One example I heard about on NPR was a bakery that made fancy cakes somewhere in Colorado. The baker formerly made wedding cakes in addition to regular cakes for things like birthdays and such. The baker currently does not offer the wedding cake service any longer because if he can't turn down people with a particular sexual orientation he is legally bound to turn down everybody. It ultimately hurts choice. It is bigotry and shame on the business owner for not being comfortable enough as a person to tolerate all sorts of different sexual orientations, but is this really the arena that people of that particular sexual orientation should be taking a stand with respect to their rights? The "denied access to see their partner in the hospital" circumstance tugs on more heart strings than "no wedding cakes for anybody until we can get this mess sorted out".
I'd have to agree that the "Internet Explorer" in "Microsoft Internet Explorer" isn't the part the causes me not to trust it.
On the plus side, Microsoft still can't figure out how to compete with the big boys in the Mobile platform environment so they are successfully relegates to backend server infrastructure, offices, and home environments for people who aren't compelled to care to much about running competing software (i.e. Mac, Linux, OpenOffice, Mozilla, or Google). I do admit to dealing with Microsoft in these three environments... I'm still glad they are virtually locked out from Mobile, though.
I'm surprised that anybody believed Lenovo had a good reputation dating back to when they took over the IBM Thinkpad brand of laptops (in 2005) since IBM didn't want it anymore. Prior to that, I haven't heard of Lenovo. After that, I knew of Lenovo as a Chinese company. 'Nuf said.
Efficiencies are a major issue with Wind and Solar. I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation a few years ago for powering the state of New Jersey with Solar and estimated that the size of the Solar Panel arrays for this implementation would be approximately the size of the entire state of New Jersey. It could be that solar is 5-10x more efficient than they were at the time I did my guesstimate, but even at those levels Solar doesn't scale like that.
FYI... I recall reading at the time that nuclear powers 4,000 MW in NJ and accounts for 50% of NJs power consumption at the time. So I scaled up the Length X Width of a solar panel that could deliver 8,000 MW and came up with something like 50 miles by 180 miles. I provide no warranty about this memory of the data... but encourage anybody to correct me if I'm wrong.
This sounds like a canary/coal mine solution... but I also don't understand the chemistry of it. Does anybody know why a radiation leak would cause an orange-then-white painted wall to show white when there isn't a leak and orange when there is?
I had the opportunity to hear Nancy speak a few years ago. Something that resonated with me that she said was that errors/accidents (mostly?) occur because people/systems with imperfect information make reasonable (but bad) assumptions... so the only truly "safe/reliable" system is the one where perfect information is being given to the feedback loops to the people/systems who are making operational decisions (obviously not possible for complex, new systems).
As in... unique movement mechanics with few exceptions for 6 different types of pieces and no more than 16 different objects in play for each player at a time? Honestly I think chess is the best example of "simple rules, tough to master" but I must disagree that it has the "maximum amount of rules for a game".
There are games that are far more complicated than chess that are still great. I would submit "Magic: The Gathering" as an example. But really, if you take the time... there aren't too many popular games that are "too complicated".
I'm going to jump in here because this is the sort of discussion that fascinates me. Science fiction calls this type of thought experiment world "Post-scarcity" which is a counterpoint to 1984 which was more of a regulated scarcity economy. My thought is that when the world goes "Post-scarcity" there will still be things that are scarce such as ocean-front property or awesome tickets seats to see a live performance. The things that will NOT be scarce are food, water, electricity, comfortable sleeping quarters, wireless network bandwidth, clean clothing, and advertizements on the video program platform du jour. This is by no means a correct list, but to answer the question, "what do you do when you only need 50% (or less) of the available people to actually work?" my answer would be to ensure that they have the minimum "Post-scarcity" list and that in their free time they aren't causing trouble. Since a lot of these people will cause trouble, though, the alternatives are to stick them in jail or make some kind of fulfilling occupation available to them. So yeah, certain jobs that robots replaced humans would revert back to the humans. The economics basically becomes a muddle at this point.
"If all those things could be provided to me without working, I wouldn't work." There is a degree of leisure activities that becomes available if you stop working. You'd have time to do more things in your newly found spare time - some free like running outside - some not free like playing a round of golf. So if you wanted to golf, you'd still need to work (i.e. earn money) so that you can trade with the golf course to reserve your tee-time (this example works because I think there can never be a high enough supply of golf courses to meet the demand is playing a round is free and people have infinite free time).
"If you make it too low, they will be unable to survive." I think the greatest threat is making it so low that they organize, rebel, and destroy the companies who shifted from human labor to robot labor. It is tough for me to imagine a scenario is a 1st world country where technological advancement leads to people who are displaced gracefully exiting the human race.
I can't tell from your message tone if you think fewer women in CS is a problem that should be solved or if you think it is ingrained in human nature for men to be to majority of CS workers. I feel like it is on the human nature side of things, but mainly I just wanted to post this link which illustrates Female/Male occupation splits by percentage and shows CS somewhere in the middle of occupations that are male dominated.
What the article fails to mention is that the new reactor has to be 800 feet tall or buried 400 feet in the ground. Or 400 feet tall and 200 feet buried. It's pretty complicated figuring out the math here.
I'm not sure I see the point in paying any significant amount of money for eBook cover art, but to each his own. The average cover art for an eBook is going to be shown Icon Size on an eReader menu. No?
I agree editing is key and being able to pay editors frees an author to do other things. But wouldn't high editor fees equate to the equivalent of the "unpolished/lousy prototype" type project that this thread is saying shouldn't go through KS anyway?
My KS pet peeve is seeing typographic errors in project descriptions. What chance is there that the end product will be polished if the requester doesn't have sense to polish the request for money that they are putting out there?
A video game of a card game is still fundamentally a card game. A KS project to implement a video game based on a card game that already exists (whether it be published or not) is a more attractive KS than one to invent a new video game card game that only exists in the "idea phase" of the designer's head. Right?
An extra 3GB of data sent to a casual users ought to earn Facebook some kickbacks from cellphone providers!
So maybe that's their new business model? Deliver content, earn kickbacks? This actually seems much more lucrative than being an advertizing company since cellular phone companies have been clamping down on Monthly Allowances for the past few years.
Are you trolling? I neither mentioned "white" or even "minorities". Hiring based on certain factors is illegal. Period. There are laws that exist. I don't care to reference them. Go look them up yourself. Company's need to take minimum steps to ensure they follow these laws. End of discussion.
Are you accusing these companies of racist hiring practices?
No. Speaking generally.
General demographics of the company's employees is not evidence.
Correct. But Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and every other big company with complicated organizational structures where hiring decisions aren't centralized should be aware that the people they trust to make hiring decision sometimes have selfish motivations behind their decisions. I don't think you'd disagree with the generalized statement that "racist people exist" and extrapolating that to "racist people who make hiring decisions exist" isn't too much of a leap of faith. I'm not saying Google, Facebook, or Yahoo employ racists who make hiring decisions. I'm saying they ought to have some checks and balances in place to guard against allowing illegal practices from occurring within their organizations.
My post was a reply to the question "Why should company's care about this at all?" because I think there are very real reasons why companies should care even if they have no real reason to suspect their hiring managers are acting unlawfully.
Why would Google/Facebook/Yahoo or any other company be paying attention to the race, gender or religion when hiring?
Company's aren't supposed to be racist. People are occasionally racist. People do hiring. Hiring is liable to be racist if the people doing the hiring are racist. Company's have a responsibility to monitor the people doing the hiring to minimize racism within that process. If a company does pass over a better qualified minority because of racism (or sexism, for that matter) that is a problem for the company.
The usual villain here is Walmart. They have been abusing suppliers long before Amazon got in the act.
Point of consideration that Walmart bullies around smaller suppliers while Amazon is taking a stand against one of the major publishers with Hachette and Warner Bros which is operated by Time Warner who is currently seeking Anti-Trust approval to merge with Comcast.
If anything, Amazon's ability to stand up to Big Media seems to be in the best interest of consumers. Big Media is where the evil monopolies seem to be. Amazon's power over online sales relies on convenience, their customer supplied rating/feedback system, and their pricing policies. Amazon wants to charge small for high quality because cheap crap will be rated as such on Amazon and nobody will buy it. Meanwhile Walmart wants to charge small for low quality because who cares about customers and suppliers if they can earn 20% of half a Trillion bucks each year (http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/wmt/financials).
I do not claim to know details... but as you mentioned a remote wipe won't work on a phone that is powered off and there are things known as Faraday Cage that should block signals once the time to power on the device and take evidence off it arrives.
Can you explain to me... are there significant people who go "Off Grid" or
are users with solar panels just offsetting part of the cost of their power?
I thought a small percent who have panels are producing more energy than
they consume allowing them to "sell" it to the power company which
means that they are due some amount of money... but still part of the Grid.
Between government meddling with regulations, oversight and taxation, and the whole "occupy" crowd making villains of those who have sacrificed for years to become successful, it's a wonder any entrepreneurs still exist.
Successful capitalists -- anybody who has more capital than they could spend in 100 lifetimes -- get an opportunity to allocate funds to things that benefit society. They earn the right to share the future. Too many pour billions of dollars into elections to buy regulations that have consensus not to benefit society. When so many successful capitalists are perceived to be focused on harming society like this, they are demonized.
Alas, the contributions of super-capitalists like Gates, Buffett, and Zuckerberg to try to benefit society get overlooked.
Slashdot Mirror
One example I heard about on NPR was a bakery that made fancy cakes somewhere in Colorado. The baker formerly made wedding cakes in addition to regular cakes for things like birthdays and such. The baker currently does not offer the wedding cake service any longer because if he can't turn down people with a particular sexual orientation he is legally bound to turn down everybody. It ultimately hurts choice. It is bigotry and shame on the business owner for not being comfortable enough as a person to tolerate all sorts of different sexual orientations, but is this really the arena that people of that particular sexual orientation should be taking a stand with respect to their rights? The "denied access to see their partner in the hospital" circumstance tugs on more heart strings than "no wedding cakes for anybody until we can get this mess sorted out".
I'd have to agree that the "Internet Explorer" in "Microsoft Internet Explorer" isn't the part the causes me not to trust it.
On the plus side, Microsoft still can't figure out how to compete with the big boys in the Mobile platform environment so they are successfully relegates to backend server infrastructure, offices, and home environments for people who aren't compelled to care to much about running competing software (i.e. Mac, Linux, OpenOffice, Mozilla, or Google). I do admit to dealing with Microsoft in these three environments... I'm still glad they are virtually locked out from Mobile, though.
I'm surprised that anybody believed Lenovo had a good reputation dating back to when they took over the IBM Thinkpad brand of laptops (in 2005) since IBM didn't want it anymore. Prior to that, I haven't heard of Lenovo. After that, I knew of Lenovo as a Chinese company. 'Nuf said.
Efficiencies are a major issue with Wind and Solar. I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation a few years ago for powering the state of New Jersey with Solar and estimated that the size of the Solar Panel arrays for this implementation would be approximately the size of the entire state of New Jersey. It could be that solar is 5-10x more efficient than they were at the time I did my guesstimate, but even at those levels Solar doesn't scale like that.
FYI... I recall reading at the time that nuclear powers 4,000 MW in NJ and accounts for 50% of NJs power consumption at the time. So I scaled up the Length X Width of a solar panel that could deliver 8,000 MW and came up with something like 50 miles by 180 miles. I provide no warranty about this memory of the data... but encourage anybody to correct me if I'm wrong.
This sounds like a canary/coal mine solution... but I also don't understand the chemistry of it. Does anybody know why a radiation leak would cause an orange-then-white painted wall to show white when there isn't a leak and orange when there is?
I had the opportunity to hear Nancy speak a few years ago. Something that resonated with me that she said was that errors/accidents (mostly?) occur because people/systems with imperfect information make reasonable (but bad) assumptions... so the only truly "safe/reliable" system is the one where perfect information is being given to the feedback loops to the people/systems who are making operational decisions (obviously not possible for complex, new systems).
Chess has the maximum amount of rules for a game.
As in... unique movement mechanics with few exceptions for 6 different types of pieces and no more than 16 different objects in play for each player at a time? Honestly I think chess is the best example of "simple rules, tough to master" but I must disagree that it has the "maximum amount of rules for a game".
There are games that are far more complicated than chess that are still great. I would submit "Magic: The Gathering" as an example. But really, if you take the time... there aren't too many popular games that are "too complicated".
I'm going to jump in here because this is the sort of discussion that fascinates me. Science fiction calls this type of thought experiment world "Post-scarcity" which is a counterpoint to 1984 which was more of a regulated scarcity economy. My thought is that when the world goes "Post-scarcity" there will still be things that are scarce such as ocean-front property or awesome tickets seats to see a live performance. The things that will NOT be scarce are food, water, electricity, comfortable sleeping quarters, wireless network bandwidth, clean clothing, and advertizements on the video program platform du jour. This is by no means a correct list, but to answer the question, "what do you do when you only need 50% (or less) of the available people to actually work?" my answer would be to ensure that they have the minimum "Post-scarcity" list and that in their free time they aren't causing trouble. Since a lot of these people will cause trouble, though, the alternatives are to stick them in jail or make some kind of fulfilling occupation available to them. So yeah, certain jobs that robots replaced humans would revert back to the humans. The economics basically becomes a muddle at this point.
"If all those things could be provided to me without working, I wouldn't work." There is a degree of leisure activities that becomes available if you stop working. You'd have time to do more things in your newly found spare time - some free like running outside - some not free like playing a round of golf. So if you wanted to golf, you'd still need to work (i.e. earn money) so that you can trade with the golf course to reserve your tee-time (this example works because I think there can never be a high enough supply of golf courses to meet the demand is playing a round is free and people have infinite free time).
"If you make it too low, they will be unable to survive." I think the greatest threat is making it so low that they organize, rebel, and destroy the companies who shifted from human labor to robot labor. It is tough for me to imagine a scenario is a 1st world country where technological advancement leads to people who are displaced gracefully exiting the human race.
I can't tell from your message tone if you think fewer women in CS is a problem that should be solved or if you think it is ingrained in human nature for men to be to majority of CS workers. I feel like it is on the human nature side of things, but mainly I just wanted to post this link which illustrates Female/Male occupation splits by percentage and shows CS somewhere in the middle of occupations that are male dominated.
What the article fails to mention is that the new reactor has to be 800 feet tall or buried 400 feet in the ground. Or 400 feet tall and 200 feet buried. It's pretty complicated figuring out the math here.
I'm not sure I see the point in paying any significant amount of money for eBook cover art, but to each his own. The average cover art for an eBook is going to be shown Icon Size on an eReader menu. No?
I agree editing is key and being able to pay editors frees an author to do other things. But wouldn't high editor fees equate to the equivalent of the "unpolished/lousy prototype" type project that this thread is saying shouldn't go through KS anyway?
My KS pet peeve is seeing typographic errors in project descriptions. What chance is there that the end product will be polished if the requester doesn't have sense to polish the request for money that they are putting out there?
Sell an eBook on Kickstarter and keep 95% of the sales (or whatever KS skims off the top which I think is 5-10%). :-)
A video game of a card game is still fundamentally a card game. A KS project to implement a video game based on a card game that already exists (whether it be published or not) is a more attractive KS than one to invent a new video game card game that only exists in the "idea phase" of the designer's head. Right?
An extra 3GB of data sent to a casual users ought to earn Facebook some kickbacks from cellphone providers!
So maybe that's their new business model? Deliver content, earn kickbacks? This actually seems much more lucrative than being an advertizing company since cellular phone companies have been clamping down on Monthly Allowances for the past few years.
I don't get what the .gif is supposed to mean. Are you trying to reference an image? Why didn't you hyperlink to it?
Fucking puerile moron.
Boy, that escalated quickly!
.jpg :)
Whatever... I learned a new word today! puerile.png FTW.
Are you trolling? I neither mentioned "white" or even "minorities". Hiring based on certain factors is illegal. Period. There are laws that exist. I don't care to reference them. Go look them up yourself. Company's need to take minimum steps to ensure they follow these laws. End of discussion.
Are you accusing these companies of racist hiring practices?
No. Speaking generally.
General demographics of the company's employees is not evidence.
Correct. But Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and every other big company with complicated organizational structures where hiring decisions aren't centralized should be aware that the people they trust to make hiring decision sometimes have selfish motivations behind their decisions. I don't think you'd disagree with the generalized statement that "racist people exist" and extrapolating that to "racist people who make hiring decisions exist" isn't too much of a leap of faith. I'm not saying Google, Facebook, or Yahoo employ racists who make hiring decisions. I'm saying they ought to have some checks and balances in place to guard against allowing illegal practices from occurring within their organizations.
My post was a reply to the question "Why should company's care about this at all?" because I think there are very real reasons why companies should care even if they have no real reason to suspect their hiring managers are acting unlawfully.
Why would Google/Facebook/Yahoo or any other company be paying attention to the race, gender or religion when hiring?
Company's aren't supposed to be racist. People are occasionally racist. People do hiring. Hiring is liable to be racist if the people doing the hiring are racist. Company's have a responsibility to monitor the people doing the hiring to minimize racism within that process. If a company does pass over a better qualified minority because of racism (or sexism, for that matter) that is a problem for the company.
The usual villain here is Walmart. They have been abusing suppliers long before Amazon got in the act.
Point of consideration that Walmart bullies around smaller suppliers while Amazon is taking a stand against one of the major publishers with Hachette and Warner Bros which is operated by Time Warner who is currently seeking Anti-Trust approval to merge with Comcast.
If anything, Amazon's ability to stand up to Big Media seems to be in the best interest of consumers. Big Media is where the evil monopolies seem to be. Amazon's power over online sales relies on convenience, their customer supplied rating/feedback system, and their pricing policies. Amazon wants to charge small for high quality because cheap crap will be rated as such on Amazon and nobody will buy it. Meanwhile Walmart wants to charge small for low quality because who cares about customers and suppliers if they can earn 20% of half a Trillion bucks each year (http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/wmt/financials).
As a policy Netflix doesn't promote or advertize Redbox Instant.
If I had a dime for every dime I have...
If I had $2 billion for every time you've said that...
Rob Ford is a good source material for jokes. He should get some form of immunity.
if the user does a remote wipe
I do not claim to know details... but as you mentioned a remote wipe won't work on a phone that is powered off and there are things known as Faraday Cage that should block signals once the time to power on the device and take evidence off it arrives.
Can you explain to me... are there significant people who go "Off Grid" or are users with solar panels just offsetting part of the cost of their power?
I thought a small percent who have panels are producing more energy than they consume allowing them to "sell" it to the power company which means that they are due some amount of money... but still part of the Grid.
Between government meddling with regulations, oversight and taxation, and the whole "occupy" crowd making villains of those who have sacrificed for years to become successful, it's a wonder any entrepreneurs still exist.
Successful capitalists -- anybody who has more capital than they could spend in 100 lifetimes -- get an opportunity to allocate funds to things that benefit society. They earn the right to share the future. Too many pour billions of dollars into elections to buy regulations that have consensus not to benefit society. When so many successful capitalists are perceived to be focused on harming society like this, they are demonized.
Alas, the contributions of super-capitalists like Gates, Buffett, and Zuckerberg to try to benefit society get overlooked.