Basically, all income goes to one of two things - things that disappear (consumables) and things that make you more money (investments).
Poor people spend most of their money buying things they need to consume; rich people spend most of their money on things that will make them even more rich - like shares of companies; and consumption tax won't affect that part of income.
So basically such situation would be a strong push towards more inequality - even more of rich-get-more-rich, poor-get-more-poor.
On the other hand, I feel that none of things you are mentioning here relate to intelligence in any way whatsoever. If there is a way for a being to make decisions, choose actions and function in a society in a reasonably complex level (i.e., not like a pet dog, but as a weird kind of human), then it would be undoubtedly intelligent.
Determinism? Who knows if humans are deterministic or not? As soon as an infant baby sees the first glimpse of light, that's an unique experience that's different from his twin brother; The same thing would be with AI's - every interaction with the world is unique, and may affect the AI 'simulating' the non-determinism.
But in any case, the point is 'if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it may well be a duck'. If I can't tell if it's dumber as a human (as in a Turing test), I would have no grounds at all to think or say that it's not intelligent.
And if my only way of distinguishing an AI from human is to ask for the names of his pre-school buddies, then I am not checking intelligence, but checking for non-standard upbringing, and an intelligent human raised in a lab by zombie-robots would also fail to answer.
There's "not easy" and "not easy". We do hard things all the time, but that doesn't mean that all other hard things are of comparable difficulty and doable as well.
Well, the whole idea is that a round-trip is not 2 times harder and more expensive than a one-way trip, but the difference is something like 100 or 1000 times. So until you can do dozens of one-way trips, the round-trip is pretty much out of question at all.
No, the real solution would be to ban transactions on obsolete (non-chip-compliant) ATM's.
If a thief has (with this exploit or some other way) your card's magstripe and your PIN code, he should be able to get exactly $0.00 out of it, as that does not allow him to replicate the keys on chip used for most transaction.
It becomes a problem only when the transaction falls back to magstripe, which is sometimes allowed for backwards compatibility reasons (ATMs in some countries).
On the scale of moon size (or the size of the area), and for any 'reserve' amounts, 1102 tons means 'insignificant quantity far less than estimation error', not 'significant proportion'.
It's a bit different IMHO - it's not about hiring per se, it's less about the hiring-decision makers, but more about your whole team.
If your team mostly consists of class-A people, then they will naturally attract/reccommend other class-A people from their contacts, etc. (and other class-A people will be attracted to join your team instead of some other).
If your team mostly consists of class-B people, then they will naturally attract/reccommend class-C people as their inferiors, to avoid competition; and also class-C people will prefer your team to the A-team, since it will be more comfortable for them.
And I bet it's not like these people (well, the good and creative ones anyway) just sat on their asses for that time. Most likely they have quite a few things thought out and written down that they'll be able to adopt and sell now with the new rules - the producers are starved for content right now, they've run out of shelved things, taken breaks, and now need a lot of scripts to catch up again.
The same taxfree shops (at least in airports i've been) sell also stronger alcohols - for example, I tend to by cheaper Stroh (Austrian brand of rum) there, and it comes in 40%, 60% and 80% alcohol varieties, and the 80% one definitely will ignite.
So, what's the point of banning me from bringing a bottle of mineral water? Currently it seems that the point is to improve profits for the in-zone shops by ensuring a form of monopoly there, and that's it.
If you usually have 100 units of bandwidth, and due to some accident now you have 10 available, then instead of having 'congestion', you just have full bandwidth available to the important customers (tehse important businesses with SLA's, guaranteed links), and throttle the less important ones to near zero, or cut them off at all (and deal with the consequences there). What else can be done?
The argument made 100 times above is not that it shouldn't be done (it could be very handy, as you say), but that it can't be done - it's like making water not wet.
Real DRM is not possible at all if any portion of hardware/software is outside the content owners full control. If you are working in a comparably closed evironment then 'drm-thingy-that-sort-of-works' is possible for some short time until the users become inconvenienced enough to turn it off, but if the drm software is opensource, then even that initial barrier is made very very low.
In essence, information is either available to recipient or not available. If you want to show the information to the recipient, then it's available to him and the game ends here - essentially will be practically able to do anything he wants with it.
Let me repeat that. IF the high-res photo is in any way visible to the visitor on a computer controlled by him (and not you), THEN it is possible for him to see it, and copy it, and print it.
Nothing ever will change this, it is a basic fact of life; it's useless to argue if it's good or bad - that's just the way things are. A system that could create a pony out of thin air would also be very handy, but that's about as realistic as a "DRM JPEG Browser Plug-in" that would really work in the current world.
Of course, if none of the users have access to a general-purpose computer, then DRM is possible. If all the existing computers would be destroyed, and replaced by black boxes which they cannot control nor modify, then DRM is possible on these devices. That's how it works in DoD systems, where it's implemented for their classified documents - if information never ever leaves your control, then you can implement DRM functionality.
Around here (Eastern Europe) first aid training is solved by driver's licence training - no certificate of passed first-aid training+tests - no driver's licence.
At least that way most of adult population has some idea of first aid. Though most things are soon forgotten, there's a good likelihood that at least someone from passers-by will know what to do.
Chip-cards do it - for example the EMV (europay-mastercard-visa) standard credit/debit cards - the card proves it's 'realness' by being able to execute cryptographical challenge-response, but not revealing (and thus, not allowing to copy) the secret key to anyone in the chain - not the merchant, not the POS terminal used, not the bank that processes the merchant's transaction (and still all these parties can and do verify that the transaction was signed by the billed card, and not injected by some middleman).
One nifty thing is that lipreading identifies the person - if you have a camera&mic with multiple people talking, then lipreading can easily distinguish which sentences come from person A and which from person B. Or even imagine a video (very high-res, though) of a large room, or a public gathering with many people talking at the same time, which would absolutely confuse any speech recognition (and people listening as well), but lipreading could understand ALL of the things everyone said, if it works properly.
Of course that assumes that all available relevant high-quality information is the formally published literature you are reviewing. This is true for the case mentioned in your wiki link - medical research, clinical studies, etc; and not true for many other subjects that people are interested in.
But there is an even more important point here - Google generation has obviously decided that it's much more efficient to look at the result of such systematic literature review done by someone else (or by google computers, if possible), than to do it themselves. Are they wrong?
It probably depends on their goal and reasons why they are looking for the information; and i would dare to say that 99% of the time someone wants to ask a question, they would prefer a quick and easy answer now instead of a deeper understanding of all relevant issues that'd require a longer learning process - both for 20-year-olds and 60-year-olds.
Well, it's exactly the same as some service provider (say, cable-TV or a bank) saying 'sign a statement that you won't drink/smoke or we won't service you'. No coercion is involved, but here (probably unlike US) legislation says that any unjust terms in such agreements can be determined null and void through court, in mass-agreements (where a company sets the same agreement for a multitude of customers) - since the people aren't practically able to negotiate these agreements. Especially if it's the small print that was significant, but you weren't informed about it - such smallprint can be (and quite often is) considered as non-binding by courts.
Yeah, such agreements should be automatically null and void due to the mandatory nature of their signing. In Europe, even for commercial consumer agreements, if you sign such an agreement, you can quite successfully argue that the terms were unjust and forced on you and the organisation would get a fine and be required to change the agreements.
Well, the whole idea is that there are a lot of files that you want to keep and keep available, but you don't open them all that often - a novel that your dad wrote X years ago in word 6.0, that's been kept and copied over various computer upgrades, but has not been opened with word 95 and 97 and 2000. And when he wants to read it now with newest software, why should it suddenly break down?
... and the purpose IMHO is very clear - if you were in a similar situation/decisionpoint (and your brain thinks it's somehow possible, since you're dreaming about it), then you'd have some opinion/bias about what the consequences and your feelings could be, and you'd be able to act more or less rationally without taking an hour to think about it.
That's the whole point - you get the learning/experience results (unconscious - reflexes, bias, assumptions,prejudices) of your brain playing "What-if" VR simulations with itself; but without remembering (usually) the details.
Actually, if it's not about streaming, then who cares about efficiency? I mean, if you give the customer a slightly better sounding MP3 with simply 5 times larger bitrate, then they'll accept that as a very good format, since a few $$ for storage (and they don't want to try to understand or even think about the file sizes) doesn't matter to them, but the image of convenience, compatibility and DRM-free-ness favours the mp3 (also, the details don't matter, the 'brand image' of mp3 says that it has these properties, ergo, mp3 has these properties irregardless if facts support it or deny it).
Well, it won't happen - because a lot of people, when given this opportunity, would fail in securing their social security; and then when they are in need and without income, what happens? Does the goverment let them starve or offer euthanasia, since no SS funds are available for them?
The successful, healthy, and able people would opt out, since it would benefit them. And the less successful would either die or come to rob your house. (I am exaggerating, of course, but it would greatly increase the social differences, and this would hurt society a lot.)
Also, there is a world of difference in the "wasted time" between airplane and train. With airplanes, and their ridiculous check-in, baggage, and security procedures, you waste a significant amount (compared to even a NYC-Miami flight) of time, while for a train you could simply arrive 10 minutes before departure, wave a ticket at somebody or some device, and be ready for travel.
Also, the trip to a train station most likely will be shorter than a trip to the airport, since airports (especially the larger ones) tend to be pushed to some completely far-off areas.
You're right on spot with the 'minimising down-time' thing. Even the new 2.3 patch - which is quite nice in general - seems quite broken in the "facilitate grouping" part. For a specific example - the level requirements for the instances were made more narrow. WHY?? I had a class-specific quest to do at the Sunken Temple, but due to a simple, unneccesary restriction I cannot a) use the LookingForGroup interface to find people for this instance, and b) use summoning stone for this instance.... does it really benefit the players, Blizzard or the gameplay in any way?
What if you have 3 keys and provide them 2 of 3? What if you only have 2 keys, but they think that you have 3 keys and put you in jail for not giving the 3rd one?
It is impossible to decide between these cases, if the encryption is done properly.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, all income goes to one of two things - things that disappear (consumables) and things that make you more money (investments).
Poor people spend most of their money buying things they need to consume; rich people spend most of their money on things that will make them even more rich - like shares of companies; and consumption tax won't affect that part of income.
So basically such situation would be a strong push towards more inequality - even more of rich-get-more-rich, poor-get-more-poor.
On the other hand, I feel that none of things you are mentioning here relate to intelligence in any way whatsoever. If there is a way for a being to make decisions, choose actions and function in a society in a reasonably complex level (i.e., not like a pet dog, but as a weird kind of human), then it would be undoubtedly intelligent.
Determinism? Who knows if humans are deterministic or not? As soon as an infant baby sees the first glimpse of light, that's an unique experience that's different from his twin brother; The same thing would be with AI's - every interaction with the world is unique, and may affect the AI 'simulating' the non-determinism.
But in any case, the point is 'if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it may well be a duck'. If I can't tell if it's dumber as a human (as in a Turing test), I would have no grounds at all to think or say that it's not intelligent.
And if my only way of distinguishing an AI from human is to ask for the names of his pre-school buddies, then I am not checking intelligence, but checking for non-standard upbringing, and an intelligent human raised in a lab by zombie-robots would also fail to answer.
There's "not easy" and "not easy".
We do hard things all the time, but that doesn't mean that all other hard things are of comparable difficulty and doable as well.
Well, the whole idea is that a round-trip is not 2 times harder and more expensive than a one-way trip, but the difference is something like 100 or 1000 times. So until you can do dozens of one-way trips, the round-trip is pretty much out of question at all.
No, the real solution would be to ban transactions on obsolete (non-chip-compliant) ATM's.
If a thief has (with this exploit or some other way) your card's magstripe and your PIN code, he should be able to get exactly $0.00 out of it, as that does not allow him to replicate the keys on chip used for most transaction.
It becomes a problem only when the transaction falls back to magstripe, which is sometimes allowed for backwards compatibility reasons (ATMs in some countries).
On the scale of moon size (or the size of the area), and for any 'reserve' amounts, 1102 tons means 'insignificant quantity far less than estimation error', not 'significant proportion'.
It's a bit different IMHO - it's not about hiring per se, it's less about the hiring-decision makers, but more about your whole team.
If your team mostly consists of class-A people, then they will naturally attract/reccommend other class-A people from their contacts, etc. (and other class-A people will be attracted to join your team instead of some other).
If your team mostly consists of class-B people, then they will naturally attract/reccommend class-C people as their inferiors, to avoid competition; and also class-C people will prefer your team to the A-team, since it will be more comfortable for them.
And I bet it's not like these people (well, the good and creative ones anyway) just sat on their asses for that time. Most likely they have quite a few things thought out and written down that they'll be able to adopt and sell now with the new rules - the producers are starved for content right now, they've run out of shelved things, taken breaks, and now need a lot of scripts to catch up again.
The same taxfree shops (at least in airports i've been) sell also stronger alcohols - for example, I tend to by cheaper Stroh (Austrian brand of rum) there, and it comes in 40%, 60% and 80% alcohol varieties, and the 80% one definitely will ignite.
So, what's the point of banning me from bringing a bottle of mineral water? Currently it seems that the point is to improve profits for the in-zone shops by ensuring a form of monopoly there, and that's it.
If you usually have 100 units of bandwidth, and due to some accident now you have 10 available, then instead of having 'congestion', you just have full bandwidth available to the important customers (tehse important businesses with SLA's, guaranteed links), and throttle the less important ones to near zero, or cut them off at all (and deal with the consequences there). What else can be done?
The argument made 100 times above is not that it shouldn't be done (it could be very handy, as you say), but that it can't be done - it's like making water not wet.
Real DRM is not possible at all if any portion of hardware/software is outside the content owners full control. If you are working in a comparably closed evironment then 'drm-thingy-that-sort-of-works' is possible for some short time until the users become inconvenienced enough to turn it off, but if the drm software is opensource, then even that initial barrier is made very very low.
In essence, information is either available to recipient or not available. If you want to show the information to the recipient, then it's available to him and the game ends here - essentially will be practically able to do anything he wants with it.
Let me repeat that. IF the high-res photo is in any way visible to the visitor on a computer controlled by him (and not you), THEN it is possible for him to see it, and copy it, and print it.
Nothing ever will change this, it is a basic fact of life; it's useless to argue if it's good or bad - that's just the way things are. A system that could create a pony out of thin air would also be very handy, but that's about as realistic as a "DRM JPEG Browser Plug-in" that would really work in the current world.
Of course, if none of the users have access to a general-purpose computer, then DRM is possible. If all the existing computers would be destroyed, and replaced by black boxes which they cannot control nor modify, then DRM is possible on these devices. That's how it works in DoD systems, where it's implemented for their classified documents - if information never ever leaves your control, then you can implement DRM functionality.
Around here (Eastern Europe) first aid training is solved by driver's licence training - no certificate of passed first-aid training+tests - no driver's licence.
At least that way most of adult population has some idea of first aid. Though most things are soon forgotten, there's a good likelihood that at least someone from passers-by will know what to do.
Chip-cards do it - for example the EMV (europay-mastercard-visa) standard credit/debit cards - the card proves it's 'realness' by being able to execute cryptographical challenge-response, but not revealing (and thus, not allowing to copy) the secret key to anyone in the chain - not the merchant, not the POS terminal used, not the bank that processes the merchant's transaction (and still all these parties can and do verify that the transaction was signed by the billed card, and not injected by some middleman).
One nifty thing is that lipreading identifies the person - if you have a camera&mic with multiple people talking, then lipreading can easily distinguish which sentences come from person A and which from person B.
Or even imagine a video (very high-res, though) of a large room, or a public gathering with many people talking at the same time, which would absolutely confuse any speech recognition (and people listening as well), but lipreading could understand ALL of the things everyone said, if it works properly.
Of course that assumes that all available relevant high-quality information is the formally published literature you are reviewing. This is true for the case mentioned in your wiki link - medical research, clinical studies, etc; and not true for many other subjects that people are interested in.
But there is an even more important point here - Google generation has obviously decided that it's much more efficient to look at the result of such systematic literature review done by someone else (or by google computers, if possible), than to do it themselves. Are they wrong?
It probably depends on their goal and reasons why they are looking for the information; and i would dare to say that 99% of the time someone wants to ask a question, they would prefer a quick and easy answer now instead of a deeper understanding of all relevant issues that'd require a longer learning process - both for 20-year-olds and 60-year-olds.
Well, it's exactly the same as some service provider (say, cable-TV or a bank) saying 'sign a statement that you won't drink/smoke or we won't service you'. No coercion is involved, but here (probably unlike US) legislation says that any unjust terms in such agreements can be determined null and void through court, in mass-agreements (where a company sets the same agreement for a multitude of customers) - since the people aren't practically able to negotiate these agreements. Especially if it's the small print that was significant, but you weren't informed about it - such smallprint can be (and quite often is) considered as non-binding by courts.
Yeah, such agreements should be automatically null and void due to the mandatory nature of their signing. In Europe, even for commercial consumer agreements, if you sign such an agreement, you can quite successfully argue that the terms were unjust and forced on you and the organisation would get a fine and be required to change the agreements.
Well, the whole idea is that there are a lot of files that you want to keep and keep available, but you don't open them all that often - a novel that your dad wrote X years ago in word 6.0, that's been kept and copied over various computer upgrades, but has not been opened with word 95 and 97 and 2000. And when he wants to read it now with newest software, why should it suddenly break down?
... and the purpose IMHO is very clear - if you were in a similar situation/decisionpoint (and your brain thinks it's somehow possible, since you're dreaming about it), then you'd have some opinion/bias about what the consequences and your feelings could be, and you'd be able to act more or less rationally without taking an hour to think about it.
That's the whole point - you get the learning/experience results (unconscious - reflexes, bias, assumptions,prejudices) of your brain playing "What-if" VR simulations with itself; but without remembering (usually) the details.
Actually, if it's not about streaming, then who cares about efficiency?
I mean, if you give the customer a slightly better sounding MP3 with simply 5 times larger bitrate, then they'll accept that as a very good format, since a few $$ for storage (and they don't want to try to understand or even think about the file sizes) doesn't matter to them, but the image of convenience, compatibility and DRM-free-ness favours the mp3 (also, the details don't matter, the 'brand image' of mp3 says that it has these properties, ergo, mp3 has these properties irregardless if facts support it or deny it).
Well, it won't happen - because a lot of people, when given this opportunity, would fail in securing their social security; and then when they are in need and without income, what happens? Does the goverment let them starve or offer euthanasia, since no SS funds are available for them?
The successful, healthy, and able people would opt out, since it would benefit them. And the less successful would either die or come to rob your house. (I am exaggerating, of course, but it would greatly increase the social differences, and this would hurt society a lot.)
Also, there is a world of difference in the "wasted time" between airplane and train. With airplanes, and their ridiculous check-in, baggage, and security procedures, you waste a significant amount (compared to even a NYC-Miami flight) of time, while for a train you could simply arrive 10 minutes before departure, wave a ticket at somebody or some device, and be ready for travel.
Also, the trip to a train station most likely will be shorter than a trip to the airport, since airports (especially the larger ones) tend to be pushed to some completely far-off areas.
You're right on spot with the 'minimising down-time' thing.
Even the new 2.3 patch - which is quite nice in general - seems quite broken in the "facilitate grouping" part. For a specific example - the level requirements for the instances were made more narrow. WHY?? I had a class-specific quest to do at the Sunken Temple, but due to a simple, unneccesary restriction I cannot a) use the LookingForGroup interface to find people for this instance, and b) use summoning stone for this instance.... does it really benefit the players, Blizzard or the gameplay in any way?
What if you have 3 keys and provide them 2 of 3?
What if you only have 2 keys, but they think that you have 3 keys and put you in jail for not giving the 3rd one?
It is impossible to decide between these cases, if the encryption is done properly.