I suspect, having plenty of people who remember living behind the Iron Curtain, that residents of countries like Ukraine would rather emigrate than go back to Russian rule.
Communism wasn't evil, but the communists were - maybe they're not communists anymore, but why would anybody believe that things will be "better this time"?
I'm thinking the movie you want to see is encrypted and buried in such a sea of garbage that it becomes impractical to extract it without the master key....
This way they can charge you $10 a pop for the blanks that cost pennies to make (after up front costs), > 50% of which will be wasted on bad recording sessions or discs that didn't get filled. They can also charge you more for the burner/player than that 4TB hard drive costs, and sell "premium" machines with the differentiator being that the lower line models only have BluRay burners....
I won a notebook that came with a BluRay burner, I think I played one BluRay movie in it, one time just to see that it worked. I've burned a few dozen DVDs in it, though most of them would have been fine on a 700Meg CD, never burned the "sample" blank BluRay that came with it - never had a need.
I think this new generation of Disc burners is akin to the tape drives of 20 years ago - a way to get data off the live system and put it in a closet somewhere. "Sure, we can restore that at any time" - with about 50% success when put to an actual real-world test. In the early 1990s, we tried shipping data cross-country on tape cartridges - we ended up with a system where we made triplicate tapes, ship 2, keep 1 and confirm successful restoration on the other end before wiping the source.
Not as good as a mammogram in from some points of view - the mammo can cause the disease it detects, thereby feeding the system additional cases to treat. Quote from a newly minted M.D. "whether or not the test causes the disease is irrelevant, we can treat it, so we're saving those who would have gone untreated and not harming those in whom we are causing the disease." assuming they continue to come back for future testing...
I guess the Hippocratic oath has gone out of fashion.
Depends on doctor and hospital - they're putting people in their 30s with small superficial melanomas through chemo around here, not that I'm saying it's unwarranted, but maybe somewhere else they're even more aggressive...
A. You have cancerous cells in your body, guaranteed - it's a question of how many and whether or not they are multiplying out of control, and that can be a grey area.
B. Unless you just sterilized your mouth to an unhealthy level of bacterial absence, you also have halitosis, same as above....
It's not too surprising that "sniffers" thousands of times more sensitive than our own noses can pick out the chemical signature of larger active tumors, just like we can tell when somebody needs to brush and floss... the psychological aspect of not wanting to know about the cancer is an interesting one, I can totally understand people who'd rather go when their time has come instead of submitting to chemo/radio therapy...
I think it was a brilliant stroke: "We've got an online trading system here - with a tweak here and a kludge there, we can trade these Bitcoin, that could be profitable..."
Kind of like a kid who's been riding their bike without the training wheels for a couple of months now, entering an olympic downhill offroad cycling challenge...
MBAs from Harvard aren't a magic elixir - I've watched plenty of 'em preside over S.N.A.F.U.s just like the rest of us.
But you need to remember your George Carlin: "Think of somebody you know with a 100 I.Q. - now, realize, they are average. That means, half the people in the world are dumber than them..."
Even though they aren't magic, MBAs from Harvard do tend to be above average - most of the startups out there are trying to make a go of it with less talent, less resources, and less common sense than you'd ever think possible. MtGox was most likely out of their depth, possibly crooked, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the real story is a little of both.
I think what people miss is that they didn't have a half billion USD worth of currency when they set things up. When they set things up, BTC was trading for less than 1% of today's values, and (just speculating here) a couple of years back they probably had a small fraction of the BTC that they have today (had a few months ago, at least...). So, the half billion USD peak might have only been a hundred thousand or so when the organization started to "get serious."
When your organization's total assets are less than a year's salary of a good software engineer, odds are, you don't have a good software engineer on staff full time to make sure things like change management are happening properly. Ditto for accounting and audits.
Should they have hired up proper staff when assets started to resemble Scrooge McDuck's vault? Yep, they sure should have. Think about how long it takes to hire good people when you're looking for them. Now think about how long it takes management to start looking for good people, even when they have a clearly demonstrated need, but no immediate crisis.
Not that I trust a damn thing written about fund managers on prospectuses, but this is why people should be looking for years of experience in relevant fields in the team that manages an investment. Then, when the fund goes bust and it turns out that the prospectus was a pack of lies, some lawyers can make a little money suing the bastards until they only have their offshore accounts left to live on.
Now you're getting to the political basis of it all - it matters more who a change is going to benefit in the short term than whether or not a change is better for everyone in the long term. I'm not saying moving (back) to gold would be a good thing, just that this is how decisions are made....
However, the world's richest people don't have proportionately more gold... on the contrary, it's mostly the upper-middles in poorer and less stable nations (or states of mind) that have largish hoards of precious metals.
Currency choice has little to do with perpetuating the wealth gap, tax structure, however, has a lot to do with it... When Warren Buffet has a lower effective tax rate than his secretary, what is that saying?
It's because the naysayers are the ones more actively working in the field and closest to the experimental and theoretical results and are trying to actually accomplish these kinds of tasks.
Most of the time, you're right, the experts are the experts, they know their fields and they can predict the future.
I find, however, that the experts that have the time to seek publicity, pontificate for the press, serve as expert witnesses, etc. are often a bit low on skill and behind the curve on what is really possible, or even true in their field. Meanwhile, some of the most cutting edge innovators can be disinclined to share their latest progress.
This is patently not the case in massively collaborative projects like the LHC, but AI is a different field altogether, and I have seen plenty superficial criticism and lack of mutual understanding within the "top" of AI research for the last 30 years. AI still seems to be strongly influenced by the Not Invented Here phenomenon - they may change and start a productive global collaboration someday, but right now it looks to me like the next big thing in AI is likely to spring from a dark closet someday.
Arguably, making the computer mobile, giving it responsibility for care of its own "body," is one way to make it more human. It could be simulated, the big deep blue processor could be kept in a closet and operate the body by remote, or the whole body and world thing could play out in VR, but those elements of seeing the world through two eyes, hearing from two ears, smelling, tasting, feeling, having to balance while walking, getting hurt if you are careless, those are all part and parcel of being human - giving an artificial intelligence those limitations and responsibilities will give it a more familiar frame of reference for mutual understanding.
Besides, robots just look a whole lot cooler than a box on a desk, and when a physical robot can pass the Turing test, you've hit a pretty cool milestone.
Too lazy to RTFA, but the bit about "won't have time to develop adult intelligence by 2029" seems to be missing the difference between the speed of chemical synapses and electrical or photonic switching circuits.
Re: Kurzweil, you missed my perspective, I think he's a crazy dreamer who has been right about a fair number of things. I take his predictions with a great deal of skepticism, but I wouldn't bet my retirement accounts on him being wrong....
Depends on how much of a hard-on you have for enforcing particular laws.
If it was an ad for a "smoke shop" and it showed paraphernalia for illegal materials, you bet there are people who will follow up.
The drone space is very competitive right now, even if the regulatory officials don't particularly care, some of the competitors will be prodding them into action just to bring each other down...
Lived there for many years without a problem, it's one particular neighbor who calls in the DEP when she gets a mean streak going - not just on me, pretty much everyone...
Actually, yes, the whole county is pretty full of stupid regulations, regulatory officials, political bozos, ignorant bigots, etc. We left a year ago.
The path doesn't have to be wood paved, but that is the option, and, as you say, it has a basis in some reasonable thought.
The further reasoning about the play swing is that it is "high traffic / high impact" while a path would carry less foot traffic.
I put the path in, no paving, and now it carries a whole lot of "hoof traffic" (deer, probably 30-40 "trips" a day, according to the trail cam.) I can't imagine that a couple of kids playing on a swing a few times a week could do more to compact the soil.
Gotta love that ground compaction argument - the local (county) department of natural resources had me remove a play-swing from my backyard because my two children using it might cause undesirable ground compaction. Meanwhile, I can legally put in a path 10' wide and infinitely long, and pave it with wood.
In the free market culture we have, it is very probable that the person filing the complaint (possibly anonymously) was the one who lost the bid for the job.
Estimates of distance and portrayal of peril can be very subjective.
I think there has been a complicit cooperation between actresses, fashion designers and the papparazi for years - elegant evening gown: hit it with a good flash, suddenly see through. That doesn't happen to dresses you buy at normal department stores.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't Russia beat Napolean with this kind of strategy?
A nuclear device in the back of a truck is one hell of an effective weapon.
I suspect, having plenty of people who remember living behind the Iron Curtain, that residents of countries like Ukraine would rather emigrate than go back to Russian rule.
Communism wasn't evil, but the communists were - maybe they're not communists anymore, but why would anybody believe that things will be "better this time"?
I'm thinking the movie you want to see is encrypted and buried in such a sea of garbage that it becomes impractical to extract it without the master key....
This way they can charge you $10 a pop for the blanks that cost pennies to make (after up front costs), > 50% of which will be wasted on bad recording sessions or discs that didn't get filled. They can also charge you more for the burner/player than that 4TB hard drive costs, and sell "premium" machines with the differentiator being that the lower line models only have BluRay burners....
I won a notebook that came with a BluRay burner, I think I played one BluRay movie in it, one time just to see that it worked. I've burned a few dozen DVDs in it, though most of them would have been fine on a 700Meg CD, never burned the "sample" blank BluRay that came with it - never had a need.
I think this new generation of Disc burners is akin to the tape drives of 20 years ago - a way to get data off the live system and put it in a closet somewhere. "Sure, we can restore that at any time" - with about 50% success when put to an actual real-world test. In the early 1990s, we tried shipping data cross-country on tape cartridges - we ended up with a system where we made triplicate tapes, ship 2, keep 1 and confirm successful restoration on the other end before wiping the source.
Not as good as a mammogram in from some points of view - the mammo can cause the disease it detects, thereby feeding the system additional cases to treat. Quote from a newly minted M.D. "whether or not the test causes the disease is irrelevant, we can treat it, so we're saving those who would have gone untreated and not harming those in whom we are causing the disease." assuming they continue to come back for future testing...
I guess the Hippocratic oath has gone out of fashion.
Depends on doctor and hospital - they're putting people in their 30s with small superficial melanomas through chemo around here, not that I'm saying it's unwarranted, but maybe somewhere else they're even more aggressive...
Probably very sensitive to prostate cancer, maybe not so much for a brain tumor?
A. You have cancerous cells in your body, guaranteed - it's a question of how many and whether or not they are multiplying out of control, and that can be a grey area.
B. Unless you just sterilized your mouth to an unhealthy level of bacterial absence, you also have halitosis, same as above....
It's not too surprising that "sniffers" thousands of times more sensitive than our own noses can pick out the chemical signature of larger active tumors, just like we can tell when somebody needs to brush and floss... the psychological aspect of not wanting to know about the cancer is an interesting one, I can totally understand people who'd rather go when their time has come instead of submitting to chemo/radio therapy...
I think it was a brilliant stroke: "We've got an online trading system here - with a tweak here and a kludge there, we can trade these Bitcoin, that could be profitable..."
Kind of like a kid who's been riding their bike without the training wheels for a couple of months now, entering an olympic downhill offroad cycling challenge...
MBAs from Harvard aren't a magic elixir - I've watched plenty of 'em preside over S.N.A.F.U.s just like the rest of us.
But you need to remember your George Carlin: "Think of somebody you know with a 100 I.Q. - now, realize, they are average. That means, half the people in the world are dumber than them..."
Even though they aren't magic, MBAs from Harvard do tend to be above average - most of the startups out there are trying to make a go of it with less talent, less resources, and less common sense than you'd ever think possible. MtGox was most likely out of their depth, possibly crooked, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the real story is a little of both.
I think what people miss is that they didn't have a half billion USD worth of currency when they set things up. When they set things up, BTC was trading for less than 1% of today's values, and (just speculating here) a couple of years back they probably had a small fraction of the BTC that they have today (had a few months ago, at least...). So, the half billion USD peak might have only been a hundred thousand or so when the organization started to "get serious."
When your organization's total assets are less than a year's salary of a good software engineer, odds are, you don't have a good software engineer on staff full time to make sure things like change management are happening properly. Ditto for accounting and audits.
Should they have hired up proper staff when assets started to resemble Scrooge McDuck's vault? Yep, they sure should have. Think about how long it takes to hire good people when you're looking for them. Now think about how long it takes management to start looking for good people, even when they have a clearly demonstrated need, but no immediate crisis.
Not that I trust a damn thing written about fund managers on prospectuses, but this is why people should be looking for years of experience in relevant fields in the team that manages an investment. Then, when the fund goes bust and it turns out that the prospectus was a pack of lies, some lawyers can make a little money suing the bastards until they only have their offshore accounts left to live on.
Now you're getting to the political basis of it all - it matters more who a change is going to benefit in the short term than whether or not a change is better for everyone in the long term. I'm not saying moving (back) to gold would be a good thing, just that this is how decisions are made....
However, the world's richest people don't have proportionately more gold... on the contrary, it's mostly the upper-middles in poorer and less stable nations (or states of mind) that have largish hoards of precious metals.
Currency choice has little to do with perpetuating the wealth gap, tax structure, however, has a lot to do with it... When Warren Buffet has a lower effective tax rate than his secretary, what is that saying?
It's because the naysayers are the ones more actively working in the field and closest to the experimental and theoretical results and are trying to actually accomplish these kinds of tasks.
Most of the time, you're right, the experts are the experts, they know their fields and they can predict the future.
I find, however, that the experts that have the time to seek publicity, pontificate for the press, serve as expert witnesses, etc. are often a bit low on skill and behind the curve on what is really possible, or even true in their field. Meanwhile, some of the most cutting edge innovators can be disinclined to share their latest progress.
This is patently not the case in massively collaborative projects like the LHC, but AI is a different field altogether, and I have seen plenty superficial criticism and lack of mutual understanding within the "top" of AI research for the last 30 years. AI still seems to be strongly influenced by the Not Invented Here phenomenon - they may change and start a productive global collaboration someday, but right now it looks to me like the next big thing in AI is likely to spring from a dark closet someday.
Arguably, making the computer mobile, giving it responsibility for care of its own "body," is one way to make it more human. It could be simulated, the big deep blue processor could be kept in a closet and operate the body by remote, or the whole body and world thing could play out in VR, but those elements of seeing the world through two eyes, hearing from two ears, smelling, tasting, feeling, having to balance while walking, getting hurt if you are careless, those are all part and parcel of being human - giving an artificial intelligence those limitations and responsibilities will give it a more familiar frame of reference for mutual understanding.
Besides, robots just look a whole lot cooler than a box on a desk, and when a physical robot can pass the Turing test, you've hit a pretty cool milestone.
Too lazy to RTFA, but the bit about "won't have time to develop adult intelligence by 2029" seems to be missing the difference between the speed of chemical synapses and electrical or photonic switching circuits.
Re: Kurzweil, you missed my perspective, I think he's a crazy dreamer who has been right about a fair number of things. I take his predictions with a great deal of skepticism, but I wouldn't bet my retirement accounts on him being wrong....
So, in short, Facebook just bought a security guard who has better legal rights to use force.
Depends on how much of a hard-on you have for enforcing particular laws.
If it was an ad for a "smoke shop" and it showed paraphernalia for illegal materials, you bet there are people who will follow up.
The drone space is very competitive right now, even if the regulatory officials don't particularly care, some of the competitors will be prodding them into action just to bring each other down...
Lived there for many years without a problem, it's one particular neighbor who calls in the DEP when she gets a mean streak going - not just on me, pretty much everyone...
Actually, yes, the whole county is pretty full of stupid regulations, regulatory officials, political bozos, ignorant bigots, etc. We left a year ago.
The path doesn't have to be wood paved, but that is the option, and, as you say, it has a basis in some reasonable thought.
The further reasoning about the play swing is that it is "high traffic / high impact" while a path would carry less foot traffic.
I put the path in, no paving, and now it carries a whole lot of "hoof traffic" (deer, probably 30-40 "trips" a day, according to the trail cam.) I can't imagine that a couple of kids playing on a swing a few times a week could do more to compact the soil.
increasing grass damage and ground compaction.
Gotta love that ground compaction argument - the local (county) department of natural resources had me remove a play-swing from my backyard because my two children using it might cause undesirable ground compaction. Meanwhile, I can legally put in a path 10' wide and infinitely long, and pave it with wood.
In the free market culture we have, it is very probable that the person filing the complaint (possibly anonymously) was the one who lost the bid for the job.
Estimates of distance and portrayal of peril can be very subjective.
They saw the product? It is a reasonable assumption that the video was paid for.
I think there has been a complicit cooperation between actresses, fashion designers and the papparazi for years - elegant evening gown: hit it with a good flash, suddenly see through. That doesn't happen to dresses you buy at normal department stores.
I think Peeping Tom requires partial nudity in a place with an expectation of privacy (e.g. through a window).