My job flexibility means that when the boss says "update that server" I can do it from home, during off hours, when nobody at work cares that they can't get email or whatever. That means less explanations to the other bosses, fewer complaints, and I can focus more on my other duties while actually in the office.
A morale boost like that could come from a raise, or from me logging in from via my cell phone, while watching TV with a drink in hand. I'm okay with the latter.
So who gets to decide what the line is between a government issue and a non-government issue? That hole in your backyard could be a reservoir that impacts the local water system, and filling it in would shift runoff toward a more contaminated source, meaning there's less clean water available in local wells. Those plastic bags are a major source of local litter, killing off wildlife. The wolves think the government shouldn't stick its nose in the personal choice of what's for dinner.
In my opinion, personal freedom of choice should end when it affects the ability for others to choose, and it's those others who should be able to declare what affects them. Due to psychological biases that have evolved in our society and genome, individuals are not able to accurately assess fully how their actions impact others. Once an issue moves outside that personal freedom of choice, the ultimate decision should rest with a disinterested third party. That's where the government should step in, and enforce a neutral and unbiased decision.
Quite the contrary... I fully understand how difficult anything interstellar is. I simply don't see that as a reason not to try. We can solve the intermediate problems such as asteroid mining, space-based habitats, artificial (centrifugal) gravity, and politics in the interim, but still keep an eye toward future targets. No, it will not be 20 or 100 years... probably at least another thousand, but there is no hard constraint that humans must be confined to the neighborhood of this one particular star.
If we're assuming enough grass to sustain a sheep population indefinitely, than we can also assume enough sheep to sustain a wolf population indefinitely.
In that case, then long-term consequences can be considered, which must take into account the growth rate of each population, the grass's depleting effect on the soil, fertilizer production by both species, and the distribution system for all food sources. Of course this is far too much information for an average wolf (or sheep) to consider when making a choice, so the decision should be deferred to specialists who are trained to understand the impact of each dinner, and the consensus of those specialists should be taken as the policy decision.
You know... sort of like a representative democracy, but without packaged candidates who are expected to know everything about every issue.
The real problem is that the scenario has no good outcome, and doesn't really model any government at all. It's just an example of popular choice leading to something scary when there's really no better outcome. Great propaganda, but not meaningful for debate.
Lack of any government control at all? Then the wolves don't bother to decide, and just eat the sheep.
Moralism? The lamb gets to unanimously forbid all carnivorous diets, until all carnivores are starving, but it's their own fault for choosing to eat meat.
Please feel free to suggest any political system where wolves and sheep are both living happily together.
Structural engineering (and the related chemistry, metallurgy, and industrial engineering) technology will have to improve, of course, but it is reasonable to build a large spinning wheel as a habitat around a central weightless work area. It doesn't need to be nearly as much as Earth's gravity to be useful, and the subsequent generations that spend their whole lives on the craft will adapt (mentally first, then ever-so-slowly physically) to the altered environment.
And that's what probes are for, which is a good way to test the travel capability. Of course, even if we sent a probe today, we're talking a few generations before useful data is returned, and our probe technology isn't really good enough to scan a whole solar system for asteroids yet... so now's a good time to work on picking promising stars, confirming or ruling out suspicions, and exploring our own solar system. Heck, maybe we can get a viable small fusion reactor working productively, then we just have our interstellar ship grab asteroids from our own system on the way out as a source of both fuel (enough to offset the additional needs) and material for the destination. Unfortunately I do not know the math involved, and the equations will change as new technologies are developed, anyway... but here's hoping.
People making their own choices often make very bad choices, and the consequences of those choices affect others. Government control is a means of making those choices by (ideally) popular choice, so that if bad choices are made, it's because the majority of us wanted it that way.
Of course, the system is flawed in that politicians are now package deals, so a popular choice in one field means a you're stuck with an unpopular choice elsewhere. That's still no reason to abandon the system, but rather a reason to work to change it.
One thousand years ago, the peak of technology was a powder that would explode when ignited, that could propel a small projectile in a general direction a few hundred feet. Today, the peak of technology is dropping a laser-armed nuclear-powered semi-autonomous wheeled laboratory from a rocket-powered flying crane onto a precise target from 150 million miles away.
By the time we have the capability to load up humans and send them 1.8 parsecs away before they (and any descendents) die, we might just have the technology to build an artificial planet, or at least a large structure capable of artificial gravity, a self-sustaining ecosystem, and harvesting materials from whatever asteroids are nearby. It does not need to be as big as the Earth or support as large a population, but it'll do for a while until technology improves further.
Because of course the engineers building an automated network aren't aware enough to think about what the car should do if it loses connections to other cars...
If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that the 3000 radios aren't all transmitting to each other. Rather, each one would lower its power to broadcast only to its immediate area, so other cars can avoid it. A jammer would force cars nearby to switch to backup systems, and other vehicles could increase their own transmission power to compensate for the noise.
Also note that though the article uses the term "WiFi", these are likely not standard 802.11 devices. Rather, they are in the 5.9 GHz band, with 75MHz bandwidth.
Re:This is why we need more workers rights / union
on
OnLive Acquires OnLive
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· Score: 0
Right! That way the company becomes a toxic burden of debt for investors, and after the first attempt goes bankrupt, everyone can lose their jobs because nobody wants to pick up the pieces.
Sounds like some loophole method of getting out of your debts
Exactly.
Not quite. It does probably let them get out of long-term contracts and service agreements, and wipes the slate clean for future expenses. Assets that were previously locked in can now be dumped. While there may be some debt that is escaped, I doubt it'd be worth the financial damage from trying to rebuild what has to be sold off to cover those debts.
The other important detail is that it means the original company has effectively gone bankrupt. Everyone who contributed money to the original OnLive project (by buying stock) has lost their investment. That's where the money for debts came from.
So basically, "you're fired. Now, you can come back to work for us with no pay, just stock options that will be worth absolutely nothing when we do this again."
More like "Your employer has gone bankrupt, and the company that bought it doesn't want to pay for you all, but they want you to stay involved and stay in the loop for whenever they do hire again"
Right. Any time a CEO works for "no compensation whatsoever," it means they have an agreement in place for a ton of shares or options down the road. So, in effect, he makes it look like he got wiped out like everyone else, when in fact his compensation has just been swept under the rug/shell for safe keeping.
Stock options are compensation. In effect, he's still working toward the goal of having OnLive functional and eventually even profitable, but this time without the expense of his own salary. Perlman has a long history of chasing crazy ideas, so I think it's perfectly reasonable that he treats this company as a hobby... great if he can make money off of it, but pretty fun if it just works.
Alex Jones is not a credible source. Alex Jones is a conspiracy-loving community-college dropout.
Quickly reading through a less inflammatory site paints a more reasonable picture: Michael Taylor is a lawyer who studies politics and, for 35 years. worked his way up through two related groups. He started as an FDA attorney, then went to private practice five years later. At the private practice, he specialized in what he had experience in: food and drug law. Ten years later, he went back to the government for another five-year term. After that was when he got the VP title, as Vice President of Public Policy, the furthest outside his field. Then he moved to a think tank, researching how best to feed Africa's rural population.
Shortly after he published papers on effectively helping feed Africa, the government pledged to help feed Africa. So here's a guy who has recently done research into a major project, has decades of experience in the legal issues at hand, and is already intimately familiar with every level of how the FDA works... who else could be better for the job?
Of course, Alex Jones doesn't care for silly things like Occam's Razor. If there's any way, no matter how indirect, that someone in the government could be branded as corrupt, he'll push that angle, and there's no reason to let those trivial facts get in the way, either. I don't suppose he's made clear exactly which crops are supposedly exempt from testing? Or what FDA rule prevents researchers from testing them?
Nope. He'll just say that there's no testing required and casually mention Agent Orange in the same sentence just to scare readers. As for sources, he'll cite his own movie and the front pages of other conspiracy sites.
Now maybe some of the folks here will actually learn how Big Data methodologies work, rather than just spamming links to a strawman argument starring the word "web-scale"...
Aw, who am I kidding... this is Slashdot! A knee-jerk reaction with little forethought is not only the norm, but the mandate!
A particular quality, habit, or disposition regarded as adversely affecting a person or group of people.
The line is entirely subjective, based on someone's particular definition of "adverse". If, for example, parents see being a redhead as adversity, why should they be prohibited from engineering a blonde?
Who enforces that line for the rich?
Why should anyone?
Clearly this guy hasn't seen enough dystopian movies about two-class societies emerging from genetics.
Or perhaps movies aren't the best indicator of future progress. More likely than a two-class dystopia is just an evolution of our current society, where the rich can have medical procedures done on a whim, and the poor can have procedures done after months of careful planning and borrowing. For treatments that are widely recognized as being medically suitable, insurance providers will help reduce the impact of the cost.
But it's the American Revolution! This insightful revelation shows that the Founding Fathers not only approved plagiarism, but that it was vitally important to their cause! Obviously, our modern politics are far out of line, having been corrupted by this silly "evolution of society" thing. This should be a clear message for Ron Paul and other politicians who actually care about the Founding Fathers' ideals that all copyright should be abandoned because it didn't matter in 1776.
It's perfectly clear that journalists back then had far higher ethical standards than modern journalists, because they wrote about the American Revolution! That immediately clears any doubt of their honesty, right? They wouldn't have copied something just because they could get away with it, but rather they did so out of a pure desire to spread the gospel of democracy.
Next week, we'll see the full story on how cholera was an effective means of population control, how slavery protected American companies from labor unions, and how an expensive and slow postal system encouraged only meaningful correspondence.
As much as I love the awesome idea of moving a chunk of terrain between planets, I'm going to shoot for an informative mod and answer the question.
There is a sundial mounted on Curiosity, with a few colored stripes on it. Those stripes' colors (red, green, blue, and yellow) were recorded under Earth's lighting, Now that those same stripes are on Mars, their apparent color change in new pictures is the result of Mars' different lighting. By comparing the stripes' pictures, an approprite transformation can be determined, then applied to other pictures to compensate for the change in lighting.
We are sure because we're assuming that those stripes' actual colors haven't changed significantly during flight or landing.
A candidate for the U.S. Senate was in town for a discussion panel for which I was running sound (since I volunteer as an audio technician). After the panel, she came out on stage where I was coiling cables, and we had a lovely discussion on labor unions. We presented our positions, discussed the merits and shortcomings of union power, and eventually conceded that both employers and unions too often behave like infants. It was an insightful and interesting conversation.
This is one of several similar encounters I've had over the years, though the majority of discussions I've fallen into were with more local politicians. I doubt I could say I've "confronted" any of them, because I'm not going to go out of my way to be confrontational. Though it seems popular now to call any gaudy spectacle with a political motive a "protest", I prefer to submit my protests in a more effective and less offensive manner: calm and polite discourse.
And yet you can blithely say that, posting logged in to your account, with full knowledge that your IP address and user agent string are being logged, and yet still have no fear that the US government will ever come hunting you down for your disparaging remarks.
So to summarize, "all those other statistics and figures from actual trained economists are wrong! Real things are worse than everything being measured, because I say so!"
That's the GDP adjusted for inflation (real GDP). Note that the scale is logarithmic. The USA is the most productive it's ever been, and since leaving the gold standard in 1971, the economy has been far more stable. There's your history. The gold standard currency was unstable and had no effect on America's productivity.
On the one hand, I agree... Michigan was screwed to begin with, and no less screwed now.
On the other hand, that's a lot of folks whose lives depend on having constant access to that wealth, regardless of where it's distributed.
Michigan effectively put all its eggs in one basket without realizing it. Nobody ever thought that all the Detroit car companies would be failing at once without something else in the area taking their place.
Slashdot Mirror
I do object to being paid for it...
I'm going to assume a missing negative in there somewhere...
My job flexibility means that when the boss says "update that server" I can do it from home, during off hours, when nobody at work cares that they can't get email or whatever. That means less explanations to the other bosses, fewer complaints, and I can focus more on my other duties while actually in the office.
A morale boost like that could come from a raise, or from me logging in from via my cell phone, while watching TV with a drink in hand. I'm okay with the latter.
So who gets to decide what the line is between a government issue and a non-government issue? That hole in your backyard could be a reservoir that impacts the local water system, and filling it in would shift runoff toward a more contaminated source, meaning there's less clean water available in local wells. Those plastic bags are a major source of local litter, killing off wildlife. The wolves think the government shouldn't stick its nose in the personal choice of what's for dinner.
In my opinion, personal freedom of choice should end when it affects the ability for others to choose, and it's those others who should be able to declare what affects them. Due to psychological biases that have evolved in our society and genome, individuals are not able to accurately assess fully how their actions impact others. Once an issue moves outside that personal freedom of choice, the ultimate decision should rest with a disinterested third party. That's where the government should step in, and enforce a neutral and unbiased decision.
Quite the contrary... I fully understand how difficult anything interstellar is. I simply don't see that as a reason not to try. We can solve the intermediate problems such as asteroid mining, space-based habitats, artificial (centrifugal) gravity, and politics in the interim, but still keep an eye toward future targets. No, it will not be 20 or 100 years... probably at least another thousand, but there is no hard constraint that humans must be confined to the neighborhood of this one particular star.
If we're assuming enough grass to sustain a sheep population indefinitely, than we can also assume enough sheep to sustain a wolf population indefinitely.
In that case, then long-term consequences can be considered, which must take into account the growth rate of each population, the grass's depleting effect on the soil, fertilizer production by both species, and the distribution system for all food sources. Of course this is far too much information for an average wolf (or sheep) to consider when making a choice, so the decision should be deferred to specialists who are trained to understand the impact of each dinner, and the consensus of those specialists should be taken as the policy decision.
You know... sort of like a representative democracy, but without packaged candidates who are expected to know everything about every issue.
The real problem is that the scenario has no good outcome, and doesn't really model any government at all. It's just an example of popular choice leading to something scary when there's really no better outcome. Great propaganda, but not meaningful for debate.
What alternative system do you propose, then?
Lack of any government control at all? Then the wolves don't bother to decide, and just eat the sheep.
Moralism? The lamb gets to unanimously forbid all carnivorous diets, until all carnivores are starving, but it's their own fault for choosing to eat meat.
Please feel free to suggest any political system where wolves and sheep are both living happily together.
And two thirds of the population were well-fed, while one third died.
The alternative was that two thirds of the population starved while one third watched.
It seems popular choice is the ethical one here. Or am I supposed to be swayed by the emotional appeal of the lamb?
I just want a big spinning thing.
Structural engineering (and the related chemistry, metallurgy, and industrial engineering) technology will have to improve, of course, but it is reasonable to build a large spinning wheel as a habitat around a central weightless work area. It doesn't need to be nearly as much as Earth's gravity to be useful, and the subsequent generations that spend their whole lives on the craft will adapt (mentally first, then ever-so-slowly physically) to the altered environment.
And that's what probes are for, which is a good way to test the travel capability. Of course, even if we sent a probe today, we're talking a few generations before useful data is returned, and our probe technology isn't really good enough to scan a whole solar system for asteroids yet... so now's a good time to work on picking promising stars, confirming or ruling out suspicions, and exploring our own solar system. Heck, maybe we can get a viable small fusion reactor working productively, then we just have our interstellar ship grab asteroids from our own system on the way out as a source of both fuel (enough to offset the additional needs) and material for the destination. Unfortunately I do not know the math involved, and the equations will change as new technologies are developed, anyway... but here's hoping.
People making their own choices often make very bad choices, and the consequences of those choices affect others. Government control is a means of making those choices by (ideally) popular choice, so that if bad choices are made, it's because the majority of us wanted it that way.
Of course, the system is flawed in that politicians are now package deals, so a popular choice in one field means a you're stuck with an unpopular choice elsewhere. That's still no reason to abandon the system, but rather a reason to work to change it.
This is exactly what I came here to say.
One thousand years ago, the peak of technology was a powder that would explode when ignited, that could propel a small projectile in a general direction a few hundred feet. Today, the peak of technology is dropping a laser-armed nuclear-powered semi-autonomous wheeled laboratory from a rocket-powered flying crane onto a precise target from 150 million miles away.
By the time we have the capability to load up humans and send them 1.8 parsecs away before they (and any descendents) die, we might just have the technology to build an artificial planet, or at least a large structure capable of artificial gravity, a self-sustaining ecosystem, and harvesting materials from whatever asteroids are nearby. It does not need to be as big as the Earth or support as large a population, but it'll do for a while until technology improves further.
Because of course the engineers building an automated network aren't aware enough to think about what the car should do if it loses connections to other cars...
If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that the 3000 radios aren't all transmitting to each other. Rather, each one would lower its power to broadcast only to its immediate area, so other cars can avoid it. A jammer would force cars nearby to switch to backup systems, and other vehicles could increase their own transmission power to compensate for the noise.
Also note that though the article uses the term "WiFi", these are likely not standard 802.11 devices. Rather, they are in the 5.9 GHz band, with 75MHz bandwidth.
Right! That way the company becomes a toxic burden of debt for investors, and after the first attempt goes bankrupt, everyone can lose their jobs because nobody wants to pick up the pieces.
Sounds like some loophole method of getting out of your debts
Exactly.
Not quite. It does probably let them get out of long-term contracts and service agreements, and wipes the slate clean for future expenses. Assets that were previously locked in can now be dumped. While there may be some debt that is escaped, I doubt it'd be worth the financial damage from trying to rebuild what has to be sold off to cover those debts.
The other important detail is that it means the original company has effectively gone bankrupt. Everyone who contributed money to the original OnLive project (by buying stock) has lost their investment. That's where the money for debts came from.
So basically, "you're fired. Now, you can come back to work for us with no pay, just stock options that will be worth absolutely nothing when we do this again."
More like "Your employer has gone bankrupt, and the company that bought it doesn't want to pay for you all, but they want you to stay involved and stay in the loop for whenever they do hire again"
Right. Any time a CEO works for "no compensation whatsoever," it means they have an agreement in place for a ton of shares or options down the road. So, in effect, he makes it look like he got wiped out like everyone else, when in fact his compensation has just been swept under the rug/shell for safe keeping.
Stock options are compensation. In effect, he's still working toward the goal of having OnLive functional and eventually even profitable, but this time without the expense of his own salary. Perlman has a long history of chasing crazy ideas, so I think it's perfectly reasonable that he treats this company as a hobby... great if he can make money off of it, but pretty fun if it just works.
Alex Jones is not a credible source. Alex Jones is a conspiracy-loving community-college dropout.
Quickly reading through a less inflammatory site paints a more reasonable picture: Michael Taylor is a lawyer who studies politics and, for 35 years. worked his way up through two related groups. He started as an FDA attorney, then went to private practice five years later. At the private practice, he specialized in what he had experience in: food and drug law. Ten years later, he went back to the government for another five-year term. After that was when he got the VP title, as Vice President of Public Policy, the furthest outside his field. Then he moved to a think tank, researching how best to feed Africa's rural population.
Shortly after he published papers on effectively helping feed Africa, the government pledged to help feed Africa. So here's a guy who has recently done research into a major project, has decades of experience in the legal issues at hand, and is already intimately familiar with every level of how the FDA works... who else could be better for the job?
Of course, Alex Jones doesn't care for silly things like Occam's Razor. If there's any way, no matter how indirect, that someone in the government could be branded as corrupt, he'll push that angle, and there's no reason to let those trivial facts get in the way, either. I don't suppose he's made clear exactly which crops are supposedly exempt from testing? Or what FDA rule prevents researchers from testing them?
Nope. He'll just say that there's no testing required and casually mention Agent Orange in the same sentence just to scare readers. As for sources, he'll cite his own movie and the front pages of other conspiracy sites.
Obligatory.
Now maybe some of the folks here will actually learn how Big Data methodologies work, rather than just spamming links to a strawman argument starring the word "web-scale"...
Aw, who am I kidding... this is Slashdot! A knee-jerk reaction with little forethought is not only the norm, but the mandate!
But where do diseases end, where does aesthetics start?
In the dictionary:
A particular quality, habit, or disposition regarded as adversely affecting a person or group of people.
The line is entirely subjective, based on someone's particular definition of "adverse". If, for example, parents see being a redhead as adversity, why should they be prohibited from engineering a blonde?
Who enforces that line for the rich?
Why should anyone?
Clearly this guy hasn't seen enough dystopian movies about two-class societies emerging from genetics.
Or perhaps movies aren't the best indicator of future progress. More likely than a two-class dystopia is just an evolution of our current society, where the rich can have medical procedures done on a whim, and the poor can have procedures done after months of careful planning and borrowing. For treatments that are widely recognized as being medically suitable, insurance providers will help reduce the impact of the cost.
But it's the American Revolution! This insightful revelation shows that the Founding Fathers not only approved plagiarism, but that it was vitally important to their cause! Obviously, our modern politics are far out of line, having been corrupted by this silly "evolution of society" thing. This should be a clear message for Ron Paul and other politicians who actually care about the Founding Fathers' ideals that all copyright should be abandoned because it didn't matter in 1776.
It's perfectly clear that journalists back then had far higher ethical standards than modern journalists, because they wrote about the American Revolution! That immediately clears any doubt of their honesty, right? They wouldn't have copied something just because they could get away with it, but rather they did so out of a pure desire to spread the gospel of democracy.
Next week, we'll see the full story on how cholera was an effective means of population control, how slavery protected American companies from labor unions, and how an expensive and slow postal system encouraged only meaningful correspondence.
Fascinating and educational.
The sundial's stripes are just one of several markings on the rover. I would expect a known black to be somewhere.
As much as I love the awesome idea of moving a chunk of terrain between planets, I'm going to shoot for an informative mod and answer the question.
There is a sundial mounted on Curiosity, with a few colored stripes on it. Those stripes' colors (red, green, blue, and yellow) were recorded under Earth's lighting, Now that those same stripes are on Mars, their apparent color change in new pictures is the result of Mars' different lighting. By comparing the stripes' pictures, an approprite transformation can be determined, then applied to other pictures to compensate for the change in lighting.
We are sure because we're assuming that those stripes' actual colors haven't changed significantly during flight or landing.
A candidate for the U.S. Senate was in town for a discussion panel for which I was running sound (since I volunteer as an audio technician). After the panel, she came out on stage where I was coiling cables, and we had a lovely discussion on labor unions. We presented our positions, discussed the merits and shortcomings of union power, and eventually conceded that both employers and unions too often behave like infants. It was an insightful and interesting conversation.
This is one of several similar encounters I've had over the years, though the majority of discussions I've fallen into were with more local politicians. I doubt I could say I've "confronted" any of them, because I'm not going to go out of my way to be confrontational. Though it seems popular now to call any gaudy spectacle with a political motive a "protest", I prefer to submit my protests in a more effective and less offensive manner: calm and polite discourse.
And yet you can blithely say that, posting logged in to your account, with full knowledge that your IP address and user agent string are being logged, and yet still have no fear that the US government will ever come hunting you down for your disparaging remarks.
So to summarize, "all those other statistics and figures from actual trained economists are wrong! Real things are worse than everything being measured, because I say so!"
Sure, why not?
Here's a nice graph.
That's the GDP adjusted for inflation (real GDP). Note that the scale is logarithmic. The USA is the most productive it's ever been, and since leaving the gold standard in 1971, the economy has been far more stable. There's your history. The gold standard currency was unstable and had no effect on America's productivity.
On the one hand, I agree... Michigan was screwed to begin with, and no less screwed now.
On the other hand, that's a lot of folks whose lives depend on having constant access to that wealth, regardless of where it's distributed.
Michigan effectively put all its eggs in one basket without realizing it. Nobody ever thought that all the Detroit car companies would be failing at once without something else in the area taking their place.