A lot of EEs used to be needed to design discrete circuits. Nowadays most of that probably gets implemented in SW. So maybe not so many are needed any more?
Needed?!? We don't care who's needed. In the world of politics, "jobs" are a magical substance, and are all about the heart.
Political interventions - you know, of the kind that this article is urging (either explicitly or implicitly) - are responsible for far more unemployment trauma than automation ever has been.
We did not have robot armies causing mass unemployment in the 1930's. No, we had the "New Deal" turning a temporary crash into a Depression.
We did not have robot armies causing the stagflation of the 1970s.
And we did not have some massive advance in robotics magically happen right around 2008 / 2009. No, we had "stimulus", huge food stamp expansion, unemployment "insurance" 'extension', bank "bailouts"... a massive firehose of government spending supposedly intended to make things better.
And all these memes are designed to get you to blame CEOs, Republicans, robots... anybody except those who are actually responsible. You are being told what to think, who to blame, and you are going right along.
The openly attack the private organizations that provide birth control pills and condoms to would be welfare mothers.
A firehose full of birth control pills and condoms has been poured on our society since the early 1970s. You may have noticed that ALL indicators - unwed pregnancy, STDs, abortions - have got WORSE, not better, since the 1970s.
I can see with my own eyes that opening the government spending spigots ("stimulus", food stamp expansion, etc.) has not made anything any better. It has made things worse.
It's very easy to create unique passwords that are hard to guess, and completely trivial to remember. My method is this:
- I have a 4 "stems" that are the first letters of 4 lines of poetry I remember from school. one stem is used for "very personal" things (ssh private key passwords for instance), another for login on "trusted" machines (my servers), and a third to use on various websites I trust moderately, and a fourth is a "junk" stem to use on shite websites (hotmail and the likes).
- To each stems, I append 2 digits (always the same)
- I prefix each stem with the first 3 letters of my username, and I append the 3 first letters of the machine's name, or website name I'm logging onto, after the digits.
- Finally, I append the number of letters in the machine name or website name (sans www. or.com).
The passwords that I create that way are reasonably secure, usually unique, and all I have to remember is a poem, my username for a particular machine/website (those I can store somewhere in plain text just in case) and the method to derive the corresponding password.
I have kajillions of passwords, and zero trouble remembering them. How hard can it be? I've never felt the need for a password storage solution of any kind.
Hey, that's great... {scribble}... what was that middle one again?
There's reasonable evidence that the prevalence of obesity is related to the liberal use of high-fructose corn syrup on prepared foods. And a part of the reason for that use of corn is GM corn.
The main reason for the high use of corn syrup is sugar tariffs. We charge insane tariffs on imported sugar, so that a few families in Florida can be rich. This drives the price of sugar up to multiples of what it otherwise would be.
It would be interesting to know how long these printed artificial limbs will hold up compared to a conventional prosthetic limb. It would also be interesting to know how much a conventional prosthetic could be made for w/o all of the overhead. I realize that in the US there's a ton of money dumped into testing, trials, FDA approval, lawyers and fear of being sued. But why can't conventional prosthetic limbs be made in countries like this without all of the legal BS? Obviously they can be printed w/o it. I don't know what the average yearly wage is in Sudan, but $100 could be a rather sizable amount of money. Regardless, good for Mr. Ebeling for trying to make a difference.
I only know the consumer end of it.
Obviously there is overhead - the prosthetist has an office, staff, equipment. Then there's the work and expertise - there's a lot of custom fitting and casting involved, especially with the sockets. Usually multiple appointments and fittings. Then of course the parts that aren't custom come from a supply chain, with markup along the way. And there's the insane markup from it being something covered (to some extent, with some insurances) by insurance and government programs. And the presumably small demand/market for the manufactured parts must mean small production runs, and higher costs.
So yeah, part of me reads these stories and cries "why can't we have $100 limbs here?!?" But the rest of me knows better...
If the library owns the books, then they have a collection, and that collection is a community asset. If the library has to pay for each checkout, I feel that any donation is just subsidizing poor/cheap people's amazon ebook purchases. You can't donate ebooks to the library so all this money has to come from taxes/cash donations. Ultimately at that point the library is an expensive internet cafe and a place taxpayer money is funneled into Amazon in an inefficient way.
Not to mention, paper books avoid the format problem. I can check out a paper book the library got in 1930, and if it hasn't physically fallen apart, I can still read it.
Cost may be an issue for e-readers today, but you already can get some pretty damn cheap e-readers if you are willing to buy something other than the big name brands. So if you are talking about the future of books, not just trends over the next 5-10 years, it is most likely going to be incredibly cheap color e-ink tablets that most books are read from.
No one knows the future for sure, so perhaps POD will have its place, but I find it doubtful.
I don't, unless we finally get ereaders that are literally indistinguishable from paper books. There are just times that I want to read a book, not hold an ereader.
The laws of nature are almost completely understood in a few, very important senses. We know that our Universe is about 13.8 billion years old, despite having human experiences and observations that range from only a few fractions of a second to a handful of years. Our investigations of the laws of nature today allow us to look back into the distant history of the Universe, and understand what it was like 13.8 billion years ago, and how that gave rise to our Universe today.
We believe we know that stuff. Obviously we can't verify it experimentally.
Like anything else, social networking info is a possible source of useful info. As long as you understand the limitations.
I doubt that the average headhunter is good at evaluating much of anything, social networking or no. But that goes for the average {most professions} too...
Slashdot Mirror
It's very hard to automate a broken idea.
For $9.95/mo, I can listen to pretty much whatever I want, as much as I want.
Or for $9.95/mo, I could maybe get a bargain basement clearance CD every month. Which has one song that I want, and 15 that I don't.
Hmm ....
Productivity has been rising for decades.
Productivity has been rising for millennia.
Yet somehow, the dystopias only seem to arrive when we take large political actions designed to prevent them from arriving.
A lot of EEs used to be needed to design discrete circuits. Nowadays most of that probably gets implemented in SW. So maybe not so many are needed any more?
Needed?!? We don't care who's needed. In the world of politics, "jobs" are a magical substance, and are all about the heart.
I'm not sure why we're discussing Apple in this context at all. I guess we just like also-rans here...
Because Apple is the choice of the cool crowd ... and geeks secretly love the cool crowd and want to be in it.
What is it you do again son?
Well, last night I had to work late; I was shaving bees ...
Oy, my son shaving bees! What your father would say!
There is a desperate need for lower cost, more versatile prosthetics.
Political interventions - you know, of the kind that this article is urging (either explicitly or implicitly) - are responsible for far more unemployment trauma than automation ever has been.
We did not have robot armies causing mass unemployment in the 1930's. No, we had the "New Deal" turning a temporary crash into a Depression.
We did not have robot armies causing the stagflation of the 1970s.
And we did not have some massive advance in robotics magically happen right around 2008 / 2009. No, we had "stimulus", huge food stamp expansion, unemployment "insurance" 'extension', bank "bailouts" ... a massive firehose of government spending supposedly intended to make things better.
And all these memes are designed to get you to blame CEOs, Republicans, robots ... anybody except those who are actually responsible. You are being told what to think, who to blame, and you are going right along.
The openly attack the private organizations that provide birth control pills and condoms to would be welfare mothers.
A firehose full of birth control pills and condoms has been poured on our society since the early 1970s. You may have noticed that ALL indicators - unwed pregnancy, STDs, abortions - have got WORSE, not better, since the 1970s.
So just who is being anti-science, again?
I can see with my own eyes that opening the government spending spigots ("stimulus", food stamp expansion, etc.) has not made anything any better. It has made things worse.
Early European settlers in New England devastated the native landscape
Eek!
and, basically, turned it into English sheep farms.
Oh, you mean they wanted homes and livelihoods just like us. That doesn't sound quite so sinister.
The Democrats can have Christie for all I care ... they are his true kindred.
But it is funny to see all the Two Minutes Hate starting already.
Until we stop waiting for the "free market" to come up with a solution and regulate better credit card security, nothing will change.
Because if the government "does something", there will magically be no economic tradeoffs?
Because the government has proven they are such security experts?
... under this circumstance, remembering passwords is likely to be the least of my problems.
You can't plan for everything. This one is pretty low on my list.
It's very easy to create unique passwords that are hard to guess, and completely trivial to remember. My method is this:
- I have a 4 "stems" that are the first letters of 4 lines of poetry I remember from school. one stem is used for "very personal" things (ssh private key passwords for instance), another for login on "trusted" machines (my servers), and a third to use on various websites I trust moderately, and a fourth is a "junk" stem to use on shite websites (hotmail and the likes).
- To each stems, I append 2 digits (always the same)
- I prefix each stem with the first 3 letters of my username, and I append the 3 first letters of the machine's name, or website name I'm logging onto, after the digits.
- Finally, I append the number of letters in the machine name or website name (sans www. or .com).
The passwords that I create that way are reasonably secure, usually unique, and all I have to remember is a poem, my username for a particular machine/website (those I can store somewhere in plain text just in case) and the method to derive the corresponding password.
I have kajillions of passwords, and zero trouble remembering them. How hard can it be? I've never felt the need for a password storage solution of any kind.
Hey, that's great ... {scribble} ... what was that middle one again?
There's reasonable evidence that the prevalence of obesity is related to the liberal use of high-fructose corn syrup on prepared foods. And a part of the reason for that use of corn is GM corn.
The main reason for the high use of corn syrup is sugar tariffs. We charge insane tariffs on imported sugar, so that a few families in Florida can be rich. This drives the price of sugar up to multiples of what it otherwise would be.
It would be interesting to know how long these printed artificial limbs will hold up compared to a conventional prosthetic limb. It would also be interesting to know how much a conventional prosthetic could be made for w/o all of the overhead. I realize that in the US there's a ton of money dumped into testing, trials, FDA approval, lawyers and fear of being sued. But why can't conventional prosthetic limbs be made in countries like this without all of the legal BS? Obviously they can be printed w/o it. I don't know what the average yearly wage is in Sudan, but $100 could be a rather sizable amount of money. Regardless, good for Mr. Ebeling for trying to make a difference.
I only know the consumer end of it.
Obviously there is overhead - the prosthetist has an office, staff, equipment. Then there's the work and expertise - there's a lot of custom fitting and casting involved, especially with the sockets. Usually multiple appointments and fittings. Then of course the parts that aren't custom come from a supply chain, with markup along the way. And there's the insane markup from it being something covered (to some extent, with some insurances) by insurance and government programs. And the presumably small demand/market for the manufactured parts must mean small production runs, and higher costs.
So yeah, part of me reads these stories and cries "why can't we have $100 limbs here?!?" But the rest of me knows better ...
No more worthless than the assertion it was addressed to.
You mean, for us? Not so well. Chaotic weather, not even, gradual warming over the entire globe, is what we can expect for quite a number of years.
You seriously believe that weather is "more chaotic" than it always has been?
I *believe* flipping a coin is 50-50 odds, but of course I didn't verify every single coin in existence. Therefore it's little more than faith.
Get back to me when you've run a few universes through a few billion years.
If the library owns the books, then they have a collection, and that collection is a community asset. If the library has to pay for each checkout, I feel that any donation is just subsidizing poor/cheap people's amazon ebook purchases. You can't donate ebooks to the library so all this money has to come from taxes/cash donations. Ultimately at that point the library is an expensive internet cafe and a place taxpayer money is funneled into Amazon in an inefficient way.
Not to mention, paper books avoid the format problem. I can check out a paper book the library got in 1930, and if it hasn't physically fallen apart, I can still read it.
Cost may be an issue for e-readers today, but you already can get some pretty damn cheap e-readers if you are willing to buy something other than the big name brands. So if you are talking about the future of books, not just trends over the next 5-10 years, it is most likely going to be incredibly cheap color e-ink tablets that most books are read from.
No one knows the future for sure, so perhaps POD will have its place, but I find it doubtful.
I don't, unless we finally get ereaders that are literally indistinguishable from paper books. There are just times that I want to read a book, not hold an ereader.
If I wanted to read the Internet, I could stay home.
THANK YOU. I officially nominate you as genius of the decade ... and please let me use that quote at will!
The laws of nature are almost completely understood in a few, very important senses. We know that our Universe is about 13.8 billion years old, despite having human experiences and observations that range from only a few fractions of a second to a handful of years. Our investigations of the laws of nature today allow us to look back into the distant history of the Universe, and understand what it was like 13.8 billion years ago, and how that gave rise to our Universe today.
We believe we know that stuff. Obviously we can't verify it experimentally.
Like anything else, social networking info is a possible source of useful info. As long as you understand the limitations.
I doubt that the average headhunter is good at evaluating much of anything, social networking or no. But that goes for the average {most professions} too ...