Hear, hear. None of your genetic strengths or gifts matter if you have one or two hereditary diseases. Off yourself, and leave the planet to anonymous cowards with no empathy, no wisdom, and no common sense.
Given "nature's" obvious shortfalls, and the resounding success that our "meddling" has yielded so far -- clothing, farming, animal husbandry, domesticated fire, water purification, and so on -- I find it a bit depressing that the "meddling with nature" trope still gets any traction at all. I rather wish that those who oppose "meddling with nature" would pull themselves away from this globe-spanning communication network and go become wolf food, rather than bothering the rest of us.
On the other hand, I just finished replying to (and agreeing with) someone singing the praises of his $6000 hearing aids, so perhaps I'm just an idiot who shouldn't be trusted with good gear.
In other words, whatever they cost, you'll be buying multiple pairs. Because when one falls out, there's nothing to catch it, and sooner or later -- no, just make that "soon" -- you'll lose one where you can't find it, or can't retrieve it, or can't un-soak or un-foul or un-trample it. And if you lose one, you can't very well just replace the missing one; naturally, they'll only ever be sold in pairs.
I think entirely wire-free earbuds are a great idea -- when they're marketed as disposable, and priced accordingly. If they're going to market these as a higher-end alternative to the already-overpriced Beats, that's not happening.
Most of Slashdot's audience probably doesn't suffer from significant hearing loss -- yet. But the more time you spend listening to things over non-isolating earbuds, necessarily turned up loud enough to be clear over ambient sounds, the more your hearing will suffer in the long term.
Now, personally, I'm hoping that I follow in my father's footsteps, not my mother's, and retain good hearing at least through my 80s. I also hope that research on hearing restoration -- not just hearing aids or implants, but actually regenerating damaged cells and structures -- will yield effective and affordable treatments in time for me. Heck, I'd like implants that give me better than standard hearing. But that's not where we are now, and wishing doesn't help people who are currently hearing-impaired.
Until these problems are solved -- heck, even after these problems are solved -- I'll continue to complain when companies assume all customers are alike, all customers want the same thing, and the company's job is to convince users of this rather than accommodating them.
I'd love to see this be a real effect, but it just sounds like cold fusion, or polywater, or homeopathy -- a tiny effect, where the more closely you examine it, the harder it becomes to see.
Then again, high-temperature superconductors looked the same way for a bit, and they have worked out quite nicely, with theory trying desperately to regain its footing as it's dragged along behind practice.
And as for fishing small signals out of large backgrounds, yes, that makes things tricky, but my working GPS receiver shows that it's not only possible but practical -- when the signal you're fishing for actually exists.
Right. In our lab, simple professionalism prevents us from bringing on faculty or staff whose surnames could be mistaken for given names. Those pesky Aussie gits Marshall and Warren have never gotten over the rejection.
Back in the day, you had to move wires around to program and then someone had the bright idea of assembly. Then someone invented human readable code. And we've been programming like that for what? 60 years now? Programming hasn't changed much at all since then. We're basically writing code.
What nonsense.
I remember when "lines of code" was a widely-accepted measure of programmer productivity -- and the industry standard was single digit counts per programmer per day. That's less than ten lines per day per developer. And these were mostly programs for batch processing; some systems supported interactive use, where you'd type a command on a terminal, enter data in response to some prompts, and then see results. There was process-control stuff happening, too, but when a system executing thousands of instructions per second had to control a physical process, it wasn't very elaborate -- there wasn't time, never mind RAM, for much complexity. So, programmers thought really hard about each line that they wrote. (Are you old enough to have heard the term "desk checking"? Why waste valuable computer time trying to compile and run something, when it's got bugs that you should have caught with a few hours' review?)
By the standards of those days, most of today's code is profligate waste -- coddling the users, correcting their mistakes, presenting things in a way that's convenient to the user rather than the computer. But by the standards of those days, displaying streaming video or recognizing speech by comparing it against a multi-terabyte distributed archive of conversational snippets is bleeding magic.
And being able to invoke that power by calling a simple API? Oh, sure, that's exactly like duplicating your Quicksort card deck to add it into your current FORTRAN job.
Maybe they figure they can get by with 75% of the hours if they avoid having people do the same thing over and over again. You know, since they aren't a tech-news aggregator, where that sort of thing is apparently necessary.
...let me amend that to "I'd happily accept a 25% pay cut for a 30-hour work week, but not at Amazon."
I could possibly be earning more money working somewhere else if I were willing to put up with 24/7 on-call. Not interested. Not interested in the quality-of-life sacrifice, and not interested in helping perpetuate the myth that you can do that to people without impairing the work they do during "normal hours".
I could definitely be earning more money working 60-80 hour weeks for a nominally "full-time" position. But what would I do with the extra money? I'd have no spare time to spend it. I couldn't use it to buy back my kids' childhood, or my marriage. And by the time I'd "saved up enough to retire early", I would've forgotten how to enjoy it.
I'm sure a large company would love to hire people for 30 hours or less a week, thus dodging any requirement to give them full-time benefits.
<reads rest of summary>
The 30-hour groups would receive the same benefits as 40-hour-a-week employees but less pay, Amazon said.
...hmm. Now I'm intrigued. Count me among the group that would happily accept a 25% pay cut for a guaranteed cap at 30 hours per week, if I didn't have to give up benefits.
Actually, given the cost of benefits, the pay cut would probably have to be more than that, because the cost of benefits is mostly constant. If your 40-hour week earns you $100K/yr take-home, and your benefits cost another $50K, Amazon would want to pay $150K * 0.75 for three-quarters of the work, or $112.5K, of which you'd see $62.5K -- a 37.5% cut in take-home pay. But I still might consider it.
I'm thinking any plant capable of changing the course of a dinosaur-killer, at least in a timeframe of decades rather than millennia, would need an Orion to get it off the ground and deliver it to the asteroid. I'd imagine planting some sort of industrial complex, ready to crank out many square kilometers of solar panels and an array of ion drives or magnetic accelerators to spit out asteroidal metal as reaction mass. I'm not sure you're right that the Orion ship itself couldn't do the job, but I can't be bothered to run the numbers, as I'm not currently facing an actual threat of planetary annihilation.
And as for "prohibitively expensive", I agree -- except that priorities change when the alternative is certain extinction.
On a related note, while I was snooping around about Orion, I reread some info about the NERVA program. I hadn't fully realized how close that came to being deployed. It's depressing that politics cost us a reliable and affordable drive that could've taken humans to Mars and beyond. Of course, I suppose there are many who are relieved that we dodged a sky full of high-power nuclear reactors. Making compromises that disappoint people is kind of the purpose of politics.
If voicemail had auto-correct that shouted corrections back at speakers in mid-sentence, or buzzed every time they mispronounced a word, or made a rapid finger-drumming noise every time they said "um..." -- well, I might actually start encouraging people to leave me voicemail again.
So, it's "inherently dangerous" unless I'm willing to open it up and lick it? By that standard, the ceramic batteries you mentioned below are also "inherently dangerous". For that matter, so is their inventor.
Sure, given time, you wouldn't dream of launching from the ground, probably not even from the atmosphere or exosphere (pulse! pulse! pulse!). It seems to me, though, that setting up a "spacecraft manufacturing facility" (including materials production, fabrication and assembly) on the Moon is a project of many decades. Again, something you can launch this century would trump something you can't launch until next century, if you know that there isn't going to be a next century for Earth.
From a slightly different perspective, I'd happily put up with a large-scale Orion ground launch, yes, even in my back yard, to lift the equipment needed to divert a 10km dinosaur-killer asteroid. It would make a mess, but not as much of a mess as a hundred-teraton impact dumping a few thousand km^3 of rock vapor into the atmosphere.
We've been hearing that it's the next big thing since 1987.
Yes, we've made great strides in display resolution, rendering speed, reduced weight and power, and wireless communication. But as long as I'm stuck with a V1.0 inner ear, pure VR (as opposed to AR) is pretty much a non-starter.
One of the points of Orion was that it provided more than enough power to lift heavy vehicles from Earth's surface. (This is the hardest part for much space travel, though certainly not for interstellar travel.) If you're motivated enough -- say, if you realize that your planet is about to be rendered uninhabitable by a major asteroid strike or a previously-unsuspected large-scale variation in the Sun's output -- it'll get more off the planet quicker than anything else we've thought of.
The cool part about Orion propulsion was that it seemed quite plausible to scale it up to ships the size of a city block or more, and get those giant ships to Alpha Centauri in less than a century. They'd just make kind of a mess in the atmosphere on their way up.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right -- we don't have enough wisdom and knowledge yet. Wisdom, the ability to make good choices, comes from experience.
Experience, of course, comes from making bad choices.
Hear, hear. None of your genetic strengths or gifts matter if you have one or two hereditary diseases. Off yourself, and leave the planet to anonymous cowards with no empathy, no wisdom, and no common sense.
Except none of those things have altered the human being.
That's a very silly assertion.
Given "nature's" obvious shortfalls, and the resounding success that our "meddling" has yielded so far -- clothing, farming, animal husbandry, domesticated fire, water purification, and so on -- I find it a bit depressing that the "meddling with nature" trope still gets any traction at all. I rather wish that those who oppose "meddling with nature" would pull themselves away from this globe-spanning communication network and go become wolf food, rather than bothering the rest of us.
On the other hand, I just finished replying to (and agreeing with) someone singing the praises of his $6000 hearing aids, so perhaps I'm just an idiot who shouldn't be trusted with good gear.
In other words, whatever they cost, you'll be buying multiple pairs. Because when one falls out, there's nothing to catch it, and sooner or later -- no, just make that "soon" -- you'll lose one where you can't find it, or can't retrieve it, or can't un-soak or un-foul or un-trample it. And if you lose one, you can't very well just replace the missing one; naturally, they'll only ever be sold in pairs.
I think entirely wire-free earbuds are a great idea -- when they're marketed as disposable, and priced accordingly. If they're going to market these as a higher-end alternative to the already-overpriced Beats, that's not happening.
Mod parent up.
Most of Slashdot's audience probably doesn't suffer from significant hearing loss -- yet. But the more time you spend listening to things over non-isolating earbuds, necessarily turned up loud enough to be clear over ambient sounds, the more your hearing will suffer in the long term.
Now, personally, I'm hoping that I follow in my father's footsteps, not my mother's, and retain good hearing at least through my 80s. I also hope that research on hearing restoration -- not just hearing aids or implants, but actually regenerating damaged cells and structures -- will yield effective and affordable treatments in time for me. Heck, I'd like implants that give me better than standard hearing. But that's not where we are now, and wishing doesn't help people who are currently hearing-impaired.
Until these problems are solved -- heck, even after these problems are solved -- I'll continue to complain when companies assume all customers are alike, all customers want the same thing, and the company's job is to convince users of this rather than accommodating them.
I'd love to see this be a real effect, but it just sounds like cold fusion, or polywater, or homeopathy -- a tiny effect, where the more closely you examine it, the harder it becomes to see.
Then again, high-temperature superconductors looked the same way for a bit, and they have worked out quite nicely, with theory trying desperately to regain its footing as it's dragged along behind practice.
And as for fishing small signals out of large backgrounds, yes, that makes things tricky, but my working GPS receiver shows that it's not only possible but practical -- when the signal you're fishing for actually exists.
Right. In our lab, simple professionalism prevents us from bringing on faculty or staff whose surnames could be mistaken for given names. Those pesky Aussie gits Marshall and Warren have never gotten over the rejection.
Back in the day, you had to move wires around to program and then someone had the bright idea of assembly. Then someone invented human readable code. And we've been programming like that for what? 60 years now? Programming hasn't changed much at all since then. We're basically writing code.
What nonsense.
I remember when "lines of code" was a widely-accepted measure of programmer productivity -- and the industry standard was single digit counts per programmer per day. That's less than ten lines per day per developer. And these were mostly programs for batch processing; some systems supported interactive use, where you'd type a command on a terminal, enter data in response to some prompts, and then see results. There was process-control stuff happening, too, but when a system executing thousands of instructions per second had to control a physical process, it wasn't very elaborate -- there wasn't time, never mind RAM, for much complexity. So, programmers thought really hard about each line that they wrote. (Are you old enough to have heard the term "desk checking"? Why waste valuable computer time trying to compile and run something, when it's got bugs that you should have caught with a few hours' review?)
By the standards of those days, most of today's code is profligate waste -- coddling the users, correcting their mistakes, presenting things in a way that's convenient to the user rather than the computer. But by the standards of those days, displaying streaming video or recognizing speech by comparing it against a multi-terabyte distributed archive of conversational snippets is bleeding magic.
And being able to invoke that power by calling a simple API? Oh, sure, that's exactly like duplicating your Quicksort card deck to add it into your current FORTRAN job.
Won't it be great if the FBI, ideally in collaboration with numerous other three-letter agencies, finds and prosecutes the folks who did this?
Um, by adding 14 to 16?
Sounds like you've put in too many hours already this week. You should take some time off.
Maybe they figure they can get by with 75% of the hours if they avoid having people do the same thing over and over again. You know, since they aren't a tech-news aggregator, where that sort of thing is apparently necessary.
...let me amend that to "I'd happily accept a 25% pay cut for a 30-hour work week, but not at Amazon."
I could possibly be earning more money working somewhere else if I were willing to put up with 24/7 on-call. Not interested. Not interested in the quality-of-life sacrifice, and not interested in helping perpetuate the myth that you can do that to people without impairing the work they do during "normal hours".
I could definitely be earning more money working 60-80 hour weeks for a nominally "full-time" position. But what would I do with the extra money? I'd have no spare time to spend it. I couldn't use it to buy back my kids' childhood, or my marriage. And by the time I'd "saved up enough to retire early", I would've forgotten how to enjoy it.
I'm sure a large company would love to hire people for 30 hours or less a week, thus dodging any requirement to give them full-time benefits.
<reads rest of summary>
The 30-hour groups would receive the same benefits as 40-hour-a-week employees but less pay, Amazon said.
...hmm. Now I'm intrigued. Count me among the group that would happily accept a 25% pay cut for a guaranteed cap at 30 hours per week, if I didn't have to give up benefits.
Actually, given the cost of benefits, the pay cut would probably have to be more than that, because the cost of benefits is mostly constant. If your 40-hour week earns you $100K/yr take-home, and your benefits cost another $50K, Amazon would want to pay $150K * 0.75 for three-quarters of the work, or $112.5K, of which you'd see $62.5K -- a 37.5% cut in take-home pay. But I still might consider it.
I'm thinking any plant capable of changing the course of a dinosaur-killer, at least in a timeframe of decades rather than millennia, would need an Orion to get it off the ground and deliver it to the asteroid. I'd imagine planting some sort of industrial complex, ready to crank out many square kilometers of solar panels and an array of ion drives or magnetic accelerators to spit out asteroidal metal as reaction mass. I'm not sure you're right that the Orion ship itself couldn't do the job, but I can't be bothered to run the numbers, as I'm not currently facing an actual threat of planetary annihilation.
And as for "prohibitively expensive", I agree -- except that priorities change when the alternative is certain extinction.
On a related note, while I was snooping around about Orion, I reread some info about the NERVA program. I hadn't fully realized how close that came to being deployed. It's depressing that politics cost us a reliable and affordable drive that could've taken humans to Mars and beyond. Of course, I suppose there are many who are relieved that we dodged a sky full of high-power nuclear reactors. Making compromises that disappoint people is kind of the purpose of politics.
My keyboard says "delete" on that button, so I expect it to trash everything I've done without confirmation.
If voicemail had auto-correct that shouted corrections back at speakers in mid-sentence, or buzzed every time they mispronounced a word, or made a rapid finger-drumming noise every time they said "um..." -- well, I might actually start encouraging people to leave me voicemail again.
So, it's "inherently dangerous" unless I'm willing to open it up and lick it? By that standard, the ceramic batteries you mentioned below are also "inherently dangerous". For that matter, so is their inventor.
They're pretty obscure, you probably haven't heard of them.
Sure, given time, you wouldn't dream of launching from the ground, probably not even from the atmosphere or exosphere (pulse! pulse! pulse!). It seems to me, though, that setting up a "spacecraft manufacturing facility" (including materials production, fabrication and assembly) on the Moon is a project of many decades. Again, something you can launch this century would trump something you can't launch until next century, if you know that there isn't going to be a next century for Earth.
From a slightly different perspective, I'd happily put up with a large-scale Orion ground launch, yes, even in my back yard, to lift the equipment needed to divert a 10km dinosaur-killer asteroid. It would make a mess, but not as much of a mess as a hundred-teraton impact dumping a few thousand km^3 of rock vapor into the atmosphere.
We've been hearing that it's the next big thing since 1987.
Yes, we've made great strides in display resolution, rendering speed, reduced weight and power, and wireless communication. But as long as I'm stuck with a V1.0 inner ear, pure VR (as opposed to AR) is pretty much a non-starter.
One of the points of Orion was that it provided more than enough power to lift heavy vehicles from Earth's surface. (This is the hardest part for much space travel, though certainly not for interstellar travel.) If you're motivated enough -- say, if you realize that your planet is about to be rendered uninhabitable by a major asteroid strike or a previously-unsuspected large-scale variation in the Sun's output -- it'll get more off the planet quicker than anything else we've thought of.
You left out the part about doing this repeatedly.
The cool part about Orion propulsion was that it seemed quite plausible to scale it up to ships the size of a city block or more, and get those giant ships to Alpha Centauri in less than a century. They'd just make kind of a mess in the atmosphere on their way up.
Astroturfing: you're doing it wrong.