That 1% of tablets are the only ones that can open MS-Word documents correctly. They are a POS, but people will buy them if only for MS-Office compatibility.
The evil with an illegal monopoly is in letting it happen to begin with. Microsoft is now leveraging their old secret standard file formats to impose an inferior product on the market.
Your argument is like saying no one needs a bigger outboard engine than the Seven Marine 557 HP, therefore there is no need for bigger ship engines.
At the way businesses operate right now, current desktop computers are good enough. Same for enterprise servers. But there are plenty of tasks demanding more CPU power than we have right now. The only reason we do business that way is because we do not have good enough CPUs.
Show me a computer that can take dictation the way a human secretary does. A machine that will not listen to the words "new display" and interpret them as "nudist play", that will not confuse a robot with a row boat. Show me a machine that can infer things from the context.
We are still far in hardware capability from machines that can do simple things humans are capable of. There's plenty of room to grow. Don't let the fact that current machines are good enough for the tasks they do confuse you, there's need for more than text editing and spreadsheets.
How we manage a transition from a jobs based economy, to a post-scarcity society will be very interesting.
We are already doing that, with government-paid benefits. Every industrial country provides a lot of social services to the citizens. The transition is a bit too advanced at this point, since most governments are struggling with debt right now.
The big problem will be how to automate government. I don't see public servants relinquishing their privileges any time soon, but an automated society implies necessarily in an automated government. If the jobs public servants do were more automated, like industrial jobs have become, the governments would be able to provide social services at much lower cost.
Is a Roomba a robot? Is a dishwasher a robot? What about a thermostat? There are so many ways that machine automate jobs, no one could possibly find a way to classify a machine as a "robot" or not.
Just FYI, there was a time early in the industrial revolution when steam engines didn't have mechanical valve actuators. There was a person with the task of opening and closing the intake and exhaust valves at the right times. In the sense that a job was eliminated by a machine, the camshaft in your car's engine could be called a robot.
Tax robots and the only jobs you will create will be for lawyers to find arguments to label machines as "not robots".
3D is NOT new, it was tried and failed before. It will fail again and again, it will fail as many times as they try it.
People pay to see an entertaining story, they don't pay to see stupid tricks. Why do they think people will pay again and again to see stuff thrown at the screen, which seems to be the only thing that makes 3D necessary?
It may be a constitutional right, according to some interpretations, but no one can deny that the way it is being applied is the main cause of these recurring massacres.
Assuming it IS a constitutional right, then a VERY strict check should be done to keep those guns away from deranged people. A guy who goes shooting people at random is not a member of "a well regulated militia".
Anyhow, "the right to keep and bear arms" does not specify which arms. Under the current interpretations, there are lots of weapons that are not allowed for civilian use. A common citizen certainly cannot have a nuclear weapon, it's just a matter of where to draw the line.
As for being hard to hit a bird with a.22, isn't how difficult it is part of the fun? If you want it easy, go get your birds at the supermarket.
Perhaps you could use a snowboard to murder someone, but I don't know of any mass murder done with a snowboard.
If guns weren't widely available, people with mental disorders would be less likely to have access to them. If guns with high capacity weren't available to the general public, there would be much less probability of mass murders being committed.
Want to have fun with guns? What is exactly that you want to do that you cannot do with a.22 rimfire? Other than macho bragging, there's no need at all for a civilian to have access to guns that shoot military ammo.
A prisoner was promised liberty if he were able to communicate by gestures with a priest.
The priest showed a hand with one extended finger. The prisoner answered with two fingers. Then the priest showed three fingers and the prisoner answered with a clenched fist.
-"Set this man free", the priest said, "he is obviously a pious man".
-"I told him there's only one God, he answered that there are the Father and the Son, when I answered that actually there's the Holy Ghost too, he answered that the Holy Trinity is but only one God".
When they interviewed the prisoner to get his version, he said:
-"He said he would shove a finger in my ass, I said I would shove two fingers up his ass, he said he would shove three fingers in my ass, I said I would fist his ass".
if the Nazis caught the pidgeon then they'd know too where the message was being sent from
I suppose the Nazis knew where their own headquarters, panzers, and engineers were located, right? If that interpretation is correct, the way that message is worded pinpoints the agent's position.
Until today, corporations are ruled by managers who are good at manipulating people. The CEO is the guy who has the ability to get a lot of people working together to reach a goal.
In the future, when more and more things are done by machines, people skills will not matter.
The rulers of the future will be people who are good at manipulating machines, they will be programmers.
The longer you wait the higher the risk of missing the deadline.
Let me see if I understand, are you proposing to make everyone wait a random time before their trades are accepted? Nothing could be less fair than that.
The big traders would split their business into millions of small trades, ensuring that they got the best average possible. You and I would be fucked up.
some people may not be accessing the market directly, but rather be trading by proxy
Evidently, you have never bought or sold anything on the market.
Everyone does business through proxies, they are called "brokers". You go through a lot of paperwork and pay a stiff fee to become a broker. There are a lot of regulations in place to make sure brokers comply to a set of ethical guidelines.
If everyone had the same level of access to the market as brokers have today, we would have two nasty side effects.
First of all, every transaction would be encumbered with a very high fee, which would mean only the very biggest investors could possibly get any profit from trading.
Second, that would still leave the market operator itself in a privileged position, open to all sorts of corruption.
from a practical viewpoint, these things don't scale. HFT are trying to exploit inefficiencies in the system
That's something I found out when I developed my own algorithms for trading. I can turn $20,000 into $20,500 every day on the intraday trade. 2.5% a day sounds awesome, but I can't get $2500 out of $100k.
There are tricks that work only on the $millions scale, there are things that work only on the $thousands scale.
One faulty algorithm accidentally dumps lots of stocks
That only harms the corporations that hire incompetent programmers who write faulty algorithms. If you have confidence in a company's business and see its price falling, what do you do? You buy. Only to sell it at a big profit after the people realize it was only a faulty algorithm that dumped the stock. Where is the harm in that? Financial Darwinism at its best!
A round could spend a couple of seconds executing the trades, then publish the results, add another couple of seconds for communication, and traders will still have six seconds for calculations before the deadline for the next trading round.
Do you know how your system would work? The big traders would hold their trades until the last microsecond of the time block. This would happen no matter which deadline you use.
Keep the quotes secret, you say? Well, I have some bad news for you. The big investment banks have information about the trades that go through them. They know the way the wind is blowing. You don't know that.
The longer the latency is, the worse it is for the small trader. Information ALWAYS helps.
High frequency trading helps the big guys without harming the small ones. I ought to know, I'm a private investor. I watch the prices and see big trades going through. There are times when my own trades are "big", When I buy $50000 of a small share the price may go up $0.07 as a result. I can "manipulate" the market just like the big guys do.
It's just a matter of economy of scale. If I had more capital, I could invest more, but for the capital I have it doesn't pay to squeeze 0.001% more. My broker has a wide range of tools, I pay for those that fit my portfolio, it's as simple as that.
Let the people who work the market and understand it create the rules, don't try messing with what you don't understand. Amateurs are likely to fuck up things.
You both did your calculations wrong, (1.03 ^ 600) * 100000 = 5 trillion.
Anyhow, the GP is lying, the fictitious person who makes 3% / day clearly does not exist. Which also implies that there's no one who "writes such algorithms and says it's evil".
being aware that you're going to drive 2000 km and sell it at a profit, after selling it to you I phone my contact 2000 km away and have him sell another 1.5 ton gold at your target destination...
t doesn't add value, or efficiency,
Excuse me, please, how come phoning someone at a remote place instead of driving all the way there doesn't add efficiency?
If anything, your analogy reinforces my own proving how right I was.
the market reflects the intrinsic value of the companies instead of behaving as a high-tech casino.
If it needs quick transmission of information, then it does reflect reality. It would be a casino if it depended on random factors, in which case no information transmission would be needed.
Haters gonna hate, but when you have infrastructure you can profit from economy of scale. If you want to profit you must invest, it's the reality of life.
The guy who has a dedicated link to the stock market will profit more than the guy who depends on his home broadband modem, same as the guy who has a thirty-ton eighteen wheeler will profit more from hauling cargo than the guy who depends on his 1.5 ton pick-up truck.
Einstein's revolution was sparked by a moment of insight.
Wrong, it was the result of long hard work by several people.
It all started when Maxwell's equations gave results that did not agree with newtonian physics. In an attempt to get at the root of things, Michelson and Morley created an experimental setup to measure the speed of light in different directions in a very precise way. To everyone's astonishment, these experiments indicated that the speed of light is a universal constant, which does not depend on either the movement of the light emitter nor the movement of the detector.
Which was exactly what Maxwell's equations had predicted to begin with! If there was a true intellectual giant here, it was Maxwell.
Several scientists started creating equations that made the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment compatible with classical mechanics. Einstein was just the most successful one, because his equations were more elegant and simpler than those of the others.
However, this does not mean Einstein was absolutely right, his theory was only the best one for that particular period. Today we know things he didn't know, just as Newton didn't know that the speed of light is constant.
For instance, there IS a fixed frame for the whole universe, the one in which the cosmic background is symmetrical. This background was discovered only in 1965.
There's also the horizon problem, which was discovered only in the 1970s. If we look at the sky in opposite directions, we see the same characteristics. We are looking at different regions of the universe that never had contact with each other since the creation of the universe. They are so far apart that even light couldn't have reached one from the other during the universe's lifetime. To solve this problem in a way that's compatible with einsteinian relativity, cosmologists came up with cosmic inflation, a rather ugly and contrived kludge.
Besides, relativity does not give results that are compatible with quantum physics, this has been demonstrated experimentally.
It's rather unfortunate that Einstein's theory is so elegant and precise, because it's certainly wrong when your size scales too much up or down.
If it weren't for the fact that Vdd and Vss are reversed, a properly programmed PIC 12f675 could be a pin-for-pin replacement for a 555. As a matter of fact, I've stopped using 555s entirely, since a 12f675 provides the same functionality, and more, with NO external parts.
Installing a trojan would be as easy as inverting the 1 and 8 pins inside the package.
Slashdot Mirror
At least, the newspaper has all the armed guards' names and addresses.
Bad luck film producer. Plans to make the major science fiction film of the year, releases it in the same year as The Terminator.
That dominant market share of 1%?
Yes, unfortunately.
That 1% of tablets are the only ones that can open MS-Word documents correctly. They are a POS, but people will buy them if only for MS-Office compatibility.
The evil with an illegal monopoly is in letting it happen to begin with. Microsoft is now leveraging their old secret standard file formats to impose an inferior product on the market.
Your argument is like saying no one needs a bigger outboard engine than the Seven Marine 557 HP, therefore there is no need for bigger ship engines.
At the way businesses operate right now, current desktop computers are good enough. Same for enterprise servers. But there are plenty of tasks demanding more CPU power than we have right now. The only reason we do business that way is because we do not have good enough CPUs.
Show me a computer that can take dictation the way a human secretary does. A machine that will not listen to the words "new display" and interpret them as "nudist play", that will not confuse a robot with a row boat. Show me a machine that can infer things from the context.
We are still far in hardware capability from machines that can do simple things humans are capable of. There's plenty of room to grow. Don't let the fact that current machines are good enough for the tasks they do confuse you, there's need for more than text editing and spreadsheets.
How we manage a transition from a jobs based economy, to a post-scarcity society will be very interesting.
We are already doing that, with government-paid benefits. Every industrial country provides a lot of social services to the citizens. The transition is a bit too advanced at this point, since most governments are struggling with debt right now.
The big problem will be how to automate government. I don't see public servants relinquishing their privileges any time soon, but an automated society implies necessarily in an automated government. If the jobs public servants do were more automated, like industrial jobs have become, the governments would be able to provide social services at much lower cost.
Tax the robots at 70%
What do you mean "robot"?
Is a Roomba a robot? Is a dishwasher a robot? What about a thermostat? There are so many ways that machine automate jobs, no one could possibly find a way to classify a machine as a "robot" or not.
Just FYI, there was a time early in the industrial revolution when steam engines didn't have mechanical valve actuators. There was a person with the task of opening and closing the intake and exhaust valves at the right times. In the sense that a job was eliminated by a machine, the camshaft in your car's engine could be called a robot.
Tax robots and the only jobs you will create will be for lawyers to find arguments to label machines as "not robots".
nobody is going to make The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars in their basement.
Someone already made Star Trek in their basement, so Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings wouldn't seem to be that hard to do.
Now we're starting to see remakes of old movies... BUT NOW IN 3D!
I've seen the opposite. An old classic that was originally filmed in 3D in 1954 was remade in 1998 as a normal 2D film.
3D is NOT new, it was tried and failed before. It will fail again and again, it will fail as many times as they try it.
People pay to see an entertaining story, they don't pay to see stupid tricks. Why do they think people will pay again and again to see stuff thrown at the screen, which seems to be the only thing that makes 3D necessary?
It may be a constitutional right, according to some interpretations, but no one can deny that the way it is being applied is the main cause of these recurring massacres.
Assuming it IS a constitutional right, then a VERY strict check should be done to keep those guns away from deranged people. A guy who goes shooting people at random is not a member of "a well regulated militia".
Anyhow, "the right to keep and bear arms" does not specify which arms. Under the current interpretations, there are lots of weapons that are not allowed for civilian use. A common citizen certainly cannot have a nuclear weapon, it's just a matter of where to draw the line.
As for being hard to hit a bird with a .22, isn't how difficult it is part of the fun? If you want it easy, go get your birds at the supermarket.
Perhaps you could use a snowboard to murder someone, but I don't know of any mass murder done with a snowboard.
If guns weren't widely available, people with mental disorders would be less likely to have access to them. If guns with high capacity weren't available to the general public, there would be much less probability of mass murders being committed.
Want to have fun with guns? What is exactly that you want to do that you cannot do with a .22 rimfire? Other than macho bragging, there's no need at all for a civilian to have access to guns that shoot military ammo.
That joke reminds me of this one:
A prisoner was promised liberty if he were able to communicate by gestures with a priest.
The priest showed a hand with one extended finger. The prisoner answered with two fingers. Then the priest showed three fingers and the prisoner answered with a clenched fist.
-"Set this man free", the priest said, "he is obviously a pious man".
-"I told him there's only one God, he answered that there are the Father and the Son, when I answered that actually there's the Holy Ghost too, he answered that the Holy Trinity is but only one God".
When they interviewed the prisoner to get his version, he said:
-"He said he would shove a finger in my ass, I said I would shove two fingers up his ass, he said he would shove three fingers in my ass, I said I would fist his ass".
if the Nazis caught the pidgeon then they'd know too where the message was being sent from
I suppose the Nazis knew where their own headquarters, panzers, and engineers were located, right? If that interpretation is correct, the way that message is worded pinpoints the agent's position.
A pidgoen is a pidgeon that's goen somewhere.
Until today, corporations are ruled by managers who are good at manipulating people. The CEO is the guy who has the ability to get a lot of people working together to reach a goal.
In the future, when more and more things are done by machines, people skills will not matter.
The rulers of the future will be people who are good at manipulating machines, they will be programmers.
The longer you wait the higher the risk of missing the deadline.
Let me see if I understand, are you proposing to make everyone wait a random time before their trades are accepted? Nothing could be less fair than that.
The big traders would split their business into millions of small trades, ensuring that they got the best average possible. You and I would be fucked up.
some people may not be accessing the market directly, but rather be trading by proxy
Evidently, you have never bought or sold anything on the market.
Everyone does business through proxies, they are called "brokers". You go through a lot of paperwork and pay a stiff fee to become a broker. There are a lot of regulations in place to make sure brokers comply to a set of ethical guidelines.
If everyone had the same level of access to the market as brokers have today, we would have two nasty side effects.
First of all, every transaction would be encumbered with a very high fee, which would mean only the very biggest investors could possibly get any profit from trading.
Second, that would still leave the market operator itself in a privileged position, open to all sorts of corruption.
from a practical viewpoint, these things don't scale. HFT are trying to exploit inefficiencies in the system
That's something I found out when I developed my own algorithms for trading. I can turn $20,000 into $20,500 every day on the intraday trade. 2.5% a day sounds awesome, but I can't get $2500 out of $100k.
There are tricks that work only on the $millions scale, there are things that work only on the $thousands scale.
One faulty algorithm accidentally dumps lots of stocks
That only harms the corporations that hire incompetent programmers who write faulty algorithms. If you have confidence in a company's business and see its price falling, what do you do? You buy. Only to sell it at a big profit after the people realize it was only a faulty algorithm that dumped the stock. Where is the harm in that? Financial Darwinism at its best!
A round could spend a couple of seconds executing the trades, then publish the results, add another couple of seconds for communication, and traders will still have six seconds for calculations before the deadline for the next trading round.
Do you know how your system would work? The big traders would hold their trades until the last microsecond of the time block. This would happen no matter which deadline you use.
Keep the quotes secret, you say? Well, I have some bad news for you. The big investment banks have information about the trades that go through them. They know the way the wind is blowing. You don't know that.
The longer the latency is, the worse it is for the small trader. Information ALWAYS helps.
High frequency trading helps the big guys without harming the small ones. I ought to know, I'm a private investor. I watch the prices and see big trades going through. There are times when my own trades are "big", When I buy $50000 of a small share the price may go up $0.07 as a result. I can "manipulate" the market just like the big guys do.
It's just a matter of economy of scale. If I had more capital, I could invest more, but for the capital I have it doesn't pay to squeeze 0.001% more. My broker has a wide range of tools, I pay for those that fit my portfolio, it's as simple as that.
Let the people who work the market and understand it create the rules, don't try messing with what you don't understand. Amateurs are likely to fuck up things.
You both did your calculations wrong, (1.03 ^ 600) * 100000 = 5 trillion.
Anyhow, the GP is lying, the fictitious person who makes 3% / day clearly does not exist. Which also implies that there's no one who "writes such algorithms and says it's evil".
being aware that you're going to drive 2000 km and sell it at a profit, after selling it to you I phone my contact 2000 km away and have him sell another 1.5 ton gold at your target destination ...
t doesn't add value, or efficiency,
Excuse me, please, how come phoning someone at a remote place instead of driving all the way there doesn't add efficiency?
If anything, your analogy reinforces my own proving how right I was.
the market reflects the intrinsic value of the companies instead of behaving as a high-tech casino.
If it needs quick transmission of information, then it does reflect reality. It would be a casino if it depended on random factors, in which case no information transmission would be needed.
Haters gonna hate, but when you have infrastructure you can profit from economy of scale. If you want to profit you must invest, it's the reality of life.
The guy who has a dedicated link to the stock market will profit more than the guy who depends on his home broadband modem, same as the guy who has a thirty-ton eighteen wheeler will profit more from hauling cargo than the guy who depends on his 1.5 ton pick-up truck.
With very small cars there's always the question of safety.
Now imagine a car that, besides being small and lightweight, is also designed to be taken apart.
Little did they mention that it means having to keep a personal standing army around, negotiating with other local power brokers,
All that can be avoided if there exists a government which makes recreational drugs illegal, right?
Einstein's revolution was sparked by a moment of insight.
Wrong, it was the result of long hard work by several people.
It all started when Maxwell's equations gave results that did not agree with newtonian physics. In an attempt to get at the root of things, Michelson and Morley created an experimental setup to measure the speed of light in different directions in a very precise way. To everyone's astonishment, these experiments indicated that the speed of light is a universal constant, which does not depend on either the movement of the light emitter nor the movement of the detector.
Which was exactly what Maxwell's equations had predicted to begin with! If there was a true intellectual giant here, it was Maxwell.
Several scientists started creating equations that made the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment compatible with classical mechanics. Einstein was just the most successful one, because his equations were more elegant and simpler than those of the others.
However, this does not mean Einstein was absolutely right, his theory was only the best one for that particular period. Today we know things he didn't know, just as Newton didn't know that the speed of light is constant.
For instance, there IS a fixed frame for the whole universe, the one in which the cosmic background is symmetrical. This background was discovered only in 1965.
There's also the horizon problem, which was discovered only in the 1970s. If we look at the sky in opposite directions, we see the same characteristics. We are looking at different regions of the universe that never had contact with each other since the creation of the universe. They are so far apart that even light couldn't have reached one from the other during the universe's lifetime. To solve this problem in a way that's compatible with einsteinian relativity, cosmologists came up with cosmic inflation, a rather ugly and contrived kludge.
Besides, relativity does not give results that are compatible with quantum physics, this has been demonstrated experimentally.
It's rather unfortunate that Einstein's theory is so elegant and precise, because it's certainly wrong when your size scales too much up or down.
If it weren't for the fact that Vdd and Vss are reversed, a properly programmed PIC 12f675 could be a pin-for-pin replacement for a 555. As a matter of fact, I've stopped using 555s entirely, since a 12f675 provides the same functionality, and more, with NO external parts.
Installing a trojan would be as easy as inverting the 1 and 8 pins inside the package.