-$10 a month to use Office. Wouldn't you? I mean, sure it's not as good as Open office, or... Well it sucks, but they aren't willing to pay me to use those products, they just expect me to use them for free.
If MS wants me to use Office, I'm willing, for a mere $10 a month, for $50 a month I'll actually *use* it, not just pretend to use it and install it on my computer!
Also, old people. Yes old people have netflix, I'm 47, I have in previous decades hacked/copied/pirated everything/had the coolest fastest/newest/most slashes/best home entertainment stuff. But I got old, I care a lot less about that crap now and my primary movie watching device and television that has a fucking tube, and it has a DVD player plugged into it, and when I get netflix or redbox movies and can toss them in and watch them. I don't want to watch them on my phone, or my pc or my tablet. Because I am old, and I am happy to pop in a disk, since it works and I don't have to rewind it before I mail it back or toss it in the redbox. I have decent bandwidth, and if I wanted to I could get a spiffy new PC or media centre, hell I built one before the term was hip. But I urge you to get off my lawn.
It isn't just that your elders can't keep up with the current technology, aren't smart enough or don't see the benefit, you can just get happy doing it the same way. "Because we've always done it that way" is a terrible reason in anything that matters. But for entertainment and leisure activities, such as watching movies... It's a perfect reason.
Also the movie industry is run mostly by folks who think me as young.
Look, the other day I watched a backhoe, barely bigger than a vending machine digging the smallest section of drainage ditch. I'm tempted to just rattle off a bunch of buzzwords and say synergy and 3D printing etc sixteen times.
But the increasing complexity, intelligence and sophistication of computing power, software, sensors and things like servomotors is growing at a... Exponential? (Geometric?) INCREDIBLE rate and at some point, sooner than even I think, ten, fifteen years at the max, humanoid robots will be so cheap that they will, in fact be cheaper than actual humans. At that point the problem isn't how to develop and employ them, it's what to do with the 90% of humanity that can't do any job cheaper than a robot.
The only jobs left right now are.
1: Guy that does a job robot cannot do. Doctor, Lawyer, Scientist, politician.
2: Robot trainer
3: Robot Repairman (See #1)
4: Guy who does a job cheaper than a robot, or a job a robot isn't willing to do. (These jobs suck ass.)
AI, like Watson will continue to shrink categories, 1 and 2, and eventually category 3 will be taken over by robots.
This is the real robot apocalypse, not murderous killbots, but they will have "TOOK R JOBS" and only folks who own the robots will have any realistic way to make money.
The good news, for me, is that I'm kind of old, so it won't crush me. The bad news is that you probably aren't. We need to figure this out, now.
Period, no matter what do not do work for your employer for free. Do it once and you've set a precedent that you can't undo.You pay me to program machines to make parts for you, you are also paying me to make the normal number of mistakes and fix them. If I screw up so often that you can't live with my output, then I should find a different job, if you expect me to fix my mistakes for free then we are violating the basic premise of my employment. What's more you will have created a situation where your employer has a financial interest in making you work for free, and they will accordingly seek to maximize their profit by getting you to do so at every opportunity, the situation will grow worse with time and you will hate your job. I have done something similar to this in the past and it lead to a nightmare scenario. (Although I was exempt salary so it's hard to say when I was working for "free" exactly)
When you have made a mistake you might be tempted, but don't fall for it..
As other posters have said a company or contractor repairing something for "free" for it's end customer is fine, those costs should be, in the long run cooked into the price of doing business, but if you are a regular employer you should never ever do this under any circumstances.
We started off with at least the half hearted assumption that this was the case, then the web and the net went mainstream. Society assumed our paranoia was irrational and silly. It might have been for a bit, but it clearly wasn't in the long run.
One of the assumptions we made in the interim and that many folks still make is that, "There aren't enough watchers to watch every one of us" or "They might have access to my e-mail, text and data but they don't have enough people to read each and every one of those things" because we the people society at large, just don't get technology, even those of us who do, Watson super-computing and the Google search algorithm can be applied to you and I our behavior associations and the possibility that we will do something bad in the future...
BUT brothers and sisters nevermind that, think for a moment of the possibility that those in charge, or some of them, with access to the spying they might use this access to do something bad, like leak secret e-mails from a popular Governor, that show he closed a bridge, or those who work for him did, as some sort of act of dickery, and so we catch him lying about it, and thus remove the threat of him becoming president... Really... Don't tell me why he is in fact a dick.. he probably is, I could care less, the idea is those with access to the NSA cloud can decide who is in and who is out in terms of eligibility for admission to the public sphere.
You know I hope in the long run we develop some sort of program to deter people from starting nicotine in any form, while also encouraging the lapsed quitter to deflecting his or her relapses to e-cigs or vaping because while I doubt that it's wonderful for your health I can't see how cutting out tar, carbon monoxide and burnt paper can make anything worse for you.
Everyone dies, but I'm saving it for last. Don't smoke do whatever you can to encourage others to not smoke. Really not only are the health consequences devastating the power of the addiction is intense, some of you haven't quit, or haven't gotten fully addicted yet don't believe me. But I'm 47 I've smoked maybe ten years or so in my life, quit several times, have been currently been quit for several years, but I still struggle with it sometimes. I could start tomorrow, hell tonight, and be back at it for however long it took to quit again. Really don't smoke, stop now don't reply with some BS about willpower or choice. Look at the statistics count up the corpses do you imagine that you're really so far superior a being to all those who couldn't quit? Don't take that chance. Quit.
If I wasn't so tired from shoveling snow I would work out some mathematically logical rational for low userid posturing and posing. You know, based on numbers of orders of magnitude lower than the current newest userid, or perhaps one's place in the percentage of total all-time accounts (This would maximize my 115K bragging rights I think.) and then someone else would work up some clever theorem based on who's userids are prime and who has the lowest and highest prime userids and of course the cool 4 digit one's which coincide with memorable years or even the users birth, and it would spiral into something more interesting than/. beta, but about this time they'd make beta go live and ruin the whole thread causing/.ers to launch some insidious DDOS attack which at first only take out/. but would then spiral out of control and trigger some unforeseen double data copying in the NSAs echelon project, thousands of NSA data centres would catch fire and explode, Leading a nuclear winter and the extinction of life on earth. Good thing I shoveled all that snow after all.
I'm a bit paranoid when it comes to this sort of abuse by those in power. If the data is streamed back to "police Hq" then there is a layer of oversight there to reduce the abuse, it's not about whether or not the deputy who decided he didn't like the look of you decides to ignore or delete this information, it requires a larger conspiracy by those who are supposed to responsible and accountable, and those who didn't make some mistake or abuse their power to begin with, so it's not unlike dashcams for policemans hats.
Also seeing this article with the XKCD extension that replace Google Glass with Virtual Boy made me smile.
At first I didn't hate it, but then I tried to, and actually did reply to a few comments, and WTF they've broken the discussion system? Also I can't see anyone's userid# damnit, what's the point in having a low six digit userid# if I can't subtly flaunt it? Really...
Also hotgrits and natalie portman.
We should also ad an X-do not oppress field to everyone on Earth's birth certificate or equivalent? That way if they don't want to be oppressed, they can just say so, and surely oppressive governments will abide by the rational, peaceful and nicely expressed desire of their citizens to be, or not be oppressed. Right?
A big part of the problem is that in the USA we have defined "CAR" to be a relatively large, powerful vehicle, which must travel at 60+MPH while potentially trading paint with trucks which are up to sixty-thousand pounds and traveling at the same speed. Add to this a lemming-like, almost suicidal traffic pattern, and you see how it becomes impossible to go out there and travel around your daily ten mile or less errands in a reasonable, lightweight vehicle, which however it was powered would lower the emissions (Both local, and global) immensely. Part of the problem with fixing THAT of course is that we've built an entire country, and interstate highway system around the old model. Now, we're not paying enough to sustain the roads, bridges and infrastructure we have now. So something will have to change in the future.
Most things in nature are chaotic, the tiniest variations and deviations from the purely uniform in the starting conditions can lead to great irregularities in the final state of the system. I hadn't given much though to the matter of the heliopause, but I think a little thought would have lead you to expect it to look like a snowflake, or a raisin, or maybe a supernova, galaxy or nebula, rather than a light bulb, other than the rainbow which was put there by the almighty as a promise to not end the world again by flood most natural phenomena are pretty irregular, aren't they?
I would have you believe it's my heroic abilities and self idealized individual ruggedness that allowed me to survive the first thirty-four years of my life, and then the last two (Voluntarily) with no cell phone, but hey, really it's no big deal. The actually spun before twitter and facebook as well, although I'm not sure it wasn't all cannibals and dinosaurs, asteroid impacts and human sacrifice before/. but my memory of that dim before time is pretty vague.
Humans, even primitive ones would easily out compete dinos. Think, fire, spear throwers, single, long term fatal, but in the short term insignificant wounds. We're just too much smart than they are. I think. On the other hand, watch that episode about Crows, and or spend some time observing the Corvids and ponder that some of the smaller, faster smarter dinosaurs had similar brain to body size ratios. A Raven, Crow, Blue Jay or Grackle, that was six foot tall and had manipulative forepaws? Hmm Lucky for us they never had a space program or we simply wouldn't be.
You! Are the man! Or woman, or whatever. Do not let your beliefs. (Even if we are talking about empirically justified, rational beliefs.) Fuck up your relationship. Now, it may very well be that there are underlying issues in your currently significant others grasp of reality that might one day infringe upon your shared happiness. Really. But dear God, don't screw it up because you can't believe in fairies, or she thinks atomic powered spacecraft are a terrible idea, or because you believe in strong AI and she doesn't. Or because you're sure the singularity is nigh, and she hasn't a clue what you're on about. Don't lie to her, don't pretend, don't play games, but if in the short run you have to believe in cavemen astride velociraptors, fuck wait, I think I have decided to believe in that now, just how cool is that anyway?
Leading people to begin to consider security seriously? You know, protocols, encryption, up to date software, actually not plugging every last device and every single fact into what amounts to a publicly accessible network? Nahhh, never happen.
Don't hire any women. Or men. Or only hire eunuchs to be UNIX admins.
Seriously, your question does almost sound like a troll. Either you are suggesting that your team is a bunch of animals, or that this women is apparently a walking complaint waiting to happen. It does turn out to be a fact of life that in general men, and women, talk about things, and in ways that are just not appropriate in mixed company sometimes. Remind your team of this.
Almost no one pushing for curbs on greenhouse gases mentions that this exhaust is usually coupled with other stuff, like soot, and smoke and whatever toxic chemicals are associated with burning whatever is making the greenhouse gases, and that we all have to breathe air, and that soot, smoke and crap are killing people. Push harder for clean air.
You shoot, you jump in a hole. You'll almost certainly survive the immediate blast and radiation effects. Now you're long term survival may have been harmed. But in an alternate timeline where WWIII begins with tactical nukes back in the fifties/sixties and you find yourself on the front lines shooting Davy Crockett at the Russian steamroller. Tomorrow is about as long term as you've got to think about.
Who knows? These sort of experiments are tremendously costly in terms of cash, lives, and the political aftermath. But the current state of thinking, among those who do that sort of thing for a living. Is that this is not the case. Nor has it been the case for the most part since the aircraft carrier became the staple of US military power projection. Getting missile platforms within range of a carrier battle group, and then getting those missiles (Generally these things are the size a small airplane ) a target lock on the carrier, then those missiles flying to the target (Through a hail of missiles and at the end point-defense gunfire) and getting a hit. Don't forget quite powerful and active ECM, Chaff etc.
So it certainly doesn't seem to be an open and shut case. Now at the start of the war, the "bad guys" may get to start off close the carrier, and maybe they've got visual spotters, or electronic eyes on the target, think about those Soviet trawlers that used to sail around looking at the US navy during the cold war. Maybe that opening day a shot gets lucky. But probably not.
Slashdot Mirror
-$10 a month to use Office. Wouldn't you? I mean, sure it's not as good as Open office, or... Well it sucks, but they aren't willing to pay me to use those products, they just expect me to use them for free. If MS wants me to use Office, I'm willing, for a mere $10 a month, for $50 a month I'll actually *use* it, not just pretend to use it and install it on my computer!
Also, old people. Yes old people have netflix, I'm 47, I have in previous decades hacked/copied/pirated everything/had the coolest fastest/newest/most slashes/best home entertainment stuff. But I got old, I care a lot less about that crap now and my primary movie watching device and television that has a fucking tube, and it has a DVD player plugged into it, and when I get netflix or redbox movies and can toss them in and watch them. I don't want to watch them on my phone, or my pc or my tablet. Because I am old, and I am happy to pop in a disk, since it works and I don't have to rewind it before I mail it back or toss it in the redbox. I have decent bandwidth, and if I wanted to I could get a spiffy new PC or media centre, hell I built one before the term was hip. But I urge you to get off my lawn. It isn't just that your elders can't keep up with the current technology, aren't smart enough or don't see the benefit, you can just get happy doing it the same way. "Because we've always done it that way" is a terrible reason in anything that matters. But for entertainment and leisure activities, such as watching movies... It's a perfect reason. Also the movie industry is run mostly by folks who think me as young.
Look, the other day I watched a backhoe, barely bigger than a vending machine digging the smallest section of drainage ditch. I'm tempted to just rattle off a bunch of buzzwords and say synergy and 3D printing etc sixteen times. But the increasing complexity, intelligence and sophistication of computing power, software, sensors and things like servomotors is growing at a... Exponential? (Geometric?) INCREDIBLE rate and at some point, sooner than even I think, ten, fifteen years at the max, humanoid robots will be so cheap that they will, in fact be cheaper than actual humans. At that point the problem isn't how to develop and employ them, it's what to do with the 90% of humanity that can't do any job cheaper than a robot. The only jobs left right now are. 1: Guy that does a job robot cannot do. Doctor, Lawyer, Scientist, politician. 2: Robot trainer 3: Robot Repairman (See #1) 4: Guy who does a job cheaper than a robot, or a job a robot isn't willing to do. (These jobs suck ass.) AI, like Watson will continue to shrink categories, 1 and 2, and eventually category 3 will be taken over by robots. This is the real robot apocalypse, not murderous killbots, but they will have "TOOK R JOBS" and only folks who own the robots will have any realistic way to make money. The good news, for me, is that I'm kind of old, so it won't crush me. The bad news is that you probably aren't. We need to figure this out, now.
Period, no matter what do not do work for your employer for free. Do it once and you've set a precedent that you can't undo.You pay me to program machines to make parts for you, you are also paying me to make the normal number of mistakes and fix them. If I screw up so often that you can't live with my output, then I should find a different job, if you expect me to fix my mistakes for free then we are violating the basic premise of my employment. What's more you will have created a situation where your employer has a financial interest in making you work for free, and they will accordingly seek to maximize their profit by getting you to do so at every opportunity, the situation will grow worse with time and you will hate your job. I have done something similar to this in the past and it lead to a nightmare scenario. (Although I was exempt salary so it's hard to say when I was working for "free" exactly) When you have made a mistake you might be tempted, but don't fall for it.. As other posters have said a company or contractor repairing something for "free" for it's end customer is fine, those costs should be, in the long run cooked into the price of doing business, but if you are a regular employer you should never ever do this under any circumstances.
Exactly this is to me the primary objection to whole program, as important as the rather obvious (To me) violations of the fourth amendment.
And choose from one of the two folks selected by the elite to represent you.
We started off with at least the half hearted assumption that this was the case, then the web and the net went mainstream. Society assumed our paranoia was irrational and silly. It might have been for a bit, but it clearly wasn't in the long run. One of the assumptions we made in the interim and that many folks still make is that, "There aren't enough watchers to watch every one of us" or "They might have access to my e-mail, text and data but they don't have enough people to read each and every one of those things" because we the people society at large, just don't get technology, even those of us who do, Watson super-computing and the Google search algorithm can be applied to you and I our behavior associations and the possibility that we will do something bad in the future... BUT brothers and sisters nevermind that, think for a moment of the possibility that those in charge, or some of them, with access to the spying they might use this access to do something bad, like leak secret e-mails from a popular Governor, that show he closed a bridge, or those who work for him did, as some sort of act of dickery, and so we catch him lying about it, and thus remove the threat of him becoming president... Really... Don't tell me why he is in fact a dick.. he probably is, I could care less, the idea is those with access to the NSA cloud can decide who is in and who is out in terms of eligibility for admission to the public sphere.
You know I hope in the long run we develop some sort of program to deter people from starting nicotine in any form, while also encouraging the lapsed quitter to deflecting his or her relapses to e-cigs or vaping because while I doubt that it's wonderful for your health I can't see how cutting out tar, carbon monoxide and burnt paper can make anything worse for you.
Everyone dies, but I'm saving it for last. Don't smoke do whatever you can to encourage others to not smoke. Really not only are the health consequences devastating the power of the addiction is intense, some of you haven't quit, or haven't gotten fully addicted yet don't believe me. But I'm 47 I've smoked maybe ten years or so in my life, quit several times, have been currently been quit for several years, but I still struggle with it sometimes. I could start tomorrow, hell tonight, and be back at it for however long it took to quit again. Really don't smoke, stop now don't reply with some BS about willpower or choice. Look at the statistics count up the corpses do you imagine that you're really so far superior a being to all those who couldn't quit? Don't take that chance. Quit.
If I wasn't so tired from shoveling snow I would work out some mathematically logical rational for low userid posturing and posing. You know, based on numbers of orders of magnitude lower than the current newest userid, or perhaps one's place in the percentage of total all-time accounts (This would maximize my 115K bragging rights I think.) and then someone else would work up some clever theorem based on who's userids are prime and who has the lowest and highest prime userids and of course the cool 4 digit one's which coincide with memorable years or even the users birth, and it would spiral into something more interesting than /. beta, but about this time they'd make beta go live and ruin the whole thread causing /.ers to launch some insidious DDOS attack which at first only take out /. but would then spiral out of control and trigger some unforeseen double data copying in the NSAs echelon project, thousands of NSA data centres would catch fire and explode, Leading a nuclear winter and the extinction of life on earth. Good thing I shoveled all that snow after all.
I'm a bit paranoid when it comes to this sort of abuse by those in power. If the data is streamed back to "police Hq" then there is a layer of oversight there to reduce the abuse, it's not about whether or not the deputy who decided he didn't like the look of you decides to ignore or delete this information, it requires a larger conspiracy by those who are supposed to responsible and accountable, and those who didn't make some mistake or abuse their power to begin with, so it's not unlike dashcams for policemans hats. Also seeing this article with the XKCD extension that replace Google Glass with Virtual Boy made me smile.
At first I didn't hate it, but then I tried to, and actually did reply to a few comments, and WTF they've broken the discussion system? Also I can't see anyone's userid# damnit, what's the point in having a low six digit userid# if I can't subtly flaunt it? Really... Also hotgrits and natalie portman.
We should also ad an X-do not oppress field to everyone on Earth's birth certificate or equivalent? That way if they don't want to be oppressed, they can just say so, and surely oppressive governments will abide by the rational, peaceful and nicely expressed desire of their citizens to be, or not be oppressed. Right?
Corporations of the giant sort aren't faceless. They are people now didn't you know? Don't discriminate against Bank of America!
As to the existence of an external universe we have only the flawed testimony of our own unreliable perception.
A big part of the problem is that in the USA we have defined "CAR" to be a relatively large, powerful vehicle, which must travel at 60+MPH while potentially trading paint with trucks which are up to sixty-thousand pounds and traveling at the same speed. Add to this a lemming-like, almost suicidal traffic pattern, and you see how it becomes impossible to go out there and travel around your daily ten mile or less errands in a reasonable, lightweight vehicle, which however it was powered would lower the emissions (Both local, and global) immensely. Part of the problem with fixing THAT of course is that we've built an entire country, and interstate highway system around the old model. Now, we're not paying enough to sustain the roads, bridges and infrastructure we have now. So something will have to change in the future.
Most things in nature are chaotic, the tiniest variations and deviations from the purely uniform in the starting conditions can lead to great irregularities in the final state of the system. I hadn't given much though to the matter of the heliopause, but I think a little thought would have lead you to expect it to look like a snowflake, or a raisin, or maybe a supernova, galaxy or nebula, rather than a light bulb, other than the rainbow which was put there by the almighty as a promise to not end the world again by flood most natural phenomena are pretty irregular, aren't they?
I would have you believe it's my heroic abilities and self idealized individual ruggedness that allowed me to survive the first thirty-four years of my life, and then the last two (Voluntarily) with no cell phone, but hey, really it's no big deal. The actually spun before twitter and facebook as well, although I'm not sure it wasn't all cannibals and dinosaurs, asteroid impacts and human sacrifice before /. but my memory of that dim before time is pretty vague.
Humans, even primitive ones would easily out compete dinos. Think, fire, spear throwers, single, long term fatal, but in the short term insignificant wounds. We're just too much smart than they are. I think. On the other hand, watch that episode about Crows, and or spend some time observing the Corvids and ponder that some of the smaller, faster smarter dinosaurs had similar brain to body size ratios. A Raven, Crow, Blue Jay or Grackle, that was six foot tall and had manipulative forepaws? Hmm Lucky for us they never had a space program or we simply wouldn't be.
You! Are the man! Or woman, or whatever. Do not let your beliefs. (Even if we are talking about empirically justified, rational beliefs.) Fuck up your relationship. Now, it may very well be that there are underlying issues in your currently significant others grasp of reality that might one day infringe upon your shared happiness. Really. But dear God, don't screw it up because you can't believe in fairies, or she thinks atomic powered spacecraft are a terrible idea, or because you believe in strong AI and she doesn't. Or because you're sure the singularity is nigh, and she hasn't a clue what you're on about. Don't lie to her, don't pretend, don't play games, but if in the short run you have to believe in cavemen astride velociraptors, fuck wait, I think I have decided to believe in that now, just how cool is that anyway?
Leading people to begin to consider security seriously? You know, protocols, encryption, up to date software, actually not plugging every last device and every single fact into what amounts to a publicly accessible network? Nahhh, never happen.
Seriously, your question does almost sound like a troll. Either you are suggesting that your team is a bunch of animals, or that this women is apparently a walking complaint waiting to happen. It does turn out to be a fact of life that in general men, and women, talk about things, and in ways that are just not appropriate in mixed company sometimes. Remind your team of this.
Almost no one pushing for curbs on greenhouse gases mentions that this exhaust is usually coupled with other stuff, like soot, and smoke and whatever toxic chemicals are associated with burning whatever is making the greenhouse gases, and that we all have to breathe air, and that soot, smoke and crap are killing people. Push harder for clean air.
You shoot, you jump in a hole. You'll almost certainly survive the immediate blast and radiation effects. Now you're long term survival may have been harmed. But in an alternate timeline where WWIII begins with tactical nukes back in the fifties/sixties and you find yourself on the front lines shooting Davy Crockett at the Russian steamroller. Tomorrow is about as long term as you've got to think about.
So it certainly doesn't seem to be an open and shut case. Now at the start of the war, the "bad guys" may get to start off close the carrier, and maybe they've got visual spotters, or electronic eyes on the target, think about those Soviet trawlers that used to sail around looking at the US navy during the cold war. Maybe that opening day a shot gets lucky. But probably not.