the finite number of minigames they set up with their finite number of items in them, rendering the whole thing pretty useless.

There might not be a benefit to that outcome, but a "good" CAPTCHA system does have a good outcome when it's broken.

I was talking to the guy who started reCAPTCHA many years ago, and his idea was that the OCR work they were farming out was too tough for algorithms to beat. As long as bots could not do better than humans, reCAPTCHA would be offering a valuable service. As soon as the bots were as good as the humans, accurate OCR had been solved, and reCAPTCHA had made that happen, so it was also a win, and he'd have to come up with another CAPTCHA.

I tend to shy away from helping Google StreetSpy on people, and use the audio CAPCHA when available now, but more people are doing the street number thing, which could still be used for good (if we trust Google). And if the bots solve that, maybe their algorithms could be applied to ambulance services, or whatever.

I'm not sure that the TFA's proposals "solve two problems" the way that great engineering solutions universally do. But there are certainly worthy ones out there.

Does "promoting" mean passing out some posters or getting rid of the requirement to purchase a fishing license from the State to keep the northern snakehead? There are plenty of folks out of work who could help here in a win-win situation. We already have systems in place to police the fish that people keep and removing all restrictions on invasive species taking would go a long way towards reducing their populations.

The state of engineering in PC recovery is awful, shame on software devs

What? You just power off your vm, roll back the storage to the appropriate snapshot, and turn it on again.

Wait - you let Windows touch your hardware? Oh, my.

Sometimes I think what America needs is mother nature hitting the proverbial reset button on us.

It'll be amazing if "America" is still around in 2080, much less 2880.

The entire population of the 13 Colonies was less than the current population of Iowa and they stood up a country just fine. China doesn't keep itself together by playing nice, and we really need to avoid going the Mao Zedong route.
 

The problem is their algorithm has to be close to perfect or it makes things worse. Once people begin to trust the label, they'll fall harder for the stories that the algorithm misses.

I don't think Literally Unbelievable has anything to worry about.

If someone develops a digital currency that addresses those issues and makes them more practical for every day use I support it.

Exactly. The Bitcoin high priests have already chased off the Zerocoin folks, so their future is far from guaranteed. secp256k1 also looks like it wasn't the best choice.

The blockchain idea is a good one, and will probably outlast bitcoin itself. But middlemen are also needed for any of these systems to handle transactions and arbitrage efficiently.

The OP isn't wrong, though - the trendy altcoins are all doomed too.

Literally, a guy named Lovins writes papers about applied hope.

It's just a made up fairy-tale name anyway.

We need some leadership to push the concept.

Leadership is exactly the opposite of what we need. Remember, the Integral Fast Reactor was successfully run for more than a year and was ready for commercialization by about '92. Within the first few weeks of Clinton's Presidency, he defunded the post-research effort and Gore, Kerry and O'Leary lead the Senate fight to kill the project completely.

Without that "leadership" we'd all be sipping power by now generated by cleaning up the waste from the light water reactors that is such a disastrous 300,000-year problem. Branson even has been trying to get an appointment with Obama for years to talk about _him_ footing the bill to get such a system rolling in the US (Virgin Electric?) but "leadership" continues to suppress clean[up] power.

"Leadership" wants to make an enemy out of carbon-based energy sources - not replace them. An external threat is always the way to more power (but not the kind we need).

We could stand to have quite a bit less leadership and instead let coordinating partners actually fix the problem.

Oh they are "merely imagined" by a lot more than just the US Government. And that's why they have actual value.

And that "imagining" of new FRN's is also why commodity producers around the world demand twice as many FRN's for their goods as they did a decade ago.

With the caveat that not all startups are created equal, if you want to be treated like family then you need to find a startup to work for.

Once a group of humans gets above about 150 people, it starts to fracture. The whole point of the modern corporation is to keep warring factions together and get something done despite the constant efforts of its participants to tear itself apart. It's not surprising that the group will tend to fracture along lines of similar people - engineers perhaps being the beta clan in many corporations (that tend to hire beta engineers).

If you think you can get respect as an engineer in a big corporation (that's not explicitly run by engineers) then you need to go talk to an anthropologist. Not that anthropologists know anything that engineers don't already know better...

You do like this, OK?

<URL:http://www.audioholics.com/audio-technologies/5-reasons-dolby-atmos-is-doa>

http://www.audioholics.com/audio-technologies/5-reasons-dolby-atmos-is-doa

I'd really like to see a crowdfunding site which takes venture capital out of the realm of multi-millionaires, and puts it within reach of the common person.

It's a great idea but don't try it in the USA - the SEC specifically forbids this.

People complain that the rich just keep getting richer.

Right, that's the desired outcome of the SEC.

At least it'll be a helluva lot more productive than getting low- and middle-income people to play the lottery.

Those are designed to make the poor poorer whist enriching the governments. They also work as intended.

the customers of the products it produces. So they should on average pick good product ideas, making it positive sum, whereas lotteries are zero or negative sum

Exactly - we can't have that now - it makes for very poor herd management costs.

Witness the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, an aircraft nobody needs

Don't play the game, man. Here's who needs it:

* Politicians, for pork
* Defense contractors, for "Sweet Jesus we're rolling in dough" money
* Lobbyists, for a slice of the dough.
* The Federal Reserve, the monopoly private bank that makes interest on the debt
* Wall Street bankers, who take a commission on the new debt created.

If you look at this as corruption instead of a mysterious boondoggle, it makes perfect sense.

There's absolutely zero chance of defeating an invisible enemy.

No punishments or consequences, all around!

No government worker will be fired, but don't worry, three hundred million people will be collectively punished for it as that billion dollars gets added to the debt and all their cost-of-goods prices go up.

Sadly, that feedback loop never seems to get closed. Results don't matter - as long as there are promises and intentions, that's good enough for most.

Uber et. al. have obviated the need for those a-priori licensing regimes and offer safer, better solutions to the same old coordination problems.

It means the end of the useful life of the cartels and their [often captured] regulators, so of course they fight it.

Here, have a listen:
http://www.cato.org/multimedia...