TIn a more egalitarian society... who gets to live in Downtown Manhatten in the 'nice' neighborhood close to transit? Answer that question without saying one person earns more than another.
In a perfectly egalitarian society, the most desirable populated areas would still cost more and you would still get less. The people who lived there would be those willing to spend the largest fraction of their income to live in the smallest practical housing. This is largely how it works today.
There would likely be areas that are populated today that would not be in this system. If no one can afford to live there, then the space will be used for other activities that can justify the cost. Or the rent reaches a plateau so getting in become a matter of chance, connections, and subterfuge. That happens today too.
I'm a guy who recently had a piece of matter removed from the brain area and am still recovering six months later.
What's your point? Better that I was already dead?
The point is that while there has a been a great deal of success in keeping people alive, there has been little success in keeping them healthy. Even putting aside the individual pain and suffering, there are serious economic consequences. Unhealthy people produce less and require more from society. The sicker they are, the more this is true. Eventually society may have to let people die that they technically could save because they can not afford the resources to keep these people alive.
"The idea that technology cannot cause unemployment has long been taken as a simple fact of economics" By who? it has clearly eroded employment. The only people saying that where corporate factory owners. If technology produced more jobs then it replaced, then we really wouldn't need it
Not necessarily. High labor costs can limit the market for a product, and thus the employment it provides even if it has entirely hand made. If automation can reduce costs below a critical threshold, sales and production take off, leading to greater employment even if there is less labor per unit.
Technology can also allow things to be manufactured that human hands just can't do but humans still want buy.
Mass-production already took jobs away. The only reason this unemployment-meltdown scenario has been avoided so far is that the typical westerner today lives a lifestyle that would have made pre-industrial kings envy them.
Higher consumption helps, certainly but the biggest reason why early automation did not destroy the livelihoods of the masses is that the masses moved up the food chain. Farming -> Manufacturing -> Information. When the machines do the job better than people can, people move to jobs that machines still can't do. The problem is that machines keep getting better but people don't. You eventually reach the stage where there is nothing that machines can't do better. Then what? Even the elite won't be managing their own money. Machines will do it for them. But this won't be a problem for those fortunate enough to own the machines. It will be a huge problem for those who don't own anything and have only their labor (now worthless) to trade for their means of survival.
I just saw a documentry on ancient Alexandria last night with that historian hotty, Betteny Hughes, and how it and Egypt was the center of learning, knowledge, multicultural and tolerant of others.
WTF happened to them?
By the standards of the Ancient and Medieval world, current day Egypt is multicultural and tolerant of others. For most of human history, "tolerant" meant that the state would not burn down the houses or places of worship of those who did not not adhere to the state religion. It also meant that non-believers were generally not killed and seldom imprisoned simply for being non-believers.
It did not mean that non-believers were exempt from religious law. It did not mean that non-believers received the same services or were not economically penalized. The Ottoman Empire at it's zenith is often held up as a great, multicultural and tolerant society. Except that non-muslims were taxed at a significantly higher rate for the specific reason of encouraging conversion. Christian churches were directly taxed, often quite heavily.
It is widely believed that China needs 8% growth in order to maintain domestic stability. There is no way they can maintain this through 2030. They got this far by draining Western economies through aggressive exports. The Western economies are already faltering and internal consumption is heavily dependent on a real estate bubble.
If you read the announcements, you will weasel words like "14nm class". The bottom line is: these are not 14nm processes. It would be more accurate to call them 20nm with FinFets. Global Foundries process does reduce some parameters from their 20nm planer but there is nothing 14nm about it.
If you ever wonder why the burger-flipper behind the counter at McDonalds sneezed in your burger, this is also why.
In the foodservice industry in the US, they probably don't get any paid time off at all (unless things have changed since 25 years ago when I was in it). So, their options are to call in and not be paid, incur the wrath of their manager (do it too many times and you will either be fired or won't get any hours), or just suck it up and go in.
I agree that it is stupid, but it's how it goes.
That's the part time trap. It is common in service jobs for the employers to resist allowing their employees to work full time. That is because they required to provide benefits to full-time employees but not to part time. Among those benefits are paid time off.
The problem in the US isn't just that vacation and sick leave are combined. The total is usually less. It is a slight of hand that management uses to reduce time off while making it look like they offer more. There is usually not enough time to get sick, handle unexpected situations, and fit in a actual vacation. That leaves two solutions
1) Give up on the idea of a real vacation and accept that an extended weekend is the best you are going to get. 2) Don't take sick days
IDE Hard Drives - useable if you really had to, but why?
IDE CDROM - same as above
Why not? They still work and provide enough storage to be useful especially for backup purposes (backing up to the same spindle is less useful) The PATA -> SATA transition is still pretty recent. I upgraded motherboards recently and kept everything else except for the video card (AGP), memory, and cpu. The pair of SATA disks that were connected via a PCI adapter I connected directly. The IDE devices that were connected directly, I attached to PCI adapters. Especially the IDE DVD burner. Why replace that?
Going the other way, I recently picked up Tivo Series 2 with a lifetime subscription. I put in a SATA disk with a PATA adapter.
Most U-233 that comes out of a reactor is formed by protactinium-233 decay.
While U-232 and U-233 are nearly impossible to separate (which is why Thorium has been considered to be proliferation-resistant), protactinium-233 is very easy to separate chemically, and leads to nearly pure U-233.
As mentioned in a comment to TFA, U-232 comes from Pa232. U-233 comes from PA 233. So, in order to get only U-233 out you would seem to need to separate Pa233 from Pa232. Aside from (maybe) less gamma exposure, that should be no easier than separating U232 from U233.
This is not doing anything useful from a research perspective. To quote the article, "even [chip] technology 10 years old is much better than current mining devices". That's being generous. Look at the first semiconductor roadmap chart from 1993 for a minute. These Bitcoin ASICs are being built at 65 to 90nm; that wasn't even state of the art then. This is advancing absolutely nothing except Bitcoin mining; there's no benefit for anyone else.
I think you are mis-reading the chart. 90nm was well past sate of the art in 1993. That's more like 2003. In 1993, state of the art was 500nm, better known as 0.5 micron.
65nm isn't state of the art, but it's not bad for a low volume ASIC. High volume, performance sensitive ASIC are at 28nm. 45nm is more common. Only Intel is shipping 22nm.
2000 was the top of the Dot Com boom, a gold rush period for computer professions that we may never see again. If average wages have improved in real terms at all from that starting point, it is actually kind of impressive.
Semiconductor companies have long held massive patent portfolios. They crossed licensed the patents to each other so, for them, the problem that you couldn't build anything without stepping on somebody's patent wasn't big issue. But startups don't have such portfolios and would be simply be crushed. Cyrix and Nexgen wanted to build x86 compatible processors but Intel had patents critical for compatibility that could not be worked around. They tried having their chips manufactured by IBM, which had cross-licensing agreement but both eventually had to be borged into larger companies (AMD and National Semiconductor) in order to keep operating.
You're assuming the one being bought out is the startups founder, not the employees that get nothing more than laid off.
Also your logic is that you'd rather have a partial lobotomy than a full. The lesser of two bad things. Why not have a good outcome rather than the lesser of two bad ones? For most it's not all abut the money. Seeing something you worked hard to build be taken and thrown in a bin never to see the light of day sucks. This thing you worked so hard on will never get the chance to show how awesome of an idea it really was.
If startups are getting bought than at least there is a decent chance of getting a job at another startup and "successful" startup experience (even if borged and crushed) is better resume fodder than a stint at a startup that quietly disappeared. If startups are not being bought than pretty soon they won't be any funded and you will have no choice but to work for a large company, even you even have that option. (Big companies aren't usually impressed by experience at startups that have never heard of and don't exist anymore)
We've tried several. The big problem is that the Treasury won't simply ditch the dollar bill in favor of coins.
No. The problem is that every coin that has been tried has been massively less convenient than a note in the quantity that $1 units are carried.
1) Eisenhower Dollar: Practically speaking, before my time, but anyone who has seen one knows that they are god-awfully huge and totally impractical for daily use. 2) Susan B Anthony Dollar: Visibly so similar to a quarter than humans and machines have problems. They are very heavy. You don't want to have more than a couple in your wallet. 3) Sacagawea dollar: more visibly distinct but still easily confused in dim light and just as heavy. Getting change for a $20 in Sacagawea dollars is still a horror.
A viable dollar coin needs to be visibly and tacitly distinct from any other coin. It also needs to be light enough than ten of them can be carried without noticeable inconvenience. Perhaps something like the Australian $2 coin. It it small, distinctively thick and surprisingly light. Come to think of it, that might the trick. Abolish the $1 note and create a $2 coin. It wouldn't have to be quite as light if you only needed to carry half as many.
It is not the government's business what you do - provided you are not committing terrorism etc. This is a fundamental principle.
It is only fundamental if you can not articulate the reasons.
This is about power. Information is power. If the state has more information about individuals, it shifts the balance of power toward the state and away from individuals. Increased surveillance might be counter balanced by reducing the authority of the state (you can have the information but you can't do anything useful with it) or by increasing transparency.
Unfortunately, privacy erosion tends to be paired with increased regulation and/or reduced transparency. It should be fought.
Biodegradation is wasteful. The only reason to do it is you can't keep the item out of the environment after it's (usualy short) useful life and you want to reduce the harm when this happens.
But a server chassi isn't anything like that.
1) It can be reused for quite a long time, saving a lot of energy and waste that would be required to make new short-live biodegradeable units 2) When it can no longer be re-used, it can be recycle quite easily. 3) Even if it does (stupidly) end up in the environment, it's made out if iron and iron is not harmful to life. Eventually it will rust but iron-oxide isn't harmful to life either.
I don't know about you, but I wear regular size 32" pants and it fits in my pocket just fine.
Which pocket? I don't know about you but I don't want to sit on my phone if I can help it. Further, I'm not crazy about he security of a phone in the back pocket. Jeans also have smaller pockets than slacks or khakis.
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Then it is $24.95 to revoke the bad cert, which you have to do becuase an IP is only allowed one cert.
I would be more interested if CACert is supported. Free for everyone, not just the lucky and the very careful.
TIn a more egalitarian society... who gets to live in Downtown Manhatten in the 'nice' neighborhood close to transit? Answer that question without saying one person earns more than another.
In a perfectly egalitarian society, the most desirable populated areas would still cost more and you would still get less. The people who lived there would be those willing to spend the largest fraction of their income to live in the smallest practical housing. This is largely how it works today.
There would likely be areas that are populated today that would not be in this system. If no one can afford to live there, then the space will be used for other activities that can justify the cost. Or the rent reaches a plateau so getting in become a matter of chance, connections, and subterfuge. That happens today too.
I'm a guy who recently had a piece of matter removed from the brain area and am still recovering six months later.
What's your point? Better that I was already dead?
The point is that while there has a been a great deal of success in keeping people alive, there has been little success in keeping them healthy. Even putting aside the individual pain and suffering, there are serious economic consequences. Unhealthy people produce less and require more from society. The sicker they are, the more this is true. Eventually society may have to let people die that they technically could save because they can not afford the resources to keep these people alive.
"The idea that technology cannot cause unemployment has long been taken as a simple fact of economics"
By who? it has clearly eroded employment. The only people saying that where corporate factory owners.
If technology produced more jobs then it replaced, then we really wouldn't need it
Not necessarily. High labor costs can limit the market for a product, and thus the employment it provides even if it has entirely hand made. If automation can reduce costs below a critical threshold, sales and production take off, leading to greater employment even if there is less labor per unit.
Technology can also allow things to be manufactured that human hands just can't do but humans still want buy.
Mass-production already took jobs away. The only reason this unemployment-meltdown scenario has been avoided so far is that the typical westerner today lives a lifestyle that would have made pre-industrial kings envy them.
Higher consumption helps, certainly but the biggest reason why early automation did not destroy the livelihoods of the masses is that the masses moved up the food chain. Farming -> Manufacturing -> Information. When the machines do the job better than people can, people move to jobs that machines still can't do. The problem is that machines keep getting better but people don't. You eventually reach the stage where there is nothing that machines can't do better. Then what? Even the elite won't be managing their own money. Machines will do it for them. But this won't be a problem for those fortunate enough to own the machines. It will be a huge problem for those who don't own anything and have only their labor (now worthless) to trade for their means of survival.
I just saw a documentry on ancient Alexandria last night with that historian hotty, Betteny Hughes, and how it and Egypt was the center of learning, knowledge, multicultural and tolerant of others.
WTF happened to them?
By the standards of the Ancient and Medieval world, current day Egypt is multicultural and tolerant of others. For most of human history, "tolerant" meant that the state would not burn down the houses or places of worship of those who did not not adhere to the state religion. It also meant that non-believers were generally not killed and seldom imprisoned simply for being non-believers.
It did not mean that non-believers were exempt from religious law. It did not mean that non-believers received the same services or were not economically penalized. The Ottoman Empire at it's zenith is often held up as a great, multicultural and tolerant society. Except that non-muslims were taxed at a significantly higher rate for the specific reason of encouraging conversion. Christian churches were directly taxed, often quite heavily.
It is widely believed that China needs 8% growth in order to maintain domestic stability. There is no way they can maintain this through 2030. They got this far by draining Western economies through aggressive exports. The Western economies are already faltering and internal consumption is heavily dependent on a real estate bubble.
In 30 years it has changed dramatically. Given how common degrees are, many HR departments will simply filter out any resumes that do not have one.
Certainly. But a budget associates degree won't help if the next filter is for a bachelors or masters from a well known school.
If you read the announcements, you will weasel words like "14nm class". The bottom line is: these are not 14nm processes. It would be more accurate to call them 20nm with FinFets. Global Foundries process does reduce some parameters from their 20nm planer but there is nothing 14nm about it.
If you ever wonder why the burger-flipper behind the counter at McDonalds sneezed in your burger, this is also why.
In the foodservice industry in the US, they probably don't get any paid time off at all (unless things have changed since 25 years ago when I was in it). So, their options are to call in and not be paid, incur the wrath of their manager (do it too many times and you will either be fired or won't get any hours), or just suck it up and go in.
I agree that it is stupid, but it's how it goes.
That's the part time trap. It is common in service jobs for the employers to resist allowing their employees to work full time. That is because they required to provide benefits to full-time employees but not to part time. Among those benefits are paid time off.
The problem in the US isn't just that vacation and sick leave are combined. The total is usually less. It is a slight of hand that management uses to reduce time off while making it look like they offer more. There is usually not enough time to get sick, handle unexpected situations, and fit in a actual vacation. That leaves two solutions
1) Give up on the idea of a real vacation and accept that an extended weekend is the best you are going to get.
2) Don't take sick days
IDE Hard Drives - useable if you really had to, but why?
IDE CDROM - same as above
Why not? They still work and provide enough storage to be useful especially for backup purposes (backing up to the same spindle is less useful) The PATA -> SATA transition is still pretty recent. I upgraded motherboards recently and kept everything else except for the video card (AGP), memory, and cpu. The pair of SATA disks that were connected via a PCI adapter I connected directly. The IDE devices that were connected directly, I attached to PCI adapters. Especially the IDE DVD burner. Why replace that?
Going the other way, I recently picked up Tivo Series 2 with a lifetime subscription. I put in a SATA disk with a PATA adapter.
Read TFA.
Most U-233 that comes out of a reactor is formed by protactinium-233 decay.
While U-232 and U-233 are nearly impossible to separate (which is why Thorium has been considered to be proliferation-resistant), protactinium-233 is very easy to separate chemically, and leads to nearly pure U-233.
As mentioned in a comment to TFA, U-232 comes from Pa232. U-233 comes from PA 233. So, in order to get only U-233 out you would seem to need to separate Pa233 from Pa232. Aside from (maybe) less gamma exposure, that should be no easier than separating U232 from U233.
This is not doing anything useful from a research perspective. To quote the article, "even [chip] technology 10 years old is much better than current mining devices". That's being generous. Look at the first semiconductor roadmap chart from 1993 for a minute. These Bitcoin ASICs are being built at 65 to 90nm; that wasn't even state of the art then. This is advancing absolutely nothing except Bitcoin mining; there's no benefit for anyone else.
I think you are mis-reading the chart. 90nm was well past sate of the art in 1993. That's more like 2003. In 1993, state of the art was 500nm, better known as 0.5 micron.
65nm isn't state of the art, but it's not bad for a low volume ASIC. High volume, performance sensitive ASIC are at 28nm. 45nm is more common. Only Intel is shipping 22nm.
2000 was the top of the Dot Com boom, a gold rush period for computer professions that we may never see again. If average wages have improved in real terms at all from that starting point, it is actually kind of impressive.
Semiconductor companies have long held massive patent portfolios. They crossed licensed the patents to each other so, for them, the problem that you couldn't build anything without stepping on somebody's patent wasn't big issue. But startups don't have such portfolios and would be simply be crushed. Cyrix and Nexgen wanted to build x86 compatible processors but Intel had patents critical for compatibility that could not be worked around. They tried having their chips manufactured by IBM, which had cross-licensing agreement but both eventually had to be borged into larger companies (AMD and National Semiconductor) in order to keep operating.
You're assuming the one being bought out is the startups founder, not the employees that get nothing more than laid off.
Also your logic is that you'd rather have a partial lobotomy than a full. The lesser of two bad things. Why not have a good outcome rather than the lesser of two bad ones? For most it's not all abut the money. Seeing something you worked hard to build be taken and thrown in a bin never to see the light of day sucks. This thing you worked so hard on will never get the chance to show how awesome of an idea it really was.
If startups are getting bought than at least there is a decent chance of getting a job at another startup and "successful" startup experience (even if borged and crushed) is better resume fodder than a stint at a startup that quietly disappeared. If startups are not being bought than pretty soon they won't be any funded and you will have no choice but to work for a large company, even you even have that option. (Big companies aren't usually impressed by experience at startups that have never heard of and don't exist anymore)
i though Eisenhower was on the 50 cent piece.
Nope. Eisenhower was on the dollar. JFK was on the half dollar.
We've tried several. The big problem is that the Treasury won't simply ditch the dollar bill in favor of coins.
No. The problem is that every coin that has been tried has been massively less convenient than a note in the quantity that $1 units are carried.
1) Eisenhower Dollar: Practically speaking, before my time, but anyone who has seen one knows that they are god-awfully huge and totally impractical for daily use.
2) Susan B Anthony Dollar: Visibly so similar to a quarter than humans and machines have problems. They are very heavy. You don't want to have more than a couple in your wallet.
3) Sacagawea dollar: more visibly distinct but still easily confused in dim light and just as heavy. Getting change for a $20 in Sacagawea dollars is still a horror.
A viable dollar coin needs to be visibly and tacitly distinct from any other coin. It also needs to be light enough than ten of them can be carried without noticeable inconvenience. Perhaps something like the Australian $2 coin. It it small, distinctively thick and surprisingly light. Come to think of it, that might the trick. Abolish the $1 note and create a $2 coin. It wouldn't have to be quite as light if you only needed to carry half as many.
I don't get this ultimate desire for privacy.
It is not the government's business what you do - provided you are not committing terrorism etc. This is a fundamental principle.
It is only fundamental if you can not articulate the reasons.
This is about power. Information is power. If the state has more information about individuals, it shifts the balance of power toward the state and away from individuals. Increased surveillance might be counter balanced by reducing the authority of the state (you can have the information but you can't do anything useful with it) or by increasing transparency.
Unfortunately, privacy erosion tends to be paired with increased regulation and/or reduced transparency. It should be fought.
Copyright and patents are two vastly different beasts.
And yet "defend it or lose it" doesn't apply to either. It is a property of trademark law.
This is an annoucment for a 32nm Itanium. Intel has been shipping 22nm x86 since spring.
Biodegradation is wasteful. The only reason to do it is you can't keep the item out of the environment after it's (usualy short) useful life and you want to reduce the harm when this happens.
But a server chassi isn't anything like that.
1) It can be reused for quite a long time, saving a lot of energy and waste that would be required to make new short-live biodegradeable units
2) When it can no longer be re-used, it can be recycle quite easily.
3) Even if it does (stupidly) end up in the environment, it's made out if iron and iron is not harmful to life. Eventually it will rust but iron-oxide isn't harmful to life either.
I don't know about you, but I wear regular size 32" pants and it fits in my pocket just fine.
Which pocket? I don't know about you but I don't want to sit on my phone if I can help it. Further, I'm not crazy about he security of a phone in the back pocket. Jeans also have smaller pockets than slacks or khakis.
I didn't know that Apple made pacemakers...
Don't be silly. Apple would never allow you to change the battery.