I don't think anyone is saying automation is a zero-sum game, and I don't think anyone is arguing that organizations shouldn't be automating, but what I, Lanier, and many other are arguing is that we can't just pretend that it's some sort of economic law that automation always creates more jobs.
Automation is great and I'm all for it, but the problem I have is that we have to be socially aware of the people, most of them highly-skilled, who are losing their jobs because of it. I'm talking about the professional bank tellers replaced by ATM machines, the professional photographers replaced by digital cameras, the paralegals replaced by search engines, and the doctors who will soon lose their jobs to Watsons.
I personally welcome the replacement of all these professions with more efficient and precise algorithms and machines, but I also think society has to be mindful of the people being put out of work. So many pundits and politicians in America are arguing that the unemployed are responsible for their plight, but if you factor in the rapid acceleration of automation, it's obvious that jobs are being eliminated faster than Capitalism can generate new ones, and Capitalism doesn't care about humans losing their jobs anymore than it cared about horses being replaced with cars. Society has to adjust it's paradigms to account for the fact that high rates of unemployment might be here to stay thanks to the automation revolution.
Strangely enough, it's a Conservative friend of mine who I think came up with the best possible solution to this new social reality: have the government pay everyone a "survival" wage, the bare minimum required to afford a low-rent apartment and food. If you want more, you have to compete in the workplace to afford the luxuries. There are incredible problems with this solution, but at least it's something, and dialog on this issue is better than one side saying "no" to automation and the other asserting that the magical invisible hand will take care of everyone.
I started using Git last year for my personal projects. It's a fantastic platform for coding as a social-network. I love that I can grab code I need from other developers around the world, tweak it, and send it back with a few suggestions. I love that I can follow other projects without having to get involved. Git is awesome.
That being said, we still use SVN for our internal development. The WYSIWYG interface of Tortoise is simply really comprehensive. I realize that Git offers more options, but if those options aren't available with a simple right-click, then I don't have the time for them. Tortoise SVN makes everything readily available, while Git makes me run to the command line too often.
I recently ordered one from foc.us. I've been following this technology for awhile. I briefly considered building one myself, but my electrical skill are highly wanting and if you get the voltage too high I've heard you can burn holes in your brain. This device is not FDA approved, but it does meet "CE Safety standard EN60601-2-10: 2001 and EN60601-1: 2006" (and I admit I am a dumbass for not knowing what that means). It's a very small voltage, so I feel safe using it in limited amounts.
I think the thing to keep in mind is that this technology is like Personal Genomics, in the wrong hands it can be a disaster and some people will harm themselves with it, but if you keep up with the continuing research you'll get a clearer and clearer understanding of it. When I get my device in a few months, I plan on following the research that continues to be published on it. I've already read studies that found people who use these devices are trading their ability to learn new material for the ability to focus in the moment. So I probably won't use it for studying, but I will use it for programming sprints.
I think this is more than just Microsoft. It's crazy the lengths I have to go to sometimes if I want to resurrect a 10-year-old game on my modern PC. Switching to 64-bit Windows also killed a number of old programs I used to run in x86--even though they should run in x86 mode, they don't. I agree with you that the vast majority of issues are with proprietary software, but discontinued open-source projects regularly suffer the same fate.
I've personally run into this problem on a couple of occasions when making FOI requests. Once I requested court transcripts from a case that I wanted to provide to the local newspaper as evidence of an incredibly incompetent prosecutor, but the county courthouse wanted thousands of dollars to copy the transcripts and would not allow me to simply come down and copy them myself. I ran into a similar problem with the Department of Transportation when trying to build a database of VIN numbers for a used car sales site 14 years ago. They had no electronic records and only companies with huge pockets could afford to send people down to photocopy the new VINs every month (stack of papers the size of several telephone books) and ship them off to India for data entry. It basically killed our business model. The first example felt like a local court playing CYA, while the second was DOT simply having no incentive to make its data accessible benefiting larger corporations who could throw money at it.
I do feel it's getting better though. Things like data.gov and the Open Data Initiative are things we should be applauding, because there are some incredibly useful datasets that we the taxpayers have funded and now have access to. When things happen like this story of the AP being effectively blocked from FOIA via a bureaucratic maneuver, we should be outraged, but let's not forget the progress we're making and let our cynicism override the truth that we can change the system.
Technical nit-pick. They are not "introducing new genes into the ecosystem," they are taking genes that already exist in the wild and adding them to a species' genome. Believe it or not, this happens all the time all over the place naturally thanks to viruses, bacteria, and allows for artificial transduction in laboratories. Most of the time, they aren't even doing this, instead they are knocking out existing genes, removing them from the genome to produce desired results.
But on a broader level, I appreciate what you are trying to say, but your argument that GMOs are dangerous because we don't fully understand the ecosystem also applies to hybridization (which has been going on for 10,000 years), artificial selection, pharmaceuticals, any moden farming technique, any chemical we add to our environment--even as a byproduct of our lifestyles, and pretty much any technology anywhere. There is no rational reason to single GMOs out as Frankenstein's monster, especially with scientists all over the world monitoring their effects--which 25 years of research have found to be pretty benign.
I'm sorry, but this urban legend that Monsanto sues farmers for cross-pollination with their crops simply has to die already. I saw the film "Food Inc" and completely bought into the horror stories of Organic Farmers being sued out of business for cross-pollination, but then those same farmers took the case to court and the Judge threw the case out because the farmers could not produce one single example of this ever happening. Here's the Court Transcript, and the defense makes a pretty strong argument pages 33-36:
23...the notion that Monsanto's campaign, so to
speak, against farmers -- which, by the way, by their count,
over 15 years has amounted to 144 lawsuits brought, every single one of them against farmers who wanted, affirmatively
were making use of the trade, and spraying herbicide over the
tops of their crops without signing a license, without paying
Monsanto the royalty for the use of its intellectual
property -- the notion that that terrorizes people who have no
desire to use it whatsoever is perhaps belied most
significantly by Mr. Ravicher's inability to cite anything
other than a movie called Food, Inc. or a CBS report to
demonstrate what they can't demonstrate, which is if this were
a ubiquitous threat, you would expect that there would be some
plaintiff in this case who would say, "I am an inadvertent
user. I have it and it's inadvertent. I have it in my fields
and Monsanto has sent me a letter or Monsanto has called me and
said, 'You are in patent jeopardy.'"
When you go to court to sue a company for unfairly suing innocent farmers who's crops were inadvertently cross-pollinated with patented GMOs, you better be able to produce at least one single example of this happening. When I read this transcript, I realized the Organic Seed Growers Association and all this anti-GMO stuff is really just anti-Science Neo-Luddism. As nerds we should be concerned with veracity and not fall into the trap all the muggles fall into of condemning technology and believing all the scientifically-unsupported horror stories about it simply because it's new and different.
My wife and I recently mentored at the Thomas Jefferson Hackathon, and it was very fascinating to see so many gifted kids come up with so many wonderful technical solutions. The problem, I felt, came when it was time for all the teams to pitch their solutions. Many presentations came off as sales-pitches, which seemed to be what the judges wanted, but it left me wanting to know more about the technical details of what they were working on--not how much revenue they thought their software would generate or how large a user-base it might get in an appstore.
Hackathons are 24-plus hours of intense, focused coding. Following up that technical focus with a sales pitch really seems like a waste and encourages the participants to work on projects that work best in a market place rather than solve interesting problems or explore interesting ideas. An exploration of the technologies used, the languages, algorithms, APIs, etc would make the presentation portion of the Hackathon more like engineers presenting their ideas to other engineers to peer-review and inspire one another. It would also encourage participants to broaden their horizons, consider data visualizations, focus on just an algorithm or family of algorithms, or explore some other aspect of computer science deeply for 24 hours, instead of trying to develop another application to solve some aspect of daily life (which is fine too in moderation).
I don't know about everyone else, but in the real world most of my pitches are being made to other developers. Sales people pitch to the customers and clients, with project managers acting as translators between the technical and social staff. Developers don't just want to see how slick your software is, they also want to evaluate the elegance of your solution under the hood. Hackathons should focus on developer-to-developer communications when it comes time to present solutions.
Nukes do the most damage if detonated in the air above the target. The effects of a nuke detonating in a harbor would be blunted by the shoreline and water. It could potentially do a lot of damage, but nowhere near what a nuke detonated hundreds of meters above the center of a city would do.
Both of you are off-topic and not insightful. Nowhere in this article does anyone mention Monsanto. Monsanto sucks, but:
Monsanto != GMOs
GMOs hold incredible promise to feed the world, but all anyone can ever talk about is Monsanto and "Frankenfoods." There is not one single shred of scientific evidence of any GMOs causing serious health problems (Note: I said "GMOs" not the pesticides farmers are using on those crops), and there are plenty of publicly funded GMO projects that have produced real-life benefits like saving Papaya crops, bringing crops to parts of Africa where they wouldn't normally survive, and bringing nutrient-rich rice to impoverished parts of China.
But you know what? All of this scientific progress is being stymied because of anti-science people screaming "frankenfoods!" In Africa, some countries refused American food aid because of GMO fears--until their people began to starve to death. The Blood Rice GMO could nourish millions, but China can't get anywhere with it because of GMO fears. GMO farm salmon has spent 15 years trying to get approved in the United States, but politicians have blocked it for fear of GMOs; meanwhile, our natural fish stocks collapse from over-fishing.
If you are anti-GMO, then I put you in the same class of people who don't believe in Evolution, who are anti-vaccine, or don't accept the very basic science of Global Warming. You believe things without evidence or are simply denying the scientific evidence that exists, and your ignorance is making life harder for the rest of us.
You're daughter Esther is one of the most incredibly inspiring women role models alive today. Do you have any parenting advice for those of out here with kids of our own who would like them to become similarly active, positive, and brilliant adults?
What keeps me from buying into the Chrome OS is the idea of having everything in the "cloud." A few months back I switched to Google Docs for all my writing, and the experience hasn't been the best. On my laptop, I've got local versions of all my docs, so it isn't too big a problem, but on my tablet, the local versions won't work unless there's an internet connection. I live just outside of DC, but Verizon's DSL is still unreliable. Many times I'm writing and docs looses the internet connection and freezes up, making me sit there waiting until it can sync my last edit with its servers.
What's worse is that Office 2013 is starting to go the Cloud-drive route too, so Word freezes up when I'm not connected to the Internet. You know what else freezes up when I'm not connected to the cloud? Mass Effect 3, right in the middle of my game play. Even though all the content is on my hard drive.
I am all for the cloud, but developers need to make sure their products work when I'm not connected to it. I have no intention of shelling out a $1000-plus dollars for a device that turns into a brick when I'm riding in a car just because my hot-spot can't get a cellphone signal.
Incorrect. There are plenty of GMOs engineered for higher yields and better nutritional value. GMOs single-handedly saved papaya crops. Blood rice holds the promise of eliminating malnutrition in parts of Asia. GMO salmon will make fish farming more viable and reduce stresses on salmon in the wild.
Hate on Monsanto all you want, but hating on GMOs is anti-science and, even worse, it's killing people. Children have starved to death in Africa because leaders there refused to accept food aid from the United States because organic farmers told them the grains were "Frankenfoods" that would kill their children. GMO Salmon took over a decade to get approved because of public protest. Blood rice is still failing to get to the people who need it most because of "frankenfood" rhetoric.
Fun Fact: Organic Farmers are capitalists too. They have the same greedy motivations Monsanto has to spread disinformation in support of their profits. Stop listening to any of these people and start looking to the science.
I'm not a Monsanto fan at all, and was shocked at the corrupt behaviors described in the film Food Inc about the company suing small farms out of business because their crops were inadvertently cross-pollinated with Monsanto RoudupReady GMOs, but then I felt like a fool because Organic Farmers filed a class-action lawsuit against Monsanto over suing for patent infringement where cross-pollination was the culprit and the judge threw the case out because the farmers could not produce one single example of this happening.
Busted ACORN??? For what? Are you talking about the "Project Veritas" videos that multiple attorney generals found were heavily edited to make it appear as though ACORN employees were guilty of giving advice on how to run a child prostitution ring? And who reviewed the raw footage and found no evidence of illegal behavior?
Oh wait, you mean FOX news didn't follow up on the story or post a correction and instead let the fraud stand so that numerous innocent lives were ruined and dozens of jobs were lost?
I see a lot of angst from Conservatives about the fact that Patrick Moran, son of Virginia Rep. Jim Moran, won't be charged with voter fraud even though Project Veritas released a video of him supposedly engaging in criminal acts, implying the kid has connections that give him a free pass, but ignoring statements from the police that they can't prosecute because James O'Keefe refuses to hand over the unedited video. Considering his history with the ACORN video, can we make assumptions as to his reluctance?
For those of us not living in FOX News land, O'Keefe is a scumbag who is famous for defrauding the public. In Conservative media land he's a damned hero and national treasure. Take a long look in the mirror before you start accusing other of "drinking the kool-aid." Your utter lack of critical thinking and willful frustrates me bitterly.
Not fake. It's the real me, but a selective presentation of myself. We all wear many faces. The person I am in the workplace is not the same person I am at the bar with my close friends is not the same person I am when I'm with my family. That's just a natural part of being a social animal.
There's no social stigma to not using Facebook, but there is incredulity. People can't believe you don't use it, but I have lots of friends who have opted out of the social network. When people express shock at your lack of an account, just shrug nonchalantly and say you simply don't have time for it. A large number of people who are FB addicts are so because they have no higher purpose in life. If you're engaged with life, you aren't posting perpetually to your newsfeed.
I confess I get a guilty pleasure out of the semi-regular meltdowns and drama people post on the site that they really shouldn't be sharing. People will post things to facebook or associate themselves with causes that they would never reveal to me were we in person, and people really need to think of Facebook as interacting with 100s of people in person and whether you're okay with every single one of those people knowing these things about you (this includes clicking "Like" or commenting on anything controversial, it's amazing the things I've learned about my friends watching the "Ticker" of activity--it's much worse than the public newsfeed). I have one friend who runs two accounts, a fake one with his real name where he maintains a professional facade, and a real one with a fake name where he feels free to talk about politics and make outrageous controversial statements.
My strategy is that I use my real name on Facebook, but I remain highly cognizant of the fact that I am presenting a public persona. I've posted controversial subjects only a few times, and ended up pulling those things down. Instead, I try to post things that I feel present me in the best possible light. I word everything like a politician, keep my content engaging but noncontroversial, and block/hide anyone who posts controversial comments in response to my posts. There are one or two photos of me passed out at a party from 10 years ago online, but you can't find them anymore because I've flooded the internet with subjectmatter that I'm proud of and want associated with me. It's all in how you use it, and every single teenager should be put into a mandatory public school class to teach them how to manage their online reputations and the real life consequences of their online actions.
I was a little creeped-out, but did appreciate my android phone downloading all my Facebook friends as contacts with their phone numbers when I first set it up. Admittedly, 95% of these are people I would never ever call, it's still nice to not have to hunt down phone numbers for the remaining 5% I *might* need to call when traveling in other cities or states.
This threat seems very credible to me as I've written harvesters for other websites and phone numbers are very easy to iterate through. I've gone to my Facebook account, clicked on "Account Settings > Mobile" and removed my phone number since I've decided FB is too loose with my info, but another option is "Privacy Settings > Who Can Look Me Up?" and letting only your friends search you by phone/email.
Part of the SEO thing might be to try a slight rebranding. Are the domain names "firstname+lastname.com"? My brother was in a somewhat similar situation with a lawyer who had the same name as him who was coming up in all the search results. So my brother rebranded himself to "firstname+middlename+lastname.com", put that on all his promotional materials, and made sure any publicity about him listed all three names to distinguish himself from the other guy.
I imagine future generations are going to increasingly resort these sorts of techniques as the web grows and parents will increasingly have to find more and more unique names for their children to distinguish them. In the meantime, if your wife's slanderer hasn't been thorough enough in his domain purchases, then you can take the step of attaching her brand to her complete name.
Congratulations to the real winners of last nights race: Nate Silver, Sam Wang, Intrade and all the other "Quants" (statisticians) who never characterized this election as "close" or a "tossup," but stuck to their Bayesian models predicting Obama as a heavy favorite. If their predictions were wrong, they would be looking for new jobs today, but the hiney hobbit pundits who characterized these brilliant nerds as "effeminate UnAmerican eggheads" will pathetically deflect responsibility for their own failed predictions this morning--but the nerds know the score. Science works bitches.
Just to add to this, the shipping and handling is actually the source of profit for many companies on Amazon. I personally knew the owner of a company that sells $0.99 computer games on Amazon, but charges $5.99 shipping on them, which turns into a $5-plus profit on each game sold. I recently fell for this tactic when I bought a copy of the Hulk Video Game for $3.96 and got charged $4.59 in shipping. This is also the case with many used-book sellers on Amazon, who sell the book for a dollar, charge you five in shipping, and then send it using the library book rate, which only costs them pennies.
Someone else in this thread mentioned that NC does not have a tax on services, which might be why the company I knew was located there.
No. I haven't read that one and neither of you since Peter and the Wolf is a 1936 classical composition by Sergei Prokofiev, where the boy beats the wolf at the end and rescues his animal friends.
I believe what you meant to refer to is the Aesop fable of the Boy Who Cried Wolf.
Following up on your "serious note" part, I did a review of the peer-reviewed literature concerning the beneficial and inconsequential effects of meditation from the perspective of a rational secular skeptic. Some studies have found no benefits, but the majority of them do find mindfulness meditation, as opposed to other forms of meditation, does improve brain plasticity, increase novel thinking, and greatly improves the sense of well-being. This really seems to be something we should work into our lives like physical fitness and eating healthy.
One of my martial arts teachers always instructed me to focus my gaze on my opponent's solar plexus so that I could see what their legs and arms were doing in the peripheral vision and to never move the gaze from that point so as not to telegraph my intention with my eyes. Kick boxing ended up being probably the most important class I ever took in my life. It taught me to never get in a fight.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think anyone is saying automation is a zero-sum game, and I don't think anyone is arguing that organizations shouldn't be automating, but what I, Lanier, and many other are arguing is that we can't just pretend that it's some sort of economic law that automation always creates more jobs.
Automation is great and I'm all for it, but the problem I have is that we have to be socially aware of the people, most of them highly-skilled, who are losing their jobs because of it. I'm talking about the professional bank tellers replaced by ATM machines, the professional photographers replaced by digital cameras, the paralegals replaced by search engines, and the doctors who will soon lose their jobs to Watsons.
I personally welcome the replacement of all these professions with more efficient and precise algorithms and machines, but I also think society has to be mindful of the people being put out of work. So many pundits and politicians in America are arguing that the unemployed are responsible for their plight, but if you factor in the rapid acceleration of automation, it's obvious that jobs are being eliminated faster than Capitalism can generate new ones, and Capitalism doesn't care about humans losing their jobs anymore than it cared about horses being replaced with cars. Society has to adjust it's paradigms to account for the fact that high rates of unemployment might be here to stay thanks to the automation revolution.
Strangely enough, it's a Conservative friend of mine who I think came up with the best possible solution to this new social reality: have the government pay everyone a "survival" wage, the bare minimum required to afford a low-rent apartment and food. If you want more, you have to compete in the workplace to afford the luxuries. There are incredible problems with this solution, but at least it's something, and dialog on this issue is better than one side saying "no" to automation and the other asserting that the magical invisible hand will take care of everyone.
I started using Git last year for my personal projects. It's a fantastic platform for coding as a social-network. I love that I can grab code I need from other developers around the world, tweak it, and send it back with a few suggestions. I love that I can follow other projects without having to get involved. Git is awesome.
That being said, we still use SVN for our internal development. The WYSIWYG interface of Tortoise is simply really comprehensive. I realize that Git offers more options, but if those options aren't available with a simple right-click, then I don't have the time for them. Tortoise SVN makes everything readily available, while Git makes me run to the command line too often.
I recently ordered one from foc.us. I've been following this technology for awhile. I briefly considered building one myself, but my electrical skill are highly wanting and if you get the voltage too high I've heard you can burn holes in your brain. This device is not FDA approved, but it does meet "CE Safety standard EN60601-2-10: 2001 and EN60601-1: 2006" (and I admit I am a dumbass for not knowing what that means). It's a very small voltage, so I feel safe using it in limited amounts.
I think the thing to keep in mind is that this technology is like Personal Genomics, in the wrong hands it can be a disaster and some people will harm themselves with it, but if you keep up with the continuing research you'll get a clearer and clearer understanding of it. When I get my device in a few months, I plan on following the research that continues to be published on it. I've already read studies that found people who use these devices are trading their ability to learn new material for the ability to focus in the moment. So I probably won't use it for studying, but I will use it for programming sprints.
I think this is more than just Microsoft. It's crazy the lengths I have to go to sometimes if I want to resurrect a 10-year-old game on my modern PC. Switching to 64-bit Windows also killed a number of old programs I used to run in x86--even though they should run in x86 mode, they don't. I agree with you that the vast majority of issues are with proprietary software, but discontinued open-source projects regularly suffer the same fate.
Kevin Kelly had a good article on this at the Longnow blog, where he makes the argument that the only way to preserve digital data is to perpetually migrate it to new systems and formats. It seems extreme, but I don't know if I see an alternative; othewise, if not for the work of volunteers we will loose much of our digital history.
I've personally run into this problem on a couple of occasions when making FOI requests. Once I requested court transcripts from a case that I wanted to provide to the local newspaper as evidence of an incredibly incompetent prosecutor, but the county courthouse wanted thousands of dollars to copy the transcripts and would not allow me to simply come down and copy them myself. I ran into a similar problem with the Department of Transportation when trying to build a database of VIN numbers for a used car sales site 14 years ago. They had no electronic records and only companies with huge pockets could afford to send people down to photocopy the new VINs every month (stack of papers the size of several telephone books) and ship them off to India for data entry. It basically killed our business model. The first example felt like a local court playing CYA, while the second was DOT simply having no incentive to make its data accessible benefiting larger corporations who could throw money at it.
I do feel it's getting better though. Things like data.gov and the Open Data Initiative are things we should be applauding, because there are some incredibly useful datasets that we the taxpayers have funded and now have access to. When things happen like this story of the AP being effectively blocked from FOIA via a bureaucratic maneuver, we should be outraged, but let's not forget the progress we're making and let our cynicism override the truth that we can change the system.
Technical nit-pick. They are not "introducing new genes into the ecosystem," they are taking genes that already exist in the wild and adding them to a species' genome. Believe it or not, this happens all the time all over the place naturally thanks to viruses, bacteria, and allows for artificial transduction in laboratories. Most of the time, they aren't even doing this, instead they are knocking out existing genes, removing them from the genome to produce desired results.
But on a broader level, I appreciate what you are trying to say, but your argument that GMOs are dangerous because we don't fully understand the ecosystem also applies to hybridization (which has been going on for 10,000 years), artificial selection, pharmaceuticals, any moden farming technique, any chemical we add to our environment--even as a byproduct of our lifestyles, and pretty much any technology anywhere. There is no rational reason to single GMOs out as Frankenstein's monster, especially with scientists all over the world monitoring their effects--which 25 years of research have found to be pretty benign.
I'm sorry, but this urban legend that Monsanto sues farmers for cross-pollination with their crops simply has to die already. I saw the film "Food Inc" and completely bought into the horror stories of Organic Farmers being sued out of business for cross-pollination, but then those same farmers took the case to court and the Judge threw the case out because the farmers could not produce one single example of this ever happening. Here's the Court Transcript, and the defense makes a pretty strong argument pages 33-36:
23 ...the notion that Monsanto's campaign, so to
speak, against farmers -- which, by the way, by their count,
over 15 years has amounted to 144 lawsuits brought, every single one of them against farmers who wanted, affirmatively
were making use of the trade, and spraying herbicide over the
tops of their crops without signing a license, without paying
Monsanto the royalty for the use of its intellectual
property -- the notion that that terrorizes people who have no
desire to use it whatsoever is perhaps belied most
significantly by Mr. Ravicher's inability to cite anything
other than a movie called Food, Inc. or a CBS report to
demonstrate what they can't demonstrate, which is if this were
a ubiquitous threat, you would expect that there would be some
plaintiff in this case who would say, "I am an inadvertent
user. I have it and it's inadvertent. I have it in my fields
and Monsanto has sent me a letter or Monsanto has called me and
said, 'You are in patent jeopardy.'"
When you go to court to sue a company for unfairly suing innocent farmers who's crops were inadvertently cross-pollinated with patented GMOs, you better be able to produce at least one single example of this happening. When I read this transcript, I realized the Organic Seed Growers Association and all this anti-GMO stuff is really just anti-Science Neo-Luddism. As nerds we should be concerned with veracity and not fall into the trap all the muggles fall into of condemning technology and believing all the scientifically-unsupported horror stories about it simply because it's new and different.
My wife and I recently mentored at the Thomas Jefferson Hackathon, and it was very fascinating to see so many gifted kids come up with so many wonderful technical solutions. The problem, I felt, came when it was time for all the teams to pitch their solutions. Many presentations came off as sales-pitches, which seemed to be what the judges wanted, but it left me wanting to know more about the technical details of what they were working on--not how much revenue they thought their software would generate or how large a user-base it might get in an appstore.
Hackathons are 24-plus hours of intense, focused coding. Following up that technical focus with a sales pitch really seems like a waste and encourages the participants to work on projects that work best in a market place rather than solve interesting problems or explore interesting ideas. An exploration of the technologies used, the languages, algorithms, APIs, etc would make the presentation portion of the Hackathon more like engineers presenting their ideas to other engineers to peer-review and inspire one another. It would also encourage participants to broaden their horizons, consider data visualizations, focus on just an algorithm or family of algorithms, or explore some other aspect of computer science deeply for 24 hours, instead of trying to develop another application to solve some aspect of daily life (which is fine too in moderation).
I don't know about everyone else, but in the real world most of my pitches are being made to other developers. Sales people pitch to the customers and clients, with project managers acting as translators between the technical and social staff. Developers don't just want to see how slick your software is, they also want to evaluate the elegance of your solution under the hood. Hackathons should focus on developer-to-developer communications when it comes time to present solutions.
Nukes do the most damage if detonated in the air above the target. The effects of a nuke detonating in a harbor would be blunted by the shoreline and water. It could potentially do a lot of damage, but nowhere near what a nuke detonated hundreds of meters above the center of a city would do.
Both of you are off-topic and not insightful. Nowhere in this article does anyone mention Monsanto. Monsanto sucks, but:
Monsanto != GMOs
GMOs hold incredible promise to feed the world, but all anyone can ever talk about is Monsanto and "Frankenfoods." There is not one single shred of scientific evidence of any GMOs causing serious health problems (Note: I said "GMOs" not the pesticides farmers are using on those crops), and there are plenty of publicly funded GMO projects that have produced real-life benefits like saving Papaya crops, bringing crops to parts of Africa where they wouldn't normally survive, and bringing nutrient-rich rice to impoverished parts of China.
But you know what? All of this scientific progress is being stymied because of anti-science people screaming "frankenfoods!" In Africa, some countries refused American food aid because of GMO fears--until their people began to starve to death. The Blood Rice GMO could nourish millions, but China can't get anywhere with it because of GMO fears. GMO farm salmon has spent 15 years trying to get approved in the United States, but politicians have blocked it for fear of GMOs; meanwhile, our natural fish stocks collapse from over-fishing.
If you are anti-GMO, then I put you in the same class of people who don't believe in Evolution, who are anti-vaccine, or don't accept the very basic science of Global Warming. You believe things without evidence or are simply denying the scientific evidence that exists, and your ignorance is making life harder for the rest of us.
You're daughter Esther is one of the most incredibly inspiring women role models alive today. Do you have any parenting advice for those of out here with kids of our own who would like them to become similarly active, positive, and brilliant adults?
What keeps me from buying into the Chrome OS is the idea of having everything in the "cloud." A few months back I switched to Google Docs for all my writing, and the experience hasn't been the best. On my laptop, I've got local versions of all my docs, so it isn't too big a problem, but on my tablet, the local versions won't work unless there's an internet connection. I live just outside of DC, but Verizon's DSL is still unreliable. Many times I'm writing and docs looses the internet connection and freezes up, making me sit there waiting until it can sync my last edit with its servers.
What's worse is that Office 2013 is starting to go the Cloud-drive route too, so Word freezes up when I'm not connected to the Internet. You know what else freezes up when I'm not connected to the cloud? Mass Effect 3, right in the middle of my game play. Even though all the content is on my hard drive.
I am all for the cloud, but developers need to make sure their products work when I'm not connected to it. I have no intention of shelling out a $1000-plus dollars for a device that turns into a brick when I'm riding in a car just because my hot-spot can't get a cellphone signal.
Incorrect. There are plenty of GMOs engineered for higher yields and better nutritional value. GMOs single-handedly saved papaya crops. Blood rice holds the promise of eliminating malnutrition in parts of Asia. GMO salmon will make fish farming more viable and reduce stresses on salmon in the wild.
Hate on Monsanto all you want, but hating on GMOs is anti-science and, even worse, it's killing people. Children have starved to death in Africa because leaders there refused to accept food aid from the United States because organic farmers told them the grains were "Frankenfoods" that would kill their children. GMO Salmon took over a decade to get approved because of public protest. Blood rice is still failing to get to the people who need it most because of "frankenfood" rhetoric.
Fun Fact: Organic Farmers are capitalists too. They have the same greedy motivations Monsanto has to spread disinformation in support of their profits. Stop listening to any of these people and start looking to the science.
I'm not a Monsanto fan at all, and was shocked at the corrupt behaviors described in the film Food Inc about the company suing small farms out of business because their crops were inadvertently cross-pollinated with Monsanto RoudupReady GMOs, but then I felt like a fool because Organic Farmers filed a class-action lawsuit against Monsanto over suing for patent infringement where cross-pollination was the culprit and the judge threw the case out because the farmers could not produce one single example of this happening.
Busted ACORN??? For what? Are you talking about the "Project Veritas" videos that multiple attorney generals found were heavily edited to make it appear as though ACORN employees were guilty of giving advice on how to run a child prostitution ring? And who reviewed the raw footage and found no evidence of illegal behavior?
Oh wait, you mean FOX news didn't follow up on the story or post a correction and instead let the fraud stand so that numerous innocent lives were ruined and dozens of jobs were lost?
I see a lot of angst from Conservatives about the fact that Patrick Moran, son of Virginia Rep. Jim Moran, won't be charged with voter fraud even though Project Veritas released a video of him supposedly engaging in criminal acts, implying the kid has connections that give him a free pass, but ignoring statements from the police that they can't prosecute because James O'Keefe refuses to hand over the unedited video. Considering his history with the ACORN video, can we make assumptions as to his reluctance?
For those of us not living in FOX News land, O'Keefe is a scumbag who is famous for defrauding the public. In Conservative media land he's a damned hero and national treasure. Take a long look in the mirror before you start accusing other of "drinking the kool-aid." Your utter lack of critical thinking and willful frustrates me bitterly.
Not fake. It's the real me, but a selective presentation of myself. We all wear many faces. The person I am in the workplace is not the same person I am at the bar with my close friends is not the same person I am when I'm with my family. That's just a natural part of being a social animal.
There's no social stigma to not using Facebook, but there is incredulity. People can't believe you don't use it, but I have lots of friends who have opted out of the social network. When people express shock at your lack of an account, just shrug nonchalantly and say you simply don't have time for it. A large number of people who are FB addicts are so because they have no higher purpose in life. If you're engaged with life, you aren't posting perpetually to your newsfeed.
I confess I get a guilty pleasure out of the semi-regular meltdowns and drama people post on the site that they really shouldn't be sharing. People will post things to facebook or associate themselves with causes that they would never reveal to me were we in person, and people really need to think of Facebook as interacting with 100s of people in person and whether you're okay with every single one of those people knowing these things about you (this includes clicking "Like" or commenting on anything controversial, it's amazing the things I've learned about my friends watching the "Ticker" of activity--it's much worse than the public newsfeed). I have one friend who runs two accounts, a fake one with his real name where he maintains a professional facade, and a real one with a fake name where he feels free to talk about politics and make outrageous controversial statements.
My strategy is that I use my real name on Facebook, but I remain highly cognizant of the fact that I am presenting a public persona. I've posted controversial subjects only a few times, and ended up pulling those things down. Instead, I try to post things that I feel present me in the best possible light. I word everything like a politician, keep my content engaging but noncontroversial, and block/hide anyone who posts controversial comments in response to my posts. There are one or two photos of me passed out at a party from 10 years ago online, but you can't find them anymore because I've flooded the internet with subjectmatter that I'm proud of and want associated with me. It's all in how you use it, and every single teenager should be put into a mandatory public school class to teach them how to manage their online reputations and the real life consequences of their online actions.
I was a little creeped-out, but did appreciate my android phone downloading all my Facebook friends as contacts with their phone numbers when I first set it up. Admittedly, 95% of these are people I would never ever call, it's still nice to not have to hunt down phone numbers for the remaining 5% I *might* need to call when traveling in other cities or states.
This threat seems very credible to me as I've written harvesters for other websites and phone numbers are very easy to iterate through. I've gone to my Facebook account, clicked on "Account Settings > Mobile" and removed my phone number since I've decided FB is too loose with my info, but another option is "Privacy Settings > Who Can Look Me Up?" and letting only your friends search you by phone/email.
Part of the SEO thing might be to try a slight rebranding. Are the domain names "firstname+lastname.com"? My brother was in a somewhat similar situation with a lawyer who had the same name as him who was coming up in all the search results. So my brother rebranded himself to "firstname+middlename+lastname.com", put that on all his promotional materials, and made sure any publicity about him listed all three names to distinguish himself from the other guy.
I imagine future generations are going to increasingly resort these sorts of techniques as the web grows and parents will increasingly have to find more and more unique names for their children to distinguish them. In the meantime, if your wife's slanderer hasn't been thorough enough in his domain purchases, then you can take the step of attaching her brand to her complete name.
...moving us closer and closer to psychohistory.
Congratulations to the real winners of last nights race: Nate Silver, Sam Wang, Intrade and all the other "Quants" (statisticians) who never characterized this election as "close" or a "tossup," but stuck to their Bayesian models predicting Obama as a heavy favorite. If their predictions were wrong, they would be looking for new jobs today, but the hiney hobbit pundits who characterized these brilliant nerds as "effeminate UnAmerican eggheads" will pathetically deflect responsibility for their own failed predictions this morning--but the nerds know the score. Science works bitches.
Just to add to this, the shipping and handling is actually the source of profit for many companies on Amazon. I personally knew the owner of a company that sells $0.99 computer games on Amazon, but charges $5.99 shipping on them, which turns into a $5-plus profit on each game sold. I recently fell for this tactic when I bought a copy of the Hulk Video Game for $3.96 and got charged $4.59 in shipping. This is also the case with many used-book sellers on Amazon, who sell the book for a dollar, charge you five in shipping, and then send it using the library book rate, which only costs them pennies.
Someone else in this thread mentioned that NC does not have a tax on services, which might be why the company I knew was located there.
No. I haven't read that one and neither of you since Peter and the Wolf is a 1936 classical composition by Sergei Prokofiev, where the boy beats the wolf at the end and rescues his animal friends.
I believe what you meant to refer to is the Aesop fable of the Boy Who Cried Wolf .
Thanks for playing though.
Following up on your "serious note" part, I did a review of the peer-reviewed literature concerning the beneficial and inconsequential effects of meditation from the perspective of a rational secular skeptic. Some studies have found no benefits, but the majority of them do find mindfulness meditation, as opposed to other forms of meditation, does improve brain plasticity, increase novel thinking, and greatly improves the sense of well-being. This really seems to be something we should work into our lives like physical fitness and eating healthy.
One of my martial arts teachers always instructed me to focus my gaze on my opponent's solar plexus so that I could see what their legs and arms were doing in the peripheral vision and to never move the gaze from that point so as not to telegraph my intention with my eyes. Kick boxing ended up being probably the most important class I ever took in my life. It taught me to never get in a fight.