nuclear power has gone up because we've stopped building them for 40 years?
Why does that matter? If they are uneconomic, they are uneconomic. The reasons are irrelevant. Do you really believe that we should squander money subsidizing nukes because that is the "fair" thing to do? Fair to whom?
Those would be services, not money. Don't have a car? You still pay for roads. Don't have lawsuits? Still pay for judges. Don't fly? Still pay for airports.
All of which benefit the society you live in, whether you use them personally or not.
Just because they benefit everyone doesn't mean funding them with general tax revenue is the best way. Roads should be funded with gasoline excise taxes and registration fees, not general taxes. That way the people that use them directly pay directly, and the people that use them indirectly pay for them through the prices of the goods and services they use. Under our current system, people that use few infrastructure resources are subsidizing those that use more, and the latter group tend to be richer than the former.
Much of the judicial system could be privatized. Arbitration is much cheaper, and mediation is cheaper still. Both have higher satisfaction rates from both plaintiffs and defendants.
Many airports are privately owned and operated. Prior to 9/11, security was also privatized. The TSA more than doubled the cost, without measurably improving security.
The poster is posting on a network originally developed with taxpayer money.
That is fallacious reasoning. You can't just say that "X resulted in something good, therefore X is justified". Even if the government had never funded the Internet, it is possible that something similar would have been developed. It is even possible that it would have happened sooner, since in the early days there were many prohibitions on who had access and how it could be used. It is unlikely those prohibitions would have been there if it was commerical from the very beginning.
You also have to weigh successes like the Internet against the many government boondoggles that never resulted in anything of value. For instance, the Space Shuttle and the ISS.
How do I benefit from my government spending $600B on these? How did I benefit from America's participation in the Iraq War? Or the Vietnam War? Would I benefit less if we only spent as much on weapons as the next 10 countries combined rather than the next 20?
Close to 45% of US citizens do not pay federal or state income taxes.
About 40% of households do not pay income tax. But they do pay sales tax, excise tax (on gasoline, cigarettes, alcohol), social security taxes, medicare taxes, etc.
Yes, it is expensive, but once built the plant can run for 80 to 100 years and pay for itself many times over.
No. When you consider the interest payments on the capital investment, and the amortized cost of decommissioning, nuclear is not competitive with shale gas, and cannot operate without subsidies. Nuclear is no longer even competitive with wind. If current trends continue, solar will be more economical within a decade. While the cost of wind and solar are going down, the cost of nuclear is going UP.
It seems to me they'll always have that to fall back on. I assume they have all sorts of patent money coming in from that.
Toshiba's original patents for flash were issued in the 1980s, and have long since expired. Sandisk has some current patents for NAND flash, but I don't think Toshiba is still getting any royalties for flash.
1. They have sold millions, so I figure somebody has checked. 2. If they were actually recording everything, a lot of people would have to be in on the secret. 3. I assume that Amazon is run by greedy bastards, and they wouldn't build a lot of expensive extra capacity into a device if there was no profit in it for them. 4. If they were spying, and got caught, it would have terrible effects on their reputation, and cost them a lot of customers.
And after the neural network has analysed it and extracted the command, the raw audio data may well be ditched other than the command it recognised with a success/error response code.
I don't think anything is kept locally, but I don't think all the data is ditched on the server. If I say "Alexa, play some music" it will play something I like, such as Willie Nelson or Waylon Jennings. But if my daughter says the same thing, it will play something she likes, such as Bruno Mars. So it is obviously saving enough info to recognize the voice and preferences of individual family members.
A delivery truck arrives with no driver. Self service, help yourself to what you want. What could go wrong?
Unlocking and opening the cargo door will require a PIN and a fingerprint scan, and there will be multiple cameras in the trailer, recording the unloading from several angles, so I don't think this will be a big problem.
Pushing for profitability now would be foolish. Uber has plenty of cash, and plenty of runway. They need to push for growth. Profit can come later. The VCs didn't invest billions to get a small mildly profitable mom-and-pop business. They are looking for another Amazon or Google (which both endured years of little or no profit).
How exactly does it deliver the package Does it have an onboard robot to carry it to your front door?
TFA is not very informative, but judging by the accompanying photos, it looks like they will initially be doing long and short haul commercial trucking, and not to-the-home deliveries.
Uber's recent activities is that the company is over-valued for a taxi service
Indeed. You nailed it. The problem for Uber is that they, and many investors, assumed that ride-sharing would be like auctions or social media where the network effect would create a "winner-take-all" market like it did for eBay and Facebook. That didn't happen. Lyft is hanging in there, Didi clobbered Uber in China, there are several upstarts in India. There is little customer loyalty: I will gladly switch between Uber and Lyft to save a buck. There is not even any driver lock-in: many Uber drivers, and most Lyft drivers, have both apps, and take whatever fare pops up first. Uber is struggling to make enough profit to justify their valuation, and it is unlikely that ride-sharing will ever give one company pricing power. So their only option at this point is to shoot for the moon with projects designed to revolutionize transportation.
It would be interesting how this would stand up in court given that asking Siri where to hide a body used to be something people did for shits and giggles.
Bayesian statistics could help: If you ask Siri that question when no family member has just been murdered, it is likely a joke. Otherwise, there is a conditional probability that it is not.
Do police regularly request cellular phone companies to provide recordings of ambient audio recorded by cellphones?
Irrelevant. This is not about how stupid the police are, but about what Amazon records. They do not record "ambient audio". The device itself only listens for the "wake word", which is "Alexa" by default. Only the sentence directly after that wake word is recorded and transmitted, and this is relatively easy to verify.
Being paranoid about Echo and not your cellphone is irrational.
That's completely different. Two guys are in the same species.
Why should that matter? You sound like a speciesist. If you went back 30 years, and asked Americans if they would object more to gays marrying, or robots marrying, I think the robots would win.
Most people can instantly recognize a picture of Princess Leia. Far fewer could recognize a photo of Lara Croft, and even fewer would recognize Mrs Smith.
The main reason that Carrie had little success beyond Star Wars is because she was too busy snorting cocaine up her nose, and she has openly acknowledged the negative effect of drugs on both her health and career.
In 1977 I fell in love with Princess Leia, and there is still a warm place in my heart whenever I think of her. Carrie, wherever you are out there among the stars, may the force be with you.
or you could say: the emergent properties, such as consciousness, are the result of biological structures
Yup, you could say that. You could also say there is an invisible purple elephant in my pantry. But (and this is the important part) there is absolutely no evidence for either conjecture, and thus it is not rational to believe that either is true.
Everything we have learned about how brains and neurons work indicates that they follow the same physical laws as the rest of the universe. Attempts to mimic brain functions in computer software and hardware using artificial neural networks have been successful in many areas. We have found no indication that there is any barrier to further progress.
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The kind of retarded shit that also pays 40% more for everything else they have to buy. $200k on $50k in Ohio?
That is not true. I live in Silicon Valley (San Jose). Housing is hecka expensive here. But everything else costs about the same here as it does anywhere else. The grocery prices in San Jose are no higher than they are in Gilroy or Tracy.
If you can keep your housing cost down, you can save up a ton of money here. When I first moved here, I lived out of my van for two years, and save enough for a down payment. Plenty of other people rent a place and bunk two or four to a room while they build their nest egg. That is no worse than living in a college dorm or a military barracks. The house next door to me has 16 Filipinos living in it. It is absurd to call these people "homeless".
Do you think that maybe, possibly, perhaps the costs of nuclear power has gone up because we've stopped building them for 40 years?
Why does that matter? If they are uneconomic, they are uneconomic. The reasons are irrelevant. Do you really believe that we should squander money subsidizing nukes because that is the "fair" thing to do? Fair to whom?
All of which benefit the society you live in, whether you use them personally or not.
Just because they benefit everyone doesn't mean funding them with general tax revenue is the best way. Roads should be funded with gasoline excise taxes and registration fees, not general taxes. That way the people that use them directly pay directly, and the people that use them indirectly pay for them through the prices of the goods and services they use. Under our current system, people that use few infrastructure resources are subsidizing those that use more, and the latter group tend to be richer than the former.
Much of the judicial system could be privatized. Arbitration is much cheaper, and mediation is cheaper still. Both have higher satisfaction rates from both plaintiffs and defendants.
Many airports are privately owned and operated. Prior to 9/11, security was also privatized. The TSA more than doubled the cost, without measurably improving security.
The poster is posting on a network originally developed with taxpayer money.
That is fallacious reasoning. You can't just say that "X resulted in something good, therefore X is justified". Even if the government had never funded the Internet, it is possible that something similar would have been developed. It is even possible that it would have happened sooner, since in the early days there were many prohibitions on who had access and how it could be used. It is unlikely those prohibitions would have been there if it was commerical from the very beginning.
You also have to weigh successes like the Internet against the many government boondoggles that never resulted in anything of value. For instance, the Space Shuttle and the ISS.
An army, navy, marines, air force
How do I benefit from my government spending $600B on these?
How did I benefit from America's participation in the Iraq War?
Or the Vietnam War?
Would I benefit less if we only spent as much on weapons as the next 10 countries combined rather than the next 20?
Close to 45% of US citizens do not pay federal or state income taxes.
About 40% of households do not pay income tax. But they do pay sales tax, excise tax (on gasoline, cigarettes, alcohol), social security taxes, medicare taxes, etc.
Computers are a lot more expensive.
Cost of an IBM PC in 1983: $4000.
Cost of a Raspberry Pi in 2016: $29.
The Raspberry Pi is several orders of magnitude faster, and comes with WAY more free development software.
The barrier to entry for nerdy children is much higher now then it was for me.
This is what my 8 year old daughter did:
1. Go to https://scratch.mit.edu/
2. Start coding
Total time to surmount barriers: 10 seconds.
Definitely no.. much more boring now than 30 years ago.
That is called "growing old". Everything is more fun when you are young.
Today's younglings likely enjoy using WebGL to make 4K 3D webpages more than I enjoyed writing UIs with curses on a VT100 30 years ago.
Yes, it is expensive, but once built the plant can run for 80 to 100 years and pay for itself many times over.
No. When you consider the interest payments on the capital investment, and the amortized cost of decommissioning, nuclear is not competitive with shale gas, and cannot operate without subsidies. Nuclear is no longer even competitive with wind. If current trends continue, solar will be more economical within a decade. While the cost of wind and solar are going down, the cost of nuclear is going UP.
It seems to me they'll always have that to fall back on. I assume they have all sorts of patent money coming in from that.
Toshiba's original patents for flash were issued in the 1980s, and have long since expired. Sandisk has some current patents for NAND flash, but I don't think Toshiba is still getting any royalties for flash.
1. They have sold millions, so I figure somebody has checked.
2. If they were actually recording everything, a lot of people would have to be in on the secret.
3. I assume that Amazon is run by greedy bastards, and they wouldn't build a lot of expensive extra capacity into a device if there was no profit in it for them.
4. If they were spying, and got caught, it would have terrible effects on their reputation, and cost them a lot of customers.
And after the neural network has analysed it and extracted the command, the raw audio data may well be ditched other than the command it recognised with a success/error response code.
I don't think anything is kept locally, but I don't think all the data is ditched on the server. If I say "Alexa, play some music" it will play something I like, such as Willie Nelson or Waylon Jennings. But if my daughter says the same thing, it will play something she likes, such as Bruno Mars. So it is obviously saving enough info to recognize the voice and preferences of individual family members.
A delivery truck arrives with no driver. Self service, help yourself to what you want. What could go wrong?
Unlocking and opening the cargo door will require a PIN and a fingerprint scan, and there will be multiple cameras in the trailer, recording the unloading from several angles, so I don't think this will be a big problem.
My question is: are they turning a profit yet?
Pushing for profitability now would be foolish. Uber has plenty of cash, and plenty of runway. They need to push for growth. Profit can come later. The VCs didn't invest billions to get a small mildly profitable mom-and-pop business. They are looking for another Amazon or Google (which both endured years of little or no profit).
Perhaps you can say that people buying their stock on public markets are stupid rubes buying into hype
Uber is a private company. The only investors (so far) are VCs. VCs may be stupid, but they are not rubes.
is filled with all kinds of rules.
A robot can be programmed to follow rules a lot more strictly than a human.
Some rules shouldn't apply to SDTs, such as the 11 hours per day driving limit. Robots don't need sleep.
the thought of Uber self-driving trucks cruising through red lights in major cities
To be fair, the Uber SDC recorded running a red light was under fully human control at the time. According the Uber, the driver has been fired.
How exactly does it deliver the package
Does it have an onboard robot to carry it to your front door?
TFA is not very informative, but judging by the accompanying photos, it looks like they will initially be doing long and short haul commercial trucking, and not to-the-home deliveries.
Uber's recent activities is that the company is over-valued for a taxi service
Indeed. You nailed it. The problem for Uber is that they, and many investors, assumed that ride-sharing would be like auctions or social media where the network effect would create a "winner-take-all" market like it did for eBay and Facebook. That didn't happen. Lyft is hanging in there, Didi clobbered Uber in China, there are several upstarts in India. There is little customer loyalty: I will gladly switch between Uber and Lyft to save a buck. There is not even any driver lock-in: many Uber drivers, and most Lyft drivers, have both apps, and take whatever fare pops up first. Uber is struggling to make enough profit to justify their valuation, and it is unlikely that ride-sharing will ever give one company pricing power. So their only option at this point is to shoot for the moon with projects designed to revolutionize transportation.
It would be interesting how this would stand up in court given that asking Siri where to hide a body used to be something people did for shits and giggles.
Bayesian statistics could help: If you ask Siri that question when no family member has just been murdered, it is likely a joke. Otherwise, there is a conditional probability that it is not.
Do police regularly request cellular phone companies to provide recordings of ambient audio recorded by cellphones?
Irrelevant. This is not about how stupid the police are, but about what Amazon records. They do not record "ambient audio". The device itself only listens for the "wake word", which is "Alexa" by default. Only the sentence directly after that wake word is recorded and transmitted, and this is relatively easy to verify.
Being paranoid about Echo and not your cellphone is irrational.
That's completely different. Two guys are in the same species.
Why should that matter? You sound like a speciesist. If you went back 30 years, and asked Americans if they would object more to gays marrying, or robots marrying, I think the robots would win.
Most people can instantly recognize a picture of Princess Leia. Far fewer could recognize a photo of Lara Croft, and even fewer would recognize Mrs Smith.
The main reason that Carrie had little success beyond Star Wars is because she was too busy snorting cocaine up her nose, and she has openly acknowledged the negative effect of drugs on both her health and career.
In 1977 I fell in love with Princess Leia, and there is still a warm place in my heart whenever I think of her. Carrie, wherever you are out there among the stars, may the force be with you.
or you could say: the emergent properties, such as consciousness, are the result of biological structures
Yup, you could say that. You could also say there is an invisible purple elephant in my pantry. But (and this is the important part) there is absolutely no evidence for either conjecture, and thus it is not rational to believe that either is true.
Everything we have learned about how brains and neurons work indicates that they follow the same physical laws as the rest of the universe. Attempts to mimic brain functions in computer software and hardware using artificial neural networks have been successful in many areas. We have found no indication that there is any barrier to further progress.