Unseelie

Not just drones, but -swarms- of drones. I make that point because its important to differentiate between what could be massive, battleship (or, likely, crusier) sized drones, and collections of very small drones.

There's reasons this makes sense, even in the context of a fight against battleships (please assume similar technical capability, since a WWII Battleship would likely not fair well against a 2020 drone swarm..) A battleship, even a big automated one, has a series of weak points, such as sensors, removal of which can cripple the ship, and a swarm doesn't lose effectiveness at a blast from heavy weaponry...it may get a hole punched through it, and have only a few drones taken out...

only if it runs into things and explodes...if it launches its own torpedoes, its not a torpedo. Mother-torpedo..

Arguably, we're beating the shit out of the middle east for the same reason we beat the shit out of Japan (and Germany, just for good measure): Because they hit us.

If you let people hit you, people will know that you let people hit you. The same holds, in a much stronger sense, when you move out to conflicts between societies (or, in the same field, corporations) because such organizations -don't- feel even the empathy that humans do, and so habitually assault one another.

Were the wars worth it? Well that just depends on how hostile you think the world is. I'm fairly certain at least those two were/are. You can't turn the other cheek when attacked and maintain a position that keeps every two bit conquerer from seeing you as a likely target.

I'm often drawn to greyed things, as they're different...not sure how prevalent that reaction is, but its at least a counterweight to overlook.

The article is talking about a 'sheet', in the colloquial sense of the word, of the thickness of a piece of cling wrap.

I'm going to hazard that a lot is based on inherent properties. probably 'most' of the ease. They were mucking around with silicon computers with basically hobby chemistry sets back in the fifties and sixties, where today, with some of the best materials science we have, we're only able to manipulate graphene on the nanoscale..

I believe the world portrayed used metric, though. They at least talk about nano-meters and etc in their blurbs.

my source said a .06 7 day rate, soo...I dunno. if its just .06% per year...that's horrendous. Banks suck.

I was just using the layout my tech guy at the comp lab told me, and he was talking about using two gpus.

So I'm a business selling stocks. I can sell them to a market which will buy them purely on the speculation that they will rise, costing me nothing over time, or I can sell them with a promise to pay the people who buy them money for the rest of the existence of the stock....if the market's willing to buy the purely speculative sort, what economic sense does it make for me, the company, to sell the other?

Please explain the intent of that graphic? Or, rather, what does where the electicity is have to do with voting power, aside from the congruence with cities?

Ah. My power bill is somewhere around 1.5 cents per kwh..

We don't even need to make the comparison so bold. the world could consume twice(I do not have statistics) as many hours of youtube as it does netflix, but still netflix would demand higher bandwidth...

Netflix HD is 2gb/hour...what is the bandwidth taken by youtube?

> the generation now values owning digital media I think you've missed the point, it isn't about ownership at all, or even that the media is digital. Its that what we value is access to the media. We're willing to pay a nominal fee for access to it, but that's really all we care about: Having the media play when we want it to. Ownership of the media is irrelevant to our experience of the media...unless not owning it means we cannot experience it.

Why on earth would you want to base votes on who has the most computing power?

starting a new bitcoin is the best way to deflate bitcoins that I've encountered so far. What do you suspect the max price would be?

how'd you arive at $100 in electrical costs? that's rather higher than I calculated, and actually more than my home's entire monthly bill, with four computers being run sporadically, plus the central air nearly constantly, the washer, drier, water heater, refridgerator, tv, and other incedentals...

Paypal's money market yeild is currently .06% per week. At that rate, with $1000, you make .6 dollars a week, and buy maybe a bitcoin each month and a half...the discussion here is about earning a bitcoin a day mining, so I'm assuming you're down under a third of the mining return.

Assuming the cost of the electricitiy is 1.26 cents per kwh, and your machine is running at around 800 wats, constantly, that's 720 hours and 576 kwh, seven dollars a month...so the cost of running doesn't seem to be that high either.

Edited for bad math. May continue to do so. Please point out errors.

That's making the assumption that the exchange rate goes down. If, (big if) the currency finds demand..the exchange rate goes up.

I saw it pointed out somewhere that bitcoins are meant to be rare, and that once the final bitcoin is generated, as there's meant to be a set ammount, there will be many orders of magnitudes less of them than dollars, euros, or the etc. So, even if the cost right now is high, having a hash of them could become worth a great deal.

That is of course speculative, but when there's going to be 1 bitcoin for every 600,000 of today's dollars...assuming the sum of bitcoins becomes worth a thousandth of that of dollars, each bitcoin will be worth 600 dollars...run a mining op for one coin a day for a year(365 coins), hold onto it for a while, average the price down to 300 dollars a coin...sell for a hundred grand...

So running a bitcoin mining opp, or even buying the coins at current market value, is a feasible long term high risk investment. I wouldn't suggest putting all your eggs in that basket, but I would suggest adding the purchase of the occasional bitcoin (or the cost of mining) to your list of high risk investments.

As an aside, I'm slightly more concerned with the generation of Only Children as opposed to the generation of 114 men to 100 girls...just to toss another layer of complexity into the mix.

The Chineese exchange students, that is, the ones who are not nationalized in America, the off the boat people, at my school think rather differently. They consider the government of China, for the most part, simply the nature of china. It isn't a necessary evil, its just the way things are.

A lot of that stability approach can be traced back through much of the history of the Han, to the point that I'd argue the engineering background isn't the source of the stabilizing pressure, but rather a facet of the Han culture.

You say "Risk is bad in business", here, on a forum dedicated to startups? Where our conversation hinges around venture capital investments and quit your day job gambles?

Yeah, some, perhaps even many, risks get you sunk. On the other side of the coin, nothing we discuss here would exist if people didn't take risks with their businesses.

The world would be so different if no-one took risks. I daresay we wouldn't be making tools, have a knowledge of agriculture, or even have spread out of Africa.

you cannot make the argument that unforseeable effects are patently bad. You're contradicting your terms, and arguing that you have an inkling that it would be bad, rather than, possibly, good.

We'd also have to give them problems to solve outside of 'how do I raise my children' or 'feed myself' or 'entertain myself'...or is that what you meant by productive?

Children can't be compared to goods. There's biological things at worth beyond self interest. That is to say, people want children, even though its not in their self interest.

I'd posit, if you were to try to assign children a status as a good in a wealthy culture, they'd be a luxury good. They cost a great deal, are effectively useless, but still desired.

The first question is very difficult to answer..the second?

>Or, how does a developed nation survive in relative bounty surrounded by nations undergoing severe war and famine?

Brutality and self interest.

That currently developed nations currently have a negative growth rate only makes sense in terms of our current medical situation. If it were a hundred years ago, they'd all have collapsed by now, and if life expectancy doubled, or if people could halt their aging, population would once again explode, simply because couples like to raise children.

Aside from the fact that more than half of the people in the world actually don't know anything about English, what does that have to do with..anything?

I do claim to be at least moderately familiar with the language, and have no idea why you're quoting that line.

To take your points one by one:

The software center is easty to use, yes. It is also a hugely important part of the experience, because its how you get new software...if you can find it in the software center. (often you can't..more on that in response to your last point)

Most commercial liscenses are remarkably simmilar to one another. The gist is 'don't infringe my IP', to the extent that you can plug different IPs into one by word searches.

I do mean free as beer software, as in response to the argument that avoiding credit card charges is a benefit of Ubuntu..there's plenty of widows capable free software. (and open source). Incedentally, many of the open source applications I've found have an option for a windows download. Lots of users in windows, after all.

Walled garden from the end user's side. If your access to software is through the software center, then you'll discover that there are plenty of things not supported by cannonical. Its an app store, and one with fairly limited supply. (33,686 on display, as opposed to over 80,000 in the android) If you consider that the average user is not a person who knows how to make from source, or even navigate the terminal (and I'll lay good odds not willing to learn), the software center is the -only- way anyone is likely to get decent software.

All right, only is rather extreme, but other sources of apps are so frequently rather difficult to install in this OS, where accepting a liscense agreement and pressing the install button is anything but.

The point being is that the average user won't see an open source repository, or the source at all. they'll see a list of apps they can install from what is, essentially, the ubuntu market, each app chosen and vetted by canonical.