No it needs to be the forefront of lethality. Everything the military does is in service to killing the enemy. The point of Sun Tzu "moral law" isn't that the army needs be moral but to be a "cohesive fighting force" which demonstrably increases the lethality of that fighting force. Everything is secondary to killing the enemy.
Except that isn't western military doctrine, which has decided that killing people is not the most effective way to eliminate their ability to wage war. Wounding the enemy such that they cannot continue to fight, and causes otherwise able soldiers to come to their aid and remove themselves from battle is a more effective strategy.
Sure, but the precedent is very un-cryptocurrency. Reverting the transfer means that a central authority has the ability to invalidate transactions they don't like. Today it may be theft, but tomorrow it could be political contributions or purchases of "bad" items. It seems like that kind of thing would undermine the value of having a cryptocurrency in the first place.
Not quite, some central authority might suggest its a good idea but it's ultimately up to the miners to decide to follow through. This is what happened with TheDAO and not everyone agreed and so now we have Ethereum Classic fork as well.
This is ultimately how blockchains work, its up to the miners to agree what the 'current state' of the chain is and they can change their mind at any time.
Almost all western nations face the same fate, in response Denmark started placing adverts to try and encourage people to have more children, and oddly enough it actually appears to have worked.
The issue at hand is that the right to keep and bear arms is specifically enumerated in the constitution therefore laws targeting to limit or control it are treated with the highest scrutiny, furthermore in Heller v. D.C. the Supreme Court ruled that given the historical background of the second amendment it protects an individual right to keep and bear arms unconnected with military service and that the idea behind the second was to provide a deterrent against tyranny whether domestic or foreign.
I am not American, and I get the whole constitution issue, but why aren't kids taught about gun safety? In your constitution it says you have this right, so why not give them the knowledge to exercise that right without accidentally shooting each other?
This would include being taught about proper storage of guns, and encouragement to have a gun safe and separate ammo store.etc
Maybe you can't change the constitution around the right to bare arms, but you should make an attempt to change the culture around guns, how you treat them, how you keep them, and under what circumstances you should start waving them around.
Yeah and it would be great if unicorns existed too. The reason for the 600+ distros is that there is an increasing level of overhead the more people are involved in a project, especially if those people are volunteers.
Now, get those people who are introverts to self select themselves and you can see why the OSS landscape is the way it is. Volunteer hackers want to write code, and not manage projects, and they're usually quite opinionated about the way-things-should-be and so its a lot easier to fork and get things done rather than coordinate with others.
Given the very real prospect of radioactive contamination that may persist for tens of thousands of years, nuclear fission holds no commercial promise.
Many areas in Australia already have higher levels of background radiation due to the large amount of granite in the rock, other areas like Maralinga are already contaminated thanks to atmospheric nuclear weapons testing. We are also considering importing and storing other country's radioactive waste because the ground is so stable and we have desolate areas nobody lives in.
It's a problem, but it can be managed. I think it makes a large amount of sense given the geology in Australia, other countries can make their own decisions on what makes sense for them.
.Nuclear baseload. We've known how to do it for half a century. That alone would resolve most of the CO2 issues.
When you find a left-leaning AGW zealot who wants more nukes, then I'll start taking the problem more seriously.
As is, looks more like an attempt at social engineering (lowering everyone's standard of living except for the "Right People")
So that would be me then, I've long advocated nuclear power in Australia as a means to get rid of our aging coal power plants. We've got large uranium deposits, a geologically stable continent, and the fuel security alone would be worth it.
So many people are terrified about nuclear power though, and the cost of building new plants tends to put the rest off particularly with the price of wind and solar slowly dropping.
In the US, few people seem to be ashamed of being ignorant.
Just last week I mentioned to someone that I'd like to visit Malta again, and he said "Where's that? Africa?". It's not that he didn't know, but that he had no embarrassment or shame whatsoever.
To be fair, 'Africa' is not a bad guess. Malta is a tiny island located between continental Africa and Italy.
As a counter-anecdote, last week I was in France for a music festival, and one of the bar staff there was clearly american. I'm not french and so she wondered where I was from, I answered and her immediate response was; 'I have no idea where that is, my geography is terrible, I'm from the states'.
So apparently being American is a sufficient excuse for being ignorant about stuff, I don't think she was being proud about it as such but certainly not ashamed.
There's part of the problem. ALSA has advanced enough that the best way to improve sound handling is to uninstall Pulseaudio. Why polish a turd when there's a perfectly good toilet handy?
Too many confuse "different" with improved. To really be an improvement, it must either do something useful that the old way couldn't do (or be made to do), or it must do it much more elegantly than the old way could.
I've got Linux with pulseaudio on my phone, it has to handle all kinds of audio routing between the ear piece, speaker, audio jack, bluetooth headset, and to do it all as seamlessly as possible. Can ALSA do this? because pulseaudio seems to handle it well.
Now I admit that this is not exactly a typical usecase, and indeed if you only have one thing you want to output audio to then simply using ALSA is more than adequate. This is perhaps one of the main issues facing the Linux ecosystem, everyone has wildly different usecases and expectations for their software and in the end you get a bit of an overengineered jack-of-all-trades without being good at any one thing.
When you think about it, our brains evolved over time and so will have been built on top of something approximating simpler organisms around us today, which is to say a purely reactive nervous system like that of a Jellyfish. Add in the fact that sensory deprivation causes us to become unhinged and sensory overload can be quite debilitating as well, we dream when we sleep.etc, then it seems that our senses are things that our higher level brain functions are built on top of.
So we aren't information processing machines as such, we are of course biological nervous systems and complicated ones at that.
Look at it this way - if you won a contest that gave you $1,000 a month from now on, tax-free, would you quit your job, or would you think to yourself "I have $1000 more per month to spend on fun stuff!" Now, maybe you'd quit your job to go back to college for a better degree, in order to get an even better job, but is that a bad thing either?
My generation are also seemingly less materialistic than other recent generations, we care more about experiences and memories rather than buying endless trinkets. A big limiter on that is time, but realise that the more people have free time and excess money to spend on doing cool things, the more people required to help facilitate and organise all the various activities as well.
Anyway, i'm just suggesting that using a battery tech that doesnt exhibit thermal runaway effects sounds like a good idea in a country thats hot and gets fires on a yearly basis sounds like a good idea should such a technology exist and otherwise performs adequately
I don't really want to know what happens when a bushfire hits a substation filled with Lithium-Ion batteries.
Um, this is probably solved by not building your battery farm in the middle of the bush? (seems obvious, but here we are...)
Yes obviously, but its still a risk that needs to be managed which limits where and how these units can be used. Do you even build a battery farm? or do you install units into every substation acting somewhat like a UPS for the local area? Crazy idea i know, that different technology might be best suited for different applications.
Wow, I don't even like Tesla and I read that as a "buy local" because of this FUD about fires "that the local product surely doesn't share."
Lithium-Ion batteries don't like being set on fire, thats well known. In Australia we get bush fires rather regularly and I don't really want to know what happens when a bushfire hits a substation filled with Lithium-Ion batteries. Zinc-Bromine batteries however, are completely different and as such have different pros and cons, one of which is that they dont fail quite so spectactularly when set on fire.
As popular as Musk is, and he is no doubt doing cool things, I can't help but think that the SA Government should be looking locally for a possible solution before importing battery units from Nevada.
We have an Australian company that is bringing Grid Storage products to market using Flow Battery tech called RedFlow, and it seems to be better suited for grid based applications rather than a re-purposed automotive unit, particularly when it comes to risk of fires.
Most of these blockchain articles fail to mention the important technical details about how a blockchain would be used.
For every reason you mentioned, and an additional infinite reasons, using Blockchain to eliminate middlemen is a pipe dream even in a make believe world. It will do exactly the opposite. There will be a few (at most, and eventually merging into one) extremely large middlemen guarding all the doors and holding all the keys. It is not even a remotely viable replacement for our current economic system.
A centralised 'blockchain' is just a database, and we have those already so why bother? The whole value proposition of a blockchain is cooperation between entities that don't really trust each other but the greater value is in working together, so like a multi-player prisoners dilemma.
Actually, I think people believing a sci-fi movie to be true probably has less impact on the real world than those who believe historical movies to be completely true. It has often been said that history is written the victors, and that may have been true once, but nowadays the history that many know and believe was actually written by Hollywood scriptwriters.
Not when that Sci-Fi movie includes fictitious science. In the UK I had a conversation about the idea that humans only use 10% of their brain, and upon saying that the idea was basically bullshit and provably so from an evolutionary perspective, I was asked if I had watched Lucy, the Scarlett Johanssen film based upon the premise and that I might find it interesting.
Extracted from the sailfish developer documentation: "we recommend using C++" to develop apps which do anything non-trivial, to paraphrase.
Ok that's all I need to know about sailfish.
Wake me up when you have a mobile OS where the main app development language was invented in the 21st century, and is, for example, safe, simple, and well-designed.
You can get quite far with QML and Javascript, which is modern and reasonably nice to work with. Qt style C++ is there if you need it, but many Sailfish APIs are exposed through QML and so you don't need to use it a lot of the time
As scientists we should advocate for standardization of weights and measures. If the length of the meter changed every day it would be extremely difficult for two construction companies to co-operate in building a bridge. Without extremely precise measurements modern science couldn't exist.
Meters measure distance, money is supposed to measure value. So why does our unit of measurement (the dollar) change in value every day? It should be as constant as possible, we should standardize this unit of measurement.
Except the total amount of things we want to put a value on changes, so having a variable unit means that people don't have to change the price of their goods everyday, and beyond a certain point gold becomes rather hard to divide up into the right amounts.
This is why it's important to keep the technology in reach of the general public.
Community developments like Makerspaces with their cheap 3D Printers, Laser Cutters, CNC Machines and the like are helping the non-rich get a grip on what these things can do, and how to build and use them. We are already starting to see a rise in Owner No Employee manufacturing businesses no doubt in part to these same automation technologies, and we need to continue down that path or perhaps only the 1% will own the technology.
But in which universe do you imagine that the additional input cost of corporation tax isn't wholly born by increase in the cost to the customer of the goods and services they consume. Corporation tax is just a hidden consumption tax on you and me any way you slice it.
This depends on the product and the market of course, but remember goods and services are already priced for maximum profit. If corporations could charge more without a drop off in demand, they would be doing that already increased taxes or not.
If the margins are thin, you'll see an increase in price and subsequent drop in demand if its some kind of luxury item. If the margins are fat you'll likely see no change at all.
Which make and model of phone runs GNU/Linux? If it's the one I think you're talking about (Nokia N900), it's probably "a mythical beast" in Slashdot's home country. Can it even connect to modern networks now that AT&T is phasing out GSM service in favor of expanding LTE?
It's a Jolla C running Sailfish OS manufactured last year by Intex (India), its modem is designed for Europe so I guess it won't be that happy in the US of A.
Slashdot Mirror
but it needs to be at the forefront of equality:
No it needs to be the forefront of lethality. Everything the military does is in service to killing the enemy. The point of Sun Tzu "moral law" isn't that the army needs be moral but to be a "cohesive fighting force" which demonstrably increases the lethality of that fighting force. Everything is secondary to killing the enemy.
Except that isn't western military doctrine, which has decided that killing people is not the most effective way to eliminate their ability to wage war. Wounding the enemy such that they cannot continue to fight, and causes otherwise able soldiers to come to their aid and remove themselves from battle is a more effective strategy.
Sure, but the precedent is very un-cryptocurrency. Reverting the transfer means that a central authority has the ability to invalidate transactions they don't like. Today it may be theft, but tomorrow it could be political contributions or purchases of "bad" items. It seems like that kind of thing would undermine the value of having a cryptocurrency in the first place.
Not quite, some central authority might suggest its a good idea but it's ultimately up to the miners to decide to follow through. This is what happened with TheDAO and not everyone agreed and so now we have Ethereum Classic fork as well.
This is ultimately how blockchains work, its up to the miners to agree what the 'current state' of the chain is and they can change their mind at any time.
Almost all western nations face the same fate, in response Denmark started placing adverts to try and encourage people to have more children, and oddly enough it actually appears to have worked.
The issue at hand is that the right to keep and bear arms is specifically enumerated in the constitution therefore laws targeting to limit or control it are treated with the highest scrutiny, furthermore in Heller v. D.C. the Supreme Court ruled that given the historical background of the second amendment it protects an individual right to keep and bear arms unconnected with military service and that the idea behind the second was to provide a deterrent against tyranny whether domestic or foreign.
I am not American, and I get the whole constitution issue, but why aren't kids taught about gun safety? In your constitution it says you have this right, so why not give them the knowledge to exercise that right without accidentally shooting each other?
This would include being taught about proper storage of guns, and encouragement to have a gun safe and separate ammo store .etc
Maybe you can't change the constitution around the right to bare arms, but you should make an attempt to change the culture around guns, how you treat them, how you keep them, and under what circumstances you should start waving them around.
Yeah and it would be great if unicorns existed too. The reason for the 600+ distros is that there is an increasing level of overhead the more people are involved in a project, especially if those people are volunteers.
Now, get those people who are introverts to self select themselves and you can see why the OSS landscape is the way it is. Volunteer hackers want to write code, and not manage projects, and they're usually quite opinionated about the way-things-should-be and so its a lot easier to fork and get things done rather than coordinate with others.
Given the very real prospect of radioactive contamination that may persist for tens of thousands of years, nuclear fission holds no commercial promise.
Many areas in Australia already have higher levels of background radiation due to the large amount of granite in the rock, other areas like Maralinga are already contaminated thanks to atmospheric nuclear weapons testing. We are also considering importing and storing other country's radioactive waste because the ground is so stable and we have desolate areas nobody lives in.
It's a problem, but it can be managed. I think it makes a large amount of sense given the geology in Australia, other countries can make their own decisions on what makes sense for them.
.Nuclear baseload. We've known how to do it for half a century. That alone would resolve most of the CO2 issues.
When you find a left-leaning AGW zealot who wants more nukes, then I'll start taking the problem more seriously.
As is, looks more like an attempt at social engineering (lowering everyone's standard of living except for the "Right People")
So that would be me then, I've long advocated nuclear power in Australia as a means to get rid of our aging coal power plants. We've got large uranium deposits, a geologically stable continent, and the fuel security alone would be worth it.
So many people are terrified about nuclear power though, and the cost of building new plants tends to put the rest off particularly with the price of wind and solar slowly dropping.
In the US, few people seem to be ashamed of being ignorant. Just last week I mentioned to someone that I'd like to visit Malta again, and he said "Where's that? Africa?". It's not that he didn't know, but that he had no embarrassment or shame whatsoever.
To be fair, 'Africa' is not a bad guess. Malta is a tiny island located between continental Africa and Italy.
As a counter-anecdote, last week I was in France for a music festival, and one of the bar staff there was clearly american. I'm not french and so she wondered where I was from, I answered and her immediate response was; 'I have no idea where that is, my geography is terrible, I'm from the states'.
So apparently being American is a sufficient excuse for being ignorant about stuff, I don't think she was being proud about it as such but certainly not ashamed.
Too bad Jolla doesn't have the financial power to make it really take off.
The Russian and Chinese governments are throwing their weight behind Sailfish, it might take off but perhaps not in western markets
There's part of the problem. ALSA has advanced enough that the best way to improve sound handling is to uninstall Pulseaudio. Why polish a turd when there's a perfectly good toilet handy?
Too many confuse "different" with improved. To really be an improvement, it must either do something useful that the old way couldn't do (or be made to do), or it must do it much more elegantly than the old way could.
I've got Linux with pulseaudio on my phone, it has to handle all kinds of audio routing between the ear piece, speaker, audio jack, bluetooth headset, and to do it all as seamlessly as possible. Can ALSA do this? because pulseaudio seems to handle it well.
Now I admit that this is not exactly a typical usecase, and indeed if you only have one thing you want to output audio to then simply using ALSA is more than adequate. This is perhaps one of the main issues facing the Linux ecosystem, everyone has wildly different usecases and expectations for their software and in the end you get a bit of an overengineered jack-of-all-trades without being good at any one thing.
The brain is an information processing machine, with inputs and outputs.
It really isn't and this method of thinking about the brain isn't helping to figure out how it actually works. This gives a decent overview of why the brain isn't a computer.
When you think about it, our brains evolved over time and so will have been built on top of something approximating simpler organisms around us today, which is to say a purely reactive nervous system like that of a Jellyfish. Add in the fact that sensory deprivation causes us to become unhinged and sensory overload can be quite debilitating as well, we dream when we sleep .etc, then it seems that our senses are things that our higher level brain functions are built on top of.
So we aren't information processing machines as such, we are of course biological nervous systems and complicated ones at that.
Look at it this way - if you won a contest that gave you $1,000 a month from now on, tax-free, would you quit your job, or would you think to yourself "I have $1000 more per month to spend on fun stuff!" Now, maybe you'd quit your job to go back to college for a better degree, in order to get an even better job, but is that a bad thing either?
My generation are also seemingly less materialistic than other recent generations, we care more about experiences and memories rather than buying endless trinkets. A big limiter on that is time, but realise that the more people have free time and excess money to spend on doing cool things, the more people required to help facilitate and organise all the various activities as well.
Anyway, i'm just suggesting that using a battery tech that doesnt exhibit thermal runaway effects sounds like a good idea in a country thats hot and gets fires on a yearly basis sounds like a good idea should such a technology exist and otherwise performs adequately
I don't really want to know what happens when a bushfire hits a substation filled with Lithium-Ion batteries.
Um, this is probably solved by not building your battery farm in the middle of the bush? (seems obvious, but here we are...)
Yes obviously, but its still a risk that needs to be managed which limits where and how these units can be used. Do you even build a battery farm? or do you install units into every substation acting somewhat like a UPS for the local area? Crazy idea i know, that different technology might be best suited for different applications.
Wow, I don't even like Tesla and I read that as a "buy local" because of this FUD about fires "that the local product surely doesn't share."
Lithium-Ion batteries don't like being set on fire, thats well known. In Australia we get bush fires rather regularly and I don't really want to know what happens when a bushfire hits a substation filled with Lithium-Ion batteries. Zinc-Bromine batteries however, are completely different and as such have different pros and cons, one of which is that they dont fail quite so spectactularly when set on fire.
As popular as Musk is, and he is no doubt doing cool things, I can't help but think that the SA Government should be looking locally for a possible solution before importing battery units from Nevada.
We have an Australian company that is bringing Grid Storage products to market using Flow Battery tech called RedFlow, and it seems to be better suited for grid based applications rather than a re-purposed automotive unit, particularly when it comes to risk of fires.
Most of these blockchain articles fail to mention the important technical details about how a blockchain would be used.
For every reason you mentioned, and an additional infinite reasons, using Blockchain to eliminate middlemen is a pipe dream even in a make believe world. It will do exactly the opposite. There will be a few (at most, and eventually merging into one) extremely large middlemen guarding all the doors and holding all the keys. It is not even a remotely viable replacement for our current economic system.
A centralised 'blockchain' is just a database, and we have those already so why bother? The whole value proposition of a blockchain is cooperation between entities that don't really trust each other but the greater value is in working together, so like a multi-player prisoners dilemma.
Actually, I think people believing a sci-fi movie to be true probably has less impact on the real world than those who believe historical movies to be completely true. It has often been said that history is written the victors, and that may have been true once, but nowadays the history that many know and believe was actually written by Hollywood scriptwriters.
Not when that Sci-Fi movie includes fictitious science. In the UK I had a conversation about the idea that humans only use 10% of their brain, and upon saying that the idea was basically bullshit and provably so from an evolutionary perspective, I was asked if I had watched Lucy, the Scarlett Johanssen film based upon the premise and that I might find it interesting.
Extracted from the sailfish developer documentation: "we recommend using C++" to develop apps which do anything non-trivial, to paraphrase.
Ok that's all I need to know about sailfish.
Wake me up when you have a mobile OS where the main app development language was invented in the 21st century, and is, for example, safe, simple, and well-designed.
You can get quite far with QML and Javascript, which is modern and reasonably nice to work with. Qt style C++ is there if you need it, but many Sailfish APIs are exposed through QML and so you don't need to use it a lot of the time
As scientists we should advocate for standardization of weights and measures. If the length of the meter changed every day it would be extremely difficult for two construction companies to co-operate in building a bridge. Without extremely precise measurements modern science couldn't exist.
Meters measure distance, money is supposed to measure value. So why does our unit of measurement (the dollar) change in value every day? It should be as constant as possible, we should standardize this unit of measurement.
Except the total amount of things we want to put a value on changes, so having a variable unit means that people don't have to change the price of their goods everyday, and beyond a certain point gold becomes rather hard to divide up into the right amounts.
This is why it's important to keep the technology in reach of the general public.
Community developments like Makerspaces with their cheap 3D Printers, Laser Cutters, CNC Machines and the like are helping the non-rich get a grip on what these things can do, and how to build and use them. We are already starting to see a rise in Owner No Employee manufacturing businesses no doubt in part to these same automation technologies, and we need to continue down that path or perhaps only the 1% will own the technology.
But in which universe do you imagine that the additional input cost of corporation tax isn't wholly born by increase in the cost to the customer of the goods and services they consume. Corporation tax is just a hidden consumption tax on you and me any way you slice it.
This depends on the product and the market of course, but remember goods and services are already priced for maximum profit. If corporations could charge more without a drop off in demand, they would be doing that already increased taxes or not.
If the margins are thin, you'll see an increase in price and subsequent drop in demand if its some kind of luxury item. If the margins are fat you'll likely see no change at all.
Which make and model of phone runs GNU/Linux? If it's the one I think you're talking about (Nokia N900), it's probably "a mythical beast" in Slashdot's home country. Can it even connect to modern networks now that AT&T is phasing out GSM service in favor of expanding LTE?
It's a Jolla C running Sailfish OS manufactured last year by Intex (India), its modem is designed for Europe so I guess it won't be that happy in the US of A.
My phone running GNU\Linux is obviously a mythical beast then...
His firing was one of virtue signaling, nothing more. I think virtue signaling is far more harmful to society than some moron's stupid jokes.
What exactly is the problem with not tolerating jokes made in poor taste (so called virtue signalling)?
Calling for the death of an entire people/culture can still be construed as an incite to violence, even if it was made in jest.