No, Elon Musk was actually at a point where not only these companies were in risk of bankruptcy (noting also that he personally guaranteed much of the debt of these companies too, not to mention having fiduciary responsibility over the debt of these companies as CEO), but that he even was in debt at this time too.
You are simply wrong. He was very much at risk of personal bankruptcy too and definitely losing everything he had.
I'm glad to know that you are so cognizant of the future that you can possibly anticipate that nobody in the future will possibly develop any sort of technique or capability for capturing or restoring intelligences and personalities of those who currently are alive, may have been in the past, or will be in the future.
That is the kind of prophecy that really requires some sort of religious faith.
I'm not asserting that such technology will ever be developed, but it is silly to think it could never happen too.
The weirdest mixture is how the American military uses meters for horizontal distances, but feet for vertical distances.
We use "mils" in the semiconductor industry, and they also did in the paint/coating industry when I worked in it 20 years ago. A "mil" is a thousandth of an inch... a milli-inch! This can lead to some funny mixes, like "grams per square mil" for shear force measurements.
I would tend to disagree with your assertion. There is something a little different in terms of a soul, or self-awareness, or however you want to describe that thing which is an intelligence. It is more than merely a pile of facts and data.
While the physical structure which is me is certainly a pile of data stored as DNA and developed over time that is my lifetime and the various environments I have lived in, not to mention my memories, there is much more to what is "me" than just that physical structure and data. There is also much more to "you" as well.
This is BTW one of my largest complaints about those who talk about artificial intelligence being something other than a bunch of tools which mimic but never achieve actual intelligence. Those who claim self-aware computers are just around the corner and a few years or decades from being developed don't have a clue as to what actual intelligence involved. This includes those who try to make claims as to how big of a computer must be to have human-like intelligence.
Data without that intelligence is meaningless, which I guess is the point I was trying to make. Yes, that thing which is "me" or my children for that matter does represent a huge pile of data, but I am more than just that data.
I wish the internet was any good at preserving information. In reality, I have lost far more data to network servers, including some rather important information, than anything I've ever lost from moves, water damage, or even fire. As a medium of information exchange it works really good, but it does a damn lousy job of preserving data for more than a few years. It is also odd what information does get preserved, as some things sort of stick around and persist for a very long time, while other stuff goes away... and I can't predict at the moment which kind of data will persist in terms of content I've generated.
The only kind of information that I've been able to preserve on the internet for certain is stuff that I am very active in preserving. It really doesn't get saved in multiple locations though.
Operating systems like Unix, Linux, MacOS, Solaris, etc. don't have a registry,...
True, and clearly a win.
...and don't have any significant "OS Decay".
ROFLMAO. IME, the only thing more painful than maintaining a Windows system over the long term is maintaining a *nix system over the long term.
Let's consider Linux. First, you probably get to choose between a stable or a not stable version of your distro. Choose stable and you're OK as long as you don't need to run any software released in the last 3 years and you're OK with being forced to upgrade the whole OS after maybe 2 years anyway (which will quite possibly trash your entire machine to the point of not being able to boot, or at least breaking minor features like RAID arrays, assuming you actually managed to configure one of those properly in the first place after your distro's "user friendly" installer messed it up completely). Alternatively, choose unstable if you want to run more recent software but don't mind stuff breaking all the time instead of every couple of years on a schedule.
Either way, if you want anything that hasn't got into your distribution's package management system yet, you're almost invariably forced into compiling your own software and manually installing it with makefiles. Those might, if you're really lucky, also offer a make uninstall option that actually does cleanly uninstall. That might, if you're even luckier, still work six months later, as long as no-one inadvertently installed a new version of the manually compiled code over the top to "upgrade" it, or just ran make distclean without thinking leaving you with no idea what make uninstall should have done. In any case, Linux is going to enforce absolutely no system hygiene at any point in this process.
OS X is of course doing much better with a similar foundation, as anyone who has spoken the words "Apple" and "shellshock" in the same sentence over the past few days can testify. Or at least, they'll be able to testify, just as soon as they've finished wiping and reinstalling their botnetted systems, because the patch everyone else had within hours only arrived for Apple gear several days later and long after exploits were widely found in the wild.
You're absolutely right that we should be able to install many programs and uninstall them with no lingering effects. But the idea that the registry is the only thing preventing that on Windows or that *nix systems do better is crazy. The only reason *nix systems don't break more often is that the only people running them are geeks and professionals, and those kinds of people are less likely to install random junk and more willing to dive in and fix internals when stuff goes wrong.
Except there wasn't. Well, there was. A bit. Sometimes. Naturally, this half-baked approach actually made the problems worse.
Even today and with native Windows applications, many aren't very well behaved in following the "standards" here, because Microsoft did such a terrible job of promoting good practices.
Anything that isn't a native Windows application -- including almost every darling of the open source world, for a start -- probably ignores not only the application data directory but also the program files directories and insists on spewing its crap all over your filesystem and environment. Oh, and $DEITY help you if you need to do anything with Cygwin, and $CHORUS_OF_DEITIES help you if you have more than one ported application that requires Cygwin.
It is telling that you can't even schedule a backup of the "official" place to store documents without considerable effort, because Windows itself sets up so many links that most backup tools can't handle them.
And that's before you get idiots like the Chrome team at Google who think it's clever to install executable software in your data directory in order to deliberately circumvent Windows' normal security model, just so their auto-updater can do things it shouldn't without anything silly like troubling the user for permission. I'm always a little surprised that Microsoft hasn't, with considerable and legitimate justification, flagged Chrome's installer/updater software as malware and automatically removed it at some point.
On the bright side, if Microsoft can actually manage to produce an operating system with a sensible filesystem structure and application installation/update/uninstallation tools that actually enforce that structure, they might yet salvage the Windows brand and convince significant parts of their potential market to upgrade again.
You just have to know what you're doing.
You can make Windows systems run crap-free and full speed again as well, by cleaning out all the obscure registry entries and system services and automatic updaters and cached thingies and temporary wotsits. You just have to know what you're doing.
Also, as with the part of the Linux strategy you forgot to mention, you have to be willing to spend forever doing it, because the tools provided as standard are just about hopeless.
The FAA requirement for a lock on the door was only issued after 9/11
On October 9, 2001, the FAA published the first of a series of Special Federal Aviation Regulations (SFARs) to expedite the modification of cockpit doors in the U.S. fleet. This Phase I fix included installation of steel bars and locking devices.
No mandatory door locks before 9/11.
Yes, but the claim was that prior to 9/11 pilots were asking that locks be installed and that airlines refused the expense. I was asking for a citation supporting those claims -- that pilots asked and airlines refused.
Oh, I see the problem. You've internalized Republican wingnut derp. Only a wingnut would hold being a community organizer against someone.
I'm not a Republican, but even I can see that you've misunderstood the complaint. He's not holding having been a community organizer against Barack Obama, he's implying that community organizer is the role in which Obama belongs, i.e. that he's not competent to be the president and that he should therefore go back to what he knows how to do.
It is if we are permitted to keep our own information secret from law enforcement except when compelled to deliver it by warrant.
That's an interesting statement, because some US courts have ruled that we cannot be so compelled because it violates the fifth amendment protection against self-incrimination.
I see three options:
1. Makers of devices are required to provide back doors for law enforcement access. This was part of the idea of the Clipper chip... which was a total flop because no one wanted to buy it, and Congress didn't get around to (or didn't dare to) compel usage.
2. Makers of devices don't have to provide back doors, but people can be held in contempt for refusing to provide access to officials with a warrant. Some US courts have taken this position.
3. Makers of devices don't have to provide back doors, and fifth amendment protection prevents requiring people to provide law enforcement access. Some US courts have taken this position.
So, which should we aim for? I think 1 is clearly not a good idea, not least because providing a LE backdoor that can't be exploited by malicious actors is far easier said than done. 2 is what you suggested. 3 is what many on slashdot believe they prefer.
Personally, I lean towards 3, though I can see arguments for 2.
Won't be long before Google and Microsoft follow suit.
Google has never had the ability to decrypt an encrypted Android phone. The key encryption key is derived from the user's password (plus salt), so a brute force search of possible passwords can recover it, but Google hasn't ever had any special back door. If you use a good password, no one is going to be able to get in without your assistance.
(I'm a member of Google's Android security team. Not speaking as an official representative, mind you, but anyone can look at the code and see exactly how it works, so no official statement could appreciably differ.)
Several years before 9/11, pilots were asking that the cockpits be made more secure by installing a $200 lock on the pilot's side of the door giving access to the cockpit. Airlines complained that it would be too expensive.
Cite?
And unlike Earth where you can simply reboot society via going outside and farming a little plot of land, you can't do that on Mars!
You can't necessarily do that on Earth, either. Earth as it is right now, sure. But it hasn't always been like it is now... in fact it mostly hasn't been like it is now, and it's guaranteed that it won't always be like it is now. Changes can happen with lightning speed, too. A supervolcano eruption, a meteor strike... or even just climate change. What would happen if the planet suddenly reverted to "Snowball Earth", with 30 feet of surface ice covering the equatorial oceans?
We're eventually going to have to learn to either (a) sustain human life in extreme conditions or (b) engineer the planet's climate, deflect rocks, suck the energy from supervolcanos, etc., or else we'll die. Learning to live on Mars, or in space for that matter, without constant support from Earth is a Good Idea.
So I'm not at all surprised to learn that doctors are resorting to faxing records. It's almost certainly easier than trying to exchange them digitally.
I thought all faxes were transmitted and received digitally... for the past 20 years. Are there still people storing them on paper?
Normal Facsimile workflow is like this:
1) person pulls up the records, saves them as PDF
2) Person "prints" PDF to fax
3) PDF is converted to CCITT-compatible TIFF format, which is then
4) transmitted as a high quality fax (we're not talking the old 30dpi ones anymore)
5) Recipient's fax machine gets the fax with header info, saves it as PDF and emails it to the appropriate local recipient
6) PDF is saved from email, possibly printed if needed, and filed via the local EMR.
And this is why the data you're looking for is in the hospital's EMR as a PDF: it was received by fax.
Any solution that's going to change this workflow is going to need to handle TIFF and PDF formats, with ClearText-style OCR. That way, people can still use the fax workflow as an alternative to digital data transmission. The system also has to have the ability to pull up the original PDFs in the cases where the OCR failed.
It'll then take at LEAST 5-10 years for the new digital transmission system to work out the kinks and gain enough momentum to retire the old workflow completely.
Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.
