This would never work, but I really think they should run an award where a significant number of books are nominated, they rip off the covers, leave out the titles and anything that would suggest who the author is, and then have people actually read them and vote on the one(s) they liked the best.
Awards like this are always going to be tricky, because there are biases on both sides that can affect things, not to mention groups can form that believe that they are being completely "equitable" in what they are doing, but somehow clash with the other groups. The tendency is to see the other side as "the Enemy", but in reality, I think people are reacting to things they haven't really thought out.
There are a few things that will affect the gender/ethnic/skin color breakdown of any awards, the most important being:
1) How many authors of any group are there who have produced anything of note in this period of time? This could vary wildly. It's easy to say that the percentage of women who won is very high, but was it high based on the number of eligible works? Did it just so happen that a larger number of white male authors happened to not have eligible works this year?
2) What are the criteria of the award? Saying that something is "best" is very, very subjective, and it tends to breed both incomprehension at who is selected, and also tends to reinforce biases on both sides. If your favorite SF is hard SF, then you're probably not going to like some of the winners, and if more people like the soft SF and fantasy, you're potentially going to hate the book that wins the popularity contest.
It makes me wonder if there would be the same hate out there for a meticulously researched hard military SF book that just happened to be written by a female.
I admit, I like all sorts of SF and fantasy, but I have my bias towards something that feels less like wish fulfillment fantasy full of soap opera-like swords and sorcery fare and something that feels more like it could actually happen if we made just one decisive discovery, and then the implications of it were fully thought out logically.
Would I have voted for some of the works that won this year? No. But I have to suggest that it would have much less to do with the author and more to do with the subject matter. Since the award is for "best", do I try to create some sort of odd equivalence system where their use of language or their "themes" are better than the others? Or do I just vote for the book I liked the best? I'd probably vote for the book that I loved, and not vote for a book that I used some sort of "fair" criteria-based formula to select.
If you are a feminist or a feminist-supporter, you're going to like the themes of certain works and those books will appeal to you, whereas they will not be as interesting or even irritate someone who finds the subject overblown and boring.
In that sense, there may well be a bias in the awards towards females and those who are not white because the authors have an interest in "progressive" type themes. But that is more of a question of criteria than what is actually best. "Best" is different for everyone.
If you had an award for Hard SF, or best use of language, or feminist themes or whatever, then I could go into a voting slate and say, "this book would not usually appeal to me, but based on it's treatment of these themes, the author did a splendid job"
Like any awards without quantifiable metrics, in the end, its a popularity contest. Instead of getting upset over it, I think certain people should lobby for or create their own structured awards that better display the variety of what is out there instead of trying to game the system.
I think a "dystopia" refers to a more or less functioning society and civilization, according to some definitions I have looked up it, "describes an imaginary society that is as dehumanizing and as unpleasant as possible".
Post-apocalyptic implies that civilization is pretty much dead or shattered and people are picking up the scraps, if they are surviving at all. You could call that dystopic, or there could be surviving remnants that have survived as dystopias, but the terms don't necessarily go hand-in-hand.
Moreover, while it is unlikely to see a "utopia" in a post-apocalyptic scenario, it is possible to have *hope* in that situation. For instance the Fallout games have actually been described as a "world half-full" scenario, because while it is an irradiated wasteland filled with dire threats and misery, it actually replaced a shiny, chrome-plated, technologically superior dystopia that the US had become with people who were in serious danger all the time, but who are actively rebuilding something less crushingly dystopic.
On the Western Front, yes. Although there were some intervals where there was some movement even there.
Many, many attacks had one side or the other make it to the other side's first few trenches and there was heavy fighting there. And then you'd get counterattacked and possibly thrown back.
The major problem isn't the possibility of a good FPS fight in the trenches, its the fact that there was a very high casualty rate for getting there. Between machine guns, artillery, barbed wire and such, a lot of troops didn't make it across the No Man's Land. What would justify your character getting across? I'd presume, however, that you could use the narrative to simply suggest that they were one of the lucky ones who did simply because if they didn't, there'd be no game.
Now on the Eastern Front and in the Middle East (which they took some care to show), it wasn't all trench warfare. Remember this is when Lawrence of Arabia was active, so you're going to be mobile in any campaign that is located there.
Many laws do have sunset clauses, for instance the Patriot Act did. And it does help create new debate around existing provisions. Although, as you can see with the Patriot Act, sometimes they just get renewed.
I'd actually like to see something like a project to create a clean slate version of the various titles of the US Code. Once that was agreed on, we'd simply repeal an entire Title of the US Code and replace it with the refactored one. You'd need an independent commission to do that work, because it would likely take forever, but legal refactoring is important. Many of the famous law codes like Justinian's Law Code and the Napoleonic Code were restatements and refactors which were big steps forward for their time.
Maybe, but it is just as likely the problem is that lawmakers are great at making laws, but they rarely get credit for repealing old laws unless it is some sort of tax.
Ask your legislator about some law that was passed even 20 years ago, and unless it is on a hot button issue like taxes, abortion, gay marriage, or whatever, they won't know shit about it. That's how stupid blue laws and such stay on the books for years after everyone alive considers them quaint or even abhorrent when they find out about them. And no one pays much attention to something like traffic regulations unless they were elected on a traffic regulation reform platform or something.
Yes, there may be some intentional negligence out there for some ordinances, but more likely, it's just layered up over time.
That said, I don't think that comics do a very good job of modeling the life that a "real-life" Vandal Savage might have. A real immortal could end up dead or evil, or he could just as easily be really good.
However, there is just as much possibility that a person like that could have a "blue/orange morality" as oppose to black and white, and be completely unpredictable.
You could easily find yourself bored, and that is a real danger, not simply with immortals, but with any leisure class. We've already seen the shit that aristocrats can get up to when they're bored and don't need to work to maintain their lifestyle.
Of course immortality could also be an eternal life of everlasting drudgery. You're never bored, per se, but you're working on things you dislike, just to maintain your immortal existence.
If the parts are interchangeable, yes, this will work. The real challenge is ensuring equivalent functionality when you replace neurons with something electronic. We may be able to eventually simulate complete neuron function in electronics, but it may require much more to do that with electronics than with biological components.
I'm more of the mind that the real revolution could involve electronics for having minds in static locations, but mobile platforms will need to make use of much more space and power efficient components that are based on real neurons, albeit, enhanced neurons. So we still have a lot of work to do.
In more words, what you are failing to recognize is that the problem is that it's too hard for the public to exercise their own rights and interests, that the people are actually disadvantaged as the federal and state legislators are in districts that are almost guaranteed to vote for them, and they can't even be sure that it evens out on a state-wide basis.
What needs to be changed is the electoral system, centralization isn't the issue, it's a more fundamental problem.
Gerrymandering isn't new. The term was invented in 1812, not in 1992. This has been going on for two centuries. Yes, there are state legislative lines which have been drawn in that way. Yet, this is the time where there are historic levels of polarization and disconnect.
More to the point, is it actually harder for minorities to exercise their voting rights now or in the past? Certain obstacles aside, I would not pit this period against Jim Crow or the period of the Company Towns. Today, there is influence and obstacles. In the past, votes used to be outright owned by political machines or denied to voters by outright violence and direct intimidation.
Sure, I agree that there are obstacles to full participation, but we've never been so alienated from government, and the real reason for that is not a lack of being able to exercise certain rights, which have always been in some manner blocked, but the very fact that this is not the government of 1800 or 1900, or even 1980.
The United States government is probably the most complex and entrenched bureaucracy in the history of the world, bar none. Even China is not there yet, with even more people and a long history of bureaucracy. Legislators and government employees live in a different world. The issues they deal with, most voters can't be bothered with. The people they meet are the lobbyists and assorted staffers and experts needed to advise on all aspects of a gigantic bureaucracy.
Certainly, by all means, get all the voters to the polls. And let them elect their candidate. And in less than one term in office, their candidate will be in that same group of people. Not because they are corrupt, but because the voters may have elected them, but the voters don't send them along with all the answers to the many, many questions that a centralized bureaucracy throws at them every day.
Oh no, it's a great system for the truth, it's just that it's often easy for lies and distractions to purport to be democracy and otherwise hide it.
And what methodology does democracy use for determining truth? None that I can see. That's fine for people who only have to care about asking for things for themselves, because they have personal interest and knowledge, but how does one make decisions about more global or abstract problems, especially ones they can't immediately perceive like climate change or international trade considerations? As far as I can tell, democracy doesn't determine truth, it merely picks a "truth" that is sold to voters. That may work if there is a choice between a clear right or wrong answer, but what happens when there is a very attractive looking wrong answer? Or what happens when all options presented are wrong or of poor quality?
In democracy the voter is a voter, and the more you throw at a voter, the less the voter is capable of mastering, just like the legislator, only the voters don't even have a staff to help them with the details.
Put a group of Nobel prize winners together to answer questions in their field, and they're geniuses. Ask them questions about something not in their field, and your mileage may vary quite a bit. Some are even straight-up flakes. And that's people who have been recognized for their intelligence. The average voter doesn't even have that going for them.
It is my belief that technology improves the capability to centralize government operations. That's one reason you have states tending towards top down centralization today. It is now possible to run more things from the national capital than ever before.
Centralization has benefits that are quite considerable... if they are used for good. The problem with big government is that the characteristics of a large bureaucracy make the government itself into its own constituency. Look at US legislators. They're completely out of step with a lot of their voters, on both sides. How could that happen? It's way too easy to manage things from the capital.
Will direct democracy and other things become more prevalent with more technology? Quite possibly. However, while I've always stated that democracy is a very good method of generating legitimacy for a particular government, it's really shitty at determining the truth for questions that have anything but the simplest answers.
A lot of progressive types today take great comfort in the belief that they have the majority opinion on their side. However, would they still consider themselves correct if they were a minority? They certainly would. Therefore, having everyone on your side is convenient, but doesn't necessarily improve the value of your proposition. A direct democracy without experts mediating the effects could generate some very popular, and very disastrous policies.
As for technology in general managing things. Garbage in, garbage out. If you start with a flawed premise, your technology will find the best possible means of achieving your flawed goals and screwing you over. I am interested in how technology can help us in the future, but in the end, I think the real determination of whether a future is utopia or dystopia will be determined by the moral and ethical decisions that we generate the starting goals and premises from which the technology will implement a solution.
One wonders though. Why was VT set up? Was it made open to make it possible for more and more security vendors to get good data in order to increase global security? If so, then the failure to give back is a problem, but as long as that data is used, the goal of the project is satisfied. More security.
What is happening is that there appears to be some who are able to leech. Well... to some degree, that is merely an extreme use case of what VT was intended for. Even if they don't give back, they are improving global detection of malware to the collective benefit of everyone.
As for the competition... here is my question. Why is it that these "old school" contributors don't have the billion dollar valuations? Clearly, they've been doing this longer and they have experience. I can understand why they wouldn't want to feed their competitors who aren't sharing with them, but if this had been meant to be a security cartel to begin with, the rules would have started that way. To me, it is clear that these leechers are better at something than the sharers, either technically, or in marketing, or whatever. Admittedly, they're hitching a free ride, but couldn't it be argued that VT was basically set up to encourage the growth of good detection and these companies are pushing that forward?
I'm not totally defending these leechers. Without contributions, the database isn't going to go anywhere, and if the leechers put the contributors out of business, then not only is there no reason to contribute, but the leeches will end up killing themselves by out-competing those who actually make it possible for them to detect viruses and malware.
So for all the reasons above, I agree that a common sense contribution policy or at least a subscription rate for the data should be implemented which could be used to compensate contributors and Google for their efforts.
However, rather than slam the leeches for leeching, I think leeches should be *encouraged* until it gets to the point where they no longer need the help to get off the ground, and then they should either contribute, or alternately, pay for their data. We want to get new companies off the ground to add global security capacity and expertise. We just don't want the leeches to be parasites who kill the host in the process.
You're assuming that the end user will correlate their detection rate with this sort of thing. If they didn't happen to read this story, they might continue on blissfully unaware that their vendor now suddenly sucks. You can be sure the vendor won't say a damn thing about it, unless prompted by the customers first.
Really, these firms are leeches. They built a business out of nothing more than capitalizing on Virustotal, They can die and no one will miss them.
I don't disagree with the thought behind that, but even with wild inflation of value that is common these days, a company with a billion dollars of valuation is going to be missed when their customers end up with a crappier product, but no one mentioned to the already-sold customers that their provider is now sucking it because they have less ability to detect malware.
These companies will likely have to scramble to either contribute or find their own way of getting data, but you can bet that they will not call their customers and state that they are suddenly unable to detect as much as they used to.
In the end, this will fuck over customers who probably had no idea that their vendor was leeching. That could have a real effect on security in general, and making people less secure globally can have indirect effects on everyone else.
Hopefully, these companies do start contributing. Presumably they have the money to run a few honeypots and some security admins to watch them if they have a billion dollar valuation. If they don't... well they won't be the only ones who are paying for it.
So, effectively what you are saying is that this was not a good test of swarm intelligence because the outcome did not provide any extraordinary proof of extra intelligence being accessed by the "swarm". They did get a correct bet, but that was only one instance, and it was not a particularly low probability compared to all possible probabilities that could have existed for that kind of bet.
However, it doesn't mean that the swarm intelligence doesn't exist, it just means that there is only one data point, and not a particularly rigorous one, so we should reserve our judgement for future bets, preferably bets made against much less favorable odds, in order to demonstrate a pattern of successful bets that cannot be explained by pure random guessing.
In effect, this was the entry level for the concept. If it had failed, it would have cast doubt on the idea. Now that it has succeeded, there is some reason to proceed forward with further investigation, but there is nothing yet to get excited about. The concept has not failed, but the predictive power of the theory is still "undetermined". It probably shouldn't have gotten an article written about it yet, but that's the way it goes.
Actually, they would usually run into machine gun fire. They really only walked when they were trying to stay behind a creeping artillery barrage, and no one was firing a machine gun through that.
WWI was plenty exciting if you got into the trenches on the other side, then you'd be fighting in close quarters with trench knives, spades/entrenching tools, pistols, and just about anything you could beat someone down with. You'd also have shotguns which were not thought well of by the Germans because they would fuck your shit up in such a small space and were not considered sporting.
Also, there were other things like night recon in No Man's Land and Stormtrooper tactics that the Germans (and Russians) came up with.
And they did show the desert warfare which was a lot more mobile than the Western Front.
If you were anywhere but the Western Front there wasn't just only trench warfare, although that was certainly where most of the troops were allocated to. And by 1918 the war was starting to become more mobile again with tanks showing up.
And let's not forget the Russian Civil War (1917-1920) which was anything but trench warfare. If they get that in there, be prepared for the old school Communists to be going up against the Whites. Horses, armored trains, complete anarchy, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin (in his terrorist/bank robber days before he was big). Good times.
I think they will have plenty of trenches, but they could certainly break that up some with other locations. It was the first *World* War, and it was called that for a reason.
You're right, although, if they actually do get lasers right, you could have one plane shoot down missiles that are fired BVR. That would then require the opposition force to close to visual range to intercept the incoming.
Of course, nobody has really mentioned ground-based laser anti-aircraft weaponry, which is much, much more feasible than jet lasers, and would have both the stability, and the ability to have a big generator to actually fire those thousands of high power shots per minute. Then all you need is BVR radar and you can pick off thousands of incoming missiles as soon as they enter visual range.
A jet is a much better firing platform for a laser weapon, mostly because a jet always has a look-down ability to ensure they have line of sight on a target, but an AA weapon with sufficient visibility would seem a much better first project for the technology.
I never actually said I wouldn't fly in an airship. You are confusing my assessment of the general safety situation with what I would or would not do.
And the reality is that an airplane might well go up, but it's not going to go up in flames and burn down in less than a minute while it is docking on the ground in an otherwise *completely normal landing*.
Hydrogen is considerably more flammable in that situation than jet fuel. There's a difference between the well secured potential fire of a gas or jet fuel tank going up and something that's just going to flame up into a fireball due to an event that *no one still knows what exactly happened*.
I don't think most of them really think about it, to be honest. It just sort of works. If they did think about it, they might think it is some advanced metadata processing or Big Data thing that allows it, without actually storing facial recognition files.
Faceprinting probably still sounds futuristic to most people, even though it's now relatively common, so it's probably still pretty far down on the list of things they would think of first.
Not necessarily. We don't need to dig up fuel from the ground, it's just considerably more efficient and convenient. We would need to seriously amp up our power from renewables to do it, but it should be possible to synthesize hydrocarbon fuel. And if fusion ever actually became a thing that works, we'd almost certainly have the power to do it.
The Hindenburg was going to happen eventually. It was only a matter of time with hydrogen. More usage of Zeppelins would have just increased the probabilities.
Which is not to say it is impossible to make them much safer even with hydrogen, but I think the probability of an accident was always going to be high enough that its hard to imagine them having gotten far enough into the future for them to have been fully developed.
Yes, barring an absolute revolution in battery storage densities, we're not going to approach the energy density of hydrocarbon fuels even with sustained incremental advances.
That revolution may happen at some point in the future, but we may need to have a much better handle on physics to do it.
Right. Batteries are not the only way to generate fuel for a plane from solar power. In theory, if you were somehow able to pull carbon from the atmosphere and use that material to make hydrocarbon fuels, you'd at least have a nearly carbon neutral jet fuel, even if carbon was emitted at some point in the cycle. Obviously, this is not something we know how to do at the industrial levels required to support all air traffic, but if we're able to scale out current methods, or more likely, find a more efficient method, we'd be able to continue to fly jets in close to the same way we do now.
And someone else mentioned that batteries used for takeoff and landing assist might help reduce fuel use without having to have so many batteries as a fully electric plane would.
I think you are excessively optimistic to assume that production differences will prevent the emergence of cartels.
For one thing, you assume that the possibility of many sources of energy will prevent one single source from being paramount. However, isn't that precisely what happened with oil?
You're assuming that the people running one type of renewable won't use dirty tactics to lower their prices to the point where the other methods are not profitable. Or they buy up the other generation capacities and then shut them down in order to favor their preferred generation method. Embrace and extinguish. Cartels don't play fair. That's their point.
I think you overestimate the difficulty of bringing more than one technology under the umbrella of one corporation, let alone a cartel. Today's oil and gas companies are rebranding themselves as "energy" companies. That's not just some sort of PR maneuver. They are actively using their money to look for the next big thing in energy. Your small time producers today will become the subsidiaries of Big Energy, Inc. tomorrow. Do not believe for a second that mere differences in generation will make it unpalatable to consolidate.
I'm not sure a carbon tax to replace income or sales tax is a good long term strategy. It definitely has an attraction, but if we do actually *succeed* and cut down carbon emissions, you're just going to have to restore the income and sales taxes. Only good luck with trying to raise a tax that no one is used to paying.
We need to be taxing productive output or your tax policy is based on a source of revenue that you're actively trying to get rid of, which means it isn't growing with the GDP. That can cause all sorts of problems, not just running out of things to tax. The most likely result will be further complicated tax codes to try and balance things out, but which by their very nature, will introduce inefficiencies and loopholes into the tax code.
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This would never work, but I really think they should run an award where a significant number of books are nominated, they rip off the covers, leave out the titles and anything that would suggest who the author is, and then have people actually read them and vote on the one(s) they liked the best.
Awards like this are always going to be tricky, because there are biases on both sides that can affect things, not to mention groups can form that believe that they are being completely "equitable" in what they are doing, but somehow clash with the other groups. The tendency is to see the other side as "the Enemy", but in reality, I think people are reacting to things they haven't really thought out.
There are a few things that will affect the gender/ethnic/skin color breakdown of any awards, the most important being:
1) How many authors of any group are there who have produced anything of note in this period of time? This could vary wildly. It's easy to say that the percentage of women who won is very high, but was it high based on the number of eligible works? Did it just so happen that a larger number of white male authors happened to not have eligible works this year?
2) What are the criteria of the award? Saying that something is "best" is very, very subjective, and it tends to breed both incomprehension at who is selected, and also tends to reinforce biases on both sides. If your favorite SF is hard SF, then you're probably not going to like some of the winners, and if more people like the soft SF and fantasy, you're potentially going to hate the book that wins the popularity contest.
It makes me wonder if there would be the same hate out there for a meticulously researched hard military SF book that just happened to be written by a female.
I admit, I like all sorts of SF and fantasy, but I have my bias towards something that feels less like wish fulfillment fantasy full of soap opera-like swords and sorcery fare and something that feels more like it could actually happen if we made just one decisive discovery, and then the implications of it were fully thought out logically.
Would I have voted for some of the works that won this year? No. But I have to suggest that it would have much less to do with the author and more to do with the subject matter. Since the award is for "best", do I try to create some sort of odd equivalence system where their use of language or their "themes" are better than the others? Or do I just vote for the book I liked the best? I'd probably vote for the book that I loved, and not vote for a book that I used some sort of "fair" criteria-based formula to select.
If you are a feminist or a feminist-supporter, you're going to like the themes of certain works and those books will appeal to you, whereas they will not be as interesting or even irritate someone who finds the subject overblown and boring.
In that sense, there may well be a bias in the awards towards females and those who are not white because the authors have an interest in "progressive" type themes. But that is more of a question of criteria than what is actually best. "Best" is different for everyone.
If you had an award for Hard SF, or best use of language, or feminist themes or whatever, then I could go into a voting slate and say, "this book would not usually appeal to me, but based on it's treatment of these themes, the author did a splendid job"
Like any awards without quantifiable metrics, in the end, its a popularity contest. Instead of getting upset over it, I think certain people should lobby for or create their own structured awards that better display the variety of what is out there instead of trying to game the system.
I think a "dystopia" refers to a more or less functioning society and civilization, according to some definitions I have looked up it, "describes an imaginary society that is as dehumanizing and as unpleasant as possible".
Post-apocalyptic implies that civilization is pretty much dead or shattered and people are picking up the scraps, if they are surviving at all. You could call that dystopic, or there could be surviving remnants that have survived as dystopias, but the terms don't necessarily go hand-in-hand.
Moreover, while it is unlikely to see a "utopia" in a post-apocalyptic scenario, it is possible to have *hope* in that situation. For instance the Fallout games have actually been described as a "world half-full" scenario, because while it is an irradiated wasteland filled with dire threats and misery, it actually replaced a shiny, chrome-plated, technologically superior dystopia that the US had become with people who were in serious danger all the time, but who are actively rebuilding something less crushingly dystopic.
On the Western Front, yes. Although there were some intervals where there was some movement even there.
Many, many attacks had one side or the other make it to the other side's first few trenches and there was heavy fighting there. And then you'd get counterattacked and possibly thrown back.
The major problem isn't the possibility of a good FPS fight in the trenches, its the fact that there was a very high casualty rate for getting there. Between machine guns, artillery, barbed wire and such, a lot of troops didn't make it across the No Man's Land. What would justify your character getting across? I'd presume, however, that you could use the narrative to simply suggest that they were one of the lucky ones who did simply because if they didn't, there'd be no game.
Now on the Eastern Front and in the Middle East (which they took some care to show), it wasn't all trench warfare. Remember this is when Lawrence of Arabia was active, so you're going to be mobile in any campaign that is located there.
Many laws do have sunset clauses, for instance the Patriot Act did. And it does help create new debate around existing provisions. Although, as you can see with the Patriot Act, sometimes they just get renewed.
I'd actually like to see something like a project to create a clean slate version of the various titles of the US Code. Once that was agreed on, we'd simply repeal an entire Title of the US Code and replace it with the refactored one. You'd need an independent commission to do that work, because it would likely take forever, but legal refactoring is important. Many of the famous law codes like Justinian's Law Code and the Napoleonic Code were restatements and refactors which were big steps forward for their time.
Maybe, but it is just as likely the problem is that lawmakers are great at making laws, but they rarely get credit for repealing old laws unless it is some sort of tax.
Ask your legislator about some law that was passed even 20 years ago, and unless it is on a hot button issue like taxes, abortion, gay marriage, or whatever, they won't know shit about it. That's how stupid blue laws and such stay on the books for years after everyone alive considers them quaint or even abhorrent when they find out about them. And no one pays much attention to something like traffic regulations unless they were elected on a traffic regulation reform platform or something.
Yes, there may be some intentional negligence out there for some ordinances, but more likely, it's just layered up over time.
"Greg Kroah-Hartmant, the Linux superstar,"
Uh, what? There are only two superstars in Linux: Linus and the guy who came up with systemd.
You mean there is one superstar, and one cackling super villain. I'll let you figure out which is which.
That said, I don't think that comics do a very good job of modeling the life that a "real-life" Vandal Savage might have. A real immortal could end up dead or evil, or he could just as easily be really good.
However, there is just as much possibility that a person like that could have a "blue/orange morality" as oppose to black and white, and be completely unpredictable.
You could easily find yourself bored, and that is a real danger, not simply with immortals, but with any leisure class. We've already seen the shit that aristocrats can get up to when they're bored and don't need to work to maintain their lifestyle.
Of course immortality could also be an eternal life of everlasting drudgery. You're never bored, per se, but you're working on things you dislike, just to maintain your immortal existence.
If the parts are interchangeable, yes, this will work. The real challenge is ensuring equivalent functionality when you replace neurons with something electronic. We may be able to eventually simulate complete neuron function in electronics, but it may require much more to do that with electronics than with biological components.
I'm more of the mind that the real revolution could involve electronics for having minds in static locations, but mobile platforms will need to make use of much more space and power efficient components that are based on real neurons, albeit, enhanced neurons. So we still have a lot of work to do.
In more words, what you are failing to recognize is that the problem is that it's too hard for the public to exercise their own rights and interests, that the people are actually disadvantaged as the federal and state legislators are in districts that are almost guaranteed to vote for them, and they can't even be sure that it evens out on a state-wide basis.
What needs to be changed is the electoral system, centralization isn't the issue, it's a more fundamental problem.
Gerrymandering isn't new. The term was invented in 1812, not in 1992. This has been going on for two centuries. Yes, there are state legislative lines which have been drawn in that way. Yet, this is the time where there are historic levels of polarization and disconnect.
More to the point, is it actually harder for minorities to exercise their voting rights now or in the past? Certain obstacles aside, I would not pit this period against Jim Crow or the period of the Company Towns. Today, there is influence and obstacles. In the past, votes used to be outright owned by political machines or denied to voters by outright violence and direct intimidation.
Sure, I agree that there are obstacles to full participation, but we've never been so alienated from government, and the real reason for that is not a lack of being able to exercise certain rights, which have always been in some manner blocked, but the very fact that this is not the government of 1800 or 1900, or even 1980.
The United States government is probably the most complex and entrenched bureaucracy in the history of the world, bar none. Even China is not there yet, with even more people and a long history of bureaucracy. Legislators and government employees live in a different world. The issues they deal with, most voters can't be bothered with. The people they meet are the lobbyists and assorted staffers and experts needed to advise on all aspects of a gigantic bureaucracy.
Certainly, by all means, get all the voters to the polls. And let them elect their candidate. And in less than one term in office, their candidate will be in that same group of people. Not because they are corrupt, but because the voters may have elected them, but the voters don't send them along with all the answers to the many, many questions that a centralized bureaucracy throws at them every day.
Oh no, it's a great system for the truth, it's just that it's often easy for lies and distractions to purport to be democracy and otherwise hide it.
And what methodology does democracy use for determining truth? None that I can see. That's fine for people who only have to care about asking for things for themselves, because they have personal interest and knowledge, but how does one make decisions about more global or abstract problems, especially ones they can't immediately perceive like climate change or international trade considerations? As far as I can tell, democracy doesn't determine truth, it merely picks a "truth" that is sold to voters. That may work if there is a choice between a clear right or wrong answer, but what happens when there is a very attractive looking wrong answer? Or what happens when all options presented are wrong or of poor quality?
In democracy the voter is a voter, and the more you throw at a voter, the less the voter is capable of mastering, just like the legislator, only the voters don't even have a staff to help them with the details.
Put a group of Nobel prize winners together to answer questions in their field, and they're geniuses. Ask them questions about something not in their field, and your mileage may vary quite a bit. Some are even straight-up flakes. And that's people who have been recognized for their intelligence. The average voter doesn't even have that going for them.
It is my belief that technology improves the capability to centralize government operations. That's one reason you have states tending towards top down centralization today. It is now possible to run more things from the national capital than ever before.
Centralization has benefits that are quite considerable... if they are used for good. The problem with big government is that the characteristics of a large bureaucracy make the government itself into its own constituency. Look at US legislators. They're completely out of step with a lot of their voters, on both sides. How could that happen? It's way too easy to manage things from the capital.
Will direct democracy and other things become more prevalent with more technology? Quite possibly. However, while I've always stated that democracy is a very good method of generating legitimacy for a particular government, it's really shitty at determining the truth for questions that have anything but the simplest answers.
A lot of progressive types today take great comfort in the belief that they have the majority opinion on their side. However, would they still consider themselves correct if they were a minority? They certainly would. Therefore, having everyone on your side is convenient, but doesn't necessarily improve the value of your proposition. A direct democracy without experts mediating the effects could generate some very popular, and very disastrous policies.
As for technology in general managing things. Garbage in, garbage out. If you start with a flawed premise, your technology will find the best possible means of achieving your flawed goals and screwing you over. I am interested in how technology can help us in the future, but in the end, I think the real determination of whether a future is utopia or dystopia will be determined by the moral and ethical decisions that we generate the starting goals and premises from which the technology will implement a solution.
One wonders though. Why was VT set up? Was it made open to make it possible for more and more security vendors to get good data in order to increase global security? If so, then the failure to give back is a problem, but as long as that data is used, the goal of the project is satisfied. More security.
What is happening is that there appears to be some who are able to leech. Well... to some degree, that is merely an extreme use case of what VT was intended for. Even if they don't give back, they are improving global detection of malware to the collective benefit of everyone.
As for the competition... here is my question. Why is it that these "old school" contributors don't have the billion dollar valuations? Clearly, they've been doing this longer and they have experience. I can understand why they wouldn't want to feed their competitors who aren't sharing with them, but if this had been meant to be a security cartel to begin with, the rules would have started that way. To me, it is clear that these leechers are better at something than the sharers, either technically, or in marketing, or whatever. Admittedly, they're hitching a free ride, but couldn't it be argued that VT was basically set up to encourage the growth of good detection and these companies are pushing that forward?
I'm not totally defending these leechers. Without contributions, the database isn't going to go anywhere, and if the leechers put the contributors out of business, then not only is there no reason to contribute, but the leeches will end up killing themselves by out-competing those who actually make it possible for them to detect viruses and malware.
So for all the reasons above, I agree that a common sense contribution policy or at least a subscription rate for the data should be implemented which could be used to compensate contributors and Google for their efforts.
However, rather than slam the leeches for leeching, I think leeches should be *encouraged* until it gets to the point where they no longer need the help to get off the ground, and then they should either contribute, or alternately, pay for their data. We want to get new companies off the ground to add global security capacity and expertise. We just don't want the leeches to be parasites who kill the host in the process.
You're assuming that the end user will correlate their detection rate with this sort of thing. If they didn't happen to read this story, they might continue on blissfully unaware that their vendor now suddenly sucks. You can be sure the vendor won't say a damn thing about it, unless prompted by the customers first.
Really, these firms are leeches. They built a business out of nothing more than capitalizing on Virustotal, They can die and no one will miss them.
I don't disagree with the thought behind that, but even with wild inflation of value that is common these days, a company with a billion dollars of valuation is going to be missed when their customers end up with a crappier product, but no one mentioned to the already-sold customers that their provider is now sucking it because they have less ability to detect malware.
These companies will likely have to scramble to either contribute or find their own way of getting data, but you can bet that they will not call their customers and state that they are suddenly unable to detect as much as they used to.
In the end, this will fuck over customers who probably had no idea that their vendor was leeching. That could have a real effect on security in general, and making people less secure globally can have indirect effects on everyone else.
Hopefully, these companies do start contributing. Presumably they have the money to run a few honeypots and some security admins to watch them if they have a billion dollar valuation. If they don't... well they won't be the only ones who are paying for it.
So, effectively what you are saying is that this was not a good test of swarm intelligence because the outcome did not provide any extraordinary proof of extra intelligence being accessed by the "swarm". They did get a correct bet, but that was only one instance, and it was not a particularly low probability compared to all possible probabilities that could have existed for that kind of bet.
However, it doesn't mean that the swarm intelligence doesn't exist, it just means that there is only one data point, and not a particularly rigorous one, so we should reserve our judgement for future bets, preferably bets made against much less favorable odds, in order to demonstrate a pattern of successful bets that cannot be explained by pure random guessing.
In effect, this was the entry level for the concept. If it had failed, it would have cast doubt on the idea. Now that it has succeeded, there is some reason to proceed forward with further investigation, but there is nothing yet to get excited about. The concept has not failed, but the predictive power of the theory is still "undetermined". It probably shouldn't have gotten an article written about it yet, but that's the way it goes.
Actually, they would usually run into machine gun fire. They really only walked when they were trying to stay behind a creeping artillery barrage, and no one was firing a machine gun through that.
WWI was plenty exciting if you got into the trenches on the other side, then you'd be fighting in close quarters with trench knives, spades/entrenching tools, pistols, and just about anything you could beat someone down with. You'd also have shotguns which were not thought well of by the Germans because they would fuck your shit up in such a small space and were not considered sporting.
Also, there were other things like night recon in No Man's Land and Stormtrooper tactics that the Germans (and Russians) came up with.
And they did show the desert warfare which was a lot more mobile than the Western Front.
If you were anywhere but the Western Front there wasn't just only trench warfare, although that was certainly where most of the troops were allocated to. And by 1918 the war was starting to become more mobile again with tanks showing up.
And let's not forget the Russian Civil War (1917-1920) which was anything but trench warfare. If they get that in there, be prepared for the old school Communists to be going up against the Whites. Horses, armored trains, complete anarchy, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin (in his terrorist/bank robber days before he was big). Good times.
I think they will have plenty of trenches, but they could certainly break that up some with other locations. It was the first *World* War, and it was called that for a reason.
You're right, although, if they actually do get lasers right, you could have one plane shoot down missiles that are fired BVR. That would then require the opposition force to close to visual range to intercept the incoming.
Of course, nobody has really mentioned ground-based laser anti-aircraft weaponry, which is much, much more feasible than jet lasers, and would have both the stability, and the ability to have a big generator to actually fire those thousands of high power shots per minute. Then all you need is BVR radar and you can pick off thousands of incoming missiles as soon as they enter visual range.
A jet is a much better firing platform for a laser weapon, mostly because a jet always has a look-down ability to ensure they have line of sight on a target, but an AA weapon with sufficient visibility would seem a much better first project for the technology.
I never actually said I wouldn't fly in an airship. You are confusing my assessment of the general safety situation with what I would or would not do.
And the reality is that an airplane might well go up, but it's not going to go up in flames and burn down in less than a minute while it is docking on the ground in an otherwise *completely normal landing*.
Hydrogen is considerably more flammable in that situation than jet fuel. There's a difference between the well secured potential fire of a gas or jet fuel tank going up and something that's just going to flame up into a fireball due to an event that *no one still knows what exactly happened*.
I don't think most of them really think about it, to be honest. It just sort of works. If they did think about it, they might think it is some advanced metadata processing or Big Data thing that allows it, without actually storing facial recognition files.
Faceprinting probably still sounds futuristic to most people, even though it's now relatively common, so it's probably still pretty far down on the list of things they would think of first.
Not necessarily. We don't need to dig up fuel from the ground, it's just considerably more efficient and convenient. We would need to seriously amp up our power from renewables to do it, but it should be possible to synthesize hydrocarbon fuel. And if fusion ever actually became a thing that works, we'd almost certainly have the power to do it.
The Hindenburg was going to happen eventually. It was only a matter of time with hydrogen. More usage of Zeppelins would have just increased the probabilities.
Which is not to say it is impossible to make them much safer even with hydrogen, but I think the probability of an accident was always going to be high enough that its hard to imagine them having gotten far enough into the future for them to have been fully developed.
Yes, barring an absolute revolution in battery storage densities, we're not going to approach the energy density of hydrocarbon fuels even with sustained incremental advances.
That revolution may happen at some point in the future, but we may need to have a much better handle on physics to do it.
Right. Batteries are not the only way to generate fuel for a plane from solar power. In theory, if you were somehow able to pull carbon from the atmosphere and use that material to make hydrocarbon fuels, you'd at least have a nearly carbon neutral jet fuel, even if carbon was emitted at some point in the cycle. Obviously, this is not something we know how to do at the industrial levels required to support all air traffic, but if we're able to scale out current methods, or more likely, find a more efficient method, we'd be able to continue to fly jets in close to the same way we do now.
And someone else mentioned that batteries used for takeoff and landing assist might help reduce fuel use without having to have so many batteries as a fully electric plane would.
I think you are excessively optimistic to assume that production differences will prevent the emergence of cartels.
For one thing, you assume that the possibility of many sources of energy will prevent one single source from being paramount. However, isn't that precisely what happened with oil?
You're assuming that the people running one type of renewable won't use dirty tactics to lower their prices to the point where the other methods are not profitable. Or they buy up the other generation capacities and then shut them down in order to favor their preferred generation method. Embrace and extinguish. Cartels don't play fair. That's their point.
I think you overestimate the difficulty of bringing more than one technology under the umbrella of one corporation, let alone a cartel. Today's oil and gas companies are rebranding themselves as "energy" companies. That's not just some sort of PR maneuver. They are actively using their money to look for the next big thing in energy. Your small time producers today will become the subsidiaries of Big Energy, Inc. tomorrow. Do not believe for a second that mere differences in generation will make it unpalatable to consolidate.
I'm not sure a carbon tax to replace income or sales tax is a good long term strategy. It definitely has an attraction, but if we do actually *succeed* and cut down carbon emissions, you're just going to have to restore the income and sales taxes. Only good luck with trying to raise a tax that no one is used to paying.
We need to be taxing productive output or your tax policy is based on a source of revenue that you're actively trying to get rid of, which means it isn't growing with the GDP. That can cause all sorts of problems, not just running out of things to tax. The most likely result will be further complicated tax codes to try and balance things out, but which by their very nature, will introduce inefficiencies and loopholes into the tax code.