If you're a Briton travelling abroad on vacation, and you buy a doughnut in Berlin, does the baker owe Britain a tax?
Because the Internet makes it REAL easy to go make a deal with entities in other countries. The crux of the question is where is the business being done? You're sitting in London, the server you're talking to is in the USA, the effects of an ad happen "on the Internet", the corporation is an ethereal beast that transcends borders. Does it matter?
Also.... couldn't Germany and Briton both claim that Google does 90% of their business in their country? How would Google settle that?
Taxation based on market share is interesting. But it's going to have just as many issues as the current system.
That's.... huh. I wanted to call bullshit on that because the system is ludicrously rigged for business taxes... but that makes a good deal of sense.
So while that might be true, putaro's point still stands. Practically everything is a business expense for a corporation: Planes, ludicrous CEO's wages, the rent on the building they pay to the owner to bypass taxes. There is no upper limit to the extravagance that a corporation can claim as a business expense. Their "lifestyle choices" are not scrutinized. Only when they try to invest in the company and see capital gains. Or hoard money. Meanwhile individuals are expected to just get by on the minimum amount, and taxed on anything past that.
Wait a minute, I can still call bullshit on this: if you think that the cost of doing business for individuals (ie, living) is built into the tiered tax-rate.... then why doesn't that argument apply to the tiered corporate tax rate? Why do they get to write off business expenses if people can't write off living expenses? If your comeback is "well that's what the lowest brackets are for", then YEAH, that's what the lowest corporate tax brackets are for!
Your argument sounds a good and rational way of dealing with individual taxes. We're just saying it'd be nice if corporations played by the same rules.
Not quite. We mock them when they believe their priests/pastors/whatever tell them bold-faced lies that can't possibly be true. You know, things like a 6,000 year old earth, jesus riding dinosaurs, faith healing, speaking in tounges, transubstantiation, and how their souls are going to be harvested by that alien space-ship hiding in Hale-bop's comet tail. Stuff like that is laughable, and if you believe in it, yeah, that's an easy laugh.
There are also the people that mock the religious sorts for trusting priests/whatnot on matters that are unknowable. The afterlife, who/what kickstarted the big-bang, and why we're all here. And philosophical issues. Yeah, those people are kind of dicks and I don't find that sort of humor all that productive. I see where they're coming from though, I mean, if the thing is unknowable.... why trust that guy over any of the other people preaching their flavor?
As for us expecting everyone to trust scientists, hey man, we have a pretty robust system of NOT trusting those scientists until they have a pretty good argument. If someone finds reason to question them, that is perfectly acceptable and even encouraged, whereas the religion side usually responds to questions with excommunication and damnation. Some of the religions have demonized the idea of being a skeptic. And skeptics can believe in things, you know. It's not like they're in a perpetual state of untrust. They can approach something, be skeptical, look at the facts, and then accept it.
Anyway, all that aside, you're fighting against people who believe in the scientific method. Good luck with that.
Show me a monopoly in the United States that isn't enforced by the government
Sure, I want to play the top of the line computer games. AAA titles. Because let's say I'm a gamer.
Now which operating system do I have to buy? Do I really have any choices?
Diamonds. Debeers had a global diamond monopoly that extended to the USA. Huh, this has apparently gotten better in the last few years.
Monsanto has the seed market. But oh, let me guess. Because the US government enforces IP laws, that means that the big bad evil guy is actually da gobermint.
Companies have no power to enforce a monopoly
...Other than market dominance. And all the things they can do to keep competitors out of their market. Remember "embrace, extend, extinguish"? Come on dude, your'e on slashdot, are you just going to pretend companies don't do things like this?
You can claim that there are some natural monopolies, but if these are actually natural monopolies, then why would it require a law to prevent anyone from competing with them?
Yeah, some natural monopolies, like the power grid and the cables connecting my house to the grid. Your question is backwards. They don't have laws keeping out competition (pft, hell with all the regulatory capture, they probably do, but hey, I'm talking about in general here) they have laws regulating HOW that natural monopoly is used. Someone wants to buy a section of the power grid? Go for it, but the regulation applies to them just the same.
The "natural monopoly" of the power grid is that there's just the one. Alright? I don't have the choice to connect my house power to a number of competing grids.
Even if a capitalist managed to achieve a local monopoly on something, the only thing keeping their competitors away is if the barriers to entry are larger than the potential profit.
"Even"? "EVEN!?" That by itself is some pretty bad mojo. No competition means shitty service, no price competition, and the consumer can suffer the entire cost of the barrier to entry, every year. If anyone tries to enter the market, the monopoly holder drops the price down to unsustainable until the new guy is dead and gone. And in case this concept is entirely foreign to you, companies strive to increase the barrier to entry for their market. You're absolutely right that one of the ways they do this is by getting the government to pass regulation that is difficult to meet. And when those regulations dance to the monopolies tune, that's regulatory capture, and it's a terrible thing. But don't pretend that the government is the root of all evil, or companies are all saints, or the market will cure all ills. It doesn't always work everywhere. Like essential utilities with natural monopolies.
. . . The entire reason they deregulated anything at all was to lower the price to the consumer. That's the goal. That's why they did it. They argued all the way to capitol hill that "trust us, market forces will work their magic and prices will come down".
They deregulated generation and transmission, specifically splitting companies to separate the two. The two sides were supposed to compete and buy/sell power amount themselves to compete for the lowest price. The maximum prices were a safeguard in case it all went to hell.
Listen, Enron found they could manipulate the industry and create artificial scarcity and drive up prices. If there was no regulated maximum price, the price would simply be pushed off to the regular people who have zero choice about who to buy from.
I understand what they were trying to do. A competitive capitalistic market is fantastically good at finding out how to eat each other's lunch, deliver better products, and make a buck. This is a REALLY ROCK SOLID example of a deregulation clusterfuck. And not for the reason you pointed out. In general, I'd agree that market forces don't work on essential utilities (because not delivering is not an option, as well as the natural monopolies aspect)
The big bang didn't have an origin? Doesn't the universe have a discreet edge that's approx 15 billion years * speed of light away from the origin point? I'd consider the mid-point between those two edges to be the origin of the big-bang. I mean, I know the big bang happened in all of the universe, kinda per it's definition. But a second after the boom, you've got this roughly spherical ball of a universe going and that sphere has a center-point.
I was under the impression that the galaxies that are nearer to that rim are going faster than we are, and they'd experience less time. The rim itself going at the speed of light, and the stuff near the center of mass going... some sort of universal zero velocity that experiences the least amount of speed-based time dilation possible.
Pft. Their attempts at inserting additional market forces worked SOOO well.
And there is no market force from the consumers. They have no choice about where their power comes from. There are natural monopolies at play. The only thing they can do is complain. That's a political force, not a market force.
Your complaint isn't warranted. AmiMoJo pointed out that the goal in capitalism is to win your market. He said nothing about government control or any of your -isms.
You seem to be assuming that "monopoly" instantly means "government control". Which makes sense, really. Once companies win their market, then there's usually abuse. You know, otherwise known as "making money". With that abuse comes the cries of the consumers, and since we live in a self-balancing democracy, down comes the regulation that tries to keep the abuse to a minimum.
And honestly, the above post:
Yes, but power companies have local monopolies, so there is no super capitalism there unless you equate super capitalism with monopolies
That's not warranted either. Even with a monopoly (and no competition driving cost down) you'll still find companies skimping on maintenance because that makes them more money in the short term.
What if there was a whole...dare I say...confederation of relativistic societies?
The question would be where are they and where are they going?
You could probably achieve some meaningful dilation if you orbited a black hole or something. But other than that, presumably the society that can hop around the galaxy still wants to have something to go to. And those locations would experience just as much time as the rest of us. Not that we all experience the same amount. Whole sections of the universe travel at different speeds and times. Like, you know how galaxies are accelerating away from the origin? Yeah, some are moving faster than others. And consequently experience different time dilatation. Dunno what sort of ranges we're talking about. Even at 90% lightspeed, you're only looking at a 1:7 ratio. A 142,000 years as opposed to a million years is still a society-crushing amount of time.
I'm not sure why you'd want to have a space-faring society that was rushing as fast as they could towards the heat-death of the universe. I guess some people would want to wait and see if anything interesting happened.
Well for the first few hundred million years there's zero metal. Anything* other than hydrogen and helium are only made during a sun exploding. And the quickest dying, hottest stars last hundreds of millions of years. In general, as time goes on, more suns explode making more and more exotic elements like... you know.... carbon and gold.
Hate is probably the wrong word for most cops but it would be fair to say cops don't trust anyone who isn't a cop.... Apply a bit of low grade racism and you have a real problem with police distrusting a minority population and the minority population growing to distrust the police.
Hell, I'm a pasty-ass cracker from upper-middle society and I distrust the police. I know that I can afford a lawyer that means a whole swath of laws actually apply to the police during their interactions with me, but things like civil forfeiture, swatting, and local events give me good reason to distrust the cops. The complain that this teaches children to fear and avoid cops might be accurate, in all ways.
Now it's not like all cops are bad cops. It only takes one rotten apple to poison a department though, and they seem to have a culture of looking after their own. So if one screws up, the rest will cover for him. Because hey, for most of them it's just a job. Something they go into in the morning, and leave at night. They want to retire eventually. And they don't want to rock the boat. And now you have a perfectly reasonable guy who suspects that O'maley down the hall got into the evidence locker when his buddy punched that guy, but doesn't really have any proof, and sure as shit isn't going to rat on his co-worker, and generally just goes along with the flow.
Not distrustful, but fearful? You're telling people to fear scientists looking for grants. (and coaching it with "but oh, hey, I never said DISTRUSTFUL, pft). This is EXACTLY the sort of thing that boristdog talking about. Let me guess, you think the climate change scientists are doing it for the money. The EPA is controlled by rent-seeker under guise of environmentalism. That the people brow-bashing the anti-vacciers probably own stock in bigPharma. Are these the sort of things you think to yourself when you hear about scientists doing their job. Oh, but there really are not "true" scientists, just lobbyists wearing science skins.
Hey, you're main argument is correct though. We SHOULD come at science, all of it, with a healthy amount of skepticism. From scientists claims, to papers, to proposals, all of it. The correct response is; "prove it". And oh look, there's the proof. Bravo.
But your title, your snide comments, and your history of posts sadly fall into an anti-intellectual stereotype.
It has nothing ti do with his nature and everything to do with the scorpions inability to understand you.
What? No, the military industrial complex as a whole understands that academics don't like autonomous kill bots. They just don't care.
Take the MQ-1 Predator. Built by a team of engineers of all sorts of disciplines. 6,000 employees in San Diego. For most it's probably just a job. They might even agree and sympathize with the academics. Doesn't mean they're going to stop going to work. GA's CEO Neal Blue.... looks to be a pretty hard-core conservative, so maybe he doesn't understand what the academics are getting at. But with that much money you'd hope he's at least a little smart. He's going to keep making things that are price-competitive with the capabilities he can talk someone in congress or the pentagon into wanting. A PR officer from the Airforce that buys these things is going to point out that it's their major function and reason for existing. It literally IS the nature of the airforce to make decisions about who to go kill. The colonels and generals might even prefer if they could actually codify the rules of engagement into a robot rather than training a pilot.
And if it will mean more employment, more sales, better capabilities in low-connectivity theaters, and better or equivalent adherence to the rules of engagement, then these people are going to make an autonomous version of the Predator. You could sit these people down with the authors of this paper, have it fully explained, and the AutoPred would still be made, sold, bought, and used.
Besides, perfect is the enemy of good.
Why doesn't anyone note that the frog acted outside it's nature?
...huh. That'd be to distrust scorpions and not give free rides. Which makes sense.
Wow, that's a really convoluted path they take to get to "we don't like autonomous kill bots". Hey, that's great and everything. Very noble of you. I'm sure people like you also lamented the invention of repeating rifles, the air force, and ICBMs. But it REALLY doesn't change much of anything. An academic paper on how killing is, like, BAD duuuuuude, just doesn't impact the people wanting, making, buying, selling, or using these these things.
Let me put it this way: You can tell the scorpion not to sting you. You can reason with it to the moon and back. But that fucker's going to sting you because it's in his nature. And he doesn't give a shit about reason.
Sure, a lot of programmers don't need to be referred to as engineers. Because they're not engineers. Software engineers, the sort that do less programming and more engineering work (which is, sadly, mostly paperwork) should be refereed to as engineers because that's what they are.
A lot of programmers do a lot of architect work. If it's a big enough code-shop or a project, then there may even be people who don't do much programming anymore and focus on the architecture rather than the codebase. Not that I've ever seen that personally, but it exists in theory. And there are OH GOD SO MANY programmers that cannot be trusted to perform any architecture work, and generally have trouble building things from scratch.
DevOps are programmers that also answer the phone and generally know the IT side.
Testers are trained monkeys while test engineers are an entirely different beast who specialize not in writing code, but in breaking it. Some of those people are called SWQA, but they're not to be confused with the sort that only file DO-178 audits.
It'd be awfully nice if everyone could agree on these terms, and be more or less consistent, but sadly the entire field isn't a century old and there are plenty of growing pains.
As did PDAs like the Newton and the Palm Pilot, and yet hand-held personal computers didn't really become ubiquitous and the craze for apps developers didn't begin until after 2000 and smartphones were a thing.
I'm not confused, I just know the difference between something being invented and becoming widespread.
If you were an early adopter, props to you for being on the ball and identifying a better way of doing things. You helped steer the masses towards the light.
Hey now, while certainly a buzz word, it wasn't meaningless. Where before you had sites that delivered content to the masses, the web 2.0 craze was to allow user input. Accounts, logins, uploaded content and data. Like wikipedia, right? That interaction with the users, and content created by the users was the basis of the whole shindig. It was a neat and exciting change, and the talking heads and venture capitalists nearly had an stroke raving about it and certainly talked it up.
That coward can't be job hunting all that hard if he never sent me a resume. Or hey, maybe just just finally stopped browsing slashdot and got back to work.
Nothing. It's really not that special at all. And hence I don't think we should have special laws criminalizing it nor treat gay couples any differently then non-gay couples.
Same thing with black people. Remember all those special laws we had about black people?
Geeze man, part of explaining something is knowing your audience. What part of "1-pbinom(38,54,.50)" didn't you get? Do you even know where you are? ~halfSarcasm
Slashdot's exclusive original content that distinguishes it from everyone else is the comments and community.
The columnists are: eldavojohn (898314) Samantha Wright (1324923) phantomfive (622387) And all the rest.
Their lengthy opinion pieces are stored under the not-read-so-much "journal" section of slashdot. But mostly it's just the comment sections.
If the DICE overlords wanted something more "traditional" they HAVE the resources at hand to give out front-page space to people with the writing skills, technical insight, and common sense needed to make an insightful piece. They just have to get off their asses and make an effort to make it happen. But apparently it's easier to go have someone's buddy write something out. Or hell, maybe Bennett bribed someone for this. That's the only explanations I can think of.
I am balls to the walls on board with tolerance. I strive for open-mindedness. It's important to me.
And yet, I expressed my distain for seeing the new Enders Game movie explicitly because it put money in Orson Scott Card's wallet, and he is actively campaigning for some really nasty ideas. I understand the view that the artist can be, and possibly even should be, separated from their works. It doesn't matter if $FAMOUS_PERSON made something, that doesn't make it meaningful. And no-name artists can make quality work. Nor does it really impact the latest dubstep remix if the artist doesn't believe in evolution.
You can appreciate a piece of work separate from the author.
However. Your actions DO impact the world outside of the piece of work. I didn't want to go see Ender's Game, not because I had any ill-will towards the story (it's ok), but rather because I didn't want to put money in the hand of someone who was going to give it to a hate-filled group who are actively working at making the world a worse place. If Card just happened to have a crazy belief? Eh, so what. Plenty of bigots out there. But no, he's an actively supporter of... (oh, HAH, he's mormon too. Ugh, I wasn't expecting to stir up a mormon bashing thread.) But anyway, he was on the board of National Organization for Marriage from 2009 to 2013. And calls the criminalization of homosexuality. Up until the movie deal, at which point he quit the board, disavowed some quotes, and got generally quieter.
I'm all for open-mindedness, and he can believe in whatever he wants, and say whatever he wants, but there are some people I really don't want to help out financially. Even if they make pretty things.
Oh my god, I don't know why I found this so funny, but "moving the error correction process up to layer eight" is now my favorite euphemism. It's a feature!
Correct, and passion, tenacity, and/or experience sans degree don't trump a college degree.
I don't care how passionate you are if you can't learn anything. I don't care how long you banged your head against that simple problem. I know a couple of self-taught programmers who are simply incompatible with any other coder or codebase. They've got their one project at their company, and no-one else can touch it. And frankly they shouldn't touch anything else.
It's as if there is no trump, and there is no silver bullet guaranteed way to make a competent IT worker. Or a developer. Or an engineer. Because if there was a simple guaranteed path to becoming one of those, people wouldn't be bothering with anything else.
Passion is great if you capitalize on it. Tenacity is required to get anything done, but you have to know how to overcome problems. Most experience is good experience. Some experience just teaches you bad habits. Some experience is the same experience over and over again.
And a degree doesn't mean you're all that hot either. It just means you can pass a specific sort of hurdle. A big hurdle, sure, depending on the school and the degree. But there are plenty of grads who can't code.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're a Briton travelling abroad on vacation, and you buy a doughnut in Berlin, does the baker owe Britain a tax?
Because the Internet makes it REAL easy to go make a deal with entities in other countries. The crux of the question is where is the business being done? You're sitting in London, the server you're talking to is in the USA, the effects of an ad happen "on the Internet", the corporation is an ethereal beast that transcends borders. Does it matter?
Also.... couldn't Germany and Briton both claim that Google does 90% of their business in their country? How would Google settle that?
Taxation based on market share is interesting. But it's going to have just as many issues as the current system.
That's.... huh. I wanted to call bullshit on that because the system is ludicrously rigged for business taxes... but that makes a good deal of sense.
So while that might be true, putaro's point still stands. Practically everything is a business expense for a corporation: Planes, ludicrous CEO's wages, the rent on the building they pay to the owner to bypass taxes. There is no upper limit to the extravagance that a corporation can claim as a business expense. Their "lifestyle choices" are not scrutinized. Only when they try to invest in the company and see capital gains. Or hoard money. Meanwhile individuals are expected to just get by on the minimum amount, and taxed on anything past that.
Wait a minute, I can still call bullshit on this: if you think that the cost of doing business for individuals (ie, living) is built into the tiered tax-rate.... then why doesn't that argument apply to the tiered corporate tax rate? Why do they get to write off business expenses if people can't write off living expenses? If your comeback is "well that's what the lowest brackets are for", then YEAH, that's what the lowest corporate tax brackets are for!
Your argument sounds a good and rational way of dealing with individual taxes. We're just saying it'd be nice if corporations played by the same rules.
Not quite. We mock them when they believe their priests/pastors/whatever tell them bold-faced lies that can't possibly be true. You know, things like a 6,000 year old earth, jesus riding dinosaurs, faith healing, speaking in tounges, transubstantiation, and how their souls are going to be harvested by that alien space-ship hiding in Hale-bop's comet tail. Stuff like that is laughable, and if you believe in it, yeah, that's an easy laugh.
There are also the people that mock the religious sorts for trusting priests/whatnot on matters that are unknowable. The afterlife, who/what kickstarted the big-bang, and why we're all here. And philosophical issues. Yeah, those people are kind of dicks and I don't find that sort of humor all that productive. I see where they're coming from though, I mean, if the thing is unknowable.... why trust that guy over any of the other people preaching their flavor?
As for us expecting everyone to trust scientists, hey man, we have a pretty robust system of NOT trusting those scientists until they have a pretty good argument. If someone finds reason to question them, that is perfectly acceptable and even encouraged, whereas the religion side usually responds to questions with excommunication and damnation. Some of the religions have demonized the idea of being a skeptic. And skeptics can believe in things, you know. It's not like they're in a perpetual state of untrust. They can approach something, be skeptical, look at the facts, and then accept it.
Anyway, all that aside, you're fighting against people who believe in the scientific method. Good luck with that.
Show me a monopoly in the United States that isn't enforced by the government
Sure, I want to play the top of the line computer games. AAA titles. Because let's say I'm a gamer.
Now which operating system do I have to buy? Do I really have any choices?
Diamonds. Debeers had a global diamond monopoly that extended to the USA. Huh, this has apparently gotten better in the last few years.
Monsanto has the seed market. But oh, let me guess. Because the US government enforces IP laws, that means that the big bad evil guy is actually da gobermint.
Companies have no power to enforce a monopoly
...Other than market dominance. And all the things they can do to keep competitors out of their market. Remember "embrace, extend, extinguish"? Come on dude, your'e on slashdot, are you just going to pretend companies don't do things like this?
You can claim that there are some natural monopolies, but if these are actually natural monopolies, then why would it require a law to prevent anyone from competing with them?
Yeah, some natural monopolies, like the power grid and the cables connecting my house to the grid.
Your question is backwards. They don't have laws keeping out competition (pft, hell with all the regulatory capture, they probably do, but hey, I'm talking about in general here) they have laws regulating HOW that natural monopoly is used. Someone wants to buy a section of the power grid? Go for it, but the regulation applies to them just the same.
The "natural monopoly" of the power grid is that there's just the one. Alright? I don't have the choice to connect my house power to a number of competing grids.
Even if a capitalist managed to achieve a local monopoly on something, the only thing keeping their competitors away is if the barriers to entry are larger than the potential profit.
"Even"? "EVEN!?" That by itself is some pretty bad mojo. No competition means shitty service, no price competition, and the consumer can suffer the entire cost of the barrier to entry, every year. If anyone tries to enter the market, the monopoly holder drops the price down to unsustainable until the new guy is dead and gone.
And in case this concept is entirely foreign to you, companies strive to increase the barrier to entry for their market. You're absolutely right that one of the ways they do this is by getting the government to pass regulation that is difficult to meet. And when those regulations dance to the monopolies tune, that's regulatory capture, and it's a terrible thing. But don't pretend that the government is the root of all evil, or companies are all saints, or the market will cure all ills. It doesn't always work everywhere. Like essential utilities with natural monopolies.
. . . The entire reason they deregulated anything at all was to lower the price to the consumer. That's the goal. That's why they did it. They argued all the way to capitol hill that "trust us, market forces will work their magic and prices will come down".
They deregulated generation and transmission, specifically splitting companies to separate the two. The two sides were supposed to compete and buy/sell power amount themselves to compete for the lowest price. The maximum prices were a safeguard in case it all went to hell.
Listen, Enron found they could manipulate the industry and create artificial scarcity and drive up prices. If there was no regulated maximum price, the price would simply be pushed off to the regular people who have zero choice about who to buy from.
I understand what they were trying to do. A competitive capitalistic market is fantastically good at finding out how to eat each other's lunch, deliver better products, and make a buck. This is a REALLY ROCK SOLID example of a deregulation clusterfuck. And not for the reason you pointed out.
In general, I'd agree that market forces don't work on essential utilities (because not delivering is not an option, as well as the natural monopolies aspect)
The big bang didn't have an origin? Doesn't the universe have a discreet edge that's approx 15 billion years * speed of light away from the origin point? I'd consider the mid-point between those two edges to be the origin of the big-bang. I mean, I know the big bang happened in all of the universe, kinda per it's definition. But a second after the boom, you've got this roughly spherical ball of a universe going and that sphere has a center-point.
I was under the impression that the galaxies that are nearer to that rim are going faster than we are, and they'd experience less time. The rim itself going at the speed of light, and the stuff near the center of mass going... some sort of universal zero velocity that experiences the least amount of speed-based time dilation possible.
On the contrary, market forces work fine.
Pft. Their attempts at inserting additional market forces worked SOOO well.
And there is no market force from the consumers. They have no choice about where their power comes from. There are natural monopolies at play. The only thing they can do is complain. That's a political force, not a market force.
Your complaint isn't warranted. AmiMoJo pointed out that the goal in capitalism is to win your market. He said nothing about government control or any of your -isms.
You seem to be assuming that "monopoly" instantly means "government control". Which makes sense, really. Once companies win their market, then there's usually abuse. You know, otherwise known as "making money". With that abuse comes the cries of the consumers, and since we live in a self-balancing democracy, down comes the regulation that tries to keep the abuse to a minimum.
And honestly, the above post:
Yes, but power companies have local monopolies, so there is no super capitalism there unless you equate super capitalism with monopolies
That's not warranted either. Even with a monopoly (and no competition driving cost down) you'll still find companies skimping on maintenance because that makes them more money in the short term.
What if there was a whole...dare I say...confederation of relativistic societies?
The question would be where are they and where are they going?
You could probably achieve some meaningful dilation if you orbited a black hole or something. But other than that, presumably the society that can hop around the galaxy still wants to have something to go to. And those locations would experience just as much time as the rest of us. Not that we all experience the same amount. Whole sections of the universe travel at different speeds and times. Like, you know how galaxies are accelerating away from the origin? Yeah, some are moving faster than others. And consequently experience different time dilatation. Dunno what sort of ranges we're talking about. Even at 90% lightspeed, you're only looking at a 1:7 ratio. A 142,000 years as opposed to a million years is still a society-crushing amount of time.
I'm not sure why you'd want to have a space-faring society that was rushing as fast as they could towards the heat-death of the universe. I guess some people would want to wait and see if anything interesting happened.
Well for the first few hundred million years there's zero metal. Anything* other than hydrogen and helium are only made during a sun exploding. And the quickest dying, hottest stars last hundreds of millions of years. In general, as time goes on, more suns explode making more and more exotic elements like... you know.... carbon and gold.
*HEY, I'm getting some of that wrong. Turns out elements up to boron could be made by cosmic rays. And gold can only be made in a super-nova. Huh.
This wikipedia page about the origins of the elements is really nifty.
Cops tend to (understandably) have an us versus them world view and see everyone's actions as those of a potential suspect.
What? Why is that understandable? You could say that it's understandable that waiters have an us-vs-them worldview. Or IT support. Or musicians. Or doctors. Or ANY group of people that interacts with anyone else in a professional capacity. And all of it is bullshit tribalism that makes for shitty services.
Hate is probably the wrong word for most cops but it would be fair to say cops don't trust anyone who isn't a cop. ... Apply a bit of low grade racism and you have a real problem with police distrusting a minority population and the minority population growing to distrust the police.
Hell, I'm a pasty-ass cracker from upper-middle society and I distrust the police. I know that I can afford a lawyer that means a whole swath of laws actually apply to the police during their interactions with me, but things like civil forfeiture, swatting, and local events give me good reason to distrust the cops. The complain that this teaches children to fear and avoid cops might be accurate, in all ways.
Now it's not like all cops are bad cops. It only takes one rotten apple to poison a department though, and they seem to have a culture of looking after their own. So if one screws up, the rest will cover for him. Because hey, for most of them it's just a job. Something they go into in the morning, and leave at night. They want to retire eventually. And they don't want to rock the boat. And now you have a perfectly reasonable guy who suspects that O'maley down the hall got into the evidence locker when his buddy punched that guy, but doesn't really have any proof, and sure as shit isn't going to rat on his co-worker, and generally just goes along with the flow.
Well, with enough crossbreeding, it's a possibility. We'd just need more gay black Mexicans and other interesting mixes.
Not distrustful, no, but skeptical nonetheless.
Not distrustful, but fearful? You're telling people to fear scientists looking for grants. (and coaching it with "but oh, hey, I never said DISTRUSTFUL, pft). This is EXACTLY the sort of thing that boristdog talking about. Let me guess, you think the climate change scientists are doing it for the money. The EPA is controlled by rent-seeker under guise of environmentalism. That the people brow-bashing the anti-vacciers probably own stock in bigPharma. Are these the sort of things you think to yourself when you hear about scientists doing their job. Oh, but there really are not "true" scientists, just lobbyists wearing science skins.
Hey, you're main argument is correct though. We SHOULD come at science, all of it, with a healthy amount of skepticism. From scientists claims, to papers, to proposals, all of it. The correct response is; "prove it". And oh look, there's the proof. Bravo.
But your title, your snide comments, and your history of posts sadly fall into an anti-intellectual stereotype.
It has nothing ti do with his nature and everything to do with the scorpions inability to understand you.
What? No, the military industrial complex as a whole understands that academics don't like autonomous kill bots. They just don't care.
Take the MQ-1 Predator. Built by a team of engineers of all sorts of disciplines. 6,000 employees in San Diego. For most it's probably just a job. They might even agree and sympathize with the academics. Doesn't mean they're going to stop going to work. GA's CEO Neal Blue.... looks to be a pretty hard-core conservative, so maybe he doesn't understand what the academics are getting at. But with that much money you'd hope he's at least a little smart. He's going to keep making things that are price-competitive with the capabilities he can talk someone in congress or the pentagon into wanting. A PR officer from the Airforce that buys these things is going to point out that it's their major function and reason for existing. It literally IS the nature of the airforce to make decisions about who to go kill. The colonels and generals might even prefer if they could actually codify the rules of engagement into a robot rather than training a pilot.
And if it will mean more employment, more sales, better capabilities in low-connectivity theaters, and better or equivalent adherence to the rules of engagement, then these people are going to make an autonomous version of the Predator. You could sit these people down with the authors of this paper, have it fully explained, and the AutoPred would still be made, sold, bought, and used.
Besides, perfect is the enemy of good.
Why doesn't anyone note that the frog acted outside it's nature?
...huh. That'd be to distrust scorpions and not give free rides. Which makes sense.
Wow, that's a really convoluted path they take to get to "we don't like autonomous kill bots".
Hey, that's great and everything. Very noble of you. I'm sure people like you also lamented the invention of repeating rifles, the air force, and ICBMs. But it REALLY doesn't change much of anything. An academic paper on how killing is, like, BAD duuuuuude, just doesn't impact the people wanting, making, buying, selling, or using these these things.
Let me put it this way: You can tell the scorpion not to sting you. You can reason with it to the moon and back. But that fucker's going to sting you because it's in his nature. And he doesn't give a shit about reason.
Sure, a lot of programmers don't need to be referred to as engineers. Because they're not engineers. Software engineers, the sort that do less programming and more engineering work (which is, sadly, mostly paperwork) should be refereed to as engineers because that's what they are.
A lot of programmers do a lot of architect work. If it's a big enough code-shop or a project, then there may even be people who don't do much programming anymore and focus on the architecture rather than the codebase. Not that I've ever seen that personally, but it exists in theory. And there are OH GOD SO MANY programmers that cannot be trusted to perform any architecture work, and generally have trouble building things from scratch.
DevOps are programmers that also answer the phone and generally know the IT side.
Testers are trained monkeys while test engineers are an entirely different beast who specialize not in writing code, but in breaking it. Some of those people are called SWQA, but they're not to be confused with the sort that only file DO-178 audits.
It'd be awfully nice if everyone could agree on these terms, and be more or less consistent, but sadly the entire field isn't a century old and there are plenty of growing pains.
As did PDAs like the Newton and the Palm Pilot, and yet hand-held personal computers didn't really become ubiquitous and the craze for apps developers didn't begin until after 2000 and smartphones were a thing.
I'm not confused, I just know the difference between something being invented and becoming widespread.
If you were an early adopter, props to you for being on the ball and identifying a better way of doing things. You helped steer the masses towards the light.
Hey now, while certainly a buzz word, it wasn't meaningless.
Where before you had sites that delivered content to the masses, the web 2.0 craze was to allow user input. Accounts, logins, uploaded content and data. Like wikipedia, right? That interaction with the users, and content created by the users was the basis of the whole shindig. It was a neat and exciting change, and the talking heads and venture capitalists nearly had an stroke raving about it and certainly talked it up.
But it was a real thing.
Now a days we just take it for granted.
That coward can't be job hunting all that hard if he never sent me a resume. Or hey, maybe just just finally stopped browsing slashdot and got back to work.
Nothing. It's really not that special at all. And hence I don't think we should have special laws criminalizing it nor treat gay couples any differently then non-gay couples.
Same thing with black people. Remember all those special laws we had about black people?
Geeze man, part of explaining something is knowing your audience.
What part of "1-pbinom(38,54,.50)" didn't you get? Do you even know where you are?
~halfSarcasm
Slashdot's exclusive original content that distinguishes it from everyone else is the comments and community.
The columnists are:
eldavojohn (898314)
Samantha Wright (1324923)
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And all the rest.
Their lengthy opinion pieces are stored under the not-read-so-much "journal" section of slashdot. But mostly it's just the comment sections.
If the DICE overlords wanted something more "traditional" they HAVE the resources at hand to give out front-page space to people with the writing skills, technical insight, and common sense needed to make an insightful piece. They just have to get off their asses and make an effort to make it happen. But apparently it's easier to go have someone's buddy write something out. Or hell, maybe Bennett bribed someone for this. That's the only explanations I can think of.
I am balls to the walls on board with tolerance. I strive for open-mindedness. It's important to me.
And yet, I expressed my distain for seeing the new Enders Game movie explicitly because it put money in Orson Scott Card's wallet, and he is actively campaigning for some really nasty ideas. I understand the view that the artist can be, and possibly even should be, separated from their works. It doesn't matter if $FAMOUS_PERSON made something, that doesn't make it meaningful. And no-name artists can make quality work. Nor does it really impact the latest dubstep remix if the artist doesn't believe in evolution.
You can appreciate a piece of work separate from the author.
However. Your actions DO impact the world outside of the piece of work. I didn't want to go see Ender's Game, not because I had any ill-will towards the story (it's ok), but rather because I didn't want to put money in the hand of someone who was going to give it to a hate-filled group who are actively working at making the world a worse place. If Card just happened to have a crazy belief? Eh, so what. Plenty of bigots out there. But no, he's an actively supporter of ... (oh, HAH, he's mormon too. Ugh, I wasn't expecting to stir up a mormon bashing thread.) But anyway, he was on the board of National Organization for Marriage from 2009 to 2013. And calls the criminalization of homosexuality. Up until the movie deal, at which point he quit the board, disavowed some quotes, and got generally quieter.
I'm all for open-mindedness, and he can believe in whatever he wants, and say whatever he wants, but there are some people I really don't want to help out financially. Even if they make pretty things.
Oh my god, I don't know why I found this so funny, but "moving the error correction process up to layer eight" is now my favorite euphemism. It's a feature!
Correct, and passion, tenacity, and/or experience sans degree don't trump a college degree.
I don't care how passionate you are if you can't learn anything.
I don't care how long you banged your head against that simple problem.
I know a couple of self-taught programmers who are simply incompatible with any other coder or codebase. They've got their one project at their company, and no-one else can touch it. And frankly they shouldn't touch anything else.
It's as if there is no trump, and there is no silver bullet guaranteed way to make a competent IT worker. Or a developer. Or an engineer. Because if there was a simple guaranteed path to becoming one of those, people wouldn't be bothering with anything else.
Passion is great if you capitalize on it. Tenacity is required to get anything done, but you have to know how to overcome problems. Most experience is good experience. Some experience just teaches you bad habits. Some experience is the same experience over and over again.
And a degree doesn't mean you're all that hot either. It just means you can pass a specific sort of hurdle. A big hurdle, sure, depending on the school and the degree. But there are plenty of grads who can't code.