Shh. It's not polite to say that so bluntly. Please try to use a more acceptable phrase like 'law and order', 'broken windows/quality of life issues' or, if you must, 'need to keep those animals off the streets'...
If it makes you feel any better, odds are pretty decent that the first remote-controlled cybernetic insects to actually hit the field will be military. The fact that they'll be hunter-seekers or looking for targets to sink their autoinjector mandibles into won't improve your situation; but it will make your fear and loathing a great deal more justified!
The gestation period of a human is only 9 months. Perhaps 4 is enough to produce a developer capable primarily of crying, primitive babbling, and soiling itself?
That's just real America trying to finish the nation building we left incomplete after the civil war. I'm not sure why we bother; but I suppose somebody has to.
Exactly! A perfect solution to the problems of drought and flooding: should things get a bit parched, we trap up the population of wild rainbows and the old guy (his memory must be going a bit by now, it's been an eternity after all) stops receiving his reminders and starts flooding us. Once we've had enough rain in a given spot, we just ship an appropriate number of rainbow enclosures there and re-introduce them into the wild.
Optical computing and practical weather control, what's not to like?
No, its a simplified model created by 'economists' to provide a comparatively well behaved 'ideal market' that can be used as a comparison tool to study the behavior of the real market, how it is similar and different, what factors are or aren't relevant to its behavior, and so on.
It's a 'strawman' in the same painfully weak sense that ignoring friction when a physics class starts talking about parabolic motion is an attempt to tear down Newtonian mechanics. Yes, it's an abstraction that doesn't exist in the real world. Everyone knows that. However, its an abstraction that simplifies the behavior of the model and provides a starting point to analyze the real world and attempt to work out what sorts of information imperfection are at play, what types of information would be most valuable in achieving results similar to those of perfect information, and so on.
It sounds like the software your company was selling either included a lot of skilled labor hours in the price, or required substantial localization and wasn't exactly a household product.
Charging poorer customers less is really only doable when the per-unit costs are small enough that you still make money at the discounted rate. Often the case for software and media if support is essentially nonexistent and localization is sufficiently cheap or spread out across enough units; but that's more likely with mass-market software and somewhat less likely with more specialized products.
I'm assuming from the tone of your post that the company you were with sold something comparatively expensive and specialized?
Zalman might actually be a better 'sell off and business as usual' candidate than OCZ was.
Fraudulent accounting is a problem, and no doubt the banks are angry and the books are thoroughly cooked; but none of that has any direct impact on Zalman's products, consumer perception of them, or how profitable or unprofitable Zalman's day-to-day operations would be. It is unlikely that they are even remotely profitable enough to make good on the loans obtained by fraud; but if they are otherwise healthy the creditors might recover the most money by selling them off as a viable business.
OCZ, by contrast, had some dramatic product issues, and was being eaten alive by pressure from competitors on the low end who (while a bit slower) were as cheap or cheaper and didn't fail catastrophically, and competitors on the high end who were as fast or faster, actually reliable, and getting cheaper at a reasonably steady clip. I'm still amazed that somebody thought that their brand was worth saving.
Does capitalism depend on people being truthful all the time? Somehow I don't see that working. I thought the robustness of capitalism came from relying on everybody to be selfish bastards.
That depends on what you mean by 'capitalism'(many people who use the term do mean something, though often not the same thing, so it's pretty rhetorically slippery).
Typically, when people say 'capitalism', they are implying 'free market' and implicitly or explicitly extolling the virtues of 'economic equilibrium'. This is where truthfulness becomes a direct requirement. The idealized model of a free market equilibrium requires rational actors, perfect information, absence of market power, and the like. Lying is about as aggressively contrary to perfect information as you can get, since it's usually a calculated attempt to ensure even more asymmetric information in the liar's favor. And the demonstrations of asymmetric information leading to market failure(both historical case studies and in theoretical models) are numerous.
So, while any real-world implementation can't rely on people to be honest, or even assume that the cheats will be caught all the time; there are good reasons to suspect that dishonesty imposes both direct costs on the victims of fraud and an overall drag on the market efficiency, so there is a strong incentive to punish, and attempt to minimize, dishonesty and fraud.
(That said, South Korea has its own flavor of structurally problematic businesses, most notably the rather fraught interactions between the Chaebols and the banking sector and a certain amount of 'too big to fail', against which reform has had limited success.)
The investors might have been acting reasonably (I don't know whether they were; but stock in a company that makes a relatively prosaic commodity isn't necessarily a bad thing as long as the P/E and various other details are in order compared to the alternatives); but I have to wonder about the logic behind the banks willing to extend 3 billion in loans.
Even with inflated sales numbers, I'd (probably naively) think that a bank would get nervous about that sort of borrowing unless they had some idea of the logic behind it. You don't borrow a bunch of money and pay interest on it just for giggles, you do so because you need to turn future expected profits into immediately available cash. If I were a bank lending them considerable amounts of money, I'd want to at least get a summary of why. Zalman manufactures stuff, so the idea that they might take loans to invest in manufacturing facilities, equipment upgrades, or the like seems plausible enough; but they make fans and heatpipes and stuff, not 20nm semiconductors. Did they tell the same story to multiple banks that didn't know about the others? Were the banks pretending to believe them because of a desire to get more loans on the books? Did somebody fall for a "Yup, 3 billion dollar machine shop, that's what we need!" story?
I am a bit concerned about why the prosecution decided that Sarbanes-Oxley was the best tool for the job (both because it's a comparatively recent one, which raises the possibility that destruction of evidence was either unhindered or toothlessly enforced; and because little good ever comes of creative application of laws designed for one job to other areas); but the idea that a box of undersized fish, specifically assembled as part of an enforcement action by a marine fisheries officer, would not be a 'tangible object' (and quite likely a 'record' as well. Normally we like those to be more machine readable and less odorous; but if sorting out the undersized fish from a catch and putting them in a box to be transferred isn't 'recording' I'd be interested to know why) seems absurd.
It's strange that, if the fisheries law relies on having perps carry boxes of evidence for you, it doesn't provide somewhat stiffer penalties for evidence tampering, or for some sort of tamper-evident seals to be affixed to the boxes; but if "Let's just throw out the incriminating evidence and replace it with an innocent looking fabrication" isn't destruction of evidence it's hard to imagine what would qualify.
Many of us have something called "self-control" and know how to control our thoughts. If your mind is constantly filled with sexual thoughts perhaps you should masturbate more often or less often. If that doesn't work, I suggest you go on disability because your mind is clearly screwed up.
We don't yet have the technology to know; but I'd bet that 'self control' is a lot more about pruning of spurious thoughts before they reach awareness than it is about the absence of them.
Perception is much more amenable to study than introspective activity, and we know that that process involves a lot of (often pretty impressive, sometimes embarrassing) culling of irrelevant input to allow conscious focus on a limited set of salient details. This has its advantages (picking a single speaker out of the background of a noisy room would be pretty nasty to do entirely consciously); but as the ever entertaining 'change blindness' experiments show, can involve some pretty dramatic details hitting the cutting room floor without the subject ever noticing them.
Since Google is having trouble legalizing self-driving cars, now they can use this technology to self-drive humans who in turn drive the cars!
Depending on the cost of the implantation and the achievable precision that just might be economically viable...
For certain tasks, robots are already markedly superior to humans, mostly the ones that we can build around the robot's capabilities; but our general-purpose humanoid robots are still pretty tepid and very expensive. Humans, by contrast, are fairly elegant mechanisms and not terribly expensive to maintain if your standards are low enough.
With just a dash of neurosurgery, and an appalling disregard for the poor bastard locked helplessly in his own body as it moves under external control, we can convert surplus or undesirable humans into computer-controlled robotic platforms with limited self healing capabilities, excellent dexterity, adequate runtime on a variety of commonly available food items, and a steady supply of replacements!
That's incrementally less plausible than the idea that the electrical signalling in our nervous system should give us the ability to shoot lighting from our fingers...
Psychology professor proves that parents retarded their children's development by listening to psychology professors. But totally has the right answer this time.
Pick your poison. You've got the sources you need to distrust because of their long history of being wrong or the sources you need to distrust because of their long history of claiming not to be wrong.
It would probably be safer to say that people will not be smarter than they think they are. If all the people who are less smart than they think they are were only as smart as they think they are we'd probably have cured cancer and be driving our flying cars, on mars, by now.
Be fair now. Some are coddled and told that it is alright not to challenge themselves. The rest are reminded that they are so screwed that the outcome of any amount of effort is likely to be equally unpleasant.
I'm not forcing you to do anything. I just thought that having a 'Get Out The Vote!' day at the office, where everyone gets to bring in their absentee ballot and fill it in during the staff meeting, would be a great way to build team spirit, and help remind everyone that it's what we share that really matters most. The event is totally optional, somebody has to keep the H1-Bs company, and you can fill the ballot out however you like.
Computer related issues tend to be nasty enough when you are strongly motivated to get it right, face consequences if you don't, and have access to considerable talent.
A computer related issue where the customer mostly doesn't care, the harm of failure minimal, and the state of the market 'unmotivated at best, malicious at worst'? Even omniscience would have trouble under those circumstances, and those are basically the situation.
They are built to be about as user-hostile as anything without the budget for really classy anti-tamper mechanisms can be; but it would be really handy if some of the little 'femtocell' devices were usable with OpenWRT-style firmware. It's hardly impossible for someone other than the telco to have a chat with your cellular modem; but the barriers to entry are very, very, steep compared to wifi, bluetooth, or ethernet links.
One's choice (when it's a choice at all, rather than just going along with what you were raised with or what everyone else is doing) of religion is pretty much orthogonal to one's fanaticism and dangerousness(excluding the ones so marginal that they get essentially zero 'default' members and are built exclusively on recruitment, suicide cults and such).
That said, there are some historical differences (largely unrelated to the actual theology of the religions involved) that have an impact:
Most notably, it's hard to overstate just how brutal a beating christianity's status took in Europe between the reformation, the enlightenment, and the destruction of basically all the divine right monarchies by revolution(or the first world war, for the real stragglers). It's not as though the continent was thoroughly secularized or anything; but the notion that a union of church and state would basically be a great idea and that mosaic law should totally be a leading component of the code of law was more or less driven into disrepute (ironically the US, with its very, very, explicit 'No, no state church, don't even think about it, bad idea, just look at Europe...' clause, probably has more popular support for church/state integration than do a variety of European states that actually have a, usually decrepit, legacy state church that they haven't gotten around to defunding yet).
It's not hard to find people who get up and go on about "This is a Christian Nation!" and "Our laws should be founded on God's Law!" (mostly because they are loud); but they aren't terribly common, and tend to occupy the fringes. Exactly what weight you want to give the various factors of European history in the delegitimization of these ideas is a matter of argument; but it happened.
By contrast, (and despite having a nasty little schism of their own, as well as abundant other conflicts), the same process has not befallen islam. I don't know why that is so; but it is. The notion that religious law should be enforced by civil power is downright mainstream(and in common practice), heads of state who assert religious legitimacy not uncommon, and enthusiasts with a vision for a unified state/church thing ruling over all the faithful are currently running a zesty little war, rather than, say, Mike Huckabee's campaign.
This hardly means that all individuals are extremist zealots who loath civil government (indeed, the only religions that actually seem to be able to preach their followers into something other than basically the same population-level grab bag as the guy down the street has are the highly selective ones that are able to do some serious pruning); but for whatever historical reasons, christianity largely lost the fight against civil government, while islam has yet to do so. I don't know why this is; but it definitely does introduce some differences in the expected influence of religious adherents on government.
That bug report seemed to be somewhat inconclusive about where the trouble was (aside from the fact that it became visible in Chrome). At this point 'HW decoding' can mean Nvidia (probably several flavors/feature sets between GPU generations; but all under the same driver team), AMD (ditto), and at least two for Intel (the one that does decode assist in the GPU 'Pure Video' and the one that does it in an on-CPU fixed function block as the decode step of 'Quick Sync'), and probably a few of the Broadcomm decoders floating around. And that's just x86.
Is this a browser level bug that breaks across all drivers? A nasty interaction with certain drivers but not others? Hardware assisted video decode hasn't exactly been nailed down into the core x86 ISA yet.
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Shh. It's not polite to say that so bluntly. Please try to use a more acceptable phrase like 'law and order', 'broken windows/quality of life issues' or, if you must, 'need to keep those animals off the streets'...
If it makes you feel any better, odds are pretty decent that the first remote-controlled cybernetic insects to actually hit the field will be military. The fact that they'll be hunter-seekers or looking for targets to sink their autoinjector mandibles into won't improve your situation; but it will make your fear and loathing a great deal more justified!
It's too bad I can't mod TFS funny.
The gestation period of a human is only 9 months. Perhaps 4 is enough to produce a developer capable primarily of crying, primitive babbling, and soiling itself?
That's just real America trying to finish the nation building we left incomplete after the civil war. I'm not sure why we bother; but I suppose somebody has to.
Exactly! A perfect solution to the problems of drought and flooding: should things get a bit parched, we trap up the population of wild rainbows and the old guy (his memory must be going a bit by now, it's been an eternity after all) stops receiving his reminders and starts flooding us. Once we've had enough rain in a given spot, we just ship an appropriate number of rainbow enclosures there and re-introduce them into the wild.
Optical computing and practical weather control, what's not to like?
No, its a simplified model created by 'economists' to provide a comparatively well behaved 'ideal market' that can be used as a comparison tool to study the behavior of the real market, how it is similar and different, what factors are or aren't relevant to its behavior, and so on.
It's a 'strawman' in the same painfully weak sense that ignoring friction when a physics class starts talking about parabolic motion is an attempt to tear down Newtonian mechanics. Yes, it's an abstraction that doesn't exist in the real world. Everyone knows that. However, its an abstraction that simplifies the behavior of the model and provides a starting point to analyze the real world and attempt to work out what sorts of information imperfection are at play, what types of information would be most valuable in achieving results similar to those of perfect information, and so on.
It sounds like the software your company was selling either included a lot of skilled labor hours in the price, or required substantial localization and wasn't exactly a household product.
Charging poorer customers less is really only doable when the per-unit costs are small enough that you still make money at the discounted rate. Often the case for software and media if support is essentially nonexistent and localization is sufficiently cheap or spread out across enough units; but that's more likely with mass-market software and somewhat less likely with more specialized products.
I'm assuming from the tone of your post that the company you were with sold something comparatively expensive and specialized?
It's from a particularly terrible Batman movie; but otherwise harmless.
Zalman might actually be a better 'sell off and business as usual' candidate than OCZ was.
Fraudulent accounting is a problem, and no doubt the banks are angry and the books are thoroughly cooked; but none of that has any direct impact on Zalman's products, consumer perception of them, or how profitable or unprofitable Zalman's day-to-day operations would be. It is unlikely that they are even remotely profitable enough to make good on the loans obtained by fraud; but if they are otherwise healthy the creditors might recover the most money by selling them off as a viable business.
OCZ, by contrast, had some dramatic product issues, and was being eaten alive by pressure from competitors on the low end who (while a bit slower) were as cheap or cheaper and didn't fail catastrophically, and competitors on the high end who were as fast or faster, actually reliable, and getting cheaper at a reasonably steady clip. I'm still amazed that somebody thought that their brand was worth saving.
Does capitalism depend on people being truthful all the time? Somehow I don't see that working. I thought the robustness of capitalism came from relying on everybody to be selfish bastards.
That depends on what you mean by 'capitalism'(many people who use the term do mean something, though often not the same thing, so it's pretty rhetorically slippery).
Typically, when people say 'capitalism', they are implying 'free market' and implicitly or explicitly extolling the virtues of 'economic equilibrium'. This is where truthfulness becomes a direct requirement. The idealized model of a free market equilibrium requires rational actors, perfect information, absence of market power, and the like. Lying is about as aggressively contrary to perfect information as you can get, since it's usually a calculated attempt to ensure even more asymmetric information in the liar's favor. And the demonstrations of asymmetric information leading to market failure(both historical case studies and in theoretical models) are numerous.
So, while any real-world implementation can't rely on people to be honest, or even assume that the cheats will be caught all the time; there are good reasons to suspect that dishonesty imposes both direct costs on the victims of fraud and an overall drag on the market efficiency, so there is a strong incentive to punish, and attempt to minimize, dishonesty and fraud.
I'm Arthur Andersen, and I approve this post.
Moody's has rated this post AAA.
This post is fully insured by AIG.
(That said, South Korea has its own flavor of structurally problematic businesses, most notably the rather fraught interactions between the Chaebols and the banking sector and a certain amount of 'too big to fail', against which reform has had limited success.)
The investors might have been acting reasonably (I don't know whether they were; but stock in a company that makes a relatively prosaic commodity isn't necessarily a bad thing as long as the P/E and various other details are in order compared to the alternatives); but I have to wonder about the logic behind the banks willing to extend 3 billion in loans.
Even with inflated sales numbers, I'd (probably naively) think that a bank would get nervous about that sort of borrowing unless they had some idea of the logic behind it. You don't borrow a bunch of money and pay interest on it just for giggles, you do so because you need to turn future expected profits into immediately available cash. If I were a bank lending them considerable amounts of money, I'd want to at least get a summary of why. Zalman manufactures stuff, so the idea that they might take loans to invest in manufacturing facilities, equipment upgrades, or the like seems plausible enough; but they make fans and heatpipes and stuff, not 20nm semiconductors. Did they tell the same story to multiple banks that didn't know about the others? Were the banks pretending to believe them because of a desire to get more loans on the books? Did somebody fall for a "Yup, 3 billion dollar machine shop, that's what we need!" story?
I am a bit concerned about why the prosecution decided that Sarbanes-Oxley was the best tool for the job (both because it's a comparatively recent one, which raises the possibility that destruction of evidence was either unhindered or toothlessly enforced; and because little good ever comes of creative application of laws designed for one job to other areas); but the idea that a box of undersized fish, specifically assembled as part of an enforcement action by a marine fisheries officer, would not be a 'tangible object' (and quite likely a 'record' as well. Normally we like those to be more machine readable and less odorous; but if sorting out the undersized fish from a catch and putting them in a box to be transferred isn't 'recording' I'd be interested to know why) seems absurd.
It's strange that, if the fisheries law relies on having perps carry boxes of evidence for you, it doesn't provide somewhat stiffer penalties for evidence tampering, or for some sort of tamper-evident seals to be affixed to the boxes; but if "Let's just throw out the incriminating evidence and replace it with an innocent looking fabrication" isn't destruction of evidence it's hard to imagine what would qualify.
Many of us have something called "self-control" and know how to control our thoughts. If your mind is constantly filled with sexual thoughts perhaps you should masturbate more often or less often. If that doesn't work, I suggest you go on disability because your mind is clearly screwed up.
We don't yet have the technology to know; but I'd bet that 'self control' is a lot more about pruning of spurious thoughts before they reach awareness than it is about the absence of them.
Perception is much more amenable to study than introspective activity, and we know that that process involves a lot of (often pretty impressive, sometimes embarrassing) culling of irrelevant input to allow conscious focus on a limited set of salient details. This has its advantages (picking a single speaker out of the background of a noisy room would be pretty nasty to do entirely consciously); but as the ever entertaining 'change blindness' experiments show, can involve some pretty dramatic details hitting the cutting room floor without the subject ever noticing them.
Since Google is having trouble legalizing self-driving cars, now they can use this technology to self-drive humans who in turn drive the cars!
Depending on the cost of the implantation and the achievable precision that just might be economically viable...
For certain tasks, robots are already markedly superior to humans, mostly the ones that we can build around the robot's capabilities; but our general-purpose humanoid robots are still pretty tepid and very expensive. Humans, by contrast, are fairly elegant mechanisms and not terribly expensive to maintain if your standards are low enough.
With just a dash of neurosurgery, and an appalling disregard for the poor bastard locked helplessly in his own body as it moves under external control, we can convert surplus or undesirable humans into computer-controlled robotic platforms with limited self healing capabilities, excellent dexterity, adequate runtime on a variety of commonly available food items, and a steady supply of replacements!
Surely nothing could go wrong, yes?
That's incrementally less plausible than the idea that the electrical signalling in our nervous system should give us the ability to shoot lighting from our fingers...
Psychology professor proves that parents retarded their children's development by listening to psychology professors. But totally has the right answer this time.
Pick your poison. You've got the sources you need to distrust because of their long history of being wrong or the sources you need to distrust because of their long history of claiming not to be wrong.
It would probably be safer to say that people will not be smarter than they think they are. If all the people who are less smart than they think they are were only as smart as they think they are we'd probably have cured cancer and be driving our flying cars, on mars, by now.
Be fair now. Some are coddled and told that it is alright not to challenge themselves. The rest are reminded that they are so screwed that the outcome of any amount of effort is likely to be equally unpleasant.
I'm not forcing you to do anything. I just thought that having a 'Get Out The Vote!' day at the office, where everyone gets to bring in their absentee ballot and fill it in during the staff meeting, would be a great way to build team spirit, and help remind everyone that it's what we share that really matters most. The event is totally optional, somebody has to keep the H1-Bs company, and you can fill the ballot out however you like.
That won't be nearly enough to save you.
Computer related issues tend to be nasty enough when you are strongly motivated to get it right, face consequences if you don't, and have access to considerable talent.
A computer related issue where the customer mostly doesn't care, the harm of failure minimal, and the state of the market 'unmotivated at best, malicious at worst'? Even omniscience would have trouble under those circumstances, and those are basically the situation.
They are built to be about as user-hostile as anything without the budget for really classy anti-tamper mechanisms can be; but it would be really handy if some of the little 'femtocell' devices were usable with OpenWRT-style firmware. It's hardly impossible for someone other than the telco to have a chat with your cellular modem; but the barriers to entry are very, very, steep compared to wifi, bluetooth, or ethernet links.
It must sting a bit for the guys who work on Google Code when Google releases a project on Github...
One's choice (when it's a choice at all, rather than just going along with what you were raised with or what everyone else is doing) of religion is pretty much orthogonal to one's fanaticism and dangerousness(excluding the ones so marginal that they get essentially zero 'default' members and are built exclusively on recruitment, suicide cults and such).
That said, there are some historical differences (largely unrelated to the actual theology of the religions involved) that have an impact:
Most notably, it's hard to overstate just how brutal a beating christianity's status took in Europe between the reformation, the enlightenment, and the destruction of basically all the divine right monarchies by revolution(or the first world war, for the real stragglers). It's not as though the continent was thoroughly secularized or anything; but the notion that a union of church and state would basically be a great idea and that mosaic law should totally be a leading component of the code of law was more or less driven into disrepute (ironically the US, with its very, very, explicit 'No, no state church, don't even think about it, bad idea, just look at Europe...' clause, probably has more popular support for church/state integration than do a variety of European states that actually have a, usually decrepit, legacy state church that they haven't gotten around to defunding yet).
It's not hard to find people who get up and go on about "This is a Christian Nation!" and "Our laws should be founded on God's Law!" (mostly because they are loud); but they aren't terribly common, and tend to occupy the fringes. Exactly what weight you want to give the various factors of European history in the delegitimization of these ideas is a matter of argument; but it happened.
By contrast, (and despite having a nasty little schism of their own, as well as abundant other conflicts), the same process has not befallen islam. I don't know why that is so; but it is. The notion that religious law should be enforced by civil power is downright mainstream(and in common practice), heads of state who assert religious legitimacy not uncommon, and enthusiasts with a vision for a unified state/church thing ruling over all the faithful are currently running a zesty little war, rather than, say, Mike Huckabee's campaign.
This hardly means that all individuals are extremist zealots who loath civil government (indeed, the only religions that actually seem to be able to preach their followers into something other than basically the same population-level grab bag as the guy down the street has are the highly selective ones that are able to do some serious pruning); but for whatever historical reasons, christianity largely lost the fight against civil government, while islam has yet to do so. I don't know why this is; but it definitely does introduce some differences in the expected influence of religious adherents on government.
That bug report seemed to be somewhat inconclusive about where the trouble was (aside from the fact that it became visible in Chrome). At this point 'HW decoding' can mean Nvidia (probably several flavors/feature sets between GPU generations; but all under the same driver team), AMD (ditto), and at least two for Intel (the one that does decode assist in the GPU 'Pure Video' and the one that does it in an on-CPU fixed function block as the decode step of 'Quick Sync'), and probably a few of the Broadcomm decoders floating around. And that's just x86.
Is this a browser level bug that breaks across all drivers? A nasty interaction with certain drivers but not others? Hardware assisted video decode hasn't exactly been nailed down into the core x86 ISA yet.