if I write an amazing piece of software that nobody has seen before and some big company comes and makes a totally ripped off clone, I'd be pissed and that'd be unfair.
And even with a patent you probably wouldn't see a dime. They have money and you don't. They can win court cases that take a decade to resolve. You can't. The best you can hope for is to sell your patent for a pittance to a company in the business of suing people.
And let's say you do make something really novel and innovative and useful, like generic object recognition, then that's great. But once competitors make their own object recognition software, how do you know they're using your code, your algorithm, and your patent? The idea of object recognition isn't patentable. Once it's known that it's possible, you'll attract a lot of talent to the problem. They'll come up with their own ideas about how to solve it. Maybe even doing better than you.
But if you can make innovative advances in AI, maybe you should be working for a software company that can utilize that code rather than trying to sell dot's bargain AI components out of your garage.
it put several countries into a corner and forced their hand.; which led to an extending campaign in which soldiers died.
Wut?
OR, taken another way, it put the USA in a corner and forced our hand. The one where we finally GTFO and RAMP DOWN these stupid campaigns. SAVING soldiers lives.
See how easy that is to spin?
But no, go ahead, give us some examples of what information was leaked, that caused either Iraq or Afghanistan to "force their hand", which somehow forced us to extend our military campaigns. Please, reason it out. Explain it to us. Because we're obviously not seeing how that could possibly be.
Some documents should remain hidden.
Absolutely, which is why Wikileaks takes so damn long scouring the material and releases it in batches
Should we publish the data on when we move missiles? which truck is the decoy?
After it's already happened? Sure, who gives a shit which truck is the decoy after the goods are safe. If they can analyze the frequency of our missile movements to predict where the next one will be, we ALREADY HAVE PROBLEMS.
Meters have something like 40 different values you can get in addition to various events. I expect something on the order of 1KB per read. We get voltage, power factor etc. along with usage.
Nifty. I was unaware. That would be an informative and interesting list.
Disaster recovery and that lot is typical IT work, 7 years data is only required for the data proving the bill (what they store now), and I worry about deregulation. You wave money under the nose of people in power and the rules start to bend.
My faith in the power companies to keep the costs low, when they have the ability to simply bump it up, oh so slightly, oh so temporarily, is minimal. It's like how I prefer a mortgage with a fixed rate rather than one that can change willy-nilly. Even if there are good companies out there that will do their best to do right by the customer, bad companies who abuse it will make a mint and buy out the good guys. *cough*Enron*cough*.
And remember, they HAVE a real-time up-to-the-minute picture of generation and load. They sure as shit know what they're generating, they know what the load is, and they know WHERE over WHAT LINES this is all happening. But residential blocks are all lumped together past the substation. I don't see the need to give the power companies a finer level of awareness that creeps into my home. Not if it costs money. Not if there are privacy issues.
If you really want some sort of smart device that turns itself off when the power company sets their arbitrary price, publish it to a webpage, and my toaster will go look.
that there is a set or predicted period of time that is "peak" and "non-peak"
Oh, right, Also, YES there IS. It's called DAYTIME. Jesus christ dude, power companies have noticed this freaking trend. It might vary slightly region to region, but power is consumption peaks during the DAY. But sure, power generation comes in a lot of flavors. Nukey plants are good for baseline generation, but they hate to change. Coal plants take half and hour to to ramp up. Hydro is instant and cheap but you can't just summon more rain. Gas turbines and gasoline generators are quick but expensive. And it all depends on what is where. You lose a lot in transmission.
It's ok Slashmydots, you were wrong on this one. It happens to everyone now and then. But before you hit that little submit button again, take a moment to think about how the world works, or take a quick check on wikipedia, or google it. Be better.
No utility has the desire to store data at that level of detail.
But I imagine they will. I could quite easily see a marketeer going to the utility company and offering a lump of money to know which houses have the stay-at-home moms. Translate that to smart meter data: sizable energy consumption deltas between 9am and 4pm that show some variance to account for AC units on timers. That's people starting the laundry mid-day or having some toast for lunch. The power company will realize they're sitting on a gold-mine of house-hold specific data they can sell to marketeers. That's what's propping up Facebook's stock right now after all.
The utility I work for will store data with 1 hour resolution. That means we will know how much power was used during a specific one hour interval. This alone has enormous storage and server requirements.
No it isn't. If you logged a 32-bit integer for everyone in the USA every hour, a years worth of data is only 11 TB. I can go pick that up at Best Buy. Not, you know, whimsically, but that's nothing for a businesses. Especially one making money off the data.
... 313 million people * 32 bits / 8 bits per bytes * 24 hours * 365 days is 10,967,520,000,000 or ~11TB.
The idea is to charge you more for the electricity that costs them more to generate.
See:
While it's definitely the power company's right to know how much power I'm using, and even to know in aggregate how much peak versus non-peak power I'm using,
Which all they need is a dumb clock on the meter and two counters.
The idea of constantly changing rates isn't needed. They can set rates on a monthly or yearly. They are not nearly agile enough to justify having peak rates jump 3 cents next Sunday. The idea that you can program your devices to know what the current rate is and behave accordingly is a neat idea. But you don't need smart meters. You need a web connection and a webpage. Which, if your device is that smart, it will have anyway.
Could you explain to me how/why brine has an electrical charge compared to regular seawater? Is it really all that much? I mean, you can get a couple of watts out of a potato, but potato farmers don't run around in potato-powered electric tractors.
There's good culture and bad culture. Every place has it's own. Enthusiastic startups, monolithic corporates, brogrammers, 9-5 time-card punchers, TPS reporters, associates of synergizing proactive meetings to co-align the group's baseline throughput, these are all describing different types of cultures. And yes, they simply form on their own. Sometimes that'll mean every commit has derogatory statements about the sanctity of marriage. There are code-shops where the culture allows and/or encourages that sort of crap. It's the bosses job to fix that and avoid the impending lawsuit. Which is one reason why people care about culture.
I see a lot of people here suggesting perks they'd like to see rather than ways to get people to work together. Like suggesting for videogame night, or kegs? Yeah, suggestions like that will probably make a subset of your group happy. And the minorities will be pushed aside. I don't think that's the best idea.
You bitch to the boss. Note that I was talking about when YOUR boss or PEERS bitch. When an underling is bitching about the process, you should listen. Dealing with overambitious design guys is his job, even when it makes more work for you.
And refining the process is indeed something that everyone works on. And there IS a level of bitching from all directions. But once there is more bitching than working... well that's a pretty bad sign.
A friend suggested it in college and I read it like it was playing it straight. I got to the point where mr. badass revealed he delivered pizzas and that this was an important job and I simply put the book down. That was, what? Page 5?
Later on I re-read it accepting that the characters are shaped by a satirical, cynical view of society. Nay, the world is formed around this view, so that yes, it's perfectly reasonable to bring a sword to a gunfight and 15 year old skater-punks can have side-jobs delivering mail in a lawless war-zone. Once I accepted that, it was more enjoyable.
With a movie you've got to do something that sets this tone. Hopefully it'll be more like Scott Pilgrim and less like Blade Runner. It's simply doomed if it takes itself too seriously.
Oh yes, the blowback from Clinton's attacks Iraq was what caused us to unilaterally invade Iraq on a lie. Obviously. I mean, Iraq was like, INCHES away from launching nukes at us. That blowback was a'comming I tells ya.
Bin Laden's hatred of the USA was fostered when we ditched him and his crowd after they fought off the Russian's in Afghanistan. Remember the CIA-trained mujahedin fighters? You might remember it from that movie, Charlie Wilson's war? Yeah, that was a bit before Clinton's time. And it's the CIA, is anyone personally liable for the shit they stir?
One which doesn't presume that early hominid's were all programmable autistic freaks and that we somehow evolved the ability to program ourselves giving us the spark of sapience that puts us above animals. And that this mystical ur-language can be used to hack the minds of people if they look at a screen with this writing on it, reprogramming them to do your bidding.
The setting is interesting. As long as you view the whole thing as satire. The writing style is enjoyable. But as soon as they start to get to that "plot" thing? It kind of turns into a shit sandwich of bullshit wrapped with unbelievability. Here we go, ala wikipedia:
Hiro, at the prompting of his Catholic and linguist ex-girlfriend Juanita Marquez, begins to unravel the nature of this crisis. It relates back to the mythology of ancient Sumer, which Stephenson describes as speaking a very powerful ur-language. Sumerian is to modern "acquired languages" as binary is to programming languages: it affects the entity (be it human or computer) at a far lower and more basic level than does acquired/programming language. Sumerian is rooted in the brain stem and related to glossolalia, or "speaking in tongues"—a trait displayed by most of L. Bob Rife's convertees. Furthermore, Sumerian culture was ruled and controlled via "me," the human-readable equivalent of software which contains the rules and procedures for various activity (harvests, the baking of bread, etc.). The keepers of these important documents were priests referred to as en; some of them, like the god/semi-historical-figure Enki, could write new me, making them the equivalent of programmers or hackers.
And at this point we have jumped ship from science fiction, even the cyberpunk sub-genre, and dove head-first into fantasy-land.
But the first half of the book was pretty good, as long as you didn't take it too seriously.
Ok, so D&D, novels, television, movies, theater, concerts, art galleries, museums, webcomics, masturbation, watching sports, videogames, meditation, and religion might not be for you. It may take time, and you don't have anything to show for it other than the experience, but some people enjoy it. Live and let live I say.
Naw, eldavojohn is just our representative. The ol' boys club of Slashdot, those of us with the mod points, know him to have his head on his shoulders. So rather than write out questions ourselves we simply upvote his.
Slashdot Mirror
if I write an amazing piece of software that nobody has seen before and some big company comes and makes a totally ripped off clone, I'd be pissed and that'd be unfair.
And even with a patent you probably wouldn't see a dime. They have money and you don't. They can win court cases that take a decade to resolve. You can't. The best you can hope for is to sell your patent for a pittance to a company in the business of suing people.
And let's say you do make something really novel and innovative and useful, like generic object recognition, then that's great. But once competitors make their own object recognition software, how do you know they're using your code, your algorithm, and your patent? The idea of object recognition isn't patentable. Once it's known that it's possible, you'll attract a lot of talent to the problem. They'll come up with their own ideas about how to solve it. Maybe even doing better than you.
But if you can make innovative advances in AI, maybe you should be working for a software company that can utilize that code rather than trying to sell dot's bargain AI components out of your garage.
it put several countries into a corner and forced their hand.; which led to an extending campaign in which soldiers died.
Wut?
OR, taken another way, it put the USA in a corner and forced our hand. The one where we finally GTFO and RAMP DOWN these stupid campaigns. SAVING soldiers lives.
See how easy that is to spin?
But no, go ahead, give us some examples of what information was leaked, that caused either Iraq or Afghanistan to "force their hand", which somehow forced us to extend our military campaigns. Please, reason it out. Explain it to us. Because we're obviously not seeing how that could possibly be.
Some documents should remain hidden.
Absolutely, which is why Wikileaks takes so damn long scouring the material and releases it in batches
Should we publish the data on when we move missiles? which truck is the decoy?
After it's already happened? Sure, who gives a shit which truck is the decoy after the goods are safe. If they can analyze the frequency of our missile movements to predict where the next one will be, we ALREADY HAVE PROBLEMS.
Meters have something like 40 different values you can get in addition to various events. I expect something on the order of 1KB per read. We get voltage, power factor etc. along with usage.
Nifty. I was unaware. That would be an informative and interesting list.
Disaster recovery and that lot is typical IT work, 7 years data is only required for the data proving the bill (what they store now), and I worry about deregulation. You wave money under the nose of people in power and the rules start to bend.
an instrument of driving real change
Turn into:
they can just raise the rates
My faith in the power companies to keep the costs low, when they have the ability to simply bump it up, oh so slightly, oh so temporarily, is minimal. It's like how I prefer a mortgage with a fixed rate rather than one that can change willy-nilly. Even if there are good companies out there that will do their best to do right by the customer, bad companies who abuse it will make a mint and buy out the good guys. *cough*Enron*cough*.
And remember, they HAVE a real-time up-to-the-minute picture of generation and load. They sure as shit know what they're generating, they know what the load is, and they know WHERE over WHAT LINES this is all happening. But residential blocks are all lumped together past the substation. I don't see the need to give the power companies a finer level of awareness that creeps into my home. Not if it costs money. Not if there are privacy issues.
If you really want some sort of smart device that turns itself off when the power company sets their arbitrary price, publish it to a webpage, and my toaster will go look.
that there is a set or predicted period of time that is "peak" and "non-peak"
Oh, right, Also, YES there IS. It's called DAYTIME. Jesus christ dude, power companies have noticed this freaking trend. It might vary slightly region to region, but power is consumption peaks during the DAY. But sure, power generation comes in a lot of flavors. Nukey plants are good for baseline generation, but they hate to change. Coal plants take half and hour to to ramp up. Hydro is instant and cheap but you can't just summon more rain. Gas turbines and gasoline generators are quick but expensive. And it all depends on what is where. You lose a lot in transmission.
It's ok Slashmydots, you were wrong on this one. It happens to everyone now and then. But before you hit that little submit button again, take a moment to think about how the world works, or take a quick check on wikipedia, or google it. Be better.
And this prediction is for a 1 inch rise a decade.
The panic, I'm missing it.
No utility has the desire to store data at that level of detail.
But I imagine they will. I could quite easily see a marketeer going to the utility company and offering a lump of money to know which houses have the stay-at-home moms. Translate that to smart meter data: sizable energy consumption deltas between 9am and 4pm that show some variance to account for AC units on timers. That's people starting the laundry mid-day or having some toast for lunch. The power company will realize they're sitting on a gold-mine of house-hold specific data they can sell to marketeers. That's what's propping up Facebook's stock right now after all.
The utility I work for will store data with 1 hour resolution. That means we will know how much power was used during a specific one hour interval. This alone has enormous storage and server requirements.
No it isn't. If you logged a 32-bit integer for everyone in the USA every hour, a years worth of data is only 11 TB. I can go pick that up at Best Buy. Not, you know, whimsically, but that's nothing for a businesses. Especially one making money off the data.
... 313 million people * 32 bits / 8 bits per bytes * 24 hours * 365 days is 10,967,520,000,000 or ~11TB.
The idea is to charge you more for the electricity that costs them more to generate.
See:
While it's definitely the power company's right to know how much power I'm using, and even to know in aggregate how much peak versus non-peak power I'm using,
Which all they need is a dumb clock on the meter and two counters.
The idea of constantly changing rates isn't needed. They can set rates on a monthly or yearly. They are not nearly agile enough to justify having peak rates jump 3 cents next Sunday. The idea that you can program your devices to know what the current rate is and behave accordingly is a neat idea. But you don't need smart meters. You need a web connection and a webpage. Which, if your device is that smart, it will have anyway.
Dude, seek help.
Could you explain to me how/why brine has an electrical charge compared to regular seawater? Is it really all that much? I mean, you can get a couple of watts out of a potato, but potato farmers don't run around in potato-powered electric tractors.
There's good culture and bad culture. Every place has it's own. Enthusiastic startups, monolithic corporates, brogrammers, 9-5 time-card punchers, TPS reporters, associates of synergizing proactive meetings to co-align the group's baseline throughput, these are all describing different types of cultures. And yes, they simply form on their own. Sometimes that'll mean every commit has derogatory statements about the sanctity of marriage. There are code-shops where the culture allows and/or encourages that sort of crap. It's the bosses job to fix that and avoid the impending lawsuit. Which is one reason why people care about culture.
I see a lot of people here suggesting perks they'd like to see rather than ways to get people to work together. Like suggesting for videogame night, or kegs? Yeah, suggestions like that will probably make a subset of your group happy. And the minorities will be pushed aside. I don't think that's the best idea.
You bitch to the boss. Note that I was talking about when YOUR boss or PEERS bitch. When an underling is bitching about the process, you should listen. Dealing with overambitious design guys is his job, even when it makes more work for you.
And refining the process is indeed something that everyone works on. And there IS a level of bitching from all directions. But once there is more bitching than working... well that's a pretty bad sign.
Remember citizen, fun in mandatory!
Yeah, he's kind of an MS-whore, but he's got nice bite-sized pieces of good information. Generally he's over-rated, but he's not a bad read.
In general it's a bad sign if your boss/peers lecture/bitch more about what process to use than how to do whatever it is you're there to do.
A friend suggested it in college and I read it like it was playing it straight. I got to the point where mr. badass revealed he delivered pizzas and that this was an important job and I simply put the book down. That was, what? Page 5?
Later on I re-read it accepting that the characters are shaped by a satirical, cynical view of society. Nay, the world is formed around this view, so that yes, it's perfectly reasonable to bring a sword to a gunfight and 15 year old skater-punks can have side-jobs delivering mail in a lawless war-zone. Once I accepted that, it was more enjoyable.
With a movie you've got to do something that sets this tone. Hopefully it'll be more like Scott Pilgrim and less like Blade Runner. It's simply doomed if it takes itself too seriously.
Can you point out legislation or executive acts that encouraged investment in dot com businesses?
Oh yes, the blowback from Clinton's attacks Iraq was what caused us to unilaterally invade Iraq on a lie. Obviously. I mean, Iraq was like, INCHES away from launching nukes at us. That blowback was a'comming I tells ya.
Bin Laden's hatred of the USA was fostered when we ditched him and his crowd after they fought off the Russian's in Afghanistan. Remember the CIA-trained mujahedin fighters? You might remember it from that movie, Charlie Wilson's war? Yeah, that was a bit before Clinton's time. And it's the CIA, is anyone personally liable for the shit they stir?
Funny how Republicans suck at history.
The setting is interesting. As long as you view the whole thing as satire. The writing style is enjoyable. But as soon as they start to get to that "plot" thing? It kind of turns into a shit sandwich of bullshit wrapped with unbelievability. Here we go, ala wikipedia:
Hiro, at the prompting of his Catholic and linguist ex-girlfriend Juanita Marquez, begins to unravel the nature of this crisis. It relates back to the mythology of ancient Sumer, which Stephenson describes as speaking a very powerful ur-language. Sumerian is to modern "acquired languages" as binary is to programming languages: it affects the entity (be it human or computer) at a far lower and more basic level than does acquired/programming language. Sumerian is rooted in the brain stem and related to glossolalia, or "speaking in tongues"—a trait displayed by most of L. Bob Rife's convertees. Furthermore, Sumerian culture was ruled and controlled via "me," the human-readable equivalent of software which contains the rules and procedures for various activity (harvests, the baking of bread, etc.). The keepers of these important documents were priests referred to as en; some of them, like the god/semi-historical-figure Enki, could write new me, making them the equivalent of programmers or hackers.
And at this point we have jumped ship from science fiction, even the cyberpunk sub-genre, and dove head-first into fantasy-land.
But the first half of the book was pretty good, as long as you didn't take it too seriously.
Unless, you know, they made a sterile version....
Then I really don't think she should try riding a bicycle to school.
Ok, so D&D, novels, television, movies, theater, concerts, art galleries, museums, webcomics, masturbation, watching sports, videogames, meditation, and religion might not be for you. It may take time, and you don't have anything to show for it other than the experience, but some people enjoy it. Live and let live I say.
Man, I LOVED Traveller.
Naw, eldavojohn is just our representative. The ol' boys club of Slashdot, those of us with the mod points, know him to have his head on his shoulders. So rather than write out questions ourselves we simply upvote his.
But, uh... yeah! WOO direct democracy!
What's the probability that we'll have a technically savvy member of the US Congress?