Are you trying to imply that they way people communicate is forever fixed in stone and cannot be changed or improved upon? Don't you think that's a little shortsighted?
Sorry, could you rephrase your questions? I didn't understand what you were asking, as I was unable to see your facial expression as you were typing them.
So I accept beer, scotch, and redeaded women.
Wow, you are one twisted individual
Maybe in another 20 years they'll re-discover perspective.
That's the thing, isn't it? It seems OS look-and-feel trends are just going around in circles.
Perhaps they should just make a slider that lets you choose which year you want your desktop to look like, and be done with it. (or would adding that feature remove peoples' sole remaining incentive to upgrade every other year?)
I bet we could outsource that work to a 3rd world country and only pay a 1/10 of minimum wage. It is not like the pilots would have to be physically here in the US to run them remotely.
Good idea! We can hire drone pilots for cheap in, say, Pakistan. I can't think of anything that could possibly go wrong with this plan.
except on exceptionally cold days, i.e. below 60F (or so).
That sound you just heard was all the Canadian readers falling over from laughter
Sounds more like all ideologies are harmful, religious or otherwise.
It's not that ideologies are always harmful, so much as that acting without thinking can be harmful, and ideology discourages people from thinking things through for themselves.
If people are carefully and honestly thinking through the consequences of their actions, they are less likely to harm themselves or others.
If, OTOH, people are blindly following dogma rather than engaging in rational thought.... well, often that isn't an immediate problem (either because the dogma is reasonably applicable to the situation at hand, or because the consequences of the decisions being made on auto-pilot are not too severe). But it does open the door for serious harm to occur, because people who aren't thinking are not able to quickly or easily detect or amend their mistakes.
So why hasn't it happened? Is the panopticon that good? Are they just burying all the stories of thwarted attempts?
I'd go with another theory -- there are very, very few people inside the USA who want to be terrorists (and even fewer with the required combination of skills and ruthlessness to actually pull off a successful act of terrorism).
The reason why: If you're living in a hopelessly dysfunctional third-world hellhole, you don't have a lot to lose, so you may well just say "screw it" and throw in your lot with the local terrorist militia, in the hopes that shaking things up enough might somehow improve things. If you're inside the USA, on the other hand, your quality of life is (or at least, can be) much higher, so you'll be less tempted to throw all that away for the glory of jihad.
The TSA will be at all entrances doing bag checks.
Getting into the mall will become such a hassle that almost nobody will go there; instead people will do most of their shopping on line and the rest at non-mall locations.
Actually, that doesn't sound too bad.
A lot of positions require learning algorithms. Once you have those, what's stopping them from learning whole new jobs without programmer's intervention?
A major part of programming is talking to your users, learning about what the problem is that they need to have solved, and then designing a program that will (hopefully) solve that problem for them in a reasonably acceptable manner. If/when a computer program is intelligent enough to do that, then we've pretty much reached human-level AI, and at that point the world will be so different from today's that underemployment of human programmers will likely be the least of our concerns.
So it's reinventing quantum physics: it's fuzzy until you look at it more carefully. P.S. don't look at cats.
He's not kidding. I looked at my cat through VR glasses and saw this.
The problem with a vaccum tube, though, is that it is closed at both ends. As much as it sucks coming to an early stop below the surface, slamming into the airlock is going to hurt, at a speed which would otherwise get you up for another 4km
The fix is to make the "short" end of the tube taller, so that it sticks up above the Earth's surface as much as necessary. Oh yeah, and put a handrail next to the airlock.
It's kind of beside the point whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. No doubt it will have some combination of good and bad effects, but regardless of what the effects are, the cat is out of the bag -- the algorithm is invented and it's not going to go away. And if these guys hadn't invented it, somebody else would have. The only question that remains is how society ought to react to its existence.
...that he will be strongly in favor of whatever the audience is in favor of in whatever venue he's speaking (because he won't really talk to Republicans anyway, so in that sense self-selecting).
Should I infer from this that you believe that Republicans are against strong encryption?
I'd think the Libertarian wing of the Republican party, at least, would want to promote strong encryption everywhere. I'm not sure where the "Defend America Against Evil" wing stands on the issue. (The "We Are Against Whatever Obama Is For" wing, of course, doesn't itself know where it stands on any given issue, until after Obama has stated his position
I think it will be more like:
Alright sir, I see you are here to defend patent XJ82934952H28354. Why isn't the inventor here?
> I'm right here, your Honor!
Someone said you used a computer program to write this patent. Is that true?
> It sure is, your Honor! But then again, most everybody uses a computer program to write patents these days. Microsoft Word, for example.
Ah, I see. Carry on!
I wonder how many TV companies would shovel over billions for the rights to broadcast "The Real World"/"Survivor"/"Big Brother" Mars for long term funding.
Let's assume the best-case scenario -- that the entertainment industry is dying to get broadcast rights for the Mars Reality TV show and will pay top dollar to do so.
What constitutes "top dollar" for that industry? i.e. how much could they afford to pay if they really wanted to?
I'm not sure how to answer that, but the biggest TV event I'm aware of is the World Cup, which brought in $4 billion to FIFA last year.
Would $4 billion be enough for a Mars colonization program? According to this article, they'd still be $2 billion short.
Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.
