"It's not like there aren't countries that have less shootings. It is simple enough to look at what they do and do the same."
Mono-cultural societies often have lower levels of violence; Japan might be the classic example.Japan has no cultural minorities, and has a low level of violence. Multi-culti societies have more. At an extreme, think of Iraq with Sunni, Shia and Kurdish minorities. There's a lot of violence in the transition; for example, England and France are experiencing a lot of violence in importing a Muslim underclass that refuses to assimilate.
Agreed; "Never10" is the way to go. I support several hundred customers' computers running a proprietary application that isn't compatible with Win10, and "Never10" is a quick, painless install that prevents Win10 from loading.
But when the grid goes down - for any reason at all - you lose your power, too, because most solar systems go offline when there's no connection to the grid. It's a basic safety feature; you don't want to be powering otherwise-dead lines while technicians are are trying to repair the outage.
You can get an islander" system that isolates you from the grid, but then you can't sell power back to the utility.
Baloney. The 4+ billion people who don't already have internet access are primarily peasant farmers who are struggling to feed themselves, much less add anything to their national (or even local) economies. They don't have the tools or the knowledge nor the willingness to learn anything that would allow them to jump to first-world levels of productivity. In most places, they have neither reliable electrical power nor reliable potable water, and those folks need clean water a WHOLE lot more than they need internet access.
Probably half of those people would never be ALLOWED to connect to the internet, even if it were possible to provide access. Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, many of the impoverished African kleptocracies... which of those governments would ever allow their subjects any information about a better way of life?
Bad analogy; it's not that difficult to ship manufacturing overseas and import cars and computers. Hamburgers don't travel well; for some reason, people seem to prefer fresh ones.
So I can certainly believe that a series of sharp jumps in the "minimum wage" will transfer a lot of high school kids' jobs to robots. Kids are unreliable employees; they take vacations and slack off or fail to show up for their shifts at all, and robots don't. Because the true MINIMUM wage is always ZERO.
By 2025, the only human employee at Burger King will be the technician who maintains the hamburger-making robot.
Having been "in the bag" for most of the flight on my one-and-only ACM (Air Combat Maneuvering) flight at VT10 in Pensacola, I can say with some certainty that having the visual experience match the physical one is no guarantee of a steady stomach. Nor is standing on the rail of a rolling ship even when you can SEE the ship moving exactly the way you can FEEL the ship moving.
Also; health care, especially geriatric care, is unlikely to be so thoroughly automated as other professions. Carl Karcher Enterprises, the parent company of Carl's Junior and Hardee's, is said to be working on a restaurant with no employees at all. This is likely unattainable; SOMEBODY will be needed to fix the machinery when it breaks, but I've seen video of the hamburger-cooking robot, and more and more fast food places have self-service order kiosks. It will be a while before a robot can properly change a bedpan or a dressing.
"But even if such efforts achieve pay parity, will CS for All result in lower pay for all?"
Yes. Not because women depress pay scales, but because when more and more people get into a field, competition inevitably causes lower prices. Lowe prices for the things we buy - like groceries or electronics - is good. Competition in the stuff we sell - like our labor - is bad.
My "go to" excuse for any electronic problems is "sunspots, or stray cosmic rays". However.....
The Sun has been very quiet for the last several weeks, and Solar Cycle 24 is on a steep downward trend. I expect that we'll begin an extended Solar Minimum by the end of 2016 which may last 3-4 years (the "average" is 2 years, and the last Solar Min was nearly 3). I also expect that the next few solar cycles will be fairly quiet. Perhaps not Maunder Minimum quiet, but probably Dalton Minimum quiet, or nearly so.
You should visit www.spaceweather.com periodically to keep up to date on this.
Also; it's going to get somewhat chilly by and by.
Could be; especially since a similar problem is affecting the D.C. Metro trains. Perhaps the Iranians have reverse-engineered Stuxnet and pointed it back at us?
If there is ever a person who knows what he's doing around computers, that person would be Jerry Pournelle, former columnist for BYTE magazine (and several others over the last 3 decades) and current master science fiction author.
Jerry Pournelle's Windows 7 computer "updated" itself to Windows 10 overnight without his permission a few days ago.
I continue to recommend the GWX Control Panel to prevent your Windows 7/8/8.1 system from upgrading before you're ready. https://askleo.com/block-windo...
It might be possible for Apple to comply with the FBI's request AND prevent any future requests. Treat this as a "professional services" engagement, and announce that Apple is willing to unlock any iPhone that the government has legitimately seized - for the nominal fee of one BILLION dollars, in advance, in cash, per phone. No discounts, and no dickering; greenbacks delivered in armored trucks in exchange for one unlocked phone.
Rachel Carson, "Silent Spring", and the banning of DDT. Malaria was contained, virtually extinct, and the banning of DDT has killed millions of African and South American children by allowing malaria to spread again.
Yeah, I think "environmentalism" is a shoo-in for 3rd place.
There are a couple of dozen gunfighters' graves on Boot Hill - in about 40 years. Gunfights were a rare occurrence; that's what made them stand out in history.
The United States of America was never a democracy. It was established in 1787 as a representative Republic.
That said, the Republic died in 1913 with the passage of the 16th Amendment (income tax) and the 17th Amendment (direct election of Senators). Before that, the legislatures of the various States were able to somewhat control the Federal government, in that the States appointed Senators, and a direct income tax paid to the FEDERAL government gave it the money to whatever it wanted to do.
Then the rise of the Administrative State - especially in the last 50 years - has made it impossible even to reverse the decline, because the Administrative State controls the currency, the elections, and the news.
It's not as if Strategic Defense needs to be "revived"; they've made great progress in the last dozen years or so. And frankly, SDI seems especially well designed to counter the NORK threat. The Norks have... "few" may be too generous... only a few rockets, they may or may not be able to loft their somewhat primitive nuclear weapons with them, and if they tried to aim one at a city, their chances of actually hitting THAT city are somewhat iffy.
But yes, SDI needs to be put back on the front burner, and we need to begin actually deploying it. A launching site in South Korea and a couple in Japan would seem to be sufficient to counter the NORK threat.
The big SDI debate back in the 1980s and early '90s was that the Soviets had SO MANY missiles, we couldn't hope to intercept them ALL, so it was better not to try. This notion was childishly brain-dead even then; nuclear missiles against hardened silos aren't a guaranteed kill, so you'd launch three missiles against each target. Intercept ONE of the three, and the probability of kill goes down a LOT, and would give the Soviet planners a reason to think that a first disarming strike might not be entirely successful. SDI + MAD gives any relatively sane warplanner on either side a reason to hold off.
The NORKS are not "relatively sane", and probably aren't even CLOSE to being sane, but even a small SDI deployment would pull their fangs - especially if the US and Japan make it clear to the Chinese and the Russians that even one nuclear launch would invite a massive response and the annihilation of North Korea. The Chinese especially could order Kim to stand down or be deposed.
Of course, the Chinese are doing a lot of their OWN saber-rattling, so it's not as if we can sit back and do nothing. After 24 years of letting our military forces decay, it's going to take some effort to restore the balance.
I suppose it's asking too much of the Feds to have properly implemented Apple's mobile device management protocols, so that when the next Ed Snowden takes his government-issued iPhone to Moscow with him, the Feds can read his itinerary from it?
Don't SAY stuff like that, not even in jest! Some congresscritter (or staffer) is likely to be lurking here, and get the idea that this might actually WORK!
But there is case law concerning the All Writs Act; demands made regarding it are required to be "reasonable", which the FBI's demand in this case is not.
But now Apple will spend a billion dollars litigating this all the way to the Supreme Court, and Apple is pretty sure that's how far it'll go - because you don't hire the former Solicitor General of the United States, who represented the U.S. at the Supreme Court, unless you're pretty sure that's where it is going.
And the fact that Ted Olson took the case is a pretty clear statement that he doesn't think this case is about terrorism. Olson HATES terrorists; his wife was on the airplane that hit the Pentagon on 9/11/01.
That doesn't comply with the court order, which requires that the software shall run ONLY on the target device and NO OTHERS. If it were a matter of changing some variables and recompiling, then it would violate the court order. Since Apple would violate the court order in ANY event, then they're correct to choose THIS course of action - to do nothing.
Assume (and this is hopelessly naive) that any back doors that you leave in the software will never be found and hacked. With the U.S. Government's miserable record on keeping secrets, SOMEBODY on the team will turn out to be a Chinese or Iranian or Russian agent, and the back door will become a SCREEN door, allowing all your data to be stolen and disinformation inserted into your systems.
Perhaps Apple should agree to write that software for the FBI, but the Professional Services fee should be TEN BILLION DOLLARS, paid in advance.
And since there are, reportedly, 8 or 9 other Federal prosecutors in the possession of locked iPhones who plan to use the FBI's precedent to make their OWN case (these cases are all drug related, not terrorism), then Apple will have set the price for this service. No discounts!
The "unreasonable" part. It's "reasonable" for Apple, on receipt of a court order, to turn over to the FBI all data in its possession concerning the terrorists, which Apple has done.
Demanding that Apple force its programmers to write custom software THAT DOES NOT NOW EXIST to allow the FBI to break into one particular iPhone is "unreasonable", and I think Cook, and Apple, are correct here.
Further, concerning the 1789 "All Writs Act", signed by George Washington back before there was much Federal law at all; if the All Writs Act can be perverted so far as to demand that Apple write software that does not exist, then what government demand does it NOT permit? Because if there aren't any limits to THIS PARTICULAR LAW, then the Constitution died in 1789, barely two years after its ratification.
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Any government bureaucrat who had ANY involvement, however slight, in approving a trademark for "THANKYOU" should be fired.
"It's not like there aren't countries that have less shootings. It is simple enough to look at what they do and do the same."
Mono-cultural societies often have lower levels of violence; Japan might be the classic example.Japan has no cultural minorities, and has a low level of violence. Multi-culti societies have more. At an extreme, think of Iraq with Sunni, Shia and Kurdish minorities. There's a lot of violence in the transition; for example, England and France are experiencing a lot of violence in importing a Muslim underclass that refuses to assimilate.
Agreed; "Never10" is the way to go. I support several hundred customers' computers running a proprietary application that isn't compatible with Win10, and "Never10" is a quick, painless install that prevents Win10 from loading.
But when the grid goes down - for any reason at all - you lose your power, too, because most solar systems go offline when there's no connection to the grid. It's a basic safety feature; you don't want to be powering otherwise-dead lines while technicians are are trying to repair the outage.
You can get an islander" system that isolates you from the grid, but then you can't sell power back to the utility.
Baloney. The 4+ billion people who don't already have internet access are primarily peasant farmers who are struggling to feed themselves, much less add anything to their national (or even local) economies. They don't have the tools or the knowledge nor the willingness to learn anything that would allow them to jump to first-world levels of productivity. In most places, they have neither reliable electrical power nor reliable potable water, and those folks need clean water a WHOLE lot more than they need internet access.
Probably half of those people would never be ALLOWED to connect to the internet, even if it were possible to provide access. Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, many of the impoverished African kleptocracies... which of those governments would ever allow their subjects any information about a better way of life?
Bad analogy; it's not that difficult to ship manufacturing overseas and import cars and computers. Hamburgers don't travel well; for some reason, people seem to prefer fresh ones.
So I can certainly believe that a series of sharp jumps in the "minimum wage" will transfer a lot of high school kids' jobs to robots. Kids are unreliable employees; they take vacations and slack off or fail to show up for their shifts at all, and robots don't. Because the true MINIMUM wage is always ZERO.
By 2025, the only human employee at Burger King will be the technician who maintains the hamburger-making robot.
Having been "in the bag" for most of the flight on my one-and-only ACM (Air Combat Maneuvering) flight at VT10 in Pensacola, I can say with some certainty that having the visual experience match the physical one is no guarantee of a steady stomach. Nor is standing on the rail of a rolling ship even when you can SEE the ship moving exactly the way you can FEEL the ship moving.
VR for roller coasters sounds like a great idea.
Also; health care, especially geriatric care, is unlikely to be so thoroughly automated as other professions. Carl Karcher Enterprises, the parent company of Carl's Junior and Hardee's, is said to be working on a restaurant with no employees at all. This is likely unattainable; SOMEBODY will be needed to fix the machinery when it breaks, but I've seen video of the hamburger-cooking robot, and more and more fast food places have self-service order kiosks. It will be a while before a robot can properly change a bedpan or a dressing.
"But even if such efforts achieve pay parity, will CS for All result in lower pay for all?"
Yes. Not because women depress pay scales, but because when more and more people get into a field, competition inevitably causes lower prices. Lowe prices for the things we buy - like groceries or electronics - is good. Competition in the stuff we sell - like our labor - is bad.
My "go to" excuse for any electronic problems is "sunspots, or stray cosmic rays". However.....
The Sun has been very quiet for the last several weeks, and Solar Cycle 24 is on a steep downward trend. I expect that we'll begin an extended Solar Minimum by the end of 2016 which may last 3-4 years (the "average" is 2 years, and the last Solar Min was nearly 3). I also expect that the next few solar cycles will be fairly quiet. Perhaps not Maunder Minimum quiet, but probably Dalton Minimum quiet, or nearly so.
You should visit www.spaceweather.com periodically to keep up to date on this.
Also; it's going to get somewhat chilly by and by.
Could be; especially since a similar problem is affecting the D.C. Metro trains. Perhaps the Iranians have reverse-engineered Stuxnet and pointed it back at us?
If there is ever a person who knows what he's doing around computers, that person would be Jerry Pournelle, former columnist for BYTE magazine (and several others over the last 3 decades) and current master science fiction author.
https://www.jerrypournelle.com...
Jerry Pournelle's Windows 7 computer "updated" itself to Windows 10 overnight without his permission a few days ago.
I continue to recommend the GWX Control Panel to prevent your Windows 7/8/8.1 system from upgrading before you're ready.
https://askleo.com/block-windo...
It might be possible for Apple to comply with the FBI's request AND prevent any future requests. Treat this as a "professional services" engagement, and announce that Apple is willing to unlock any iPhone that the government has legitimately seized - for the nominal fee of one BILLION dollars, in advance, in cash, per phone. No discounts, and no dickering; greenbacks delivered in armored trucks in exchange for one unlocked phone.
Rachel Carson, "Silent Spring", and the banning of DDT. Malaria was contained, virtually extinct, and the banning of DDT has killed millions of African and South American children by allowing malaria to spread again.
Yeah, I think "environmentalism" is a shoo-in for 3rd place.
There are a couple of dozen gunfighters' graves on Boot Hill - in about 40 years. Gunfights were a rare occurrence; that's what made them stand out in history.
The ONLY CURE for a "lying dormant cyber pathogen" is for the phone to be boiled in holy water.
The United States of America was never a democracy. It was established in 1787 as a representative Republic.
That said, the Republic died in 1913 with the passage of the 16th Amendment (income tax) and the 17th Amendment (direct election of Senators). Before that, the legislatures of the various States were able to somewhat control the Federal government, in that the States appointed Senators, and a direct income tax paid to the FEDERAL government gave it the money to whatever it wanted to do.
Then the rise of the Administrative State - especially in the last 50 years - has made it impossible even to reverse the decline, because the Administrative State controls the currency, the elections, and the news.
I wonder what we'll become next?
It's not as if Strategic Defense needs to be "revived"; they've made great progress in the last dozen years or so. And frankly, SDI seems especially well designed to counter the NORK threat. The Norks have ... "few" may be too generous... only a few rockets, they may or may not be able to loft their somewhat primitive nuclear weapons with them, and if they tried to aim one at a city, their chances of actually hitting THAT city are somewhat iffy.
But yes, SDI needs to be put back on the front burner, and we need to begin actually deploying it. A launching site in South Korea and a couple in Japan would seem to be sufficient to counter the NORK threat.
The big SDI debate back in the 1980s and early '90s was that the Soviets had SO MANY missiles, we couldn't hope to intercept them ALL, so it was better not to try. This notion was childishly brain-dead even then; nuclear missiles against hardened silos aren't a guaranteed kill, so you'd launch three missiles against each target. Intercept ONE of the three, and the probability of kill goes down a LOT, and would give the Soviet planners a reason to think that a first disarming strike might not be entirely successful. SDI + MAD gives any relatively sane warplanner on either side a reason to hold off.
The NORKS are not "relatively sane", and probably aren't even CLOSE to being sane, but even a small SDI deployment would pull their fangs - especially if the US and Japan make it clear to the Chinese and the Russians that even one nuclear launch would invite a massive response and the annihilation of North Korea. The Chinese especially could order Kim to stand down or be deposed.
Of course, the Chinese are doing a lot of their OWN saber-rattling, so it's not as if we can sit back and do nothing. After 24 years of letting our military forces decay, it's going to take some effort to restore the balance.
I suppose it's asking too much of the Feds to have properly implemented Apple's mobile device management protocols, so that when the next Ed Snowden takes his government-issued iPhone to Moscow with him, the Feds can read his itinerary from it?
One correction to that; the hack would only work on an iPhone 5C, and not on the 5S or any newer model.
Don't SAY stuff like that, not even in jest! Some congresscritter (or staffer) is likely to be lurking here, and get the idea that this might actually WORK!
But there is case law concerning the All Writs Act; demands made regarding it are required to be "reasonable", which the FBI's demand in this case is not.
But now Apple will spend a billion dollars litigating this all the way to the Supreme Court, and Apple is pretty sure that's how far it'll go - because you don't hire the former Solicitor General of the United States, who represented the U.S. at the Supreme Court, unless you're pretty sure that's where it is going.
And the fact that Ted Olson took the case is a pretty clear statement that he doesn't think this case is about terrorism. Olson HATES terrorists; his wife was on the airplane that hit the Pentagon on 9/11/01.
That doesn't comply with the court order, which requires that the software shall run ONLY on the target device and NO OTHERS. If it were a matter of changing some variables and recompiling, then it would violate the court order. Since Apple would violate the court order in ANY event, then they're correct to choose THIS course of action - to do nothing.
Assume (and this is hopelessly naive) that any back doors that you leave in the software will never be found and hacked. With the U.S. Government's miserable record on keeping secrets, SOMEBODY on the team will turn out to be a Chinese or Iranian or Russian agent, and the back door will become a SCREEN door, allowing all your data to be stolen and disinformation inserted into your systems.
Perhaps Apple should agree to write that software for the FBI, but the Professional Services fee should be TEN BILLION DOLLARS, paid in advance.
And since there are, reportedly, 8 or 9 other Federal prosecutors in the possession of locked iPhones who plan to use the FBI's precedent to make their OWN case (these cases are all drug related, not terrorism), then Apple will have set the price for this service. No discounts!
The "unreasonable" part. It's "reasonable" for Apple, on receipt of a court order, to turn over to the FBI all data in its possession concerning the terrorists, which Apple has done.
Demanding that Apple force its programmers to write custom software THAT DOES NOT NOW EXIST to allow the FBI to break into one particular iPhone is "unreasonable", and I think Cook, and Apple, are correct here.
Further, concerning the 1789 "All Writs Act", signed by George Washington back before there was much Federal law at all; if the All Writs Act can be perverted so far as to demand that Apple write software that does not exist, then what government demand does it NOT permit? Because if there aren't any limits to THIS PARTICULAR LAW, then the Constitution died in 1789, barely two years after its ratification.