Maybe crypto currencies are to be seen as a hybrid between traditional financial assets (like stocks) and traditional money (like cash)?
Right now, the total market cap of the 1200 biggest cryptocurrencies are about 0,3% of the global stock market value. Traditional finance are starting to take notice. If value is moved from traditional stocks to cryptocurrencies - say to a 95%-5% ratio, that is a x16,6 increase which places Bitcoin at 166000$ assumed that Bitcoin stays at ~50% of the total cryptocurrency value.
I would expect non-lethal wedlock style drones that swarms people, stuns them with tazers and attach drones with trackers, cameras and microphones around their neck. If you try to take them off, they taze your spinal cord and call in reinforcements. Then they monitor everything everyone does or says. The massive drone swarm is controlled by AI, effectivly forcing everyone to obey the dronemasters.
Since such a swarm is non-lethal, the barrier to deploy it is low.
8 years away is a long time, given the current trend. A yearly 20% price reduction on solar electricity will drop the price with 83% over 8 years. Right now, electricity from a new solar farm or a new coal power plant costs roughly the same. It won't take many years before the price for electricity from a new solar farm will be lower than the price for electricity from an already-build and paid off coal power plant.
Here is my some so far unlisted experiences from me, after 16 years in IT in various roles - right now as IT Strategist in a large organization.
1) All IT solutions are more or less temporary and constantly evolving. Continous evolution of the systems environment is generally less risky than big projects that aim to replace several systems. Often, sticking with your old systems and adding, replacing and removing functions works best.
2) Getting new systems is easy compared to migration from old systems and decommisioning.
3) Collecting requirements from users are generally very hard and often fails. The best requirements specifications is a current systems or sometimes an advanced excel sheet that has outlived itself. These can be seen as prototypes.
4) Large scale IT operations can save money but it also adds maintenance complexity, which costs money. The IT cost is not what matters. What matters is the total effect on business.
5) Technical arguments to replace a application should be vetted carefully. If someone proposes that a new system is required because the old system is based on legacy COM+ or some other obsolete framework, this is often incorrect. It is very often much cheaper to replace different modules in applications.
6) Measure as much as possible. Website uptime, usage statistics, server usage, response times, firewall rule hits, database requests, etc. Users and system administrators are very ofter clueless on how much their application is used or if it works properly or not. The IT department should set up a good measuring framework. Only the experts even know what can be measured.
7) Don't overdo ITIL or similar frameworks. If you have more people on managerial roles than technical roles, you have problems.
More like this, but with a station wagon or MPV design and electric drive.
For people living in an archipelago, such a car would be a must-have. You could take the car to work any day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There are great room for innovation in the electric vehicle market. Some suggestions.
Electric cars should be quite easy to do amphiobous. Electric cars don't need a big, open grille.
Electric cars should have 230V/110V electric outlets for power tools and camping.
There is only one electric car that can have a tow hitch, and that particular vehicle is extremly expensive and can't have a roof box.
Also, nobody have made an electric car even closely resembling the dyson 360 eye. That would be 1950-futuristic.
The obvious solution is to keep on inventing pointless jobs, like we are already doing. There are huge amounts of professional paper-pushers, spending their days writing emails, going to meetings and creating routines and documents that produce little to none value for society as a whole.
Kurzweil might be right but he also might be wrong. You no longer have oxen pulling wagons, and oxen doesn't have a very good jobb nowadays (growing to be eaten). And we no longer use camphene or whale oil. Demand of some kind of jobs and resources have gone to zero.
If a computer or robot can do something better than a human, demand for human labour and humans in general will fall. And that does not only apply to work - maybe a AI can be more compassionate and friendly than many humans? AI's might replace friends, spouses, children and lots of human interaction in general.
Producing enough stuff for everyone to live quite comfortable will not be the problem, we can do that today. But how do we create a meaningful life for everyone?
I'm probably getting hanged here for using onedrive, but I get 1 TB of storage for around 60$ per year including office. It's nice to be able to access your data from anywhere and have it all synced to the main computer at home. It also works well with smartphones. I also irregularly take a copy and put offline, in case I should accidently delete something.
Sensitive stuff like password safe is encrypted.
Give me a small battery + a ICE range extender. That would create a better vehicle than any EV or ICE.
ICE Vehicle: Virtaully unlimited combination of heat/ac/towing/range, high maintenance, high energy cost, high noise, low touque
EV : Very limited combination of heat/ac/towing/range, low maintenance, low total energy cost, low noise, high touque
EV + REX : Virtaully unlimited combination of heat/ac/towing/range, medium maintenance, low/medium energy cost, low noise, high touque, mobile power plant function
Workhorse W-15, I am looking at you. Please transform yourself into a 4x4 station wagon. http://workhorse.com/pickup/
I guess this phone will look good for a week until I have dropped it on the floor a few times, and the screen has shattered on the edges.
My otterbox have kept my Iphone 5S alive for several years now. How do you keep a phone with wrapped screen from breaking when dropped?
Why is Brin doing this?
Could it somehow be connected to Larry Page's flying cars business? Maybe a giant airshop could work as a carrier for flying cars or delivery drones? I don't see the business case yet but someone might have an idea?
When can I have a phone without any connectors whatsoever? Bluethooth, wlan and wireless charging should be enough. Such a phone could be 100% waterproof and very shock-resistant. And rubber coating, please.
Healthy food is too complicated to regulate with good results. A few years ago, low fat products were considered heathy. Then came Atkins and LCHF and now sugar and sweet food is the culprits. There are also unintended side effects from this kind of regulation - for example that the kids don't like the food and goes to McDonalds instead.
Some simple things could be regulated, like limiting sale and drinking of soft drinks on school, but such a limitation can also be requested by parents so it's hardly useful. One thing that might work out is to force schools to describe how they ensure that the school food is healthy - then parents and journalists can keep check on them.
Almost no government spending is unnecessary or unjustified. The problem is the total spending. And to reduce the total spending, some programs that create something good must be prioritized away.
The question every government program should as be asked is not "is this good". Rather "do we really create good value for the money spent?", "can someone else do this better?", "could these money create more value spent elsewhere?" etc.
Maybe the ship will be wrapped in textile solar cells? It is always sunny above the clouds (except nighttime).
A huge airship could serve as base for drones collecting and delivering stuff. It could be useful in areas where the road network is bad. Many places in africa has that problem.
Maybe an airship frame could be built by aluminium and carbon fibre instead of steel?Thus decreasing weight.
This should be doable with current technology.
The 113 kW hydrogen fuel cell in a Toyota Mirai is 56 kg, the hydrogen tanks 87,5 + 5 kg. 148,5 kg in total. In a standard helicopter, 1 horsepower can lift 5,1 Pound. 1 hp = 1,3 kW, 5,1 Pounds = 2.3 kg. So 1 kW Power = 3 kg lift. With 339 kW power, a drone should be able to lift around 190 kg + the mirai fuel cell stack. So with a lightweight carbon fibre body and motors, one person should be flyable by hydrogen drone.
I am quite certain that some weight reductions can be done on the Mirai fuel system, it is right now optimized for ground transport where weight is not very important.
Energy is on path to not becoming a problem.
A hydrogen powered fuel cell drone have 4x the flight time of a battery drone. Solar cells and fuel cell prices are falling fast.
Where I live (Sweden), the energy for powering an ICE vehicle is about 1$/10 km and about 0.20$ for an EV. The total cost for driving your ICE car 10 km is about 5$. If we assume that a flying hydrogen drone uses 4x the energy of an EV and electricity to hydrogen to electricity is 25% efficient, we get an energy cost of 1.60$/km for a flying drone taxi. That is hardly a problem even with today's electricity prices.
A FC Toyota Mirai is about 90000$ in Sweden. That can be compared to a Volvo XC90 that is about 100000$. If we assume that a FC flying drone taxi is about 200000$, the total cost per 10km would be in the range of 7-10$. That is a lot less than taking a cab.
Not only the users will love it, the boss might also. Considering the price of gigabit ethernet ports, compared to the time users will spend waiting for large files to download, you could actually get a good return on investment time on gigabit to the desktop.
Maximum practical speed for a 802.11g network is approximately 25 mbit/s = 3 Mbytes/s. Often much less, because the 25 mb/s is shared between all users.
Maximum download speed for a 100 Mbit/s switched network is 12 Mbytes/s.
Maximum download speed for a 1000 Mbit/s switched network is determined by server performance, or client performance if writing to disk is neccesary. On a standard fileserver, you could expect around 30 Mbytes/s.
This could sometimes cause a significant differance in access times for various files.
If you could save 30 seconds per day and user by deploying a faster network, that will be 5 hours over three years (if you work 200 days/year). If one hours of working time is worth 100$, that would be 5 * 100$ * 200 = 100,000$. You could cut any of the figues by 50% and still the profit from building a fast wired network instead of a wireless network would pay for the whole installation.
If you add factors like higher reliability for wired networks, or the hiddens costs of a wireless access point breakdown and increased need of security the deal will be even sweeter.
You could also deploy a internet-access-only, cheap, low-security wireless network for guest requiring internet access. You should probably skip access point and go for a wireless switch + access ports (less administration than on access point networks) network with web auth for for accessing the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe crypto currencies are to be seen as a hybrid between traditional financial assets (like stocks) and traditional money (like cash)?
Right now, the total market cap of the 1200 biggest cryptocurrencies are about 0,3% of the global stock market value. Traditional finance are starting to take notice. If value is moved from traditional stocks to cryptocurrencies - say to a 95%-5% ratio, that is a x16,6 increase which places Bitcoin at 166000$ assumed that Bitcoin stays at ~50% of the total cryptocurrency value.
Link: http://www.businessinsider.com...
I would expect non-lethal wedlock style drones that swarms people, stuns them with tazers and attach drones with trackers, cameras and microphones around their neck. If you try to take them off, they taze your spinal cord and call in reinforcements. Then they monitor everything everyone does or says. The massive drone swarm is controlled by AI, effectivly forcing everyone to obey the dronemasters. Since such a swarm is non-lethal, the barrier to deploy it is low.
8 years away is a long time, given the current trend. A yearly 20% price reduction on solar electricity will drop the price with 83% over 8 years. Right now, electricity from a new solar farm or a new coal power plant costs roughly the same. It won't take many years before the price for electricity from a new solar farm will be lower than the price for electricity from an already-build and paid off coal power plant.
Here is my some so far unlisted experiences from me, after 16 years in IT in various roles - right now as IT Strategist in a large organization.
1) All IT solutions are more or less temporary and constantly evolving. Continous evolution of the systems environment is generally less risky than big projects that aim to replace several systems. Often, sticking with your old systems and adding, replacing and removing functions works best.
2) Getting new systems is easy compared to migration from old systems and decommisioning.
3) Collecting requirements from users are generally very hard and often fails. The best requirements specifications is a current systems or sometimes an advanced excel sheet that has outlived itself. These can be seen as prototypes.
4) Large scale IT operations can save money but it also adds maintenance complexity, which costs money. The IT cost is not what matters. What matters is the total effect on business.
5) Technical arguments to replace a application should be vetted carefully. If someone proposes that a new system is required because the old system is based on legacy COM+ or some other obsolete framework, this is often incorrect. It is very often much cheaper to replace different modules in applications.
6) Measure as much as possible. Website uptime, usage statistics, server usage, response times, firewall rule hits, database requests, etc. Users and system administrators are very ofter clueless on how much their application is used or if it works properly or not. The IT department should set up a good measuring framework. Only the experts even know what can be measured.
7) Don't overdo ITIL or similar frameworks. If you have more people on managerial roles than technical roles, you have problems.
More like this, but with a station wagon or MPV design and electric drive. For people living in an archipelago, such a car would be a must-have. You could take the car to work any day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There are great room for innovation in the electric vehicle market. Some suggestions.
Electric cars should be quite easy to do amphiobous. Electric cars don't need a big, open grille.
Electric cars should have 230V/110V electric outlets for power tools and camping.
There is only one electric car that can have a tow hitch, and that particular vehicle is extremly expensive and can't have a roof box.
Also, nobody have made an electric car even closely resembling the dyson 360 eye. That would be 1950-futuristic.
The obvious solution is to keep on inventing pointless jobs, like we are already doing. There are huge amounts of professional paper-pushers, spending their days writing emails, going to meetings and creating routines and documents that produce little to none value for society as a whole.
It is horrible.
Kurzweil might be right but he also might be wrong. You no longer have oxen pulling wagons, and oxen doesn't have a very good jobb nowadays (growing to be eaten). And we no longer use camphene or whale oil. Demand of some kind of jobs and resources have gone to zero. If a computer or robot can do something better than a human, demand for human labour and humans in general will fall. And that does not only apply to work - maybe a AI can be more compassionate and friendly than many humans? AI's might replace friends, spouses, children and lots of human interaction in general. Producing enough stuff for everyone to live quite comfortable will not be the problem, we can do that today. But how do we create a meaningful life for everyone?
If it is survivable depends on how it fails. Like in aircraft, some accidents are survivable.
I'm probably getting hanged here for using onedrive, but I get 1 TB of storage for around 60$ per year including office. It's nice to be able to access your data from anywhere and have it all synced to the main computer at home. It also works well with smartphones. I also irregularly take a copy and put offline, in case I should accidently delete something. Sensitive stuff like password safe is encrypted.
Give me a small battery + a ICE range extender. That would create a better vehicle than any EV or ICE.
ICE Vehicle: Virtaully unlimited combination of heat/ac/towing/range, high maintenance, high energy cost, high noise, low touque
EV : Very limited combination of heat/ac/towing/range, low maintenance, low total energy cost, low noise, high touque
EV + REX : Virtaully unlimited combination of heat/ac/towing/range, medium maintenance, low/medium energy cost, low noise, high touque, mobile power plant function
Workhorse W-15, I am looking at you. Please transform yourself into a 4x4 station wagon.
http://workhorse.com/pickup/
I guess this phone will look good for a week until I have dropped it on the floor a few times, and the screen has shattered on the edges. My otterbox have kept my Iphone 5S alive for several years now. How do you keep a phone with wrapped screen from breaking when dropped?
Why is Brin doing this? Could it somehow be connected to Larry Page's flying cars business? Maybe a giant airshop could work as a carrier for flying cars or delivery drones? I don't see the business case yet but someone might have an idea?
When can I have a phone without any connectors whatsoever? Bluethooth, wlan and wireless charging should be enough. Such a phone could be 100% waterproof and very shock-resistant. And rubber coating, please.
Healthy food is too complicated to regulate with good results. A few years ago, low fat products were considered heathy. Then came Atkins and LCHF and now sugar and sweet food is the culprits. There are also unintended side effects from this kind of regulation - for example that the kids don't like the food and goes to McDonalds instead. Some simple things could be regulated, like limiting sale and drinking of soft drinks on school, but such a limitation can also be requested by parents so it's hardly useful. One thing that might work out is to force schools to describe how they ensure that the school food is healthy - then parents and journalists can keep check on them.
Almost no government spending is unnecessary or unjustified. The problem is the total spending. And to reduce the total spending, some programs that create something good must be prioritized away. The question every government program should as be asked is not "is this good". Rather "do we really create good value for the money spent?", "can someone else do this better?", "could these money create more value spent elsewhere?" etc.
Maybe the ship will be wrapped in textile solar cells? It is always sunny above the clouds (except nighttime). A huge airship could serve as base for drones collecting and delivering stuff. It could be useful in areas where the road network is bad. Many places in africa has that problem. Maybe an airship frame could be built by aluminium and carbon fibre instead of steel?Thus decreasing weight.
This should be doable with current technology. The 113 kW hydrogen fuel cell in a Toyota Mirai is 56 kg, the hydrogen tanks 87,5 + 5 kg. 148,5 kg in total. In a standard helicopter, 1 horsepower can lift 5,1 Pound. 1 hp = 1,3 kW, 5,1 Pounds = 2.3 kg. So 1 kW Power = 3 kg lift. With 339 kW power, a drone should be able to lift around 190 kg + the mirai fuel cell stack. So with a lightweight carbon fibre body and motors, one person should be flyable by hydrogen drone. I am quite certain that some weight reductions can be done on the Mirai fuel system, it is right now optimized for ground transport where weight is not very important.
Energy is on path to not becoming a problem. A hydrogen powered fuel cell drone have 4x the flight time of a battery drone. Solar cells and fuel cell prices are falling fast. Where I live (Sweden), the energy for powering an ICE vehicle is about 1$/10 km and about 0.20$ for an EV. The total cost for driving your ICE car 10 km is about 5$. If we assume that a flying hydrogen drone uses 4x the energy of an EV and electricity to hydrogen to electricity is 25% efficient, we get an energy cost of 1.60$/km for a flying drone taxi. That is hardly a problem even with today's electricity prices. A FC Toyota Mirai is about 90000$ in Sweden. That can be compared to a Volvo XC90 that is about 100000$. If we assume that a FC flying drone taxi is about 200000$, the total cost per 10km would be in the range of 7-10$. That is a lot less than taking a cab.
Not only the users will love it, the boss might also. Considering the price of gigabit ethernet ports, compared to the time users will spend waiting for large files to download, you could actually get a good return on investment time on gigabit to the desktop.
Maximum practical speed for a 802.11g network is approximately 25 mbit/s = 3 Mbytes/s. Often much less, because the 25 mb/s is shared between all users.
Maximum download speed for a 100 Mbit/s switched network is 12 Mbytes/s.
Maximum download speed for a 1000 Mbit/s switched network is determined by server performance, or client performance if writing to disk is neccesary. On a standard fileserver, you could expect around 30 Mbytes/s.
This could sometimes cause a significant differance in access times for various files.
If you could save 30 seconds per day and user by deploying a faster network, that will be 5 hours over three years (if you work 200 days/year). If one hours of working time is worth 100$, that would be 5 * 100$ * 200 = 100,000$. You could cut any of the figues by 50% and still the profit from building a fast wired network instead of a wireless network would pay for the whole installation.
If you add factors like higher reliability for wired networks, or the hiddens costs of a wireless access point breakdown and increased need of security the deal will be even sweeter.
You could also deploy a internet-access-only, cheap, low-security wireless network for guest requiring internet access. You should probably skip access point and go for a wireless switch + access ports (less administration than on access point networks) network with web auth for for accessing the internet.