Vernor Vinge introduces many fantastic ideas in his really excellent scifi book A Fire Upon the Deep. He has many fascinating concepts like what if somehow there are parts of the universe where you can go faster than the speed of light, and you would be smarter there, that's where the super intelligent beings go. Guess what, we humans live in the slow zone, you morons. Also there it's a ftl communication method that is like good old Usenet. There is (what looked credible to me) a fascinating set of multiple brain beings, thing like dogs where together 5 of them form one "intelligence" where the different personalities combine in interesting ways.
And I was sad to notice he died this year, aged 79. A real cs prof who wrote sci fi.
But if someone calls you on the phone, they are just sending their voice to you, there's no Avatar from them, except for one your software invented. The one that you're looking at is disconnected from the actual person.
They could be video-calling you or using their own pair of glasses with their own avatar. It doesn't necessarily have to be audio-only, especially when it will get easier and easier to do this.
My example is NOT about "self identified" "experts", but REAL experts who ACTUALLY have the skills. They also are typically very safe on the roads and know that race-like on-the-limit driving on the streets is idiocy.
The point is that people who ACTUALLY have these skills have a far wider margin of safety than the ordinary driver, and far better capability to avoid accidents. But, they will also — with that far wider margin of safety — often turn or brake with higher than ordinary G-forces.
For example, ordinary street tires and suspensions on modern cars can handle 0.9G lateral or braking acceleration. Ordinary people get uncomfortable at 0.2G lateral acceleration.
An unskilled driver approaching 0.25G lateral acceleration does risk exceeding adhesion limits and losing control because they are insensitive to inputs and feedback. In contrast, a skilled driver can turn at 0.25G all day with virtually no risk, as they are accustomed to driving at 3-4 times those Gs, and are situationally aware, sensitive to inputs and feedback, and choose lines and inputs that avoid the limit.
They are far less of a risk than an unskilled driver at 0.1G. Yet, the skilled driver will get flagged as "bad".
With deeper understanding and analysis, they could make the distinction between actual expert drivers vs overconfident idiots. But I see no indication that this will happen.
Itemized receipt data is not transmitted to the network or to the issuing bank.
Some merchants have multiple registers for the sale of different types of products, but generally if you receive only one receipt for your full purchase, it will be recorded under the category code for the merchant's primary business.
On my American Express credit card statement, all the airline flights show the details of the flight and Staples.com transactions show the specific items that were purchased. And this has appeared for at least 6 to 8 years.
In Canada, at least, you have to go to specific stores that only sell either alcohol, or cannabis. So the just having a bill from there would be enough.
Can you explain what project is unwinding? It looks to me like Europe is still coming together to resist the danger of Russian invasion. For Nuland, it looks like she had a long career, she had many good roles, she championed protecting Ukraine and there was only one other position for to be promoted to and they promoted someone else. So that seems like a perfect time to leave after a successful career.
If you think anything is defeated, you should look at the facts ( eg. Airplanes downed in the last weeks). Which seems to be more significant to me while f16's are on the way.
Oh boy, by that account Russia should be in rubbles a year ago. Putin even had to kill off his caterer turned warlord, who staged a mutiny and marched with 5k mercenaries on Moscow and the rest of the country just stood by and watched the show.
I got tired of typing bc -l years ago, I have a function so I can do it on the command line: calc 2^27 + 3^15. I wish somehow the shell would let me add parens here, instead of having to escape them with a quote.
function calc2
{
if [ $# -eq 0 ];
then echo 'pass commands for math evaluation, like calc l(2^32/17) + 3';
fi;
echo $* | bc -l;
}
I guess old unix persons do use bc. But even older unix persons, like you and me, use dc. Oh, and I still have my trusty old HP48GX calculator that I bought nearly thirty years ago. Algebraic notation is fine for paper, bur RPN is best for calculating. I am glad I can even have an RPN calculator (PCalc) on my phone now.
rpn for for the win I guess ;-). I actually didn't get to try my first linux stuff until grad school in the 80s. I wish I had saved off all my init files from then to see what they look like now.
Back in the day (Unix Seventh Edition) bc was just a front end that compiled the expression and piped it to dc. My take it is most people didn't find rpn a win, and bc was the fix.
I used bc's compiled output ("bc -c") to learn how to make dc jump through hoops.
How do we get China to stop? It's impossible. It's completely to their advantage to have drones get better. They can mass produce them way better than us. The CPUs don't seem to be that advanced up to now, so they can probably make them. If not they can steal/buy them illegally.
Russia is a slightly different case because they can't make many of the parts but they can cobble them together using other CPUs. So they are hurt, but possibly helped.
And I was sad to notice he died this year, aged 79. A real cs prof who wrote sci fi.
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