And what was the profit for Faraday to do research into electromagnets in the 1840s, a time when the largest market for electrical gadgets was magicians doing parlor tricks? A far more profitable endeavor would have been better horse breeding techniques or faster looms.
Fast forward 150 years, and 90+% of our entire economy is based on the electrical foundations discovered by Faraday, distilled into equations by Maxwell (also without profit) and turned into countless products, most of which resulted in failed businesses and ended up in trash heaps. The minority of survivors changed everything.
Faraday wasn't the only one doing scientific research into useless things at the time. He just found the right paths.
That's the nature of progress. It's a trek into the unknown. We have no way to know which paths will be "profitable" and which ones will be dead ends. And if we don't explore them all, or at least as many as possible, we may miss the discoveries that build entire future economies. Without Faraday's and Maxwell's work, we'd still be living an 18th century lifestyle.
Who are the Faradays out there today? Will they be supported, or will we stifle them in favor of better horse breeding techniques and faster looms? Which one will give society as a whole the better future?
I'm seeing all kinds of bugs everywhere. -- Text alignment on messages (keyboard interferes so I can't see what I'm writing, first line scrolls halfway off the screen, etc... ) -- Focus jumping around on forms I'm trying to fill out on Safari. Several web sites. Tried to sign-up to their mailing list and couldn't. Safari kept jumping back two or three fields in mid-word as I typed. -- Text messages arrive on my computer but not on my phone. Or messages take hours to be delivered, and I'm at my desk, not driving. -- For some reason, I can't get Square (the payment processor) to load on my (current) ipad any more. It just quits. Neither the square app nor the OS had not been updated. Something else changed.
(I later figured out that the same version of Square still works on my older ipad with the older version of the OS.)
I could go on...
Microsoft is damn obtuse, Apple has become flaky as hell-- more interested in useless cutesy animations than solid, stable functionality, and Linux is still not quite ready. Why can't someone out there do for Linux what Steve Jobs did for BSD????
We need a new Next. Billionaire potential for whoever takes on that challenge. Ready, set, GO!
I was also a developer, for IBM back in the 1990s. Somehow, back then we did a whole lot of usability testing that just doesn't seem to be done anymore. At all. I have this exact same problem with the phone app when it shows the little number in the red circle. If I check the status too quickly, I see the animation so I know the touch was received, but the number doesn't update.
Here's a thought -- can we have a "FEATURE" in the settings to TURN OFF all that annoying, time wasting animation crap? I mean, it's cute, it looks nice in the ads, kids like it, but get real, it's like the "kitchen of the future" videos from the 1950s. No one wants to wait around while the robotic cabinetry reveals the toaster. How convenient?
I want my electronics responses to be instantaneous. Animations be gone!
Perfect logic requires perfect knowledge, which we can never have, which is why empirical evidence is so critical.
Here's a lesson I did with my kids t demonstrate the flaw in trusting logic without experiment--
Take an ice cube. To raise its temperature to room temperature (and melt it) you need to raise it by about 40 degrees F.
Take a similar amount of room temperature water. To make it boil, you need to raise it about 140 degrees F.
Now, put both in the same microwave. What will happen first? Will the ice cube melt or will the water boil?
Since ice and water are the same substance, logically, most people think the ice will melt first.
-- Except that ice is perfectly transparent to microwaves. If you can keep the ice dry, it will not melt, while the water will boil furiously. (Any water on the surface of the ice will get hot and make the ice melt a little bit, so use a plastic rack or something like that.)
Question-- When Richard Feynman created Feynman diagrams, *why* did he have anti-particles moving backwards through time? Maybe we're just at a point in the universe where matter is more common that anti-matter. Wait a few billion years and measure again...
Net neutrality is vitally important, and it is beyond just free speech and economics. It's about something stronger than laws or economics. It's about nudging the trajectory of our culture.
Nothing stays as it is. Everything evolves. How and in what direction it evolves can be manipulated.
Consider-- in the 1950s it was illegal for movie production companies to own more than a few theaters and only in a limited number of markets. Why? Because in the 1930s and 40s movie theaters were the main source of news and we didn't want the movie producers to own that entire channel. Along comes radio and TV, and it becomes illegal for one company to own more than one station in any television market, or more than three radio stations in that market, and there's a limit to how many markets they can have a presence in. Why? To limit influence in the most powerful information medium ever invented. Eventually the TV market restrictions were removed, mostly because of complications with the wording around cable TV. Then wham! Along comes FOX "news" and others. (recommended-- watch the documentary "The Brainwashing of my Dad" http://www.thebrainwashingofmy... It's about FOX news, but also applies to Rachel Maddow, et al.)
Now we have the Internet. We already have trouble with companies manipulating what we're exposed to in an effort to nudge us toward certain decisions. (think about the algorithms Amazon and Google use to recommend things...) Advertising is the simplest example of this. But it gets much more interesting. The social engineering of a whole culture is not only possible, it is actively happening right in front of us. This is not a conspiracy theory, it's a well developed science used extensively by marketers, advertisers, religious and cult leaders, and politicians.
Any ability to tilt the scales of choice, however small, is an ability to nudge and steer the future of our culture. This is why net neutrality is vitally important. But I fear it is also doomed to eventually fail, just as it did with movie theaters, television markets and newspapers (only a handful of companies own the vast majority of magazines and newspapers in the US.) Ultimately it didn't matter much that the other restrictions failed -- and this is important -- because the restrictions were lifted after alternative channels became available. Newspapers gave way to theaters and radio. Theaters and radio gave way to television, which gave way to the internet. Until we have a new, open medium, we must absolutely protect net neutrality.
Recommended reading -- The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg Propaganda by Edward Bernays (the inventor of modern advertising) Hit Makers by Derek Thompson Most importantly -- Animal Farm by George Orwell (every generation has its own group of pigs. The rest of us are the animals being manipulated and worked for their benefit. Know how the system works. Only then will you know how to keep it fair.)
There are more, many more, but that's a good start.
Sorry, I got carried away there. I see I missed your point about efficiency and automation taking away all the jobs. It's been said before -- automation and machinery took away about 90% of the jobs we had 100 years ago, but today we're all better off for it. We'll invent new jobs and new industries. People can solve complex scientific problems through distributed gamification of them (like the protein folding game, for example). Imagine being a professional video game player, but one that makes a real contribution to the sphere of human knowledge. And people can organize and curate information and other systems, re-test all those medical studies that haven't been retested or verified, etc, etc, etc... And the world will be a better place. But it won't happen unless we EDUCATE the children and the masses and SUPPORT the efforts to make the world a better place for everyone. The top 1% could easily fund the entire education system of our country by themselves. That money could get us better quality of teachers (anyone here have kids? Isn't it alarming to you how many of the teachers can't really do their jobs?)...
Actually, I could write a book on this. Maybe I should go do that. Maybe some of you should too. Or better yet, go start a movement. Here's a brief instructional video -- https://www.ted.com/talks/dere... Don't be afraid to be the lone nut. Just turn off the TV, do something useful and make a difference for crying out loud.
>> I've yet to hear a good, one sentence answer to the question: "You just gonna steal my money and give it to the poor?"
How about "How much is the safety and well being of you and you family worth? (Did you skip ALL the history classes?)" Or maybe "You don't quite understand how money works. (Here's let me explain...)" Or "That's right, because you and people like you are what made them poor in the first place."
People who benefit the most from a great education and the structure of a well orchestrated society *SHOULD* be paying the most for its maintenance and stability. If not, they will drown and die (or their children will) in a deteriorating society throttled by the corruption, greed and selfishness of the few elites who cannot shoulder the innovation, the construction, maintenance and smooth operation of the greater society they directly benefit from. Look around, the world is full of these little places. Infrastrutures will crumble, innovation will halt, societies will fail.
People are not poor because they want to be. Sure, some small percentage of them will choose to be lazy and suck off the system. But by far most people are poor only because of a lack of good education or lack of opportunity. Which world would you rather live in-- look out your window and see a thriving metropolis with verdant parks and happy populace, or a shanty town? How's that for a one sentence answer? If the system is broken, stop trying to defend it and find a way to rebalance it so it doesn't topple.
Also, "poor" is a relative term. We are all insanely wealthy compared to our recent ancestors, with our indoor plumbing, electricity, mega grocery stores, automobiles, televisions, clean mattresses, air conditioning and such. Part of feeling "poor" is the comparison we make to the culture we see, on TV, advertising, the flaunting of the well-to-do, etc. But try and get the advertising community to play it down and watch the profits drop as people stop trying to catch up to being better off than they are. How are they going to buy all that stuff you're selling if they're too poor to go to the store? Are you beginning to understand how money actually works? Money is nothing but a symbolic representation of value. Did the rich *really* create all that value? Or did they exploit people and steal it from those who actually did create the value?
If you are a wealthy person who does not give back a substantial portion to the welfare and well being of the greater society, then YOU are the bloodsucking parasite, a veritable cancer on society and have no business criticizing the poor. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with being moderately wealthy. There is great value in organizing all those creative people. But don't kid yourself that you did all the work or that no one else deserves it but you. We're all in this game together.
You know what, I completely forgot about the Do Not Call registry. Thanks for reminding me. I'm registered now and I'll be sure to report any stray calls after the grace period ends.
Regarding trespass, it could be argued that a sidewalk from the street to my door, which most houses have, is an implied invitation. Especially if the primary means of getting in and out of the house by the owner is through the garage. But you are right, a simple "no trespassing" sign should be sufficient. How would a "no trespassing" sign work on a phone? As I mentioned, the phone companies already have all the call data. All they need is the time of the call and they can trace it to its origin. (I used to work for a cell phone company in the 1990s. We had it then. It was used for billing purposes. I'm sure they still have the means to connect every call end-to-end based on nothing more than a time and the recipient). Enforcement is just a matter pf public will.
Regarding "one more law"-- as robots and AI continue to progress and move into society, brace yourself for a whole new category of laws we are going to need.
I've read that robocalls cannot be made explicitly illegal because they are protected as free speech, like junk mail. But that's a bad comparison. Here are some details that might have been overlooked.
1. Fee speech is protected in public spaces and forums like newspapers, etc. and the government operated postal service (you don't get junk mail from UPS or Fedex). My phone is not a public space. A better analogy than a mailbox would be to treat my phone like the front door to my house. It is the front door to my life actually.
2. Door-to-door sales people and church solicitors often knock on my door. I have a nifty tool called a peephole that allows me to determine whether I want to open the door or not.
3. If I put up a fence around my property, they cannot get to my front door without committing the crime of trespassing. Free speech does not protect someone in putting up a loudspeaker in front of my house to broadcast a recorded sales pitch. My phone should fall into that same category. It is harassment, not free speech to have these robots call me day after day after day.
Now, consider this. In a world where automated robots cruise the streets knocking on people's doors and offering to sell them things, as often as two or three times per day, each and every day, (as often as I get calls from robo-callers), how long would this stand before it becomes regulated? How long before enterprising entrepreneurs start offering home defense tools to make the robots go away? How long before we all start putting up fences? I want a fence around my phone.
What we need is not a disingenuous technological solution from a phone company with a conflicted interest. Simply make it illegal to make pre-recorded phone calls that are not pre-approved by the recipient. Make it illegal to obfuscate the caller-ID system and make text-based caller ID mandatory for anything commercial. The technology is already there and this serves the same purpose as the peep hole on my front door. Notice I didn't use the word "spoof". We don't care what the method is, we care what the intention is. If they intend to confuse or deceive us into thinking it's not a pre-recorded call, that's illegal, regardless of the technicalities.
Free speech is still intact because a human can still make the call, just as a human can knock on my door to try and sell me pest control services or soul-saving sermons. But humans are expensive and this will be self limiting. Pre-approved messages, such as appointment reminders for existing appointments (as with a doctor) are exempted from the ban.
With caller-ID and unapproved prerecorded messages laws on the books, with hefty fines for each infraction, the calls will stop. Cell phone and other telephone system call logs are all that's needed to prove the crime. Phone companies already have these records, in abundance. Phone calls are easily traced, even after the fact.
Just make them illegal. There are already limitations to free speech. Extending your commercial messages into my private space should be one of them. Just imagine how you'd feel if every window in your house became a TV commercial, because you know, it's not impossible to project an image from across town onto your windows. Is that free speech? Perhaps, but it's also an intrusion into my personal, private space. A phone is my personal, private space. Free speech does not apply there.
In a replicator society, the value of things becomes related to the energy and time it takes to make them, not in the scarcity of the materials and labor. Let's assume our replicator can transmute elements, so the main feed stock is water, split into hydrogen and oxygen, then transmuted into whatever elements are needed and assembled atom by atom. I'm sure some of the nuclear physicists here can calculate the minimum energy needed to do all the transmutations.
So where does the energy come from? This is the main point of scarcity. Energy. Sure, real estate, physical space, human labor (both physical and intellectual) still have value, but typically only one thing is the basis for a currency -- gold, a government's promise, blockchains, etc... In the replicator economy, the only thing that makes sense is energy. Units of energy will be traded as money. Need a new coat, that's four million units. A new yacht? Sixty trillion. If you've got the energy budget, you can have whatever you want within your budget and the size of your replicator will allow.
Again, where will all this energy come from? At the moment, the only thing that makes sense and can supply orders of magnitude more energy than we currently use is a Dyson Swarm. Basically, energy companies will never go away, nor the people who own/manage/organize and control them. There will always be rich people who get the prime real estate and have the best servants and use/consume the rarest goods. And the rest of us will look up to them and feel deprived, even though a modest life today offers far, far more variety and comfort than the wealthiest person of a century or two ago could have ever had. And pomp is vastly overrated.
Oh, if anyone thinks the residents of the future will only use a little more energy than we do, I'm sure the people of the 19th century probably believed the same thing. Who among us would willingly return to a time without AC, cars, computers, paved roads, modern medicine, etc. etc. etc. If we do fall back to a pre-industrial level, it will only be because of a lack of imagination, effort and will.
I know it's a joke, but I essentially had the same thought when I heard about Hawkins and that Russian billionaire's plan to make marble sized starships and hurl them at Proxima Centauri. I couldn't help thinking how the Tau Cetians, et al, probably already did that to us. How would we ever detect a marble hurling through the solar system? Especially if it's a one-time event? Better yet, what if we caught just a glimpse of a signal it sent back home???
The point is, if we are at the cusp of such capabilities, surely someone else has already done it. And surely our star system is a target-- as the knowledge about where habitable planets might exist and how to find them becomes better known...
Or in my case, a year after I bought a nice little farm house, a cement fixture factory went up next door. The noise and dust were incredible. That's what I get for buying property outside the city in an un-zoned area. Won't make that mistake again unless I have quite a lot of acreage.
Oh give me a home... but with an HOA this time please.
Oh, I hadn't noticed any changes. I guess I'm part of a different "in crowd". I stopped using Apple's music app years ago when they decided I needed to relearn their app on every update. I am simply too busy to have to re-learn a friggin music app on every release. Today I use pandora, actual CDs and (gasp!) the radio, actually transmitted via Frequency Modulation over the EM spectrum. I have a special device for this. It's kind of an antique in today's world but, amazingly, it still works. It's called a "clock radio". Yeah, that's how I fight tyranny. It's a little inconvenient, but far, far better than the frustration and demeaning I get from a stupid app that's advertised to make my life better but only makes me feel incompetent.
This is the failure in your thesis. It ignores competition and innovation. Obscurity is an obstacle for the consumer that a competitor (in a free market anyway) will exploit. But apple's app store is not quite a free market. Neither is the smart-phone market if you're not a big enough player.
While we're at it, HEY APPLE, WHAT THE FUCK WAS WRONG WITH "SAVE" AND "SAVE AS" ???? WHAT THE FUCK IS "SAVE A VERSION" SUPPOSED TO MEAN WHEN I CAN'T SPECIFY A SEPARATE NAME OR PLACE FOR MY "VERSION" ???? This change alone, this minor loss of control over my filesystem was enough to make me download and install Linux (Mint) and try it out. Unfortunately, Linux is still too "hobby" for serious work in my office. We need a viable alternative.
Hey, all you tech folks, quit yer complainin' and make a better widget. Reverse engineer apple's music database and make a new interface to play it. Advertise it here. If it's good, we'll all download it for a dollar, or less (see my point?)
When the giants become too powerful and start forcing the little people to grovel, the little people have a duty to chop down the giants at their ankles and bring them down.
Also, In 1900 every car manufacturer had a different way to drive their cars. Some used a throttle on the dash instead of a foot pedal, some had different gear shift patterns, etc... Buy a different car and you had to learn to drive all over again. Today, aside from the location of the wipers and cruise control, all cars work pretty much the same. Why? Because the consumers demanded it.
Usability. Demand it or create it. Fuck the goddamn secret handshake society.
Sugar (sucrose) is two things -- glucose (also called dextrose) and fructose in a 50/50 split.
"High fructose" just means 55% fructose, 45% glucose.
According to the scientist in this lecture (link below), it's only the fructose that's bad for you, no matter what percentage is in your source. Fructose is found in fruit too, but that's not as bad because fruit is also high in fiber, unlike a soda or candy bar. Fiber seems to mitigate the fructose. Also, fructose is almost as bad for your liver as alcohol. Soda or beer. Same difference to the liver. (There's a whole lot more fructose in a soda than there is alcohol in a beer.) Think about that the next time you five your kids a soda.
We switched to using dextrose instead of sucrose and increased our fiber. The results were notable.
That's actually a great idea. I'm looking forward to self driving cars. Truly. But there was a podcast recently -- planet money, where they talked about all the reasons self-driving cars will probably ship without steering wheels or foot pedals. I think that's a bad idea. Just thinking of all the times I've had to wait in line at a valet station, or changed my mind when I saw how busy a restaurant was then drove off aimlessly while pondering where to go next, saw a store in passing and suddenly remembered I needed something there and decided to duck-in real quick... Unless the human-machine interface is really, really, good, I'm not ready to give up the steering wheel.
You make a good point. Google could easily buy some small countries with the cash they have laying around. Why not recreate the "company town" concept from the turn of the 20th century? Google could buy enough land in the mid-west or anywhere, really, and build a campus with apartments and single family homes and parks and shopping centers and everything. I've never understood why these big companies insist on staying in SF or NY or LA.
Also, while it may only cost $100K to build the structure, it's the dirt under it that has the real cost. The price of real estate is governed by supply and demand, and it's in scarce supply. As a former home owner in LA, the house was only worth about 180K, the dirt under it was worth $650K. A lot of houses get bought and immediately razed to make room for a new house.
I sold my little 1400 sq. ft. home in LA with no yard for $850K, then used that money to buy a little 2800 sq. ft. home near San Antonio, TX, with a friggin 65 acre back yard!!! I make less money here, a lot less. But hell, there's almost never a real traffic jam, the food is cheaper, the schools are much better and my three kids all have their own electric motorcycles and a twelve-acre race track to play on. We launch rockets, fly kites and have a tree house bigger than most Manhattan apartments. For us, a backyard camp out really is a camp out, stargazing, camp fire and all.
Yeah, my refrigerator even has a freaking touch sensitive "button" to turn the light on. Damned if I can find it in the middle of the night though. I specifically looked for a fridge with tactile buttons when I replaced it. Couldn't find one. So now I've got one of those battery operated LED pods mounted to the door, but that doesn't help the cube/crush ice button sense my hard, calloused fingers any better. I have the same problem on those touch-screen POS systems at the stores now too. I like to joke that I'm just a damn good looking zombie when the checker notices my fingers have no effect on the touch screen "These things don't work for dead people." I calmly tell them as I reach for the stylus or ask them to touch it for me.
Any sufficiently advanced technology shouldn't have to be hacked it just to make it usable. Enough with the bells and whistles that only get in the way of what I need to do instead of helping me do it.
And while we're on the topic of self-driving cars... A thought occurred to me in the parking lot of Best Buy. How the hell are self-driving cars going to navigate a parking lot and find a spot near the store I want to go to? What if I notice a different store and change the plan at the last minute? What search strategy will it use to seek that one open spot in a full lot? I'll keep the steering wheel, thanks.
As a former LA Times employee and lead engineer on several of their spin-off web sites, I don't understand why this is such a problem.
I only recently installed adblocking software on all my devices. I resisted, but ultimately I had to. Reading on-line had become extremely unpleasant, or occasionally impossible in the case of some of my older equipment. Adblocking was a breath of fresh air. Now pages actually load instead of hanging for minutes at a time, I don't have to be followed everywhere... you know the story.
But there are a few places I still see ads, even though I've got the most aggressive settings turned on (angry, I was.) I don't mind the ads I see, because they are respectful, done the old-school way, like newspapers, magazines, TV and radio have always done it. The ad is the same media as the host, served right along with the other content. No weird redirects, no waiting for content from a multitude of servers to load, no friggin javascript nonsense, etc. etc. etc.
Hey publishers, you want to save the net and get revenue too? Take a lesson from the old school and go back to delivering the ad embedded in the content, in a way that's respectful of your users. Hey advertisers, stop being so friggin nefarious and maybe we'll accept your existence like we do elsewhere. When I'm reading a story from the NY Times, blocking the images from the story only hurts me. Give the publisher the display ad just like you did in the columns of the actual paper and our ad-blocking software won't even know its there.
Everybody can win with a method that's tried and true. Until I am respected by the advertiser, I will not respect the advertiser, nor the publisher who gives them a place to shout from. I will go back to reading actual printed media instead. Ain't no javascript there.
Somebody call James Randi !!! I understand he'll put up a million dollars against supernatural claims (paying if he can't debunk the claim), and he always wins.
Slashdot Mirror
And what was the profit for Faraday to do research into electromagnets in the 1840s, a time when the largest market for electrical gadgets was magicians doing parlor tricks? A far more profitable endeavor would have been better horse breeding techniques or faster looms.
Fast forward 150 years, and 90+% of our entire economy is based on the electrical foundations discovered by Faraday, distilled into equations by Maxwell (also without profit) and turned into countless products, most of which resulted in failed businesses and ended up in trash heaps. The minority of survivors changed everything.
Faraday wasn't the only one doing scientific research into useless things at the time. He just found the right paths.
That's the nature of progress. It's a trek into the unknown. We have no way to know which paths will be "profitable" and which ones will be dead ends. And if we don't explore them all, or at least as many as possible, we may miss the discoveries that build entire future economies. Without Faraday's and Maxwell's work, we'd still be living an 18th century lifestyle.
Who are the Faradays out there today? Will they be supported, or will we stifle them in favor of better horse breeding techniques and faster looms? Which one will give society as a whole the better future?
Ever notice how we tend to drive on a parkway and park on a driveway?
-- Stephen Wright
Why do the Brits call it a carriageway? Does any of that make sense?
I don't think Apple is even doing QA any more.
I'm seeing all kinds of bugs everywhere.
-- Text alignment on messages (keyboard interferes so I can't see what I'm writing, first line scrolls halfway off the screen, etc... )
-- Focus jumping around on forms I'm trying to fill out on Safari. Several web sites. Tried to sign-up to their mailing list and couldn't. Safari kept jumping back two or three fields in mid-word as I typed.
-- Text messages arrive on my computer but not on my phone. Or messages take hours to be delivered, and I'm at my desk, not driving.
-- For some reason, I can't get Square (the payment processor) to load on my (current) ipad any more. It just quits. Neither the square app nor the OS had not been updated. Something else changed.
(I later figured out that the same version of Square still works on my older ipad with the older version of the OS.)
I could go on...
Microsoft is damn obtuse, Apple has become flaky as hell-- more interested in useless cutesy animations than solid, stable functionality, and Linux is still not quite ready. Why can't someone out there do for Linux what Steve Jobs did for BSD????
We need a new Next. Billionaire potential for whoever takes on that challenge.
Ready, set, GO!
I was also a developer, for IBM back in the 1990s. Somehow, back then we did a whole lot of usability testing that just doesn't seem to be done anymore. At all. I have this exact same problem with the phone app when it shows the little number in the red circle. If I check the status too quickly, I see the animation so I know the touch was received, but the number doesn't update.
Here's a thought -- can we have a "FEATURE" in the settings to TURN OFF all that annoying, time wasting animation crap? I mean, it's cute, it looks nice in the ads, kids like it, but get real, it's like the "kitchen of the future" videos from the 1950s. No one wants to wait around while the robotic cabinetry reveals the toaster. How convenient?
I want my electronics responses to be instantaneous. Animations be gone!
Perfect logic requires perfect knowledge, which we can never have, which is why empirical evidence is so critical.
Here's a lesson I did with my kids t demonstrate the flaw in trusting logic without experiment--
Take an ice cube. To raise its temperature to room temperature (and melt it) you need to raise it by about 40 degrees F.
Take a similar amount of room temperature water. To make it boil, you need to raise it about 140 degrees F.
Now, put both in the same microwave. What will happen first? Will the ice cube melt or will the water boil?
Since ice and water are the same substance, logically, most people think the ice will melt first.
-- Except that ice is perfectly transparent to microwaves. If you can keep the ice dry, it will not melt, while the water will boil furiously. (Any water on the surface of the ice will get hot and make the ice melt a little bit, so use a plastic rack or something like that.)
Question-- When Richard Feynman created Feynman diagrams, *why* did he have anti-particles moving backwards through time? Maybe we're just at a point in the universe where matter is more common that anti-matter. Wait a few billion years and measure again...
Coffee has, by far, the most antioxidants of anything we eat or drink.
So does it cure cancer too?
Net neutrality is vitally important, and it is beyond just free speech and economics. It's about something stronger than laws or economics. It's about nudging the trajectory of our culture.
Nothing stays as it is. Everything evolves. How and in what direction it evolves can be manipulated.
Consider-- in the 1950s it was illegal for movie production companies to own more than a few theaters and only in a limited number of markets. Why? Because in the 1930s and 40s movie theaters were the main source of news and we didn't want the movie producers to own that entire channel. Along comes radio and TV, and it becomes illegal for one company to own more than one station in any television market, or more than three radio stations in that market, and there's a limit to how many markets they can have a presence in. Why? To limit influence in the most powerful information medium ever invented. Eventually the TV market restrictions were removed, mostly because of complications with the wording around cable TV. Then wham! Along comes FOX "news" and others. (recommended-- watch the documentary "The Brainwashing of my Dad" http://www.thebrainwashingofmy... It's about FOX news, but also applies to Rachel Maddow, et al.)
Now we have the Internet. We already have trouble with companies manipulating what we're exposed to in an effort to nudge us toward certain decisions. (think about the algorithms Amazon and Google use to recommend things...) Advertising is the simplest example of this. But it gets much more interesting. The social engineering of a whole culture is not only possible, it is actively happening right in front of us. This is not a conspiracy theory, it's a well developed science used extensively by marketers, advertisers, religious and cult leaders, and politicians.
Any ability to tilt the scales of choice, however small, is an ability to nudge and steer the future of our culture. This is why net neutrality is vitally important. But I fear it is also doomed to eventually fail, just as it did with movie theaters, television markets and newspapers (only a handful of companies own the vast majority of magazines and newspapers in the US.) Ultimately it didn't matter much that the other restrictions failed -- and this is important -- because the restrictions were lifted after alternative channels became available. Newspapers gave way to theaters and radio. Theaters and radio gave way to television, which gave way to the internet. Until we have a new, open medium, we must absolutely protect net neutrality.
Recommended reading --
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
Propaganda by Edward Bernays (the inventor of modern advertising)
Hit Makers by Derek Thompson
Most importantly -- Animal Farm by George Orwell (every generation has its own group of pigs. The rest of us are the animals being manipulated and worked for their benefit. Know how the system works. Only then will you know how to keep it fair.)
There are more, many more, but that's a good start.
Sorry, I got carried away there. I see I missed your point about efficiency and automation taking away all the jobs. It's been said before -- automation and machinery took away about 90% of the jobs we had 100 years ago, but today we're all better off for it. We'll invent new jobs and new industries. People can solve complex scientific problems through distributed gamification of them (like the protein folding game, for example). Imagine being a professional video game player, but one that makes a real contribution to the sphere of human knowledge. And people can organize and curate information and other systems, re-test all those medical studies that haven't been retested or verified, etc, etc, etc... And the world will be a better place. But it won't happen unless we EDUCATE the children and the masses and SUPPORT the efforts to make the world a better place for everyone. The top 1% could easily fund the entire education system of our country by themselves. That money could get us better quality of teachers (anyone here have kids? Isn't it alarming to you how many of the teachers can't really do their jobs?) ...
Actually, I could write a book on this. Maybe I should go do that. Maybe some of you should too. Or better yet, go start a movement. Here's a brief instructional video -- https://www.ted.com/talks/dere...
Don't be afraid to be the lone nut. Just turn off the TV, do something useful and make a difference for crying out loud.
>> I've yet to hear a good, one sentence answer to the question: "You just gonna steal my money and give it to the poor?"
How about "How much is the safety and well being of you and you family worth? (Did you skip ALL the history classes?)"
Or maybe "You don't quite understand how money works. (Here's let me explain...)"
Or "That's right, because you and people like you are what made them poor in the first place."
People who benefit the most from a great education and the structure of a well orchestrated society *SHOULD* be paying the most for its maintenance and stability. If not, they will drown and die (or their children will) in a deteriorating society throttled by the corruption, greed and selfishness of the few elites who cannot shoulder the innovation, the construction, maintenance and smooth operation of the greater society they directly benefit from. Look around, the world is full of these little places. Infrastrutures will crumble, innovation will halt, societies will fail.
People are not poor because they want to be. Sure, some small percentage of them will choose to be lazy and suck off the system. But by far most people are poor only because of a lack of good education or lack of opportunity. Which world would you rather live in-- look out your window and see a thriving metropolis with verdant parks and happy populace, or a shanty town? How's that for a one sentence answer? If the system is broken, stop trying to defend it and find a way to rebalance it so it doesn't topple.
Also, "poor" is a relative term. We are all insanely wealthy compared to our recent ancestors, with our indoor plumbing, electricity, mega grocery stores, automobiles, televisions, clean mattresses, air conditioning and such. Part of feeling "poor" is the comparison we make to the culture we see, on TV, advertising, the flaunting of the well-to-do, etc. But try and get the advertising community to play it down and watch the profits drop as people stop trying to catch up to being better off than they are. How are they going to buy all that stuff you're selling if they're too poor to go to the store? Are you beginning to understand how money actually works? Money is nothing but a symbolic representation of value. Did the rich *really* create all that value? Or did they exploit people and steal it from those who actually did create the value?
If you are a wealthy person who does not give back a substantial portion to the welfare and well being of the greater society, then YOU are the bloodsucking parasite, a veritable cancer on society and have no business criticizing the poor. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with being moderately wealthy. There is great value in organizing all those creative people. But don't kid yourself that you did all the work or that no one else deserves it but you. We're all in this game together.
Also,
Dec. 31, 1870 is only a couple of bits away from Jan 1, 1970.
Bits flip. Dates and Epochs change.
Was this card issued by a computer?
You know what, I completely forgot about the Do Not Call registry. Thanks for reminding me. I'm registered now and I'll be sure to report any stray calls after the grace period ends.
Regarding trespass, it could be argued that a sidewalk from the street to my door, which most houses have, is an implied invitation. Especially if the primary means of getting in and out of the house by the owner is through the garage. But you are right, a simple "no trespassing" sign should be sufficient. How would a "no trespassing" sign work on a phone? As I mentioned, the phone companies already have all the call data. All they need is the time of the call and they can trace it to its origin. (I used to work for a cell phone company in the 1990s. We had it then. It was used for billing purposes. I'm sure they still have the means to connect every call end-to-end based on nothing more than a time and the recipient). Enforcement is just a matter pf public will.
Regarding "one more law"-- as robots and AI continue to progress and move into society, brace yourself for a whole new category of laws we are going to need.
I've read that robocalls cannot be made explicitly illegal because they are protected as free speech, like junk mail.
But that's a bad comparison. Here are some details that might have been overlooked.
1. Fee speech is protected in public spaces and forums like newspapers, etc. and the government operated postal service (you don't get junk mail from UPS or Fedex). My phone is not a public space. A better analogy than a mailbox would be to treat my phone like the front door to my house. It is the front door to my life actually.
2. Door-to-door sales people and church solicitors often knock on my door. I have a nifty tool called a peephole that allows me to determine whether I want to open the door or not.
3. If I put up a fence around my property, they cannot get to my front door without committing the crime of trespassing. Free speech does not protect someone in putting up a loudspeaker in front of my house to broadcast a recorded sales pitch. My phone should fall into that same category. It is harassment, not free speech to have these robots call me day after day after day.
Now, consider this. In a world where automated robots cruise the streets knocking on people's doors and offering to sell them things, as often as two or three times per day, each and every day, (as often as I get calls from robo-callers), how long would this stand before it becomes regulated? How long before enterprising entrepreneurs start offering home defense tools to make the robots go away? How long before we all start putting up fences? I want a fence around my phone.
What we need is not a disingenuous technological solution from a phone company with a conflicted interest. Simply make it illegal to make pre-recorded phone calls that are not pre-approved by the recipient. Make it illegal to obfuscate the caller-ID system and make text-based caller ID mandatory for anything commercial. The technology is already there and this serves the same purpose as the peep hole on my front door. Notice I didn't use the word "spoof". We don't care what the method is, we care what the intention is. If they intend to confuse or deceive us into thinking it's not a pre-recorded call, that's illegal, regardless of the technicalities.
Free speech is still intact because a human can still make the call, just as a human can knock on my door to try and sell me pest control services or soul-saving sermons. But humans are expensive and this will be self limiting. Pre-approved messages, such as appointment reminders for existing appointments (as with a doctor) are exempted from the ban.
With caller-ID and unapproved prerecorded messages laws on the books, with hefty fines for each infraction, the calls will stop. Cell phone and other telephone system call logs are all that's needed to prove the crime. Phone companies already have these records, in abundance. Phone calls are easily traced, even after the fact.
Just make them illegal. There are already limitations to free speech. Extending your commercial messages into my private space should be one of them. Just imagine how you'd feel if every window in your house became a TV commercial, because you know, it's not impossible to project an image from across town onto your windows. Is that free speech? Perhaps, but it's also an intrusion into my personal, private space. A phone is my personal, private space. Free speech does not apply there.
Not bitcoin. Replicators don't run on bitcoin.
In a replicator society, the value of things becomes related to the energy and time it takes to make them, not in the scarcity of the materials and labor. Let's assume our replicator can transmute elements, so the main feed stock is water, split into hydrogen and oxygen, then transmuted into whatever elements are needed and assembled atom by atom. I'm sure some of the nuclear physicists here can calculate the minimum energy needed to do all the transmutations.
So where does the energy come from? This is the main point of scarcity. Energy. Sure, real estate, physical space, human labor (both physical and intellectual) still have value, but typically only one thing is the basis for a currency -- gold, a government's promise, blockchains, etc... In the replicator economy, the only thing that makes sense is energy. Units of energy will be traded as money. Need a new coat, that's four million units. A new yacht? Sixty trillion. If you've got the energy budget, you can have whatever you want within your budget and the size of your replicator will allow.
Again, where will all this energy come from? At the moment, the only thing that makes sense and can supply orders of magnitude more energy than we currently use is a Dyson Swarm. Basically, energy companies will never go away, nor the people who own/manage/organize and control them. There will always be rich people who get the prime real estate and have the best servants and use/consume the rarest goods. And the rest of us will look up to them and feel deprived, even though a modest life today offers far, far more variety and comfort than the wealthiest person of a century or two ago could have ever had. And pomp is vastly overrated.
Oh, if anyone thinks the residents of the future will only use a little more energy than we do, I'm sure the people of the 19th century probably believed the same thing. Who among us would willingly return to a time without AC, cars, computers, paved roads, modern medicine, etc. etc. etc. If we do fall back to a pre-industrial level, it will only be because of a lack of imagination, effort and will.
I know it's a joke, but I essentially had the same thought when I heard about Hawkins and that Russian billionaire's plan to make marble sized starships and hurl them at Proxima Centauri. I couldn't help thinking how the Tau Cetians, et al, probably already did that to us. How would we ever detect a marble hurling through the solar system? Especially if it's a one-time event? Better yet, what if we caught just a glimpse of a signal it sent back home???
The point is, if we are at the cusp of such capabilities, surely someone else has already done it. And surely our star system is a target-- as the knowledge about where habitable planets might exist and how to find them becomes better known...
Weight scales as the cube of the length, just like volume.
So ten times the linear dimension would be 100 times the weight, or 5000 lbs. (for a solid anyway)
The problem is, material strength and gravity don't scale that way.
Or in my case, a year after I bought a nice little farm house, a cement fixture factory went up next door. The noise and dust were incredible.
That's what I get for buying property outside the city in an un-zoned area. Won't make that mistake again unless I have quite a lot of acreage.
Oh give me a home... but with an HOA this time please.
Oh, I hadn't noticed any changes. I guess I'm part of a different "in crowd". I stopped using Apple's music app years ago when they decided I needed to relearn their app on every update. I am simply too busy to have to re-learn a friggin music app on every release. Today I use pandora, actual CDs and (gasp!) the radio, actually transmitted via Frequency Modulation over the EM spectrum. I have a special device for this. It's kind of an antique in today's world but, amazingly, it still works. It's called a "clock radio". Yeah, that's how I fight tyranny. It's a little inconvenient, but far, far better than the frustration and demeaning I get from a stupid app that's advertised to make my life better but only makes me feel incompetent.
This is the failure in your thesis. It ignores competition and innovation. Obscurity is an obstacle for the consumer that a competitor (in a free market anyway) will exploit. But apple's app store is not quite a free market. Neither is the smart-phone market if you're not a big enough player.
While we're at it, HEY APPLE, WHAT THE FUCK WAS WRONG WITH "SAVE" AND "SAVE AS" ???? WHAT THE FUCK IS "SAVE A VERSION" SUPPOSED TO MEAN WHEN I CAN'T SPECIFY A SEPARATE NAME OR PLACE FOR MY "VERSION" ???? This change alone, this minor loss of control over my filesystem was enough to make me download and install Linux (Mint) and try it out. Unfortunately, Linux is still too "hobby" for serious work in my office. We need a viable alternative.
Hey, all you tech folks, quit yer complainin' and make a better widget. Reverse engineer apple's music database and make a new interface to play it. Advertise it here. If it's good, we'll all download it for a dollar, or less (see my point?)
When the giants become too powerful and start forcing the little people to grovel, the little people have a duty to chop down the giants at their ankles and bring them down.
Also, In 1900 every car manufacturer had a different way to drive their cars. Some used a throttle on the dash instead of a foot pedal, some had different gear shift patterns, etc... Buy a different car and you had to learn to drive all over again. Today, aside from the location of the wipers and cruise control, all cars work pretty much the same. Why? Because the consumers demanded it.
Usability. Demand it or create it. Fuck the goddamn secret handshake society.
Watch "Clash of the Titans" by Ray Harryhausen.
R2D2 is clearly the mechanical owl. The rest is a pretty close parallel too.
Of course, Joe Campbell's book "Hero with 1000 faces" was a strong influence to both.
Sugar (sucrose) is two things -- glucose (also called dextrose) and fructose in a 50/50 split.
"High fructose" just means 55% fructose, 45% glucose.
According to the scientist in this lecture (link below), it's only the fructose that's bad for you, no matter what percentage is in your source.
Fructose is found in fruit too, but that's not as bad because fruit is also high in fiber, unlike a soda or candy bar. Fiber seems to mitigate the fructose.
Also, fructose is almost as bad for your liver as alcohol. Soda or beer. Same difference to the liver. (There's a whole lot more fructose in a soda than there is alcohol in a beer.) Think about that the next time you five your kids a soda.
We switched to using dextrose instead of sucrose and increased our fiber. The results were notable.
Here's the video -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
That's actually a great idea. I'm looking forward to self driving cars. Truly. But there was a podcast recently -- planet money, where they talked about all the reasons self-driving cars will probably ship without steering wheels or foot pedals. I think that's a bad idea. Just thinking of all the times I've had to wait in line at a valet station, or changed my mind when I saw how busy a restaurant was then drove off aimlessly while pondering where to go next, saw a store in passing and suddenly remembered I needed something there and decided to duck-in real quick... Unless the human-machine interface is really, really, good, I'm not ready to give up the steering wheel.
You make a good point. Google could easily buy some small countries with the cash they have laying around. Why not recreate the "company town" concept from the turn of the 20th century? Google could buy enough land in the mid-west or anywhere, really, and build a campus with apartments and single family homes and parks and shopping centers and everything. I've never understood why these big companies insist on staying in SF or NY or LA.
Also, while it may only cost $100K to build the structure, it's the dirt under it that has the real cost. The price of real estate is governed by supply and demand, and it's in scarce supply. As a former home owner in LA, the house was only worth about 180K, the dirt under it was worth $650K. A lot of houses get bought and immediately razed to make room for a new house.
Congrats on the move to sanity!
I sold my little 1400 sq. ft. home in LA with no yard for $850K, then used that money to buy a little 2800 sq. ft. home near San Antonio, TX, with a friggin 65 acre back yard!!! I make less money here, a lot less. But hell, there's almost never a real traffic jam, the food is cheaper, the schools are much better and my three kids all have their own electric motorcycles and a twelve-acre race track to play on. We launch rockets, fly kites and have a tree house bigger than most Manhattan apartments. For us, a backyard camp out really is a camp out, stargazing, camp fire and all.
Yeah, life is a LOT better here. Zero regrets.
Yeah, my refrigerator even has a freaking touch sensitive "button" to turn the light on. Damned if I can find it in the middle of the night though. I specifically looked for a fridge with tactile buttons when I replaced it. Couldn't find one. So now I've got one of those battery operated LED pods mounted to the door, but that doesn't help the cube/crush ice button sense my hard, calloused fingers any better. I have the same problem on those touch-screen POS systems at the stores now too. I like to joke that I'm just a damn good looking zombie when the checker notices my fingers have no effect on the touch screen "These things don't work for dead people." I calmly tell them as I reach for the stylus or ask them to touch it for me.
Any sufficiently advanced technology shouldn't have to be hacked it just to make it usable. Enough with the bells and whistles that only get in the way of what I need to do instead of helping me do it.
And while we're on the topic of self-driving cars... A thought occurred to me in the parking lot of Best Buy. How the hell are self-driving cars going to navigate a parking lot and find a spot near the store I want to go to?
What if I notice a different store and change the plan at the last minute?
What search strategy will it use to seek that one open spot in a full lot?
I'll keep the steering wheel, thanks.
As a former LA Times employee and lead engineer on several of their spin-off web sites, I don't understand why this is such a problem.
I only recently installed adblocking software on all my devices. I resisted, but ultimately I had to. Reading on-line had become extremely unpleasant, or occasionally impossible in the case of some of my older equipment. Adblocking was a breath of fresh air. Now pages actually load instead of hanging for minutes at a time, I don't have to be followed everywhere... you know the story.
But there are a few places I still see ads, even though I've got the most aggressive settings turned on (angry, I was.) I don't mind the ads I see, because they are respectful, done the old-school way, like newspapers, magazines, TV and radio have always done it. The ad is the same media as the host, served right along with the other content. No weird redirects, no waiting for content from a multitude of servers to load, no friggin javascript nonsense, etc. etc. etc.
Hey publishers, you want to save the net and get revenue too? Take a lesson from the old school and go back to delivering the ad embedded in the content, in a way that's respectful of your users.
Hey advertisers, stop being so friggin nefarious and maybe we'll accept your existence like we do elsewhere. When I'm reading a story from the NY Times, blocking the images from the story only hurts me. Give the publisher the display ad just like you did in the columns of the actual paper and our ad-blocking software won't even know its there.
Everybody can win with a method that's tried and true. Until I am respected by the advertiser, I will not respect the advertiser, nor the publisher who gives them a place to shout from. I will go back to reading actual printed media instead. Ain't no javascript there.
Somebody call James Randi !!! I understand he'll put up a million dollars against supernatural claims (paying if he can't debunk the claim), and he always wins.