I'm a fan of a lot of artists that put their stuff up on either youtube or soundcloud. Might be time to switch off of youtube.
Hate to say it. I saw the rise of Google and a lot of money and effort went to really good things. They offered their services for free using the knowledge gained to make a buck off better advertising. Things were good. They certainly had/have a shit-ton of power and people rallied against that. Claiming that they could abuse it and be a terrible blight upon the land. But they didn't. Until now. And I've seen similar sort of moves by Google of late. The sun sets eventually. Kinda sad, but perhaps it's time to move on.
Now, of course I'm still going to have a gmail account for a long time, and using google-docs is still crazy useful. Hell I still have the yahoo account where I throw spam. But rather than simply being happy with the bright future of the new young blood in the market, I'll be looking for some place to jump ship to. And I'll tell others as much.
an ambitious white product manager in his late forties with an MBA
Why do you have to be racist about it? Or ageist for that matter? Or sexist? The quip about him having an MBA is oh-so-tangentially on topic. All things considered, it's probably a safe bet. That's how stereotypes work. But it doesn't make you any less of a racist dick.
That post he just made is quite useful to to the crowd of people that may not be familiar with you and your particular flavor of bias. He knows you. And 5 slashot moderators know you and are willing to spend points to bump this up.
His post was, in short, insightful.
But hey, some people need more help than others,
Feel free to point out the facts I get wrong
CAN DO!
Your overall argument is that the rich aren't all that powerful and the poor have plenty of power. That the poor can get together and give their money to political organizations that run this town. And that'd be nice, if it were true. But the fact of the matter is that the rich ARE powerful, very powerful, to the point that
Fact: The gini coefficient in the USA is rising. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the middle class is shrinking.
Political ideologues aren't simply "always going to be around." Some of them are dangerous and need to be guarded against.
Not when they're homeless poor people. The crazy guy ranting on the corner WILL always be there and no, there's no real need to go guard against him. If anything we need to guard against the people trying to censor him. The guy is harmless, at least on a political scale. He has zero hope of swaying the masses. If he somehow managed to gather a crowd and/or become a cult leader, and people started to listen to him, he'd probably no longer be a poor homeless person. He'd transform into a radio host, a televangelist, a full-blown-locked-in-a-compound cult leader, or worse, a CEO.
When did "the rich" develop a monopoly on TV and radio stations?
Since their inceptions? Only the rich could afford to step into those industries. They were serious money ordeals back in the day. But hey, now anyone with a phone can shoot video. Look at all of those mom&pop TV channels watched by millions! Oh, wait, no, that's Youtube and the Internet. Well radio broadcasters are cheap! Look at all the... oh wait, the barrier to entry for commercial radio stations is really high just to keep competition out. Well there's always HAM... which is specifically barred from making money from it.
So this one is wrong. You're presuming there was a time that the rich didn't have a monopoly on it. And that isn't true.
Are you confusing "the rich" with corporations?
And this might be the basis of why your worldview is so fucked. YES. The rich and powerful run the corporations. Literally. The job is titled "CEO". Their boss is supposed to be the shareholders, but it's effectively the board, which is composed of a handful of rich people who are CEOs of their own corporations which have the original CEO on THEIR board.
Is there some group or segment of the population that you think doesn't have at least some radio stations catering to it?
And this here is some fantastic spin. Here let me point it out for you. "catering to". There is some rich individual, running a corporation that controls a chunk of spectrum that caters to rednecks. They pay lip-service to the cultural background of the redneck, play the right music, and run ads that hit the mark, but it is wholly controlled, steered, and profited by soulless corporate goons that don't know the difference between a banjo and a guitar. If you think that a corporation that SELLS to a group is the same thing as the group being politically empowered, then you are monstrously fucked up.
Who are the rich people that you are apparently claiming are "spending billions of dollars in foreign countries to start civil wars"?
Bush. Rumsfeld. Cheney. They spent billions of (someone else's) dollars to destabilize the middle east. The sectarian violence in Iraq during the US occupation killed 100's of thousands. Arguably
Jesus motherfucking CHRIST! There's an arbitrary $200,000 investment required to be a cabbie in Europe? What the hell!?
Let me make this clear for you in case you don't understand the problem with this. 1) Most people don't just have $200,000 lying about. Not even for business expenses. So the phrase "you might pay $200,000 for it" is straight up bullshit. No. People go get a loan to buy this and pay the intrest on the loan. Which is a fancy-dancy way of making cabbies rent the privileged of being a cabbie.
2) For ANY sort of investment that ties up money, the phrase "you can sell it to somebody else, probably at a profit." is something you feed to suckers. It's something you say when you're trying to sell.
3) If you can just sell the thing to anybody, without any sort of certification, testing, vouching or anything, then it serves ZERO purpose other than simply being another bar to entry. And I think that was the original intent. To impose a limit on the number of taxis clogging the streets. This system does a really shitty job of keeping up with a growing populace and shifts in traffic needs.
Is Steam stopping me from playing the games I purchased? No?
YES it bloody well HAS stopped me from playing the games I purchased. Specifically on roadtrips. It's finally someone else's turn to drive, I whip out the laptop to do something. I go to launch a game I haven't played in a while and GUESS WHAT?
No internet connection means no launching.
I hear they're getting better about this. And Valve and Steam are probably the best, least intrusive, most palpitate form on DRM currently out there. And there's some value with being able to download your game library on whatever computer. And they're setting up a system to allow family to borrow games. And their push for Linux is good for the industry. All good stuff.
But don't pretend that the DRM found in steam is painless and doesn't get in people's way. If you're always online, then sure, it probably works great for you.
He can tell you can cook his own cocoa. He can tell you he could probably fry an egg. He can tell you he's a virgin.
"He" is a placeholder for both the AI system and the authentic Ukrainian boy. One you consider to be clearly not intelligent. Presumably you consider the flesh and blood human boy to be intelligent.
What has that to do with a program, that CLEARLY is NOT intelligent?
Because the two are indistinguishable. Or, at least, they're headed that way. The future, it's coming.
Google search is vastly better at finding my slippers than my dog. It's not going to pass any Turing Tests. Watson is better at trivia then my dog. It's not going to pass any Turing Tests. Big Blue is better at chess then my dog. It's not going to pass any Turing Tests.
Conversation is not the pinnacle of intelligence. You're chasing after a false notion of human-like hard AI.
So if there were a boy which genuinely had the intellect and communication capabilities of a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy (conversing in English), you would not consider him intelligent?
I think that to pass the Turing test, you have to tell the judges that the entity they are about to talk to *might* be a computer program. Eliza worked because people had never encountered a computer that even tried to be remotely human - so the assumption was that this was a real person from the outset
An interesting aspect of the Turing Test is that it's dependent upon sociological factors. Back in the 60's, like you said, it was assumed that the thing on the other side was a human. But as time goes forward and we get flooded with clever ads, chatbots, brand-dropping honeypot girlfriends, smart cars, automated grocery tellers, and AI in general, we'll be more suspicious of the humanity of EVERYTHING around us.
It'll be harder for AI's to pass the Turing Test as time goes on.
It'll also be harder for us to pass the Turing Test. It's a jarring experience to answer the phone and have the person swear at getting voice-mail.
Turning test is NOT supposed to be limited to 15 minutes,
Whatever, you have to put some sort of time-limit on it just for feasibility of testing.
nor is it supposed to be conducted by someone that does not understand the main language claimed to be used by the computer.
Pft, you are not some sort of high cleric in charge of spotting bots.
Similarly, the computer must convince the judge it is a human with it's full mental capacity, not child, nor a mentally defective person, nor someone in a coma.
That's an decent point. It's certainly a valid issue to take with any bot that passes a turing test in such a way. You could claim any blank terminal is indistinguishable from a coma patient. Or a gibberish machine is equivalent to the mentally ill.
Let's extend that. The first machines that "legitimately" passes a Turing test will not be super-insightful teaching gurus. They will not be fonts of wisdom. Just as there is a difference between a math teacher and the mentally ill, there is a difference between your typical math teachers and the likes of Einstein, Stephan Hawking, and Feynman. I suspect that AI chatbots will climb that axis incrementally, similar to how robotics have progressed. The impact of such things is that the supply of simpletons to chat with will explode and the relative value of children and the mentally ill will plummet. And as they get better, the merely moderately intelligent will likewise plummet as only the intelligent are better than whiteCollarOfficeBotv7.4_3(noSextingMod).
The test is whether a computer can, in an extended conversation, fool a competent human into thinking it is a competent human being speaking the same language,at least 50% of the time.
There we go. That's the test right there. The "extended conversation" is still variable, and I think 15 minutes is fine. But the "competent human" is refinement that's needed. It's implied in the original Turing test. It's also still rather subjective.
I think it would be deeply insightful if we aired all the dirty laundry of Hoover's FBI dragnet. A lot of it has already been brought to light when... huh... a leftist activist group burglarized a field office and released document to the media about COINTELPRO.
Now, what was exposed was the offical documented record of what happened. Imagine if the actual agents revealed what really went on. Why they did it. What the rational was. Who ordered what.
I imagine there would be a number of similarities between Hoover's dragnet and the NSA's meta-data collection. And all those records from the very mouths of the agents doing the deed would let us see the bullshit for what it really is.
Some people have the ability to learn from history. But only if there's a record of it happening.
Traveller campaign: intercept "time-capsules" bound for Earth-orbit trajectory, discover hottest "blast from the past" media chum weeks-months before the story breaks and secure exclusive rights to the descendent's interview.
If you take a broad view, sure, just being rich doesn't inherently harm anyone.
Just like poor people are not harming anyone just by being poor.
Much on the contrary. Someone with employees is providing the employees jobs that otherwise wouldn't exist.
That's some classist warfare material right there. The sort of propaganda spread by the slave owners to get their slaves to lick their boots harder. You could quite equally say that the job is going to exist with or without the leeches feeding off of other people doing actual work.
He can "screw them over" and they can decide to go elsewhere. That is how a free society works.
Right, as long as the employees have the ability to "go elsewhere". If you've never known a wage-slave with no better options then the dead-end job they're in, then you don't know what you're talking about. If you've never known someone who is going to work every day, not for the job or pay, but because without the medical benefits that are tied to the job they or a loved one are going to die, then you don't really know all the finer details that go into setting up and managing a "free society".
if you want to prevent damage from being done you should...
Place the power not with the government, megacorporations, or rich men, but rather with the people. The moment that power is removed from the masses, the masses get screwed over.
Vote with your wallets. If you don't like this sort of thing, STOP FUNDING IT.
forgetting that the corporations are only doing what they're chartered to do: using every resource to increase wealth for their share-holders.
Corporations aren't ~allowed~ to consider "the greater good" over that profit,
Except that CEOs can do practically ANYTHING and justify it as "increasing wealth for the share-holders".
Here we go: 1) Fire everyone, sell everything, liquidate like it's 1999. This increases the bottom-line of the company and makes it easy to increase the wealth of the shareholders (effectively removing the risk of not knowing what the stock is worth, do all that liquidation and you have a definite value the stock can be compared against)
2) Go into debt, hire a shit-ton of scientists, designers, artist, whoever to invest in the product so that next year/decade they'll be able to corner the market, bring in more money, and increase wealth for the shareholders.
3) Dodge all taxes as it leaves more money for the shareholders
4) Pay all the taxes as it removes the risk of the government coming in a busting up the company, shattering the wealth of the shareholders.
5) Pissing it all away on hookers and blow. "Hey, I'm a high-powered businessman, I make you the money. Walk away, leave me in charge, and you'll get your quarterly gains (as long as the economy is still booming)."
6) Axing all of the top skill and people with connections in the business. They're just doing lines of blow. It's not like we really need that guy whose mother is running the government regulator, I'm sure she'll be professional. Removing this overhead increases wealth for the shareholders.
All of that happens and in some cases is even the smart thing to do. If you think corporations are somehow LEGALLY REQUIRED to curb-stomp you, then you have no flipping clue what happens in the business world.
Go to Cairo, breath the leaded-gas fume encrusted air, fight off the wandering dogs, dodge traffic, learn that their more important industry is tourism of all things and that it's on shaky grounds with the country undergoing political turmoil, that their whole economy is tanking, that the nation's credit rating is falling, and then reflect on the need to keep laser pointers out of the hands of children.
I mean, I get the sentiment. That some of these kids are going to look into the things and have their vision damaged. And that's sad. And you feel for these kids.
But it's like commenting on a guy's stubbed toe when he's currently bleeding out from a gunshot wound mid-revolution. Because holy shit have you BEEN to Egypt?
It's neutral for the economy. Wealth is neither created nor destroyed, just merely transferred between entities.
It's good for the economy of the New Yorkers, it's bad for the economy of the New York Government.
The economy is not a zero-sum game and can go up and down. But this right here is a zero-sum transfer. You could argue about where the money is being more productive, in the government's pocket or in the parker's pockets, but that trends into the philosophical.
M-M-M-MONSTER POST!!!! Of enlightenment and knowledge peering past the veil of ignorance, cutting through the bullshit curtain of marketing, and bringing us along for the ride. Thank you
Microsoft can't maintain a numbering scheme for more than two versions. I will bet you solid money that the next version of windows is not marketed as "Windows 9" when it comes out.
They can't even stick to a minor change numbering scheme. The next big update will probably be Windows 8.1 update 1 service pack 1. You know there's some pointy haired boss that goes into a conniption fit when an engineer suggests they release 8.2.
Although, It'd be pretty awesome if they released Windows 9.4 and then had a "throwback" UI change for Windows 9.5
Refine our nano-scale manufacturing capabilities, build a ribbon of carbon nano-tubes that's gigapascel's in strength for 30 some thousand kilometers, build it, ship it up, lower it down, anchor it, build a climber, power the climber somehow, and have it ascend.
Yeah, that's pretty much it.
After that we can lift bulk material up into space on the cheap. It would cut the cost of getting into space from $10000/lb to $100/lb. We'd probably still need rockets if people want to go up.
The galaxies are ACCELERATING away from each other, and we don't have a real solid answer for why. Cosmology, the study of where all these planets and stuff came from and how, is still a young field with really big and really interesting discoveries yet to be made.
For all of those people claiming that there's nothing new to discover, point them to the stars and ask how the hell that happened.
And the state of the art is getting to the point where we don't need placeholders to conveniently fill in the gaps.
I don't think he's in the industry. There's simply a subset of America that is nationalistic. They truely believe that the NSA can be trusted, that they're fighting the good fight, that there are evil armies out there that can take down the USA, and that Snowden impacted the NSA's ability to keep them safe.
He probably sees the scenario akin to someone blabbing about how we broke the Enigma cypher in the WWII. It's really more akin to someone busting Hoover's balls for COINTELPRO and impacting his ability to hunt the commie infiltrators. There really WERE communists infiltrating the USA, they just weren't that big of a problem.
Yeah, it's pretty popular in the embedded world. Toasters, Arduinos, Avionics.
When the hardware maker couldn't be bothered to make a high level compiler for the chip or when the thing absolutely positively can't be allowed to fail, C is a good choice.
Oh, and that Linux thing and a large swath of open source software. You know, if you're into that sort of thing.
I was going to comment how you skipped Malbolge and how that makes you a closed-minded noob that only works with popular languages, but then I noticed that you skipped over C. Or maybe you made a typo and lumped it with BuildProfessionalCC.
So if you were wondering why you got skipped over a job, it might just be because HR's filter didn't think you knew how to program in C.
Slashdot Mirror
So ditch'em.
Move to soundcloud.
I'm a fan of a lot of artists that put their stuff up on either youtube or soundcloud. Might be time to switch off of youtube.
Hate to say it. I saw the rise of Google and a lot of money and effort went to really good things.
They offered their services for free using the knowledge gained to make a buck off better advertising. Things were good. They certainly had/have a shit-ton of power and people rallied against that. Claiming that they could abuse it and be a terrible blight upon the land. But they didn't. Until now. And I've seen similar sort of moves by Google of late. The sun sets eventually. Kinda sad, but perhaps it's time to move on.
Now, of course I'm still going to have a gmail account for a long time, and using google-docs is still crazy useful. Hell I still have the yahoo account where I throw spam. But rather than simply being happy with the bright future of the new young blood in the market, I'll be looking for some place to jump ship to. And I'll tell others as much.
an ambitious white product manager in his late forties with an MBA
Why do you have to be racist about it? Or ageist for that matter? Or sexist? The quip about him having an MBA is oh-so-tangentially on topic.
All things considered, it's probably a safe bet. That's how stereotypes work. But it doesn't make you any less of a racist dick.
That post he just made is quite useful to to the crowd of people that may not be familiar with you and your particular flavor of bias.
He knows you. And 5 slashot moderators know you and are willing to spend points to bump this up.
His post was, in short, insightful.
But hey, some people need more help than others,
Feel free to point out the facts I get wrong
CAN DO!
Your overall argument is that the rich aren't all that powerful and the poor have plenty of power. That the poor can get together and give their money to political organizations that run this town.
And that'd be nice, if it were true. But the fact of the matter is that the rich ARE powerful, very powerful, to the point that
Fact: The gini coefficient in the USA is rising. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the middle class is shrinking.
Political ideologues aren't simply "always going to be around." Some of them are dangerous and need to be guarded against.
Not when they're homeless poor people. The crazy guy ranting on the corner WILL always be there and no, there's no real need to go guard against him. If anything we need to guard against the people trying to censor him.
The guy is harmless, at least on a political scale. He has zero hope of swaying the masses. If he somehow managed to gather a crowd and/or become a cult leader, and people started to listen to him, he'd probably no longer be a poor homeless person. He'd transform into a radio host, a televangelist, a full-blown-locked-in-a-compound cult leader, or worse, a CEO.
When did "the rich" develop a monopoly on TV and radio stations?
Since their inceptions? Only the rich could afford to step into those industries. They were serious money ordeals back in the day. But hey, now anyone with a phone can shoot video. Look at all of those mom&pop TV channels watched by millions! Oh, wait, no, that's Youtube and the Internet.
Well radio broadcasters are cheap! Look at all the... oh wait, the barrier to entry for commercial radio stations is really high just to keep competition out. Well there's always HAM... which is specifically barred from making money from it.
So this one is wrong. You're presuming there was a time that the rich didn't have a monopoly on it. And that isn't true.
Are you confusing "the rich" with corporations?
And this might be the basis of why your worldview is so fucked.
YES. The rich and powerful run the corporations. Literally. The job is titled "CEO". Their boss is supposed to be the shareholders, but it's effectively the board, which is composed of a handful of rich people who are CEOs of their own corporations which have the original CEO on THEIR board.
Is there some group or segment of the population that you think doesn't have at least some radio stations catering to it?
And this here is some fantastic spin. Here let me point it out for you.
"catering to".
There is some rich individual, running a corporation that controls a chunk of spectrum that caters to rednecks. They pay lip-service to the cultural background of the redneck, play the right music, and run ads that hit the mark, but it is wholly controlled, steered, and profited by soulless corporate goons that don't know the difference between a banjo and a guitar. If you think that a corporation that SELLS to a group is the same thing as the group being politically empowered, then you are monstrously fucked up.
Who are the rich people that you are apparently claiming are "spending billions of dollars in foreign countries to start civil wars"?
Bush. Rumsfeld. Cheney. They spent billions of (someone else's) dollars to destabilize the middle east. The sectarian violence in Iraq during the US occupation killed 100's of thousands.
Arguably
Damn shame that mentioning guns and healthcare completely derails a conversation about open source software.
Jesus motherfucking CHRIST! There's an arbitrary $200,000 investment required to be a cabbie in Europe? What the hell!?
Let me make this clear for you in case you don't understand the problem with this.
1) Most people don't just have $200,000 lying about. Not even for business expenses. So the phrase "you might pay $200,000 for it" is straight up bullshit. No. People go get a loan to buy this and pay the intrest on the loan. Which is a fancy-dancy way of making cabbies rent the privileged of being a cabbie.
2) For ANY sort of investment that ties up money, the phrase "you can sell it to somebody else, probably at a profit." is something you feed to suckers. It's something you say when you're trying to sell.
3) If you can just sell the thing to anybody, without any sort of certification, testing, vouching or anything, then it serves ZERO purpose other than simply being another bar to entry. And I think that was the original intent. To impose a limit on the number of taxis clogging the streets. This system does a really shitty job of keeping up with a growing populace and shifts in traffic needs.
Is Steam stopping me from playing the games I purchased? No?
YES it bloody well HAS stopped me from playing the games I purchased.
Specifically on roadtrips. It's finally someone else's turn to drive, I whip out the laptop to do something. I go to launch a game I haven't played in a while and GUESS WHAT?
No internet connection means no launching.
I hear they're getting better about this. And Valve and Steam are probably the best, least intrusive, most palpitate form on DRM currently out there. And there's some value with being able to download your game library on whatever computer. And they're setting up a system to allow family to borrow games. And their push for Linux is good for the industry. All good stuff.
But don't pretend that the DRM found in steam is painless and doesn't get in people's way. If you're always online, then sure, it probably works great for you.
He can tell you can cook his own cocoa.
He can tell you he could probably fry an egg.
He can tell you he's a virgin.
"He" is a placeholder for both the AI system and the authentic Ukrainian boy. One you consider to be clearly not intelligent. Presumably you consider the flesh and blood human boy to be intelligent.
What has that to do with a program, that CLEARLY is NOT intelligent?
Because the two are indistinguishable. Or, at least, they're headed that way. The future, it's coming.
Google search is vastly better at finding my slippers than my dog. It's not going to pass any Turing Tests.
Watson is better at trivia then my dog. It's not going to pass any Turing Tests.
Big Blue is better at chess then my dog. It's not going to pass any Turing Tests.
Conversation is not the pinnacle of intelligence. You're chasing after a false notion of human-like hard AI.
So if there were a boy which genuinely had the intellect and communication capabilities of a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy (conversing in English), you would not consider him intelligent?
I think that to pass the Turing test, you have to tell the judges that the entity they are about to talk to *might* be a computer program. Eliza worked because people had never encountered a computer that even tried to be remotely human - so the assumption was that this was a real person from the outset
An interesting aspect of the Turing Test is that it's dependent upon sociological factors. Back in the 60's, like you said, it was assumed that the thing on the other side was a human. But as time goes forward and we get flooded with clever ads, chatbots, brand-dropping honeypot girlfriends, smart cars, automated grocery tellers, and AI in general, we'll be more suspicious of the humanity of EVERYTHING around us.
It'll be harder for AI's to pass the Turing Test as time goes on.
It'll also be harder for us to pass the Turing Test. It's a jarring experience to answer the phone and have the person swear at getting voice-mail.
Turning test is NOT supposed to be limited to 15 minutes,
Whatever, you have to put some sort of time-limit on it just for feasibility of testing.
nor is it supposed to be conducted by someone that does not understand the main language claimed to be used by the computer.
Pft, you are not some sort of high cleric in charge of spotting bots.
Similarly, the computer must convince the judge it is a human with it's full mental capacity, not child, nor a mentally defective person, nor someone in a coma.
That's an decent point. It's certainly a valid issue to take with any bot that passes a turing test in such a way. You could claim any blank terminal is indistinguishable from a coma patient. Or a gibberish machine is equivalent to the mentally ill.
Let's extend that. The first machines that "legitimately" passes a Turing test will not be super-insightful teaching gurus. They will not be fonts of wisdom. Just as there is a difference between a math teacher and the mentally ill, there is a difference between your typical math teachers and the likes of Einstein, Stephan Hawking, and Feynman. I suspect that AI chatbots will climb that axis incrementally, similar to how robotics have progressed.
The impact of such things is that the supply of simpletons to chat with will explode and the relative value of children and the mentally ill will plummet. And as they get better, the merely moderately intelligent will likewise plummet as only the intelligent are better than whiteCollarOfficeBotv7.4_3(noSextingMod).
The test is whether a computer can, in an extended conversation, fool a competent human into thinking it is a competent human being speaking the same language,at least 50% of the time.
There we go. That's the test right there. The "extended conversation" is still variable, and I think 15 minutes is fine. But the "competent human" is refinement that's needed. It's implied in the original Turing test. It's also still rather subjective.
I think it would be deeply insightful if we aired all the dirty laundry of Hoover's FBI dragnet. A lot of it has already been brought to light when... huh... a leftist activist group burglarized a field office and released document to the media about COINTELPRO.
Now, what was exposed was the offical documented record of what happened. Imagine if the actual agents revealed what really went on. Why they did it. What the rational was. Who ordered what.
I imagine there would be a number of similarities between Hoover's dragnet and the NSA's meta-data collection. And all those records from the very mouths of the agents doing the deed would let us see the bullshit for what it really is.
Some people have the ability to learn from history. But only if there's a record of it happening.
Traveller campaign: intercept "time-capsules" bound for Earth-orbit trajectory, discover hottest "blast from the past" media chum weeks-months before the story breaks and secure exclusive rights to the descendent's interview.
Rich people are not "harming" anybody.
If you take a broad view, sure, just being rich doesn't inherently harm anyone.
Just like poor people are not harming anyone just by being poor.
Much on the contrary. Someone with employees is providing the employees jobs that otherwise wouldn't exist.
That's some classist warfare material right there. The sort of propaganda spread by the slave owners to get their slaves to lick their boots harder.
You could quite equally say that the job is going to exist with or without the leeches feeding off of other people doing actual work.
He can "screw them over" and they can decide to go elsewhere. That is how a free society works.
Right, as long as the employees have the ability to "go elsewhere". If you've never known a wage-slave with no better options then the dead-end job they're in, then you don't know what you're talking about. If you've never known someone who is going to work every day, not for the job or pay, but because without the medical benefits that are tied to the job they or a loved one are going to die, then you don't really know all the finer details that go into setting up and managing a "free society".
if you want to prevent damage from being done you should...
Place the power not with the government, megacorporations, or rich men, but rather with the people. The moment that power is removed from the masses, the masses get screwed over.
Vote with your wallets. If you don't like this sort of thing, STOP FUNDING IT.
The Heritage Foundation? Duuuuuuuude. It's a conservative think tank funded by rich men like the Coors heir and the Koch brothers.
You are listening to rich men tell you why you should appreciate rich men.
forgetting that the corporations are only doing what they're chartered to do: using every resource to increase wealth for their share-holders.
Corporations aren't ~allowed~ to consider "the greater good" over that profit,
Except that CEOs can do practically ANYTHING and justify it as "increasing wealth for the share-holders".
Here we go:
1) Fire everyone, sell everything, liquidate like it's 1999. This increases the bottom-line of the company and makes it easy to increase the wealth of the shareholders (effectively removing the risk of not knowing what the stock is worth, do all that liquidation and you have a definite value the stock can be compared against)
2) Go into debt, hire a shit-ton of scientists, designers, artist, whoever to invest in the product so that next year/decade they'll be able to corner the market, bring in more money, and increase wealth for the shareholders.
3) Dodge all taxes as it leaves more money for the shareholders
4) Pay all the taxes as it removes the risk of the government coming in a busting up the company, shattering the wealth of the shareholders.
5) Pissing it all away on hookers and blow. "Hey, I'm a high-powered businessman, I make you the money. Walk away, leave me in charge, and you'll get your quarterly gains (as long as the economy is still booming)."
6) Axing all of the top skill and people with connections in the business. They're just doing lines of blow. It's not like we really need that guy whose mother is running the government regulator, I'm sure she'll be professional. Removing this overhead increases wealth for the shareholders.
All of that happens and in some cases is even the smart thing to do. If you think corporations are somehow LEGALLY REQUIRED to curb-stomp you, then you have no flipping clue what happens in the business world.
Go to Cairo, breath the leaded-gas fume encrusted air, fight off the wandering dogs, dodge traffic, learn that their more important industry is tourism of all things and that it's on shaky grounds with the country undergoing political turmoil, that their whole economy is tanking, that the nation's credit rating is falling, and then reflect on the need to keep laser pointers out of the hands of children.
I mean, I get the sentiment. That some of these kids are going to look into the things and have their vision damaged. And that's sad. And you feel for these kids.
But it's like commenting on a guy's stubbed toe when he's currently bleeding out from a gunshot wound mid-revolution. Because holy shit have you BEEN to Egypt?
It's neutral for the economy.
Wealth is neither created nor destroyed, just merely transferred between entities.
It's good for the economy of the New Yorkers, it's bad for the economy of the New York Government.
The economy is not a zero-sum game and can go up and down. But this right here is a zero-sum transfer. You could argue about where the money is being more productive, in the government's pocket or in the parker's pockets, but that trends into the philosophical.
M-M-M-MONSTER POST!!!!
Of enlightenment and knowledge peering past the veil of ignorance, cutting through the bullshit curtain of marketing, and bringing us along for the ride.
Thank you
Microsoft can't maintain a numbering scheme for more than two versions.
I will bet you solid money that the next version of windows is not marketed as "Windows 9" when it comes out.
They can't even stick to a minor change numbering scheme. The next big update will probably be Windows 8.1 update 1 service pack 1. You know there's some pointy haired boss that goes into a conniption fit when an engineer suggests they release 8.2.
Although, It'd be pretty awesome if they released Windows 9.4 and then had a "throwback" UI change for Windows 9.5
Refine our nano-scale manufacturing capabilities, build a ribbon of carbon nano-tubes that's gigapascel's in strength for 30 some thousand kilometers, build it, ship it up, lower it down, anchor it, build a climber, power the climber somehow, and have it ascend.
Yeah, that's pretty much it.
After that we can lift bulk material up into space on the cheap. It would cut the cost of getting into space from $10000/lb to $100/lb. We'd probably still need rockets if people want to go up.
The galaxies are ACCELERATING away from each other, and we don't have a real solid answer for why.
Cosmology, the study of where all these planets and stuff came from and how, is still a young field with really big and really interesting discoveries yet to be made.
For all of those people claiming that there's nothing new to discover, point them to the stars and ask how the hell that happened.
And the state of the art is getting to the point where we don't need placeholders to conveniently fill in the gaps.
Exciting times.
I don't think he's in the industry. There's simply a subset of America that is nationalistic. They truely believe that the NSA can be trusted, that they're fighting the good fight, that there are evil armies out there that can take down the USA, and that Snowden impacted the NSA's ability to keep them safe.
He probably sees the scenario akin to someone blabbing about how we broke the Enigma cypher in the WWII. It's really more akin to someone busting Hoover's balls for COINTELPRO and impacting his ability to hunt the commie infiltrators. There really WERE communists infiltrating the USA, they just weren't that big of a problem.
Yeah, it's pretty popular in the embedded world. Toasters, Arduinos, Avionics.
When the hardware maker couldn't be bothered to make a high level compiler for the chip or when the thing absolutely positively can't be allowed to fail, C is a good choice.
Oh, and that Linux thing and a large swath of open source software. You know, if you're into that sort of thing.
I was going to comment how you skipped Malbolge and how that makes you a closed-minded noob that only works with popular languages, but then I noticed that you skipped over C. Or maybe you made a typo and lumped it with BuildProfessionalCC.
So if you were wondering why you got skipped over a job, it might just be because HR's filter didn't think you knew how to program in C.