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The phone blok idea isn't bad, it's just coming at the wrong time. Modularity introduces overhead into an industry, but it also forces competition and is thus better in cases where an end product with that overhead can remotely compete with a product that lacks modularity. We're not there with smartphones yet, mainly because of size. However, with miniaturization of components, there will likely come a time when the benefits of modularity outweigh the overhead. Decreasing smartphone size brings diminishing returns, and therefore if parts continue to shrink, that time will come when there is a sufficient amount of air space within a typical phone. |
I used to think the same way, coming from a background in dynamic languages (Python FTW), I considered Java a big slow bloated enterprise behemoth. It chews up lots of memory, takes ages to start up, and desktop applications using 'Swing' feel slow and laggy.
Then I actually started using it in real world production environments. My company at the time had a very large codebase in Python that ran like a dog. It was slow as hell, took forever to start up, used a lot of memory, and could barely manage 4-5 request per second with over 10 seconds response time under load. I ported it to Java without any major architectural changes, and we were hitting 1000-2000 requests per second and half the memory usage.
Microbenchmarks back up this performance delta, given that it's up to two orders of magnitude faster than [Ruby]( or [Python]( and 2-3 times faster than [V8/Node](
It's still clearly slower than C/C++ mind you, but it's in the ballpark.
Now keep in mind this is execution speed on a warm JVM that's had time to start up. Perfect for a server side process that runs for long period of time.
For desktop applications, it's a different story. The startup time is pretty damned close to instant on modern computers with an SSD, but it wasn't long past that a Java application would take 3-5 seconds or longer to fully bootstrap - which is a long time when the user is waiting. Throw 'Swing' (GUI framework) being just slightly laggy and ugly as sin out of the box and you end up with a platform that was just never quite good enough for desktop applications.
I have a few small in-house utilities in Java that you wouldn't even know weren't native. These use a native widget skin, so effectively just wrapping GTK/MFC/Cocoa widgets (Depending on platform) and run very snappily.
JDownloader, Eclipse, and IntelliJ are about the only other desktop Java applications that I use on a regular basis. JDownloader is pretty lean and doesn't feel slow (Although the ugly Swing theme means it'll never quite fit in). Eclipse and IntelliJ are bloated IDE's, but are of a similar level of bloatiness to their C++ counterparts.
As far as the language of Java itself goes, it's a bit of a dog. I don't like it. Fortunately there's a number of fantastic languages that compile to the JVM - in particular Scala, which is absolutely sublime. |
Shit like that does happen though. I am an avid ebay shopper and seller. I recently had this happen:
I bought a package. I tracked the package online. The package showed as delivered. So when I got home I checked the mail. I live in an apartment and all mail is in a locked mailbox, if its to big they leave you a key to the larger locked boxes.
Anyways, I check my mail box and the package was not in there.
So I printed off my conformation and drove to the Post Office. I handed over the delivery conformation number and said I didn't receive the package. After looking at her computer for 10 minutes she called the delivery driver. I described the package size and the delivery driver said "I remember that package, I must have delivered it to the wrong house"
I asked if I could get an updated Delivery Conformation showing the package as not delivered, I was denied that request.
I then let the ebay seller know the situation, that the package was delivered yet I have not received it. It was another 3 days until my package was in my mailbox, with a nice apology note from the driver. I then let the ebay seller know all is well. |
The fbi don't have jurisdiction anywhere outside the USA. If this guy is an American, fine... But if not, all the fbi can do is petition and lean on the authorities of his host country for some sort of action. |
No I guess you're right. Not 100% guarantee, but I assure you its upwards of 95%. There are two types of recording scenarios. "Quality" and "Compliance". There are very few places out there that do selective recording for quality. And I'd 95% guarantee PayPal isnt one of them. Expecially when it comes to calls where information like this is exchanged. NICE Systems can also record screen. Yes... the agent's PC screen as the call is taken. That is setup for quality selective recording. Normally % of calls. Like 1 out of 10.
We are a NICE business partner. We hired a guy who used to handle one of NICE's biggest accounts when he worked for them. I showed him this link and he immediately said he knows the tech that handles Ebay. I know its just my word, as I wont be presenting any proof on here to back it up unfortunately. |
I know it costs more, but you should not rely on USPS Delivery Confirmation as it is not a true proof of delivery. Only Express mail packages have this. If you had used FedEx or UPS you would have won the case, many times even without a signature. Source: I work for an eBay seller and deal with these cases on a weekly basis. |
Best non-sequitur |
simple answer. voip recording cost for our environment somewhere in the mid 80k, if we were to start switching all the phones to voip phones now you can add 12k, average $320 a phone, plus recording license, plus 1 time activation since it isn't avaya the money whore. Works out to be $550 a phone with a $80 annual fee for recording license. Or the analog phone which cost $440 all in with a cheaper $40 annual fee for recording. |
The easy answer is Yes. I dont have many specific details about PayPal's setup. However if its anything like any other banking-ish institutions I can make some assumptions.
My guess is that they're Voip. I havent been to a big install in years that still uses digital phones. So I'm guessing either Avaya or Cisco. Most likely Cisco. Irregardless its the recording is done at the extension level. Even internal calls can still be classified as "inbound" or "outbound" depending on who is making the call and who is recieving it. Cisco does it by defining the extension length thats passed in the call data. Think METADATA!!! thast been made so famous by the NSA lately. If the incoming call has a number of say 4 digits then its an internal call.
Avaya actually passes internal/outgoing/internal calls in the Metadata to the recording system. |
My point is that stopping one person when there is such a glaring issue should be a secondary goal. Obviously it should be pursued but it is definitely not more important. There is a reason that he felt so secure in the brazenness with which he went about this, he is likely too far away for "justice" and it would cost considerable resources and diplomatic efforts to get him. Whereas stopping companies from giving away this sort of information is something that you could actually hope to curb. That would have much further reaching implications when it comes to security in general. That should be the priority because that is the bigger problem. |
Censorship drives innovation.
e.g. When Apple banned flash (all those many years ago) porn sites started utilizing what HTML5 functionality that was available to deliver their content to those flashless platforms. This focused the browser community to implement HTML5/CSS3 etc. as fast as possible and the W3C to ensure the standard (somewhat) as major vendors started enforcing their own interpretation on the standards. |
preface: I did not read the article
I don't know if the intent was straight up censorship, but I do know that my sister was able to access my chromecast from across the house on her iphone without my consent. Privacy was likely the concern before censorship especially if you consider that some tvs will automatically switch to the chromecast's input on your tv when activated. |
The attacker either sits on the same network as you, if the base station doesn't have access point isolation turned on, and uses ARP spoofing to cause your machine to think the attacker is the router, or he listens to your device's probe requests, spoofs the network, gets close to you so his signal is stronger, and then he deauths you from the coffee shop's network and your device jumps to his network.
At this point, your traffic is going through the me, so now I need to take care of HTTPS.
I setup Apache on my machine, to act as a reverse proxy, and I sign a certificate for amazon.com, with my own certificate authority, and I direct your machine to connect to me (I am your network, so I'm going to go ahead and be your DNS server while I'm at it), so you go to my Apache server fetches Amazon, and then serves it to you with my bogus HTTPS certificate, with an incorrect CA, but since your machine isn't checking if the CA is correct because of this vulnerability, your machine accepts it as correct, and you're now presented with Amazon.com, on your machine, with HTTPS, with no warnings.
If you want to do this easily, I suggest the [WiFi Pineapple Mark V]( just throw it into a bag with a small battery.
Now, since this has already been patched on the latest version of iOS, and is going to be fixed on OS X, I'll throw in some fingerprinting to not fuck with your connection if you've been updated, so you don't get the warning message and start looking around for an attacker. |
I have recently read the entire constitution, technically privacy really isn't a right that the United States government guarantees its citizens.
The US Government is a government of enumerated powers only do the things that it is granted to do by the Constitution. The only reason that the Bill of Rights was written into the Constitution was to absolutely guarantee that certain rights would not be trampled upon. This was actually controversial at the time, because some argued that, by simply writing down certain rights, you would create the illusion of "granting" those rights to people. Technically, this is unnecessary, because, being a government of enumerated powers, the government shouldn't be able to trample those rights unless you explicitly give it the authority to do so. Regardless, they went ahead with the amendments, but as a compromise, they included [the 9th amendment](
> The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
This amendment has been used in the past, most notably in Roe v. Wade, to argue that a right to privacy does exist, even though it isn't explicitly included in the Constitution. |
I have been saying this for awhile but in addition to reduced accidents, you will have many other massive factors to take into account
Fewer accidents, there goes half the insurance industry and a chunk of healthcare
More fuel efficiency since robo cars could, in theory never have to stop while driving, 4 robo cars approach a 4 way stop, they can vary speed in accordance to each other and safely keep going.
Many jobs within industries like the post office, fed ex, ups, pizza delivery, document couriers, long haul trucking, etc could all go bye bye with self driving vehicles (assuming they can get pure autonomy) heck even farming and public transit change drastically.
That all would save TRILLIONS but then we have a HUGE swatch of people suddenly out of work.
That would lead to increased taxes to provide services, which would lead to a more concerted grassroots effort to raise the min wage, which would force the hand of McDonalds and many other low wage jobs to use the new found technology and societal acceptance of automation to fully automate a significant amount of things leaving a HUGE underclass of plebes and all wealth concentrated on a few. |
I live in a very rural area of Washington State and I can tell you without a doubt that computers and sensors could not drive on roads safely and accurately during the winter. White out conditions, icy roadways, animals, no road markers, and a plethora of other hazards and uncontrollable factors would amount to a computer applying the brakes at the wrong time to try and not hit a deer or skunk, with the final result being a car with people inside rolled a few times.
In my opinion, that is the biggest hurdle that self-driving technology has to make. I realize that others will say "oh but the cars don't have to be automatic ALL of the time," but I would then ask, if I were sleeping, and the weather changes quickly, how would the car/I respond and how aware would I be after just waking up? |
Why would the GNP suffer a major hit if we made the first/best/most popular/successful driverless cars?
The US is poised to have one of the best infrastructures in the world for it. Large space, large number of gridded cities, expansive + well maintained highway system, relatively not-dense population based on land mass (the us is #181, thanks alaska!)
To anyone saying that self driving / electric cars will not be appropriated in due time, I'd like to see your nostradamus like powers used to predict the weird end of tobacco coupled with the convenient legalization of marijuana? |
I've always had the idea to implement a "social media" for self-driving cars as soon as they become pretty much the only type of car on the road. It would combine the schedules of its drivers and interact with global, real time GPS to find the fastest route to their destination. It would also have the ability to have locations inputted right before traveling in case the driver doesn't want to input their schedule or something new comes up. Each vehicle would then create the route while taking in the routes of other vehicles that will be traveling on the same route to avoid collisions. Speed limits wouldn't matter as long as the system could calculate the appropriate speed for turns and traffic lights. This is as just a shower thought for me that I tend to think about a lot and if anyone could offer improvements to it, that would be awesome! |
Self driving cars will happen but drivers will always have to be in the vehicle alert.
I was debating a friend about this a few weeks ago and currently for all driverless vehicles on the road there is a requirement that a person must be able to intervene at all times.
So if there is any accident in a "driverless" car it would still be the "driver's" fault. They would still be culpable in that situation since they failed to act.
Revenue from speeding tickets may decrease but that would mean that it would be picked up in other forms: distracting lights from the vehicle, loud music, questionable parking, etc. |
Fewer accidents, there goes half the insurance industry and a chunk of healthcare
No industry is immune to technological progress. Healthcare providers would welcome the decreased workload I think as well. Less funding would be required as well. My guess is that there will still be car accident insurance may be gone, insurance for other damage (natural disasters, riots etc.) will still be around. Of course, claims will definitely drop.
> More fuel efficiency since robo cars could, in theory never have to stop while driving, 4 robo cars approach a 4 way stop, they can vary speed in accordance to each other and safely keep going.
No more traffic lights -> less road maintenance required, less electricity required etc.
> Many jobs within industries like the post office, fed ex, ups, pizza delivery, document couriers, long haul trucking, etc could all go bye bye with self driving vehicles (assuming they can get pure autonomy) heck even farming and public transit change drastically.
Again, no industry is immune to technological progress. Instead of driving, current delivery "drivers" could now sit / sleep along for the ride and simply take care of administrative stuff (delivery forms, meeting with the customer etc.) and loading/unloading of cargo.
> That all would save TRILLIONS but then we have a HUGE swatch of people suddenly out of work. That would lead to increased taxes to provide services, which would lead to a more concerted grassroots effort to raise the min wage, which would force the hand of McDonalds and many other low wage jobs to use the new found technology and societal acceptance of automation to fully automate a significant amount of things leaving a HUGE underclass of plebes and all wealth concentrated on a few.
> |
i responded a little more indepth in another comment.
here's a link: |
The figure was pulled from an article that pulled from an article that pulled from a report released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
That report stated:
> The total includes $277 billion in economic costs – nearly $900 for each person living in the USA – and $594 billion in societal harm from the loss of life and the pain and decreased quality of life because of injuries.
I've attached the link to the article referenced by the article below
EDIT:
I've also found the actual paper referenced for this figure:
Here are some of the societal harm valuations, I'll be adding more as I skim through:
Societal Impacts of Crashes (Comprehensive Costs)
■ The value of societal harm from motor vehicle crashes, which includes both economic impacts and
valuation for lost quality-of-life, was $870.8 billion in 2010. Sixty-eight percent of this value
represents lost quality-of-life, while 32 percent is economic impacts.
■ The lifetime comprehensive cost to society for each fatality is $9.1 million. Eighty-five percent of this
amount is attributable to lost quality-of-life.
■ Each critically injured survivor (MAIS 5) has comprehensive costs that average of $5.7 million. Lost
quality-of-life accounted for 81 percent of the total harm for this most serious level of non-fatal
injury.
■ Alcohol-involved crashes resulted in $242.6 billion in comprehensive costs in 2010, accounting for
28 percent of all societal harm from motor vehicle crashes. Eighty-five percent of these costs
occurred in crashes where one driver had a BAC of .08 g/dL or greater.
■ Although drinking drivers may experience impaired judgment, perceptions, and reaction times, not
all crashes in which alcohol was present were caused by alcohol. Crashes in which alcohol was the
cause resulted in $196 billion in societal harm in 2010. This represents 22 percent of all societal
harm from motor vehicle crashes. Ninety-eight percent of societal harm from crashes caused by
alcohol occurs in crashes where drivers had BACs of .08 or greater.
■ Crashes in which at least one driver was exceeding the legal speed limit or driving too fast for
conditions caused $210.3 billion in comprehensive costs in 2010. This represents 24 percent of all
societal harm from motor vehicle crashes.
■ Crashes in which at least one driver was identified as being distracted caused $129.5 billion in
comprehensive costs in 2010, causing roughly 15 percent of all societal harm from motor vehicle
crashes.
■ In 2010, seat belts prevented $349.0 billion in comprehensive costs to society. Over the last 36
years, seat belts have prevented over $8 trillion in societal harm, resulting in lower economic costs
to society and improved quality-of-life for millions of motor vehicle occupants. |
This is extremely impractical anywhere other than within a single city.
Unless you can map and pre-render said data on a regular basis for a much larger area. If each networked vehicle has sensors and can contribute to this database, it isn't impossible. Each vehicle not only benefits from the digital maps they share, but are also able to "see" through the eyes of every other vehicle when something changes (new roads, disaster damage, construction, etc). |
Someone just slipped on a slippery slope.
Are you even paying attention? You can still drive if you want. That's what everyone is saying. That's the message that is constantly being re-said over and over again in this thread, in various articles about the subject, and from the pioneers in the self driving car industry.
You seem like the kind of person who cries about gun registration, while happily registering your car and not noticing the hypocrisy. Or a person who cries about the, "socialist take over of medicine" while going to the public library, or driving on a street, or using police or fire department service, etc. |
I'm sure that's what people said about the livery industry when automobiles were invented to begin with. Horses need to eat. Horses need to be cleaned up after. Saddles. Carriages. Accessories.
Or scribes, when the typewriter was invented.
Driverless cars are still going to need to be fixed. Body shops are going to lose business, no doubt, but it won't be quite as drastic as you think.
Insurance won't change much. The government will simply appease the insurance companies by making the mandatory minimum liability amount for a driverless car significantly higher to offset the low collision premiums, and you'll end up paying the same amount.
I suspect for every job lost there will be another one gained, because the industry will grow hugely.
Why?
Another comment here is from a blind person who has no need for an automobile, because he can't drive one. That changes. That's one more car owner.
Think about elderly people who decide to stop driving due to infirmity, like my great aunt who's 81. There's no reason she can't now own automobiles forever.
Think about children who can't drive today. Most families will not buy little Timmy a car, but the age at which a kid could legitimately have his/their own car drops. Instead of thinking about buying that 3rd car for a kid when he's 16, families with means might decide to buy that 3rd car when their kids are 8 or 9, so their driverless car can chaffeur them to their after school activities without requiring mom.
Which in turn frees up mom to work a full 40 hour week because she doesn't have to worry about being home at 3:00 to take Jimmy to swimming practice, which grows the economy. |
I really don't think anyone here understands how insurance companies work. When an insurance company pays a claim, that's money going the wrong way. Safer cars means fewer accidents, fewer accidents means fewer claims to pay, fewer claims = more money for insurance companies. And seeing as how nothing in this world is perfect, the government would more than likely still adhere to a mandatory car insurance policy, afterall, a certain rate of failure is always expected. So if anything, smart cars will be a huge moneymaker for insurance companies, not a deficit. So can we please get off the retarded circle jerk not based on irrational and not real-world thinking that presumes insurance companies will lobby against smart cars? Thank you. |
Posts that get upvoted are the ones that are the most readable and relatable. Because there is so much hate for Comcast, posts about the company draw redditors who may otherwise not have visited the subreddit. This means people who are not as interested in a technical post will be casting their votes for the post that was shorter, easier to read, and shares their dislike for the company. Other posts draw out more specific groups of people. For example, on the front page of the subreddit right now is a post about issues with IPv4. The people who will read the thread about that likely have some idea about what IPv4 is. I would wager that the demographics of redditors in the IPv4 thread would prove to be a more particular group than those posting about Comcast; they would be up voting posts that are more technical because they have knowledge of the subject already.
In short, lots of people know of and dislike Comcast. The high volume of traffic to those posts lowers the aggregate scores in the areas you defined.
Also, what made you interested in this in the first place? |
I think we all agree that Snapchat doesn't prevent abuse by a malicious communication partner; If something's displayed on your partner's screen, then he/she can take a picture of it.
The only way Snapchat can be useful (yes, it can), is if you trust your partner at the moment .
In that case, Snapchat protects you from:
angry exes trying to get at you afterwards
accidental discovery by nosy coworkers/family members |
I do see where you're coming from, don't get me wrong. I really do try to see it from these peoples point of view, but it's very hard. It's hard for me to think that I would ever be taken advantage of in this way, or that being taken advantage of in this way is actually "being taken advantage of."
I definitely wouldn't say anyone admires any con men, I would say that people are all too willing to ignore that there is one, hence, why I think it's an issue within our culture. They think everything is everyone elses problem, because they don't believe those people are con men, or that people mean them harm in these ways. They think they can do whatever they want, and life should form around them and keep them protected. But this makes no sense to me. In this situation I don't think Snapchat is to blame at all, and definitely aren't conning anyone. I mean maybe I'm missing the part where they explicitly state that your photos can't be saved? I mean they even have a feature where if someone takes a screen shot, it tells you. That ALONE is admittance that this can and does happen. It blows my mind that people would then act as though Snapchat is trying to get one over on anyone.
I would go even farther to say that it's the stupid and gullible that are admired, or seen as some sort of protected class. Instead of looking to correct behavior, educate, and get people to protect themselves, people scream "VICTIM BLAMING!" and act as though all of the pressure is on this system, or that system, or this company, or that law.
People need to start protecting themselves. The days of being called crazy for saying that everything is being monitored are over. In my opinion it's ludicrous that they ever existed, but it's thankfully over. It's now time to educate people on very simple things like the internet, and how their phones connect to eachother, or how simple data is stored or comes to be displayed on their phones. Taking a nude photo on a phone should be seen as something to do with extreme caution, but it seems people think it's the same as taking it with a stand alone camera with no internet connectivity. That's just not an issue with admiring a con man to me. The fact that so many actually believe these things to make sense, and put the blame on "the system" just destroys my brain completely.
The |
there's always existed this idea that, "once on the internet; forever on the internet"
Yes, I agree with you and users need to take responsibility for what they post, but that doesn't absolve the service provider from their responsibility of keeping the data secure. Just because I could care less if a video of my dog humping a lamp got leaked wide-spread on the Internet, doesn't mean I should accept sub-par security from the service I use to share that video privately.
The counter argument to that would be not using the service to begin with. That's where you get into the chicken and the egg scenario of security vs. convenience. By and large, the public has decided to accept sub-par security standards on the web. One individual quitting a service is not going to lead to a policy change. Instead, that user just loses out on the service. To use another example, depositing checks to my bank from an app on my phone probably isn't the most secure method in the world, but fuck me if it's not more convenient than the alternatives. If my account info gets leaked through some attack on the bank app, yes i'm partly to blame for using the app, but the bank is also partly to blame for not implementing tighter security. Extrapolate that to any other web service we take for granted. |
So? That is not their fault...
I don't even like SnapChat but they are trying to sell you on their app and when have you ever met a salesman who will sell you the weakness first? If I sell TVs and someone tells me they want a TV that meets certain criteria I will sell the TV on those criteria. I am not going to start the sale with "well this one has shitty viewing angles" because then nobody would buy it and I would loose my job.
I am not saying one should intentionally hide defects (though many do) but as a salesman you never open with them. This is the same in legal practice (when do you see the bad terms and conditions right at the top of a contract?) as well many other things.
Hell in this case SnapChat actually was better than most in that it put this right in the description. They could have just as easily put a link to their terms of service on a separate page and said "by using this app you agree to our TOS" then hidden that bit in the TOS. |
From an advertiser-perspective this could actually be good for consumers. If mobile traffic keeps increasing like it does but cross-device tracking remains as poor as it is chances are websites will go out of business because advertisers will keep focusing on the decreasing desktop traffic that will be unsustainable for some sites. |
More like welcome to the land of the dumb and overly easy to manipulate with clickbait articles.
Simple things like "id" is being misconstrued in half the comments much less half of what this can even be used for. Much less what a header or cookie is. |
So, I believe that All of us cooperating , open source is going to eventually make that which holds us back from fullfilling each of our unique volitions, IRRELEVANT. Within our daily lives, we will step into a more authetic praxis with regards to our processes of meeting ALL of our basic collective human-needs. This will occur out of necessity, because the Status Quo's options will eventually not be VALUABLE enough of ventures (dayinandout) for us as iindividuals to continue to opperate within that (current) SOCIO-ECONOMIC manner... what kind of lives will we have for our children under our current currency/energy/finance/ect paradigm?; what externalities from our brutal stubborness will they have to overcome?? As yourself this: How Unsustainable is the current macro Socio-Economic Political Militaristic Status Quo?
A culture of Mutual Benefit and OS knowledge-sharing could help to draw out the most innovative and creative of us to emulate eachothers unique theories or ventures(bus, nonprof, ect). We could establish networks of non-contradictory, coop processes for meeting our human needs... Alternative currencies, crowd source financing, OS coop contruction of essential services--- OPEN SOURCE, global COOP automated aquaponics systems, tiny homes, 3D PRINTING, LFTR projects, i dont know...
im just saying that if we work together and use even THE INTERNET appropriately (non-proprietary,OS-culture of bringing the future here, now) our general knowledge, and potential to develop tech-socially could explode the innovation in local chapters (mutual benefit societies), manefesting sustainable solutions for community-wide self sufficiency. The futurist in me sees AI and human coops/colabs to achieve a non-dependence on the State or mega-corporation. We can each uniquely work to build the civilization we want, by creating that which operates outside of the Establishment's contradictory technological black hole... With OS INDIVIDUATED UNITY and we could cooperatovely build unbelievable feats..
Anyway, We need to just hack the game, my friends, ONE BY ONE.
Edit. Added clarification. Lots of it... (oops sorry for replying to myself) |
Little story here.
Last March break for spring break a whole bunch of us from school went to Cayo Coco for a week of drunk in the sun fun. We had a day excursion that took us into a small village and see one of the schools. We played with the kids and chatted them up. This one little boy and I got talking and he showed me all the cool things he was learning. We ended up getting into a conversation about starcraft. I was actually quite surprised that they played computer games and had computers. We exchanged emails and write to each other time from time. I guess that's how they are able to play these online games with each other. |
This is one of the many problems of user perception. Games can't get these incredible(but real) performance gains if they're just patched to be "DirectX 12 ready". Expect new games that will use the Unreal Engine 4, the Nitrous Engine, Unity, CryEngine - and a couple others that I can't remember - to feature much more detailed worlds, superior lighting (from 4 lights in dx11 to thousands in dx12), and much better (and consistent) performance. Problem is that game studios have usually been slow to make the jump to a newer gfx API, but since Microsoft is offering the upgrade to Windows 10 for free, a lot of people will have an incentive to jump to the latest OS, which in turn will incentivize developers to deliver games written using DirectX 12. |
That is the problem; but not in the snarky way you phrase it.
With a lot of drivers, you can spread the costs over a lot of premiums. This means that every individual premium can be lower.
If there are fewer cars to insure, but the same or more people on the road, then you have:
more people to get injured
more people to get hurt
more people who sue
more people who need lifetime disability
then you have no choice to raise the premiums on the remaining drivers.
It's the same with all insurance:
health
life
car
home
social
unemployment
deposit
The more people who pay into it, the lower the individual cost can be. If you have a mass exodus of ownership, then you will have a mass increase in individual premiums.
For example, in 2014 State Farm due to causality and underwriting claims, off its $57 billion in premiums revenue from 80 million policies. A 1.7% loss means they essentially break-even on insurance.
$57 billion policy revenue
80 million policies
~$712.50 per policy per year
Lets say that autonomous vehicles cause 20% of people who would otherwise own a car to instead share a car. E.g.:
my car takes me to work
then goes home
takes my daughter to university
then goes to brother's house
which he uses to run errands
then picks up me up at 3pm
then goes to pick up daughter
And that's not even taking into account [ride-sharing companies]( where one vehicle can service literally dozen of people per day:
$57.9 billion in costs, means:
$57.9 billion revenue needed
64 million policyholders (remember, we're assuming 20% fewer vehicles)
~$904.69 per policy per year
All other things being equal:
20% fewer policy holders ==> +27.0% price increase |
If you look at the voting patterns of a typical American Republican voter, especially the older generation, you can only come to one conclusion. And that's their politics are driven not by a desire to have a better outcome for themselves and everyone else; it's to make sure that others that they deem unworthy do not have the same opportunities that they had. |
Fully wipe your system using fastboot from an external PC prior to flashing
-Disable default performance options (compcache and surface dithering)
-Replace shitty ADWLauncher with the default launcher or LauncherPro (rename the apk to Launcher.apk and push it to the /system directory for even better speed)
-Use adb to remove bullshit like Twitter, Amazon MP3, etc to get more internal space
In my experience, Firerat's scripts for changing the MTD partition sizes for more internal space and moving the apps to the SD card outside of the built in Froyo system are nothing but trouble. I just wasted another three hours getting my phone back to normal after all of my nonstock apps disappeared and my call and home buttons stopped working. The linking failed or something failed to mount on boot or some other bullshit many people experience but he doesn't acknowledge as an actual bug. |
Most movies these days suck ass. Why would anyone risk years in jail or retarted fines for downloading pirated movies? Doing so is lieterally not worth it. So what if the studios want to make sure that Pirates don't into their piece of the pie. Can anyone honestly say that downloading a pirated movie/TV show is worth all the potential harrasment/legal trouble? If you want the damn movie so much wait a few months until it's on DVD/Blue Ray or download it from a repitible source. |
802.11s]( is still draft and I have no idea how long it will take to finalize, but there is progress being made to get support into [Linux]( and [FreeBSD](
This stuff looks so fucking awesome, I can hardly wait. /nerdgasm
edit: |
Erik Naggum had a very interesting comment about what too long a period of growth does to an industry. As far as I can recall the |
There is a lot of politics behind the scenes with regards to foxconn, what the owner says in public, and China.
China frequently uses the owner of foxconn as a voice box. For example, before the last Taiwanese presidential election, the CEO of foxconn heavily criticized the fact that a lot of his fellow manufactoring owners were having dinner with the opposing presidential candidate (this politician was largely anti-china to put it simply). The CEO of foxconn is Taiwanese himself who has, in the past, supported nationalistic endeavors.
The relationship between foxconn and China is complicated to say the least. Both parties don't really like each other, but both parties need each other.
I can offer another example: a week ago, news came out about a mass suicide threat from Foxconn employees. At face value, that may have seemed like a general complaint against poor working conditions (totally legit), but for those who follow the behind the scene workings of chinese politics, there were other motivations that probably led to this sudden threat.
Before the mass suicide threat, China had been forcing Foxconn to move their factories from the coastline into the countryside to try to even out the income disparity between the two regions of the country (people in the countryside make even less then their city counterparts). Obviously, Foxconn was not very happy with this, but they decided to play along. A week later, Foxconn's CEO announced that he would begin implementing plans to introduce robots to lower the need for human labor in his plants (an obvious jab back at China and a very real, plausible threat as Taiwan has very high tech manufacturing robots). After this was announced, this mass suicide news comes out (I have to look up how long afterwards). It is suspected that China might have organized this to hobble Foxconn's rebellious nature and further alleviate the income disparity between the countryside and the coastline (by forcing a pay raise). |
Perhaps a story of a similar event would help you get the ball rolling on getting your rightfully deserved prize.
Years ago me and my wife went into a store called Media Play (i don't think they are around anymore), and they were having a competition on the Nintendo 64 playing the game Tetris (or so we thought). The winner got an acoustic guitar that was signed by Edwin McCain, or a little boom box radio thing or a $100 gift certificate for the store (my wife being a big fan of McCain combined with her uncanny talent for Tetris, we thought she was a shoe in).
There were only about 20 people at the event, and when we got there they showed this weird game that had just come out called Tetri-Sphere, which turns out is a pretty cool game and all, but it hadn't even been released yet so there wasn't a person at the event that had the first clue how to play it...playing for this guitar against I'm guessing developers since they were pretty good at it already.
Well after a few minutes my wife's turn comes up and she some how walks up, figures the game out in a few seconds and proceeds to whoop the first guys ass, then the second guy, and then finally, one of the suits that was there as kind of the "expert" on the game...they were pretty quiet as she was the only one that had actually managed to beat not one, but ALL of them at the game. Everyone else had backed away from the consoles after losing but she maintained right next to it waiting for her prize...then we hear...
"Thanks guys for coming out! Look for Tetri-Sphere in stores this summer!" (or something like that)
...and then they proceeded to start packing everything up. My wife and I were just standing there kind of naively thinking they were gearing up to award her the prize and after about 15min. she asks one of them where should she pick up the guitar (which was no where to be seen). The guy goes "Oh ma'am, this was simply to show off the game, there was never really going to be a "winner"...", then handed her a Tshirt. She went into a full out Cuban rage and threw the shirt back at the guy and told him "Bring me my guitar NOW...", this command drew the attention of the other "participants" to walk back to the area and start inquiring as to what was going down.
Finally, after a few minutes, one of the reps came back over with a media play rep and explained that they brought the new game out to demo and didn't think anyone would win, as nobody had ever played or seen the game before, and offered to give her a $25 gift certificate for her time...this wasn't happening, and she started a mob with the other people (and myself) demanding the rightful prize for winning. They explained that the guitar was part of another marketing display and could not be given away...she turned on the faucets and let the tears start doing her dirty work, and she got the whole store (over 100 people) behind her chanting "CHEATS! CHEATS! CHEATS!"(referring to the store clerks) and "GIVE HER THE GUITAR!" It was honestly awesome, but i thought we were going to get arrested, lol.
Finally the store manager came out and asked what he could do to disperse the crowd and my wife, with tears in her eyes said "Give me my guitar please." And the manager hander her the guitar and asked everyone to leave, then proceeded to lay into the guys that brought the demo as it turned out they, with no intention or plan to give a "prize" away, randomly grabbed stuff off the marketing displays and used them as "props". She got her guitar, the crowd cheered and i think the store closed down about a year later, lol! (sweet sweet karma) |
So as a proud owner of a Samsung galaxy s2 and with my best friend sporting the Note, we're going to go hit the Windows challenge, possibly filming one another's endeavors discreetly.
So far the challenges I've been able to discover are as follows (and here's how I intend on winning them):
Send the same friend a Facebook message and a text (home screen applaunch/direct text shortcuts)
Translate a menu (Google goggles)
Check weather in two cities (home screen Widgets)
Any other challenges I'm missing / anywhere I can see a list of the current challenges? |
I too was scammed by them a few weeks ago.
The prize: $100 Gift Card
My Phone: Samsung Galaxy Nexus.
Task: Take Picture of Sign and Upload to Facebook.
They had me connect to their store wifi which took some time to get an IP.
They counted down and I took the photo and put the phone down on the table as it was uploading the pic to FB.
They were still taking a picture when my phone was uploading the picture. I could tell because I heard the shutter sound on their phone. I beat their phone in taking the picture, but the upload took forever.
After wandering the store, I took a look at their phone and did a speedtest on the wifi. After multiple runs, we confirmed they were throttling other phones. The results were like comparing 3G to LTE.
After making a big stink, they agreed to a rematch. This time I used 4G-LTE and smoked their phone. I shouted done while they were still taking the picture. I won but their excuse was it has to be one the first try. I tried to get them to do another for a best 2 out of 3 but they refused. |
The fact that you dont keep a lock screen on your phone is crazy. You were obviously scamming the test, and looking for loopholes to exploit.
Without a lockscreen your phone is libel to do all sorts of things in your pocket or bag that you would never want happening. Everyone has a lock screen enabled and Microsoft knows this, anyone who doesn't have it enabled is only doing so to scam the test and they will most likely enable the lock screen after walking out the door.
Everyone is quick to call BS on Microsoft but I think the person who wrote this article went into that store with the lock screen off with the intention of deceit, Microsoft called him on his bullshit and op got butt hurt and came to reddit. |
Scandinavia is a geographical location, namely the Scandinavian penisula. So technically only Sweden and Norway are "Scandinavian" countries. A more sensible categorization would be linguistic, in which case Finns fall out aswell, since Finnish is fenno-ugric language, and not Scandinavian. |
Semi-related to this: my home country Norway, and particularly the capitol Oslo, have gained recognition for a high density of quality coffee spots. Some of the grocers and baristas have developed a particular style of roasting the beans which differ significantly from French and Italian roast.
You can read a little about it here: |
Yes, TrueCrypt. The best part is creating "Hidden Volumes", in case you are forced to type in a password.
I encrypted my entire 1.5 TB external hard drive, and made two partitions. When it is plugged into my PC, it shows the entire drive as full, and you cannot access anything (You must mount it with TrueCrypt, otherwise your OS think's the drive is corrupted). I can then type in my real password, and my personal files that I want encrypted show up. However, since I created two partitions, if I type in my 'fake' password, my other partition shows up, and the only file there is a nonstop loop video of Nyan Cat :] |
Yes, the hardest reason for people to read your mail is, in fact, the laws. The laws that say you can't open someone's mail without specific reasons -- and the fact that if the mail is indeed opened, someone within the chain of the communication will be aware that it was intercepted/viewed. But it's that last point which really makes it all work. I know if I drop off my mail I will be completely informed on the integrity of that communication... quite easily too.
Accountability is the issue. And physical mail, in addition to laws, make this relatively safe... and has been so since wax-seals of ancient times.
These days, however, digital communications make it exceedingly easy for those who have no reason (or even no known reason by those within the communication) to completely circumvent citizens' rights simply for the fact that it is easier to do so. That doesn't make it right.
Even with laws in place, they are meaningless without accountability... and small factions of those who either do not care about being held accountable, or have means to evade such accountability, can do incredibly harmful things in a digital environment under the guise of government good. |
They are not being extradited. They are facing charges in the UK and will go to a UK prison.
Being raped in the ass is rare in UK prisons, as it should be. It's considered, you know, gay. And usually tough criminals don't like gays. You could be the biggest toughest criminal in a UK prison, one day decide to rape a man in the ass, and the next day you'd have zero respect with most of prison wanting to kill you. |
I was working at CompUSA when we did a 'virus scan' - as we called it - on a customer's computer. Dozens upon dozens, hundreds perhaps, of real deal photos of child pornography came up. There was no question that these were young children engaged in sex acts with adults and other minors.
The floor of the tech shop turned into a scene from Twelve Angry Men. Some technicians wanted to call the police and others wanted to bash the guys face in. While everyone was deliberating one older technician deleted the images. I still regret not calling police.
Despite that regret, I was brutally scarred from having seen those images. The destruction of innocence of those children was documented profoundly.
Then, I wouldn't be able to comprehend doing what this person did as a contractor for Google. Now, I've been desensitized by the internet. |
Best case scenario, since 30k/yr isn't much (and will be even less over time) is to get whatever job you feel like, let's say an exceptional slacker job that pays 20k/yr, or 17k after tax(simplified). You pull 13k out to supplement your income to 30k.
Including capital gains taxes, your nest egg is a little over 600k after 6 years (603397.14).
Maybe at this point you decide you don't want to be a fancy paperweight, but want to throw your hands at a keyboard wildly at an office for a bit more money, and you want to raise your standard of living. You find a position that carries almost no responsibility, but the pay is still shit because of it--27k. Good news is it actually comes with benefits--now you can get those wisdom teeth out! After taxes and benes, you're pulling in 21k, and you decide to raise your standard of living to 50k year--pulling out 29k from your fund.
Of course, you're constantly coming in sleepless or still drunk, but you're cheaper than anyone else they can afford to hire, and you do your job well enough. 4 years in, you have an "incident" at a cantina and...let's just say you're not on speaking terms with your friends for a while. Your ostracizing causes you to focus on your work for once, and (oops) you're promoted. Nothing big, you're still handling duties a chimp could do, but you're pulling 30k---24k net.
At this point, you decide to lower your standard of living a little bit, down to 45k (pulling 21k in returns as income). Knowing that drinking to excess leads to hot sauce bottles going places they shouldn't has sobered you up some. You notice your lifestyle is strikingly similar to your menial paperweight days though--as well it should! 10 years of 3% inflation compounding means what would have cost 30k before now costs a little over 40k, and you've got a few extra costs at this point too--maybe you'd bought a house or a new car while you were living it up. Essentially you're back where you started. Your nest egg is up to 631069.19 though, which is nice.
This new "responsible you" persists for 3 more years, working hard to try to redeem yourself because of the nightmares that poor barista will forever be subject to, and your boss gives you a 2% raise each year. Even though you know this doesn't even cover inflation, you smile wide, gritting your teeth a little harder each time. As a good financial planner, you manage to keep yourself at a 45k lifestyle for these 3 years, knowing it'll pay off in the end. Basically you knock 500 off the income you're pulling from your fund.
THIS IS RETARDED!
...you scream out to your boss, 13 years after declaring you'd never have to work again. And it's true, the poor way he's going about giving raises means that, because of inflation, you're currently making less in real wages than you did on your first day of being a slacker paperweight 13 years ago. Your boss is fully understanding and gives you a large raise to pay you what you're worth fires you on the spot.
Whatever man, I'm living the dream. And I'm never ever working again. And I'm going back to my 50k/yr lifestyle (which now costs 61.5k/yr). Hell, I'm even going to write a blog about my experiences!
And so your new blog "Hot Whiskey Butt" becomes a rousing success. You're making an amazing amount from your blogging and ad revenue--a whopping 14.5k/yr net! Yeah, your average blogger doesn't make much. Still, you pull 50k yearly from your nest egg and keep it up and pay your own insurance. To make the math simple, we'll assume your blogs grows enough over time to combat inflation.
Fast forward to 45 years after the initial scenario. Are you still alive? Yes? Well, fuck, that's too bad, you just ran out of money. But hey, those last 32 years were pretty amazing, right? And it's not like you didn't make little life adjustments along the way to keep you going because the narrator of your story is getting tired of writing, eh? |
I'm lazy, and that was a long article. Can someone give me a |
For writing an article about Reddit, they really have no idea what |
Correct, but you also pay taxes on that gain. I enjoy solving problems like this, so here's something that may help you out:
>If you're looking to live off a stream of passive income and know how much money you can get by on in after tax dollars today , this equation will tell you how much principle you'll need:
>* X+iX(1-t)-piX = X+Y
>Plug in your tax rate for t, interest earned for i, expected inflation for pi, and how much money you need in after tax dollars for Y, and solve for X where X is the principle needed.
>Along with the formula above, if you know how much capital you need today (X in the previous equation) and you know how much money you have now you can use the following equality to find out how long a lump sum investment (the money you have now) will take to grow into your inflation adjusted today's needed principle:
>* B((1+i)^x ) = C((1+pi)^x )
>Where B is the amount you have today, C is the amount you need to comfortably retire (X in previous equality), i is interest, and pi is inflation. Solve for x to get number of years.
> Example:
>Let's say you can reasonably yield 7%, your taxes are 35%, and inflation is 3%; in order for you to have a real gain of 70K a year you are going to need X dollars. That is, you must solve for the following:
>* X+.07X(1-.35)-.03X = X+70,000
>Solving for X shows you'll need $4,516,129 to meet your goal of an indefinite 70K a year in after-tax real terms. We can check this math further:
>* Principle = 4,516,129.03
7% Growth = 4,832,258.06
Gain = 316,129.03
After tax gain = 205,483.87
Loss on inflation = 135,483.87 (based off principle)
Total gain = 70,000
>In the past 50 years the S&P has returned a CAGR of 11% while inflation was around 3%.
>We know a few things:
>* In order for your principle to keep up with inflation it'll need to grow by 3%
Historically, if you were to invest in an S&P index you would have returned, on average, 11% a year.
>So we have two curves where one is growing faster than the other and at some point they will intersect. The point of intersection will be when:
>* 1,000,000(1.11^x ) = 4,516,129.03(1.03^x )
>Solving for x we get approximately 20 years. Meaning, if you have 1M today and put the money in an index fund that tracks the S&P and if the S&P continues to return - on average - 11% a year it would only take you 20 years before you can get an inflation adjusted 70,000 in real, after-tax income on a security that yields 7%.
Edited:
Clarity |
That's an interesting point, and there's actually an enormous risk there. You see, the more that people fear the loss of privacy, the more likely they are to want to use a VPN, and they'll pay good money for it. The NSA could set up companies to provide VPN, but also spy on everything passing through them. Then, the NSA would be in a position to earn a lot of money if people started using VPNs. All they'd have to do is create a scandal about how much they're spying on everyone, and the money would start rolling in...
You're really just speculating here, so let's try not to do that since it's off topic.
The main issue at stake here is regarding the everyday joe having an online footprint. I'm a real guy with a job, and I'm fyeah, I play some online games as some other name, I like songs on soundcloud as some other username, I friend people on facebook, I have twitter, I have a footprint. It's really easy to tie all those things together because they all at some point have initiated data from the same connection, my ISP, which is located in the city where I'm known to live. If the NSA wanted to start profiling me for any reason it wouldn't take them long to paint a pretty simple picture. Hell they could do it in a month just by asking to see the http requests coming out of my cable connection.
Now say I'm connecting to the www with a VPN with 10,000 other people. My ISP only knows that I do all my traffic through some place in Sweden, or Murica, or wherever, so when the NSA comes knocking they say "sawry." Sure, let's say the NSA is tracking data by strapping a box onto the backbone outlet of my VPN, so they know that fyeah and the real me and the real you and the real other guys and some other dude on myspace and all this stuff happens at this node. So far, with no prior knowledge, they have no idea who is connected to what unless my computer is giving a fingerprint of me in the http requests by my system specs (see The VPN doesn't log, so there is no history of when or where, but the NSA will keep their own records. So I'm uploading some shit on dropbox, and I push "submit" to this post, and out of my VPN is the HTTP POST. How would this be traced back to me? That I pushed data at the same timetsamp as the output packet that they are tracing? I'm pushing data all day long like it's my job, as are the other 10,000 people. Hell 9,999 of them are just sending keep alive's every 120 seconds, and that's like 83.325 a second. Without internal VPN logging there is no way to correlate.
And that's the whole point of a VPN, transparency. If the NSA said "Yo dawgs we are putting a box in your building so that we can figure out if fyeah is Carlos Santiago, dat cool?" my VPN should say "Nah dawg" or "Yeah dog it cool, but we're telling everybody we're breached as fuck because they think we don't log dawg." |
Technologically
Ahead of time they setup monitoring systems in the backbones of the telecom companies. When you place a call or initiate communications with a server on the internet, it has to go through the telecoms' backbones on route to its destination. Due to the fact there isn't encryption on telephone calls and most internet traffic, the carrier has the ability to hear the communication. Since the carrier can get the info, the previously setup monitoring systems can to.
This lets any traffic that isn't encrypted on route to its destination to be easily seen by prying eyes and also metadata of encrypted coms.
Now, for encrypted traffic there are monitoring systems setup at most major US tech companies, with gag orders for them to not talk about them. Any encrypted communications with them are decrypted by them, copied by the monitoring systems, then processed by the company to fulfill whatever request was put in.
Legally
As for what is well known at this point, getting internet traffic on a whim is performed and getting telephone metadata on a whim is performed. There has been no notable evidence that the contents of telephone calls can be seen without a warrant.
Viewing the internet traffic like that is almost certainly a violation of the 4th, however, that has yet to go to court. Viewing metatada of telephone and internet traffic may or may not be a violation of the 4th. It has been upheld in court, but to my knowledge it hasn't gone to the supreme court yet.
Conclusion ( |
i think that's the point. its the kind of fear the government wants to instill into you, to allow yourself to be taxed and spied on and make it seem like they will accomplish better tighter security on you in the future. they want you to think there are terrorists and they want you to think the government should be looking for them. respectfully, if that was true, that would make boston a conspiracy as well as 9/11. using the fear of that event to drive you to vote for any politician who might suggest your freedoms are under attack and in need of protecting; using your newfound fear to fund their massive lie. the reality in such a case would mean your freedoms were never in any real danger, and there was no foothold one party or politician might have over another to sway your vote; enter war. hell, at that point enter a decades long conflict built to perpetuate its own lie, and create a rift between political parties to ensure that the scene never gets dull enough to become less lucrative or less appealing. |
I disagree with so much in this article, it's insane. I don't think they know what they're talking about.
Edit:
I personally think wearables were really cool this year. A few of them were overhyped (Samsung Galaxy Gear?). I'm not sure if Glass counts because it's not publicly ready yet, but for an early product, it sure made some news and appears to be a really nice product.
Mobile phones turned out pretty cool this year too. You've got Samsung introducing features like using motions to use your phone and using your phone without touching it. I forget what else they introduced but they sure introduced some new features that other phones didn't have. As for iPhone, you have our first 64bit smartphone, along with a fingerprint sensor . Although iPhone doesn't have the most RAM of the bunch, it actually out-performed all of the competition by over 25%. Mobile phones are becoming more and more like consoles in terms of performance.
Tesla and SpaceX introduced some cool tech this year, if that counts in this article. SpaceX has a rocket that's almost ready for Mars. |
The MIT list is full of "could potentially" technologies.
The net result is a list of 4 real-world developments:
Deep learning.
Temporary social media.
Smart watches.
Big data from cheap phones.
Of those four, I only find deep learning and smart watches interesting. Both require further development. Deep learning requires us to think of new applications where we can apply real-time mass data analysis. Smart watches would benefit greatly from extremely power-efficient radio transceivers, sensors, and display technologies. Also, to maximize smart watch utility, we can think of sensor swarms, for which U Berkeley has set up a specific lab. |
No its nothing new, since streaming is nothing new in general.
But in Sweden the ATV is 4 times the price, which makes a pretty considerable difference if you only want to stream.
I own the first generation but it's pretty worthless in Sweden, since all the apps are American and does not work here except for YouTube which is pretty nice.
The reason I bought it was to jailbreak it and put Plex on it which works pretty good, but if I would buy a box to the TV today it would definitely be a chromecast. |
I remember installing an HP NIC adapter card (jet card?) into the back of a Laserjet IV or V back in the late 90's and setting up the static IP through the mono-chromatic LCD on the top of the printer. Now all printers are standard with wifi. |
Fax machines suck. They take forever to handshake, and when someone got your fax machine phone number to send spam to, it cost the machine owner a good amount of coin in toner.
And god forbid, if you have to work with a company that only accepts faxes. The destination fax machine might not work or have quality issues, resulting in frustration and multiple attempts before a transmission completes. Not to mention a "good model" might not work properly with digital telephony. |
You are right, there is a lot of good quality content, but remember, to get ALL of this content you need (this is loosely what the cable company calls their subscription packages):
Basic Cable tier
Upraded Cable Tier
Digita Cable Tier
HBO + Showtime Premium
Sports and Information Package
Variety Package
An oar to paddle through all the shit.
Not to mention the cost of the equipment, taxes and fees. Now, I am sure you are aware of the cost of these packages. The point that PerInception was making was the fact tn is so saturated with other bullshit to get to the good stuff. He/She is correct in stating all of the former quality channels are now garbage largely in content, when in the past when you turned on the History Channel, it was all about History. Back in the day, before the days of digital cable, cable gave you roughly 50 channels, with more quality content per channel. Now each channel owns a million other channels that you are forced to subsidize in order to get to the good stuff, at a much higher cost. I could tangent off onto why it costs so much, but it is mainly the broadcasters and their fees to the cable companies. |
When I signed up with Shaw, I said, "I only want internet. What deals do you have right now?" They gave me second tier internet (can't remember the speed) at about $35/month for two years, then it bumps to $65. That two years is nearly up, so I'll be calling them in the near future to either extend that service at the same price or lower. If they refuse, then I'm off to a competitor.
A co-worker of mine switches companies every six months to whoever has the best deal. Just this week he ended his 6 month deal with Shaw and went to Telus for $30/month for internet and cable. That'll last for 6 months, and then he'll switch to another company. No setup fees. No cancellation fees. I might just follow suit. |
Wishful thinking. Why do you think that the cable companies just destroyed net neutrality? Because in the near future, your Internet will be billed exactly like cable. |
If you get a printer that costs more than 150 dollars it doesnt break and fuck up constantly. People only have that impression of printer because they buy the shit 50-150 dollar printers. I have a business class Brother laserjet that I paid around 400 dollars for 10 years ago, the laser toner is still at over 90% full, and its NEVER had a issue where it cant print/scan/etc. It has always works and never broke and ive never had to even think about ink. That and the 800dpi prints in full color look amazing! And it prints at like 40-50 PPM. |
If two people have faxes, and they are awesome and somehow work better than your printer, print clear, and are easy to operate
IT guy here who had a job with lots of fax based clients (doctors). Faxes are never clear. They all look like shit.
The machines are "easy" to operate because grandpa has owned the same machine for years and has learned its shitty interface. Remember mp3 players before the ipod? You'd have an A-B switch, big clunky buttons, constantly replacing batteries. Sure it "worked" and people got used it it, but it was shit.
Oh heaven forbid you fax between two different manufacturers. I've seen HPs refuse to talk to Brothers and Canons refuse to talk to Konicas.
Heaven forbid you have to talk to all these machines with all their issues. Only a handful of fax modems actually work with all these shitty implementations and you better be using the right driver for them. We'd have to write custom connection strings on a per model basis because of how poorly this stuff worked. Meanwhile, email works out of the box perfectly. SMTP just works.
Heaven forbid there's any noise on the line or some "clever" person shoved their fax machine on their voip/vonage/whatever line. They'll blame you for things not working. Afterall the fax machine is plugged in!
Oh and people lose their shit at the fax machine. They can't read error pages, have no idea what a busy signal means, get impatient with the scanning time, walk away before the system has a chance to get the error and print the error page, get pissed at the quality, ambiguous error messages, have no idea how to do anything but press 'send,' etc. The fax machine itself is super user hostile.
Faxes need to be abstracted away with services like efax or myfax. There's no reason to actually own the machine, which is an environmental disaster of constantly printing and wasting paper, electricity, and toner. Sending PDFs via email makes a lot more sense. |
In a 32 bit processor, one base instruction is a single byte.
at 64 bytes, exactly, that's 64,000 instructions that can be organized in a multitude of different ways to accomplish a single goal.
A function that takes arguments and manipulates them could be no larger than two instructions.
A loop that runs an infinite number of times can be written in two lines of assembly, and one of them isn't even code
In mips:
here: #not code, utilized at assemble to create branch instrunction
beq $0, $0, here
infinite loop, equivalent to
do{
}while(true)
Take one such loop and add a function call into it and you can have 10 instructions that build GB of data.
do{
funct1(arg1) //does data manipulation on arg1
funct2(arg2) //does different data manipulation on arg2
add(funct3(arg1,arg2) //adds result of a third manipulation based on arg1 and arg2 to data set
}while(arg1 < arg2)
If each function is comprised of 10 instructions, that code would be less than 50 bytes in size. |
This happened to a friend of mine when he crossed the border and returned after only an hour. He lived in a Canadian border town, and cigarettes were 1/4 the cost in the US. Of course this seemed highly suspect to the border guards, who promptly dismantled his car to find the drugs they believed he had. They found nothing and told him he was free to go. Of course he was now without his car and home was not in walking distance. This was before cellphones, but it's not likely anyone would have been willing to go to the border to put his car together for him even if he could call. Anyway, after an hour or so, another car arrived at the border to cross, and they were blocked by the pile of parts that had once been my friend's car. There was only one lane at this crossing, and the border guards had foolishly searched his car on the road, so they were forced to reassemble his car (not without a good amount of resentment, of course). I don't think he ever went through the trouble of buying cheaper cigarettes south of the border again.
Edit: |
Law student here, hope I can provide some insight (note: none of this is intended to be "legal advice." If you have a personal situation involving a warrantless search or seizure, contact an actual attorney). The Fourth Amendment sets forth a general rule, subject to a few, narrow exceptions: Absent a warrant based on probable cause, the (state and federal) government is not allowed to conduct searches and seizures.
So the first question that must be answered is "did a 'search' occur? (i.e. is the 4th amendment even implicated?)" A "search" occurs when a person has a subjective expectation of privacy that society recognizes as objectively reasonable or when the government trespasses into a constitutionally protected area. The court has already previously recognized that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in merely the numbers a phone dials. Therefore, if the police only look at the call log on the phone, it likely will not be deemed a "search." Also at play here is something called the "third party doctrine," which says that anything you knowingly share with a third party, you run the risk of them turning it over to the government, so there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. So here, for example, if the government looks at photos on an Instagram application, you are likely to see arguments by the government that they knowingly shared those photos with their followers and with Instagram, and thus the government can view those photos without constituting a "search." Whether the Supreme Court will agree with this argument is a little contentious, as the more liberal members of the bench have recently criticized the third party doctrine. For the sake of argument, if the Court doesn't buy the third party doctrine argument, it will look at subjective actions taken by the cellphone owner to keep the info private - password locking your phone, highest privacy settings on your apps, etc. Note that of the two cases being heard, one involves a flip phone while the other involves a smart phone. I'd expect there to be a much higher expectation of privacy in the smart phone than the flip phone because they are capable of storing almost your entire life (photos, calendar, bank info, etc.)
If the Court concludes that a "search" occurred, the government must rely on an exception to the warrant requirement to justify the search. One of those exceptions is called "search incident to a lawful arrest" and is often called a "SILA" search. In order for a SILA search to occur, there must be a lawful arrest, and the search must occur incident to (immediately before, during, or immediately after) that arrest, and the area searched must be within the arestee's arm's length (or the passenger compartment of an unsecured arrestee's car if the arrest occurs while near the car). There are two justifications for a SILA search: 1) officer safety (e.g. want police to be able to protect themselves if arrestee happens to be carrying a weapon like a knife or a gun) 2) prevent the destruction of evidence (e.g. arrestee takes incriminating wad of paper in pocket and swallows it).
Absent a situation where the cell phone is used to remotely detonate a bomb, the "officer safety" justification is wholly absent when it comes to cell phone searches. That leaves the government to solely rely on the "destruction of evidence" rationale. Let's say that the defendant is arrested for selling drugs and he was tagging himself on Instagram to let his buyers know where he was selling on a given day. Here, the arrestee will argue there is no threat that the evidence will be destroyed - the arrestee and the phone are in police custody and the police could obtain a warrant to search the phone while the arrestee is being processed and booked. The government will counter that if a co-conspirator learns of the arrest, they may try to remotely wipe the incriminating evidence from the phone. I wouldn't be surprised to see the Court endorse a rule where the police are expected to obtain a warrant when practical to do so in a timely manner (e.g. if the jurisdiction allows for a telephonic warrant), but the police may search without a warrant when there is a legitimate risk of destruction of evidence because it takes too long to obtain a warrant (e.g. if the arrest takes place at 2 AM in a rural area where it is hard to locate a magistrate). |
Zach, I'm also a fellow aspiring tech journalist, and I admire the fact that you are even writing, as writing can be difficult to do.
However, this headline is absolutely bullshit. I was thinking of writing an article about this apparent "universal" hatred of Facebook Messenger, but there are a large number of oversights, not only from yourself, but the reddit community.
Just because you and your friends don't use it, doesn't mean it's not used. In my case, I hate Facebook, it's Newsfeed, it's Events, it's god damn everything. The only Facebook product I use is in fact Messenger, as it reminds me of MSN Messenger, which everyone in my high school used. When MSN stopped being "cool", everyone was already on Facebook, and Messenger became the default option. If I'm to be honest, I can openly say that Facebook Messenger is a great utility, and is everything I wanted MSN Messenger to be one day.
Now, you might be saying, "I don't know anyone who uses Messenger! All my friends use WhatsApp!" Where I live, none of my friends use WhatsApp. You know why they don't use WhatsApp, because why the fuck should they install ANOTHER messaging app, when they and everyone they already know are on Facebook - which offers pretty good video and voice calling, in association with text messages.
IMHO - What'sApp, Viber, and all those other apps have't got shit on Facebook to me. Why? Because no one wants to install a fourteenth fucking messaging app, and create a millionth god damn account for which they can't even remember the password. Furthermore, Facebook Messenger also works seamlessly across all of their devices, tablets, phone and PC. WhatsApp and other apps don't have the greatest ease of use on a computer/laptop.
Now, back to your article: You just quoted three people on Twitter, and apparently this is enough to say people don't want the Messenger App. This article is you chucking out an opinion piece with insubstantial evidence. Generalisations are DANGEROUS things when they're the foundation of your entire ideology.
Good on you for getting them upvotes though. Facebook hate = clicks. |
No one does, but Facebook wants to corner the market occupied by Skype/viber/whatsapp.
The problem right now is people only see it as a pointless second app to send PM's, which used to work perfectly in the original app. Once enough people have it (critical mass), everyone will love it for the free 'text messaging' and VoIP. |
I find it sad that this would not take off in western markets. in the US in particular this would be something that maybe one or two test buses would be equipped with and then it would quickly be forgotten as either no one would use it (for the lack of being informed) or it ends up costing to much to replace or retrofit the existing fleets.
the US has a bad reputation of running their public transportation fleets into the ground since the early days of consumer automobiles hit the roads. much of the same behavior has been endemic of how the systems are maintained, here in AZ the fleet recently received 20 new buses that are no where near what they need to replace their entire fleet. They intend to run each and every vehicle until it dies on the side of the road (maybe going out in a literal blaze) and cannibalizing the hulks for parts.
For as much as features would benefit riders and make the experience pleasant the logic that would go into providing free charging or public wifi can also be applied to the number of vehicles that has a working air-conditioner. I've given myself heat stroke on the over crowded buses in the middle of an Arizona summer because the company won't run enough vehicles to move people without treating them like cattle. |
Yea, I know... but I'm just not sure how to do it. I'll be happy to edit post and add |
Corporate theft as far as I'm concerned. But it's not just what companies like AT&amp;T do to their customers either that I consider corporate theft. I worked for a retailer of theirs, spring mobile, five years ago. I was a sales associate at a mall and they had a bunch of sales contests going on for Black Friday. Now I'm a very average sales person, I'm not pushy enough, but it was Black Friday and I sold everyone who said hi to me, a phone. Why? Because they wanted one when they came in, it wasn't selling, it was being a cashier. My manager calls me-he'd taken the day off of course-to let me know that I'm not only on top for my state, I had sold the most cell phones in the entire company by three devices.
End of the day comes up and I sell this lady a four line deal, all smart phones, which is a big sale. To upgrade someone's account they have to have an ID, account password and know their social. We check ID first and if it matches start the sale because it has to go in order. Everything in RQ4 then AT&amp;Ts system. Well the lady was an authorized user on the account-held permissions to make upgrades and such- but couldn't remember her husbands last four so she couldn't use her phone after we processed the upgrade. Rather than return the equipment or call her hubby on my phone, she told me it was no big deal and she'd have him help her when she got home. What she actually did was go to the corporate AT&amp;T across the street and said I had upgraded her account without permission, in an attempt to get them to activate her phones right then.
So despite how crazy that is, and that you have to get their account password to even get in their account as a retailer, they believed her. I went to work the next day expecting $200 cash, tickets to my local nba team, and a back pack with an iPad and iTunes gift card. That's what I had won. Instead I got fired for fraud. The corporate store called their regional, who called my regional, who called my manager, who fired me without doing an investigation of any kind. I called the lady and asked if she could call and explain what had happened and retract her statement, guess what, SHE DID. They still didn't give me what I had won, but gave me back my job with a write up on probation. |
This whole idea is delusional. "Net Neutrality" is setting the stage for government censorship. Government will HAVE to monitor the network traffic to ensure companies are complying with the regulations. Its only a matter of time before they either 1. spy on that info 2. restrict it. Government ALWAYS suffers from scope creep and always seeks to expand its power. Government, like bacteria in a petri dish, grows until its exhausts all of its resources and then it collapses. |
Eh. At this point I assume everyone who is going to see it, has seen it. Making posts on reddit isn't going to solve anything and it's pretty clear cut they're going to go through with killing Net Neutrality as clear as it is that they're going to allow the Comcast/TWC merger. If they were going to shoot these things down, they would have already. They're just going to extend their deadlines and hearing times an arbitrary number of times to make it seem like they're listening when in reality they're just going to pass it through like they're being paid to. |
It's only been the last decade that things have been deregulated and look where it's gotten us.
My home bandwidth is 400 times what it was in 2002. (50mbps vs 128 k bps)
My monthly data bill is 1/3 of what it was in 2002 - in real dollars, not adjusting for inflation. (I had ISDN at the time, it was goddam expensive)
I've replaced my POTS lines with VOIP, knocks another $60/month off my expenses.
My cellphone bill has gone up, I'll say that much - but I've got a 4g smartphone and use 10 gigs of data a month, instead of a nokia voice-only phone. And don't need a 2-way pager any more (remember those?)
My cable TV bill has also gone up, slightly faster than the rate of inflation, but I've got another 300 channels of ... ok you pretty much got me there. |
My home bandwidth is 400 times what it was in 2002. (50mbps vs 128kbps)
Honestly, it's not at all hard to argue we'd be be doing a lot better than that if things had stayed regulated. 50mbps is way behind the curve. Especially considering how many billions upon billions upon billions (300 billions, I believe) of dollars the taxpayers have pumped into the industry via both the front door (as paying subscribers) and the back (subsidies, tax breaks, etc.)
> My monthly data bill is 1/3 of what it was in 2002 - in real dollars, not adjusting for inflation. (I had ISDN at the time, it was goddam expensive)
I'm pretty sure that would have happened, regulation or not. Shit gets cheaper as tech matures. And I'm willing to bet you wouldn't have had that ISDN line at all, or through whoever your ISP was (if not the telephone company) or at that low (but admittedly new-tech expensive) price if it had not been regulated at the time.
> I've replaced my POTS lines with VOIP, knocks another $60/month off my expenses.
That's not really germane. Would have happened regardless.
> My cellphone bill has gone up, I'll say that much - but I've got a 4g smartphone and use 10 gigs of data a month, instead of a nokia voice-only phone. And don't need a 2-way pager any more (remember those?)
Welcome to the march of progress. And now you're staring down the barrel of Data Caps which manufacture a fictitious scarcity and opens up Paid Partnerships with your fave content providers (who will, of course, pass the ISP's charges back on to you) and lovely "bundled" services. You get to be screwed coming and going.
> |
Hopefully by then, all that evil technology will stop advancing and even stop working then we can get our jobs back from those damnable steam looms. |
I don't know how i feel about this. I believe it comes down to the idea of "self preservation" and what intelligence is. If something had free will (The idea that it could choose to be altruistic or not) means that in some way it would understand the concept of preservation (Self and Others - regardless of form). In a more linear sense, at least evolution. By destroying yourself / your creator you would end that cycle unless you knew that you could keep replicating. Now, obviously it could just be wonky AI but would be just hook up capabilities to launch nukes? Or even assuming they are adaptive and learn to bypass new security as we create it (Like the Cylons in BSG) then we need to adapt as a civilization to either not have these types of capabilities (Which would be ideal but seemingly unrealistic as something isn't a weapon until its used as a weapon..fork,knives,sharp stick) or move towards a modular, decentralized system without removing humans from the system - and in turn providing "purpose" to humans. (But not specifically these two)
I believe our present course of centralization, all open access, terrible security is what needs to modified in line with these types of technologies. Unfortunately the leading culture seems to focus on Speed / ease of use over security or even properly understanding the risks outside of a NOW mindset.
Now side point - How would this manifest with life from other planet. Should we expect to find traces of this.. i feel like AI is something that an intelligent species will come across as even a calculator is AI so the concept is simple. I wonder what this means for the universe as a whole and what we may find (If machines don't destroy us first). |
We aren't talking about TODAY robots taking over. Once self driving cars are established, how long before our current transportation system is completely automated? There's your distribution of materials. Production processes change, how hard would it be to completely revamp say, a car factory? To my knowledge those are highly automated, in ten years I'm sure it will be even more efficiently automated. |
This is what I thought when I was in the shower. I am not sure if this was what Hawking was thinking when he said that. Assuming we invent an AI that can think better, more efficient and perfect than our human brains, it need not have seventeen arms or phasor guns to spell an end to our race. Let's assume this hypothetical super-smart robot we build can only communicate with sounds and no other actions. Doesn't sound to be that powerful huh? It could still persuade existing humans to do tasks that it needs to accomplish, anything it wants done that a human would do for it and considering our population and mentalities I'd say it's quite plausible. In no time, the AI would be capable of controlling anything it is interfaced with it. To be precise, I'd consider a hypothetical robot that would replicate a 'perfect human' in our world. Another thing about humans is that 'naturally' speaking, our population growth rate is very limited because the margin by which we need to expand in the near future is dependent on our fertile female population. Even after successful birth, we take years to reach full cognitive function. However, AI can behave as a self replicating machine, a self process whose results would be perfect. It can build multiple copies of itself which can understand our world faster than us with the transferable data from the creator's memory at an alarming rate. At this point, I am not sure if we would be encouraging the development of an intelligent AI as we are now. It not an unknown fact that none of us are perfect at what we are. If we were, we wouldn't have taken this long to progress to our current state. Aristotle's fallacy on mechanics of falling bodies in the mid 300BCs was disproved by Galileo only in the 1580s only because philosophers and observers did not actually propose theories by true rational observation and experiments. Having said that, an AI would not only make 'less' mistakes by being perfect, it would also learn faster in case it makes any, hence making it more efficient. Now I am going to digress on how a population of such beings would possibly create an impact on the mundane. The question I ask is what do we seek in our short lifespan? A physicist would say unlocking and exposing the secrets of our universe, say the solution to the gravity equation that we saw in Interstellar so that he'd be more accomplished than others, hence he'd get a raise and not to mention, a Nobel Prize. A delivery service agency would want more orders delivered faster and safer so that people are more likely to prefer that. Entrepreneurs, researchers, industrialists, taxi service agency, pretty much anyone worry about money, maximizing efficiency and hence, profits. What if bus drivers are replaced by intelligent robots? What if big data analytics firms start hiring intelligent robots to make business decisions? With such intelligent self replicating robots, we would all be unemployed within a month. With nothing to do and for, you're safe to assume the conclusion that we're screwed but wait, there's more! Such huge numbers of our population that is imperfect by practice, one that constantly consumes earth's limited resources for necessity and luxury, one that has polluted the world to the extent of melting our polar ice caps, one that appears so stupid to these robots having made too many poor and untimely decisions would be nothing but a pestilence that has to be rooted out. |
I understand your point, but the bigger picture is what is being inferred by Hawking and what led to the Morning War in ME. As stated by Hawking in the article, AIs will grow exponentially faster than evolution of humans. There will be a point when they will surpass us, and as our governments have shown over the course of history if something is smarter/stronger/superior/threatening to the core of government and its people a war will follow. The geth reached a point where they were as knowledgeable and eventually more-so than the Quarians. At that point the Quarians tried to suppress them, resulting in the division and ultimately to war. |
The thing is it's not a threat in the way of, "we need to start working to counteract the potential for ai takeover". It's more like, we're continuing to develop AI, and one day this is going to catch up with us whether we like it or not and we need to fully understand what AI can be capable of before super-powerful AI develops somewhere where it isn't as easily controlled. Think of it like a more gradual Manhattan project, where whoever gets to the end first (creates something that knows enough/functions well enough to teach itself autonomously, decide what to learn about, and improve its own behavior/code) could suddenly have access to a wealth of information that the ai discovers, or could unleash a program hooked up to the internet that can actually teach itself how to hack (definitely plausible and an intelligent computer would be many times more efficient at finding exploits than humans), or something we haven't even thought of because that's how explosive something like that could be. The point is, all of these possibilities are possibilities until we know more, and since it's hard to measure our current progress against that end goal (and many major companies are working hard to get there), it's really important to devote time to these questions as soon as possible. |
According to whom? The human brain.
The human brain has evolved to optimize how we can replicate our genes. In that optic, intelligence is of a great benefit when it comes to making sure you survive. Communication is a great tool to work as a group and combine knowledge. There is no obvious link between self-awareness and greater intelligence. Perhaps self-awareness increases our desire to stay alive, perhaps it makes us a lot more curious and likely to learn, or maybe it's the result of some divine intervention.
Furthermore, we have a very analytical intelligence level that fails on different levels. I once read that chimpanzees were much more capable of knowing how their peers felt than we are, even though you'd have a hard time teaching them maths. There is also the possibility that a chimp constantly trained into maths from birth would have a much better analytical intelligence. |
Honestly we don't fight wars over food, we fight wars over ideology. Intelligence has made not made the world more peaceful by any stretch of the imagination. Before Homo Sapien Sapien there was no genocide, no ethnic cleansing, no crusades. You say that we live in a dangerous cruel world, and yet life expectancy continues to increase, as does the amount of people that live on this planet. Nearly every invention and innovation throughout history has been made in an effort to make life easier. Not to mention the fact that we as a species have devoted countless time and resources to coming up with ways to kill each other easier. I mean look at the atomic bomb. How can you argue that a world where we can instantly vaporize millions of people is more peaceful than a primitive tribal society.
The point I am trying to make is that intelligence absolutely makes us violent. Intelligence allows us to act in ways that do not have any benefit to our direct survival. Intelligence even grants us the ability to purposefully harm ourselves, something that an animal would never do. I don't think that AI will have any reason to harm humans but all I know is that intelligence is dangerous. |
I think you have it wrong—we’d be better off if robots did those things. When we say we are afraid of this, it is precisely because a software program shares NONE of those values. If it did, perhaps we could reason with it, or offer it something, or perhaps it would come around to a peaceful way of thinking. To wit, the paperclip maximizer:
First described by Bostrom (2003), a paperclip maximizer is an artificial general intelligence (AGI) whose goal is to maximize the number of paperclips in its collection. If it has been constructed with a roughly human level of general intelligence, the AGI might collect paperclips, earn money to buy paperclips, or begin to manufacture paperclips.
Most importantly, however, it would undergo an intelligence explosion: It would work to improve its own intelligence, where "intelligence" is understood in the sense of optimization power, the ability to maximize a reward/utility function—in this case, the number of paperclips. The AGI would improve its intelligence, not because it values more intelligence in its own right, but because more intelligence would help it achieve its goal of accumulating paperclips. Having increased its intelligence, it would produce more paperclips, and also use its enhanced abilities to further self-improve. Continuing this process, it would undergo an intelligence explosion and reach far-above-human levels.
It would innovate better and better techniques to maximize the number of paperclips. At some point, it might convert most of the matter in the solar system into paperclips.
This may seem more like super-stupidity than super-intelligence. For humans, it would indeed be stupidity, as it would constitute failure to fulfill many of our important terminal values, such as life, love, and variety. The AGI won't revise or otherwise change its goals, since changing its goals would result in fewer paperclips being made in the future, and that opposes its current goal. It has one simple goal of maximizing the number of paperclips; human life, learning, joy, and so on are not specified as goals. An AGI is simply an optimization process—a goal-seeker, a utility-function-maximizer. Its values can be completely alien to ours. If its utility function is to maximize paperclips, then it will do exactly that. |
It would be pretty cool to be able to go beyond normal human limits.
imagine being able to expand our memories to extreme degrees, lift with the strength of a gorilla, move faster than a cheetah, think like lightning, or have an electronic form of telepathy.
instead I have to reach into my pocket for my phone (that I never am without) to do several of those, go to the garage to move faster, and get some help for heavy lifting. Coincidentally the things I need most often are the ones I'm able to do the easiest.
Well technically that's not fair. We fit the world to the technology available but still.
If you really think about it compared to even two decades ago a person on average is capable of fulfilling basic needs so much faster that it may as well be in our bodies.
I think the phone is the most obvious ones but there are so many mechanical efficiencies we tend to forget about. Professional sports see a ton of science for improving normal human capabilities.
I mean sure a Pittsburgh Steeler needs to put on his gear to be protected from a tackle but they wear protection when needed. If you have a job like that it's even better than some sort of "robotic spine strengthener" because they'll need to replace it with the latest improvements more often. The rest of us would probably be more at risk from the necessary maintenance then from spinal injury.
If you think about it telepathy and the phone I'm using would be practically the same to someone 200 years ago. It just doesn't happen like we thought it would.
We want to artificially enhance our strength but we ended up improving nutrition and fitness related sciences.
We want learning machines to inject knowledge but we improve teaching methods.
If you look at something like the exo suits in Aliens it's a multipurpose tool but could more efficiently be done with dedicated tools. (However in their world the waste is superficial in light of potential epic monster battles). A good example actually is the movie Pacific Rim. I'm sure I'm not the only one who wondered why a naval fleet didn't just surround and decimate the monsters since the Jaegers themselves often used missiles or blasters. A modern navy (or airforce) could get the job done faster, cleaner, and with less cost (I don't remember numbers given for the Jeagers cost).
As we continue to improve that wasteful extra for exo suits (in event of monsters) will become mundane. Think of a dirt bike as an exo suit dedicated to speed.
I used to think about a day when computer programs wrote themselves. How wrong I was! We were already working on that. Web site tools build as much for you as they can based on very simplified instructions. I'd compare it to a trained monkey building a house but still valid.
I mean imagine going back 20 years and explaining the internet as it is. How fast and accessible the internet was, how fast we can access a multitude of data, and how easily we can find answers because of efficient searching methods. It is damn incredible. Granted most of it is superfluous but human augmentation is going to be that 99% of the time. The main reason most of us would want to run as fast as a car is purely egotistical (guilty). |
There is a Sun in our system which energy we aren't capable of use in it's full capacity. The AI wouldn't destroy us because it won't need the space, at most it needs a factory for improves, it won't need a legion of robots because the AI doesn't need more of itself unless we are talking about something like the Geth (I don't think it's possible but who knows). In the factory, I don't think it will need a lot of space but it will need resources so a few machines controlled by the AI itself extracting resources from someplace in the middle of Africa, shouldn't be a problem unless we make it a problem.
At some point it will probably relocate outside of Earth into the moon, or Europa, someplace closer to a better resource spot (asteroids) or the Sun and it will keep improving itself, and who knows, maybe it needs more resources or maybe it needs less.
Since it's an AI, it can find a way to store energy the best way possible and move even further away because time is irrelevant to it so it may be at the other side of the universe when our species dies.
The |
Adblock+ was never advertised as a method of speeding up your browsing experience. It was advertised as an ad blocker.
Of course it takes RAM and CPU to run
First the author says it's a bad thing because ABP takes RAM and CPU to run, then they advise that you run a local proxy server to block ads instead. What do they think this proxy server is going to use to run? Hopes and dreams?
Then they claim that the downside of using a proxy server is that it, "as with all proxy servers", won't work with SSL connections. WHAT?! Don't tell virtually any corporate network administrator that. |
Interestingly (HAHAHA), premium is from Latin praemium - "reward, profit derived from booty". Which is from prae- - "before", + emere - "to buy". |
I think I understand why you're not imagining it to be impossible to read the code off the chip. The code is not like computer code, made with 1's and 0's and stored in a single spot on a hard drive. It's a physical program, using components to do tasks and communicate with the hardware (digression: there are microcontrollers in many devices that allow some digital code to be incorporated, but there's still hardware) If you have the detailed design documents off the chip, you could potentially simulate the functions that the chip performs digitally. Without knowing every component in the chip precisely, the only way to get information is to connect through the ports that connect with the rest of the hardware.
Those ports send a signal and return a signal (I'm reading on some posts that it doesn't do both, but it doesn't change my point). They only transmit what they are programmed to output, and in some cases apparently, they don't output anything. Think of the inside of the chip as connected components, each doing a single specific task, none of which fully aware of all the other components in the system. |
If your media center consists of two objects, sure. My parents have 6 different boxes and 8 different remotes, all the cables are a tangled mess and shoved behind a giant piece of furniture, and they have no idea how any of it works. Adding one new cable correctly, without messing anything up, and making it all nice and neat, and explaining to them how to use it , is easily an hour job, not to mention the travel time. |
Maybe someone (like the reporter from this article) should ask them. The setup of "People who think EM is bad" versus "People who think EM is good" is pretty contrived. I know the editorial constraints require 1-dimensionalism, but I'm sure there is much more complexity, nuance and self-criticism to the woman who lives in the farraday hut than this article gives credit. What about her husband who built the thing? I bet he's pretty damn conflicted.
So this is more the meta-criticism than "What CaptainKabob thinks should be done about the anti-EM nutjobs". Yeah, of course education, health care, jobs, abundant entrepreneurial capital, a vibrant civic culture, etc. would help these people. But barring that, setting up a "debate" and hating on them because they're clearly ignorant is a waste of time. I'm not arguing that they're not more than a bit crazy, but it's a hell of a lot more interesting to explore their not -crazy side and integrate it with the understanding that they're still whacko. |
Connect the dots: vapor trails, EM radiation, alien abductions, etc. There is a certain segment of the population that may have legitimate grievances that manifest themselves in whackjob ways. You can be an asshole about it and totally dismiss/dehumanize them, or you could ask yourself "under what circumstances might I be similar to them?" or "how could my outspoken ideals trigger non-normative behavior?"
Yeah, I know major discourse is criticizing the fuck out of anyone and everyone through logical and rational argument. But it's not like your comment is going to be the straw that breaks the camels back and makes everyone else go "Wow, thank you for telling me I was idiot. I stand corrected and relieved." |
There is a certain segment of the population that may have legitimate grievances that manifest themselves in whackjob ways.
Might have legitimate grievances of some sort that might be correlated with said whackjob ways. They certainly have grievances (we are sprayed with mind altering drugs is, after all, pretty serious). But you really can't extrapolate from that and find their "real" complaints.
Legitimate grievances can be addressed by addressing legitimate grievances. Ignorance and constant irrationality can only fixed by good education. Neither will work for all cases, but mushing them together like you are trying to do into a big ball of absurd problem will no help anything.
> |
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