Double down? No. Accept it as reality as it is? Yes, I'm for that.
Corruption is a universal in human societies, including ours in the USA. The issue Solutions to change that have the potential to be *far* worse than the original problem. Corruption can be discouraged effectively only by removing everyone's privacy and allowing the government immediate electronic access to all financial transactions and by banning all non-electronic financial transactions. No cash. No gold.
Do you want that? Really? Because then, you've more or less opened the door to a permanent security/police state whose control over the economy would inevitably evolve to absolute control over your financial life (Remember, corruption is inevitable).
Moreover, this would be unenforceable. Barter still works and would be even harder to control.
So sure, let's have some more "feel good" accountability for the polluter who used a bribe rather than simply killing anyone locally who tried to stop them. I'm sure that would be "better."
You're assuming there's a solution to the problem of civilization slowly committing suicide. I wish you were right.
In the international marketplace, all anti-bribery laws do is put European and American countries at a disadvantage. Do you think China or India are paying the slightest bit of attention to anti-bribery laws?
All such laws do is force companies to relocate to the Bahamas or somewhere like it for "greater operational flexibility" (i.e. legal bribery) in order to compete.
You're not going to get rid of corruption in Nigeria, Venezuela or Kazakhstan by passing some dimwitted do-gooder laws in Europe or the USA. It's ineffective and self-defeating.
2) Use video, which eats my limited bandwidth (Some of us use hotspots with data limits, comprende?)
3) Unexpectedly start creating sounds, interrupting my wife, the cat, myself and the children.
4) And the very worse thing, the godamm ads start JUMPING MY PAGE AROUND so the thing I was trying to click is no longer there by the time my mouse/finger manage to click the screen and I've suddenly opened the ad for hot singles in my area (The wife just loves that one).
So, clue train manifesto for online advertisers:
1) DO! NOT! INTERRUPT! ME! If you can't do that, I'm happy to go elsewhere.
2) Do not ever randomly resize or refresh my web page. It needs to load once AND STAY THERE. If you can't do that, I'm happy to go elsewhere.
3) Do not include noise in your ads, if possible. If necessary, make sure I have to work to consciously turn it on. If you can't do that, I'm happy to go elsewhere.
4) Do NOT use bandwidth sucking video unless I request it by consciously turning it on. If you can't do that, I'm happy to go elsewhere.
5) DO NOT ASK IF I WANT TO DOWNLOAD YOUR APP, RECEIVE YOUR NEWSLETTER, OR ALERTS BEFORE I'VE EVEN HAD A CHANCE TO SEE THE DAMN PAGE.
Seriously guys. Basic reasoning? How the hell would I know if I want anything to do with you ever again if I haven't even looked you over yet?
The more I see the results of web advertising, I wonder if they lobotomize the ad designers before, or after they are hired. Hire a UI specialist. Hire a psychologist. Most of all, pull your heads out of your own self absorbed asses and actually *talk* to a customer now and then.
Yes, well funny you should mention that. Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland all have mixed socialist/capitalist models using whatever works to solve actual problems.
For instance, UBER is a great capitalist solution to the problem of transportation, requiring no new infrastructure. Eventually some regulation will be required to make it safer, but it's a great working solution.
Health care would benefit from this approach too. If health care providers were legally required to post all prices up front (regulation) and the import of foreign drugs and insurance was legal (deregulation), you'd have a combination of government action and market forces that would go a long way to solving the health care mess and keeping a lid on prices.
A simplistic, "Rah, rah, free market capitalism" approach eventually leads to Somalia. An all regulation approach takes you to North Korea. Take your pick. In both cases, evil lives at the extremes.
Whether it happens on a computer or in person. Only a marketing dick, an MBA or a CEO would be dumb enough to miss the fact that it passes people off enough to drive people away from a Web site.
Any system that depends on users doing the right thing has ALREADY failed.
1) If it's difficult or complicated, users won't do it.
2) If your security organization's working strategy is, "break stuff, walk away and tell the user it's their problem," your strategies will be subverted from within so users can get actual productive work done, for which *they* get *their* bonuses.
In short, users need productivity to get their extra money. Security people need a lower number of intrusions to get theirs. These two goals are always at odds, mostly because current security strategies burden nontechnical, uninterested users.
The solution, which security people hate to hear, is to get better at installing and maintaining multiple levels of firewall, application sandboxing and/or streaming applications for all office applications, improving intrusion detection and dynamic virus removal in real time. NOT training users not to download suspicious executables or engage in fantastic feats of memory regarding passwords.
is going to miss a lot. A planet full of tool using dolphins would be invisible to us. Jovian civilizations without metals to direct radio would have the same issues. A radio using civilization that had taken all of their radio digital, complete with compression and encryption would be invisible as well since all the entropy would be distributed in such a way as to make all radio traffic appear as noise. Even a zipf analysis would probably fail.
A more interesting approach would be to attempt to train current AI to distinguish natural objects from man-made objects and then point it at the universe. Mega-engineering might be quite visible, but look to us like another bright, bright, fuzzy, oddly shaped stellar thing. Ditto for the electrical "noise" of planets like Jupiter. some of Jupiter's "whistler" and other interesting radio noises might be something other than lightning. We simply can't know at this point.
Story: New energy source based on [insert some form of unicorn fart here] may one day solve energy crisis!
Story: New memory storage based on [insert excited hand waving] may one day replace current RAM!
Story: New computing method based on [something, something, carbon, something] may one day re-instate Moore's law!
Story: New AI algorithm based on [GAs, deep multi-layer neural nets, connecting organic brains together, a little man in a box that answers the questions and pretends to be a machine] may one day give us true artificial intelligence (whatever the fuck that means).
At 57, I've been hearing this crap since I was 6. There's no magic energy source. Moore's law has been stopped by physics. HAL has yet to enter the building. There's no cure for cancer or alzheimers, and so on.
Editors and writers with liberal arts or journalism degrees who can't evaluate the research anyway *love* this kind of filler shit because it attracts the eyeballs of the sort that read popular science magazine and take it seriously. It's the science literature equivalent of Reece's Pieces (meaning no disrespect for that fine candy).
ZeroHedge.com (Sensationalist but the true bits are quite interesting and after about a year or two, whatever crazy thing they're going on about shows up on "The Economist.")
NakedCapitalism.com (It doesn't SHOUT at you the way ZeroHedge does, but it's informative).
ricefarmer.blogspot.com (A sane news aggregation site with occasional realistic commentary. As usual, reality puts people off).
ClubOrlov.com (Interesting guy. Grew up in Russia during the collapse. Comments on our ongoing slo mo collapse).
http://ourfiniteworld.com/ (A happy little blog about resource depletion and its implications. Packed with facts and numbers. Do not approach without a working calculator). Don't expect to be happy at what you finally figure out for yourself either.
And a few million other problems that are in the domain of solvable problems within acceptable time and resource constraints. Solve the BIG problem (useful, scalable, humanlike AI) and you solve the energy problem as a side effect.
Instead, Gates is chasing after problems in a random piecemeal way by simply throwing money at them. I hope it works, but the approach is not worth of someone of his intellect.
Seriously. If you want a religious pledge, you can do that in the dark under a full moon with friends and family present. I still don't understand in any way why any state government should approve/disapprove of my relationship, or why I should care?
I understand that there are legal issues and there's the usual insurance scams that don't let you designate anyone you wish as a dependent. Anything aside from that? Is this just an insurance and inheritance issue resulting from a bunch of dumb, archaic laws?
No, they didn't vote for it. They employed it as a political tool to get votes. They were happy to benefit from the Koch's astroturf money to do this. Nor did they propose some perfectly workable combination of regulation (force medical care provider price transparency) and deregulation (allow the import of foreign drugs, products and medical services) which would have nipped this abomination in the bud.
So instead of accepting a national health care system of the sort that every other European country and Canada has (and pays for), we got this..... thing.
No, the Republicans didn't write or vote for this, but they sure as shit *caused* this.
Teenage male sees computer for first time and asks, "What can I make the magic box do?"
Teenage female sees computer for first time and asks, "What can the magic box do FOR ME?"
Most males are goofballs. They like to play, without a goal in mind, just for their own amusement.
This happens to be an excellent way to learn computers.
In contrast, most women want that immediate payoff. They don't seem to like to solve difficult puzzles without getting some kind of sensory/emotional cupcake.
This isn't a good way to learn computers. There is nothing emotionally gratifying about them. No cupcakes.
These traits are not universal, but as many here who've tried to teach women software development and computers have noted, there's a strong statistical tendency in this direction.
No, it would be actual suicide. You can't feed 7 billion people in the world without fossil fuels and you never will. It would be prohibitively difficult even if it was confined to the USA. Food is not grown and transported by magic fairies. It gets from ground to plate, refrigerated because hydrocarbon fuel exists.
Given more time, and less population, this could change. Starvation would take care of the problem, and *boy* would we be green. Well, the dead folks would be, anyway.
How is most of your food transported? How is most of your food refrigerated from farm to home? How is most of the fertilizer mined (or made) and transported on site? How are the machines that work the land powered? How do you, personally, get to markets? How do you power your refrigerator?
Which has about as much chance of working. Any plans as to what to do with the 6 billion plus likely to starve while making this grand transition? Self solving problem, I guess.
Slashdot Mirror
Particularly when combined with self-absorbed angst. Can I get a disability exemption from life? I'd like a weekly check.
We're inherently too biased. Only an AI with scalable human-like intelligence will give us real answers about ourselves.
This may be why one will never be built.
...and he/she/it has shown mercy on us by allowing the destruction of the bandwidth sucking, virus vector, POS that is flash.
I'm not sure these guys could distinguish a credible threat from a popular band fan base... Oh wait, they can't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Double down? No. Accept it as reality as it is? Yes, I'm for that.
Corruption is a universal in human societies, including ours in the USA. The issue Solutions to change that have the potential to be *far* worse than the original problem. Corruption can be discouraged effectively only by removing everyone's privacy and allowing the government immediate electronic access to all financial transactions and by banning all non-electronic financial transactions. No cash. No gold.
Do you want that? Really? Because then, you've more or less opened the door to a permanent security/police state whose control over the economy would inevitably evolve to absolute control over your financial life (Remember, corruption is inevitable).
Moreover, this would be unenforceable. Barter still works and would be even harder to control.
So sure, let's have some more "feel good" accountability for the polluter who used a bribe rather than simply killing anyone locally who tried to stop them. I'm sure that would be "better."
You're assuming there's a solution to the problem of civilization slowly committing suicide. I wish you were right.
In the international marketplace, all anti-bribery laws do is put European and American countries at a disadvantage. Do you think China or India are paying the slightest bit of attention to anti-bribery laws?
All such laws do is force companies to relocate to the Bahamas or somewhere like it for "greater operational flexibility" (i.e. legal bribery) in order to compete.
You're not going to get rid of corruption in Nigeria, Venezuela or Kazakhstan by passing some dimwitted do-gooder laws in Europe or the USA. It's ineffective and self-defeating.
So, growing them outdoors is perfectly OK, then, eh?
Currently, ads:
1) Interrupt my flow of thought.
2) Use video, which eats my limited bandwidth (Some of us use hotspots with data limits, comprende?)
3) Unexpectedly start creating sounds, interrupting my wife, the cat, myself and the children.
4) And the very worse thing, the godamm ads start JUMPING MY PAGE AROUND so the thing I was trying to click is no longer there by the time my mouse/finger manage to click the screen and I've suddenly opened the ad for hot singles in my area (The wife just loves that one).
So, clue train manifesto for online advertisers:
1) DO! NOT! INTERRUPT! ME! If you can't do that, I'm happy to go elsewhere.
2) Do not ever randomly resize or refresh my web page. It needs to load once AND STAY THERE. If you can't do that, I'm happy to go elsewhere.
3) Do not include noise in your ads, if possible. If necessary, make sure I have to work to consciously turn it on. If you can't do that, I'm happy to go elsewhere.
4) Do NOT use bandwidth sucking video unless I request it by consciously turning it on. If you can't do that, I'm happy to go elsewhere.
5) DO NOT ASK IF I WANT TO DOWNLOAD YOUR APP, RECEIVE YOUR NEWSLETTER, OR ALERTS BEFORE I'VE EVEN HAD A CHANCE TO SEE THE DAMN PAGE.
Seriously guys. Basic reasoning? How the hell would I know if I want anything to do with you ever again if I haven't even looked you over yet?
The more I see the results of web advertising, I wonder if they lobotomize the ad designers before, or after they are hired. Hire a UI specialist. Hire a psychologist. Most of all, pull your heads out of your own self absorbed asses and actually *talk* to a customer now and then.
Yes, well funny you should mention that. Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland all have mixed socialist/capitalist models using whatever works to solve actual problems.
For instance, UBER is a great capitalist solution to the problem of transportation, requiring no new infrastructure. Eventually some regulation will be required to make it safer, but it's a great working solution.
Health care would benefit from this approach too. If health care providers were legally required to post all prices up front (regulation) and the import of foreign drugs and insurance was legal (deregulation), you'd have a combination of government action and market forces that would go a long way to solving the health care mess and keeping a lid on prices.
A simplistic, "Rah, rah, free market capitalism" approach eventually leads to Somalia. An all regulation approach takes you to North Korea. Take your pick. In both cases, evil lives at the extremes.
We don't have to kill ISIS, just distract them until they're 60 or so.
Cheaper yet, we should be airdropping porn, pot and pizza. The three P's of victory!
Whether it happens on a computer or in person. Only a marketing dick, an MBA or a CEO would be dumb enough to miss the fact that it passes people off enough to drive people away from a Web site.
Any system that depends on users doing the right thing has ALREADY failed.
1) If it's difficult or complicated, users won't do it.
2) If your security organization's working strategy is, "break stuff, walk away and tell the user it's their problem," your strategies will be subverted from within so users can get actual productive work done, for which *they* get *their* bonuses.
In short, users need productivity to get their extra money. Security people need a lower number of intrusions to get theirs. These two goals are always at odds, mostly because current security strategies burden nontechnical, uninterested users.
The solution, which security people hate to hear, is to get better at installing and maintaining multiple levels of firewall, application sandboxing and/or streaming applications for all office applications, improving intrusion detection and dynamic virus removal in real time. NOT training users not to download suspicious executables or engage in fantastic feats of memory regarding passwords.
It will become more powerful than you can imagine...
is going to miss a lot. A planet full of tool using dolphins would be invisible to us. Jovian civilizations without metals to direct radio would have the same issues. A radio using civilization that had taken all of their radio digital, complete with compression and encryption would be invisible as well since all the entropy would be distributed in such a way as to make all radio traffic appear as noise. Even a zipf analysis would probably fail.
A more interesting approach would be to attempt to train current AI to distinguish natural objects from man-made objects and then point it at the universe. Mega-engineering might be quite visible, but look to us like another bright, bright, fuzzy, oddly shaped stellar thing. Ditto for the electrical "noise" of planets like Jupiter. some of Jupiter's "whistler" and other interesting radio noises might be something other than lightning. We simply can't know at this point.
Story: New energy source based on [insert some form of unicorn fart here] may one day solve energy crisis!
Story: New memory storage based on [insert excited hand waving] may one day replace current RAM!
Story: New computing method based on [something, something, carbon, something] may one day re-instate Moore's law!
Story: New AI algorithm based on [GAs, deep multi-layer neural nets, connecting organic brains together, a little man in a box that answers the questions and pretends to be a machine] may one day give us true artificial intelligence (whatever the fuck that means).
At 57, I've been hearing this crap since I was 6. There's no magic energy source. Moore's law has been stopped by physics. HAL has yet to enter the building. There's no cure for cancer or alzheimers, and so on.
Editors and writers with liberal arts or journalism degrees who can't evaluate the research anyway *love* this kind of filler shit because it attracts the eyeballs of the sort that read popular science magazine and take it seriously. It's the science literature equivalent of Reece's Pieces (meaning no disrespect for that fine candy).
is as dumb as ALL of us. Now the wisdom of crowds can generate tulip manias faster than *ever* before. What a great time to be alive....
ZeroHedge.com (Sensationalist but the true bits are quite interesting and after about a year or two, whatever crazy thing they're going on about shows up on "The Economist.")
NakedCapitalism.com (It doesn't SHOUT at you the way ZeroHedge does, but it's informative).
ricefarmer.blogspot.com (A sane news aggregation site with occasional realistic commentary. As usual, reality puts people off).
ClubOrlov.com (Interesting guy. Grew up in Russia during the collapse. Comments on our ongoing slo mo collapse).
http://ourfiniteworld.com/ (A happy little blog about resource depletion and its implications. Packed with facts and numbers. Do not approach without a working calculator). Don't expect to be happy at what you finally figure out for yourself either.
Ooopsie!
And a few million other problems that are in the domain of solvable problems within acceptable time and resource constraints. Solve the BIG problem (useful, scalable, humanlike AI) and you solve the energy problem as a side effect.
Instead, Gates is chasing after problems in a random piecemeal way by simply throwing money at them. I hope it works, but the approach is not worth of someone of his intellect.
Seriously. If you want a religious pledge, you can do that in the dark under a full moon with friends and family present. I still don't understand in any way why any state government should approve/disapprove of my relationship, or why I should care?
I understand that there are legal issues and there's the usual insurance scams that don't let you designate anyone you wish as a dependent. Anything aside from that? Is this just an insurance and inheritance issue resulting from a bunch of dumb, archaic laws?
No, they didn't vote for it. They employed it as a political tool to get votes. They were happy to benefit from the Koch's astroturf money to do this. Nor did they propose some perfectly workable combination of regulation (force medical care provider price transparency) and deregulation (allow the import of foreign drugs, products and medical services) which would have nipped this abomination in the bud.
So instead of accepting a national health care system of the sort that every other European country and Canada has (and pays for), we got this..... thing.
No, the Republicans didn't write or vote for this, but they sure as shit *caused* this.
Teenage male sees computer for first time and asks, "What can I make the magic box do?"
Teenage female sees computer for first time and asks, "What can the magic box do FOR ME?"
Most males are goofballs. They like to play, without a goal in mind, just for their own amusement.
This happens to be an excellent way to learn computers.
In contrast, most women want that immediate payoff. They don't seem to like to solve difficult puzzles without getting some kind of sensory/emotional cupcake.
This isn't a good way to learn computers. There is nothing emotionally gratifying about them. No cupcakes.
These traits are not universal, but as many here who've tried to teach women software development and computers have noted, there's a strong statistical tendency in this direction.
No, it would be actual suicide. You can't feed 7 billion people in the world without fossil fuels and you never will. It would be prohibitively difficult even if it was confined to the USA. Food is not grown and transported by magic fairies. It gets from ground to plate, refrigerated because hydrocarbon fuel exists.
Given more time, and less population, this could change. Starvation would take care of the problem, and *boy* would we be green. Well, the dead folks would be, anyway.
How is most of your food transported?
How is most of your food refrigerated from farm to home?
How is most of the fertilizer mined (or made) and transported on site?
How are the machines that work the land powered?
How do you, personally, get to markets?
How do you power your refrigerator?
For more details, I refer you to this sweetly over-optimistic missive by those wild liberal radicals at the NIH ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm... ). A grimmer, more realistic picture can be found here: ( http://www.wolfatthedoor.org.u... )
Which has about as much chance of working. Any plans as to what to do with the 6 billion plus likely to starve while making this grand transition? Self solving problem, I guess.