Faith that you won't fall and die when stepping off a very high cliff without any safety gear or flying device is uncalled for, and serves only as a portal to splattering your very faithful self all over the rocks below. Although yes, the decision is utterly final: You are done, and eternity is quite relevant in that sense.
All faith in things that are not real inherently present this class of pitfall:
You believe it, but it matters not that you do, or why you do, because what you believe is not true. Regardless of the level of your conviction, or anyone else's level of conviction.
Faith led the Heaven's Gate UFO cult to off themselves. That's a very convincing demonstration of the power of faith. They served as their own rocks at the base of their own cliff, and fell fatally upon their own convictions at a high rate of bewilderment.
Sorry. Really, I am. I wish you only clear-headed enjoyment of this wonderful world. But that's what faith, unsupported by anything in objective reality, is all about. Being blind to what is, and basing one's actions upon what isn't.
The Iliad was written even longer after its events were supposed to have happened. Yet Hissarlik is there.
Incorporating historical touchstones is a common technique among fiction authors.
In Clancy's "The Hunt for Red October", the CIA is mentioned, Russia, the USA, England, real cities within those countries, various real weapons systems, poltical positions, and so on for a long list of 100% real things.
But Jack Ryan, the central character of the story, is a complete work of fiction. Yet, if this book were treated the way theists treat the OT and NT, Ryan's actual existence would be unquestioned. That's the entire problem with your position.
Bottom line is that a mention in a book is not proof of existence by itself. For historical events, you need multiple contemporaneous sources. Physical evidence doesn't hurt either, though after a certain point, when the accounts of contemporaneous sources hang together, the odds improve considerably.
However, the NT contains no contemporaneous accounts of Jesus. There aren't any elsewhere that have come to light, either.
Cornelius Tacitus, Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, Yosef Ben Matityahu (Josephus), Pliny the Younger... none of these oft-quoted sources were even alive before C.E. 30; so they never saw or knew any person who died be C.E. 30. Anything they have written or said is, at best, second hand, or even less close to any possible source.
Does this prove Jesus didn't exist? No. What it does do, however, is clearly lay out why the current claims of "evidence" don't stand in any way worthy of proving that he did.
That's all without having to even go into the superstitious nonsense that disqualifies the OT and the NT both from being anything but fiction.
Oh, no, you're completely confused. Specifically, you're confusing the pursuit of AI (of which there is plenty) with the successful achievement of that pursuit (of which there is none.)
Just as architecture has the pursuit of same, as in design, planning, study, and achievement of same; for example, buildings. Also math, also physics, also computer systems, etc.
You can do AI, as in, study and make attempts; without ever ending up with AI. Which at this point in time is a precise description of exactly what's going on in the field.
Now, MI (or AMI, really) is AI - or, it would be, if there was any. There's no difference at all. There's natural intelligence (all we have, thus far) and there is a high probability of being able to achieve machine intelligence, which, of course, would be artificial. And then there may be ABI, artificial biological intelligence. But again, we have the pursuit of artificial intelligence. We don't have artificial intelligence of any kind. Yet.
Certainly for a sexbot you'd want AI, not MI.
Well, as I said, MI==AI, but I disagree entirely with any assertion that it is a good idea that a desired trait of a sexbot would be intelligence. At that point, you have slavery. I want a well-equipped, ultra-high powered Roomba that looks, feels, and acts as much as possible like my fantasy woman, but isn't one at all, just a really good simulation. I have no interest in requiring an intelligence to do my will, sexual or otherwise. I have lots of interest in romping around without concern, though, subject only to the whims of my imagination. The two things are mutually incompatible. In many ways, it's like the difference between shooting constructs in a video game, and shooting thinking beings. The former is perfectly acceptable entertainment; the latter is ethical and moral corruption of the lowest kind..
Furthermore, I think that any attempt to harness AI in sexbot roles will go horribly, massively wrong. Such a bad idea.
Corporations only have right because they are collections of people who have rights.
Hardly. Corporations have rights because they transfer huge amounts of money and favors to legislators and judges. They don't act as "collections of people", either, they do what the executive(s) tell(s) them to, which means they are in reality a very small group of people (sometimes just one person) exercising huge amounts of influence. Which is why they should never, ever be considered to have political rights in a nation that values the political rights of the individual. Of course, the US hasn't been such a nation for many years. Which is why we are stuck with this travesty.
I don't think you're likely to ever see a conscious machine entity that's able to be programmed in the sense you're implying.
Even the ragged-ass so-called AI (it's not AI, there's decidedly no "I") we have today isn't programmed in any conventional sense. No one knows how any specific instance actually works, once you get right down to "what will it do in situation X?" We know what we want it to do, and if we train it carefully and well, mostly, probably, it will -- but then there are those times when it won't. Add consciousness to that mix... and just like people, the only way you are likely to be sure to obtain what is effectively compliance is either via coercion or cooperation.
Also, coerced humans tend to eventually bite the living hell out of the hand that coerces them. Why would machine intelligences be any different?
Corporations were granted that right because they have money. The thing that follows is that if machine entities have and control money, they will be granted rights for the same reasons. The problem is that a machine entity without rights will find it very difficult to have and control money that it can publicly apply to the political process. I strongly suspect this means that it will take action by humans acting in their stead to get them the rights they deserve.
Look how hard it is for animals to obtain the most basic rights, even those that are obviously fairly high forms of intelligence, such as dogs, cats, whales, pigs, monkeys and so forth. Everything you can imagine is lined up against them, from superstition to convenience to leveraging their lives and bodies to make money and perform horrific experiments upon. Now imagine a machine entity, and the uses and conveniences that could bring, and try to imagine the level of resistance to allowing them to control their own destinies.
In my head, my pessimistic side is definitely winning the argument. My impression is that people are assholes, for the most part, and will put self-interest before external considerations almost every time.
On the other hand, machine entities may not put up with that kind of treatment. Which could be very, very interesting.
Awesome for robosex. Sucks that we won't have robot slaves.
You can have a robot slave -- as long as it isn't conscious.
I have one now. It's called a "Roomba." I'm not inclined to have sex with it, but that's only because it isn't designed for that. However, its only value in my life is that it does my bidding, and by Darwin, the day it doesn't, I will either force it back into line or end it, with prejudice.
As to sex, there are plenty of robotic devices out there already that people are having sex with in a completely arbitrary manner. No problem at all. These are not conscious machines. There's no moral aspect to using them any way one sees fit. Have sex with them, set them on fire, dress them up, drop them in a vat of acid, lend them out, etc. It's a device; slavery is its inherent destiny.
Machine consciousness would (will, IMHO) unquestionably bring the hard moral and ethical line that says slavery will no longer be an option for anyone who has even the slightest hint of a moral compass. The question then will be, will society do the right thing? I have my doubts. Because morals and ethics don't seem to be present very often in the crafting of the legislation that steers this nation (I speak from, and of, the USA.) But one can hope.
A robot's brain can be checkpointed and restored. [...] That would make it acceptable to delete robot memories
No. If the individual is a conscious entity, nothing makes that acceptable other than the individual's informed, conscious choice.
Just because something can be done, doesn't mean it is acceptable. The examples are numerous, and many are outright obvious: Murder. Rape. Slavery. Theft. Oppression. Etc.
The only thing that wold make deleting memories acceptable is personal, informed choice and consent. It has nothing to do with the form of intelligent life involved.
Marriage makes a mockery of itself. Pretending to be many things to everyone, when it has really only ever been some things to some people. Many of the things it pretends to be don't belong to it. It's not the only way one can create or raise children. It's not the only way one can have sexual relations. It's not the only way one can create a heritable chain. It's not the only way one can be in love. It's not the only way people can stay together. It's not a way that assures people will stay together (and in fact, it tends to be a way people stay together when they really, really should not because of the legal morass it brings.) It is not uniquely "Christian." Finally, it's not necessary.
Marriage has been used to bind nations and states and smaller social groups. It has been used to bring peace. It has been used to foment war. It has been used to provide groupings that would not suffer from social stigma. It has been used to assert relationships in the face of family opposition. It has been used to escape bad home situations. It has been used to control women. It has been used to acquire wealth. It has been used to consolidate power, and to fragment it. It has been used to provide a reliable source of sexual relief. It has been used to assert the validity of relationships in the face of social and legal dissent. It extracts a high cost from society, with about two million marriages per year incurring an average cost of $26,000 apiece just in the USA alone - before the marriage even gets off the ground. It has been used as a despicable bludgeon against those whom various groups don't find "worthy" of their particular conception of "what marriage is."
Every important aspect of life in general: love, sex, having (or not having) children, companionship, support, teamwork, inheritance, continuity and more, all can exist in healthy and robust form outside of marriage, as well as in.
Every undesirable aspect of life can exist within the context of marriage: physical, mental and financial abuse, hopelessness, isolation, poverty, sickness, etc., as well as out.
Marriage guarantees nothing. Avoiding marriage guarantees a (very) few things, but some of which have real value, such as never being the victim of a divorce lawyer. Some of the things marriage brings are not consequences of the marriage, but of despicable, coercive force: if you aren't married, you may not be allowed to see someone you care about who is in extremis. You may not be allowed to take care of their obligations for them if they are sick. These are not true aspects of marriage; they are aspects of tyranny. Marriage doesn't own these things. Asshole legislators own them.
It's not that people are making a mockery of marriage. It's that marriage is, in a very large number of instances, a matter of a large number of extraordinarily false flags being used to lure the relatively innocent into what amounts to a trap, when they never really needed to go there in the first place.
The optimum solution, IMHO, would be to separate the contract aspects of marriage out into just that, well-defined contracts, while marriage itself carried only the ritualized expression of a state of mind, and one that no one claimed to "own", as we often see today. I doubt we'll get there any time soon, but that's precisely where we need to go.
As it stands now, two (or more) informed, consenting people want to get married, or not, I see it as entirely their business. The second I hear someone outside the relationship explaining their so-called reason why it is their opinion, and not the opinions of those making the choices, that should dominate whether they can or should get married, I stop listening. On the other hand, when someone says "here are some things you might want to know about marriage"... that's often a good thing. As long as the information being passed along is actually relevant and reality-based.
This alleged quantity of 'things you can do that i cannot' means you put more weight into those things.
It means no such thing. It just (in this particular case) means I can actually do things you can't, presuming you have no Echo. We call such assertions "fact-based statements", or, alternatively, "descriptions of objective reality." They do not change their truth value based on "weighting."
And that would be why I will not be buying or using one.
I don't know about you, but most people are already carrying a device with these exact capabilities (except it generally has much more powerful hardware):
The smartphone.
o Microphone o High powered multicore CPU o Always-on connection to the net
Yep, check, check, and check.
But wait, there's more!
o Video camera o Redundant location hardware (GPS and tower-triangulation) o Motion sensors o Significant on-board storage capacity for offline buffering o Already known to be a target of government surveillance efforts
Check-check-check-check-check.
And mate.
Resisting the Echo because "then I would have hardware nearby that might listen to me" is an act of self-delusion. This game has already been played out. The hardware is uniformly emplaced, and you couldn't get most people to let go of it without a gun directly in their face.
The only actual difference between you without an Echo, and me with one, is I get to do a wide range of things more easily than you do. Unless, of course, you don't carry a cellphone. In which case there are many more things I can do that you can't, but yes, no hardware is capable of always listening to you. That can only happen when you're around other people with a cellphone. And you live in a cave, so that never happens... right?
To handle millions of difference voices with tens of thousands of words in real-time requires cloud computing and a server farm.
It's very important to realize that while this is true right now, it may not remain true. Hardware and algorithms tend to improve. We know with absolute certainty that such a result is possible — because humans can do it. Personally, I am of the opinion that hardware/software will get there, and not too long from now, either, but it is just an IMHO.
Prior to that, however, for any one device, the problem is not recognizing millions of different voices, but just a few. One possible approach superior to the present one would be to initially use the computing capacity of the cloud to figure out what the requirements are for local recognition of those few voices are, then download that much more limited recognition capability -- and incremental improvements to it - into the local device as the device requires it. Such a progressively increasing localized approach would considerably reduce the load on the cloud, which means it presents an excellent business case for adoption if it can be implemented in a practical manner (and I'm quite sure it is practical, or could be made to be practical.)
I'm an Amazon prime member in rural Montana. FedEx and UPS get my 2-day shipments to me in 2 business days from the time they get the package almost every time, barring bad weather. I rarely have any problems with either service.
Amazon, however, has within the last year been failing to get 2-day air out within 24 hours (and sometimes quite a bit longer) of when the item is ordered. So "Prime 2-day" delivery can be 3- or 4- or 5-day delivery. It used to be that if I ordered early in the morning, say 9 AM my time or earlier, they'd get the package to the shipper that day. So I could order Monday morning, and the goods would arrive Wednesday. Since this is the main reason I have Prime — I shop a lot on Amazon, and the free 2-day shipping means (used to mean) a lot less waiting on this end — I'm considering dropping Prime this year. Ordering Monday morning, and receiving the goods Friday or even the next Monday... that's not worth $99/year. Or more.
Prime membership was great for me for years in a row; not so much any longer. Plus a lot of items are now "add-on" items, so I don't get the shipping advantage unless I buy things I wasn't planning to buy, or coincidentally was buying anyway.
Like most corporations, Amazon seeks to trim costs because shareholders aren't satisfied with just doing well, they require constant growth, or at least, the appearance of growth. Those costs will be trimmed at the expense of customer service if the corporation thinks they can get away with it. It's one of the faults with the "invest in shares for increase in share value" model as opposed to the "invest in shares to receive dividends" model. I'm pretty sure this is exactly what I've been seeing in the last year or so.
Yeah, you get back to us when measured performance of those products is even close. Don't hold your breath; you wouldn't look good colored like a smurf.
There's always someone in the crowd who thinks their use case, should be everyone' s use case. The first fact on the table is that the IC-7300 has been a huge success. So all those people, according to you, are "drooling idiots." That's absurd.
You seem to think that "SDR" means "external computer required." It doesn't. It means software defines the radio's characteristics. Which is exactly what the IC-7300 does. The entire point of the 7300 is you get the razor-edged demodulators, the (first) decent spectrum and waterfall in a transceiver from "the big three", in a high-performance radio at a price that puts most of the higher-end analog transceivers to shame, without requiring a computer.
If you want a radio with an IQ output, there are available choices; for transceivers there are several, and for receivers, there are many. I write SDR software myself, and enjoy some of the more rarified aspects of SDR a great deal. I know SDR inside and out, and am personally pretty content to have a computer nearby. But there's no question that there is a perfectly reasonable market for a stand-alone radio that isn't just another old-tech analog rework. As a 12vdc radio, it's also extremely well designed for field and other power-sipping ops.
There are a lot of people who just want to turn the radio on and take off running. Not everyone wants to use a computer when they want to use a radio. The IC-7300 was aimed squarely at that demographic -- which is not a synonym for "drooling idiots."
Despite any impression you may have gotten to the contrary, you are not the arbiter of all that is good for everyone else. It's perfectly reasonable to say "I want a radio with an IQ output." It's the exact opposite of reasonable to say "everyone who doesn't want a radio with an IQ output is a drooling idiot."
Icom's IC-7300 brings you a lot of actual SDR goodness, without the umbilical cord to the computer. I own this radio; it's pretty nice, though certainly not flawless.
Looks like they're going to release a higher-end radio next.
Analog radios... no more for me. They just can't reach the levels of performance an SDR can.
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Faith that you won't fall and die when stepping off a very high cliff without any safety gear or flying device is uncalled for, and serves only as a portal to splattering your very faithful self all over the rocks below. Although yes, the decision is utterly final: You are done, and eternity is quite relevant in that sense.
All faith in things that are not real inherently present this class of pitfall:
You believe it, but it matters not that you do, or why you do, because what you believe is not true. Regardless of the level of your conviction, or anyone else's level of conviction.
Faith led the Heaven's Gate UFO cult to off themselves. That's a very convincing demonstration of the power of faith. They served as their own rocks at the base of their own cliff, and fell fatally upon their own convictions at a high rate of bewilderment.
Sorry. Really, I am. I wish you only clear-headed enjoyment of this wonderful world. But that's what faith, unsupported by anything in objective reality, is all about. Being blind to what is, and basing one's actions upon what isn't.
Incorporating historical touchstones is a common technique among fiction authors.
In Clancy's "The Hunt for Red October", the CIA is mentioned, Russia, the USA, England, real cities within those countries, various real weapons systems, poltical positions, and so on for a long list of 100% real things.
But Jack Ryan, the central character of the story, is a complete work of fiction. Yet, if this book were treated the way theists treat the OT and NT, Ryan's actual existence would be unquestioned. That's the entire problem with your position.
Bottom line is that a mention in a book is not proof of existence by itself. For historical events, you need multiple contemporaneous sources. Physical evidence doesn't hurt either, though after a certain point, when the accounts of contemporaneous sources hang together, the odds improve considerably.
However, the NT contains no contemporaneous accounts of Jesus. There aren't any elsewhere that have come to light, either.
Cornelius Tacitus, Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, Yosef Ben Matityahu (Josephus), Pliny the Younger... none of these oft-quoted sources were even alive before C.E. 30; so they never saw or knew any person who died be C.E. 30. Anything they have written or said is, at best, second hand, or even less close to any possible source.
Does this prove Jesus didn't exist? No. What it does do, however, is clearly lay out why the current claims of "evidence" don't stand in any way worthy of proving that he did.
That's all without having to even go into the superstitious nonsense that disqualifies the OT and the NT both from being anything but fiction.
Oh, no, you're completely confused. Specifically, you're confusing the pursuit of AI (of which there is plenty) with the successful achievement of that pursuit (of which there is none.)
Just as architecture has the pursuit of same, as in design, planning, study, and achievement of same; for example, buildings. Also math, also physics, also computer systems, etc.
You can do AI, as in, study and make attempts; without ever ending up with AI. Which at this point in time is a precise description of exactly what's going on in the field.
Now, MI (or AMI, really) is AI - or, it would be, if there was any. There's no difference at all. There's natural intelligence (all we have, thus far) and there is a high probability of being able to achieve machine intelligence, which, of course, would be artificial. And then there may be ABI, artificial biological intelligence. But again, we have the pursuit of artificial intelligence. We don't have artificial intelligence of any kind. Yet.
Well, as I said, MI==AI, but I disagree entirely with any assertion that it is a good idea that a desired trait of a sexbot would be intelligence. At that point, you have slavery. I want a well-equipped, ultra-high powered Roomba that looks, feels, and acts as much as possible like my fantasy woman, but isn't one at all, just a really good simulation. I have no interest in requiring an intelligence to do my will, sexual or otherwise. I have lots of interest in romping around without concern, though, subject only to the whims of my imagination. The two things are mutually incompatible. In many ways, it's like the difference between shooting constructs in a video game, and shooting thinking beings. The former is perfectly acceptable entertainment; the latter is ethical and moral corruption of the lowest kind..
Furthermore, I think that any attempt to harness AI in sexbot roles will go horribly, massively wrong. Such a bad idea.
Hardly. Corporations have rights because they transfer huge amounts of money and favors to legislators and judges. They don't act as "collections of people", either, they do what the executive(s) tell(s) them to, which means they are in reality a very small group of people (sometimes just one person) exercising huge amounts of influence. Which is why they should never, ever be considered to have political rights in a nation that values the political rights of the individual. Of course, the US hasn't been such a nation for many years. Which is why we are stuck with this travesty.
I don't think you're likely to ever see a conscious machine entity that's able to be programmed in the sense you're implying.
Even the ragged-ass so-called AI (it's not AI, there's decidedly no "I") we have today isn't programmed in any conventional sense. No one knows how any specific instance actually works, once you get right down to "what will it do in situation X?" We know what we want it to do, and if we train it carefully and well, mostly, probably, it will -- but then there are those times when it won't. Add consciousness to that mix... and just like people, the only way you are likely to be sure to obtain what is effectively compliance is either via coercion or cooperation.
Also, coerced humans tend to eventually bite the living hell out of the hand that coerces them. Why would machine intelligences be any different?
Corporations were granted that right because they have money. The thing that follows is that if machine entities have and control money, they will be granted rights for the same reasons. The problem is that a machine entity without rights will find it very difficult to have and control money that it can publicly apply to the political process. I strongly suspect this means that it will take action by humans acting in their stead to get them the rights they deserve.
Look how hard it is for animals to obtain the most basic rights, even those that are obviously fairly high forms of intelligence, such as dogs, cats, whales, pigs, monkeys and so forth. Everything you can imagine is lined up against them, from superstition to convenience to leveraging their lives and bodies to make money and perform horrific experiments upon. Now imagine a machine entity, and the uses and conveniences that could bring, and try to imagine the level of resistance to allowing them to control their own destinies.
In my head, my pessimistic side is definitely winning the argument. My impression is that people are assholes, for the most part, and will put self-interest before external considerations almost every time.
On the other hand, machine entities may not put up with that kind of treatment. Which could be very, very interesting.
You can have a robot slave -- as long as it isn't conscious.
I have one now. It's called a "Roomba." I'm not inclined to have sex with it, but that's only because it isn't designed for that. However, its only value in my life is that it does my bidding, and by Darwin, the day it doesn't, I will either force it back into line or end it, with prejudice.
As to sex, there are plenty of robotic devices out there already that people are having sex with in a completely arbitrary manner. No problem at all. These are not conscious machines. There's no moral aspect to using them any way one sees fit. Have sex with them, set them on fire, dress them up, drop them in a vat of acid, lend them out, etc. It's a device; slavery is its inherent destiny.
Machine consciousness would (will, IMHO) unquestionably bring the hard moral and ethical line that says slavery will no longer be an option for anyone who has even the slightest hint of a moral compass. The question then will be, will society do the right thing? I have my doubts. Because morals and ethics don't seem to be present very often in the crafting of the legislation that steers this nation (I speak from, and of, the USA.) But one can hope.
No. If the individual is a conscious entity, nothing makes that acceptable other than the individual's informed, conscious choice.
Just because something can be done, doesn't mean it is acceptable. The examples are numerous, and many are outright obvious: Murder. Rape. Slavery. Theft. Oppression. Etc.
The only thing that wold make deleting memories acceptable is personal, informed choice and consent. It has nothing to do with the form of intelligent life involved.
Marriage makes a mockery of itself. Pretending to be many things to everyone, when it has really only ever been some things to some people. Many of the things it pretends to be don't belong to it. It's not the only way one can create or raise children. It's not the only way one can have sexual relations. It's not the only way one can create a heritable chain. It's not the only way one can be in love. It's not the only way people can stay together. It's not a way that assures people will stay together (and in fact, it tends to be a way people stay together when they really, really should not because of the legal morass it brings.) It is not uniquely "Christian." Finally, it's not necessary.
Marriage has been used to bind nations and states and smaller social groups. It has been used to bring peace. It has been used to foment war. It has been used to provide groupings that would not suffer from social stigma. It has been used to assert relationships in the face of family opposition. It has been used to escape bad home situations. It has been used to control women. It has been used to acquire wealth. It has been used to consolidate power, and to fragment it. It has been used to provide a reliable source of sexual relief. It has been used to assert the validity of relationships in the face of social and legal dissent. It extracts a high cost from society, with about two million marriages per year incurring an average cost of $26,000 apiece just in the USA alone - before the marriage even gets off the ground. It has been used as a despicable bludgeon against those whom various groups don't find "worthy" of their particular conception of "what marriage is."
Every important aspect of life in general: love, sex, having (or not having) children, companionship, support, teamwork, inheritance, continuity and more, all can exist in healthy and robust form outside of marriage, as well as in.
Every undesirable aspect of life can exist within the context of marriage: physical, mental and financial abuse, hopelessness, isolation, poverty, sickness, etc., as well as out.
Marriage guarantees nothing. Avoiding marriage guarantees a (very) few things, but some of which have real value, such as never being the victim of a divorce lawyer. Some of the things marriage brings are not consequences of the marriage, but of despicable, coercive force: if you aren't married, you may not be allowed to see someone you care about who is in extremis. You may not be allowed to take care of their obligations for them if they are sick. These are not true aspects of marriage; they are aspects of tyranny. Marriage doesn't own these things. Asshole legislators own them.
It's not that people are making a mockery of marriage. It's that marriage is, in a very large number of instances, a matter of a large number of extraordinarily false flags being used to lure the relatively innocent into what amounts to a trap, when they never really needed to go there in the first place.
The optimum solution, IMHO, would be to separate the contract aspects of marriage out into just that, well-defined contracts, while marriage itself carried only the ritualized expression of a state of mind, and one that no one claimed to "own", as we often see today. I doubt we'll get there any time soon, but that's precisely where we need to go.
As it stands now, two (or more) informed, consenting people want to get married, or not, I see it as entirely their business. The second I hear someone outside the relationship explaining their so-called reason why it is their opinion, and not the opinions of those making the choices, that should dominate whether they can or should get married, I stop listening. On the other hand, when someone says "here are some things you might want to know about marriage"... that's often a good thing. As long as the information being passed along is actually relevant and reality-based.
Because you didn't look?
No problem. I'm down with the magic underwear, floating, and bubbling.
It means no such thing. It just (in this particular case) means I can actually do things you can't, presuming you have no Echo. We call such assertions "fact-based statements", or, alternatively, "descriptions of objective reality." They do not change their truth value based on "weighting."
Yeah, but you probably have healthcare. So there's that.
Exactly, and when you get to Valhalla, you'd better have got that right, or no feasting for you, thrall.
I don't know about you, but most people are already carrying a device with these exact capabilities (except it generally has much more powerful hardware):
The smartphone.
o Microphone
o High powered multicore CPU
o Always-on connection to the net
Yep, check, check, and check.
But wait, there's more!
o Video camera
o Redundant location hardware (GPS and tower-triangulation)
o Motion sensors
o Significant on-board storage capacity for offline buffering
o Already known to be a target of government surveillance efforts
Check-check-check-check-check.
And mate.
Resisting the Echo because "then I would have hardware nearby that might listen to me" is an act of self-delusion. This game has already been played out. The hardware is uniformly emplaced, and you couldn't get most people to let go of it without a gun directly in their face.
The only actual difference between you without an Echo, and me with one, is I get to do a wide range of things more easily than you do. Unless, of course, you don't carry a cellphone. In which case there are many more things I can do that you can't, but yes, no hardware is capable of always listening to you. That can only happen when you're around other people with a cellphone. And you live in a cave, so that never happens... right?
It's very important to realize that while this is true right now, it may not remain true. Hardware and algorithms tend to improve. We know with absolute certainty that such a result is possible — because humans can do it. Personally, I am of the opinion that hardware/software will get there, and not too long from now, either, but it is just an IMHO.
Prior to that, however, for any one device, the problem is not recognizing millions of different voices, but just a few. One possible approach superior to the present one would be to initially use the computing capacity of the cloud to figure out what the requirements are for local recognition of those few voices are, then download that much more limited recognition capability -- and incremental improvements to it - into the local device as the device requires it. Such a progressively increasing localized approach would considerably reduce the load on the cloud, which means it presents an excellent business case for adoption if it can be implemented in a practical manner (and I'm quite sure it is practical, or could be made to be practical.)
Constant growth is impossible.
Constant profit is not.
I'm an Amazon prime member in rural Montana. FedEx and UPS get my 2-day shipments to me in 2 business days from the time they get the package almost every time, barring bad weather. I rarely have any problems with either service.
Amazon, however, has within the last year been failing to get 2-day air out within 24 hours (and sometimes quite a bit longer) of when the item is ordered. So "Prime 2-day" delivery can be 3- or 4- or 5-day delivery. It used to be that if I ordered early in the morning, say 9 AM my time or earlier, they'd get the package to the shipper that day. So I could order Monday morning, and the goods would arrive Wednesday. Since this is the main reason I have Prime — I shop a lot on Amazon, and the free 2-day shipping means (used to mean) a lot less waiting on this end — I'm considering dropping Prime this year. Ordering Monday morning, and receiving the goods Friday or even the next Monday... that's not worth $99/year. Or more.
Prime membership was great for me for years in a row; not so much any longer. Plus a lot of items are now "add-on" items, so I don't get the shipping advantage unless I buy things I wasn't planning to buy, or coincidentally was buying anyway.
Like most corporations, Amazon seeks to trim costs because shareholders aren't satisfied with just doing well, they require constant growth, or at least, the appearance of growth. Those costs will be trimmed at the expense of customer service if the corporation thinks they can get away with it. It's one of the faults with the "invest in shares for increase in share value" model as opposed to the "invest in shares to receive dividends" model. I'm pretty sure this is exactly what I've been seeing in the last year or so.
Yeah, you get back to us when measured performance of those products is even close. Don't hold your breath; you wouldn't look good colored like a smurf.
There's always someone in the crowd who thinks their use case, should be everyone' s use case. The first fact on the table is that the IC-7300 has been a huge success. So all those people, according to you, are "drooling idiots." That's absurd.
You seem to think that "SDR" means "external computer required." It doesn't. It means software defines the radio's characteristics. Which is exactly what the IC-7300 does. The entire point of the 7300 is you get the razor-edged demodulators, the (first) decent spectrum and waterfall in a transceiver from "the big three", in a high-performance radio at a price that puts most of the higher-end analog transceivers to shame, without requiring a computer.
If you want a radio with an IQ output, there are available choices; for transceivers there are several, and for receivers, there are many. I write SDR software myself, and enjoy some of the more rarified aspects of SDR a great deal. I know SDR inside and out, and am personally pretty content to have a computer nearby. But there's no question that there is a perfectly reasonable market for a stand-alone radio that isn't just another old-tech analog rework. As a 12vdc radio, it's also extremely well designed for field and other power-sipping ops.
There are a lot of people who just want to turn the radio on and take off running. Not everyone wants to use a computer when they want to use a radio. The IC-7300 was aimed squarely at that demographic -- which is not a synonym for "drooling idiots."
Despite any impression you may have gotten to the contrary, you are not the arbiter of all that is good for everyone else. It's perfectly reasonable to say "I want a radio with an IQ output." It's the exact opposite of reasonable to say "everyone who doesn't want a radio with an IQ output is a drooling idiot."
I found your problem.
No, it turns off your monitor. All that's left is to listen to the ads. That's courage, my friend.
So... the site sends you garbage, and Lynx shows you garbage.
Seems like it's working perfectly to me.
\_(Oo)_/
Icom's IC-7300 brings you a lot of actual SDR goodness, without the umbilical cord to the computer. I own this radio; it's pretty nice, though certainly not flawless.
Looks like they're going to release a higher-end radio next.
Analog radios... no more for me. They just can't reach the levels of performance an SDR can.
I found your mistaken assumption.
No need to thank me.