Worst insult for a software developer: Wow, that's Microsoft quality!
Is it the 90s again? I used win2k/xp in the naughties, win7 for most of this decade, at work they're all Microsoft with Windows/Outlook/Office + SQL Server and honestly the code is quite okay. The big issues are usually design choices like UAC, the ribbon, UWP, telemetry, ads etc. though of course they can have a bad bug. So can Linux and open source. In fact most project except the kernel seem chronically understaffed and whenever there is a bad bug it turns out there's just a handful of volunteers making due or sometimes even just a one man band.
Microsoft don't want you to know about LTSB and do their best to hide its existence, but it's really what Windows 10 Pro should have been.
Microsoft is doing its best to discourage using it even for normal servers, probably the biggest is that there will be no new hardware support so you can't run one version for your enterprise. It's really targeted at embedded systems and such, though I agree something like that minus domain support would be a great consumer OS. Too bad that won't happen.
This is only a problem as long as you do extra work for free. If you get 150% overtime it's cheaper for the manager to have three people working 100% than two people 150% so it never becomes a lasting pattern. A salaried position is in 99% of the cases an advantage for the employer because if it looks like you have too little to do they'll find a way to give you more work and more responsibility, they'll push until you push back. I agree with the European model, only management and especially independent positions can be salaried, not your typical white collar worker. It's not perfect but it means denying people overtime pay is a crime and not simply a breach of contract so your employer could get in trouble. Not enough trouble, I really wish there was some SOX style laws to make top management more responsible but much better than nothing.
NASA has probably "explored" interstellar flight too, it doesn't mean it's anywhere near ready to go. Right now the US can't even send people to the ISS. Of course hand-waving is sometimes useful like "if we ignore all the problems of getting to Mars, what's the problems we have on Mars" but you got to take that into account. Sure at the right altitude Venus orbit is relatively human friendly. It doesn't mean we have the means to get people from Earth to there or back again. And we'd probably have to build the ship much more protected for the crew to survive the trip, so it would just be to go outside in order to go outside. Unlike Mars, where we could actually do something outside the ship.
As a full self-driving pessimist, I have no interest. But of course it's always ever only been an option for optimists. If you think there haven't been endless discussions on the Tesla forums between the pessimists who think the optimists are dumb for giving money for a feature that's still in development, and the optimists who feel they're taking part in leading the way to a self-driving future.... well, drop by some time.
Don't we have Kickstarter for that? In any case, take what Google is doing in a tiny, easy, dry and sunny geofenced 3D-mapped corner of Phoenix and extrapolate how long it is until your average Tesla customer can have a self-driving car they can practically use in their neighborhood in most normal weather, for a fraction of the cost of Waymo's sensor package. I feel like they're selling where Waymo hopes to be in ten years, so they're not only have to leapfrog past Waymo they'd have to leapfrog again way ahead if any of those Tesla customers are going to get it delivered before their cars turn to rust. But as long as people don't care about being stuck on the infinite back burner waiting for that $35k Model 3 that they'll maybe eventually sell some day...
No, being marketed to doesn't make you the product. You become the product when you're getting a product or service someone else is partially or fully paying for. Like for example a tavern hiring a bard, the patrons might think they're the customers since they have some influence over what he plays and pay tips but from the bard's perspective it's the owner's tavern and their rules come first. It's in the same vein as "there's no such thing as a free lunch" or "the first one is free", if you're not paying for it somebody else is with ulterior motives. Though I don't mean it more ominous than that when Coca-Cola runs an ad they want you to go buy Coca-Cola. But if you want to see hanky-panky and they don't want to advertise on a porn channel the TV company might listen more to them than to you, because ratings don't mean anything unless eyeballs can be converted to cash.
There's an easy solution to all those problems - modularity. You can streamline the process even further by spending a few extra cents per unit installing well-considered diagnostic elements so that it's easy to determine what's wrong. Dead toaster? Test the coils. Test the cord. Test the switch. If one of them has a problem, replace it. If none does, replace the electronics board (which is not "the toaster" - in fact it's probably one of the cheaper components in it). Total diagnostic time - 5min. Total repair time, 10min. After all, all you need to do is remove a few screws, unplug the faulty module, and install a new one. If a device takes hours to diagnose, and more hours to repair, it's because it wasn't designed for easy diagnostics and repair. That's a failure of design, not an argument against the value of repair.
You're ignoring one of the big problems and that's logistics. Chains buy something in bulk, sell it in bulk through stores and discontinue it. Unless it's a name brand the manufacturer doesn't want to sit on parts and neither does the chain. And even if they do the demand is too thin and sporadic to have it anywhere but a big central warehouse. Years down the road maybe neither of them are in business anymore or they're out of stock. All of this amount to risk, shipping cost and the need for a parts store, packaging for individual parts, instruction manuals, billing, customer support and all the other infrastructure of a very high inventory, low-volume shop.
The other thing is that people generally don't care about repairability until after it's broken. So companies get sales today, the entire management is paid based on today's performance so whatever you can argue the value is the customers aren't willing to pay for it. And that's even before we start talking about adding more sensors and complexity.
From your description, you're not working two jobs. You have a job, and you have a hobby that pays its own expenses. That's totally legit, and a choice, and it's great that you get to do that.
I think that's a rather unfair characterization of amateurs who doesn't make enough money to quit their day job but who's really trying to go pro. It's highly unlikely that anyone will hire a photographer at professional rates without a good portfolio, practically nobody jumps from not getting paid at all to a living wage. If he's just doing the gigs he wants with the income as a bonus that's a hobby. If he's genuinely trying to make a profit it's a business, even if it's not very successful yet. I mean most photographers don't get paid at all...
Robocalls to me are exemplary of the problem with regulation. I'll take big-government politicians seriously on the day that can actually stop robocalls (including their own), just like I'll take small-government politicians seriously on the day one of them eliminates the TSA. Until then I assume they only differ on who gets the bribe money.
I doubt this is even about big vs small government, if you wanted to you could just follow the money and find the crooks, or at least block it upstream. The problem in the US is that you got two pro-business parties with differently fringed colors and zero pro-consumer parties (with any power, at least). Here in Norway I got a total of zero robot calls in the last year. We had a round of "Microsoft" scammers earlier calling from England (+44) but they all but disappeared. I think our telecoms get enough spam reports and say either you drop the spammers or we drop your calls. It's not as unsolvable as it seems if the right people want it to be solved.
If I write some robotics software to rotate backup tapes for my MongoDB centric service, that'd be part of the 'backup software' and 'storage software' according to that definition, but it's hardly a very clear direct derived work, so how can the license I receive to use MongoDB apply to it?
It's an EULA like the AGPL, it does not depend on the definition of derived work like the GPL/LGPL does:
This License explicitly affirms your unlimited permission to run the unmodified Program, subject to section 13.
I can make a license that says you can only use my software wearing a pink bunny suit. It doesn't mean the code has anything to do with the suit, it's just the terms of the license. In any case, the license seems mostly intended to ban SaaS without a commercial license without actually banning it. Because I would think 99.9% of all services have some form of closed source component in their stack at some level, not even RMS has gone this far.
If instead you're referring to the idea shared by many religions of "live as if there were a judgemental being that sees everything you do and will hold you accountable", well, that's obviously true. That being is your future self.
Meh, that guy. First of all, he's looking down all the paths not taken - it doesn't matter how carefully you choose, life is not a video game where you can save and re-take choices to see where they lead. Heck he can imagine that there was a way even when there wasn't one. Besides I don't know what he wants, I can project my present self into the future and say that tomorrow I'll regret the hangover but if I say where ten years older me wants to be I have no idea if he'll agree with me. I can't start having kids because I think 80 year old me would like to have grandkids come visit at the nursing home, that's insanity. Besides he's often the product of those choices, like if I could really go back in time and drop myself a note that future me would never exist. I'd have a different future me complaining about other things.
I mean it wasn't really like you intentionally fumbled the ball, right? Those were your priorities, those were the choices you made and they seemed to make sense at the time. Hindsight is easy and if you top that with some distance to let cooler heads prevail, time to mull it over and some added wisdom then sure you were probably an idiot. But wherever that left you in life it's a sunk cost and beating yourself up about it isn't going to make anything better. Look at it this way, if you think differently now it's because you've changed and grown as a person. If you still agree with everything you did back to your teens you're probably still a teenager in your head. Either a very wise and mature teenager... or the other alternative. Don't be too hard on yourself for actually figuring shit out.
As for the abstract existence of a god I've found that's usually used as a foot in the door to start selling mainstream religion. So the best counter is actually to ask if they believe in the Bible, like the Tower of Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah, Noah's Ark etc. because very literally believes that anymore. Then start quizzing on who goes to hell, purgatory etc. because the fire and brimstone is also on the way out. And where people of other faiths go, like if they don't go do hell you can just renounce your faith and that's your get out of hell free card. Usually they default down to an adult version of Santa Claus, good people go to Heaven and that's really all that matters. No kid is really on the naughty list...
True enough, and absolutely inevitable. First, you correct for genetic defects, then you choose features you want. Why wouldn't parents prefer a healthy, attractive, intelligent, athletic child over one lacking those attributes?
And when they don't live up to your design, if your trophy child turns out to be a lazy, obese slob who's neither athletic, healthy or particularly attractive with the snarky kind of wits? I'm absolutely for getting rid of genetic defects, we don't need them any more than we need smallpox but I don't think anything good will come from letting parents design babies like avatars in a game. Let the child be what it wants to be, not what you want it to be. I think it's starting off down the wrong path.
What do we do now, with the ineducable and unskilled? We don't currently have any good solution...
Not to be crude, but do we have any urgent need of better solutions? Sure if all the jobs are automated but then productivity would be up and taking care of them would be less of a burden in total even if the volume goes up. In fact they claim robots will steal the jobs of the bright people too. We'll see, if Google's car project is proof of anything is that it takes a dedicated team a whole decade to teach a computer how to drive a car. It'll be a while before they get around to everything...
This fucking cunt could end world hunger with his pocket change today, but wont.
World hunger ended. We didn't have a single declared famine from 2011 to 2017 and the problem areas are all semi-active war zones. Of course the UN will continue to talk of undernourished and malnourished people but the mortality has dropped by over 90%. With the advances in farming we have no problem keeping up with the 1.1% growth/year, there's lots of other limited resources but growing a few percent more food is not a problem. Of course exponential growth can't go on forever but the long term solution is to invest in education and prosperity to reduce birth rates, apart from Africa we're very close to replacement rates already.
2018: Voluntarily giving up literally the most personal data about yourself you can possibly give anyone.
If you had to choose what would be spread online, a sex tape or your DNA profile I think 90%+ would pick the DNA profile. For most it's just a list of genetic predispositions and half will have less than average. And it's something you're born with, like do you make fun of the people with visible handicaps? I understand the insurance angle, though in a civilized country with universal healthcare that's not really a big problem and very little of that is strong enough percentages to plan for as an individual. Like if you got a 3% probability of cancer and the other guy 1%, aren't you still planning for the 97% probability that you don't? I'm not necessarily saying it's a good idea, but I don't think people's deepest secrets and biggest skeletons in the closet are lurking in their DNA.
I think you vastly overestimate how well average people understand percentages and fractions.
"Alice's class has 30 pupils, where 10% prefer ice cream and 60% chocolate. How many have a different favorite?" "Bob's class has 30 pupils, where 1/5th prefer ice cream and 1/3rd chocolate. How many have a different favorite?"
I think you'll be amazed to know how many can't find 9 and 14 without pen and paper. And a surprising number not even with pen and paper...
The fascination with typing speed comes from the days when you had dedicated typists and secretaries. Computers, printers and photocopiers pretty much obliterated the need to re-type things and by far most professionals now type themselves, for the rest OCR and speech-to-text will give you a draft. A coder does not code at 200 WPM. An author does not write books at 200 WPM, if they did George R.R. Martin would finish a GoT book in a day and a half. Unless you have some really unique needs the limitation is the thought behind the text not the typing of the text.
It's very rare that the government will prohibit the collection of data, they want it and can usually get it through defining it as third party information, rubber stamp warrants, national security letters and if not via legally sanctioned or unsanctioned spy programs. What they don't want is a public backlash were people refuse to provide data because it'll be abused, so they'll sometimes stop insurance companies and whatnot from using the data but only because it's good for them. I think anyone who believes the government is against the IoT revolution or will do anything meaningful to prevent them from infecting everything is a fool.
For a random example, my dad got hearing aids. I was there with him, so I've heard what he heard. And then on a check-up she asked how they worked and how much he'd been using them, then checked that against the statistics on the device. There wasn't a single word said when he got them that they were collecting usage data, of course that was just locally on the device but it was still like wait, what, you can tell that? If you got a "smart" anything, you can expect it to upload a ton of telemetry about you. If you value your privacy keep your dumb devices, don't expect the government to come rescue you they'll just curb the worst offenses to keep the IoT wave rolling.
Consider an object P positioned at (x,y,z) at time t. I'm just gonna write this event as (x,y,z,t). How do you feel about this?
In an Euclidean universe that would still just be a sequence of concurrent observations like (x,y,z,1), (x,y,z,2), (x,y,z,3) and so on. It's a bit like I can have however many space dimensions I want if they're a constant 0. It doesn't get interesting until you have the theory of relativity with curved spacetime where objects have different velocities through time. The math of time dilation is pretty well tested and proven by now, we can send an atomic clock up in a GPS satellite and predict how much it will be off compared to a clock on the ground.
I guess what the GP is saying is that this is a form of illusion, time is constant it's our time-keeping devices that are off. But it also slows down every other natural process, like if you put a radioactive isotope on a GPS satellite it would decay slower than here on earth. It really is the pulse of the universe slowing down as it moves quicker through space, not just a flaw in our clocks which means to redefine time you'd also have to redefine all the formulas that use time.
So you could define time t0 in the unaccelerated frame but to every formula you'd add an unaccelerated-to-accelerated correction factor exactly equal to the Lorentz factor 1/sqr(1-v^2/c^2). So distance would not be v*t but v*t0*1/sqr(1-v^2/c^2). Except most of the time that would be a gigantic pain in the ass as we are in the same frame of reference and the formulas work quite fine without converting out to an absolute time and back again. Those who need to deal with different frames or change of frames understand the math just fine and for the rest of us time is best defined as "local" time.
Software engineers are hardly free from the "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" fallacy. I've seen a lot of attempts to fix flawed thinking and flawed processes through software fail miserably because it ignored the non-technological aspects or got lost trying to solve a technical problem that was rather irrelevant to the business problem.
There's lots of real psychology like confirmation bias, sunken cost fallacy etc. but they're easy to poke fun at, ask a psychologist what the time is and he'll ask you what time you'd like it to be. What motivates people? What makes people work together as a group? How do you direct a bunch of people towards a common goal? Why create self-inflicted problems like OCD? It's hard because you can't set up a formula like a high school chemistry experiment and say if I put this in I always get this out. But it's still fascinating and worth studying.
There's vast branches of economics that is rather mundane, it's everything to do with accounting and microeconomics like what are our margins on this product mix and what's the return on investment. Investment theory is speculation, for everyone who lost money you can be sure somebody made money. Don't think the financial crisis was a crisis for everyone, some made billions and managed to ditch the bill on everyone else. If you want to study how and stop them from doing it again, that's economics. And yeah, they're still waiting on a model from psychology on how humans perceive value.
I'd actually like to defend gender studies as a subset of psychology too, why do we have gender roles and where do they come from is a reasonable topic to study. The problem is when you're starting to uncritically add people to workplaces and projects as a means to improve productivity. I mean, I'm part of a development team and we have a team dynamic and every one of the team members has their own perception of working there. You could do a descriptive study of that, but productivity wouldn't go up unless you actually could change something for the better. And maybe we'd do better with an expert who isn't a great fit than a mediocre team player.
The goal of politicians is to appeal to the voters, they make a lot of proposals that won't get a majority or that aren't actually feasible to do just for appearances. Saying there's nothing to be done is never appealing, even when it's the truth.
I always wondered why ancients feared eclipses so much.
You think too much as a modern human who knows the Earth is orbiting the Sun and when it's not there it's simply under the horizon and an eclipse is just the Moon intersecting. The sun god and rain god are cornerstones of all naturalistic religions, one was dependable and one was fickle. They prayed for the sun to rise again in the morning and for summer to follow winter but it always did, unlike droughts and other maladies the sun god always brought light, warmth and life. Remember a total eclipse is like once a century, if they'd heard of the sun god getting angry at all it would be apocryphal stories. If he's now angry with you, that should freak you out...
This question makes no sense. Why would someone owe for free things, which there is no contract/terms-of-service/financial agreement?
Different life philosophies. Some people seem to more or less believe in moral karma, no matter how much you say it's free with no strings attached they feel an obligation to reciprocate and if they can't pay it back, they should pay it forward. These people are often those who refuse charity, because to them it's a debt no matter what. On the other extreme of the scale you have people who aren't even grateful, it's more like disdain "If these fools are giving it away I'm grabbing all I can" and you find some really obnoxious variations of this in the welfare system. Most of us are somewhere in the middle where we're kinda grateful but not really enough to open our wallets, except when it's really some form of informal "You scratch my back if I scratch yours" agreement or cost splitting like me buying this round and you the next one.
When these world's collide it tends to get ugly, because what happens is the first group says "We gave you all this free stuff, you should give some back" and the second group goes "Oh so it wasn't really free stuff, it was a bait-and-switch and now you're going to guilt-shame me into paying for it" and it goes downhill from there. Then a third group comes in and says if you wanted obligations, you should put them in writing and make them sign on it up front, that's what we did. Then the first group will say it's not about bludgeoning them with the law because that's a cat and mouse game with legal loopholes, it's about doing the right thing. Then the third group will say fuck that, they're a bunch of amoral assholes so stop being naive crybabies. Then the second group will say fuck both of you, we have an license and we're following it, we didn't sign up for a philosophy or cause.
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to apply labels for software but it's really much broader than that and apply to a lot of community resources and services that don't operate on formal agreements.
DNA evidence has more often been used to exonerate the innocent than to convict the guilty.
It's used to convict the guilty all the time, you just don't see it because it completely shut down the "it wasn't me" defense when it totally was you. In fact before DNA profiling many cases would probably never get near a court room, because if the drunk/drugged/assaulted woman couldn't pick out the rapist from a line-up there wasn't really anything to go on. Now they all claim it was voluntary which DNA can't say anything about, but the goal posts moved. Same with a lot of other serious crime, before you had some crappy surveillance tape and fingerprints that could be trivially defeated with a ski mask and gloves if you had anything at all, now damn near everything the burglar/robber/assaulter/murderer touched can be used to identify them.
So? Driving is a calculated risk, where people see the benefits as outweighing the risks. (...) You can live in a padded room if you like, but don't impose it on others.
To most people, most of the time the benefit is getting from A to B and driving only a means to an end. And stop acting like we can't die in your crash. That's why we have laws on speeding and drunk driving, what you think is acceptable risk is not the final answer. I think we're extremely far from a ban on human driving, but your "maybe I'm high risk but I don't care because freedom" reminds me of half-blind elderly who refuse to turn in their license. I'm not going to hold on to it at all costs if it's obvious I'm now a way inferior driver...
If "ethics" courses worked, then why the hell is basically every major business scandal the result of managers... who already take ethics courses? #VWDidNothingWrong
Because we want things like money, power, sex and so on. You're stupid if you think an ethics course on corruption will end all corruption, it'll still happen if the benefits exceed the risk. Conversely when something is seen as having risk but no gain it's easy to avoid it, particularly if somebody is looking to set an example and show their zero tolerance policy. The course itself is mostly just awareness, this is the different forms and shapes it can take, this is our policy, these kinds of behaviors are not acceptable, these are the possible consequences. They rarely go down to the fundamentals on how we agree on what's ethical and not, they're basically dictating.
Slashdot Mirror
Worst insult for a software developer: Wow, that's Microsoft quality!
Is it the 90s again? I used win2k/xp in the naughties, win7 for most of this decade, at work they're all Microsoft with Windows/Outlook/Office + SQL Server and honestly the code is quite okay. The big issues are usually design choices like UAC, the ribbon, UWP, telemetry, ads etc. though of course they can have a bad bug. So can Linux and open source. In fact most project except the kernel seem chronically understaffed and whenever there is a bad bug it turns out there's just a handful of volunteers making due or sometimes even just a one man band.
Microsoft don't want you to know about LTSB and do their best to hide its existence, but it's really what Windows 10 Pro should have been.
Microsoft is doing its best to discourage using it even for normal servers, probably the biggest is that there will be no new hardware support so you can't run one version for your enterprise. It's really targeted at embedded systems and such, though I agree something like that minus domain support would be a great consumer OS. Too bad that won't happen.
This is only a problem as long as you do extra work for free. If you get 150% overtime it's cheaper for the manager to have three people working 100% than two people 150% so it never becomes a lasting pattern. A salaried position is in 99% of the cases an advantage for the employer because if it looks like you have too little to do they'll find a way to give you more work and more responsibility, they'll push until you push back. I agree with the European model, only management and especially independent positions can be salaried, not your typical white collar worker. It's not perfect but it means denying people overtime pay is a crime and not simply a breach of contract so your employer could get in trouble. Not enough trouble, I really wish there was some SOX style laws to make top management more responsible but much better than nothing.
NASA has probably "explored" interstellar flight too, it doesn't mean it's anywhere near ready to go. Right now the US can't even send people to the ISS. Of course hand-waving is sometimes useful like "if we ignore all the problems of getting to Mars, what's the problems we have on Mars" but you got to take that into account. Sure at the right altitude Venus orbit is relatively human friendly. It doesn't mean we have the means to get people from Earth to there or back again. And we'd probably have to build the ship much more protected for the crew to survive the trip, so it would just be to go outside in order to go outside. Unlike Mars, where we could actually do something outside the ship.
As a full self-driving pessimist, I have no interest. But of course it's always ever only been an option for optimists. If you think there haven't been endless discussions on the Tesla forums between the pessimists who think the optimists are dumb for giving money for a feature that's still in development, and the optimists who feel they're taking part in leading the way to a self-driving future.... well, drop by some time.
Don't we have Kickstarter for that? In any case, take what Google is doing in a tiny, easy, dry and sunny geofenced 3D-mapped corner of Phoenix and extrapolate how long it is until your average Tesla customer can have a self-driving car they can practically use in their neighborhood in most normal weather, for a fraction of the cost of Waymo's sensor package. I feel like they're selling where Waymo hopes to be in ten years, so they're not only have to leapfrog past Waymo they'd have to leapfrog again way ahead if any of those Tesla customers are going to get it delivered before their cars turn to rust. But as long as people don't care about being stuck on the infinite back burner waiting for that $35k Model 3 that they'll maybe eventually sell some day...
No, being marketed to doesn't make you the product. You become the product when you're getting a product or service someone else is partially or fully paying for. Like for example a tavern hiring a bard, the patrons might think they're the customers since they have some influence over what he plays and pay tips but from the bard's perspective it's the owner's tavern and their rules come first. It's in the same vein as "there's no such thing as a free lunch" or "the first one is free", if you're not paying for it somebody else is with ulterior motives. Though I don't mean it more ominous than that when Coca-Cola runs an ad they want you to go buy Coca-Cola. But if you want to see hanky-panky and they don't want to advertise on a porn channel the TV company might listen more to them than to you, because ratings don't mean anything unless eyeballs can be converted to cash.
There's an easy solution to all those problems - modularity. You can streamline the process even further by spending a few extra cents per unit installing well-considered diagnostic elements so that it's easy to determine what's wrong. Dead toaster? Test the coils. Test the cord. Test the switch. If one of them has a problem, replace it. If none does, replace the electronics board (which is not "the toaster" - in fact it's probably one of the cheaper components in it). Total diagnostic time - 5min. Total repair time, 10min. After all, all you need to do is remove a few screws, unplug the faulty module, and install a new one. If a device takes hours to diagnose, and more hours to repair, it's because it wasn't designed for easy diagnostics and repair. That's a failure of design, not an argument against the value of repair.
You're ignoring one of the big problems and that's logistics. Chains buy something in bulk, sell it in bulk through stores and discontinue it. Unless it's a name brand the manufacturer doesn't want to sit on parts and neither does the chain. And even if they do the demand is too thin and sporadic to have it anywhere but a big central warehouse. Years down the road maybe neither of them are in business anymore or they're out of stock. All of this amount to risk, shipping cost and the need for a parts store, packaging for individual parts, instruction manuals, billing, customer support and all the other infrastructure of a very high inventory, low-volume shop.
The other thing is that people generally don't care about repairability until after it's broken. So companies get sales today, the entire management is paid based on today's performance so whatever you can argue the value is the customers aren't willing to pay for it. And that's even before we start talking about adding more sensors and complexity.
From your description, you're not working two jobs. You have a job, and you have a hobby that pays its own expenses. That's totally legit, and a choice, and it's great that you get to do that.
I think that's a rather unfair characterization of amateurs who doesn't make enough money to quit their day job but who's really trying to go pro. It's highly unlikely that anyone will hire a photographer at professional rates without a good portfolio, practically nobody jumps from not getting paid at all to a living wage. If he's just doing the gigs he wants with the income as a bonus that's a hobby. If he's genuinely trying to make a profit it's a business, even if it's not very successful yet. I mean most photographers don't get paid at all...
Robocalls to me are exemplary of the problem with regulation. I'll take big-government politicians seriously on the day that can actually stop robocalls (including their own), just like I'll take small-government politicians seriously on the day one of them eliminates the TSA. Until then I assume they only differ on who gets the bribe money.
I doubt this is even about big vs small government, if you wanted to you could just follow the money and find the crooks, or at least block it upstream. The problem in the US is that you got two pro-business parties with differently fringed colors and zero pro-consumer parties (with any power, at least). Here in Norway I got a total of zero robot calls in the last year. We had a round of "Microsoft" scammers earlier calling from England (+44) but they all but disappeared. I think our telecoms get enough spam reports and say either you drop the spammers or we drop your calls. It's not as unsolvable as it seems if the right people want it to be solved.
If I write some robotics software to rotate backup tapes for my MongoDB centric service, that'd be part of the 'backup software' and 'storage software' according to that definition, but it's hardly a very clear direct derived work, so how can the license I receive to use MongoDB apply to it?
It's an EULA like the AGPL, it does not depend on the definition of derived work like the GPL/LGPL does:
This License explicitly affirms your unlimited permission to run the unmodified Program, subject to section 13.
I can make a license that says you can only use my software wearing a pink bunny suit. It doesn't mean the code has anything to do with the suit, it's just the terms of the license. In any case, the license seems mostly intended to ban SaaS without a commercial license without actually banning it. Because I would think 99.9% of all services have some form of closed source component in their stack at some level, not even RMS has gone this far.
If instead you're referring to the idea shared by many religions of "live as if there were a judgemental being that sees everything you do and will hold you accountable", well, that's obviously true. That being is your future self.
Meh, that guy. First of all, he's looking down all the paths not taken - it doesn't matter how carefully you choose, life is not a video game where you can save and re-take choices to see where they lead. Heck he can imagine that there was a way even when there wasn't one. Besides I don't know what he wants, I can project my present self into the future and say that tomorrow I'll regret the hangover but if I say where ten years older me wants to be I have no idea if he'll agree with me. I can't start having kids because I think 80 year old me would like to have grandkids come visit at the nursing home, that's insanity. Besides he's often the product of those choices, like if I could really go back in time and drop myself a note that future me would never exist. I'd have a different future me complaining about other things.
I mean it wasn't really like you intentionally fumbled the ball, right? Those were your priorities, those were the choices you made and they seemed to make sense at the time. Hindsight is easy and if you top that with some distance to let cooler heads prevail, time to mull it over and some added wisdom then sure you were probably an idiot. But wherever that left you in life it's a sunk cost and beating yourself up about it isn't going to make anything better. Look at it this way, if you think differently now it's because you've changed and grown as a person. If you still agree with everything you did back to your teens you're probably still a teenager in your head. Either a very wise and mature teenager... or the other alternative. Don't be too hard on yourself for actually figuring shit out.
As for the abstract existence of a god I've found that's usually used as a foot in the door to start selling mainstream religion. So the best counter is actually to ask if they believe in the Bible, like the Tower of Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah, Noah's Ark etc. because very literally believes that anymore. Then start quizzing on who goes to hell, purgatory etc. because the fire and brimstone is also on the way out. And where people of other faiths go, like if they don't go do hell you can just renounce your faith and that's your get out of hell free card. Usually they default down to an adult version of Santa Claus, good people go to Heaven and that's really all that matters. No kid is really on the naughty list...
True enough, and absolutely inevitable. First, you correct for genetic defects, then you choose features you want. Why wouldn't parents prefer a healthy, attractive, intelligent, athletic child over one lacking those attributes?
And when they don't live up to your design, if your trophy child turns out to be a lazy, obese slob who's neither athletic, healthy or particularly attractive with the snarky kind of wits? I'm absolutely for getting rid of genetic defects, we don't need them any more than we need smallpox but I don't think anything good will come from letting parents design babies like avatars in a game. Let the child be what it wants to be, not what you want it to be. I think it's starting off down the wrong path.
What do we do now, with the ineducable and unskilled? We don't currently have any good solution...
Not to be crude, but do we have any urgent need of better solutions? Sure if all the jobs are automated but then productivity would be up and taking care of them would be less of a burden in total even if the volume goes up. In fact they claim robots will steal the jobs of the bright people too. We'll see, if Google's car project is proof of anything is that it takes a dedicated team a whole decade to teach a computer how to drive a car. It'll be a while before they get around to everything...
This fucking cunt could end world hunger with his pocket change today, but wont.
World hunger ended. We didn't have a single declared famine from 2011 to 2017 and the problem areas are all semi-active war zones. Of course the UN will continue to talk of undernourished and malnourished people but the mortality has dropped by over 90%. With the advances in farming we have no problem keeping up with the 1.1% growth/year, there's lots of other limited resources but growing a few percent more food is not a problem. Of course exponential growth can't go on forever but the long term solution is to invest in education and prosperity to reduce birth rates, apart from Africa we're very close to replacement rates already.
2018: Voluntarily giving up literally the most personal data about yourself you can possibly give anyone.
If you had to choose what would be spread online, a sex tape or your DNA profile I think 90%+ would pick the DNA profile. For most it's just a list of genetic predispositions and half will have less than average. And it's something you're born with, like do you make fun of the people with visible handicaps? I understand the insurance angle, though in a civilized country with universal healthcare that's not really a big problem and very little of that is strong enough percentages to plan for as an individual. Like if you got a 3% probability of cancer and the other guy 1%, aren't you still planning for the 97% probability that you don't? I'm not necessarily saying it's a good idea, but I don't think people's deepest secrets and biggest skeletons in the closet are lurking in their DNA.
I think you vastly overestimate how well average people understand percentages and fractions.
"Alice's class has 30 pupils, where 10% prefer ice cream and 60% chocolate. How many have a different favorite?"
"Bob's class has 30 pupils, where 1/5th prefer ice cream and 1/3rd chocolate. How many have a different favorite?"
I think you'll be amazed to know how many can't find 9 and 14 without pen and paper. And a surprising number not even with pen and paper...
The fascination with typing speed comes from the days when you had dedicated typists and secretaries. Computers, printers and photocopiers pretty much obliterated the need to re-type things and by far most professionals now type themselves, for the rest OCR and speech-to-text will give you a draft. A coder does not code at 200 WPM. An author does not write books at 200 WPM, if they did George R.R. Martin would finish a GoT book in a day and a half. Unless you have some really unique needs the limitation is the thought behind the text not the typing of the text.
It's very rare that the government will prohibit the collection of data, they want it and can usually get it through defining it as third party information, rubber stamp warrants, national security letters and if not via legally sanctioned or unsanctioned spy programs. What they don't want is a public backlash were people refuse to provide data because it'll be abused, so they'll sometimes stop insurance companies and whatnot from using the data but only because it's good for them. I think anyone who believes the government is against the IoT revolution or will do anything meaningful to prevent them from infecting everything is a fool.
For a random example, my dad got hearing aids. I was there with him, so I've heard what he heard. And then on a check-up she asked how they worked and how much he'd been using them, then checked that against the statistics on the device. There wasn't a single word said when he got them that they were collecting usage data, of course that was just locally on the device but it was still like wait, what, you can tell that? If you got a "smart" anything, you can expect it to upload a ton of telemetry about you. If you value your privacy keep your dumb devices, don't expect the government to come rescue you they'll just curb the worst offenses to keep the IoT wave rolling.
Consider an object P positioned at (x,y,z) at time t. I'm just gonna write this event as (x,y,z,t). How do you feel about this?
In an Euclidean universe that would still just be a sequence of concurrent observations like (x,y,z,1), (x,y,z,2), (x,y,z,3) and so on. It's a bit like I can have however many space dimensions I want if they're a constant 0. It doesn't get interesting until you have the theory of relativity with curved spacetime where objects have different velocities through time. The math of time dilation is pretty well tested and proven by now, we can send an atomic clock up in a GPS satellite and predict how much it will be off compared to a clock on the ground.
I guess what the GP is saying is that this is a form of illusion, time is constant it's our time-keeping devices that are off. But it also slows down every other natural process, like if you put a radioactive isotope on a GPS satellite it would decay slower than here on earth. It really is the pulse of the universe slowing down as it moves quicker through space, not just a flaw in our clocks which means to redefine time you'd also have to redefine all the formulas that use time.
So you could define time t0 in the unaccelerated frame but to every formula you'd add an unaccelerated-to-accelerated correction factor exactly equal to the Lorentz factor 1/sqr(1-v^2/c^2). So distance would not be v*t but v*t0*1/sqr(1-v^2/c^2). Except most of the time that would be a gigantic pain in the ass as we are in the same frame of reference and the formulas work quite fine without converting out to an absolute time and back again. Those who need to deal with different frames or change of frames understand the math just fine and for the rest of us time is best defined as "local" time.
Software engineers are hardly free from the "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" fallacy. I've seen a lot of attempts to fix flawed thinking and flawed processes through software fail miserably because it ignored the non-technological aspects or got lost trying to solve a technical problem that was rather irrelevant to the business problem.
There's lots of real psychology like confirmation bias, sunken cost fallacy etc. but they're easy to poke fun at, ask a psychologist what the time is and he'll ask you what time you'd like it to be. What motivates people? What makes people work together as a group? How do you direct a bunch of people towards a common goal? Why create self-inflicted problems like OCD? It's hard because you can't set up a formula like a high school chemistry experiment and say if I put this in I always get this out. But it's still fascinating and worth studying.
There's vast branches of economics that is rather mundane, it's everything to do with accounting and microeconomics like what are our margins on this product mix and what's the return on investment. Investment theory is speculation, for everyone who lost money you can be sure somebody made money. Don't think the financial crisis was a crisis for everyone, some made billions and managed to ditch the bill on everyone else. If you want to study how and stop them from doing it again, that's economics. And yeah, they're still waiting on a model from psychology on how humans perceive value.
I'd actually like to defend gender studies as a subset of psychology too, why do we have gender roles and where do they come from is a reasonable topic to study. The problem is when you're starting to uncritically add people to workplaces and projects as a means to improve productivity. I mean, I'm part of a development team and we have a team dynamic and every one of the team members has their own perception of working there. You could do a descriptive study of that, but productivity wouldn't go up unless you actually could change something for the better. And maybe we'd do better with an expert who isn't a great fit than a mediocre team player.
The goal of politicians is to appeal to the voters, they make a lot of proposals that won't get a majority or that aren't actually feasible to do just for appearances. Saying there's nothing to be done is never appealing, even when it's the truth.
I always wondered why ancients feared eclipses so much.
You think too much as a modern human who knows the Earth is orbiting the Sun and when it's not there it's simply under the horizon and an eclipse is just the Moon intersecting. The sun god and rain god are cornerstones of all naturalistic religions, one was dependable and one was fickle. They prayed for the sun to rise again in the morning and for summer to follow winter but it always did, unlike droughts and other maladies the sun god always brought light, warmth and life. Remember a total eclipse is like once a century, if they'd heard of the sun god getting angry at all it would be apocryphal stories. If he's now angry with you, that should freak you out...
This question makes no sense. Why would someone owe for free things, which there is no contract/terms-of-service/financial agreement?
Different life philosophies. Some people seem to more or less believe in moral karma, no matter how much you say it's free with no strings attached they feel an obligation to reciprocate and if they can't pay it back, they should pay it forward. These people are often those who refuse charity, because to them it's a debt no matter what. On the other extreme of the scale you have people who aren't even grateful, it's more like disdain "If these fools are giving it away I'm grabbing all I can" and you find some really obnoxious variations of this in the welfare system. Most of us are somewhere in the middle where we're kinda grateful but not really enough to open our wallets, except when it's really some form of informal "You scratch my back if I scratch yours" agreement or cost splitting like me buying this round and you the next one.
When these world's collide it tends to get ugly, because what happens is the first group says "We gave you all this free stuff, you should give some back" and the second group goes "Oh so it wasn't really free stuff, it was a bait-and-switch and now you're going to guilt-shame me into paying for it" and it goes downhill from there. Then a third group comes in and says if you wanted obligations, you should put them in writing and make them sign on it up front, that's what we did. Then the first group will say it's not about bludgeoning them with the law because that's a cat and mouse game with legal loopholes, it's about doing the right thing. Then the third group will say fuck that, they're a bunch of amoral assholes so stop being naive crybabies. Then the second group will say fuck both of you, we have an license and we're following it, we didn't sign up for a philosophy or cause.
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to apply labels for software but it's really much broader than that and apply to a lot of community resources and services that don't operate on formal agreements.
DNA evidence has more often been used to exonerate the innocent than to convict the guilty.
It's used to convict the guilty all the time, you just don't see it because it completely shut down the "it wasn't me" defense when it totally was you. In fact before DNA profiling many cases would probably never get near a court room, because if the drunk/drugged/assaulted woman couldn't pick out the rapist from a line-up there wasn't really anything to go on. Now they all claim it was voluntary which DNA can't say anything about, but the goal posts moved. Same with a lot of other serious crime, before you had some crappy surveillance tape and fingerprints that could be trivially defeated with a ski mask and gloves if you had anything at all, now damn near everything the burglar/robber/assaulter/murderer touched can be used to identify them.
So? Driving is a calculated risk, where people see the benefits as outweighing the risks. (...) You can live in a padded room if you like, but don't impose it on others.
To most people, most of the time the benefit is getting from A to B and driving only a means to an end. And stop acting like we can't die in your crash. That's why we have laws on speeding and drunk driving, what you think is acceptable risk is not the final answer. I think we're extremely far from a ban on human driving, but your "maybe I'm high risk but I don't care because freedom" reminds me of half-blind elderly who refuse to turn in their license. I'm not going to hold on to it at all costs if it's obvious I'm now a way inferior driver...
If "ethics" courses worked, then why the hell is basically every major business scandal the result of managers... who already take ethics courses? #VWDidNothingWrong
Because we want things like money, power, sex and so on. You're stupid if you think an ethics course on corruption will end all corruption, it'll still happen if the benefits exceed the risk. Conversely when something is seen as having risk but no gain it's easy to avoid it, particularly if somebody is looking to set an example and show their zero tolerance policy. The course itself is mostly just awareness, this is the different forms and shapes it can take, this is our policy, these kinds of behaviors are not acceptable, these are the possible consequences. They rarely go down to the fundamentals on how we agree on what's ethical and not, they're basically dictating.