I wasn't really thinking Iraq II, which doesn't even seem to have been well thought out as some sort of pillaging scheme (though Iraq I, was pretty much entirely because we give a fuck about Kuwait, and not for their sand or their climate...), and more thinking of our Saudi presence, our worldwide interest in anybody who gets uppity about trying to nationalize an oil company (which, um, is why we don't have an Iranian presence anymore...) and that sort of thing.
Gulf War II, as best I can tell, was something of an outlier in that it was so incompetently planned that it's hard to even wrap your head around what exactly it was we failed to achieve, much less achieve whatever it was. Our foreign policy adventures don't always go well; but most of them have some clearer objective in mind.
Arguably, libertarians are one of the least conservative political ideologies ever adopted on a scale larger than 'commune' or 'suicide cult'.
The idea of a 'state' in the modern sense is also fairly new (until the rise, and then the fall, of absolute monarchy, what we would think of as 'state power' was massively diffused through assorted feudal mechanisms); but cultures whose normative social structures are autonomous individuals, property, and private contract? Pretty much unheard of.
China's a bit of a wedge issue, because doctrinaire free-marketeers don't really know what to make of mercantilists...
More nationalistic elements, and people who care about god, guns, and gays but also need a job, tend to get jumpy at even the faintest hints of foreign mercantilism; but the free-marketeers can never resist the fact that 'dumping' is another word for "Crazy low prices, right now!" (see also, every company who has ever offshored production, and then been Shocked, Shocked, to learn that the initial absurdly good deal was to encourage them to bring technology and skills over, and now it is Exciting Mandatory Joint Venture With State-Owned Company time...)
So long as China is willing to live in a toxic industrial hellzone and make various initially unprofitable moves, their prices for goods and labor will be too good for the free marketeers and slash 'n burn corporate reorg guys to say no to; but the nationalists and nativists will always be jumpy about it...
Given that the cases being described are haggling over the pricing of grid-connected; but partially solar-powered, utility customers, this seems like it would be about as close to a generic, company-neutral 'subsidizing solar energy' as one could reasonably imagine: Since it's major inconvenience is darkness, a problem that can either be fixed expensively with on-site batteries or generators, or cheaply (but with costs, of vehemently debated size) for the grid operator, by an electrical grid hookup, the T&C on the electrical grid hookup is more or less the major variable that you have access to for either helping or hindering solar installs without direct entity-subsidizing.
How could there be GOP figures busily lobbying in favor of state taxation and repression of individuals in the interests of incumbent corporations?
I've been assured, with a level of seriousness that only they can muster, by any number of internet randroids, that the right is the side of personal freedom and autonomy, and the left is the path of collectivist fascism and agenda-21! How could this be?
The trouble with price-flooring is that you encourage unsafe practices (and/or substantial death) on the poor side of the human medical use area. I suspect that it'd be a net win (per FDA estimate, US agricultural use of antibiotics in 2009 was 29 million pounds, which rather puts medical overuse into perspective...); but it still wouldn't be pretty.
The ideal allocation (which is achievable at no single price level, even if you can set the price by fiat absolutely anywhere you wish, hence the 'not a market victory' claim) would be for medically justified antibiotic use to be somewhere between zero and negative cost (since you don't want somebody taking an ineffectively low dose, or only completing half a course of antibiotics, since that breeds resistance in patients, so you don't want a disincentive for anybody who starts taking antibiotics to stop before medically advised to do so, even if they 'feel fine now' or run out of money) and non medically justified use to be somewhere between high cost and outright forbidden (high cost if you want to argue that reductions in food prices are worth balancing against the efficacy of at least certain antibiotics, outright forbidden if you prefer to argue that antibiotics are something for which we simply have no substitutes, either they work or the patient dies, while meat is tasty; but less delicious protein materials work in a pinch).
It's actually darkly ironic that assorted recreational uppers and downers and hallucinogens have the entire DEA, plus state, federal, and local law enforcement, outright banning some and severely restricting to licensed prescribers(and keeping an eye on said prescribers) the rest, while antibiotics are practically handled with shovels.
Hey, let's try to keep some sense of perspective about all this.
Some of us have been running a largely successful antibiotic R&D program for much of our ~1.5 billion year history, while occasionally taking time out of our busy schedules to help keep those lazy 'plants' alive and produce the bread that gives you the energy to sustain life and the ethanol that allows you to endure it.
Others, who I am too tactful to name, spent almost a decade trying to copy our homework, between 1928 and 1938, and after a whole 75 years are on the verge of totally fucking up at antibiotic R&D and regressing to 19th century bacterial morbidity and mortality levels.
But no, I get it, I'm the ineffective one. Sorry about that, all my fault.
Will the market save us by producing something be it at a price, or, is this too big and needs to be done by government money and research?
Antibiotics are arguably an example of a situation that (while not meeting the classic definition of 'market failure') is not a market victory.
If the price of an antibiotic is relatively low, it becomes economically viable as a growth enhancer/mortality reducer in high-density agricultural applications, likely burning through its effectiveness relatively quickly (with some help from being handed out to treat patients whining about the sniffles and being reflexively used on basically anybody admitted to a hospital; but veterinary uses are the big one). If the price is relatively high, you see a strong incentive for poorer users (especially in the 'developing' world) to try to make do by 'stretching' inadequate supplies across longer times or more patients than the supplies can provide adequate doses for. You also have more incentive for diluted and fraudulently labelled, or outright faked, versions to make it into the supply chain.
On the supply side, I don't know why it isn't working; whether biology is just being a stubborn bastard and we'd need to throw ten times as many scientists at the problem, or whether the ROI on penis pills and hair loss and pimping minor rebadges of old drugs is better than doing research; but the steady advances in increasingly resistant bacteria have not caused the invisible hand to keep pace with new drugs (particularly new drugs with novel mechanisms, which would get us further ahead in the arms race than incremental tweaks on resistance-threatened mechanisms.)
Saying something is as scary as terrorism is like saying it's as dangerous as marijuana.
Marihuana? The Mexican devil-loco-weed? Assassin of youth? A cause of homicidal mania in our formerly upstanding young men of good character, and most widely used by the Negro, to stoke its lust for depraved violation of White Womanhood?
If this is a threat that "should be ranked alongside terrorism" then I'm not even going to waste my time reading about it.
It's an idiotic comparison; but only because it's a threat that should be ranked far ahead of terrorism. 'Terrorists' are barely a rounding error compared to the existing morbidity and mortality caused by drug resistant pathogens (I include in this category ones that aren't resistant to literally everything; but are now much harder, more expensive, and potentially more dangerous to treat because they resist most or all of the cheap, common, non-ghastly-side-effects drugs, leaving you with only the options you didn't want to be stuck with).
Interesting. I guess I've been really spoiled by how fast "emulation" is when it's really a fairly mature solution for shoveling as many x86 operations straight to the host CPU, unaltered, as is architecturally possible...
I don't think that I would have expected emulation to match one of the actually-competitive top of range ARM SoCs; but I figured that a comparatively antique ARM11 part might be within shooting range.
How much does ARM emulation on x86 suck these days? I wasn't able to dig up much in the way of hard benchmarks; but this not-especially-recent page, describing QEMU ARM emulation (I'd assume that being adopted as the Android SDK's ARM emulator likely led to some improvements being made; since 2008; but don't know), says that an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ is about 20 percent faster than an NSLU2 (266MHz Xscale).
Given that the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ is a relative antique, and the Pi is only a 700MHz ARM core of not particularly new design, a contemporary system might actually emulate the rPi faster than the real thing, with the added bonus of being able to emulate more RAM than the real boards ship with, and likely faster mass storage.
Power efficient, this strategy would not be; but fast, it just might.
"How do I test for Turing completeness "on the cloud"?"
This one is actually a nontrivial challenge. Once the tape starts to get damp, you need to keep track of the probability that executing a given head-moving operation will cause the tape to snap and abruptly leave you with a confused finite state machine...
Or simply don't use the broken "cloud computing" model. If you have some calculations to do, and care the least about the results, how about buying a computer that does those calculations for you?
In other news, many problems become much easier when you assume a suitably large pile of money.
Incidentally, the same is true of explosives, amphetamines, and hookers.
Submitter is entirely ignorant of floating point issues in general. Other than the buzzword "cloud" this is no different from any other clueless question about numerical issues in computing. "Help me, I don't know anything about the problem, but I just realized it exists!"
Ignorant, perhaps; but likely correct that 'subtle differences in floating point handling exist between ostensibly binary-compatible platforms' + ' "the cloud" reduces your control, and sometimes even your information, about what platform you are running on at any given time' = 'Floating Point Fun Time'.
To actually solve such a problem, sophisticated understanding is certainly required (especially since any practical user will probably want the solution to be fast as well as correct); but the act of combining a modicum of understanding of floating point issues with consideration of how 'the cloud' operates is not without value in letting you know just how screwed you may well be.
Hardware seems like it was invented to demonstrate the "Make things as automatic as possible; but no more so." correllary to Einstein's "Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler."...
It's impossible to deny how much automagic we don't whine about anymore; because it actually works automagically and life is better; but there is always some dubiously competent OEM screwing around on the sharp edge of the line between 'automagic' and 'apparently nondeterministic hatred of all users'.
In the case of 'Intel HD Audio', I suspect that having a spec makes motherboard audio better than having no spec; but I can't really trust a spec that includes the phrase "Vendor Defined" 41 different times, mostly as acceptable responses to certain occurrences, or as acceptable contents for certain data structures...
On Windows, most of the ugly edges are papered over for you; but the issues (when they do crop up) are totally opaque. Just off the top of my head, I had one system (identical hardware, drivers, and image to all the others) suddenly lose jack-connect detection. Boom, nothing. Suddenly just incapable of seeing any device plugged into any of the audio jacks, front, rear, whatever (and this wasn't some hacktogether whitebox, this was a corporate-system-with-stable-hardware-and-vendor-support-contract-all-hardware-fixed-configuration job). And then it rebooted, and the problem never appeared again. Another, an entire model line (Optiplex 760s, not that anybody cares) used some nasty little audio chip that apparently wasn't very good at impedance detection heuristics; because it would guess, about 50/50, whether the device plugged into its combination Mic/line-in jack was a Mic or a line in. The half of the time it was correct, everything worked. The other half, it would mysteriously fail without the slightest indication to the user that anything was amiss. A minor problem for an audio language-learning lab... Eventually, I think we had to sniff registry activity and add some deny-write entries to the registry key ACLs to freeze the driver into the correct configuration.
Perhaps my favorite (though more of a 'we don't give a damn, and haven't given this code more than a token turd-polishing since SoundBlasters ruled the earth' problem than a 'too clever by half' problem) was another Optiplex whose shit internal sound card worked fine for normal purposes; but if you tried to run a more demanding MIDI-using program, you'd get playback; but with all kinds of unpredictable and unexpected pitch and duration anomalies. It turns out that, despite the fact that CPU frequency scaling is practically ancient history by now, the MIDI playback component was using the CPU clock as a timebase. If you were using the system under high load, everything would work perfectly, since the CPU would remain at maximum frequency. If the load fluctuated, things would warble oddly, like a tape player with bad belts. Under low or no load, playback occurred at a fraction of the correct frequency...
Among the poor Linux-on-laptops users (especially the laptops with 'Beats Audio', internal 'subwoofers', and other such oddities, you really get to see the ugly details up close. On the minus side, they are ugly, and even when a driver for a given chipset exists, that chipset can have model-specific channel description data, so the kernel won't save you. On the plus side, if you are an ALSA guru, you can at least see how the sausage is made...
With some probable exceptions, car salesmen aren't genetically-engineered-dispicable-abhumans or anything, they are just what you get at the pointy end of a system designed to resist non totally-fucked-up market pricing through a mixture of social flimflam, feature obfuscation, mandatory bundling, etc. (Sort of like trying to get an actual 'price' for a nontrivial medical procedure, except that with the car you are usually conscious the entire time, making it less pleasant)
If you aren't trying to fuck around on prices, I'd venture to guess that you'll automagically get at least apathetic salespeople, rather than overtly slimy ones. Actually good ones might require additional management and technique. However, at the same time, it's not as though there aren't dozens of ways to design confusing and abusive web interfaces for inhibiting comparison shopping, pre-filling unhelpful checkboxes, hiding useful things, and generally shoving the user around.
Barring gross incompetence on the part of either the management or the web devs, the experience is going to follow the economics. Are you running a business moving goods you think people will want at clearly stated prices? Your humans or your website will likely be pretty easy to deal with. Are you fucking around with the user? You'll either get slimy pressure-jockeys in person, or an absurdly unhelpful and downright malicious site. The medium is not the message, in this case.
Will the higher up members of the party be able to turn down the volume on their telespeakers?
We figured that eliminating monetary bonuses, and instead allocating the most obedient and/or productive human resources temporary volume control, within limits, seemed like a good strategy. It saves money, and once they've become helotized husks of human beings, they will feel a truly pathetic sense of reward at being granted a tiny scrap of control over their environment. There is still some debate as to whether we should bother with the pretense of tying these rewards to merit, or let the peppiest people-person in sales design 'fun' 'team-building' 'games' that will allow qualified, trained, adults to humiliate themselves playing childish nonsense games for virtual tokens. Merit-based rewards might improve productivity; but would also require actual management on our part, and runs the risk of giving the peons a sense of agency. The 'fun' approach is much easier, and has a certain undeniable aesthetic appeal.
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I wasn't really thinking Iraq II, which doesn't even seem to have been well thought out as some sort of pillaging scheme (though Iraq I, was pretty much entirely because we give a fuck about Kuwait, and not for their sand or their climate...), and more thinking of our Saudi presence, our worldwide interest in anybody who gets uppity about trying to nationalize an oil company (which, um, is why we don't have an Iranian presence anymore...) and that sort of thing.
Gulf War II, as best I can tell, was something of an outlier in that it was so incompetently planned that it's hard to even wrap your head around what exactly it was we failed to achieve, much less achieve whatever it was. Our foreign policy adventures don't always go well; but most of them have some clearer objective in mind.
Arguably, libertarians are one of the least conservative political ideologies ever adopted on a scale larger than 'commune' or 'suicide cult'.
The idea of a 'state' in the modern sense is also fairly new (until the rise, and then the fall, of absolute monarchy, what we would think of as 'state power' was massively diffused through assorted feudal mechanisms); but cultures whose normative social structures are autonomous individuals, property, and private contract? Pretty much unheard of.
China's a bit of a wedge issue, because doctrinaire free-marketeers don't really know what to make of mercantilists...
More nationalistic elements, and people who care about god, guns, and gays but also need a job, tend to get jumpy at even the faintest hints of foreign mercantilism; but the free-marketeers can never resist the fact that 'dumping' is another word for "Crazy low prices, right now!" (see also, every company who has ever offshored production, and then been Shocked, Shocked, to learn that the initial absurdly good deal was to encourage them to bring technology and skills over, and now it is Exciting Mandatory Joint Venture With State-Owned Company time...)
So long as China is willing to live in a toxic industrial hellzone and make various initially unprofitable moves, their prices for goods and labor will be too good for the free marketeers and slash 'n burn corporate reorg guys to say no to; but the nationalists and nativists will always be jumpy about it...
As long as it's two senators per state, nobody is likely to fuck with representatives from even lightly populated corn-heavy states...
So do you just not believe in externalities as an economic concept, or do you think that the subsidy is real; but smaller?
Given that the cases being described are haggling over the pricing of grid-connected; but partially solar-powered, utility customers, this seems like it would be about as close to a generic, company-neutral 'subsidizing solar energy' as one could reasonably imagine: Since it's major inconvenience is darkness, a problem that can either be fixed expensively with on-site batteries or generators, or cheaply (but with costs, of vehemently debated size) for the grid operator, by an electrical grid hookup, the T&C on the electrical grid hookup is more or less the major variable that you have access to for either helping or hindering solar installs without direct entity-subsidizing.
Does that figure count the DoD spending on being Uncle Sam's Security Services in assorted oleaginous-but-deeply-unsafe hellholes, or is that extra?
How could there be GOP figures busily lobbying in favor of state taxation and repression of individuals in the interests of incumbent corporations?
I've been assured, with a level of seriousness that only they can muster, by any number of internet randroids, that the right is the side of personal freedom and autonomy, and the left is the path of collectivist fascism and agenda-21! How could this be?
The trouble with price-flooring is that you encourage unsafe practices (and/or substantial death) on the poor side of the human medical use area. I suspect that it'd be a net win (per FDA estimate, US agricultural use of antibiotics in 2009 was 29 million pounds, which rather puts medical overuse into perspective...); but it still wouldn't be pretty.
The ideal allocation (which is achievable at no single price level, even if you can set the price by fiat absolutely anywhere you wish, hence the 'not a market victory' claim) would be for medically justified antibiotic use to be somewhere between zero and negative cost (since you don't want somebody taking an ineffectively low dose, or only completing half a course of antibiotics, since that breeds resistance in patients, so you don't want a disincentive for anybody who starts taking antibiotics to stop before medically advised to do so, even if they 'feel fine now' or run out of money) and non medically justified use to be somewhere between high cost and outright forbidden (high cost if you want to argue that reductions in food prices are worth balancing against the efficacy of at least certain antibiotics, outright forbidden if you prefer to argue that antibiotics are something for which we simply have no substitutes, either they work or the patient dies, while meat is tasty; but less delicious protein materials work in a pinch).
It's actually darkly ironic that assorted recreational uppers and downers and hallucinogens have the entire DEA, plus state, federal, and local law enforcement, outright banning some and severely restricting to licensed prescribers(and keeping an eye on said prescribers) the rest, while antibiotics are practically handled with shovels.
Hey, let's try to keep some sense of perspective about all this.
Some of us have been running a largely successful antibiotic R&D program for much of our ~1.5 billion year history, while occasionally taking time out of our busy schedules to help keep those lazy 'plants' alive and produce the bread that gives you the energy to sustain life and the ethanol that allows you to endure it.
Others, who I am too tactful to name, spent almost a decade trying to copy our homework, between 1928 and 1938, and after a whole 75 years are on the verge of totally fucking up at antibiotic R&D and regressing to 19th century bacterial morbidity and mortality levels.
But no, I get it, I'm the ineffective one. Sorry about that, all my fault.
Will the market save us by producing something be it at a price, or, is this too big and needs to be done by government money and research?
Antibiotics are arguably an example of a situation that (while not meeting the classic definition of 'market failure') is not a market victory.
If the price of an antibiotic is relatively low, it becomes economically viable as a growth enhancer/mortality reducer in high-density agricultural applications, likely burning through its effectiveness relatively quickly (with some help from being handed out to treat patients whining about the sniffles and being reflexively used on basically anybody admitted to a hospital; but veterinary uses are the big one). If the price is relatively high, you see a strong incentive for poorer users (especially in the 'developing' world) to try to make do by 'stretching' inadequate supplies across longer times or more patients than the supplies can provide adequate doses for. You also have more incentive for diluted and fraudulently labelled, or outright faked, versions to make it into the supply chain.
On the supply side, I don't know why it isn't working; whether biology is just being a stubborn bastard and we'd need to throw ten times as many scientists at the problem, or whether the ROI on penis pills and hair loss and pimping minor rebadges of old drugs is better than doing research; but the steady advances in increasingly resistant bacteria have not caused the invisible hand to keep pace with new drugs (particularly new drugs with novel mechanisms, which would get us further ahead in the arms race than incremental tweaks on resistance-threatened mechanisms.)
Any chance we could use a derivative of the sarcasm as the basis for a novel class of antibiotics, or does the toxicity preclude human trials?
Saying something is as scary as terrorism is like saying it's as dangerous as marijuana.
Marihuana? The Mexican devil-loco-weed? Assassin of youth? A cause of homicidal mania in our formerly upstanding young men of good character, and most widely used by the Negro, to stoke its lust for depraved violation of White Womanhood?
Truly a terrifying threat, sir!
(This post brought to you by the 1930s)
If this is a threat that "should be ranked alongside terrorism" then I'm not even going to waste my time reading about it.
It's an idiotic comparison; but only because it's a threat that should be ranked far ahead of terrorism. 'Terrorists' are barely a rounding error compared to the existing morbidity and mortality caused by drug resistant pathogens (I include in this category ones that aren't resistant to literally everything; but are now much harder, more expensive, and potentially more dangerous to treat because they resist most or all of the cheap, common, non-ghastly-side-effects drugs, leaving you with only the options you didn't want to be stuck with).
Interesting. I guess I've been really spoiled by how fast "emulation" is when it's really a fairly mature solution for shoveling as many x86 operations straight to the host CPU, unaltered, as is architecturally possible...
I don't think that I would have expected emulation to match one of the actually-competitive top of range ARM SoCs; but I figured that a comparatively antique ARM11 part might be within shooting range.
How much does ARM emulation on x86 suck these days? I wasn't able to dig up much in the way of hard benchmarks; but this not-especially-recent page, describing QEMU ARM emulation (I'd assume that being adopted as the Android SDK's ARM emulator likely led to some improvements being made; since 2008; but don't know), says that an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ is about 20 percent faster than an NSLU2 (266MHz Xscale).
Given that the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ is a relative antique, and the Pi is only a 700MHz ARM core of not particularly new design, a contemporary system might actually emulate the rPi faster than the real thing, with the added bonus of being able to emulate more RAM than the real boards ship with, and likely faster mass storage.
Power efficient, this strategy would not be; but fast, it just might.
Not to mention, nuclear simulations should be staying on LANL's hardware, not being foisted into the cloud.
Unless somebody fucks up, LANL's nuclear simulations become the cloud, toward the end.
protip: When discussing the difference between Fixed Point and Floating Point, the abbreviation "FP" is useless.
Even if you manage to contribute the first worthless comment on the subject?
"How do I test for Turing completeness "on the cloud"?"
This one is actually a nontrivial challenge. Once the tape starts to get damp, you need to keep track of the probability that executing a given head-moving operation will cause the tape to snap and abruptly leave you with a confused finite state machine...
Or simply don't use the broken "cloud computing" model. If you have some calculations to do, and care the least about the results, how about buying a computer that does those calculations for you?
In other news, many problems become much easier when you assume a suitably large pile of money.
Incidentally, the same is true of explosives, amphetamines, and hookers.
Submitter is entirely ignorant of floating point issues in general. Other than the buzzword "cloud" this is no different from any other clueless question about numerical issues in computing. "Help me, I don't know anything about the problem, but I just realized it exists!"
Ignorant, perhaps; but likely correct that 'subtle differences in floating point handling exist between ostensibly binary-compatible platforms' + ' "the cloud" reduces your control, and sometimes even your information, about what platform you are running on at any given time' = 'Floating Point Fun Time'.
To actually solve such a problem, sophisticated understanding is certainly required (especially since any practical user will probably want the solution to be fast as well as correct); but the act of combining a modicum of understanding of floating point issues with consideration of how 'the cloud' operates is not without value in letting you know just how screwed you may well be.
Hardware seems like it was invented to demonstrate the "Make things as automatic as possible; but no more so." correllary to Einstein's "Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler."...
It's impossible to deny how much automagic we don't whine about anymore; because it actually works automagically and life is better; but there is always some dubiously competent OEM screwing around on the sharp edge of the line between 'automagic' and 'apparently nondeterministic hatred of all users'.
In the case of 'Intel HD Audio', I suspect that having a spec makes motherboard audio better than having no spec; but I can't really trust a spec that includes the phrase "Vendor Defined" 41 different times, mostly as acceptable responses to certain occurrences, or as acceptable contents for certain data structures...
On Windows, most of the ugly edges are papered over for you; but the issues (when they do crop up) are totally opaque. Just off the top of my head, I had one system (identical hardware, drivers, and image to all the others) suddenly lose jack-connect detection. Boom, nothing. Suddenly just incapable of seeing any device plugged into any of the audio jacks, front, rear, whatever (and this wasn't some hacktogether whitebox, this was a corporate-system-with-stable-hardware-and-vendor-support-contract-all-hardware-fixed-configuration job). And then it rebooted, and the problem never appeared again. Another, an entire model line (Optiplex 760s, not that anybody cares) used some nasty little audio chip that apparently wasn't very good at impedance detection heuristics; because it would guess, about 50/50, whether the device plugged into its combination Mic/line-in jack was a Mic or a line in. The half of the time it was correct, everything worked. The other half, it would mysteriously fail without the slightest indication to the user that anything was amiss. A minor problem for an audio language-learning lab... Eventually, I think we had to sniff registry activity and add some deny-write entries to the registry key ACLs to freeze the driver into the correct configuration.
Perhaps my favorite (though more of a 'we don't give a damn, and haven't given this code more than a token turd-polishing since SoundBlasters ruled the earth' problem than a 'too clever by half' problem) was another Optiplex whose shit internal sound card worked fine for normal purposes; but if you tried to run a more demanding MIDI-using program, you'd get playback; but with all kinds of unpredictable and unexpected pitch and duration anomalies. It turns out that, despite the fact that CPU frequency scaling is practically ancient history by now, the MIDI playback component was using the CPU clock as a timebase. If you were using the system under high load, everything would work perfectly, since the CPU would remain at maximum frequency. If the load fluctuated, things would warble oddly, like a tape player with bad belts. Under low or no load, playback occurred at a fraction of the correct frequency...
Among the poor Linux-on-laptops users (especially the laptops with 'Beats Audio', internal 'subwoofers', and other such oddities, you really get to see the ugly details up close. On the minus side, they are ugly, and even when a driver for a given chipset exists, that chipset can have model-specific channel description data, so the kernel won't save you. On the plus side, if you are an ALSA guru, you can at least see how the sausage is made...
With some probable exceptions, car salesmen aren't genetically-engineered-dispicable-abhumans or anything, they are just what you get at the pointy end of a system designed to resist non totally-fucked-up market pricing through a mixture of social flimflam, feature obfuscation, mandatory bundling, etc. (Sort of like trying to get an actual 'price' for a nontrivial medical procedure, except that with the car you are usually conscious the entire time, making it less pleasant)
If you aren't trying to fuck around on prices, I'd venture to guess that you'll automagically get at least apathetic salespeople, rather than overtly slimy ones. Actually good ones might require additional management and technique. However, at the same time, it's not as though there aren't dozens of ways to design confusing and abusive web interfaces for inhibiting comparison shopping, pre-filling unhelpful checkboxes, hiding useful things, and generally shoving the user around.
Barring gross incompetence on the part of either the management or the web devs, the experience is going to follow the economics. Are you running a business moving goods you think people will want at clearly stated prices? Your humans or your website will likely be pretty easy to deal with. Are you fucking around with the user? You'll either get slimy pressure-jockeys in person, or an absurdly unhelpful and downright malicious site. The medium is not the message, in this case.
Because the fly on the wall is still too noticeable. We need the flea on the wall.
If anybody is going to fulfill DARPA's request for hybrid electronic/biological cyborg surveillance insects, they'll need some pretty tiny electronic gear....
Will the higher up members of the party be able to turn down the volume on their telespeakers?
We figured that eliminating monetary bonuses, and instead allocating the most obedient and/or productive human resources temporary volume control, within limits, seemed like a good strategy. It saves money, and once they've become helotized husks of human beings, they will feel a truly pathetic sense of reward at being granted a tiny scrap of control over their environment. There is still some debate as to whether we should bother with the pretense of tying these rewards to merit, or let the peppiest people-person in sales design 'fun' 'team-building' 'games' that will allow qualified, trained, adults to humiliate themselves playing childish nonsense games for virtual tokens. Merit-based rewards might improve productivity; but would also require actual management on our part, and runs the risk of giving the peons a sense of agency. The 'fun' approach is much easier, and has a certain undeniable aesthetic appeal.
Either way: It'll be beautiful.