They shouldn't force me to install another client before I can even play the game. I bought a couple of games in a Steam sale and was very unhappy to have to install two new steam competitors just to be able to play. I chose not to, since you then spend half your life waiting for updates to complete, and turning the bloody things off in your systray.
And they should allow me to gift my games to friends when I am finished with them.
Someone writes in a journal for Atomic Scientists says that competing technologies cannot possibly supply the worlds power needs. And people are surprised about this.
re: your sigline, just curious, but wouldn't it have been better to use plugw@sh or some other variant rather than something that looks very much like your name. Or is the whole thing a pun that has just gone way over my head?
It is not surprising though. The only thing the US leads the world on now is IP, so they want the world to protect it. Back when they were a fledgling state they were quite happy to steal IP from Europe and designed their laws accordingly (i.e. they refused to recognise European patents for quite a few years).
The mystery is why everyone else is colluding with the US on IP laws. The power they have is that of a school yard bully. The moment someone stands up to them it is all over since it is paid for with other peoples money.
So you think that a tax rate of less than 5% is reasonable. Reasonable for what? Dunno which country you are in, but a country has to provide services somehow. The lower the tax rate, the lower the quality of the services.
Personally I would rather pay more and have a fairer and more equitable society.
What is wrong with avoiding paying taxes? What is wrong with paying your fair share under any circumstances? It is ethically wrong. The problem is that the law is an ass, and is so complicated that people with time and money can always find ways of avoiding paying their dues.
Hey, you have a model that says we are cycling towards a cliff, and are already gaining momentum. Prove to me that there is a cliff there before I think about putting on the breaks.
Measurements on the great barrier reef have shown a temperature increase of 2 degrees since the 60's, and they are expecting another 2 by 2050, which is largely regarded as the temperature needed to kill it off. Already outside a reasonable range for the fauna that live in the area, which are migrating down the coast. If this were to happen over millennia the reef would probably migrate south, but at this rate of change it can't propagate quickly enough.
"Alarmists" are often climate scientists. "Denialists" seem frequently to be corporate funded loons with no expertise in the area. But even if both sides were equally populated by people of the same calibre I would still think it was worth trying to switch to alternatives ASAP to avoid the risk.
Think about it - if someone said "do this, or there is a 50% chance your house will burn down" you would do 'this', even if 'this' was quite expensive. After all, most people do exactly 'this' when they buy home insurance, and the chance is way lower than 50%.
I fail to see how a crappy Murdoch rag could be responsible for global warming.
Despite what you say, many people DO deny global warming, and just like the creationists they change their arguments when they are on a loser. Perhaps you would care to postulate as to why thousands of experts in their field are wrong, and posit an alternative theory as to why the CO2 we are pumping into the atmosphere is not following the laws of thermodynamics and heating us up like a frog on a barbie.
What I don't get is how a fair proportion of posters on this site, who must be mostly tech savvy, can leave their thinking shoes in the cupboard. Maybe it is because it is a predominately US site and you seem to be more right wing than Hitler over there. I don't think many of you get that Obama is actually right of centre compared with the free world, and your country is run as a corpocracy with your politicians doing the bidding of their sponsors rather than their electorates.
Actually I seem to recall that gas produces far less CO2 for energy produced that coal or oil. The thing is though, that we should take this as an opportunity to move to clean energy because it is better all round. No pollution, no digging dirty great holes in the ground (and I am in Australia, we are famous for the size of our holes in the ground). Sure it will be more expensive in the short term, but maybe that reflects the TRUE cost of energy, and you can bet your bottom dollar that it will plummet in price if the world made a commitment to full conversion. As a side benefit there would be huge investment into energy storage which should finally give us flying cars.
Incidentally I was in Saudi Arabia in December and while I was there the king announced a US$25 billion program of investment in solar PV. He must know something we don't...
We should just stop fantasizing about it replacing nuclear anytime soon.
That is more about politics than it is about capability. You don't even need storage if you are prepared to oversupply enough. 180% covers 90% of the time, and a 270% oversupply will give you 99.9%. Figures based on the US continent I believe, so does not assume a world grid. The later oversupply figure is expected to be cost effective by 2030 as green tech becomes more cost efficient.
A breakthrough in energy storage technology in the next 17 years would short circuit that time frame.
In other words we can start the process of phasing out dirty energy right now.
Using your logic dousing myself in lighter fluid every day would also be fine because it won't be the direct chemical effects of the fluid that will harm me.
CO2 increases the ability of the atmosphere to retain heat. A hotter planet is not good for human health.
The effect of restricting CO2 emissions will be to restrict its emissions to the most cost effective forms. Which will almost certainly see petrol cars replaced by electric ones, especially in the city. In addition to limiting warming this will have massive benefits to air quality, as well as reduce traffic noise which should lower stress in the population.
I get your point but there is no way you can universally say that all businesses want the same thing. Or coders for that matter.
Air traffic control systems vs a game for example. The most important thing to the business selling the latter might be hitting a date. Or having it look nice enough to sell.
Similarly maintainability only applies if you intend to maintain your product.
"not every bit of code that should be rewritten can be"
To right. I worked with a guy who took it upon himself to completely restructure a core product when implementing a fairly small new feature. What should have taken a month ended up taking 6 months and a massive regression testing effort because he broke the code so bad it kept failing. We ended up shipping six months late. The guy should have been fired, especially as he had previously asked to do a rewrite and was told not to. The worst part about it was that even after this experience he was still happy with his decision because he had better code.
What many, if not most, programmers do not get is that there are costs to rewriting outside of their own little worlds. Non-fuctional changes require testing, and may require the users of the software to do their own re-testing. You may also need to retune your operational monitoring rules to cope with any changed usage patterns of memory, disk or IO. In addition functional changes may need supporting documentation, help files, marketing material etc updated.
We have exactly this problem in Australia with shrubs on legs. We call them emus. They watch you approach from miles away, and then step out in front of you at the last moment. Same thing happens with kangaroos.
Of course an IR camera would pick them up no trouble. The challenge for the AI is then to try to work out whether they are a threat or not. Which I am certain it could do much better than a human. In theory you could even have some front facing airbags that the car deploys in the event of not being able to hit something sizable, to minimise the damage to both the object and the car.
Actually insurance companies are likely to jump on the bandwagon sooner rather than later. If autonomous cars are shown to cause / be involved in less accidents, I can see premiums go down if you agree to use one, with perhaps an excess if you were driving at the time.
Insurance is a huge industry. Once premiums go through the roof if you touch the steering wheel most people won't bother.
No weirder than the western hemisphere of the earth when you think about it. Which is exactly where it is. Of course you Americans make it harder for yourselves if you insist on putting the US in the centre of the map. Or should that be center?
I haven't personally received compelling evidence that the world is round, made up of atoms and over four billion years old. But since most scientists who have spent their lives studying these fields agree that this is the case, I have no reason to doubt it.
Same with global warming. That the detractors are often right wing and heavily influenced by either god botherers or fossil fuel lobby groups only makes me more comfortable with believing the science.
If you don't think that humans are the cause, as well as identifying the actual cause you also have to explain why the rules of thermodynamics don't apply to a situation where we are adding a gas to the atmosphere that is known to increase heat retention.
Oh, and as it happens even IF you don't think humans are the cause, what is the downside to moving to non-polluting forms of energy before we need to?
And even it it is just local weather that this station is reading, it is the local weather of one massive lump of ice that the world rather needs to stay in solid form, so probably more relevant than, say, the temperature of a desert in Arizona. Unless you live there and quite like the thought of one day being on a beachfront.
All this talk of pay ceiling and being haggled down doesn't sound like a reasonable way to sell your services.
I make sure that any potential employer is in the right ballpark before I go to interview. No point in wasting anyone's time if the numbers don't stack up. After all, they already have a resume, so they know what I am capable. The interview should then be about making sure it is accurate, and that we are a good cultural fit for each other.
IMHO you need to man up and not treat prospective employers as holding all the cards. Taking a negotiating course might pay for itself as well.
When people rail against 'free loaders', welfare cheats and the like, they often fail to spot the biggest freeloaders of them all. Those that inherit their wealth. From a social standpoint, they are as useless as the people you identity as freeloaders.
What really gets on my goat is that I pay around 35% tax on my hard earned. Those with inherited wealth pay much less than that on the money that they gain through investments. It is nominally 25% here in Australia, but the world is set up by them for them, so with a bit of creative accounting they pay nothing, or negotiate cents in the dollar.
Personally I am fine with taxation. It is the cost to pay to live in a civilised society, But the fact that the super rich get off scott free has gotta change.
Dunno how old you are but this sounds like me talking, maybe 20 years ago. Congratulations, you are one of the few that has ability and focus. Believe me neither a a common commodity in people (although many people may think they are).
The problem is that our society will go to hell in a hand basket when (not if) there is mass layoffs and no new jobs. We are already seeing the start of this trend. What is needed is a big shift in our society, or it will end in tears.
To misquote: First they outsourced the textile workers to Asia, but I said good, cheaper clothes for me. Then they outsourced the auto makers to Asia, but I said good, cheaper more reliable cars for me. Then they replaced the Asians with robots, but at least some of the robots were our robots. Then they outsourced the thinking jobs to strong AI, and no-one was left to buy anything except the people that owned the robots and computers. But that was okay because they are the only ones that matters.
If we don't get this right, in about 20-30 years the rich will be trying to figure out how to get rid of the other 95% of the population without causing too much inconvenience.
But they still shaft you. Either you put it in the bank, in which case the rich get to use your money to make more money.
Or you stuff it under the mattress, and the rich steal it off you via the mechanism known as 'increasing the money supply' which serves to devalue the currency.
The best way to fuck the rich is get yourself a boob job and become an escort. Or work to destroy society which will end up creating a different set of rich in the long run.
Slashdot Mirror
So am I, on two conditions.
They shouldn't force me to install another client before I can even play the game. I bought a couple of games in a Steam sale and was very unhappy to have to install two new steam competitors just to be able to play. I chose not to, since you then spend half your life waiting for updates to complete, and turning the bloody things off in your systray.
And they should allow me to gift my games to friends when I am finished with them.
Someone writes in a journal for Atomic Scientists says that competing technologies cannot possibly supply the worlds power needs. And people are surprised about this.
Greentech Media recently had an article on how the feasibility of running just on renewables: http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/how-about-99.9-percent-renewables.
PV is becoming cheaper per watt all the time, and they are also figuring out how to get energy on overcast days.
Some of the worlds best minds are busy trying to figure out how to build supercapacitors: http://singularityhub.com/2013/01/29/the-super-supercapacitor/ . Once they get those puppies up and running PV will take the world by storm.
re: your sigline, just curious, but wouldn't it have been better to use plugw@sh or some other variant rather than something that looks very much like your name. Or is the whole thing a pun that has just gone way over my head?
It is not surprising though. The only thing the US leads the world on now is IP, so they want the world to protect it. Back when they were a fledgling state they were quite happy to steal IP from Europe and designed their laws accordingly (i.e. they refused to recognise European patents for quite a few years).
The mystery is why everyone else is colluding with the US on IP laws. The power they have is that of a school yard bully. The moment someone stands up to them it is all over since it is paid for with other peoples money.
You join a treaty. You leave a treaty. Simple. Only politicians hide behind these simple facts.
So you think that a tax rate of less than 5% is reasonable. Reasonable for what? Dunno which country you are in, but a country has to provide services somehow. The lower the tax rate, the lower the quality of the services.
Personally I would rather pay more and have a fairer and more equitable society.
What is wrong with avoiding paying taxes? What is wrong with paying your fair share under any circumstances? It is ethically wrong. The problem is that the law is an ass, and is so complicated that people with time and money can always find ways of avoiding paying their dues.
Hey, you have a model that says we are cycling towards a cliff, and are already gaining momentum. Prove to me that there is a cliff there before I think about putting on the breaks.
How did you ever make it to adulthood.
Measurements on the great barrier reef have shown a temperature increase of 2 degrees since the 60's, and they are expecting another 2 by 2050, which is largely regarded as the temperature needed to kill it off. Already outside a reasonable range for the fauna that live in the area, which are migrating down the coast. If this were to happen over millennia the reef would probably migrate south, but at this rate of change it can't propagate quickly enough.
See http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-18/warming-to-put-oceans-and-reefs-in-hot-water/4470104
"Alarmists" are often climate scientists. "Denialists" seem frequently to be corporate funded loons with no expertise in the area. But even if both sides were equally populated by people of the same calibre I would still think it was worth trying to switch to alternatives ASAP to avoid the risk.
Think about it - if someone said "do this, or there is a 50% chance your house will burn down" you would do 'this', even if 'this' was quite expensive. After all, most people do exactly 'this' when they buy home insurance, and the chance is way lower than 50%.
I fail to see how a crappy Murdoch rag could be responsible for global warming.
Despite what you say, many people DO deny global warming, and just like the creationists they change their arguments when they are on a loser. Perhaps you would care to postulate as to why thousands of experts in their field are wrong, and posit an alternative theory as to why the CO2 we are pumping into the atmosphere is not following the laws of thermodynamics and heating us up like a frog on a barbie.
What I don't get is how a fair proportion of posters on this site, who must be mostly tech savvy, can leave their thinking shoes in the cupboard. Maybe it is because it is a predominately US site and you seem to be more right wing than Hitler over there. I don't think many of you get that Obama is actually right of centre compared with the free world, and your country is run as a corpocracy with your politicians doing the bidding of their sponsors rather than their electorates.
Actually I seem to recall that gas produces far less CO2 for energy produced that coal or oil. The thing is though, that we should take this as an opportunity to move to clean energy because it is better all round. No pollution, no digging dirty great holes in the ground (and I am in Australia, we are famous for the size of our holes in the ground). Sure it will be more expensive in the short term, but maybe that reflects the TRUE cost of energy, and you can bet your bottom dollar that it will plummet in price if the world made a commitment to full conversion. As a side benefit there would be huge investment into energy storage which should finally give us flying cars.
There was a recent study on how green energy could provide all of our energy needs in Green:tech http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/how-about-99.9-percent-renewables.
Incidentally I was in Saudi Arabia in December and while I was there the king announced a US$25 billion program of investment in solar PV. He must know something we don't...
We should just stop fantasizing about it replacing nuclear anytime soon.
That is more about politics than it is about capability. You don't even need storage if you are prepared to oversupply enough. 180% covers 90% of the time, and a 270% oversupply will give you 99.9%. Figures based on the US continent I believe, so does not assume a world grid. The later oversupply figure is expected to be cost effective by 2030 as green tech becomes more cost efficient.
A breakthrough in energy storage technology in the next 17 years would short circuit that time frame.
In other words we can start the process of phasing out dirty energy right now.
Source: http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/how-about-99.9-percent-renewables.
Using your logic dousing myself in lighter fluid every day would also be fine because it won't be the direct chemical effects of the fluid that will harm me.
CO2 increases the ability of the atmosphere to retain heat. A hotter planet is not good for human health.
The effect of restricting CO2 emissions will be to restrict its emissions to the most cost effective forms. Which will almost certainly see petrol cars replaced by electric ones, especially in the city. In addition to limiting warming this will have massive benefits to air quality, as well as reduce traffic noise which should lower stress in the population.
I get your point but there is no way you can universally say that all businesses want the same thing. Or coders for that matter.
Air traffic control systems vs a game for example. The most important thing to the business selling the latter might be hitting a date. Or having it look nice enough to sell.
Similarly maintainability only applies if you intend to maintain your product.
"not every bit of code that should be rewritten can be"
To right. I worked with a guy who took it upon himself to completely restructure a core product when implementing a fairly small new feature. What should have taken a month ended up taking 6 months and a massive regression testing effort because he broke the code so bad it kept failing. We ended up shipping six months late. The guy should have been fired, especially as he had previously asked to do a rewrite and was told not to. The worst part about it was that even after this experience he was still happy with his decision because he had better code.
What many, if not most, programmers do not get is that there are costs to rewriting outside of their own little worlds. Non-fuctional changes require testing, and may require the users of the software to do their own re-testing. You may also need to retune your operational monitoring rules to cope with any changed usage patterns of memory, disk or IO. In addition functional changes may need supporting documentation, help files, marketing material etc updated.
Not at all. There are plenty of cases where doing things differently work but can have a massive difference in terms of performance, scalability etc.
Mine does (Australian government department). Interestingly they specifically exclude the local banks.
We have exactly this problem in Australia with shrubs on legs. We call them emus. They watch you approach from miles away, and then step out in front of you at the last moment. Same thing happens with kangaroos.
Of course an IR camera would pick them up no trouble. The challenge for the AI is then to try to work out whether they are a threat or not. Which I am certain it could do much better than a human. In theory you could even have some front facing airbags that the car deploys in the event of not being able to hit something sizable, to minimise the damage to both the object and the car.
Actually insurance companies are likely to jump on the bandwagon sooner rather than later. If autonomous cars are shown to cause / be involved in less accidents, I can see premiums go down if you agree to use one, with perhaps an excess if you were driving at the time.
Insurance is a huge industry. Once premiums go through the roof if you touch the steering wheel most people won't bother.
No weirder than the western hemisphere of the earth when you think about it. Which is exactly where it is. Of course you Americans make it harder for yourselves if you insist on putting the US in the centre of the map. Or should that be center?
I haven't personally received compelling evidence that the world is round, made up of atoms and over four billion years old. But since most scientists who have spent their lives studying these fields agree that this is the case, I have no reason to doubt it.
Same with global warming. That the detractors are often right wing and heavily influenced by either god botherers or fossil fuel lobby groups only makes me more comfortable with believing the science.
If you don't think that humans are the cause, as well as identifying the actual cause you also have to explain why the rules of thermodynamics don't apply to a situation where we are adding a gas to the atmosphere that is known to increase heat retention.
Oh, and as it happens even IF you don't think humans are the cause, what is the downside to moving to non-polluting forms of energy before we need to?
And even it it is just local weather that this station is reading, it is the local weather of one massive lump of ice that the world rather needs to stay in solid form, so probably more relevant than, say, the temperature of a desert in Arizona. Unless you live there and quite like the thought of one day being on a beachfront.
All this talk of pay ceiling and being haggled down doesn't sound like a reasonable way to sell your services.
I make sure that any potential employer is in the right ballpark before I go to interview. No point in wasting anyone's time if the numbers don't stack up. After all, they already have a resume, so they know what I am capable. The interview should then be about making sure it is accurate, and that we are a good cultural fit for each other.
IMHO you need to man up and not treat prospective employers as holding all the cards. Taking a negotiating course might pay for itself as well.
When people rail against 'free loaders', welfare cheats and the like, they often fail to spot the biggest freeloaders of them all. Those that inherit their wealth. From a social standpoint, they are as useless as the people you identity as freeloaders.
What really gets on my goat is that I pay around 35% tax on my hard earned. Those with inherited wealth pay much less than that on the money that they gain through investments. It is nominally 25% here in Australia, but the world is set up by them for them, so with a bit of creative accounting they pay nothing, or negotiate cents in the dollar.
Personally I am fine with taxation. It is the cost to pay to live in a civilised society, But the fact that the super rich get off scott free has gotta change.
Dunno how old you are but this sounds like me talking, maybe 20 years ago. Congratulations, you are one of the few that has ability and focus. Believe me neither a a common commodity in people (although many people may think they are).
The problem is that our society will go to hell in a hand basket when (not if) there is mass layoffs and no new jobs. We are already seeing the start of this trend. What is needed is a big shift in our society, or it will end in tears.
To misquote:
First they outsourced the textile workers to Asia, but I said good, cheaper clothes for me.
Then they outsourced the auto makers to Asia, but I said good, cheaper more reliable cars for me.
Then they replaced the Asians with robots, but at least some of the robots were our robots.
Then they outsourced the thinking jobs to strong AI, and no-one was left to buy anything except the people that owned the robots and computers. But that was okay because they are the only ones that matters.
If we don't get this right, in about 20-30 years the rich will be trying to figure out how to get rid of the other 95% of the population without causing too much inconvenience.
But they still shaft you. Either you put it in the bank, in which case the rich get to use your money to make more money.
Or you stuff it under the mattress, and the rich steal it off you via the mechanism known as 'increasing the money supply' which serves to devalue the currency.
The best way to fuck the rich is get yourself a boob job and become an escort. Or work to destroy society which will end up creating a different set of rich in the long run.
Well, there would be less pollution by virtue of many fewer trucks on the road.
On the other hand, if you didn't live near a chip factory you would have to live in the pre-computing age.