lazyguy2

A phone would probably be the most useful sensor. You call the people that laid the internet cables and ask.

It is if you know where to look.

30 years ago only the wealthiest people in the wealthiest countries could have access to a lot of information. Now all you need is to know English and having a reliable internet connection.

The world is changing.

Learning is mostly a matter of motivation. It's like assuming that having an encyclopedia could replace instruction.

Or instruction can replace motivation...

The only thing that will break this is if demand for labor exceeds supply, forcing employers to hire outside traditional parameters.

I don't think that is the "only thing".

Many employers look for degrees because they are seen as valuable. But they are not necessarily valuable in the most obvious way. A lot of time people are not really interested in what you went to school for at all. The are only interested if you have a degree or not.

This signals to employers that they are interviewing somebody that is willing to make major personal commitments and defer reward for years for POTENTIAL gain. There is no guarantees that spending 10's of thousands of dollars will result in a good job. People who pay for degrees are hoping this is true. A employer can take advantage of these people easily.

If I needed somebody to just be a cog in a corporate machine and I know that they are wiling to work their ass off and make huge personal commitments on the PROMISE of future pay... then that is awesome. I know they will work their ass off and make huge sacrifices for years and I really don't have to pay them that much at all to do it. And I know that their debt will keep them scared and living paycheck to paycheck so they are not going to want to risk unemployment because of how devastating this is financially.

This is why when I am looking for jobs and employers make hard demands on educational certificates that they are probably assholes. It's fine to want degrees, but they are not willing to take professional experience as a alternative then that is a huge red flag.

Yeah it's sticky, but you can't expect the current situation to last forever.

If your goal is education there is no need to go to a university anymore. There really isn't even any need to attend K-12 schools.

It may be better to go to formal physical schools, but it's no longer necessary. Not by a long shot.

It's just going to take another few decades for society to adjust to the fact that university degrees are no longer really that valuable and figure out new ways to evaluate individual competency.

Long term the current university system is dead. I expect that some universities will exist for another hundred years, but not in it's current form.

Previous decades you had to go to a university to get access to resources that simply didn't exist in the rest of the world. Large libraries, labs, lectures, etc etc. Nowadays the internet can provide vastly superior resources then any Library for the most part. Sure there are lots of stuff not yet on there, but that issue that isn't going to exist forever.

Quality courses exist for free. Lots of others are available for hundreds were at colleges they cost thousands. Access to experts is something you can pay for. Don't need to spend hundreds of dollars on books. Can concentrate on what is important to you and you can go at your own pace. People who want to network and peers can still have access to one another through meetups and online messaging. etc etc.

K-12 education is terrible for most people. You can get far superior education for your children by simply enrolling them in Khan institute and hiring tutors for subjects you are not great on.

People think you need to government to solve the cost of education, meanwhile individuals and companies have reduced the cost of education to nearly zero in most cases. Just won't get those special degree certificates that everybody covets. But that won't last forever either.

It's amazing that you had to go to China to get a idea of how Capitalism should actually work.

Freed markets for the win.

It's entirely possible for a wage earner to become a millionaire in the USA. Anybody with a middle class income can do it. It's not even complicated or hard to figure out. The problem is that it requires discipline and living under your means.

The first step is to eliminate debt and don't make stupid purchases. Debt includes credit card, personal loans, car loans, and mortgages. Stupid purchases are things like expensive vacations, eating from restaurants all the time, or buying new cars, or buying boats. That sort of thing.

Pretty much: if you buy a brand new car you are a moron if your goal is to increase wealth. You want to do things include living in inexpensive neighborhoods, having secondary sources of income, having no adult 'children' and so on and so forth. Woe is to parents that are still paying for their 20-somethings.

If you go drive around your city and you want to see were "middle-class millionaires" live you need to avoid the 'wealthy' neighborhoods. Look for the 50-something living in a older neighborhood driving older economy cars around. These people are going to have very low credit scores, as well. The best of them are going to have a credit score of 0, which means no credit history for several years.

Do you calculate the cost of purchases by how many payments can afford in a month? If so you are doing it wrong. Instead you should only ever pay cash. If you don't have money in the bank to pay for it you can't afford it.

The S&P 500 has, historically, provided a 12% return over average 20 year period. If you start off at age 30 and invest 500 dollars a month at that rate it would take you about 26 years to make your first million dollars.

6 years after that would be your 2 million dollar mark. 3 years later would be your 3 million dollar mark. By retirement you would have just under 4 million dollars.

If you make $50k dollars a year then that amounts to about 12% of your income.

You think that is too hard?

The average car payment in the USA is at $550. The average credit card debt is $4,717. At 15% interest and doing minimum payments at $189 that card is going to take 10 years to pay off and $22,869 in total. That means that for every 1 dollar you spend the bank makes 4.

If you can afford to make banks rich you can afford to make yourself rich. Just can't do both at the same time.

For several years I ran a 64bit kernel with 32bit userland.

That way I was compatible with games and most other things without having to deal with increased memory usage and compatibility hacks.

Although the Soviets certainly were mass murderers before WW2 and British and USA still sided with them.

Hitler was elected under the pretense that he represented socialism that was friendlier to the middle class and workers. This way people could get their socialist improvements to the economy (which was shit due to bad world-wide economy and war reparations) while still having defense against the the sort of upheaval and murderous destruction that the Reds represented.

The take-home lesson of WW2 shouldn't be that 'The other side was evil and we won'. Because the entire Eastern half of Europe and most of Asia was submitted to governments that were incredibly evil due to the Soviet victory.

WW2's lessons are meaningless without WW1. They really are effectively the same war. The treaty of Versailles and the humiliation of the German civilian government are directly responsible for the rise of power of the Fascism in Germany.

The take-home lesson of the 20th century wars is that massive murder and atrocities are only possible because people obey their governments. That 'The people' cannot discern true evil running the state until it's far too late.

Because evil doesn't show up saying "Elect me because I want to gas the Jews". They gain power by promising what you want. By telling you what you want to hear. And once they gain power then it is the average person's willingness to obey authority and carry out orders is what turns shoe makers, engineers, and doctors into mass murderers.

Which is the sort of thing that is happening in many parts of China.

Always remember that in Vichy France when they rounded up the Jews for the holocaust it wasn't the Germans troops that went around arresting them. It was the French police that rounded up people to be put on those trains. It was under the order's of the French politicians. This problem of obeying governments is not something that is limited by national borders.

The reason it sold at half it's valuation is because the valuation was bullshit.

It's like some guy claiming his classic car is worth 25,000 dollars. If nobody is offering 25k for it then it's not worth 25k. Period, end of story.

It's ok to say that you don't really know for a fact and that you are just making assumptions. It doesn't mean you are wrong. It just means that you don't have anything backing your opinion.

It doesn't really matter. With Linux desktop improving and Microsoft 'WSL 2' Apple is rapidly losing it's relevance.

You don't need to run NAT to have a firewall. Even a stateful one.

If you hide something on my car to spy on me then it's not reasonable to expect it back if I find it. Charging somebody with theft for something like this is effectively rewarding the police for being incompetent.

One of the worst mistakes in modern government is pretending that the people 'serving' have more rights and privileges then everybody else.

They should have less.

Finally. A 1980's videogame car. The future really is now.

Many people in the USA observed the same thing.

That's what the term 'yuppie' implied for a lot of people.

All these people from the late 1960's and 1970's that spoke about dropping out or how awesome it would be join a short lived commune and so on and so forth only to became intensely materialistic and image obsessed in their 30's.

Which then spoke to the idea that a lot of the 'ultra spiritual' stuff that hippie movement was involved in was nothing more then getting wasted and being fashionable. And when it was fashionable to be materialistic and image-obsessed they turned into that.

This may confuse people who associate hippies with anti-war movement, but the anti-war movement was largely a separate from the hippies.

Systemd is monolithic,

It's monolythic in the same what that the GNU project or FreeBSD is monolithic.

It's a large number of utilities, tools, and daemons that is designed to provide the low-level features application developers and users demand from a modern operating system.

It's much more than an init system;

Systemd is a init system, but systemd is also a major project that has taken on the task of unifying low-level Linux OS features.

"Linux monoculture" is a real thing, and systemd makes it seriously more monocultural.

FreeBSD is a monoculture. OS X is a monoculture. Solaris is a monoculture. OpenBSD is a monoculture.

All these systems have their own init systems they designed with no regard towards Linux and replaced older systems and obsoleted them.

It was not entirely gently pushed on everyone by Red Hat, by making Gnome dependent on it.

Lies and misrepresentations.

OTOH the history shows that technically poor, and even terrible, things can get wide enough adoption and stick with us for a long time; X is a good example, SysV init is another.

Which is why people are working on replacing both X and SysV.

You want to know the real problem with anything-but-systemd crowd?

This:

Of course, this approach is not viable if it turns out that too few people are interested in init system diversity sufficiently to do the reasonably substantial implementation work required to maintain a competing implementation of the systemd unit features we care about.

There is no 'If' there. Some people don't want systemd, but the only people doing the work are Systemd. So their choice is to stick with Linux from 2000's or use systemd. Because nobody wants to commit to making any alternative actually work.

Making noise online is annoying, but it ultimately is not something that goes into the decision making of people designing operating systems. People willing to do the work are the ones that get to make the choices.

If somebody comes along and makes a better init system then systemd then they can do it and if it is better it will get adopted.

You can pretend that this is all Redhat's fault, but they are the only real enterprise that made the transition from sysv in Rhel 5, to upstart in 6, and then to systemd in 7.

And, ironically with systemd, migrating to another different init system is massively simplified compared to the work it took to migrate from sysv init. So now moving to a new init system is easier then ever.

Why do I say this?

Because systemd has unified OS design for Linux in a way that never happened with sysv init. Sure people were using 'sysv' and all used shell scripts, but they were all fundamentally different from one another. Only the most complicated shell scripts imaginable (think Apache init) or the most trivial could be made to work on more then one Linux distribution. Meanwhile systemd uses a declarative configuration syntax that all you need to do is create a parser and you could effectively import any systemd application configuration into a system with equivalent or better capabilities in any operating system.

The same can't be said for any of the bash scripts developed by any of the distributions prior to this for their own sysv variant.

A halflife of 5 years means 10% of the radioactivity is still there 16 years later.

But it's very likely that 10% is irrelevant.

Radioactivity is not a all or nothing thing. It exists all around you right now.

Camping out at a old abandoned nuclear power plant 20 years after it's decommissioned probably gives you less radiation exposure then you would get from a flight from California to Hong Kong.

Even if it was serious you'd have to wait for the patent-enforced monopolies to expire before there is significant benefit to us normal people.

This is one of the reasons why everybody is running around with 18650 lithium ion batteries. It's all 1990's tech that has been evolved and improved on since then by numerous competitive businesses.

The most important thing I've learned from watching Cia and FBI shills being interviewed on CNBC is that in order to preserve our rights we must first be willing to surrender them.

Security and privacy are not diametrically opposed concepts. They are directly dependent on one another. You can't have one without the other.

The same can be said of probably most disorders listed in the DSM.

Mental disorder diagnostics are all 'Design by committee'. People get together and vote and they are argue and they create categorizations based on that. They do their compromises every time they need to update the book.

Diagnosis is then based on observed behavior and interviews. They don't do some sort of blood test, MRI scans, or X-rays or any other kind of medical diagnosis. Yeah, sure, there is some sort of questionable neuroimaging scan they can do, but none of that stuff ever gets used to actually diagnose people.

In terms of a science it's much closer to the 'sociology' side of things then 'search for the cure for cancer'.

The original purpose of DSM was so that psychologists and the lot have categorizations handy for filling out claims with patient's insurance. It's a lot easier to convince insurance companies to pay for treatments when the diagnosis is 'Attention deficit disorder' rather then 'Little Timmy is having a hard time sitting still in class and occasionally gets completely out of control'.

That doesn't mean these disorders don't exist or that DSM diagnoses are invalid or useless. It just means that it's all a bit 'hand wavy'.

You'd have to fire all the people in the top positions of the Federal government.

People want to eat yummy sausages, but they don't want to know how sausages are made.

This is how sausages are made if you define 'sausages' as 'market regulation'.

This is normal.

The only people who are experts in a particular industry are the people running the businesses that make up that industry. So the government, in order to try to make rules that don't suck, depend on their input when drafting the rules.

This, and in combination with significant lobbying, means that given enough time the industry being regulated gets to have significant amount of control over the rules being created.

Oil, airflight, cars, steel production, cable television industry, etc etc. Everything that the government tries regulate suffers the same fate to differing degrees.

And when it comes to certain industries, like banking or medical industry, and handful of executives of top corporations end up rotating in and out of government. Being a VP one year, a lobbyist for a couple years, and then end up as a higher level bureaucrat on some cabinet or board somewhere.

They have a phrase for it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

Couldn't you do other types of storage rather than batteries?

Sure. But they all have their own downsides. Pump air into vast underground tunnels. Pump water into towers. Spin up massive drums as flywheels (this one is my favorite. Spinning weights are incredibly power dense). Lift massive weights.

It's all been done. There are companies working on making these things more practical.

Meanwhile the power companies have instituted new standards in grid-tied inverters for solar panels that have effectively solved the problem for them.

It's based on the frequency of the grid. As the grid becomes over powered it's frequency tends to shift a bit higher. As the grid becomes over loaded the frequency tends to shift a bit lower.

By responding to these frequency shifts the grid-tied inverters will either allow electricity to be generated when the frequency falls back slightly, throttle electrical generation when the frequency rises slightly, and then shut off completely when the grid goes down.

So the effect is that those expensive solar panel arrays in places were they are already popular... are effectively shut off during the peak solar power generation hours. And are turned off completely when the grid itself is shutdown.

Lithium batteries represent a unique opportunity for truly distributed power generation. They are just reaching the point, price-wise, were they can be used as a practical way to store energy on a individual small business or household manner.

This way individuals themselves can take charge of their own power needs and no longer has to rely on centralized bureaucracies to save the world for them.

Unfortunately due to the way grid-tied systems are now required to work it has effectively nullified most of the benefits of having private solar arrays. IF you want to be your own power generator you have to be off-grid to do it.

And this the reason this is unfortunate is because almost nobody is building private solar arrays this way.

There is a semi-religious belief that grid-tied systems allow a ROI in the form of selling power back to the grid. Also they are built with the assumption that battery backups for the house is too expensive and impractical. All these things are true if you are looking at low-voltage SLA battery arrays and grid-tied standards from 5-10 years ago, but with high voltage lithium power (it's a lot cheaper to convert 300v DC to 240v AC then it is to convert 48v DC to 240v AC), how accounting for energy usage has changed, and how grid-tied systems are being remote controlled by the power company this is not necessarily the truth anymore.

We could bore a series of holes through the center of the planet and then use gigantic orbital crystals to create a array of lazers to focus the sun's light through to the dark side of the planet.

Wow. What a horrorshow.

Humans operating lie detecting machines with personal interviews has yet to rise above the standard of 'Mostly used to bullshit and intimidate suspects', but these clowns think they can use facial recognition to detect lying?

What a huge scam. I don't know what conman dreamt this up, but to convince multiple governments to go along with it he has to be good.

Maybe it's time to resurrect the Canadian Fruit machine project and get some idiot in the EU government to finance it. Except instead of detecting 'gayness' it detects 'Terrorist thoughts'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_machine_(homosexuality_t...

Uhh.. no. In fact it doesn't.

If your goal is to secure the entire internet via SSL or get people to use PGP signed emails in a mass market then the tremendous technical and cultural hurdles in place that create making a 'truly secure' implementation that gets widely accepted a near impossibility.

But if you goal is to secure the communication between trained people in a 'terrorist cell' or other small group then that is pretty easy. It's really as hard as you want it to be.

For example any decent programmer could write a program that utilizes a 'One Time Pad' of random data to encrypt communication. A program in a USB flash drive that is filled with randomly generated data and the program is all that would need to be exchanged ahead of time. The biggest challenge involved in that is making absolutely sure that the every section of the one time pad used is only used once and is destroyed afterwards. You don't need to really know anything about encryption or math or protocol details to make something like that work.

And if correctly done it'll be impossible to crack.

And we are dealing with threats and adversaries that are much more sophisticated then that. Even small terrorist groups are more often then not state-funded one way or another. Foreign threats are sophisticated enough to create their own encryption. Domestic threats and cartels are sophisticated to hire competent programmers to do work for them. Pedophiles are not idiots either. Many of them are talented technical people that will have no problem avoiding government backdoors in commercial software and hardware products.

The threats American face via encryption isn't that encryption is too strong. It's that Americans don't use it enough and don't use it properly.

I find the idea that Americans are under threat due to lack of backdoors a fallacious one. Legislating that backdoors need to put in place only increases threats.

The only thing that laws like that would accomplish is to make it illegal for Americans to be secure.

Take away legal ability to have secure software then it means that the only people who will have secure software is criminals. Criminalizing good software is never going to be productive.

It reduces cost and makes it easier to give a nice user experience when people are test driving. It makes it easier to manage all the different aspects of the car from a single interface.

The primary reason the car is made, in the first place, is to be sold at a profitable price. That is priority #1.

You can... it just means modifying the PCB for the controls extensively. I had a friend who did this on a Subaru once. Was a huge PITA.