The internet is a good example. It's improved our lives in many ways, but it's also created a whole new class of problems, headaches, and information overload. Are we really quantifiably happier today than we were 30 years ago? Well, we certainly have much easier access to much more information and benefit from its convenience. But has it made our overall lives that much BETTER?
Well a lot of shitty things like abuse and neglect happen pretty much regardless of technology. Apart from that, how happy people are often depend on how miserable they want to be. For example many wallow in their lack of direction, purpose, true love and so on. Others take on the weight of the world and every shitty part of it. Yet others live so insulated from real misery that the worst thing that could happen in their belieber minds is that Justin Bieber quits. My parents saw WWII, my great-great-something parents lived through the Black Plague, what do I really have to complain about? But we mostly compare ourselves to our peers, if we're worse off we're miserable. It's not all psychology, but it's more psychology than science and technology.
The TL;DR version is that Tesla's autopilot has 1 fatality per 130M miles driven
Actually the important fact is that they have 130M miles total, one ugly front-on-front collision and the numbers would be completely different. The national average is statistically good across 32k deaths, but extrapolating from one death is folly.
This is just wrong. Most of the Java development happens on Windows/Linux while the backend servers run on Linux/ZOS/Cloud/whatever. So while you seldom port the backend servers themselves you always port while going from a local to a production environment.
You're contradicting yourself. And you do it because you can, if you couldn't you'd run it in a VM or via VNC/RDP/X forwarding or some other form of remote desktop. Even in the worst case a dev environment is really not a big deal, I assume most app developers work on a PC/tablet and deploy to cell phones for performance/usability testing. I assume that simulation is what mainframe developers do too, they don't each have one at their desk. Nobody is saying it's a useless feature, but it's probably not a killer feature compared to the effort required to make everything work the same across all environments. If you do C#/.NET development give them Windows PCs, if you do Xcode get them Macs and everything else plays nice with Linux, who really needs Java?
NP-Completeness becomes a programming problem when the people who do the programming cannot spot a NP-problem and then spend countless hours to beat it.
To be honest, it's often the programmers who hear "optimally solve it" when the requirements actually are "sufficiently solve it". For example I just suggested for a knapsack problem at work we use a simple overflow algorithm instead. It doesn't matter that we're not perfectly sizing the chunks as long as they're below the max size, it's like a 10-20% deficiency on a 50-fold improvement. Sure with infinite time and resources we might have done it perfectly, but really it's just a workaround for limitations in another imperfect system. And particularly when it comes to any human scheduling, were it often turns out that there are some unsaid requirements which means they'll look at a time table and say this won't really work anyway.
When is the last time a Republican Administration had an openly gay man in a senior role? Peter would make a decent tech adviser to Trump. For all the people bitching that Trump is a raciest, homophobic, bigot... well, you're not paying attention...
I think he's a businessman first and foremost who cares about what gets done not who's doing it, but he has to pander to the religious right. Mike Pence is obviously a counterweight and when you're going with "lets make America great again" you pretty much have to appeal to traditional values. That said, he's pretty quick to blame the whole group for over-representation or problems with small segments within that group. Islamic terrorism is a problem with Muslims, illegal immigration is a problem with Mexicans, it's easy to feel harassed and discriminated when you're a non-terrorist Muslim or of Mexican descent and not an illegal immigrant.
I'm a male. "My" 50% of the population accounts for something like 99% of the rape cases, so is that a male problem? On the one side I want to say fuck off, I haven't raped anyone and I'm just me. I got zero guilt or responsibility for what other men do and you got no legitimate reason to treat me differently than anybody else. On the flip side of that, if we happen to walk the same dark roads home a late night I totally understand that she'd be a lot more afraid that I'd drag her into the bushes and rape her than I am of she doing the same to me. Statistics are unfair. And they're more unfair, the more specific and accurate they are.
I guess I'm like most people, I like to use statistics when they're in my favor and not ignore the facts. I don't like the statistics when they're in my disfavor because I'm lumped in with people I don't want to be associated with. It's very easy to end up in a cognitive dissonance where you want one set of rules for me to judge others and one set of rules for everybody else to judge me. It's so subtle that most people don't even realize they're doing it, they cry out their innocence when people pin a problem on them yet make broad generalizations in the very next sentence. But you can't really stop speaking about certain things being prevalent in certain groups either.
If you do, are you still in a simulation? It's basically 2500+ years of philosophy that the Matrix first touched on and Inception continued, is anything real? Does it matter what's real? If it's a good dream, don't pinch me.
At first I wanted to agree with you. Then I remembered all the people I've met both in my private and personal life that don't seem to be able to do anything without a paint-by-numbers guide. And how well those ignorant and irrational people corrolate to the ones I think might go nuts and decide to blow something up. Could I find a gun if I was planning an armed robbery? Possibly. Probably. If I just learned my wife was cheating on me or that my boss fired on me? No, if I was raging I'd probably just grab the kitchen knife or something else immediately available. Sometimes a small hurdle is all it takes.
I don't speak German and the word for "autopilot" in German - which I am not going to try to guess - probably has a subtly different meaning than in English.
The word is the same and means the same. But "the car" = "das Auto" (short for automobile) so someone with a very rudimentary understanding of German and ignorant of the roots in aviation might believe it means "car pilot". I don't think that's the real problem though, the moment people see it drives "by itself" they start playing with their phone or something to relieve themselves of the boredom. If they post-hoc claim they misunderstood the word, it's mostly because that puts the blame on Tesla and not themselves. Damn hard to prove people knew they weren't following the rules though.
I had a thought earlier today: The internet is the primary vector for the worst epidemic of mental disease ever to strike humanity, on par with the Old World plagues that wiped out New World peoples upon first contact. Here's what I wrote about it elsewhere:
Well if you look at all the crazy stuff people used to believe we're certainly not at a high point of ignorance and superstition. This reminds me of the 90s when people first got email and didn't understand that Nigerian princes weren't really looking to transfer millions of dollars to you. It's the same with the loons, we'll get over it.
How is the desktop support much of an issue? Enterprise support for databases and other server services can get very complex and I can acknowledge that a real TCO case could be made. But desktop? To me that's a simple, you have a problem, let's wipe you and reimage. I can't imagine a case where the costs difference exceed the license expenses.
Wipe and reimage... please tell me why I shouldn't outsource your job to the cheapest monkey in India. To "support" in this context means "create and maintain the environment that enables our workers to be productive, including but not limited to finding solutions to missing, poor or defective functionality", you know everything but the sticker price. The help desk, the training, the patching and upgrades, enforcing policies, dealing with vendors and bug reports, finding supported hardware and functional drivers, the whole package. And if you can't find equivalent tools, the lost time or productivity of the trained monkeys too. And if you need better monkeys, the extra peanuts. The sum of running the support organization typically dwarfs the license costs.
Every 10 years after the census, congressional districts are reevaluated, and usually redrawn. Long Story short: You can make smaller states votes matter more than medium sized states due to the minimum number of electoral college votes they can obtain. Now you have people that are more equal than others.
Redistricting a state does not change the electoral college votes for that state. They're both examples of some votes mattering more than others, but independent issues with potentially different solutions.
In other countries you vote for one of many parties, and then leave it up to the elites in those parties to form coalitions without further public input. There are pros and cons to both ways of running a democracy, and claiming a two party system is fundamentally different than a 3+ party system is deeply ignorant. The only significant difference is the lack of control a 3+ party system gives the electorate.
1) It's not a coalition when the winner (Hillary/Trump) rules supreme and the loser (Bernie/Cruz) is practically gone. It's just the first elimination round. 2) The primaries are not democratic with superdelegates and whatnot, the only democratic election is the final coin flip 2) Parties have political platform they get elected on, it's hardly ever a surprise who they'll form coalitions with. If they do it's special interest parties who have promised to sell themselves to the highest bidder. The question is what constellations will give a majority and what parts of their politics they'll trade for and trade away and where they'll compromise. The bigger parties get more of their politics, the lesser ones less. That means every vote counts, while in the US if you're in a red or blue state it means nothing at all.
"Deeply ignorant"... pot, meet kettle because your arguments are straw men and fantasy. I'm not saying our system is perfect, but there's been a real reason to vote in every election. In the US it's only to make sure the wrong lizard doesn't get in office.
You should look at those political systems before spouting an opinion on them. You only need to form coalitions with enough parties to form some treshold (exact % varies between countries) of majority, you don't need 100%.
While there's usually a minimum percentage of 4-5% to get proportional representation (to avoid the problems of the Weimar Republic where tons of 1% parties couldn't agree on anything) there is generally no percentage required to form government. A majority of parliament can force it to resign, but one party or coalition may rule in minority and seek support on a case-by-case basis. This is often the case when you have two major blocks that can't form a majority and smaller parties that want influence say 48+46+6%. If neither block wants to cooperate with the last 6% you could in theory keep throwing the government back and forth with 48+6% and 46+6% but in practice the 48% will rule and the 46% refuse to play into the 6%'s hands.
The point is that physical access is usually not that much harder to get that access from within range.
Many offices are like that yes, where the access badge is just to keep random peeps from loitering for things to steal and anyone with semi-legitimate reason has access. Not every place is like that though, but disregarding that if you're talking about colored LEDs I'm mostly thinking home applications. And it's a lot harder to get access to my apartment than to get within range of my wifi. But who am I kidding, we'll probably hook it up to the IoT so it can be managed from the cloud. That puts the whole world "in range"...
I arrive at dawn and leave at dusk, work all day inside in an office. Fortunately it has a window, but when I get off work it's dark. I'd rather work 00-08, leisure time 08-16, sleep 16-24 but it's hard when everybody else is on a different schedule. Any "savings" is bullshit because I spend just as many hours in the dark in the evening, it's just a question of where I spend them. I suppose it's different in construction or agriculture but they're the exception not the norm anymore.
It had better cost a hell of a lot less than filling up a comparable gas car.
Because...? These superchargers are the most expensive and worst way to charge a battery, they're necessary to cover long distances reasonably quickly but 145 kW power circuitry does not come cheap. Both for their own costs and warranty of battery Tesla wants these superchargers to be the last resort when you've used up all other possibilities of source and destination charging. The location of the first superchargers were quite clearly picked to be really out of the way so most people didn't just go there for free electricity, it made sense passing through but not to visit for a free charge. By switching to this model they avoid the locals using it to charge all year long and can start building them closer to population centers. It's easier to find power supply and it helps people who for some reason forgot to charge or the charger was defective or whatever. Today you might wait a really long time if you've put yourself in a bad spot, in the future you'll just need enough juice to limp to the charger not entirely unlike ICE cars.
Japan and the EU have laws to prevent exploitation and limit the number of hours people can work a week, specifically to prevent all that from happening.
Well yes, but the biggest difference is overtime pay. I'd be willing to negotiate for any real hourly wage, but I'd never take any non-executive position without it. The reason is that once you're salaried every extra hour you're goaded into working is a free hour and your manager will feel the pressure to show he's maximizing return. There's always more low priority items you could have started on, you're never really done I could work at least a few years to clear everything on the backlog. Reality is that you'll just slack off once you know the important stuff is done. With overtime it's really easy, is having me around another hour worth 150% pay? Is it worth stretching my 8 hour day into 10 hour or 12 hours with lower efficiency? Only when truly necessary.
I've worked many years as a consultant billing by the hour and my attitude has always been that how many hours I bill is up to you, if you give me clear specifications, the right tools, short decision processes and quick feedback I'll be efficient for you. But I'm billing the hours it takes, so if you want to pull me into silly meetings, indecision and waste my time that's okay I'm billing that too. Slightly more diplomatically said of course, but clear enough you can't miss the point. I want my employment relationship to be the same as well, I'm here to be efficient for you if you'll be efficient for me and steal as little of my life as possible. We should both want the job to be finished in regular hours. If you're not happy with my overall work, we'll deal with that during salary negotiations.
<devil's advocate>The point is not to make an even haircut, explosive population growth is a very unevenly distributed problem, you want to punish the "offenders" and bully the others in line. Nuke the biggest city of the top five boomers and let everyone know you intend to do that again in five years if things don't improve and I suspect you'd see a huge effect.</devil's advocate>
Besides, the really interesting figure is birth rate, back the the 1970s the world rate was almost 5 children / woman and almost all of those children are still alive today. But now the birth rate is like 2.3 globally. We've gone from 3 surplus to 0.3 surplus so 90% of the growth is gone the rest is an aging population.
You do realize Stallman has been saying this stuff since the 70s right? Its been a known problem for a VERY long time and we fought the good fight for as long as we could, but pocket computers killed it.
Well I think it swings both ways, it's more and more obvious that you don't really control any closed source operating system, you pretty much must have security patches and everything else comes along for the ride and increasingly it can't be configured or disabled. That's the way of iOS, Android, Win10, they're trying to push that model on Win7/8, I'm not sure about OS X but they're probably not far behind. If you want control, you want Linux (or some other open source OS). That said, most people don't felt they were in control at all. By making Apple/Google/Microsoft the gatekeeper, they trust just one source instead of any random exe from the Internet. Same way most people want the CA system instead of messing with peer-to-peer trust. Because when they don't understand - and they won't understand, no matter how much you try to teach them - they end up trusting something or someone.
That said, what I'm mostly disappointed with is how the world has ended up revolving around a few, huge centralized services. Newsgroups, IRC, Email, blogs and really any kind of service that runs on a network or you could run from your own server is toiling in obscurity, you need to be on Facebook and Twitter and YouTube playing by their rules and if they want to wield the ban hammer there's very little you can do. Personally I'm far more concerned about how we've lost control of the human interaction rather than control over the local machine. And for the most part we don't own things in the digital world anymore we license or stream them, it's all permissions that can be revoked or services that can be shut down. That said, it works surprisingly well until one day it doesn't.
On the other hand, I assume he's not getting paid for it. Doesn't matter what open source application it is, if it wasn't my itch to scratch I doubt I'd bother to fix someone else's botched implementation of file formats, protocols and such. Particularly not a large, closed source corporation like Microsoft. Could you imagine Firefox trying to mimic IE6's rendering? I'd probably not bother with the long analogies though just mark it as WONTFIX, if someone offers
a) a clean and working compatibility patch or b) a paid consulting gig
I'd consider it, if not go complain to Microsoft. I know shit like this happens a lot in the real world, I work around a lot of broken and buggy shit but then I also collect a paycheck for it. It's not the kind of work you do for fun, it's just a pain in the butt because you're forced to deal with a poor product.
All the politics in the world won't stop the fact that labor at 33% of the price is very attractive. You might stop H1B's (they sort of suck anyway) but then they'll just offshore. Or use L1 visas. Or some other dodge. Or buy a package and just give up a half dozen features they felt were mandatory until they realized they'd have to pay a full time person to support it.
Well, if they genuinely get the same benefit at 1/3rd the cost you're in trouble. More often the case is that you get the hours, but productivity is much lower in ways that are very hard to quantify and less immediately apparent. You can spend 10x as long working around bad design and bad code and chasing bugs and corrupted data as just getting it right. But "getting it right" isn't going to show up in any MBA's spreadsheet. Wage costs cut, margins up, long term projects fail, quality falls, customers flee but probably not before the people behind it has collected their bonus and moved on to greener pastures.
Well, if you look at what a "good" Christian from 1916 or 1516 would think of 2016's society he'd be pretty shocked and appalled. The religion we have today is the same religion as the one burning witches at the stake, but the content is malleable because the Bible is full of allegories and euphemisms, not to mention we often plain out ignore certain chapters that conflict with modern society. People think other religions are like their own religion and that their Holy Book is just as much a guideline as our own Holy Book and that they can assimilate modern principles into their religion as easily as we did in ours. Experience from practice suggests that's not the case, but as long as people believe that they don't see the harm.
Playing optimally does not mean you win every time. Take for example Texas Hold 'Em, no matter how poor a hand you have pre-flop (worst is 7-2 off-suite) against the best (pair of aces) you still have about 11-12% chance depending on colors and flush draws if you just shove every time and never see a flop. If it's your one-in-a-million lucky day you could do that six times in a row and win every time. Every poker pro - and most amateurs too - will have some bad beat story where they did everything right and still lost big. But in the long run it should work most of the time.
That's what should happen if you play optimally with a fog of war too, you don't have one static strategy where you build the same every time, at least not if the game follows basic rock-paper-scissors rules that should never work. You have a variation that mostly beats your opponent's variation and you hedge and switch strategies on the fly as your opponent's strategy is revealed to you. And of course that includes bluffing, but that's part of the call or fold decision. Assuming your opponent never bluffs and always bluffs both lead to very poor strategies, they bluff part of the time and you call part of the time on the same board.
It's not like chess where in position X you always want to do Y. But it's a lot more like the real world where you don't have perfect information and that's kinda the point here to make AI that can function instead of humans in the real world. They won't necessarily be better than our best, but they'll be more consistent in not doing things that are clearly sub-optimal, like say rear ending the car standing still in front of us. I'm not a good RTS player. I notice quite often that I'm simply not keeping up with the action, those should have retreated, those should have pushed the attack, that position should have been reinforced, those troops I build didn't get any orders and so on. Just consistently using what you have in a good way probably beats any strategy I got.
Evidence from their customers seems to suggest this is indeed the case.
Like they say in the stock market, past performance is no guarantee of future results. During the Jobs years you had the iPod, iPhone and iPad that were all huge hits. What does Cook have except for incremental improvements of existing product lines? The Apple Watch I guess, but that doesn't exactly inspire confidence. I'm sure they can make money improving what they have, I have the iPhone SE which is a highly defined design but the reality distortion field that made people take a leap of faith is fading. Not that they're bad, they're a hit and miss company like most. It's just not Apple hitting home runs.
Slashdot Mirror
The internet is a good example. It's improved our lives in many ways, but it's also created a whole new class of problems, headaches, and information overload. Are we really quantifiably happier today than we were 30 years ago? Well, we certainly have much easier access to much more information and benefit from its convenience. But has it made our overall lives that much BETTER?
Well a lot of shitty things like abuse and neglect happen pretty much regardless of technology. Apart from that, how happy people are often depend on how miserable they want to be. For example many wallow in their lack of direction, purpose, true love and so on. Others take on the weight of the world and every shitty part of it. Yet others live so insulated from real misery that the worst thing that could happen in their belieber minds is that Justin Bieber quits. My parents saw WWII, my great-great-something parents lived through the Black Plague, what do I really have to complain about? But we mostly compare ourselves to our peers, if we're worse off we're miserable. It's not all psychology, but it's more psychology than science and technology.
The TL;DR version is that Tesla's autopilot has 1 fatality per 130M miles driven
Actually the important fact is that they have 130M miles total, one ugly front-on-front collision and the numbers would be completely different. The national average is statistically good across 32k deaths, but extrapolating from one death is folly.
This is just wrong. Most of the Java development happens on Windows/Linux while the backend servers run on Linux/ZOS/Cloud/whatever. So while you seldom port the backend servers themselves you always port while going from a local to a production environment.
You're contradicting yourself. And you do it because you can, if you couldn't you'd run it in a VM or via VNC/RDP/X forwarding or some other form of remote desktop. Even in the worst case a dev environment is really not a big deal, I assume most app developers work on a PC/tablet and deploy to cell phones for performance/usability testing. I assume that simulation is what mainframe developers do too, they don't each have one at their desk. Nobody is saying it's a useless feature, but it's probably not a killer feature compared to the effort required to make everything work the same across all environments. If you do C#/.NET development give them Windows PCs, if you do Xcode get them Macs and everything else plays nice with Linux, who really needs Java?
NP-Completeness becomes a programming problem when the people who do the programming cannot spot a NP-problem and then spend countless hours to beat it.
To be honest, it's often the programmers who hear "optimally solve it" when the requirements actually are "sufficiently solve it". For example I just suggested for a knapsack problem at work we use a simple overflow algorithm instead. It doesn't matter that we're not perfectly sizing the chunks as long as they're below the max size, it's like a 10-20% deficiency on a 50-fold improvement. Sure with infinite time and resources we might have done it perfectly, but really it's just a workaround for limitations in another imperfect system. And particularly when it comes to any human scheduling, were it often turns out that there are some unsaid requirements which means they'll look at a time table and say this won't really work anyway.
When is the last time a Republican Administration had an openly gay man in a senior role? Peter would make a decent tech adviser to Trump. For all the people bitching that Trump is a raciest, homophobic, bigot... well, you're not paying attention...
I think he's a businessman first and foremost who cares about what gets done not who's doing it, but he has to pander to the religious right. Mike Pence is obviously a counterweight and when you're going with "lets make America great again" you pretty much have to appeal to traditional values. That said, he's pretty quick to blame the whole group for over-representation or problems with small segments within that group. Islamic terrorism is a problem with Muslims, illegal immigration is a problem with Mexicans, it's easy to feel harassed and discriminated when you're a non-terrorist Muslim or of Mexican descent and not an illegal immigrant.
I'm a male. "My" 50% of the population accounts for something like 99% of the rape cases, so is that a male problem? On the one side I want to say fuck off, I haven't raped anyone and I'm just me. I got zero guilt or responsibility for what other men do and you got no legitimate reason to treat me differently than anybody else. On the flip side of that, if we happen to walk the same dark roads home a late night I totally understand that she'd be a lot more afraid that I'd drag her into the bushes and rape her than I am of she doing the same to me. Statistics are unfair. And they're more unfair, the more specific and accurate they are.
I guess I'm like most people, I like to use statistics when they're in my favor and not ignore the facts. I don't like the statistics when they're in my disfavor because I'm lumped in with people I don't want to be associated with. It's very easy to end up in a cognitive dissonance where you want one set of rules for me to judge others and one set of rules for everybody else to judge me. It's so subtle that most people don't even realize they're doing it, they cry out their innocence when people pin a problem on them yet make broad generalizations in the very next sentence. But you can't really stop speaking about certain things being prevalent in certain groups either.
We're not dead, we're in a simulation. Wake up
If you do, are you still in a simulation? It's basically 2500+ years of philosophy that the Matrix first touched on and Inception continued, is anything real? Does it matter what's real? If it's a good dream, don't pinch me.
At first I wanted to agree with you. Then I remembered all the people I've met both in my private and personal life that don't seem to be able to do anything without a paint-by-numbers guide. And how well those ignorant and irrational people corrolate to the ones I think might go nuts and decide to blow something up. Could I find a gun if I was planning an armed robbery? Possibly. Probably. If I just learned my wife was cheating on me or that my boss fired on me? No, if I was raging I'd probably just grab the kitchen knife or something else immediately available. Sometimes a small hurdle is all it takes.
I don't speak German and the word for "autopilot" in German - which I am not going to try to guess - probably has a subtly different meaning than in English.
The word is the same and means the same. But "the car" = "das Auto" (short for automobile) so someone with a very rudimentary understanding of German and ignorant of the roots in aviation might believe it means "car pilot". I don't think that's the real problem though, the moment people see it drives "by itself" they start playing with their phone or something to relieve themselves of the boredom. If they post-hoc claim they misunderstood the word, it's mostly because that puts the blame on Tesla and not themselves. Damn hard to prove people knew they weren't following the rules though.
I had a thought earlier today: The internet is the primary vector for the worst epidemic of mental disease ever to strike humanity, on par with the Old World plagues that wiped out New World peoples upon first contact. Here's what I wrote about it elsewhere:
Well if you look at all the crazy stuff people used to believe we're certainly not at a high point of ignorance and superstition. This reminds me of the 90s when people first got email and didn't understand that Nigerian princes weren't really looking to transfer millions of dollars to you. It's the same with the loons, we'll get over it.
CA-LI-FOR-NI-A! CA-LI-FOR-NI-A! CA-LI-FOR-NI-A!
Too many syllables. Also the lameness filter is lame because now I have to write some more.
How is the desktop support much of an issue? Enterprise support for databases and other server services can get very complex and I can acknowledge that a real TCO case could be made. But desktop? To me that's a simple, you have a problem, let's wipe you and reimage. I can't imagine a case where the costs difference exceed the license expenses.
Wipe and reimage... please tell me why I shouldn't outsource your job to the cheapest monkey in India. To "support" in this context means "create and maintain the environment that enables our workers to be productive, including but not limited to finding solutions to missing, poor or defective functionality", you know everything but the sticker price. The help desk, the training, the patching and upgrades, enforcing policies, dealing with vendors and bug reports, finding supported hardware and functional drivers, the whole package. And if you can't find equivalent tools, the lost time or productivity of the trained monkeys too. And if you need better monkeys, the extra peanuts. The sum of running the support organization typically dwarfs the license costs.
Every 10 years after the census, congressional districts are reevaluated, and usually redrawn. Long Story short: You can make smaller states votes matter more than medium sized states due to the minimum number of electoral college votes they can obtain. Now you have people that are more equal than others.
Redistricting a state does not change the electoral college votes for that state. They're both examples of some votes mattering more than others, but independent issues with potentially different solutions.
In other countries you vote for one of many parties, and then leave it up to the elites in those parties to form coalitions without further public input. There are pros and cons to both ways of running a democracy, and claiming a two party system is fundamentally different than a 3+ party system is deeply ignorant. The only significant difference is the lack of control a 3+ party system gives the electorate.
1) It's not a coalition when the winner (Hillary/Trump) rules supreme and the loser (Bernie/Cruz) is practically gone. It's just the first elimination round.
2) The primaries are not democratic with superdelegates and whatnot, the only democratic election is the final coin flip
2) Parties have political platform they get elected on, it's hardly ever a surprise who they'll form coalitions with. If they do it's special interest parties who have promised to sell themselves to the highest bidder. The question is what constellations will give a majority and what parts of their politics they'll trade for and trade away and where they'll compromise. The bigger parties get more of their politics, the lesser ones less. That means every vote counts, while in the US if you're in a red or blue state it means nothing at all.
"Deeply ignorant"... pot, meet kettle because your arguments are straw men and fantasy. I'm not saying our system is perfect, but there's been a real reason to vote in every election. In the US it's only to make sure the wrong lizard doesn't get in office.
You should look at those political systems before spouting an opinion on them. You only need to form coalitions with enough parties to form some treshold (exact % varies between countries) of majority, you don't need 100%.
While there's usually a minimum percentage of 4-5% to get proportional representation (to avoid the problems of the Weimar Republic where tons of 1% parties couldn't agree on anything) there is generally no percentage required to form government. A majority of parliament can force it to resign, but one party or coalition may rule in minority and seek support on a case-by-case basis. This is often the case when you have two major blocks that can't form a majority and smaller parties that want influence say 48+46+6%. If neither block wants to cooperate with the last 6% you could in theory keep throwing the government back and forth with 48+6% and 46+6% but in practice the 48% will rule and the 46% refuse to play into the 6%'s hands.
The point is that physical access is usually not that much harder to get that access from within range.
Many offices are like that yes, where the access badge is just to keep random peeps from loitering for things to steal and anyone with semi-legitimate reason has access. Not every place is like that though, but disregarding that if you're talking about colored LEDs I'm mostly thinking home applications. And it's a lot harder to get access to my apartment than to get within range of my wifi. But who am I kidding, we'll probably hook it up to the IoT so it can be managed from the cloud. That puts the whole world "in range"...
Sunrise: 08:23
Sunset: 15:43
I arrive at dawn and leave at dusk, work all day inside in an office. Fortunately it has a window, but when I get off work it's dark. I'd rather work 00-08, leisure time 08-16, sleep 16-24 but it's hard when everybody else is on a different schedule. Any "savings" is bullshit because I spend just as many hours in the dark in the evening, it's just a question of where I spend them. I suppose it's different in construction or agriculture but they're the exception not the norm anymore.
It had better cost a hell of a lot less than filling up a comparable gas car.
Because...? These superchargers are the most expensive and worst way to charge a battery, they're necessary to cover long distances reasonably quickly but 145 kW power circuitry does not come cheap. Both for their own costs and warranty of battery Tesla wants these superchargers to be the last resort when you've used up all other possibilities of source and destination charging. The location of the first superchargers were quite clearly picked to be really out of the way so most people didn't just go there for free electricity, it made sense passing through but not to visit for a free charge. By switching to this model they avoid the locals using it to charge all year long and can start building them closer to population centers. It's easier to find power supply and it helps people who for some reason forgot to charge or the charger was defective or whatever. Today you might wait a really long time if you've put yourself in a bad spot, in the future you'll just need enough juice to limp to the charger not entirely unlike ICE cars.
Japan and the EU have laws to prevent exploitation and limit the number of hours people can work a week, specifically to prevent all that from happening.
Well yes, but the biggest difference is overtime pay. I'd be willing to negotiate for any real hourly wage, but I'd never take any non-executive position without it. The reason is that once you're salaried every extra hour you're goaded into working is a free hour and your manager will feel the pressure to show he's maximizing return. There's always more low priority items you could have started on, you're never really done I could work at least a few years to clear everything on the backlog. Reality is that you'll just slack off once you know the important stuff is done. With overtime it's really easy, is having me around another hour worth 150% pay? Is it worth stretching my 8 hour day into 10 hour or 12 hours with lower efficiency? Only when truly necessary.
I've worked many years as a consultant billing by the hour and my attitude has always been that how many hours I bill is up to you, if you give me clear specifications, the right tools, short decision processes and quick feedback I'll be efficient for you. But I'm billing the hours it takes, so if you want to pull me into silly meetings, indecision and waste my time that's okay I'm billing that too. Slightly more diplomatically said of course, but clear enough you can't miss the point. I want my employment relationship to be the same as well, I'm here to be efficient for you if you'll be efficient for me and steal as little of my life as possible. We should both want the job to be finished in regular hours. If you're not happy with my overall work, we'll deal with that during salary negotiations.
<devil's advocate>The point is not to make an even haircut, explosive population growth is a very unevenly distributed problem, you want to punish the "offenders" and bully the others in line. Nuke the biggest city of the top five boomers and let everyone know you intend to do that again in five years if things don't improve and I suspect you'd see a huge effect.</devil's advocate>
Besides, the really interesting figure is birth rate, back the the 1970s the world rate was almost 5 children / woman and almost all of those children are still alive today. But now the birth rate is like 2.3 globally. We've gone from 3 surplus to 0.3 surplus so 90% of the growth is gone the rest is an aging population.
You do realize Stallman has been saying this stuff since the 70s right? Its been a known problem for a VERY long time and we fought the good fight for as long as we could, but pocket computers killed it.
Well I think it swings both ways, it's more and more obvious that you don't really control any closed source operating system, you pretty much must have security patches and everything else comes along for the ride and increasingly it can't be configured or disabled. That's the way of iOS, Android, Win10, they're trying to push that model on Win7/8, I'm not sure about OS X but they're probably not far behind. If you want control, you want Linux (or some other open source OS). That said, most people don't felt they were in control at all. By making Apple/Google/Microsoft the gatekeeper, they trust just one source instead of any random exe from the Internet. Same way most people want the CA system instead of messing with peer-to-peer trust. Because when they don't understand - and they won't understand, no matter how much you try to teach them - they end up trusting something or someone.
That said, what I'm mostly disappointed with is how the world has ended up revolving around a few, huge centralized services. Newsgroups, IRC, Email, blogs and really any kind of service that runs on a network or you could run from your own server is toiling in obscurity, you need to be on Facebook and Twitter and YouTube playing by their rules and if they want to wield the ban hammer there's very little you can do. Personally I'm far more concerned about how we've lost control of the human interaction rather than control over the local machine. And for the most part we don't own things in the digital world anymore we license or stream them, it's all permissions that can be revoked or services that can be shut down. That said, it works surprisingly well until one day it doesn't.
On the other hand, I assume he's not getting paid for it. Doesn't matter what open source application it is, if it wasn't my itch to scratch I doubt I'd bother to fix someone else's botched implementation of file formats, protocols and such. Particularly not a large, closed source corporation like Microsoft. Could you imagine Firefox trying to mimic IE6's rendering? I'd probably not bother with the long analogies though just mark it as WONTFIX, if someone offers
a) a clean and working compatibility patch
or
b) a paid consulting gig
I'd consider it, if not go complain to Microsoft. I know shit like this happens a lot in the real world, I work around a lot of broken and buggy shit but then I also collect a paycheck for it. It's not the kind of work you do for fun, it's just a pain in the butt because you're forced to deal with a poor product.
All the politics in the world won't stop the fact that labor at 33% of the price is very attractive. You might stop H1B's (they sort of suck anyway) but then they'll just offshore. Or use L1 visas. Or some other dodge. Or buy a package and just give up a half dozen features they felt were mandatory until they realized they'd have to pay a full time person to support it.
Well, if they genuinely get the same benefit at 1/3rd the cost you're in trouble. More often the case is that you get the hours, but productivity is much lower in ways that are very hard to quantify and less immediately apparent. You can spend 10x as long working around bad design and bad code and chasing bugs and corrupted data as just getting it right. But "getting it right" isn't going to show up in any MBA's spreadsheet. Wage costs cut, margins up, long term projects fail, quality falls, customers flee but probably not before the people behind it has collected their bonus and moved on to greener pastures.
Well, if you look at what a "good" Christian from 1916 or 1516 would think of 2016's society he'd be pretty shocked and appalled. The religion we have today is the same religion as the one burning witches at the stake, but the content is malleable because the Bible is full of allegories and euphemisms, not to mention we often plain out ignore certain chapters that conflict with modern society. People think other religions are like their own religion and that their Holy Book is just as much a guideline as our own Holy Book and that they can assimilate modern principles into their religion as easily as we did in ours. Experience from practice suggests that's not the case, but as long as people believe that they don't see the harm.
Playing optimally does not mean you win every time. Take for example Texas Hold 'Em, no matter how poor a hand you have pre-flop (worst is 7-2 off-suite) against the best (pair of aces) you still have about 11-12% chance depending on colors and flush draws if you just shove every time and never see a flop. If it's your one-in-a-million lucky day you could do that six times in a row and win every time. Every poker pro - and most amateurs too - will have some bad beat story where they did everything right and still lost big. But in the long run it should work most of the time.
That's what should happen if you play optimally with a fog of war too, you don't have one static strategy where you build the same every time, at least not if the game follows basic rock-paper-scissors rules that should never work. You have a variation that mostly beats your opponent's variation and you hedge and switch strategies on the fly as your opponent's strategy is revealed to you. And of course that includes bluffing, but that's part of the call or fold decision. Assuming your opponent never bluffs and always bluffs both lead to very poor strategies, they bluff part of the time and you call part of the time on the same board.
It's not like chess where in position X you always want to do Y. But it's a lot more like the real world where you don't have perfect information and that's kinda the point here to make AI that can function instead of humans in the real world. They won't necessarily be better than our best, but they'll be more consistent in not doing things that are clearly sub-optimal, like say rear ending the car standing still in front of us. I'm not a good RTS player. I notice quite often that I'm simply not keeping up with the action, those should have retreated, those should have pushed the attack, that position should have been reinforced, those troops I build didn't get any orders and so on. Just consistently using what you have in a good way probably beats any strategy I got.
Evidence from their customers seems to suggest this is indeed the case.
Like they say in the stock market, past performance is no guarantee of future results. During the Jobs years you had the iPod, iPhone and iPad that were all huge hits. What does Cook have except for incremental improvements of existing product lines? The Apple Watch I guess, but that doesn't exactly inspire confidence. I'm sure they can make money improving what they have, I have the iPhone SE which is a highly defined design but the reality distortion field that made people take a leap of faith is fading. Not that they're bad, they're a hit and miss company like most. It's just not Apple hitting home runs.