The only way to do that would be to greatly simplify government or have many more aides... or you can have more lobbyists help them make decisions,,,,
Have you watched CSPAN? Congress spends 90% of their time on non-binding resolutions aka worthless paper pushing. Last time I tuned in, they were debating a non-binding resolution to recognize the Hollywood Walk of Fame. They aren't debating laws or the merits of the laws. They spend their time doing idiotic stuff that they shouldn't even be doing.
Every time someone posts about AI, there are posts like this. It's called *artificial* for a reason. It's not true intelligence and it's not consciousness but no one is claiming that it is. It is computers solving complex problems which we call AI. Games like Checkers, Chess computers have pretty much been mastered. Freeform games like Starcraft they are gaining on. Complex patterns like image and speech recognition they are also gaining on quickly. The are still pretty weak in real world applications like lego sorting or folding laundry but we have unintelligent machines that can break these problem down into manageable chunks. Chunking is likely the way we move forward for the near future by taking on small domains at a time. We are also seeing where the different chunks are being recombined like in the self driving cars where they do scene recognition, text recognition, navigation, etc... as separate modules but combine the results into a system that can do very complex tasks. It's basically what we've been doing in factories for 100 years. The thing is that once we have a machine that can do all the different pieces, even if it is the size of a room, we know what to do next. We do what we did with computers and start shrinking it until that room size system fits in your pocket. Is it true intelligence? No, it's better. It can do the tasks you need to do without questioning you and without rights of its own.
Evolution explains exactly that. The differences in both brain and type of behavior between animals determines if they are suitable for domestication, and their utility to us determines if it is worth our while to do so.
Case in point: Zebras. The only ones that have successfully be domesticated have been cross bread bringing in the evolutionary traits that were missing.
Their natural traits explains why certain animals were domesticated while others weren't. Most wild animals can be raised in captivity and become handleable. Dogs and cats both have natural tendencies that make them desirable animals. Dogs tend to be loyal and can be trained to protect and hunt while cats naturally help kill pests. Also, dogs naturally want to poop away from their home and also want to please which makes them easy to house train. Likewise with cats, they naturally want to cover their poop and tend to always go in same spot which we can exploit by providing them a litter box. Some of the more exotic animals don't have the natural tendencies of either dogs or cats and housebreaking them is all but impossible.
This is not warfare, because no one is forcing humans to own fucking cats.
Depends on how you define "force". If a parasite creates a strong desire for you to own a cat, that's pretty close to force. Just like no one forces someone addicted to cigarettes to smoke, but once you are addicted, you have a very strong desire to continue to smoke. Some hard drugs are even worse where you practically die if you stop. If you stop eating for a few weeks, your body creates a strong desire that might not technically force you to eat but requires significant energy to resist. Along the same lines, the government doesn't force you to pay your taxes but if you don't it will make your life pretty miserable until you do.
a defined benefit plan requires an ever-increasing contribution base.
No, it doesn't. An unfunded defined benefit plan requires either a stable or increasing contribution base. A fully funded defined benefit plan puts away enough money that there is guaranteed to be enough money available to pay whatever they have promised. Take a look at the Missouri Teacher's Retirement Plan. It's a fully funded defined benefits plan. It's not perfect. Because of turmoil in the stock market, it currently only has enough money to fund 76% of its liabilities where back in 2000 it had enough to cover 103% of its liabilities but if it can't make up the difference, worst case scenerio is that they have to slightly reduce everyone's pension. The contribution base could go to zero and they would still be able to mostly cover the pension they promised.
Originally, Social Security was supposed to be similar to a savings account. You paid into it, and the money was supposed to be there when you retired. But then there was this large pool of $$$$ sitting there, and the government said we can't have this $$$$ sitting there, we gotta go spend it!
Not really. From day 1, Social Security paid out money from people currently working to people over 65. It started paying out immediately so the first beneficiaries never even contributed.
Simple fix - get rid of defined benefit plans and switch to defined contribution plans. Defined benefit plans can only function when the source of revenue is both 1) unlimited or nearly so and 2) easily modifiable without regard to profits. In other words, soaking the taxpayer more and more for significantly above-average pension promises.
I'm ok with defined benefit plans. For a sufficiently large company, they should be able to fully fund a defined benefit plan using actuary tables and adjust appropriately. A defined benefit plan has the advantage that you can pay out slightly higher pension amounts because the people who live longer are subsidized by the people who die early. A defined benefit plan is basically a pooled retirement fund if fully funded.
> Unfunded pensions are a ponzi scheme that should have never been allowed. I think there's a middle ground between fully funded and unfunded. Or maybe companies should be forced to buy "pension insurance.":) Or maybe it's just something we should have the government do (ie, Social Security).
Social Security is no better. It's also unfunded. It pays out benefits using current revenue. I see no benefits of an unfunded pension. What are the benefits of an unfunded pensions? It's an unlisted IOU (aka liability) for whoever is promising it. It's a way to promise to pay someone more without actually paying them. A fulled funded pension also has the advantage that a person would have the option of taking the extra cash instead of the pension. The only advantage an unfunded pension has is the hope that future revenue is greater than current revenue. This is a horrible assumption that likely only holds true 50% of the time at best.
Make in-store pickup really, really fast. Many brick and mortar stores make it too slow. So that is one of the main reasons why they are losing out to Amazon. If it takes half a day or more from me hitting "buy" on the site and the local store putting together the order, that's too slow for what it is.
Some stores are even worse than that. If you order from "Bass Pro Shop", they show you the inventory of the local store, but their online orders don't actually pull from that so it takes a week to get anything you order online from their website for in-store pickup. They should treat it like a walk in order and immediate pull the items the second they are ordered and have them waiting for you when you get there. Even walmart.com usually takes more than an hour. It would be rather trivial for them to autoprint an order when it comes in and page an employee to immediately start pulling the requested items and have them in a basket by the door waiting for you.
The economy has benefited hugely from a reliable flat-fee mail delivery system. Like many taken-for-granted benefits we enjoy I didn't realize that until I did some consulting work for a company operating in a part of the world with a unreliable postal system
I agree but I doubt the volume would go down significantly if they raised the rate to $1 per envelope and got rid of bulk rate pricing. You would lose some junk mail but could make it up with the added revenue. If volume did go down significantly, switch to MWF delivery and charge extra for Tues/Thurs/Sat/Sun delivery. On a somewhat related note, I was gone for Father's Day weekend and I had to postpone buying something I wanted on Thursday until Saturday just so amazon would delivery it on Monday instead of Sat/Sun. Not everything needs to arrive in 2 days. I would have gladly ordered it on Thursday for a Monday delivery if that would have been an option.
I would like this rule extended to the entire government, as we are sitting on a liability time bomb
I would like this rule extended to private corporations.
I agree completely. Unfunded pensions are a ponzi scheme that should have never been allowed. Whether it is Social Security, police officers, a car manufacturer, etc... promising to pay retirement out of future revenue is a disaster waiting to happen. Places like Detroit show what happens when your population shrinks and you no longer have the tax base to support your future obligations. Same with private corporations. They can go out of business, downsize, etc... and if their profit or workforce shrinks, there is no way they can fund those future obligations. At the very least, future obligations need to be on the book as debt owed so that if they go bankrupt, the retirees have equal footing to other creditors. I live in Missouri, and our public school teachers have a fully funded pension. My grandma actually gets raises when they have too much money in their pension fund. If school teachers can do it then other government and private businesses should be able to do it too.
Not sure how to get out of this cycle without inventing a better, more knowledgeable customer...
That doesn't even work. To take one example, the customer has no way of knowing what happens to their credit card once they submit it on a company's website. Is it stored unencrypted in a database? Is it emailed to someone in India for processing? Is it printed out and manually entered into a terminal? Is the 3 digit code on the back also stored in a database? Companies are supposed to be PCI compliant which should prevent most of these but most small companies aren't and to my knowledge there is really no way for the consumer to verify that they are. On a somewhat related note, I had a friend that tried to check the security of his bank by running a port scan on it and they didn't appreciate it at all.
If your company were going to be held liable for security vulnerabilities, finding and plugging these holes during development would be part of your job. As things are, there's no reason to look for or deal with them unless there's a way to make your customers pay for it. This holds true for all custom software, either open or closed source.
It really depends on how big the company is, how often they get busted, and what exactly they are liable for. As it stands now, the average small company can go 20 years without an incident. The small company that skips on security can likely outcompete and outlast the small company that doesn't. Sure if they get unlucky and have a security incident, it could bankrupt them but the odds are in their favor that skipping security gives them a competitive advantage to the company that doesn't.
Your personal theory is a published study. Mostly aspergers, but a prof looked into it and his theory is that since most people are marrying later, they are also marrying people in their fields. So instead of marrying a random girl from town, you're marrying someone that could also be intelligent and have low level autism.
Do you have a link to that study? I've seen from personal experience that most people I know with autistic kids tend to be highly intelligence and it makes sense that it could be some kind of "inbreeding" type characteristic especially considering that it's spiking in places like Silicon Valley but I have yet to see anything but conjecture on the topic.
I remember taking a left brain / right brain test in high school and the teacher saying that the only people who scored equal on both sides tended to be either genius or mentally retarded. Whether it is autism, schizophrenia, creativity, or something else, if you want to "think outside the box" then being on the fringe is to your advantage. It doesn't surprise me that great thinkers were far outside the box. The trick is being far outside the box without being so far out that you're unstable. Many great thinkers, artists, etc.. were fairly unstable but still managed to hold it together well enough to give us some novel ideas.
On a somewhat related note, I have a personal theory that the spike in autism is being caused by smart people having children. If intelligence is "balancing on the brink of insanity", then two people on the brink who reproduce sometimes causes their offspring to be over the edge.
I could be wrong but it seems like Netflix only a proponent of network neutrality when it suits them. I suspect they have recently gotten notice that they are being throttled in some locations and they don't like the proposed contract, so they are back on the net neutrality bandwagon. Once they establish long term contracts with major ISPs, they'll be back to their old anti-competitive ways.
I think they are in favor of net neutrality because it reduces their costs. At the same time, they have to reassure their stockholders that the lack of net neutrality isn't a threat to their business model. Along the way, if they can get a deal that their competitors don't, this helps them too. Basically, for them it is a business decision. Fighting for net neutrality helps them in both the short term with cost and the long term by protecting their business model but the lack of net neutrality can also help them in the short term if they can get better deals that their competitors. Sadly, from a business perspective, it's probably best for Netflix if net neutrality remains in flux so they can use it as a stick when negotiating deals.
Most weeds do not actually require sunlight to live. The roots of most plants have their own sustenance mechanisms that can leech minerals and nutrients from the soil to sustain the plant. This is why plants have roots. Duh.
Weeds can launch shoots from the nutrients they gather from the soil.
Even if this was true, the goal of weeding a garden isn't as much to kill the weeds as much as to keep the weeds from overpowering the desired plants. If the weeds remain tiny, you've effectively reached that goal regardless of whether or not the weeds are dead. If this thing works at all, I see it more useful for a flower garden than an actual garden but honestly, by the looks of it, I would expect it to get stuck the first time it rains.
I dont want it to activate a trimmer and cut it. I want it to roll a wet rag on it sprayed with either a broad leaf weed killer or roundup. Dont spray. Right now it is height based, no vision sensor. So roundup is enough. Once it recognizes weeds from grass, it can use broad leaf weed killer that does not kill the grass.
What advantage do you get from chemicals? It adds to both the cost and maintenance. It also is likely less healthy for both you and the nearly plants. Assuming it works reliably, cutting the plants daily would work effectively as it is depriving the weed of the photosynthesis it needs to survive. I see no advantage of chemicals over this assuming it works as claimed.
If black balls on a lake are better for stopping evaporation than white, surely carbon in the atmosphere would cool the climate more than white snow.
I never claimed that. I said that there were other goals besides just preventing evaporation.
What is with all the elitism and religious respect of authority figures without questioning? It's trivial to do. We made a whole field out of it.
It's called science.
I didn't say that we shouldn't question them but just that when engineering a solution to any problem there are general multiple constraints that need to be balanced. As engineers also tend to know a thing or two about science and pretty much everyone knows that black absorbs more heat than white, although it's possible that they all managed to miss this, it's likely more plausible that there were other constraints that prevented them from using white balls.
Scott Adams might be right. God committed suicide and we are the aftermath trying to put him back together again. Once computers are omnipresent, our only choice will be to become one with the hive mind.
On a more serious note, computers have been for several decades now enhancing our human ability. Very few jobs are immune as a person that uses a computer can out compete the person who doesn't. In areas like accounting, one person can now do the job that 10 people used to do. As computers continue to make humans better, smarter, and more efficient, it will be hard to hide. Unfortunately though, making a job more efficient doesn't mean that the job becomes more enjoyable. In a lot of cases, by making jobs more efficient, we are taking the enjoyment out of them. I'm not sure what the solution is to this.
Perl 5 & 6 always appeared to me as the case study which lead Python to co-develop both 2.7 and 3.x simultaneously.
The case study as in they are doing the exact same thing as Perl? Perl is also co-developing 5 and 6 at the same time just like Python but, just like Python, they are having a hard time getting people to adopt the new version because the old version still works just fine.
"I will pay you $3M per year, under the condition that you don't quit and work for a competitor" does not seem entirely unreasonable.
But is smartsheet really a competitor? I can see preventing him from going and working for rackspace but if smartsheet is considered a competitor then that eliminates 90% of his potential jobs. A non-compete should require a company to explicitly list who they consider and don't consider a competitor. An overly broad non-compete basically makes you unemployable. If a company really wants a non-compete like that then instead of paying them 3M per year, they should pay them only 2M per year and save the extra 1M per year so they can continue to pay them a salary for the additional 18 months after the employee leaves.
Which programming language made changes that broke the last ten years worth of software that was written in it, and survived? Perl?
Perl is backwards compatible as well. There is a Perl 6 but it's pretty much dead in the water because it breaks backwards compatibility with the thousands of modules on CPAN. It's very hard for a programming language to get a high adoption rate. In order to become a popular language it has to bring something new to the table that existing languages don't have. This is doubly hard for an existing language that breaks backwards compatibility because it is also competing with it's older versions which already have an ecosystem. That's why backwards compatibility is so important. It allows you to get the existing userbase for free.
I've saved over 60% of my pay for nearly 18 years and counting. Yes, it sucks to not be able to even take a single day off or to not work 80+ hours a week, but I'm going to be able to retire early.
So you've worked the equivalent of two full time jobs for 18 years but it's ok because you are going to be able to retire early. When do you plan to retire? Let's say you started at age 25 and plan to retire in 2 years. That's 25+20+20=65. You aren't retiring early, you just condensed your work into a shorter period. If you still have good health at age 45 and don't have an accident, this might not be a bad plan, but you still would likely be better off finding a job that maybe lets you save a little less for retirement and actually enjoy some of your vacation now instead of waiting to retire to have a vacation.
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The only way to do that would be to greatly simplify government or have many more aides ... or you can have more lobbyists help them make decisions,,,,
Have you watched CSPAN? Congress spends 90% of their time on non-binding resolutions aka worthless paper pushing. Last time I tuned in, they were debating a non-binding resolution to recognize the Hollywood Walk of Fame. They aren't debating laws or the merits of the laws. They spend their time doing idiotic stuff that they shouldn't even be doing.
Every time someone posts about AI, there are posts like this. It's called *artificial* for a reason. It's not true intelligence and it's not consciousness but no one is claiming that it is. It is computers solving complex problems which we call AI. Games like Checkers, Chess computers have pretty much been mastered. Freeform games like Starcraft they are gaining on. Complex patterns like image and speech recognition they are also gaining on quickly. The are still pretty weak in real world applications like lego sorting or folding laundry but we have unintelligent machines that can break these problem down into manageable chunks. Chunking is likely the way we move forward for the near future by taking on small domains at a time. We are also seeing where the different chunks are being recombined like in the self driving cars where they do scene recognition, text recognition, navigation, etc... as separate modules but combine the results into a system that can do very complex tasks. It's basically what we've been doing in factories for 100 years. The thing is that once we have a machine that can do all the different pieces, even if it is the size of a room, we know what to do next. We do what we did with computers and start shrinking it until that room size system fits in your pocket. Is it true intelligence? No, it's better. It can do the tasks you need to do without questioning you and without rights of its own.
nor centuries of evolution explains that
Evolution explains exactly that. The differences in both brain and type of behavior between animals determines if they are suitable for domestication, and their utility to us determines if it is worth our while to do so.
Case in point: Zebras. The only ones that have successfully be domesticated have been cross bread bringing in the evolutionary traits that were missing.
Their natural traits explains why certain animals were domesticated while others weren't. Most wild animals can be raised in captivity and become handleable. Dogs and cats both have natural tendencies that make them desirable animals. Dogs tend to be loyal and can be trained to protect and hunt while cats naturally help kill pests. Also, dogs naturally want to poop away from their home and also want to please which makes them easy to house train. Likewise with cats, they naturally want to cover their poop and tend to always go in same spot which we can exploit by providing them a litter box. Some of the more exotic animals don't have the natural tendencies of either dogs or cats and housebreaking them is all but impossible.
This is not warfare, because no one is forcing humans to own fucking cats.
Depends on how you define "force". If a parasite creates a strong desire for you to own a cat, that's pretty close to force. Just like no one forces someone addicted to cigarettes to smoke, but once you are addicted, you have a very strong desire to continue to smoke. Some hard drugs are even worse where you practically die if you stop. If you stop eating for a few weeks, your body creates a strong desire that might not technically force you to eat but requires significant energy to resist. Along the same lines, the government doesn't force you to pay your taxes but if you don't it will make your life pretty miserable until you do.
a defined benefit plan requires an ever-increasing contribution base.
No, it doesn't. An unfunded defined benefit plan requires either a stable or increasing contribution base. A fully funded defined benefit plan puts away enough money that there is guaranteed to be enough money available to pay whatever they have promised. Take a look at the Missouri Teacher's Retirement Plan. It's a fully funded defined benefits plan. It's not perfect. Because of turmoil in the stock market, it currently only has enough money to fund 76% of its liabilities where back in 2000 it had enough to cover 103% of its liabilities but if it can't make up the difference, worst case scenerio is that they have to slightly reduce everyone's pension. The contribution base could go to zero and they would still be able to mostly cover the pension they promised.
Hello douche bag. It's funded. That's how it works. You and you're employer pay into Social Security.
And my money goes straight to the people who are already retired not into some magical savings account waiting for me.
Originally, Social Security was supposed to be similar to a savings account. You paid into it, and the money was supposed to be there when you retired. But then there was this large pool of $$$$ sitting there, and the government said we can't have this $$$$ sitting there, we gotta go spend it!
Not really. From day 1, Social Security paid out money from people currently working to people over 65. It started paying out immediately so the first beneficiaries never even contributed.
Simple fix - get rid of defined benefit plans and switch to defined contribution plans. Defined benefit plans can only function when the source of revenue is both 1) unlimited or nearly so and 2) easily modifiable without regard to profits. In other words, soaking the taxpayer more and more for significantly above-average pension promises.
I'm ok with defined benefit plans. For a sufficiently large company, they should be able to fully fund a defined benefit plan using actuary tables and adjust appropriately. A defined benefit plan has the advantage that you can pay out slightly higher pension amounts because the people who live longer are subsidized by the people who die early. A defined benefit plan is basically a pooled retirement fund if fully funded.
> Unfunded pensions are a ponzi scheme that should have never been allowed. :)
I think there's a middle ground between fully funded and unfunded. Or maybe companies should be forced to buy "pension insurance."
Or maybe it's just something we should have the government do (ie, Social Security).
Social Security is no better. It's also unfunded. It pays out benefits using current revenue. I see no benefits of an unfunded pension. What are the benefits of an unfunded pensions? It's an unlisted IOU (aka liability) for whoever is promising it. It's a way to promise to pay someone more without actually paying them. A fulled funded pension also has the advantage that a person would have the option of taking the extra cash instead of the pension. The only advantage an unfunded pension has is the hope that future revenue is greater than current revenue. This is a horrible assumption that likely only holds true 50% of the time at best.
Make in-store pickup really, really fast. Many brick and mortar stores make it too slow. So that is one of the main reasons why they are losing out to Amazon. If it takes half a day or more from me hitting "buy" on the site and the local store putting together the order, that's too slow for what it is.
Some stores are even worse than that. If you order from "Bass Pro Shop", they show you the inventory of the local store, but their online orders don't actually pull from that so it takes a week to get anything you order online from their website for in-store pickup. They should treat it like a walk in order and immediate pull the items the second they are ordered and have them waiting for you when you get there. Even walmart.com usually takes more than an hour. It would be rather trivial for them to autoprint an order when it comes in and page an employee to immediately start pulling the requested items and have them in a basket by the door waiting for you.
The economy has benefited hugely from a reliable flat-fee mail delivery system. Like many taken-for-granted benefits we enjoy I didn't realize that until I did some consulting work for a company operating in a part of the world with a unreliable postal system
I agree but I doubt the volume would go down significantly if they raised the rate to $1 per envelope and got rid of bulk rate pricing. You would lose some junk mail but could make it up with the added revenue. If volume did go down significantly, switch to MWF delivery and charge extra for Tues/Thurs/Sat/Sun delivery. On a somewhat related note, I was gone for Father's Day weekend and I had to postpone buying something I wanted on Thursday until Saturday just so amazon would delivery it on Monday instead of Sat/Sun. Not everything needs to arrive in 2 days. I would have gladly ordered it on Thursday for a Monday delivery if that would have been an option.
I would like this rule extended to the entire government, as we are sitting on a liability time bomb
I would like this rule extended to private corporations.
I agree completely. Unfunded pensions are a ponzi scheme that should have never been allowed. Whether it is Social Security, police officers, a car manufacturer, etc... promising to pay retirement out of future revenue is a disaster waiting to happen. Places like Detroit show what happens when your population shrinks and you no longer have the tax base to support your future obligations. Same with private corporations. They can go out of business, downsize, etc... and if their profit or workforce shrinks, there is no way they can fund those future obligations. At the very least, future obligations need to be on the book as debt owed so that if they go bankrupt, the retirees have equal footing to other creditors. I live in Missouri, and our public school teachers have a fully funded pension. My grandma actually gets raises when they have too much money in their pension fund. If school teachers can do it then other government and private businesses should be able to do it too.
Not sure how to get out of this cycle without inventing a better, more knowledgeable customer...
That doesn't even work. To take one example, the customer has no way of knowing what happens to their credit card once they submit it on a company's website. Is it stored unencrypted in a database? Is it emailed to someone in India for processing? Is it printed out and manually entered into a terminal? Is the 3 digit code on the back also stored in a database? Companies are supposed to be PCI compliant which should prevent most of these but most small companies aren't and to my knowledge there is really no way for the consumer to verify that they are. On a somewhat related note, I had a friend that tried to check the security of his bank by running a port scan on it and they didn't appreciate it at all.
If your company were going to be held liable for security vulnerabilities, finding and plugging these holes during development would be part of your job. As things are, there's no reason to look for or deal with them unless there's a way to make your customers pay for it. This holds true for all custom software, either open or closed source.
It really depends on how big the company is, how often they get busted, and what exactly they are liable for. As it stands now, the average small company can go 20 years without an incident. The small company that skips on security can likely outcompete and outlast the small company that doesn't. Sure if they get unlucky and have a security incident, it could bankrupt them but the odds are in their favor that skipping security gives them a competitive advantage to the company that doesn't.
Your personal theory is a published study. Mostly aspergers, but a prof looked into it and his theory is that since most people are marrying later, they are also marrying people in their fields. So instead of marrying a random girl from town, you're marrying someone that could also be intelligent and have low level autism.
Do you have a link to that study? I've seen from personal experience that most people I know with autistic kids tend to be highly intelligence and it makes sense that it could be some kind of "inbreeding" type characteristic especially considering that it's spiking in places like Silicon Valley but I have yet to see anything but conjecture on the topic.
I remember taking a left brain / right brain test in high school and the teacher saying that the only people who scored equal on both sides tended to be either genius or mentally retarded. Whether it is autism, schizophrenia, creativity, or something else, if you want to "think outside the box" then being on the fringe is to your advantage. It doesn't surprise me that great thinkers were far outside the box. The trick is being far outside the box without being so far out that you're unstable. Many great thinkers, artists, etc.. were fairly unstable but still managed to hold it together well enough to give us some novel ideas.
On a somewhat related note, I have a personal theory that the spike in autism is being caused by smart people having children. If intelligence is "balancing on the brink of insanity", then two people on the brink who reproduce sometimes causes their offspring to be over the edge.
I could be wrong but it seems like Netflix only a proponent of network neutrality when it suits them. I suspect they have recently gotten notice that they are being throttled in some locations and they don't like the proposed contract, so they are back on the net neutrality bandwagon. Once they establish long term contracts with major ISPs, they'll be back to their old anti-competitive ways.
I think they are in favor of net neutrality because it reduces their costs. At the same time, they have to reassure their stockholders that the lack of net neutrality isn't a threat to their business model. Along the way, if they can get a deal that their competitors don't, this helps them too. Basically, for them it is a business decision. Fighting for net neutrality helps them in both the short term with cost and the long term by protecting their business model but the lack of net neutrality can also help them in the short term if they can get better deals that their competitors. Sadly, from a business perspective, it's probably best for Netflix if net neutrality remains in flux so they can use it as a stick when negotiating deals.
Most weeds do not actually require sunlight to live. The roots of most plants have their own sustenance mechanisms that can leech minerals and nutrients from the soil to sustain the plant. This is why plants have roots. Duh.
Weeds can launch shoots from the nutrients they gather from the soil.
Even if this was true, the goal of weeding a garden isn't as much to kill the weeds as much as to keep the weeds from overpowering the desired plants. If the weeds remain tiny, you've effectively reached that goal regardless of whether or not the weeds are dead. If this thing works at all, I see it more useful for a flower garden than an actual garden but honestly, by the looks of it, I would expect it to get stuck the first time it rains.
I dont want it to activate a trimmer and cut it. I want it to roll a wet rag on it sprayed with either a broad leaf weed killer or roundup. Dont spray. Right now it is height based, no vision sensor. So roundup is enough. Once it recognizes weeds from grass, it can use broad leaf weed killer that does not kill the grass.
What advantage do you get from chemicals? It adds to both the cost and maintenance. It also is likely less healthy for both you and the nearly plants. Assuming it works reliably, cutting the plants daily would work effectively as it is depriving the weed of the photosynthesis it needs to survive. I see no advantage of chemicals over this assuming it works as claimed.
If black balls on a lake are better for stopping evaporation than white, surely carbon in the atmosphere would cool the climate more than white snow.
I never claimed that. I said that there were other goals besides just preventing evaporation.
What is with all the elitism and religious respect of authority figures without questioning? It's trivial to do. We made a whole field out of it.
It's called science.
I didn't say that we shouldn't question them but just that when engineering a solution to any problem there are general multiple constraints that need to be balanced. As engineers also tend to know a thing or two about science and pretty much everyone knows that black absorbs more heat than white, although it's possible that they all managed to miss this, it's likely more plausible that there were other constraints that prevented them from using white balls.
Scott Adams might be right. God committed suicide and we are the aftermath trying to put him back together again. Once computers are omnipresent, our only choice will be to become one with the hive mind.
On a more serious note, computers have been for several decades now enhancing our human ability. Very few jobs are immune as a person that uses a computer can out compete the person who doesn't. In areas like accounting, one person can now do the job that 10 people used to do. As computers continue to make humans better, smarter, and more efficient, it will be hard to hide. Unfortunately though, making a job more efficient doesn't mean that the job becomes more enjoyable. In a lot of cases, by making jobs more efficient, we are taking the enjoyment out of them. I'm not sure what the solution is to this.
Perl 5 & 6 always appeared to me as the case study which lead Python to co-develop both 2.7 and 3.x simultaneously.
The case study as in they are doing the exact same thing as Perl? Perl is also co-developing 5 and 6 at the same time just like Python but, just like Python, they are having a hard time getting people to adopt the new version because the old version still works just fine.
"I will pay you $3M per year, under the condition that you don't quit and work for a competitor" does not seem entirely unreasonable.
But is smartsheet really a competitor? I can see preventing him from going and working for rackspace but if smartsheet is considered a competitor then that eliminates 90% of his potential jobs. A non-compete should require a company to explicitly list who they consider and don't consider a competitor. An overly broad non-compete basically makes you unemployable. If a company really wants a non-compete like that then instead of paying them 3M per year, they should pay them only 2M per year and save the extra 1M per year so they can continue to pay them a salary for the additional 18 months after the employee leaves.
Which programming language made changes that broke the last ten years worth of software that was written in it, and survived? Perl?
Perl is backwards compatible as well. There is a Perl 6 but it's pretty much dead in the water because it breaks backwards compatibility with the thousands of modules on CPAN. It's very hard for a programming language to get a high adoption rate. In order to become a popular language it has to bring something new to the table that existing languages don't have. This is doubly hard for an existing language that breaks backwards compatibility because it is also competing with it's older versions which already have an ecosystem. That's why backwards compatibility is so important. It allows you to get the existing userbase for free.
I've saved over 60% of my pay for nearly 18 years and counting. Yes, it sucks to not be able to even take a single day off or to not work 80+ hours a week, but I'm going to be able to retire early.
So you've worked the equivalent of two full time jobs for 18 years but it's ok because you are going to be able to retire early. When do you plan to retire? Let's say you started at age 25 and plan to retire in 2 years. That's 25+20+20=65. You aren't retiring early, you just condensed your work into a shorter period. If you still have good health at age 45 and don't have an accident, this might not be a bad plan, but you still would likely be better off finding a job that maybe lets you save a little less for retirement and actually enjoy some of your vacation now instead of waiting to retire to have a vacation.