Both those with vintage restored spit polished classic cars and the ones with souped up race track cars are enthusiasts just in a completely different fashion. In your world only the tinkerers are "real" enthusiasts and the people who want a car that can handle 150 mph well are just rich customers. Nobody but an enthusiast would ever start tweaking DRAM timings or the BCLK or look at anything considered "exotic cooling", even if squeezing the last FPS out of their closed-source game with DRM on closed-source OS with DRM on closed spec hardware with DRM isn't your kind of enthusiast. The millionaires that simply buy the best computer money can buy are extremely few compared to all the hardcore overclockers and tweakers who really do care and invest time and effort into building the computer version of a dragster car.
Non-enthusiasts don't care about much of anything anymore, they don't push the limits any more than soccer moms driving their kids to soccer practice. Maybe there was a time when the average computer user felt the difference, but it was a long time ago. Any modern computer is fine, it's like the car that's just supposed to get you from A to B. And if you start talking to them about a walled garden, they think of it more like only being able to drive on roads while you praise the virtues of an off-roader. Sure it can go more places, but not any they know or care about. Most of them are very happy letting everything go through the cloud now, easy backups and synchronization of everything. Not even the NSA revelations will win over convenience. If you've handed over the keys to all your data you might as well hand over the keys to the computer too...
Reality is that "enthusiast" computing today depends on what companies care to provide as "slightly ahead of the current state-of-art" at exorbitant prices. Intel's not going to launch a new CPU for enthusiasts. AMD isn't going to launch a new CPU for enthusiasts. If they do it's just because they can cherry pick some CPUs from their server process (Intel) or that can perform exceptionally well for equally high power consumption (AMD). It is so insignificant to the overall market that progress would happen the same with or without them. We're just not a significant enough portion of the market to really warrant a new process or capacity or whatever.
They were innovators for professional use. Blackberry had all the i's dotted and t's crossed for businesses, but it gave the users very little reason to want one. RIM thought that purchasing decision would lie with big corporate bigwigs and that employees would be issued their standard corporate badge, laptop and Blackberry. Even the phones they sold individually seemed to appeal more to independent contractors and others with professional needs. Blackberry could not in any way imagine what a hipster or teenager or soccer mom might want with a smart phone. It reminds me a bit of IBM in the 80s when they totally failed to understand that PCs was totally different than minicomputers and mainframes.
Don't be too hard on RIM, going from selling professional products to consumer products is one of the toughest transitions companies goes through and one that's massively underestimated because people think you're going to sell "the same". You don't. Sales has to change, marketing has to change, support and service has to change, the product design have to change, the product lifecycle changes, many of the design parameters driving R&D, engineering and production change. For example IBM was still selling "built like a tank" PCs with service contracts and expensive spare parts because servers couldn't change on a whim, while consumers wanted a cheap new replacement instead.
It's easy to say it, but turning the boat on a corporate culture is slow and hard. You can't just tell someone that's worked 20 years on building rock solid servers that you now need a quick, dirty and cheap solution for PCs and expect it to actually happen. To tell a replacement parts business that's practically never run out of parts - they had parts for positively ancient machines at exorbitant prices - that now we'll just have a few PC parts and when they run out tough shit, buy a new one. The whole system in the entire business works against you and you're actually better off as a new competitor without that incumbent culture. That is how Dell went from dorm room headquarters to Fortune 500 on PCs in 8 years.
Oh please, there's so much "Star Trek computer" in it. Hand a robot a gun, put it in front of a another guy with a gun about to kill someone. By the first law of robotics, do you by action kill the would-be killer or through inaction let the victim be killed? It always picks the "right" solutions as if by magic. By the way, wasn't there also a story where the term "human" became corrupted so the robots didn't violate their laws by attacking "sub-humans" or something to that effect? It's been a long time since I read Asimov.
Your case is typical. Managers don't know about how people work, so they try to manage them like any other resource. But, as the excellent little book "Peopleware" put it: "Adding manpower to a late project makes it later."
Umm I think they got that chapter and figured "Well if we can't add people, the people we already have must work more." At least that was the implication I got from the summary.
As a developer, once I'm in the 'zone' I can code until I'm practically asleep...
Yeah, imagine you were working for yourself and set your own hours, would you really believe yourself saying "Nope, put in eight hours today no way I could get anything more done." or not? At the expense of having a life, sure I could put in more hours.
my guess is I wouldn't considering I would probably be thinking more about how pissed I was.
I'd be thinking about all the overtime pay I'd be getting, 150% and if they went all out then 200%. Did I mention I don't live in the US?
Because what, you expect the killbot to come running after you? It'll have an IR camera and assault rifle, point-and-shoot style. Let's call it more of a moving turret, less of a "robot".
It creates a hostile environment where no one wants to help each other. No department wants to see the other succeed nor do they want to see their co-workers succeed because you're in constant competition for your own job.
People are already a bit like that because they chase promotions and raises, but there it's more everyone for themselves. What's worse about a firing policy is that it creates scheming to find a fall guy, it's like one of those reality shows where one person has to leave every week. Usually it's not the "best" person who wins, it's the one who creates the most alliances then backstabs people at the right time and subtly enough the group doesn't turn on him/her. Exactly the kind of workers you want, yeah.
And not to mention what's economically and quality-wise feasible. Bits are easy, my digital bits are perfect copies and cost $0 (not including the cost of the hardware, but I'd need the hardware to store and run/play it anyway). I suspect a lot of the time the question would be "yeah, you could do that but it's cheaper to buy one that came off a barge from China". Imagine printing your own books on your home ink printer. Yes, you could do it but if you really want it on dead tree it'll be cheaper to buy it from a bookstore (retail or etail)
No... the real left is thinking that a basic income guarantee is becoming very close to feasible. Perhaps not yet, but we are getting close to the point where the labor generated by people who work for either self fulfillment or access to luxury goods and services can produce enough wealth to provide every household with a basic income capable of covering rent, food and basic utilities.
Not even we here in Norway which is about commie-red by US standards goes that far, in fact we just took one baby step away from socialism in the last election. The problem is quite simply that if people don't feel it pays off to work they won't. If they put the "basic income" too low, the poor can't actually afford to use it. It'll only become a cheaper way for the middle class to take a year off as many people dream of doing to fulfill some sort of self-realization but find too expensive. If they raise it too close to a low-end job, who really want to struggle eight hours a day in a dead end, physically demanding job when they can bum around and play video games? Because obviously we'd have to tax the shit out of people to pay for all this, so it's not like your pay would become your current pay + your basic income, that'd require us to create tons of money from nothing.
Already we're seeing certain trends in welfare abuse, not directly fraud as such but people who try very hard to get disabilities claims or to keep their unemployment claims by not being very employable. Statistically we know these trends aren't real because we don't have the sickest population in Europe and our working conditions are very gentle compared to many other countries yet we have one of the highest disability ratios in the western world. It just doesn't add up. These are the kind of people who are already looking to get out of the job market, they'd all take basic income and never return. Recently we've had some changes to the pension system where you could elect to retire earlier for lower pensions and lots of people got out at 62 instead of 67. Really, all the signs point to that if people can get a living paycheck without working, damn many would get the hell out.
Of course, the naive say that for each one that takes a year off a position opens up for someone else. That's not how it works, businesses aren't going to hire a dropout who is also now on basic income and probably happy with it just because they lost someone, they're not that desperate to keep the headcount up. If we decrease the talent pool, the jobs are just likely to disappear or move overseas. I think such a system would belly flop miserably but I'd be the first one on it, I'd see it as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to take a year off at a reasonable cost. I'm thinking I'm not alone in that respect, good luck replacing all of us from the ranks of the currently unemployed.
I would challenge you to prove that statement. There is nothing inherent in scientific knowledge that would cause a belief in god or faith to shrink.
Seriously, you want to dispute that? A hypothetical god or gods that exists entirely outside our plane of existence and only deal in intangibles like souls and afterlife, heaven or hell no. Actual religions, yes. Just look at for example rain gods, Wikipedia lists more than a dozen who people prayed to for rain. If you are primitive farmers that only know droughts come and go and imagine it's because the divine likes or dislikes you then that ignorance is the foundation of your religion. Does anyone really believe that anymore? That if the rain's not coming, farmers should get off their tractors and get together for a rain dance? Not to mention all the sun gods racing through the sky instead of a ball of proton-proton fusion that Earth is orbiting or the fertility gods that decide if you get pregnant and whatnot.
The Christian god is a little harder to catch since he works in his "mysterious ways", but it's pretty hard to reconcile "Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being." (...) "So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man." with anything resembling modern science. Of course the apologists just say anything not reconcilable with science is an allegory and not to be taken literally. Plenty of things you were supposed to take literally in the past has now receded to creative interpretation, like "days" in the creation myth not meaning days anymore.
No, they're mainly slow because they have the power budget of less than a constantly shining 40W light bulb, during dust storms make that a 5W light bulb. There's a huge trade-off between power consumption and execution speed, give a robotic mission the same power budget as a human mission and it will change drastically too. Not to mention we have two rovers, would a human mission be able to cover both areas? No, you'd need two missions. And what would a human do at night? Return to his shelter, which would almost certainly have to be fixed. Opportunity is currently 35km from where it started, that's a 70km commute to do the "afternoon's" worth of work and Mars doesn't have paved roads or gas stations. I doubt you can do it in a Martian day and overnight gear again increases complexity and weight. What we have is slow, but extremely efficient.
And all of the above involves sharing the ride with strangers that maybe you don't want present. Whether it's sharing things with close friends, having a family argument, lover's quarrel or make-out session, tightly guarded business secrets or that you'd like to watch some porn the privacy of having your own ride is entirely different. Never mind how bizarrely inconvenient a cabin trip would be with 1) and expensive with 2) or 3), sometimes a rental car is the only sane choice whether you'd like to drive or not.
For example, an oncoming car suddenly swerving into your lane head-on. I would assume the AI would apply maximum brakes and that's it. A human (especially an experienced driver) could take more extreme action, like going off the side of the road to avoid a head-on collision.
This reminds me of "I don't wear a seat belt because jumping out of the car saved my live when the car went off a cliff." arguments. In sixteen years as a driver I've been in one real emergency and it was as a passenger, talking to older people they've had maybe one or two major accidents and a handful of close calls, not counting fender benders in the parking lot. Most people - and I'd say 90% of the people on the road, if you want to count yourself to the last 10% feel free - are distracted and too slow to act, too shocked to react, panic, react instinctively or make some very poor split-second decisions. Instantly slamming the brakes is a good choice and probably above average, it's potentially not the best choice but I imagine it'd be just as much post-accident imagination as reality.
Remember, it's really hard to collect realistic data on this. You can't put people in a simulator and get realistic results because people know they're there to be observed and experimented on. In reality it'll happen on the 235th time you've driven the exact same commute and driving on mental autopilot, you're a bit tired from yesterday but need to get to work, you're mentally thinking about the stuff you need to pick up after work and boom, out of the blue there's this idiot suddenly swerving into your lane head-on. Your reaction is probably not as good as you think it is. And while human drivers on average won't change much, they can collect crash data and improve. Instead of once-in-a-lifetime they'll have thousands of crashes to analyze for optimal behavior.
What the government is bad at is managing contracts
Well, if you broaden contracting to the whole concept of being a professional customer with requirements, deliverables, change orders and decision making. It's not the lawyers to set up a proper contract that is missing, it's that the "the product they agreed to" is some vague concept that is all but impossible to spec, estimate or deliver. No contract can give you cost control when the essentials of the contract are so bad, it's just trying to polish a turd.
With the market turns into duopoly both the players no longer have the urge to bring new and innovative features into their new products.
If AMD doesn't get any more urges soon, it might end up being a monopoly. Here's Anandtech's take on the server market right now:
At the end of last year, AMD was capable of mounting an attack on the midrange Xeons by introducing Opterons based on the "Piledriver" core. That core improved both performance and power consumption, and Opteron servers were tangibly cheaper. However, at the moment, AMD's Opteron is forced to leave the midrange market and is relegated to the budget market. Price cuts will once again be necessary. Considering AMD's "transformed" technology strategy , we cannot help but be pessimistic about AMD's role in the midrange and high-end x86 server market. AMD's next step is nothing more than a somewhat tweaked "Opteron 6300". Besides the micro server market, only the Berlin CPU (4x Steamroller, integrated GPU) might be able to turn some heads in HPC and give Intel some competition in that space. Time will tell.
I think we all know FX-8350 is no match for Intel's high end in the desktop market either and they're struggling with power efficiency in the laptop market. AMD is exiting all the markets where they're exclusively competing with Intel and entering all the markets where they're competing with Intel and half a dozen ARM competitors. As the saying goes, out of the frying pan and into the fire. If those console sales don't start to kick up AMDs finances soon they're done for, because right now their business plans stink.
Anybody who has looked in the innards of X knows its a pig. No secret there. It's only Unix fanbois that cannot fathom that some parts of Unix were not properly designed from inception.
At 15:19, David Stone has a nice slide that says: xserver 1.0.2: 879,403 lines of code xserver (now): 562,678 lines of code
That's 300,000+ lines of cruft they wiped out without breaking the X protocol. Wayland is currently about 20,000 lines of code, that's about 3.5% the size. Even if that doubles they're still getting rid of 90%+ of the old code, that's huge.
Or you could just take note that Linus is becoming more of a manager than a raw code producer.
Of 1100+ developers he's in 101st, that's what still in the top 10%? Granted many of those won't be full time but many of them will too, some of them developers that do nothing but crank out code. The real story here is that the day has only 24 hours and with more full time developers joining up Linus is pushed down. Not to mention more developers means more code is pushed upstream to the subsystem maintainers and eventually to Linus so there's more to review as well which is also a form of digging into the code. I don't think we run any risk of Linus becoming a PHB holding powerpoint presentations and board meetings any time soon.
More densely populated and much, much more mobile. Those guys who flew halfway across the country for a conference? Wonderful, you now have hundreds of distribution vectors spread across the country. Shutting down airports helps a bit but people drive far and once you start trying to quarantine that you're fighting a mass panic and people looking to get the hell out every which back road they can. We suck at fighting viruses, we've been fighting HIV for 30 years now and we're still just slowing them down, a new strain of an unknown virus that we don't have any auto-immune response to? Maybe we can scramble the development of a vaccine, but against a rapidly spreading epidemic it'd be way too slow.
Hmm, can we use the map to get global scale calibrations to a normal mass. It would seem to be unfair that the same amount of material might cost more or less in different places due to scale errors that measure weight and use it blindly as mass.
For weights that are comparing against a known mass there is no problem. The 1 kg of material you want to buy will always weigh the same as the 1 kg on the other side of the scale weight, no matter if it's 9.76 or 9.83 newtons on each side. So these "global scale calibrations" just involve transferring around known masses and has been done for centuries. The only way the scale would be off would be if one arm was on the North Pole and the other in Peru.
Well why then is this a whole PCB with chips and not just a double plug with the data pins leading to nothing? I'd hope this one is smart enough to do the power negotiation in both ends, but without the physical capability to transfer data. But hey, lets be armchair quarterbacks and assume that whoever came up with this knows nothing about USB charging...
My impression is that this fucked up state is due to lack of overtime pay in the US. If you want a 100% position they expect you to work 150%, but if you want an 80% position they expect you'll only want to work 80%. We do have an overtime exception here in Norway too but it's so narrow that anyone you'd call a worker doesn't qualify, so if I work one hour overtime I'm guaranteed 140% pay by law and even if they swap for a regular hour the extra 40% must be paid out. I'm sure the total compensation is adjusted to reflect this, but it means there's always a marginal cost to using overtime and it's always higher than hiring another worker to work regular hours.
That is enough really, it puts all the right incentives in place to hire another person instead of abusing those you already have. I'm not saying it's perfect, last survey I read 46% always get overtime pay, 20% sometimes while 33% rarely or never, though this includes self-employed, managers and a few others that are genuinely excepted. However employers risk massive lawsuits for back pay of uncompensated overtime, typically from an employee that has quit but if found guilty they might be forced to compensate all their employees. It's a huge legal liability (140% wage*hours*employees*many years) that they don't want. A friend of mine got a really nice paycheck that way.
I live five minutes from work and I spend more than half my awake hours at the job. When you only have 16 hours of awake time and an 8 hour-a-day job, it's hard to not be under half.
Well hopefully you don't work seven days a week, there's 7*16 = 112 waking hours in a week so 5*8 = 40 is just 36%. I think he was talking about the people pushing 60+ hours/week, to each his own but I would never do that over an extended period of time.
In fact, go back a century or a little more, and most people were farmers: their only "job" was growing food to keep themselves and their own families alive. They didn't need external "work" to make their lives interesting enough so that they weren't sitting around idle and getting into random brawls.
Very bad example, most of those worked much harder and longer than the people who go to "work" today. Subsistence living before tractors and power tools was a full time job, go out and try to make firewood with a felling saw and an axe. It'll take you forever to cut down, divide and chop just one tree. Even such a trivial thing as getting water involved hauling it out of a well and carrying it home and if you want hot water, see firewood. Or indeed any hot meal. Yes many had horses to help, but that's also horses to be fed and cared for. Don't look at contemporary people living the "simple" life, 99% use modern tools that didn't exist last century even the Amish. Idle hands was never a problem.
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Both those with vintage restored spit polished classic cars and the ones with souped up race track cars are enthusiasts just in a completely different fashion. In your world only the tinkerers are "real" enthusiasts and the people who want a car that can handle 150 mph well are just rich customers. Nobody but an enthusiast would ever start tweaking DRAM timings or the BCLK or look at anything considered "exotic cooling", even if squeezing the last FPS out of their closed-source game with DRM on closed-source OS with DRM on closed spec hardware with DRM isn't your kind of enthusiast. The millionaires that simply buy the best computer money can buy are extremely few compared to all the hardcore overclockers and tweakers who really do care and invest time and effort into building the computer version of a dragster car.
Non-enthusiasts don't care about much of anything anymore, they don't push the limits any more than soccer moms driving their kids to soccer practice. Maybe there was a time when the average computer user felt the difference, but it was a long time ago. Any modern computer is fine, it's like the car that's just supposed to get you from A to B. And if you start talking to them about a walled garden, they think of it more like only being able to drive on roads while you praise the virtues of an off-roader. Sure it can go more places, but not any they know or care about. Most of them are very happy letting everything go through the cloud now, easy backups and synchronization of everything. Not even the NSA revelations will win over convenience. If you've handed over the keys to all your data you might as well hand over the keys to the computer too...
Reality is that "enthusiast" computing today depends on what companies care to provide as "slightly ahead of the current state-of-art" at exorbitant prices. Intel's not going to launch a new CPU for enthusiasts. AMD isn't going to launch a new CPU for enthusiasts. If they do it's just because they can cherry pick some CPUs from their server process (Intel) or that can perform exceptionally well for equally high power consumption (AMD). It is so insignificant to the overall market that progress would happen the same with or without them. We're just not a significant enough portion of the market to really warrant a new process or capacity or whatever.
They were innovators for professional use. Blackberry had all the i's dotted and t's crossed for businesses, but it gave the users very little reason to want one. RIM thought that purchasing decision would lie with big corporate bigwigs and that employees would be issued their standard corporate badge, laptop and Blackberry. Even the phones they sold individually seemed to appeal more to independent contractors and others with professional needs. Blackberry could not in any way imagine what a hipster or teenager or soccer mom might want with a smart phone. It reminds me a bit of IBM in the 80s when they totally failed to understand that PCs was totally different than minicomputers and mainframes.
Don't be too hard on RIM, going from selling professional products to consumer products is one of the toughest transitions companies goes through and one that's massively underestimated because people think you're going to sell "the same". You don't. Sales has to change, marketing has to change, support and service has to change, the product design have to change, the product lifecycle changes, many of the design parameters driving R&D, engineering and production change. For example IBM was still selling "built like a tank" PCs with service contracts and expensive spare parts because servers couldn't change on a whim, while consumers wanted a cheap new replacement instead.
It's easy to say it, but turning the boat on a corporate culture is slow and hard. You can't just tell someone that's worked 20 years on building rock solid servers that you now need a quick, dirty and cheap solution for PCs and expect it to actually happen. To tell a replacement parts business that's practically never run out of parts - they had parts for positively ancient machines at exorbitant prices - that now we'll just have a few PC parts and when they run out tough shit, buy a new one. The whole system in the entire business works against you and you're actually better off as a new competitor without that incumbent culture. That is how Dell went from dorm room headquarters to Fortune 500 on PCs in 8 years.
Oh please, there's so much "Star Trek computer" in it. Hand a robot a gun, put it in front of a another guy with a gun about to kill someone. By the first law of robotics, do you by action kill the would-be killer or through inaction let the victim be killed? It always picks the "right" solutions as if by magic. By the way, wasn't there also a story where the term "human" became corrupted so the robots didn't violate their laws by attacking "sub-humans" or something to that effect? It's been a long time since I read Asimov.
Your case is typical. Managers don't know about how people work, so they try to manage them like any other resource. But, as the excellent little book "Peopleware" put it: "Adding manpower to a late project makes it later."
Umm I think they got that chapter and figured "Well if we can't add people, the people we already have must work more." At least that was the implication I got from the summary.
As a developer, once I'm in the 'zone' I can code until I'm practically asleep...
Yeah, imagine you were working for yourself and set your own hours, would you really believe yourself saying "Nope, put in eight hours today no way I could get anything more done." or not? At the expense of having a life, sure I could put in more hours.
my guess is I wouldn't considering I would probably be thinking more about how pissed I was.
I'd be thinking about all the overtime pay I'd be getting, 150% and if they went all out then 200%. Did I mention I don't live in the US?
Because what, you expect the killbot to come running after you? It'll have an IR camera and assault rifle, point-and-shoot style. Let's call it more of a moving turret, less of a "robot".
It creates a hostile environment where no one wants to help each other. No department wants to see the other succeed nor do they want to see their co-workers succeed because you're in constant competition for your own job.
People are already a bit like that because they chase promotions and raises, but there it's more everyone for themselves. What's worse about a firing policy is that it creates scheming to find a fall guy, it's like one of those reality shows where one person has to leave every week. Usually it's not the "best" person who wins, it's the one who creates the most alliances then backstabs people at the right time and subtly enough the group doesn't turn on him/her. Exactly the kind of workers you want, yeah.
And not to mention what's economically and quality-wise feasible. Bits are easy, my digital bits are perfect copies and cost $0 (not including the cost of the hardware, but I'd need the hardware to store and run/play it anyway). I suspect a lot of the time the question would be "yeah, you could do that but it's cheaper to buy one that came off a barge from China". Imagine printing your own books on your home ink printer. Yes, you could do it but if you really want it on dead tree it'll be cheaper to buy it from a bookstore (retail or etail)
No... the real left is thinking that a basic income guarantee is becoming very close to feasible. Perhaps not yet, but we are getting close to the point where the labor generated by people who work for either self fulfillment or access to luxury goods and services can produce enough wealth to provide every household with a basic income capable of covering rent, food and basic utilities.
Not even we here in Norway which is about commie-red by US standards goes that far, in fact we just took one baby step away from socialism in the last election. The problem is quite simply that if people don't feel it pays off to work they won't. If they put the "basic income" too low, the poor can't actually afford to use it. It'll only become a cheaper way for the middle class to take a year off as many people dream of doing to fulfill some sort of self-realization but find too expensive. If they raise it too close to a low-end job, who really want to struggle eight hours a day in a dead end, physically demanding job when they can bum around and play video games? Because obviously we'd have to tax the shit out of people to pay for all this, so it's not like your pay would become your current pay + your basic income, that'd require us to create tons of money from nothing.
Already we're seeing certain trends in welfare abuse, not directly fraud as such but people who try very hard to get disabilities claims or to keep their unemployment claims by not being very employable. Statistically we know these trends aren't real because we don't have the sickest population in Europe and our working conditions are very gentle compared to many other countries yet we have one of the highest disability ratios in the western world. It just doesn't add up. These are the kind of people who are already looking to get out of the job market, they'd all take basic income and never return. Recently we've had some changes to the pension system where you could elect to retire earlier for lower pensions and lots of people got out at 62 instead of 67. Really, all the signs point to that if people can get a living paycheck without working, damn many would get the hell out.
Of course, the naive say that for each one that takes a year off a position opens up for someone else. That's not how it works, businesses aren't going to hire a dropout who is also now on basic income and probably happy with it just because they lost someone, they're not that desperate to keep the headcount up. If we decrease the talent pool, the jobs are just likely to disappear or move overseas. I think such a system would belly flop miserably but I'd be the first one on it, I'd see it as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to take a year off at a reasonable cost. I'm thinking I'm not alone in that respect, good luck replacing all of us from the ranks of the currently unemployed.
I would challenge you to prove that statement. There is nothing inherent in scientific knowledge that would cause a belief in god or faith to shrink.
Seriously, you want to dispute that? A hypothetical god or gods that exists entirely outside our plane of existence and only deal in intangibles like souls and afterlife, heaven or hell no. Actual religions, yes. Just look at for example rain gods, Wikipedia lists more than a dozen who people prayed to for rain. If you are primitive farmers that only know droughts come and go and imagine it's because the divine likes or dislikes you then that ignorance is the foundation of your religion. Does anyone really believe that anymore? That if the rain's not coming, farmers should get off their tractors and get together for a rain dance? Not to mention all the sun gods racing through the sky instead of a ball of proton-proton fusion that Earth is orbiting or the fertility gods that decide if you get pregnant and whatnot.
The Christian god is a little harder to catch since he works in his "mysterious ways", but it's pretty hard to reconcile "Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being." (...) "So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man." with anything resembling modern science. Of course the apologists just say anything not reconcilable with science is an allegory and not to be taken literally. Plenty of things you were supposed to take literally in the past has now receded to creative interpretation, like "days" in the creation myth not meaning days anymore.
No, they're mainly slow because they have the power budget of less than a constantly shining 40W light bulb, during dust storms make that a 5W light bulb. There's a huge trade-off between power consumption and execution speed, give a robotic mission the same power budget as a human mission and it will change drastically too. Not to mention we have two rovers, would a human mission be able to cover both areas? No, you'd need two missions. And what would a human do at night? Return to his shelter, which would almost certainly have to be fixed. Opportunity is currently 35km from where it started, that's a 70km commute to do the "afternoon's" worth of work and Mars doesn't have paved roads or gas stations. I doubt you can do it in a Martian day and overnight gear again increases complexity and weight. What we have is slow, but extremely efficient.
And all of the above involves sharing the ride with strangers that maybe you don't want present. Whether it's sharing things with close friends, having a family argument, lover's quarrel or make-out session, tightly guarded business secrets or that you'd like to watch some porn the privacy of having your own ride is entirely different. Never mind how bizarrely inconvenient a cabin trip would be with 1) and expensive with 2) or 3), sometimes a rental car is the only sane choice whether you'd like to drive or not.
For example, an oncoming car suddenly swerving into your lane head-on. I would assume the AI would apply maximum brakes and that's it. A human (especially an experienced driver) could take more extreme action, like going off the side of the road to avoid a head-on collision.
This reminds me of "I don't wear a seat belt because jumping out of the car saved my live when the car went off a cliff." arguments. In sixteen years as a driver I've been in one real emergency and it was as a passenger, talking to older people they've had maybe one or two major accidents and a handful of close calls, not counting fender benders in the parking lot. Most people - and I'd say 90% of the people on the road, if you want to count yourself to the last 10% feel free - are distracted and too slow to act, too shocked to react, panic, react instinctively or make some very poor split-second decisions. Instantly slamming the brakes is a good choice and probably above average, it's potentially not the best choice but I imagine it'd be just as much post-accident imagination as reality.
Remember, it's really hard to collect realistic data on this. You can't put people in a simulator and get realistic results because people know they're there to be observed and experimented on. In reality it'll happen on the 235th time you've driven the exact same commute and driving on mental autopilot, you're a bit tired from yesterday but need to get to work, you're mentally thinking about the stuff you need to pick up after work and boom, out of the blue there's this idiot suddenly swerving into your lane head-on. Your reaction is probably not as good as you think it is. And while human drivers on average won't change much, they can collect crash data and improve. Instead of once-in-a-lifetime they'll have thousands of crashes to analyze for optimal behavior.
What the government is bad at is managing contracts
Well, if you broaden contracting to the whole concept of being a professional customer with requirements, deliverables, change orders and decision making. It's not the lawyers to set up a proper contract that is missing, it's that the "the product they agreed to" is some vague concept that is all but impossible to spec, estimate or deliver. No contract can give you cost control when the essentials of the contract are so bad, it's just trying to polish a turd.
With the market turns into duopoly both the players no longer have the urge to bring new and innovative features into their new products.
If AMD doesn't get any more urges soon, it might end up being a monopoly. Here's Anandtech's take on the server market right now:
At the end of last year, AMD was capable of mounting an attack on the midrange Xeons by introducing Opterons based on the "Piledriver" core. That core improved both performance and power consumption, and Opteron servers were tangibly cheaper. However, at the moment, AMD's Opteron is forced to leave the midrange market and is relegated to the budget market. Price cuts will once again be necessary. Considering AMD's "transformed" technology strategy , we cannot help but be pessimistic about AMD's role in the midrange and high-end x86 server market. AMD's next step is nothing more than a somewhat tweaked "Opteron 6300". Besides the micro server market, only the Berlin CPU (4x Steamroller, integrated GPU) might be able to turn some heads in HPC and give Intel some competition in that space. Time will tell.
I think we all know FX-8350 is no match for Intel's high end in the desktop market either and they're struggling with power efficiency in the laptop market. AMD is exiting all the markets where they're exclusively competing with Intel and entering all the markets where they're competing with Intel and half a dozen ARM competitors. As the saying goes, out of the frying pan and into the fire. If those console sales don't start to kick up AMDs finances soon they're done for, because right now their business plans stink.
Anybody who has looked in the innards of X knows its a pig. No secret there. It's only Unix fanbois that cannot fathom that some parts of Unix were not properly designed from inception.
At 15:19, David Stone has a nice slide that says:
xserver 1.0.2: 879,403 lines of code
xserver (now): 562,678 lines of code
That's 300,000+ lines of cruft they wiped out without breaking the X protocol. Wayland is currently about 20,000 lines of code, that's about 3.5% the size. Even if that doubles they're still getting rid of 90%+ of the old code, that's huge.
I find that fairly normal. Par for the course, you might say.
Or you could just take note that Linus is becoming more of a manager than a raw code producer.
Of 1100+ developers he's in 101st, that's what still in the top 10%? Granted many of those won't be full time but many of them will too, some of them developers that do nothing but crank out code. The real story here is that the day has only 24 hours and with more full time developers joining up Linus is pushed down. Not to mention more developers means more code is pushed upstream to the subsystem maintainers and eventually to Linus so there's more to review as well which is also a form of digging into the code. I don't think we run any risk of Linus becoming a PHB holding powerpoint presentations and board meetings any time soon.
More densely populated and much, much more mobile. Those guys who flew halfway across the country for a conference? Wonderful, you now have hundreds of distribution vectors spread across the country. Shutting down airports helps a bit but people drive far and once you start trying to quarantine that you're fighting a mass panic and people looking to get the hell out every which back road they can. We suck at fighting viruses, we've been fighting HIV for 30 years now and we're still just slowing them down, a new strain of an unknown virus that we don't have any auto-immune response to? Maybe we can scramble the development of a vaccine, but against a rapidly spreading epidemic it'd be way too slow.
Hmm, can we use the map to get global scale calibrations to a normal mass. It would seem to be unfair that the same amount of material might cost more or less in different places due to scale errors that measure weight and use it blindly as mass.
For weights that are comparing against a known mass there is no problem. The 1 kg of material you want to buy will always weigh the same as the 1 kg on the other side of the scale weight, no matter if it's 9.76 or 9.83 newtons on each side. So these "global scale calibrations" just involve transferring around known masses and has been done for centuries. The only way the scale would be off would be if one arm was on the North Pole and the other in Peru.
Well why then is this a whole PCB with chips and not just a double plug with the data pins leading to nothing? I'd hope this one is smart enough to do the power negotiation in both ends, but without the physical capability to transfer data. But hey, lets be armchair quarterbacks and assume that whoever came up with this knows nothing about USB charging...
My impression is that this fucked up state is due to lack of overtime pay in the US. If you want a 100% position they expect you to work 150%, but if you want an 80% position they expect you'll only want to work 80%. We do have an overtime exception here in Norway too but it's so narrow that anyone you'd call a worker doesn't qualify, so if I work one hour overtime I'm guaranteed 140% pay by law and even if they swap for a regular hour the extra 40% must be paid out. I'm sure the total compensation is adjusted to reflect this, but it means there's always a marginal cost to using overtime and it's always higher than hiring another worker to work regular hours.
That is enough really, it puts all the right incentives in place to hire another person instead of abusing those you already have. I'm not saying it's perfect, last survey I read 46% always get overtime pay, 20% sometimes while 33% rarely or never, though this includes self-employed, managers and a few others that are genuinely excepted. However employers risk massive lawsuits for back pay of uncompensated overtime, typically from an employee that has quit but if found guilty they might be forced to compensate all their employees. It's a huge legal liability (140% wage*hours*employees*many years) that they don't want. A friend of mine got a really nice paycheck that way.
I live five minutes from work and I spend more than half my awake hours at the job. When you only have 16 hours of awake time and an 8 hour-a-day job, it's hard to not be under half.
Well hopefully you don't work seven days a week, there's 7*16 = 112 waking hours in a week so 5*8 = 40 is just 36%. I think he was talking about the people pushing 60+ hours/week, to each his own but I would never do that over an extended period of time.
In fact, go back a century or a little more, and most people were farmers: their only "job" was growing food to keep themselves and their own families alive. They didn't need external "work" to make their lives interesting enough so that they weren't sitting around idle and getting into random brawls.
Very bad example, most of those worked much harder and longer than the people who go to "work" today. Subsistence living before tractors and power tools was a full time job, go out and try to make firewood with a felling saw and an axe. It'll take you forever to cut down, divide and chop just one tree. Even such a trivial thing as getting water involved hauling it out of a well and carrying it home and if you want hot water, see firewood. Or indeed any hot meal. Yes many had horses to help, but that's also horses to be fed and cared for. Don't look at contemporary people living the "simple" life, 99% use modern tools that didn't exist last century even the Amish. Idle hands was never a problem.