It has the resources. To bad Bill Gates has no imagination at all. Instead, he's using his foundation to pick random problems, followed by piecemeal solutions instead of acquiring a significantly large domain space of practical and solvable problems and addressing them systematically.
That's a bit naive. Chi, prana, chakras, et. al. were models of perceptions using different epistemological assumptions. For example, I feel something "flowing" in my arm when I do a Chi Kung or Yoga exercise and afterwards, my arm feels better. Absent of any more sophisticated data, you theorize some stuff that accounts for the changes. When 20 others do the same thing and get the same result, you have inter-subjective confirmation. Today, we use instrument based confirmation. Of course, you have to assume that the instruments tell you something useful.
Mental modeling is a funny thing. We used to think of electricity as a liquid. You could substitute voltage for pressure, amperes for gallons, do the math and come up with the right answer. The theory had remarkable predictive power. Was it "wrong?" Well, we have better models today. Tomorrow, presumably we'll have better neurophysiological models of what happens with acupuncture, yoga, tai chi, meditation, dreams, color perception, consciousness, and so on.
Economics can be modeled in a meaningful way using the mathematics of complex systems. Emergent behavior, system evolution and self organization. All of these contribute to useful modeling of monetary systems. Old farts going on about "rational behavior?' Not so much.
Science generally deals with repeatable falsifiable experimentation. Resulting theories tend to have considerable predictive power. Classical economics doesn't do so well with this. This is not to say that it's impossible to create theories that are falsifiable, and once proven, have predictive power. It just means that much of the crud taught in the academic community by tenured professors doesn't do this.
Uh, no, I actually haven't run into any of those although I know quite a few folks who describe themselves as "liberal." In real life, as opposed to the faux news caricatures, I've met few, well... none really, that want to expand government power. Most of the ones I know view the Obama administration as Bush's third (and now fourth) term. They're do seem interested in having a safety net equivalent to that of the Europeans and Canadians, and tend to be irritated that the reason we don't have one is that we supplement NATO and Asian defense costs. It's easy to have a social safety net if you don't have to pay for your own defense. Quite a few that I know would like to see some bankers put in jail. Personally, I'm all for cutting defense spending, and going with a single payer health plan. I also support the death penalty and am NOT in favor of gun control. I don't want the government to fund religion directly or indirectly, but if a private entity wants to put a nativity on the courthouse lawn, it's OK with me, agnostic though I am.
Real life is complicated. What you see on political entertainment TV, not so much.
What in the world do I get out of MS office, in or out of the cloud that I don't get in a basic office package of word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing. Admittedly, the graphics package could be more user-friendly, but there are FOSS substitutes for that too. The bottom line is the bottom line. Money for MS Office or no money for OpenOffice.
I purchase a phone, with my money. It's in my house. I own the phone. I own the house. It's illegal for me to make a particular modification to a piece of hardware that I own, on my property. Is that what this law is saying?
Aside from the fact that I will never purchase an unlocked phone again, and the market for said unlocked phones will skyrocket, I'm skeptical that this little example of corporate/feudalistic dictatorial overreach is going to stand up to court challenges.
How much energy does it take to make the stuff, transport it, dispose of it, and so on? It may prove to be an adequate energy carrier if it's cheap enough AND we have enough cheap electricity to make use of it, which might happen if we actually get thorium-based nuclear power AND we can solve the engineering problems involving the use of hydrogen in any metallic machines.
Not a bad technology if it's more energy dense by volume and cheaper than current batteries though.
Just whom do you think they'd want to attack Anyone they can shake down for money, pretty much. I don't think Kim Jong Un is that fussy. In fact, they don't even need to handle the shipping. There are numerous entrepreneurial extremist groups who would be glad to transport the weapons at very competitive rates.
NORAD would see a flying missile, not a truck with a large lead lined box in a truck in a line of several hundred lead lined boxes in trucks. Camouflage, in this case, would be trivial.
Oh gag. Regurgitate grade school much? Nobody's "dismissing" them. If we were, everyone with an IQ under 100 would be sterilized at birth. End of story. But the reality is that some people are born maladapted to modern technological culture, and the question is, "What do you do about it, if anything?" Moralistic, "Oh my god, the nazis!" hand wringing helps nothing. Morality is subjective, changeable with time and culture. Is genetic engineering for greater intelligence moral or immoral, and says who? You?
As a practical matter, as resources shrink, particularly energy resources shirink over time, decisions like this will be made, if not in the USA, then certainly in other countries. You can deal with them as rationally as possible, or you can continue whingeing, disclaiming all responsibility and doing nothing while overpopulation continues and EVERYBODY starves.
If they really wanted to deliver a nuke, they'd ship it in on a tramp freighter or submarine, land on some remote area of the coast, and walk the thing in somewhere. The whole missile thing is a national prestige exercise for domestic and regional consumption.
The situation is not static. People may be autonomous today, but eventually machines become far more autonomous. Even without big AI breakthroughs, steady improvements would be enough for most everyday tasks, particularly as multiprocessor units become cheap and ubiquitous.
It's not just schooling. The fact of the matter is that some people aren't too bright. Without repetitive, simple jobs, these people will literally have no place in the economy. There's no comfortable answer here. Do we prevent the births of stupid people? Gene engineer all potential parents so that their children are smarter? How smart? Where are the boundaries? And who pays? Or do we just hand them all a check each month and encourage them to stay out of the way, and reproduce as little as possible?
20th century morality isn't going to stand up long to this 21st century problem. Somewhere, something's got to give. Good luck if you think "the marketplace" is a good way to solve this. I think that was tried in France, and in Russia.
Harsh, I know, but code improvement methods are not rocket science. A programmer who writes a single unit test that essentially does nothing but let the programmer say, "Hey, I unit tested this code!" is a programmer who needs to be shown the door. Ditto for the programmer who won't add the "Why I did this" layer of comments, or the programmer who consistently overlooks error checking, anomalous inputs or other obvious errors. For that matter, I would (and have) booted programmers whose idea of a help message is "Error on Input Block 40!", OK? A programmer who doesn't understand human factors is frankly, incompetent at their trade.
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It has the resources. To bad Bill Gates has no imagination at all. Instead, he's using his foundation to pick random problems, followed by piecemeal solutions instead of acquiring a significantly large domain space of practical and solvable problems and addressing them systematically.
That's a bit naive. Chi, prana, chakras, et. al. were models of perceptions using different epistemological assumptions. For example, I feel something "flowing" in my arm when I do a Chi Kung or Yoga exercise and afterwards, my arm feels better. Absent of any more sophisticated data, you theorize some stuff that accounts for the changes. When 20 others do the same thing and get the same result, you have inter-subjective confirmation. Today, we use instrument based confirmation. Of course, you have to assume that the instruments tell you something useful.
Mental modeling is a funny thing. We used to think of electricity as a liquid. You could substitute voltage for pressure, amperes for gallons, do the math and come up with the right answer. The theory had remarkable predictive power. Was it "wrong?" Well, we have better models today. Tomorrow, presumably we'll have better neurophysiological models of what happens with acupuncture, yoga, tai chi, meditation, dreams, color perception, consciousness, and so on.
Economics can be modeled in a meaningful way using the mathematics of complex systems. Emergent behavior, system evolution and self organization. All of these contribute to useful modeling of monetary systems. Old farts going on about "rational behavior?' Not so much.
Science generally deals with repeatable falsifiable experimentation. Resulting theories tend to have considerable predictive power. Classical economics doesn't do so well with this. This is not to say that it's impossible to create theories that are falsifiable, and once proven, have predictive power. It just means that much of the crud taught in the academic community by tenured professors doesn't do this.
Uh, no, I actually haven't run into any of those although I know quite a few folks who describe themselves as "liberal." In real life, as opposed to the faux news caricatures, I've met few, well... none really, that want to expand government power. Most of the ones I know view the Obama administration as Bush's third (and now fourth) term. They're do seem interested in having a safety net equivalent to that of the Europeans and Canadians, and tend to be irritated that the reason we don't have one is that we supplement NATO and Asian defense costs. It's easy to have a social safety net if you don't have to pay for your own defense. Quite a few that I know would like to see some bankers put in jail. Personally, I'm all for cutting defense spending, and going with a single payer health plan. I also support the death penalty and am NOT in favor of gun control. I don't want the government to fund religion directly or indirectly, but if a private entity wants to put a nativity on the courthouse lawn, it's OK with me, agnostic though I am.
Real life is complicated. What you see on political entertainment TV, not so much.
What in the world do I get out of MS office, in or out of the cloud that I don't get in a basic office package of word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing. Admittedly, the graphics package could be more user-friendly, but there are FOSS substitutes for that too. The bottom line is the bottom line. Money for MS Office or no money for OpenOffice.
And this has what to do with "liberals?"
Pretty much.
More and more news sounds like "The Onion."
Then start peddling it. Then start working for the organizations that become dependent on it. Finding the application to write is the hard part.
Now, they tell me.
I purchase a phone, with my money. It's in my house. I own the phone. I own the house. It's illegal for me to make a particular modification to a piece of hardware that I own, on my property. Is that what this law is saying?
Aside from the fact that I will never purchase an unlocked phone again, and the market for said unlocked phones will skyrocket, I'm skeptical that this little example of corporate/feudalistic dictatorial overreach is going to stand up to court challenges.
Um, I think that's us. You know, the crowd. With wisdom and all that.
How much energy does it take to make the stuff, transport it, dispose of it, and so on? It may prove to be an adequate energy carrier if it's cheap enough AND we have enough cheap electricity to make use of it, which might happen if we actually get thorium-based nuclear power AND we can solve the engineering problems involving the use of hydrogen in any metallic machines.
Not a bad technology if it's more energy dense by volume and cheaper than current batteries though.
Just whom do you think they'd want to attack
Anyone they can shake down for money, pretty much. I don't think Kim Jong Un is that fussy. In fact, they don't even need to handle the shipping. There are numerous entrepreneurial extremist groups who would be glad to transport the weapons at very competitive rates.
NORAD would see a flying missile, not a truck with a large lead lined box in a truck in a line of several hundred lead lined boxes in trucks. Camouflage, in this case, would be trivial.
Oh gag. Regurgitate grade school much? Nobody's "dismissing" them. If we were, everyone with an IQ under 100 would be sterilized at birth. End of story. But the reality is that some people are born maladapted to modern technological culture, and the question is, "What do you do about it, if anything?" Moralistic, "Oh my god, the nazis!" hand wringing helps nothing. Morality is subjective, changeable with time and culture. Is genetic engineering for greater intelligence moral or immoral, and says who? You?
As a practical matter, as resources shrink, particularly energy resources shirink over time, decisions like this will be made, if not in the USA, then certainly in other countries. You can deal with them as rationally as possible, or you can continue whingeing, disclaiming all responsibility and doing nothing while overpopulation continues and EVERYBODY starves.
Problem is, even FedEx doesn't deliver nukes overnight.
The trick is to tip the driver occasionally. Really speeds things up.
it's turning into Windows. Fork that!
Um, did I say something about the USA?
If they really wanted to deliver a nuke, they'd ship it in on a tramp freighter or submarine, land on some remote area of the coast, and walk the thing in somewhere. The whole missile thing is a national prestige exercise for domestic and regional consumption.
Obviously you never watched that Hitchcock movie.
Oh, come on, somebody had to say it.
The situation is not static. People may be autonomous today, but eventually machines become far more autonomous. Even without big AI breakthroughs, steady improvements would be enough for most everyday tasks, particularly as multiprocessor units become cheap and ubiquitous.
It's not just schooling. The fact of the matter is that some people aren't too bright. Without repetitive, simple jobs, these people will literally have no place in the economy. There's no comfortable answer here. Do we prevent the births of stupid people? Gene engineer all potential parents so that their children are smarter? How smart? Where are the boundaries? And who pays? Or do we just hand them all a check each month and encourage them to stay out of the way, and reproduce as little as possible?
20th century morality isn't going to stand up long to this 21st century problem. Somewhere, something's got to give. Good luck if you think "the marketplace" is a good way to solve this. I think that was tried in France, and in Russia.
Harsh, I know, but code improvement methods are not rocket science. A programmer who writes a single unit test that essentially does nothing but let the programmer say, "Hey, I unit tested this code!" is a programmer who needs to be shown the door. Ditto for the programmer who won't add the "Why I did this" layer of comments, or the programmer who consistently overlooks error checking, anomalous inputs or other obvious errors. For that matter, I would (and have) booted programmers whose idea of a help message is "Error on Input Block 40!", OK? A programmer who doesn't understand human factors is frankly, incompetent at their trade.