Your selfie stick is a lot less likely to run away with your phone than that oh-so-honest person you asked to take a picture of you in Italy.
The odds of another tourist stealing your camera when you ask them to take a picture is pretty much 0%. The odds of a someone (especially a poor local) who asks YOU if you would them to take a picture of you stealing your camerais pretty much 100%. This is the same advice I give my kids. If you get lost, don't wait for someone to approach you, instead walk up to the first person you see and ask for help. Most people are normal law abiding citizens, if you play the odds and pick someone randomly then your chances of getting a criminal are very small. If instead you let them approach you then they are picking you which makes the odds of them being a criminal considerably higher.
Someone who is paying $10 for 5 stickers is not doing it for the stickers. They are doing it for the hopeful chance that it suceeds. As they are basically doing a donation there should be no problem with the "low stakes for high odds". For the 10% off retail then it better be an amazing product ("good return") or a high chance of success otherwise you need more than a 10% discount to account for the risk.
Traditional investors don't call themselves "Venture Capital" for nothing. The venture and most of the time they lose money.
This should be the approach taken for any risky venture on kickstarter as well. Assume that you might lose all your money. If you're only giving $10 then this isn't a big deal. Yes, traditional investors do take risks but kickstarter does have the potential to take even bigger risks as it can get 10k people to all give $10 to something that has a high probability of failing but each person's risk is minimal even if it does fail.
If they were good, they'd already be widely adopted.
The reason they aren't widely adopted has nothing to do with whether they are good or bad. The reason thay aren't widely adopted is because most people just don't need one. Alot of schools have installed smartboards. For the most part, I've never seen them use the digitizer and defintely not enough to justify the cost. They are mostly used to show movies and slides which could have been done at half the cost with a regular tv.
The problem may be that the mega screens are (from what I've seen) video quality, and thus crazy expensive.
Nope. The cost of the display itself pales compared next to the cost of the digitizer.
Here is a relatively economical digitizer($600) that just connects to any tv/projector: http://store.e-beam.com/ebeam-... Here is a $500 projector that supports a light pen: http://www.mitsubishi-presenta... and I know there are many more. There is also the wii remote which is dirt cheap if a little bit of DIY. These are not near the resolution of a professional digitizer but would still easily match the resolution of the typical dry erase marker and you can attach them to any tv that you have lying around.
In my own (quite extensive) experience working in distributed teams, you're almost never going to find the entire team using OS X; it's a near certainty that all OSs will be represented, so a single-platform solution is a non-starter, no matter how good it may be.
It really depends on what your budget is and how distributed your team is. If there are only 2-3 different locations then getting a couple dedicated OS X boxes just for a distributed whiteboard would be worth it. I also work on a distributed team and I have considered spending a weekend playing with the wii remote hack to see if I could get it working as a whiteboard. 40" lcds are cheap enough that if it actually worked, I could easily justifying buying one for everyone on the team (but I probably wouldn't have to as they all probably already have a TV available). That's really what is needed, a cheap (under $500) device like the wii remote hack that you can plug into two or more tvs and have them all be interactive. Touch screens are expensive so it would need to be either something like the wii remote or a webcam to remain cost effective. It would also need to be easily installed and callibrated.
You think being responsible for the literal lives of your passengers for 8 hours a day, needing to be alert the entire time is *less* responsibility and stress? You're out of your fucking mind.
Yes, I do. Driving is relaxing to me. And being able to clock out and go home would be beyond awesome. To an introvert, being around a bunch of people is probably stressful but people don't bother me. Crazy deadlines and work following me home is what the main stresses of my job are. A typical bus driver has zero responsibility once they go home. A programmer is on the hook if anything breaks after they clock out (if they are even allowed to clock out)
So it appears to be linked to the lighting conditions that your eyes are adjusted to when seeing the image initially... even after they've adjusted to the ambient light, the brain appears to stick to the image it created initially.
This isn't what happened to me. The first time I saw it (before I realized the controversy), it was clearly white/gold but since then no matter how I look at it, it is clearly black/blue and I can't make it change back to the white/gold. I tried finding the original picture I looked at which was white/gold but everything in my history was now blue/black.
"Now is the opportunity for shuttle bus drivers, for food service workers, for janitors, for security officers to re-ask the question: Should I be equally as valued as the high tech workers in the high tech industry?" said David Huerta, president of United Service Workers West.
Really? I mean, really? Are you seriously expecting an employee without a high school diploma doing the most simple job in the world to earn the same income as someone with a Master's degree or PHD? Really? That's just plain nonsense. Remember that all they do is drive a vehicle from A to B. Something that all of us do on a very regular basis.
If I could get the same pay for driving a bus without the stress of programming AND get time off in the middle of the day, I would quit my job as a programmer and become a bus driver tomorrow. Besides requiring more education, many of the higher paying jobs also have more stress and more responsibility.
1) Unions are collective bargaining. Collective bargaining forms the basis for an intelligent, social civilisastion.
saying "smash the unions!" is like shouting "GMO is evil!" - it's a nonsense blanket statement by an anti-science ideologue;
When I think of Unions I think of all the corrupt Unions that litter the USA. Standing unions are a corrupted version of collective bargaining. Collective bargaining is good. I'm not a big fan of the standing unions we have today. If unions came into existance, fixed the problem and then disbanding then I wouldn't have a problem with them.
People said two decades ago that we would all have 30 hour work weeks from home in paperless offices thanks to technology. See how that turned out.
Unfortunately, the main reason this hasn't happened is because it's easier, more efficient, and cheaper* to train one person and have them work 60 hours a week than it is to train 2 people and have them each work 30 hours a week.
*It's cheaper even IF companies were required to pay overtime (which many don't). Time and a half is cheaper than the added expense of medical, additional training, and Brooks's law.
The question is, now that the service sector is going through the same process where are all the workers going to move to? (There are only three sectors to the economy)
I would probably add entertainment as a different sector (although it technically might fall under service) But unfortunately although entertainment is a large chunk of people's disposable income, the majority of entertainment is also produced by only about 4% of the population.
If we only need 4% of the population to provide everybody's food, goods, services, and entertainment, I'm not sure what we're suppose to do with the excess labor. Luckily, I think we're still a long way from there. The service industry still has alot of room. There are plenty of services that people are willing to pay for whether it is for a massage or for a housekeeper. General purpose housecleaning robots are still a long way off.
The head accountant is still there but the overall size of accounting departments and associated administrative staff have shrunk massively over the last fifty years.
That was my point. The number of farm workers has also drastically declined but in both cases we haven't seen a huge spike in unemployment. I see these particular job areas reacting about the same. There are occupations that are more worrisome but I don't see making an occupation more efficient as being one of those areas.
These white collar jobs aren't being replaced any more than the spreadsheet and accounting software replaced the accountant. There is still a human at the top. A computer can't completely replace a lawyer and won't be able to for a very long time. This is just FUD. There are jobs that are at risk and just like what has happened with farmers, ditch diggers, and accountants one person can now handle the work of 10 (or 100) people but as long as the pace is reasonable and there is still a need for a percentage of humans at the top then we'll be fine. Let's start worrying about it when you see a mcdonalds, a public school, or a hospital without any employees. Granted by then it might be too late but we're not there yet. Not even close.
I am well aware of how power is *currently* priced. There has been a move towards more dynamic pricing at the residential level with smart meters and I would think a smart meter should almost be mandatory for solar users that want to buy and sell electricity. The average works ok for the average person but it doesn't allow the average person to optimize their usage to help the grid better cope. Certain things are fixed but it's very possible that if consumers knew when electricty was cheapest they would do things like charge their electric cars or heat their pool during offpeak times. Solar users are a completely different scenerio and when electricity is both coming and going then having a single fixed rate is going to allow one or both sides to potentially abuse the system where dynamic pricing is fairer to both sides.
Electric bills have two components, the supply cost and the delivery cost. The supply cost is what the electric company should be paying for electricity it buys from the home owner. But the electricity the home owner buys back should include the delivery cost.
Although I agree with the rest of your post, I don't agree with having two different rates. There should instead be two different charges. There should be a connection charge that is the same whether you use energy, use no energy, or use negative energy. Then there should be the actual cost of the electricity based on the time of the day. If you did it this way then even net metering could be sustainable as everyone is paying the same rate for electricity whether it is coming or going. The problem is currently the connection/delivery fee is wrapped up in the electricity rate where it might be even better if the distribution and the generation were two separate entities. Let the generation be owned by companies, individuals, etc... but have the distribution be neutral infrastructure that anyone can connect to just like the current net neutrality proposals. This would also make the distribution network not affected by type or price of energy where it's only job is to distribute the electricity it receives.
Instant answers do no lead to long-term memories. Reading a pop-up translation for each word you don't know will not help so much. Select few of the most important words and look them up in a paper dictionary, then read the 5 line entry completely. Having to spend effort for an answer tells your brain this information needs to be remembered. Skimming through a long wikipedia page where you got by merely clicking, and with many on-screen distractions, will not be as useful to your learning.
So the speed of lookup affects retention? I don't believe it. Just because it takes 30 seconds to look up a word in a paper dictionary vs 1 sec to click on a word isn't going to affect how well you remember that definition.
BUT....it keeps me awake. I pull out the dead tree books when I need to sleep.
If you're reading alot then you should get a non-backlit ereader. Even though tablets are more expensive and outsell dedicated ereaders, tablets are a poor substitute for a real ereader.
Overpopulation is self-adjusting. It's not pretty, famine, war and diseases comes in to play, but it is still self-adjusting. We are not going to see the end of the world because of it.
That's not entirely true. Check out the history of Easter Island and also the many simulations and experiments that have been done. If everyone only gets 50% of what they need then everybody dies. Yes, war, disease, and cannibalism can help but it still might not prevent a complete collapse. More importantly, like in easter island, the most likely outcome of overpopulation is that we screw up our ecosystem and make the world uninhabitable by us. It's possible that a few people will survive but any simblance of civilization probably wouldn't.
Greece doesn't need a currency, it needs liquidity - a crypto currency won't bring that.
Actually, what is needs is a lack of liquidity. It needs to live within it's means. If it's overextended then maybe bankrupcy is the right thing to do. A crytpcurrency might help if it can't be manipulated and used to print new money. I wouldn't say bitcoin is super stable at the moment but a stable currency backed by something that can't be faked would go a long ways to fixing greece and the other economies that like to print their own money instead of balancing their budgets.
Possibly, but if we're in a "game of life" type situation where the universe pauses, all the positions are updated, and then the next cycle begins, we would never be able to observe it as it just means that a "cycle" takes longer. This "cycle" could take 1 minute or 100 years but being inside the simulation we have no way of observing actual time and therefore have no idea how long it takes to go from moment to moment.
The idea does actually work if the assumption is that we are living in a simulation, similar to ours.;)
That's actually what I thought too. I've actually pondered this before. If we are in a simulation then stuff at the microscopic or macroscopic only has to exist when viewed and can be generalized to a much lower resolution the rest of the time which would greatly reduce the processing power required. This might also help explain some of the observation effects of quantum physics where it seems that things act differently when observed.
The only jobs that seem to resist automation are engineers and artists.
Even these jobs are under attack. Think of the number of artists that it took to make snow white versus what it would take to make a film like that today. Many jobs like accountants,engineers, and artists are in the same boat as farmers where 1 person can do the work of 100 now using advanced tools. Efficiency isn't a bad thing as long as there is still work that people are willing to pay for. The rise of zipcar, tiny homes, and the likes will also complicate things as currently society is built on people paying for more than they need. If people start significantly downsizing then we'll see pressure on the consumer side too as it will get harder and harder to find something that someone is willing to pay for.
Slashdot Mirror
Your selfie stick is a lot less likely to run away with your phone than that oh-so-honest person you asked to take a picture of you in Italy.
The odds of another tourist stealing your camera when you ask them to take a picture is pretty much 0%.
The odds of a someone (especially a poor local) who asks YOU if you would them to take a picture of you
stealing your camerais pretty much 100%. This is the same advice I give my kids. If you get lost, don't
wait for someone to approach you, instead walk up to the first person you see and ask for help. Most people
are normal law abiding citizens, if you play the odds and pick someone randomly then your chances of getting
a criminal are very small. If instead you let them approach you then they are picking you which makes the
odds of them being a criminal considerably higher.
Someone who is paying $10 for 5 stickers is not doing it for the stickers. They are
doing it for the hopeful chance that it suceeds. As they are basically doing a donation
there should be no problem with the "low stakes for high odds". For the 10% off retail
then it better be an amazing product ("good return") or a high chance of success otherwise
you need more than a 10% discount to account for the risk.
Traditional investors don't call themselves "Venture Capital" for nothing. The venture and most of the time they lose money.
This should be the approach taken for any risky venture on kickstarter as well.
Assume that you might lose all your money. If you're only giving $10 then this isn't a big deal.
Yes, traditional investors do take risks but kickstarter does have the potential to take even
bigger risks as it can get 10k people to all give $10 to something that has a high probability of
failing but each person's risk is minimal even if it does fail.
If they were good, they'd already be widely adopted.
The reason they aren't widely adopted has nothing to do with whether they are good or bad.
The reason thay aren't widely adopted is because most people just don't need one.
Alot of schools have installed smartboards. For the most part, I've never seen them use
the digitizer and defintely not enough to justify the cost. They are mostly used to show
movies and slides which could have been done at half the cost with a regular tv.
The problem may be that the mega screens are (from what I've seen) video quality, and thus crazy expensive.
Nope. The cost of the display itself pales compared next to the cost of the digitizer.
Here is a relatively economical digitizer($600) that just connects to any tv/projector: http://store.e-beam.com/ebeam-...
Here is a $500 projector that supports a light pen: http://www.mitsubishi-presenta... and I know there are many more.
There is also the wii remote which is dirt cheap if a little bit of DIY.
These are not near the resolution of a professional digitizer but would still easily match the resolution of the typical dry erase marker
and you can attach them to any tv that you have lying around.
In my own (quite extensive) experience working in distributed teams, you're almost never going to find the entire team using OS X; it's a near certainty that all OSs will be represented, so a single-platform solution is a non-starter, no matter how good it may be.
It really depends on what your budget is and how distributed your team is. If there are only 2-3 different locations
then getting a couple dedicated OS X boxes just for a distributed whiteboard would be worth it.
I also work on a distributed team and I have considered spending a weekend playing with the wii remote hack to
see if I could get it working as a whiteboard. 40" lcds are cheap enough that if it actually worked, I could easily
justifying buying one for everyone on the team (but I probably wouldn't have to as they all probably already have
a TV available). That's really what is needed, a cheap (under $500) device like the wii remote hack that you
can plug into two or more tvs and have them all be interactive. Touch screens are expensive so it would need
to be either something like the wii remote or a webcam to remain cost effective. It would also need to be easily
installed and callibrated.
You think being responsible for the literal lives of your passengers for 8 hours a day, needing to be alert the entire time is *less* responsibility and stress? You're out of your fucking mind.
Yes, I do. Driving is relaxing to me. And being able to clock out and go home would
be beyond awesome. To an introvert, being around a bunch of people is probably
stressful but people don't bother me. Crazy deadlines and work following me home
is what the main stresses of my job are. A typical bus driver has zero responsibility
once they go home. A programmer is on the hook if anything breaks after they clock
out (if they are even allowed to clock out)
So it appears to be linked to the lighting conditions that your eyes are adjusted to when seeing the image initially... even after they've adjusted to the ambient light, the brain appears to stick to the image it created initially.
This isn't what happened to me. The first time I saw it (before I realized the controversy), it was clearly
white/gold but since then no matter how I look at it, it is clearly black/blue and I can't make it change
back to the white/gold. I tried finding the original picture I looked at which was white/gold but everything
in my history was now blue/black.
"Now is the opportunity for shuttle bus drivers, for food service workers, for janitors, for security officers to re-ask the question: Should I be equally as valued as the high tech workers in the high tech industry?" said David Huerta, president of United Service Workers West.
Really? I mean, really? Are you seriously expecting an employee without a high school diploma doing the most simple job in the world to earn the same income as someone with a Master's degree or PHD? Really? That's just plain nonsense. Remember that all they do is drive a vehicle from A to B. Something that all of us do on a very regular basis.
If I could get the same pay for driving a bus without the stress of programming AND get time off in the middle of the day,
I would quit my job as a programmer and become a bus driver tomorrow. Besides requiring more education, many of the
higher paying jobs also have more stress and more responsibility.
1) Unions are collective bargaining. Collective bargaining forms the basis for an intelligent, social civilisastion.
saying "smash the unions!" is like shouting "GMO is evil!" - it's a nonsense blanket statement by an anti-science ideologue;
When I think of Unions I think of all the corrupt Unions that litter the USA. Standing unions are a corrupted version of collective bargaining.
Collective bargaining is good. I'm not a big fan of the standing unions we have today. If unions came into existance, fixed the problem and
then disbanding then I wouldn't have a problem with them.
People said two decades ago that we would all have 30 hour work weeks from home in paperless offices thanks to technology. See how that turned out.
Unfortunately, the main reason this hasn't happened is because it's easier, more efficient, and cheaper* to train one person and have
them work 60 hours a week than it is to train 2 people and have them each work 30 hours a week.
*It's cheaper even IF companies were required to pay overtime (which many don't). Time and a half is cheaper than the added
expense of medical, additional training, and Brooks's law.
The question is, now that the service sector is going through the same process where are all the workers going to move to? (There are only three sectors to the economy)
I would probably add entertainment as a different sector (although it technically might fall under service)
But unfortunately although entertainment is a large chunk of people's disposable
income, the majority of entertainment is also produced by only about 4% of the population.
If we only need 4% of the population to provide everybody's food, goods, services, and entertainment,
I'm not sure what we're suppose to do with the excess labor. Luckily, I think we're still a long way from
there. The service industry still has alot of room. There are plenty of services that people are willing
to pay for whether it is for a massage or for a housekeeper. General purpose housecleaning robots
are still a long way off.
The head accountant is still there but the overall size of accounting departments and associated administrative staff have shrunk massively over the last fifty years.
That was my point. The number of farm workers has also drastically declined but in both cases
we haven't seen a huge spike in unemployment. I see these particular job areas reacting about
the same. There are occupations that are more worrisome but I don't see making an occupation
more efficient as being one of those areas.
These white collar jobs aren't being replaced any more than the spreadsheet and accounting software replaced the accountant.
There is still a human at the top. A computer can't completely replace a lawyer and won't be able to for a very long time.
This is just FUD. There are jobs that are at risk and just like what has happened with farmers, ditch diggers, and accountants
one person can now handle the work of 10 (or 100) people but as long as the pace is reasonable and there is still a need for
a percentage of humans at the top then we'll be fine. Let's start worrying about it when you see a mcdonalds, a public school,
or a hospital without any employees. Granted by then it might be too late but we're not there yet. Not even close.
I am well aware of how power is *currently* priced. There has been a move
towards more dynamic pricing at the residential level with smart meters and
I would think a smart meter should almost be mandatory for solar users that
want to buy and sell electricity. The average works ok for the average person
but it doesn't allow the average person to optimize their usage to help the
grid better cope. Certain things are fixed but it's very possible that if
consumers knew when electricty was cheapest they would do things like
charge their electric cars or heat their pool during offpeak times.
Solar users are a completely different scenerio and when electricity is
both coming and going then having a single fixed rate is going to allow
one or both sides to potentially abuse the system where dynamic pricing
is fairer to both sides.
Electric bills have two components, the supply cost and the delivery cost. The supply cost is what the electric company should be paying for electricity it buys from the home owner. But the electricity the home owner buys back should include the delivery cost.
Although I agree with the rest of your post, I don't agree with having two different rates. There should instead be two different charges.
There should be a connection charge that is the same whether you use energy, use no energy, or use negative energy.
Then there should be the actual cost of the electricity based on the time of the day. If you did it this way then even net metering
could be sustainable as everyone is paying the same rate for electricity whether it is coming or going.
The problem is currently the connection/delivery fee is wrapped up in the electricity rate where it might be even better if the
distribution and the generation were two separate entities. Let the generation be owned by companies, individuals, etc...
but have the distribution be neutral infrastructure that anyone can connect to just like the current net neutrality proposals.
This would also make the distribution network not affected by type or price of energy where it's only job is to distribute the
electricity it receives.
During daytime, buy cheap power from all those rooftop solar installations.
This is exactly what net metering doesn't allow. It makes no sense to require power companies to
buy power from rooftop installations at retail.
Instant answers do no lead to long-term memories. Reading a pop-up translation for each word you don't know will not help so much. Select few of the most important words and look them up in a paper dictionary, then read the 5 line entry completely. Having to spend effort for an answer tells your brain this information needs to be remembered. Skimming through a long wikipedia page where you got by merely clicking, and with many on-screen distractions, will not be as useful to your learning.
So the speed of lookup affects retention? I don't believe it. Just because it takes 30 seconds to look up a word in a paper dictionary
vs 1 sec to click on a word isn't going to affect how well you remember that definition.
BUT....it keeps me awake. I pull out the dead tree books when I need to sleep.
If you're reading alot then you should get a non-backlit ereader. Even though tablets are more expensive
and outsell dedicated ereaders, tablets are a poor substitute for a real ereader.
Overpopulation is self-adjusting. It's not pretty, famine, war and diseases comes in to play, but it is still self-adjusting.
We are not going to see the end of the world because of it.
That's not entirely true. Check out the history of Easter Island and also the many simulations and experiments
that have been done. If everyone only gets 50% of what they need then everybody dies. Yes, war, disease,
and cannibalism can help but it still might not prevent a complete collapse. More importantly, like in easter
island, the most likely outcome of overpopulation is that we screw up our ecosystem and make the world
uninhabitable by us. It's possible that a few people will survive but any simblance of civilization probably wouldn't.
What came to mind to me is the movie "Screamers" based on a Philip K Dick short.
Greece doesn't need a currency, it needs liquidity - a crypto currency won't bring that.
Actually, what is needs is a lack of liquidity. It needs to live within it's means. If it's overextended then
maybe bankrupcy is the right thing to do. A crytpcurrency might help if it can't be manipulated and used
to print new money. I wouldn't say bitcoin is super stable at the moment but a stable currency backed by
something that can't be faked would go a long ways to fixing greece and the other economies that like
to print their own money instead of balancing their budgets.
Possibly, but if we're in a "game of life" type situation where the universe pauses, all the positions
are updated, and then the next cycle begins, we would never be able to observe it as it just means
that a "cycle" takes longer. This "cycle" could take 1 minute or 100 years but being inside the
simulation we have no way of observing actual time and therefore have no idea how long it takes
to go from moment to moment.
The idea does actually work if the assumption is that we are living in a simulation, similar to ours. ;)
That's actually what I thought too. I've actually pondered this before. If we are in a simulation then stuff at the microscopic
or macroscopic only has to exist when viewed and can be generalized to a much lower resolution the rest of the time which
would greatly reduce the processing power required. This might also help explain some of the observation effects of quantum
physics where it seems that things act differently when observed.
The only jobs that seem to resist automation are engineers and artists.
Even these jobs are under attack. Think of the number of artists that it took to make
snow white versus what it would take to make a film like that today.
Many jobs like accountants,engineers, and artists are in the same boat as farmers where
1 person can do the work of 100 now using advanced tools.
Efficiency isn't a bad thing as long as there is still work that people are willing to pay for.
The rise of zipcar, tiny homes, and the likes will also complicate things as currently society is
built on people paying for more than they need. If people start significantly downsizing
then we'll see pressure on the consumer side too as it will get harder and harder to find
something that someone is willing to pay for.