> No, lets face it. The Switch was intended from the start to be Nintendo's way of gracefully exiting the console market while still saving face
Oh this canard again? Normally the naysayers only throw out the "Nintendo's exiting the console market" phrase when their console sales are doing poorly, like in the Gamecube or Wii U days, instead of trying it when the latest console is on fire in the market.
Nintendo builds whatever makes the most money. Consoles sell, and Nintendo builds theirs (unlike Microsoft and Sony) to sell at a profit instead of a loss. The 3DS and 2DS also sell very well, but sell to different segments. Most families aren't going to buy 3 switches for 3 kids, they'll buy 3 3/2DSs though. And a Switch. Unless they can build a fully functional Switch for less than $100 US all in, the DS line's not going anywhere.
> Oh wait here comes a new batch of the same games again.
Yeah, go back to PS and Xbone for the innovation of new franchises like Call of Duty, Battlefield, God of War, GTA, Assassin's Creed, and the NHL/NBA/Madden/NCAA/FIFA series. Sooo much more innovative and totally not at all reskins of previous annual releases...
Hi, I live in the real world, and 99% of my Switch gaming is done on my 58" TV. It's nice to take on the road on trips, but when I'm home it's parked in the dock for days.
I might one day get a smart thermostat, but I'm definitely drawing the line at cameras. It sounds like the people in the article have *multiple* cameras inside their house. WHY? The baby monitor one, OK. The rest? WTF? Cameras go OUTSIDE if you're wanting security.
You're saying when the US spends 2 generations decimating its manufacturing industry and offshoring everything, that there isn't agility or capacity in the small amount of on-shore fabrication that's left?
I for one am shocked. SHOCKED. Next up, I'll be shocked to hear that a retired football player who hasn't exercised in 20 years can't run 100 yards in less than 25 seconds.
With literally infinite funding I think it would be easy. So much room there for overkill. You need a couple of vehicles for the transit to Mars? Why not build and launch a monstrosity that consists of 30x what the original plans called for? We've got infinite money so we can send up a new payload from every pad on the planet every week...
> One thing that hasn't changed has been change itself
Again though, this time is different because of the NATURE of the change. In days past automation was a dumb system or a purpose built machine. Now we're looking at smart systems, adaptable semi-AI. These are technologies that will both take current jobs and some of the "new" ones too.
And as others have pointed out, the change in the past hasn't been a picnic either. When it's talked about it seems rose colored glasses are passed out by the crateload. The destruction of manufacturing in the Rust Belt in the 70s and 80s, and the Midlands in England during the same time had long lasting, crippling poverty that came from that for entire swaths of the population. The same thing happened during the Industrial Revolution and the Agri revolution.
In fact, the horrific thing that *saved* Western society from massive poverty during the second quarter of the 20th century was WWI and WWII. Both of those wars absolutely decimated the populations in Europe and even took huge divots out of the populations of Canada, Australia, the US, New Zealand, etc. Hard to have a large unemployment problem when a huge chunk of your able bodied working age population was just obliterated and there is an unbelievable amount of work to be had rebuilding.
And we're on the cusp of another work revolution. Are we going to have 10s of millions of newly idled people, or is there another "correction" on the horizon? Neither option is very palatable.
> On that note; if I have a good employee, and I write some code that deprives them of anything with which to pay them for, a few things are happening, and will happen:
> 1) I was grossly underutilizing the good employee to begin with > 2) I will find something else for this good employee to do.
That will work for some places but not all. Suppose you run a trucking company with 15 office staff and 85 truckers. Here come the self-driving trucks for long hauls so now 50 of your truckers can be replaced with machines (the other 35 do inter city work with lots of manual loading and unloading of small loads so not ripe for automation. yet.)
> Multiple times I've automated much of the work that a person or department has been doing.
There's a difference between much of the work and all of the work though. There is a big change coming in the next 10-15 years, and it's almost certainly going to be very ugly.
> There's also other professions like the traditional trades (carpentry, plumbing, electricians, etc) that can't be easily automated away.
Sure, but how *many* carpenters, plumbers, etc are needed? Just one sector that's going to be automated to hell in the next 5-10 years is self driving vehicles. In the US alone that is projected to put 4 million drivers out of work. Truck drivers, taxi drivers, delivery drivers. Is there really enough work in trades that 1 in 50 working age adults becomes another one? To put that in perspective there are ~430,000 people in the US with a job that matches the category plumber/pipe fitter/steamfitter, 600,000 electricians and just under a million carpenters. So about 2 million of those 3 trades. If all the displaced drivers took up those trades, there'd be 3x as many of those trades. Do you think the current demand could support that kind of explosion of the workforce? Not from where I'm sitting...
The problem with that line of thought for a company like Pingdom is that free service is how you get a significant percentage of your new paying business as well. Many people aren't going to sign up for even $5 a month to monitor a simple site or two, but they'd sign up to a free one. And once they got used to how that monitoring service worked, if their needs changed or their place of employ needed to monitor more robustly, they are far more likely to just go with the paid version of what they are already using for free instead of shopping around.
This is exactly why Adobe has piles of money today. They know damn well that graphics arts students pirate the living shit out of all their stuff and they wink-wink-nudge-nudge say "That's wrooooong, please don't do that" - wink. Knowing full well that when those students get big boy and big girl jobs, their place of employ will shell out thousands to buy those same Adobe products that they spent the last several years using constantly.
Maybe this sounds a bit tin-foily, but since they still have no idea who was using the drones at Gatwick - highly publicized shitshow of arresting the wrong people aside - and now it's happened at Heathrow, I'm wondering if this isn't some foreign power testing to seeif some mid-range autonomous drones are capable of bringing air travel for much of a country to a halt for a few thousand dollars worth of equipment.
If so, the SAS is probably going to have a very hard time finding the people involved as they won't be alcopop drinking yobs with a line of sight drone from a big box store, but rather probably operating drones that are 100% autonomous and following a GPS defined course from a hidden launch point miles away.
> "the very human need" of seeing the wall behind the TV? The only case I could see this being true is if you somehow had a really ugly TV...?
Off the top of my head I can think of at least 2 use cases.
1. There are a LOT of condos being built around my city where the living room is basically glass windows on one or two sides, and the best place to locate a TV in the floor plan is right in front of those windows. Would be nice to have the option to have the TV roll away to see the view.
2. Projector screens are still a thing for many, and the convenience of having a large throw area on the wall behind a TV for when you want to project that movie in 120" glory with all your surround sound equipment already situated is a nice convenience.
>>Roundup (the most GMO targeted pesticide) is by definition a poison
>Roundup works by blocking a plant enzyme that does not exist in humans. So it is not "by definition" a poison to humans.
>>and does have ill effects on humans in concentration. It's all about the dose.
>Sure. Distilled water also can have ill effects on humans. It's all about the dose.
You're being pedantic. The issue is more water won't give you cancer but more Roundup appears to. You can grow crops without cancer-roundup so maybe that's how they should be grown.... Several countries in Europe have already banned it, and there's going to be a blanket EU-wide ban of glyphosate in 2022.
> soybeans are a small portion of the food supply and we don't need them anyway.
and that's why billions are being paid out in subsidies to the soybean farmers this year as a result of the trade war blowback. Maybe instead of throwing dollars at rotting crops someone should take some of that money and figure out things to do with the crops?
> That said, it's still creepy, and given how the Chinese have used the system to sweep up enemies of the state [bbc.com], I'm not sure I feel comfortable with this.
I'm not sure it's the same thing at all, it's a private venue where people are actively choosing to go attend a concert, and as others have pointed out she does have deranged stalkers - and there is a long history of deranged stalkers attacking, injuring and even killing the objects of their obsession. So in this case I'd say whatever she needs to do to ensure safety in a private venue is up to her. This seems like the least invasive option among many.
If "another country" and by that you mean Russia or China lights off a nuke powered EMP that strong, self driving cars coming to a halt will be the least of everyone's worry. All "regular" cars manufactured later than the 90s will stop working as well, but again we wouldn't be giving a crap about that, we'd be more concerned with all the nukes flying and **civilization ending**. At least the carbon emissions and global warming will probably get sorted out with the nuclear winter...
Asleep or not, I think the best autonomous cars out there today if they replaced all drivers with them would cause far fewer than 35,000 fatalities, yes.
Think about that. The US turned its country upside down because of 9/11, but cars cause a 9/11 worth of death every month. Why no "war on car accidents" and a couple trillion for autonomous vehicle implementation?
> The Polio example is still extremely obviously (and extremely obviously back then)
The only reason the polio example was obvious back then was because polio was fucking terrifying and if anything helped everyone was all for it. Most people back then knew someone who was affected by polio. Hell, it lived in the outside environment. You'd hear about little Jimmy was out playing in the park and woke up the next morning and can't walk anymore and all the rest of the kids in the neighborhood are being kept inside because their parents are terrified their kids will end up the same way.
Zika has also affected a ton of people, but not in the "developed" world much yet. Believe me, when climate change pushes these mosquitoes a little further north over the next decade and there's thousands of kids born with encephalitis in the southern US, there *will* be a panic and an outcry. They'll probably bring back DDT in response.
Slashdot Mirror
> No, lets face it. The Switch was intended from the start to be Nintendo's way of gracefully exiting the console market while still saving face
Oh this canard again? Normally the naysayers only throw out the "Nintendo's exiting the console market" phrase when their console sales are doing poorly, like in the Gamecube or Wii U days, instead of trying it when the latest console is on fire in the market.
Nintendo builds whatever makes the most money. Consoles sell, and Nintendo builds theirs (unlike Microsoft and Sony) to sell at a profit instead of a loss. The 3DS and 2DS also sell very well, but sell to different segments. Most families aren't going to buy 3 switches for 3 kids, they'll buy 3 3/2DSs though. And a Switch. Unless they can build a fully functional Switch for less than $100 US all in, the DS line's not going anywhere.
> Oh wait here comes a new batch of the same games again.
Yeah, go back to PS and Xbone for the innovation of new franchises like Call of Duty, Battlefield, God of War, GTA, Assassin's Creed, and the NHL/NBA/Madden/NCAA/FIFA series. Sooo much more innovative and totally not at all reskins of previous annual releases...
Hi, I live in the real world, and 99% of my Switch gaming is done on my 58" TV. It's nice to take on the road on trips, but when I'm home it's parked in the dock for days.
I might one day get a smart thermostat, but I'm definitely drawing the line at cameras. It sounds like the people in the article have *multiple* cameras inside their house. WHY? The baby monitor one, OK. The rest? WTF? Cameras go OUTSIDE if you're wanting security.
You're saying when the US spends 2 generations decimating its manufacturing industry and offshoring everything, that there isn't agility or capacity in the small amount of on-shore fabrication that's left?
I for one am shocked. SHOCKED. Next up, I'll be shocked to hear that a retired football player who hasn't exercised in 20 years can't run 100 yards in less than 25 seconds.
With literally infinite funding I think it would be easy. So much room there for overkill. You need a couple of vehicles for the transit to Mars? Why not build and launch a monstrosity that consists of 30x what the original plans called for? We've got infinite money so we can send up a new payload from every pad on the planet every week...
Actually, we could put live people on Mars by 2020 still. However the cost would be eye-watering. Good, cheap, fast. Pick any two.
> One thing that hasn't changed has been change itself
Again though, this time is different because of the NATURE of the change. In days past automation was a dumb system or a purpose built machine. Now we're looking at smart systems, adaptable semi-AI. These are technologies that will both take current jobs and some of the "new" ones too.
And as others have pointed out, the change in the past hasn't been a picnic either. When it's talked about it seems rose colored glasses are passed out by the crateload. The destruction of manufacturing in the Rust Belt in the 70s and 80s, and the Midlands in England during the same time had long lasting, crippling poverty that came from that for entire swaths of the population. The same thing happened during the Industrial Revolution and the Agri revolution.
In fact, the horrific thing that *saved* Western society from massive poverty during the second quarter of the 20th century was WWI and WWII. Both of those wars absolutely decimated the populations in Europe and even took huge divots out of the populations of Canada, Australia, the US, New Zealand, etc. Hard to have a large unemployment problem when a huge chunk of your able bodied working age population was just obliterated and there is an unbelievable amount of work to be had rebuilding.
And we're on the cusp of another work revolution. Are we going to have 10s of millions of newly idled people, or is there another "correction" on the horizon? Neither option is very palatable.
> On that note; if I have a good employee, and I write some code that deprives them of anything with which to pay them for, a few things are happening, and will happen:
> 1) I was grossly underutilizing the good employee to begin with
> 2) I will find something else for this good employee to do.
That will work for some places but not all. Suppose you run a trucking company with 15 office staff and 85 truckers. Here come the self-driving trucks for long hauls so now 50 of your truckers can be replaced with machines (the other 35 do inter city work with lots of manual loading and unloading of small loads so not ripe for automation. yet.)
What job can your company give those 50 people?
> Multiple times I've automated much of the work that a person or department has been doing.
There's a difference between much of the work and all of the work though. There is a big change coming in the next 10-15 years, and it's almost certainly going to be very ugly.
> There's also other professions like the traditional trades (carpentry, plumbing, electricians, etc) that can't be easily automated away.
Sure, but how *many* carpenters, plumbers, etc are needed? Just one sector that's going to be automated to hell in the next 5-10 years is self driving vehicles. In the US alone that is projected to put 4 million drivers out of work. Truck drivers, taxi drivers, delivery drivers. Is there really enough work in trades that 1 in 50 working age adults becomes another one? To put that in perspective there are ~430,000 people in the US with a job that matches the category plumber/pipe fitter/steamfitter, 600,000 electricians and just under a million carpenters. So about 2 million of those 3 trades. If all the displaced drivers took up those trades, there'd be 3x as many of those trades. Do you think the current demand could support that kind of explosion of the workforce? Not from where I'm sitting...
The problem with that line of thought for a company like Pingdom is that free service is how you get a significant percentage of your new paying business as well. Many people aren't going to sign up for even $5 a month to monitor a simple site or two, but they'd sign up to a free one. And once they got used to how that monitoring service worked, if their needs changed or their place of employ needed to monitor more robustly, they are far more likely to just go with the paid version of what they are already using for free instead of shopping around.
This is exactly why Adobe has piles of money today. They know damn well that graphics arts students pirate the living shit out of all their stuff and they wink-wink-nudge-nudge say "That's wrooooong, please don't do that" - wink. Knowing full well that when those students get big boy and big girl jobs, their place of employ will shell out thousands to buy those same Adobe products that they spent the last several years using constantly.
Um, no.
> The move, which has unsurprisingly upset many users, comes five years after Pingdom was acquired by SolarWinds, an Austin, Texas-based firm
> https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/swi
SolarWinds is public.
Maybe this sounds a bit tin-foily, but since they still have no idea who was using the drones at Gatwick - highly publicized shitshow of arresting the wrong people aside - and now it's happened at Heathrow, I'm wondering if this isn't some foreign power testing to seeif some mid-range autonomous drones are capable of bringing air travel for much of a country to a halt for a few thousand dollars worth of equipment.
If so, the SAS is probably going to have a very hard time finding the people involved as they won't be alcopop drinking yobs with a line of sight drone from a big box store, but rather probably operating drones that are 100% autonomous and following a GPS defined course from a hidden launch point miles away.
> "the very human need" of seeing the wall behind the TV? The only case I could see this being true is if you somehow had a really ugly TV...?
Off the top of my head I can think of at least 2 use cases.
1. There are a LOT of condos being built around my city where the living room is basically glass windows on one or two sides, and the best place to locate a TV in the floor plan is right in front of those windows. Would be nice to have the option to have the TV roll away to see the view.
2. Projector screens are still a thing for many, and the convenience of having a large throw area on the wall behind a TV for when you want to project that movie in 120" glory with all your surround sound equipment already situated is a nice convenience.
For the illusion of protecting their revenue from their content division? This is my shocked face.
Sony hardware used to be great. Used to be. Now it's overpriced compared to a dozen competitors. No reason to buy it.
I can post links too:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-08/cancer-council-calls-for-review-amid-roundup-cancer-concerns/10337806
https://phys.org/news/2018-07-experts-testify-roundup-linked-cancer.html
https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/10/health/monsanto-johnson-trial-verdict/index.html
>>Roundup (the most GMO targeted pesticide) is by definition a poison
>Roundup works by blocking a plant enzyme that does not exist in humans. So it is not "by definition" a poison to humans.
>>and does have ill effects on humans in concentration. It's all about the dose.
>Sure. Distilled water also can have ill effects on humans. It's all about the dose.
You're being pedantic. The issue is more water won't give you cancer but more Roundup appears to. You can grow crops without cancer-roundup so maybe that's how they should be grown.... Several countries in Europe have already banned it, and there's going to be a blanket EU-wide ban of glyphosate in 2022.
> soybeans are a small portion of the food supply and we don't need them anyway.
and that's why billions are being paid out in subsidies to the soybean farmers this year as a result of the trade war blowback. Maybe instead of throwing dollars at rotting crops someone should take some of that money and figure out things to do with the crops?
So when is Slashdot going to seriously consider removing AC posting?
> That said, it's still creepy, and given how the Chinese have used the system to sweep up enemies of the state [bbc.com], I'm not sure I feel comfortable with this.
I'm not sure it's the same thing at all, it's a private venue where people are actively choosing to go attend a concert, and as others have pointed out she does have deranged stalkers - and there is a long history of deranged stalkers attacking, injuring and even killing the objects of their obsession. So in this case I'd say whatever she needs to do to ensure safety in a private venue is up to her. This seems like the least invasive option among many.
Cover them with cameras and make harsh examples out of those caught vandalizing them. Simple countermeasure.
If "another country" and by that you mean Russia or China lights off a nuke powered EMP that strong, self driving cars coming to a halt will be the least of everyone's worry. All "regular" cars manufactured later than the 90s will stop working as well, but again we wouldn't be giving a crap about that, we'd be more concerned with all the nukes flying and **civilization ending**. At least the carbon emissions and global warming will probably get sorted out with the nuclear winter...
Asleep or not, I think the best autonomous cars out there today if they replaced all drivers with them would cause far fewer than 35,000 fatalities, yes.
Think about that. The US turned its country upside down because of 9/11, but cars cause a 9/11 worth of death every month. Why no "war on car accidents" and a couple trillion for autonomous vehicle implementation?
> The Polio example is still extremely obviously (and extremely obviously back then)
The only reason the polio example was obvious back then was because polio was fucking terrifying and if anything helped everyone was all for it. Most people back then knew someone who was affected by polio. Hell, it lived in the outside environment. You'd hear about little Jimmy was out playing in the park and woke up the next morning and can't walk anymore and all the rest of the kids in the neighborhood are being kept inside because their parents are terrified their kids will end up the same way.
Zika has also affected a ton of people, but not in the "developed" world much yet. Believe me, when climate change pushes these mosquitoes a little further north over the next decade and there's thousands of kids born with encephalitis in the southern US, there *will* be a panic and an outcry. They'll probably bring back DDT in response.