I'm sure bank robbers (not you, the types with guns) get the same thrill.
The demonizing isn't coming from ill-informed quarters. It's coming from the people who know what you do, know where you get your money from. The cash you get from HFT isn't just magically appearing from no where. It's being stolen from legitimate investors. You're all a bunch of thieves, skimming money off the top of every transaction, and using every loophole you find so that you don't even pay taxes on it. You've drained the country of its lifeblood, and in a few decades will leave it a rotting husk while you move on to another nation to loot. If telling yourself that I'm just "ill-informed" is what lets you sleep at night, then go ahead. Keep lying to yourself. But when your middle-class friends and family (do you even have any?) are suffering, know that it's because you helped your company loot their savings and run their employers out of business.
If the career path you choose is to be a thief, robbing the country blind, then yes, the government has every right to try to discourage you from that choice.
A lot of the MS-haters on Slashdot tried to write off the Kinect as a nice bit of third-party hardware with a crappy MS-made driver. I wonder how they'll respond to this. Microsoft has really outdone themselves here. I think Penny Arcade put it best. If only they could apply this sort of innovation to their more important products, they'd be back on top in no time.
So a company having a successful business model and dominating the market is evil? Got it. If all markets were dominated by companies like Google, the world would be a much better place. Are they perfect? No. But they're trying dammit.
Oh please, stop white-knighting for the multi-billion dollar international corporation. They aren't trying to be a force for good in the world. They're trying to make money.
Where are you interviewing people from? I graduated in '07 and all the things that you bemoan as missing in new graduates were required. Two courses in computer architecture culminating in designing a CPU, with optional advanced courses that covered design of other components, such as DMA drivers and USB PHYs. The computer architecture courses also covered assembly programming, including having us reverse engineer programs and create buffer overflow attacks against them. The intro to programming courses were entirely C/C++ and were followed by a course in embedded control (in C) and a course in algorithmics (C++). There were also software engineering courses that required us to take common patterns and implement them in various languages.
I was not the only person in the program, nor was my alma mater the top rated school in the world. If you can't find people under the age of 30 who know this stuff, then odds are you're not advertising the job in the right places, or you're not making it sound interesting enough.
Homosexuality is not a choice and is not a disease. It can no more be 'cured' than heterosexuality, or race, or eye color (you can put in colored contacts -- just like you can go into the closet -- but it doesn't change the underlying reality of your eye color -- or sexuality).
Is that a fact, or do you just really, really want it to be true?
Playing devil's advocate here... I am completely in favor of gay rights.
But how about incest? If two relatives are attracted to each other, and wish to adopt a child, what harm is there to society? None. And yet it's taboo. People with such feelings very much need to control them, and should probably seek counseling to get "fixed".
Likewise, homosexuality (until recently) was taboo, and very much against our culture. People were taught that they need to control their feelings, and that they should seek counseling to get "fixed".
Now on the other hand, consider alcohol use, or smoking. Definite negative impact on society, with only minor benefits. Yet because they've been culturally accepted for so long, no one thinks that a person needs fixing just because they aren't a teetotaler.
My point is that what we allow and what we disallow has very little to do with effect on society, and more to do with how our culture views those things. Right now, we're undergoing a cultural shift from puritan values to more pragmatic ones, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the new values are better.
As a thought experiment, imagine that tomorrow scientists discover that homosexuality is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and start producing a "straight pill". Our modern sensibilities might rebel at the thought, but think about it. Balding men take pills to keep their hair, flat-chested women go through surgery to get bigger breasts, depressed people take pills to feel better, stressed people take pills to sleep, damn near everyone takes caffeine to get through the day. If a gay person wants to be "fixed" and can do so easily, why shouldn't they? Just because it goes against your values?
This app is an attempt at that pill. It almost certainly doesn't work, and deserves as much derision as snake oil diet pills. But unless people are being forced to use it, there's nothing immoral going on here.
The fact that you've distributed all those free copies along side of the pay-for editions means you've got a *LOT* of people who know your name.
Does it? I've read plenty of free Kindle books and blogs and online news articles over the past few years. I'd be hard pressed to remember the names of any authors except those that I read frequently. If one comes out with another book, odds are I won't even notice. Maybe if I happen to see something on Amazon's storefront saying "from the author of XXX", but even then it's likely to be only a glimmer of recognition. The reason is simple - from a marketing viewpoint, you might think of customers purely as customers. In reality, they're complex individuals with lots of stuff going on in their lives, of which your book plays only a minuscule role.
Of the people who downloaded this guy's book, how many actually read it through? Of those, how many enjoyed it enough that they would seek out another title? Of those, how many will still remember by the time the next title comes out? Of those, how many will notice when the next title comes out? He's not going to have a "big head start" for his next book. He might have a few hundred dedicated fans, but that's about it.
So in order to make ends meet, authors should be required to match the pace of one of the most prolific authors in history? Some one like Asimov deserves to be a millionaire, not merely "better than a guy at McDonalds".
This is quite a pathetic list. Cashback programs are bribery? Better not tell the DoJ, or every credit card company on Earth is going to be in deep shit.
"Microsoft buys patents". Seriously. Buying things is now unethical is the fevered minds of the MS-haters.
MS adds support for PDF. This is bad because it helps MS Office compete against Open Office. And God knows, trying to compete against FOSS isn't just unethical, it's a crime against humanity!
The CEO gets angry and throws a chair. Ergo, MS routinely abuses their employees. This is logical your mind? I doubt even you believe this one.
Christ man, the ONLY thing on that list that's really unethical is their corruption of the OOXML standards process. Next time, just leave it at that. Posting all that other stuff just makes you look like you're grasping at straws.
I never used a Zune, but you mean to tell me that Microsoft made an MP3 player that couldn't sync with Windows Media Player? If true, that's amazingly awful.
So some lame joke that Microsoft products are toxic is not just "funny" but "informative", while a post stating that recent MS products (e.g. W7) have been improving is "offtopic" and a "troll".
Conclusion: Slashdot has the worst fucking moderation system on the internet. 4chan's/b/ has better mods.
Go ahead and mod me down, I'll just post something like "and nothing of value was lost" for the instant +5.
The best kind of boss is one that was promoted due to his technical skills and hates managing people, so he lets everyone work the way they know how to.
What you just described is the worst type of boss imaginable. He hates his job, so he just doesn't do it. You end up with massive duplication of effort, parts not fitting together, engineers fighting with each other for months because there's no one to make an executive decision, and whoops you just missed your market window, some other company has released first, and your department is getting shut down.
Either you've never actually worked on a team project outside of college, or you just judge management based on how much fun they let you have, paying no attention to how it affects the company as a whole.
Ample here means sufficient. It seems to get the job done, and gets it done better (by all accounts) than the Samsung, despite it being half as much.
You keep using that word, I do not think you know what it means. Ample means lots, more than enough, so much that you'll have some left over. My eight year old laptop has 512 MB, and considering that tablets are essentially touch-screen laptops, it makes the RAM in the iPad far from "ample". Sufficient? Maybe. But ample has a completely different meaning. Pretending that the words mean the same thing is called "lying".
Samsung is wasting time and money spec-padding. And that dual-core graphics and CPU don't seem to be helping them any in head-to-head comparisons.
How can they compete when the media is either in love with or employed by Apple? The iPad 2 was front page news for days. Every morning show host was playing around with one, infomercial style. Most companies need to pay for advertising. How much does Apple pay?
"We are pushing an Android Market security update to all affected devices that undoes the exploits to prevent the attacker(s) from accessing any more information from affected devices" sounds an awful lot like Google is patching their own code.
It's for the "fuck the government" segment of Slashdot readers. They'll claim that this is evil totalitarianism, and that since "everyone is guilty of something" the cops now have the authority to steal your most prized possessions over a jaywalking violation. They might even toss in a few oldies but goodies, like claiming the major political parties are the same, that Americans are no better off than North Koreans, and perhaps even that quip about ballot, jury, soap, and bullet boxes.
Meth dealer? I'm sure he was just a misunderstood amateur chemist.
Google isn't the first to do this, not by a long shot. Last year, there was a story about an autonomous car driving from Italy to China. There were humans on board to take over in the event of a problem, of course. I'm sure there are other examples as well.
It is cool tech, but I think it'll be a long time before it's mature, and an even longer time before it gains acceptance. People want to be in control of their lives, even if they're better off relinquishing control. Whether it's long road trips due to fear of flying or keeping a gun in their nightstand, people often choose to do something that is statistically more dangerous rather than put their lives in someone else's hands. I'm not saying that that's a bad thing or a stupid thing, just that it's human nature. Not many people will be willing to trust a computer to drive them, even if it's safer.
They followed the rules, obtained subpoenas, and investigated a crime. This, of course, is exactly the same as secretly abducting and torturing people, because.... well, because Slashdot is full of hard-core libertarian-anarchists who would only be happy if the government was completely eradicated.
Gitmo can't be shut down because Americans are too spineless to lock up the prisoners on our soil. Troops in Iraq are being drawn down responsibly. It was a mistake to go in, but that doesn't mean we should make it worse by yanking everyone out at once. Troops in Afghanistan were always supported by virtually everyone. The tax rates were extended because the fascist GOP held unemployment benefits hostage. "Give us billions in tax cuts, or we let millions of innocent people die in the streets!" I also note that you don't even mention the unmitigated disasters that are Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, and a full-hearted embrace of torture.
I'll give you the Patriot Act and the wiretaps. Still, the balance is very heavily against your boy Bush. When even Republican sweethearts like Donald Trump are calling him the worst president in American history, it takes a special kind of willful ignorance to pretend he was anything but a catastrophe.
Look, people die, that's horrible. But Libya's problems are their own internal problem. It's ultimately a healthy thing that Libyans are revolting against their dictator. This is democracy at its finest. If all goes well, this is going to be their 1776.
If the West were to intervene, that would kill all of the legitimacy that this movement has.
Right, just like the French intervention killed all the legitimacy of the American Revolution. After all, the French were clearly helping the nascent US as a way of striking against England.
People adapt. If you think the average Libyan was a war-hardened badass a month ago (or even now!), you're naive. They were farmers and carpenters and doctors and teachers. They still are. People are people everywhere, and when they're thrust into violent situations, they adapt or die. Hell, Americans might even be slightly better off, by virtue of having more firearms experience than the average third-world citizen, and by being healthier. Fat beats emaciated any day.
That is why when I hear people say the "MPAA/RIAA/government/etc cannot shut us down we will just do it this other way" I cringe..
Are you seriously suggesting that the RIAA and/or its sister organizations would set up jamming stations, and hire mercenaries to patrol the roads confiscating all portable electronics? Either you have the driest delivery I've ever seen, or the weakest hold on reality.
Now, while the government technically could do it, they won't. As I've said before in similar threads, the leaders of the US would NEVER shut off the internet. Consider:
Shutting down the internet shocks the masses. It can get people to protest who ordinarily wouldn't. In this respect, it's bad for the government.
The one use of shutting down the internet is if you're worried about the international reaction to what you're doing. In case you haven't paid attention over the past 50 years, the US really doesn't care what the international community thinks.
Therefore, shutting down the internet would be a net negative for the government, and they'd only do it if they were stupid and out of touch enough not to realize this.
Before you say, "Aha! The government IS stupid and out of touch," remember that our leaders are by definition the ones who were savvy enough at controlling public opinion to get elected in the first place. This is a case where it's better to assume malice than stupidity.
Now, if you want to say that in the event of a full blown American civil war, the government would be able to shut down communications, you'd be right. But at that point, so what? That's like saying they'd be able to kill people. It's obviously true, and would be in any situation. There's nothing we could do differently that would change the outcome. If it ever comes, and it's extremely unlikely that it will, you'll just have to accept it.
Re:Yell "Format C ... Yes, Yes, Yes" at work...
on
Talking To Computers?
·
· Score: 1
If you have to repeat or cancel more than 1% of the things you say it isn't ready yet.
I agree with everything else you say, but humans do not actually get that low an error rate in conversations. Not much worse than humans is a good metric, though.
Alright, so let's make it really human-like. It should be able to deduce, from both signal quality and context, whether or not it heard you right. If a person hears you say that your hovercraft is full of eels, they'll ask you to repeat yourself. But they won't ask "Ok, did you say X?" after every single phrase you utter.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure bank robbers (not you, the types with guns) get the same thrill.
The demonizing isn't coming from ill-informed quarters. It's coming from the people who know what you do, know where you get your money from. The cash you get from HFT isn't just magically appearing from no where. It's being stolen from legitimate investors. You're all a bunch of thieves, skimming money off the top of every transaction, and using every loophole you find so that you don't even pay taxes on it. You've drained the country of its lifeblood, and in a few decades will leave it a rotting husk while you move on to another nation to loot. If telling yourself that I'm just "ill-informed" is what lets you sleep at night, then go ahead. Keep lying to yourself. But when your middle-class friends and family (do you even have any?) are suffering, know that it's because you helped your company loot their savings and run their employers out of business.
If the career path you choose is to be a thief, robbing the country blind, then yes, the government has every right to try to discourage you from that choice.
A lot of the MS-haters on Slashdot tried to write off the Kinect as a nice bit of third-party hardware with a crappy MS-made driver. I wonder how they'll respond to this. Microsoft has really outdone themselves here. I think Penny Arcade put it best. If only they could apply this sort of innovation to their more important products, they'd be back on top in no time.
So a company having a successful business model and dominating the market is evil? Got it. If all markets were dominated by companies like Google, the world would be a much better place. Are they perfect? No. But they're trying dammit.
Oh please, stop white-knighting for the multi-billion dollar international corporation. They aren't trying to be a force for good in the world. They're trying to make money.
Where are you interviewing people from? I graduated in '07 and all the things that you bemoan as missing in new graduates were required. Two courses in computer architecture culminating in designing a CPU, with optional advanced courses that covered design of other components, such as DMA drivers and USB PHYs. The computer architecture courses also covered assembly programming, including having us reverse engineer programs and create buffer overflow attacks against them. The intro to programming courses were entirely C/C++ and were followed by a course in embedded control (in C) and a course in algorithmics (C++). There were also software engineering courses that required us to take common patterns and implement them in various languages.
I was not the only person in the program, nor was my alma mater the top rated school in the world. If you can't find people under the age of 30 who know this stuff, then odds are you're not advertising the job in the right places, or you're not making it sound interesting enough.
Homosexuality is not a choice and is not a disease. It can no more be 'cured' than heterosexuality, or race, or eye color (you can put in colored contacts -- just like you can go into the closet -- but it doesn't change the underlying reality of your eye color -- or sexuality).
Is that a fact, or do you just really, really want it to be true?
Playing devil's advocate here... I am completely in favor of gay rights.
But how about incest? If two relatives are attracted to each other, and wish to adopt a child, what harm is there to society? None. And yet it's taboo. People with such feelings very much need to control them, and should probably seek counseling to get "fixed".
Likewise, homosexuality (until recently) was taboo, and very much against our culture. People were taught that they need to control their feelings, and that they should seek counseling to get "fixed".
Now on the other hand, consider alcohol use, or smoking. Definite negative impact on society, with only minor benefits. Yet because they've been culturally accepted for so long, no one thinks that a person needs fixing just because they aren't a teetotaler.
My point is that what we allow and what we disallow has very little to do with effect on society, and more to do with how our culture views those things. Right now, we're undergoing a cultural shift from puritan values to more pragmatic ones, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the new values are better.
As a thought experiment, imagine that tomorrow scientists discover that homosexuality is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and start producing a "straight pill". Our modern sensibilities might rebel at the thought, but think about it. Balding men take pills to keep their hair, flat-chested women go through surgery to get bigger breasts, depressed people take pills to feel better, stressed people take pills to sleep, damn near everyone takes caffeine to get through the day. If a gay person wants to be "fixed" and can do so easily, why shouldn't they? Just because it goes against your values?
This app is an attempt at that pill. It almost certainly doesn't work, and deserves as much derision as snake oil diet pills. But unless people are being forced to use it, there's nothing immoral going on here.
The fact that you've distributed all those free copies along side of the pay-for editions means you've got a *LOT* of people who know your name.
Does it? I've read plenty of free Kindle books and blogs and online news articles over the past few years. I'd be hard pressed to remember the names of any authors except those that I read frequently. If one comes out with another book, odds are I won't even notice. Maybe if I happen to see something on Amazon's storefront saying "from the author of XXX", but even then it's likely to be only a glimmer of recognition. The reason is simple - from a marketing viewpoint, you might think of customers purely as customers. In reality, they're complex individuals with lots of stuff going on in their lives, of which your book plays only a minuscule role.
Of the people who downloaded this guy's book, how many actually read it through? Of those, how many enjoyed it enough that they would seek out another title? Of those, how many will still remember by the time the next title comes out? Of those, how many will notice when the next title comes out? He's not going to have a "big head start" for his next book. He might have a few hundred dedicated fans, but that's about it.
So in order to make ends meet, authors should be required to match the pace of one of the most prolific authors in history? Some one like Asimov deserves to be a millionaire, not merely "better than a guy at McDonalds".
This is quite a pathetic list. Cashback programs are bribery? Better not tell the DoJ, or every credit card company on Earth is going to be in deep shit.
"Microsoft buys patents". Seriously. Buying things is now unethical is the fevered minds of the MS-haters.
MS adds support for PDF. This is bad because it helps MS Office compete against Open Office. And God knows, trying to compete against FOSS isn't just unethical, it's a crime against humanity!
The CEO gets angry and throws a chair. Ergo, MS routinely abuses their employees. This is logical your mind? I doubt even you believe this one.
Christ man, the ONLY thing on that list that's really unethical is their corruption of the OOXML standards process. Next time, just leave it at that. Posting all that other stuff just makes you look like you're grasping at straws.
I never used a Zune, but you mean to tell me that Microsoft made an MP3 player that couldn't sync with Windows Media Player? If true, that's amazingly awful.
So some lame joke that Microsoft products are toxic is not just "funny" but "informative", while a post stating that recent MS products (e.g. W7) have been improving is "offtopic" and a "troll".
Conclusion: Slashdot has the worst fucking moderation system on the internet. 4chan's /b/ has better mods.
Go ahead and mod me down, I'll just post something like "and nothing of value was lost" for the instant +5.
The best kind of boss is one that was promoted due to his technical skills and hates managing people, so he lets everyone work the way they know how to.
What you just described is the worst type of boss imaginable. He hates his job, so he just doesn't do it. You end up with massive duplication of effort, parts not fitting together, engineers fighting with each other for months because there's no one to make an executive decision, and whoops you just missed your market window, some other company has released first, and your department is getting shut down.
Either you've never actually worked on a team project outside of college, or you just judge management based on how much fun they let you have, paying no attention to how it affects the company as a whole.
I love how all the fanbois are crawling out to insist that "ample" and "adequate" are synonyms.
Ample here means sufficient. It seems to get the job done, and gets it done better (by all accounts) than the Samsung, despite it being half as much.
You keep using that word, I do not think you know what it means. Ample means lots, more than enough, so much that you'll have some left over. My eight year old laptop has 512 MB, and considering that tablets are essentially touch-screen laptops, it makes the RAM in the iPad far from "ample". Sufficient? Maybe. But ample has a completely different meaning. Pretending that the words mean the same thing is called "lying".
Samsung is wasting time and money spec-padding. And that dual-core graphics and CPU don't seem to be helping them any in head-to-head comparisons.
How can they compete when the media is either in love with or employed by Apple? The iPad 2 was front page news for days. Every morning show host was playing around with one, infomercial style. Most companies need to pay for advertising. How much does Apple pay?
"We are pushing an Android Market security update to all affected devices that undoes the exploits to prevent the attacker(s) from accessing any more information from affected devices" sounds an awful lot like Google is patching their own code.
It's for the "fuck the government" segment of Slashdot readers. They'll claim that this is evil totalitarianism, and that since "everyone is guilty of something" the cops now have the authority to steal your most prized possessions over a jaywalking violation. They might even toss in a few oldies but goodies, like claiming the major political parties are the same, that Americans are no better off than North Koreans, and perhaps even that quip about ballot, jury, soap, and bullet boxes.
Meth dealer? I'm sure he was just a misunderstood amateur chemist.
Google isn't the first to do this, not by a long shot. Last year, there was a story about an autonomous car driving from Italy to China. There were humans on board to take over in the event of a problem, of course. I'm sure there are other examples as well.
It is cool tech, but I think it'll be a long time before it's mature, and an even longer time before it gains acceptance. People want to be in control of their lives, even if they're better off relinquishing control. Whether it's long road trips due to fear of flying or keeping a gun in their nightstand, people often choose to do something that is statistically more dangerous rather than put their lives in someone else's hands. I'm not saying that that's a bad thing or a stupid thing, just that it's human nature. Not many people will be willing to trust a computer to drive them, even if it's safer.
They followed the rules, obtained subpoenas, and investigated a crime. This, of course, is exactly the same as secretly abducting and torturing people, because.... well, because Slashdot is full of hard-core libertarian-anarchists who would only be happy if the government was completely eradicated.
Gitmo can't be shut down because Americans are too spineless to lock up the prisoners on our soil.
Troops in Iraq are being drawn down responsibly. It was a mistake to go in, but that doesn't mean we should make it worse by yanking everyone out at once.
Troops in Afghanistan were always supported by virtually everyone.
The tax rates were extended because the fascist GOP held unemployment benefits hostage. "Give us billions in tax cuts, or we let millions of innocent people die in the streets!"
I also note that you don't even mention the unmitigated disasters that are Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, and a full-hearted embrace of torture.
I'll give you the Patriot Act and the wiretaps. Still, the balance is very heavily against your boy Bush. When even Republican sweethearts like Donald Trump are calling him the worst president in American history, it takes a special kind of willful ignorance to pretend he was anything but a catastrophe.
Look, people die, that's horrible. But Libya's problems are their own internal problem. It's ultimately a healthy thing that Libyans are revolting against their dictator. This is democracy at its finest. If all goes well, this is going to be their 1776.
If the West were to intervene, that would kill all of the legitimacy that this movement has.
Right, just like the French intervention killed all the legitimacy of the American Revolution. After all, the French were clearly helping the nascent US as a way of striking against England.
People adapt. If you think the average Libyan was a war-hardened badass a month ago (or even now!), you're naive. They were farmers and carpenters and doctors and teachers. They still are. People are people everywhere, and when they're thrust into violent situations, they adapt or die. Hell, Americans might even be slightly better off, by virtue of having more firearms experience than the average third-world citizen, and by being healthier. Fat beats emaciated any day.
That is why when I hear people say the "MPAA/RIAA/government/etc cannot shut us down we will just do it this other way" I cringe..
Are you seriously suggesting that the RIAA and/or its sister organizations would set up jamming stations, and hire mercenaries to patrol the roads confiscating all portable electronics? Either you have the driest delivery I've ever seen, or the weakest hold on reality.
Now, while the government technically could do it, they won't. As I've said before in similar threads, the leaders of the US would NEVER shut off the internet. Consider:
Now, if you want to say that in the event of a full blown American civil war, the government would be able to shut down communications, you'd be right. But at that point, so what? That's like saying they'd be able to kill people. It's obviously true, and would be in any situation. There's nothing we could do differently that would change the outcome. If it ever comes, and it's extremely unlikely that it will, you'll just have to accept it.
Did you say "Delete Alt-X files?"
If you have to repeat or cancel more than 1% of the things you say it isn't ready yet.
I agree with everything else you say, but humans do not actually get that low an error rate in conversations. Not much worse than humans is a good metric, though.
Alright, so let's make it really human-like. It should be able to deduce, from both signal quality and context, whether or not it heard you right. If a person hears you say that your hovercraft is full of eels, they'll ask you to repeat yourself. But they won't ask "Ok, did you say X?" after every single phrase you utter.