I can't speak for Google, but about 30% of the people I interviewed couldn't code up a variation of FizzBuzz. I guarantee you none of those will be a net positive if hired.
We consume 11 Terra Watt hours a day. Making that much at in 8 hours of sunshine would need 1.4 TW of installed capacity, costing 1.75 trillion dollars.
How did you get the sun to stay directly overhead for 8 hours?
We need to store half that energy in battery for night use, so at 125 $/kWh we need 750 billion in battery.
Please point me to those 100% efficient batteries that you've invented.
The average part means that for every family that spends $500 to move, there is one that spends $29,500.
Right, though that's more a sign that averages are pointless. The more interesting number is the median. If a few Bill Gates type people move by buying all new $100 million dollar mansions, it really skews the average.
In your scenario, the cost of "everything else" that needs to be bought new would be counted as part of the cost of moving, since it is money expenditure directly caused by the move, even if it was not caused immediately. When you take into account "every expense that would not exist if you didn't move", it adds up surprisingly quickly.
When one is at one end of the spectrum, it can be hard to comprehend how much mass is at the center and the other extreme to make the arithmetic mean what it is. There are people out there who will look at "$5k for furniture at a yard sale" and say "OMG, this guy is super-rich! With $5k at yard sales I could outfit a mansion or four. I furnish for $200."
I'm in the top 5-10% of the US in terms of income, but I'm looking around at my house and I see about $4k worth of furniture. Even for a family of 4, I can't see how that would add up. They aren't going to need 4 50-inch TV's, 4 dining tables, or 4 sets of couches. Things that you do need multiples of, such as beds, desks and chairs, are cheap.
Spending $15k to move is insane. You can re-buy all new furniture at the new location for a lot less. If you're willing to go for yard sales, you'd be able to do it in $5k.
The most expensive thing I own is my car, which can be driven to the new place for a few hundred in gas & maintenance costs. Next are my computers, which fits in the car. Clothing and shoes fits in a large travel bag and also goes in the car. What else? Personal hygiene products? A sleeping bag and some foam padding to sleep on? A pan and a few dishes? All fit in the car.
Everything else can be easily purchased new, or if short on cash, held off until enough money is available. The only unavoidable big expense is the deposit, but I can pay part of it with my previous rental's refund.
More importantly, they lack political engagement because they're too busy playing games. Take that away and they'll have time to think about overthrowing the party.
Regardless of the reasons (or potential solutions), an energy strategy based solely around renewables results in higher energy prices. The only countries I've heard that have relatively affordable renewable energy are those with excellent geography for hydroelectric power and has a low population relative to land area, which are unfortunately not that common across the world.
Until a country actually manages lower their electricity costs with renewables, most other countries should approach it with caution.
...one could also have hidden this in general taxes similar to the subsidies for fossil fuel or nuclear.
I heard this a few times, so I looked into it. According to a report from what appears to be a very anti-fossil-fuel organization*, the US spends $20 billion per year on fossil fuel subsidies. Sounds like a lot, but then I remembered that there's fuel taxes. Turns out the US collects $35 billion in fuel taxes. Now there's probably some non-monetary benefits that's not being counted, but if the government is making money from it overall, I don't think it counts as a subsidy.
* Their mission is apparently "exposing the true costs of fossil fuels and facilitating the coming transition towards clean energy", so I'd take their numbers with a slab of red Himalayan rock salt
I think what you're describing is the result of a cycle that all countries go through:
1. The beginning:
A country has sensible laws, lots of unsatisfied demand and few established players. The public is engaged and investment in infrastructure, education and research is high. This leads to low costs, easy access to skilled labor and untapped technology. Countless individuals rise up to take advantage of the opportunities, creating numerous small businesses.
2. The rise:
The most effective small businesses experience high growth and enters a positive feedback cycle. People find it easy to get jobs and make money. More talented people starts immigrating to the country. Tax income rises, leading to even more public investment. The most competitive businesses starts exporting to other countries.
3. The plateau:
The domestic market is saturated. Businesses starts to consolidate, becoming even more efficient by laying off workers. Local labor is sufficient to satisfy labor demands and wages begins to stagnate. People turn their focus to enjoying life rather than working to improve it. Inefficiency sets in for the government as the public becomes less engaged. Public policy becomes more aspirational and less practical. Business opportunities still exist in new and niche areas but fewer people start new businesses.
4. The decline:
Big businesses stamps out almost all of the competition and stops innovating. Laws are written to keep them profitable. Public investments decline as any money that does get spent is taken by corruption or is wasted. Infrastructure starts crumbling, education becomes difficult to get, public research is cut. Opportunities become scarce and red tape prevents people from improving anything. Talented individuals starts to seek better opportunity elsewhere.
5. Death:
All wealth and power becomes consolidated in the hands of the few and they become increasingly good at maintaining their status. Life becomes miserable for ordinary people as neither the government nor the business behemoths are able to provide the necessary services. Anyone who is able to leave, leaves.
6. Rebirth:
War, revolution or massive political upheaval upends those in power and the old businesses are put to rest. A new, less corrupt government is created. The country is now open to new businesses and talented individuals, and the cycle starts again.
At least a single site operator would only have their stuff to go through. So then the question would be, how can the site operator tell what is copyrighted or not.
They literally can't. Suppose you painted a painting. When showing it to your fellow painter friend, he takes a picture and later posts it online without your knowledge (this is infringement). Now the website must inform you.
Here's what the website knows:
- No similar photo has been uploaded before
- This photo does not match any work in the (hypothetical) database of copyrighted works
- Your friend is a legitimate user who sometimes posts original content
Here's what the website needs to know to contact you about the infringement:
- You created the painting in the photo
- The painting is copyrighted by you*
- You're not the owner of the account that uploaded the photo
- The owner of the account did not receive permission from you
- Your contact info
* It could be in the public domain or copyrighted by a third party due to contracts you signed with them (who could then have further contracts with a forth party and so on)
Now please explain, besides Big Brother and God, how anyone could perform what you ask of the website?
Nothing... the pervasiveness of the big company will be such that web searches will not tend to find the free versions of the software, people will generally not even be aware that it was originally free.
That's their own problem. If someone wants to pay $10 for something at Home Depot when Walmart has the exact same thing for $5, it's their fault for not price shopping and it's not Home Depot's problem to fix.
Regardless, it's plagiarism at any level, and while it is legal to plagiairize public domain content, it is not considered remotely ethical.
I don't think anyone would disagree a company that appropriates it with no attribution would be acting unethically. Whether there should be a law against it is a different question.
Super majority would guarantee no laws are passed unless they were absolutely not controversial.
That not true. It could be controversial, but as long as less than 40% of the people are consistently against it, it will pass eventually.
The point of requiring a super majority is to prevent flip-flopping. The only thing worse than a bad policy is a bad policy that constantly changes. Over time people can come up with ways to deal with a bad policy, but they can't keep up with a moving target.
I'm not sure anything that matters is not controversial.
Where did you get this from? Lots of things are important but uncontroversial. Having elections matters quite a lot, but providing government funding for them is not controversial. Courts are important and uncontroversial. So are police, firefighters, federal currency, standardized measurements, military... need I go on?
Small company uploads it to GitHub, their own website and The Pirate Bay. The big company will do what exactly?
You might be able to convince a few tech companies to stop hosting "hate speech", but you're going to need a lot of money to get them to stop hosting or linking to source code, and I'm not even sure if those managing The Pirate Bay would accept money to take down a torrent.
And if your argument is they can give it the same name to try to hide the smaller one, then we have trademark law to prevent that. No copyright necessary.
They're pretty careful compared to other tech companies. Take self-driving cars for example, which they've worked on for almost a decade already before releasing it.
When those 80,000 lab-bred Wolbachia-infected, male mosquitoes mate with their counterpart females in the wild, the result is stealth annihilation: the offspring never hatch.
Emphasis mine. In case you're not aware, male mosquitos don't bite.
Oh sure, current copyright law is so great that people still think Apple invented the portable music player and Tesla invented the electric car.
Because of how widely known the larger agency is, the smaller might not necessarily be easily found when trying to find the source code, and that's even *if* somebody bothers to look, and the creator's intent of wanting to keep the work's source code freely available is effectively destroyed
You are out of touch with reality. In this day and age, if it exists on the internet and the author wants it found, then it will be found.
Unless you want the country to be even more run by the media than it is already. Because all you'd get with direct democracy and people voting on everything is that the "news" (I'll use the word very broadly here) will be even more an instrument of public opinion swaying than they are already.
We can implement a simple process change to fix that.
For a bill to become law, it must: 1. Be voted on twice, with the second time more than 2 years after the first 2. Pass with a majority in the first round 3. Pass with a super majority in the second round, e.g. 60%
Alternatively, if a bill passes with an even higher super-majority, e.g. 75%, then the 2nd round can be skipped.
I believe at least 30% of the country are conservatives (with a small c) who like things exactly as they are. Combined with the folks who distrusts MSM, they'd be more than enough to stop news-driven policies.
Take the Iraq war for example. It happened in 2003 and began with 70% support. That is not enough to be passed immediately. So it would be voted on again in 2005, but by then support has fallen to less than 50%, which is not enough to pass. So this huge expense that the vast majority of people now agree was a mistake could've been avoided completely under a direct democracy.
If the event organizers cared at all, they also completely solve the problem with a simple auction.
Let's say there's 5000 seats. Everyone put in the highest bid they're willing to pay, then the top 5000 bids get tickets at the lowest accepted bid price. If someone is willing to pay $500 for it, then they just bid $500. Maybe they'll only end up paying $50, but they can have certainty that they will not only get the ticket, but also at the best possible price.
Git (and really any DVCS) already handles this problem. Since a complete copy is always stored locally, any attempt to rewrite Git history will cause people to see unexpected merges or errors when updating their local repo. Not to mention if any of them issue a "git diff master origin/master", they would immediately see the changes. For the very paranoid, they can also add another remote repo that belongs to someone they trust, and compare it with the one on GitHub.
Creating a Git repo is probably one of the most robust way to ensure it cannot be tampered with. Even the alternative of storing it on paper is not as good because a surreptitiously modified copy could not be easily compared to other copies. So the changes could be undiscovered a long period of time. With Git, there would be thousands of lawyers, judges and special interest groups, each with their own copy of the law to which any changes would be easily noticeable. The fact that the copy GitHub hosts is canonical does not compromise its integrity at all.
All analog video outputs must be SD only. HD output in analog form (ie, VGA connectors or RGB cables) was strictly prohibited. DVDs were allowed to output on VGA, as they were only standard definition anyway. HD outputs were only permitted via encrypted digital.
This is all very interesting, but I think you misunderstood. I mean that someone can put a camera in front of an HD screen, then do some post-processing to remove the distortion.
Unless they planned to prevent people from seeing the HD stream entirely, the photons traveling between the screen and your eyes needs to transmit the decoded HD analog stream. As far as I know, nobody has secretly invented cyborg eyes that can see an encrypted video stream, or decryption modules that works on the signals passing through your optic nerve.
The watermark - the plan was to use a watermark for all analog outputs, including audio, which marked them as 'encrypted distribution only.' So you could play your legal music, plug a recorder into the headphone socket, and thus generate a decrypted copy - but if you then put that file onto your CPSA-complient media player, it would detect that watermarked audio was present in unencrypted form and refuse to play.
That only works as long as: 1. Non-compliant players are unavailable and cannot be built 2. The watermark is easy to detect by a compliant player, despite having been re-encoded from the lossy analog output 3. The pirate does not know where the watermark is, and thus cannot simply remove it from the stream before re-encoding it
Corollary to #3 includes: 1. No compliant media player can be reverse-engineered to reveal the location of the watermark 2. No compliant media player manufacturer or content producer would reveal the location of the watermark by accident or through being hacked 3. No compliant media player manufacturer or content producer employee could be bribed or be otherwise convinced to reveal the location of the watermark 4. No pirate can successfully pretend to be a compliant media player manufacturer or content producer
You left out the other critical flaw, which is having no way of tracking the photons after it left the screen. Until our eyes and brains are digital, there's absolutely no way to close the analog hole.
Slashdot Mirror
So... did he turn out to be the star performer on your team or the guy that always fucks things up and had to be saved by his teammates?
I can't speak for Google, but about 30% of the people I interviewed couldn't code up a variation of FizzBuzz. I guarantee you none of those will be a net positive if hired.
We consume 11 Terra Watt hours a day. Making that much at in 8 hours of sunshine would need 1.4 TW of installed capacity, costing 1.75 trillion dollars.
How did you get the sun to stay directly overhead for 8 hours?
We need to store half that energy in battery for night use, so at 125 $/kWh we need 750 billion in battery.
Please point me to those 100% efficient batteries that you've invented.
The average part means that for every family that spends $500 to move, there is one that spends $29,500.
Right, though that's more a sign that averages are pointless. The more interesting number is the median. If a few Bill Gates type people move by buying all new $100 million dollar mansions, it really skews the average.
In your scenario, the cost of "everything else" that needs to be bought new would be counted as part of the cost of moving, since it is money expenditure directly caused by the move, even if it was not caused immediately. When you take into account "every expense that would not exist if you didn't move", it adds up surprisingly quickly.
When one is at one end of the spectrum, it can be hard to comprehend how much mass is at the center and the other extreme to make the arithmetic mean what it is. There are people out there who will look at "$5k for furniture at a yard sale" and say "OMG, this guy is super-rich! With $5k at yard sales I could outfit a mansion or four. I furnish for $200."
I'm in the top 5-10% of the US in terms of income, but I'm looking around at my house and I see about $4k worth of furniture. Even for a family of 4, I can't see how that would add up. They aren't going to need 4 50-inch TV's, 4 dining tables, or 4 sets of couches. Things that you do need multiples of, such as beds, desks and chairs, are cheap.
Spending $15k to move is insane. You can re-buy all new furniture at the new location for a lot less. If you're willing to go for yard sales, you'd be able to do it in $5k.
The most expensive thing I own is my car, which can be driven to the new place for a few hundred in gas & maintenance costs. Next are my computers, which fits in the car. Clothing and shoes fits in a large travel bag and also goes in the car. What else? Personal hygiene products? A sleeping bag and some foam padding to sleep on? A pan and a few dishes? All fit in the car.
Everything else can be easily purchased new, or if short on cash, held off until enough money is available. The only unavoidable big expense is the deposit, but I can pay part of it with my previous rental's refund.
More importantly, they lack political engagement because they're too busy playing games. Take that away and they'll have time to think about overthrowing the party.
Fetuses are potential human beings, fetuses are not human beings.
Care to back that up with evidence?
Has he tried places other than Fort Wayne? Even in the midwest it's not a city known for tech.
Most of Paradise was bay area retirees with a ton of home equity to spend.
24% retired is not "most".
Regardless of the reasons (or potential solutions), an energy strategy based solely around renewables results in higher energy prices. The only countries I've heard that have relatively affordable renewable energy are those with excellent geography for hydroelectric power and has a low population relative to land area, which are unfortunately not that common across the world.
Until a country actually manages lower their electricity costs with renewables, most other countries should approach it with caution.
...one could also have hidden this in general taxes similar to the subsidies for fossil fuel or nuclear.
I heard this a few times, so I looked into it. According to a report from what appears to be a very anti-fossil-fuel organization*, the US spends $20 billion per year on fossil fuel subsidies. Sounds like a lot, but then I remembered that there's fuel taxes. Turns out the US collects $35 billion in fuel taxes. Now there's probably some non-monetary benefits that's not being counted, but if the government is making money from it overall, I don't think it counts as a subsidy.
* Their mission is apparently "exposing the true costs of fossil fuels and facilitating the coming transition towards clean energy", so I'd take their numbers with a slab of red Himalayan rock salt
How much do you pay for that again? 3 times as much as other countries?
Please come back when it's actually competitive.
I think what you're describing is the result of a cycle that all countries go through:
1. The beginning:
A country has sensible laws, lots of unsatisfied demand and few established players. The public is engaged and investment in infrastructure, education and research is high. This leads to low costs, easy access to skilled labor and untapped technology. Countless individuals rise up to take advantage of the opportunities, creating numerous small businesses.
2. The rise:
The most effective small businesses experience high growth and enters a positive feedback cycle. People find it easy to get jobs and make money. More talented people starts immigrating to the country. Tax income rises, leading to even more public investment. The most competitive businesses starts exporting to other countries.
3. The plateau:
The domestic market is saturated. Businesses starts to consolidate, becoming even more efficient by laying off workers. Local labor is sufficient to satisfy labor demands and wages begins to stagnate. People turn their focus to enjoying life rather than working to improve it. Inefficiency sets in for the government as the public becomes less engaged. Public policy becomes more aspirational and less practical. Business opportunities still exist in new and niche areas but fewer people start new businesses.
4. The decline:
Big businesses stamps out almost all of the competition and stops innovating. Laws are written to keep them profitable. Public investments decline as any money that does get spent is taken by corruption or is wasted. Infrastructure starts crumbling, education becomes difficult to get, public research is cut. Opportunities become scarce and red tape prevents people from improving anything. Talented individuals starts to seek better opportunity elsewhere.
5. Death:
All wealth and power becomes consolidated in the hands of the few and they become increasingly good at maintaining their status. Life becomes miserable for ordinary people as neither the government nor the business behemoths are able to provide the necessary services. Anyone who is able to leave, leaves.
6. Rebirth:
War, revolution or massive political upheaval upends those in power and the old businesses are put to rest. A new, less corrupt government is created. The country is now open to new businesses and talented individuals, and the cycle starts again.
Sorry, but the data disagrees.
Interesting how a collectivist society that works its people to death fails to keep up with a society built on freedom and innovation.
At least a single site operator would only have their stuff to go through. So then the question would be, how can the site operator tell what is copyrighted or not.
They literally can't. Suppose you painted a painting. When showing it to your fellow painter friend, he takes a picture and later posts it online without your knowledge (this is infringement). Now the website must inform you.
Here's what the website knows:
- No similar photo has been uploaded before
- This photo does not match any work in the (hypothetical) database of copyrighted works
- Your friend is a legitimate user who sometimes posts original content
Here's what the website needs to know to contact you about the infringement:
- You created the painting in the photo
- The painting is copyrighted by you*
- You're not the owner of the account that uploaded the photo
- The owner of the account did not receive permission from you
- Your contact info
* It could be in the public domain or copyrighted by a third party due to contracts you signed with them (who could then have further contracts with a forth party and so on)
Now please explain, besides Big Brother and God, how anyone could perform what you ask of the website?
Nothing... the pervasiveness of the big company will be such that web searches will not tend to find the free versions of the software, people will generally not even be aware that it was originally free.
That's their own problem. If someone wants to pay $10 for something at Home Depot when Walmart has the exact same thing for $5, it's their fault for not price shopping and it's not Home Depot's problem to fix.
Regardless, it's plagiarism at any level, and while it is legal to plagiairize public domain content, it is not considered remotely ethical.
I don't think anyone would disagree a company that appropriates it with no attribution would be acting unethically. Whether there should be a law against it is a different question.
Super majority would guarantee no laws are passed unless they were absolutely not controversial.
That not true. It could be controversial, but as long as less than 40% of the people are consistently against it, it will pass eventually.
The point of requiring a super majority is to prevent flip-flopping. The only thing worse than a bad policy is a bad policy that constantly changes. Over time people can come up with ways to deal with a bad policy, but they can't keep up with a moving target.
I'm not sure anything that matters is not controversial.
Where did you get this from? Lots of things are important but uncontroversial. Having elections matters quite a lot, but providing government funding for them is not controversial. Courts are important and uncontroversial. So are police, firefighters, federal currency, standardized measurements, military... need I go on?
Small company uploads it to GitHub, their own website and The Pirate Bay. The big company will do what exactly?
You might be able to convince a few tech companies to stop hosting "hate speech", but you're going to need a lot of money to get them to stop hosting or linking to source code, and I'm not even sure if those managing The Pirate Bay would accept money to take down a torrent.
And if your argument is they can give it the same name to try to hide the smaller one, then we have trademark law to prevent that. No copyright necessary.
They're pretty careful compared to other tech companies. Take self-driving cars for example, which they've worked on for almost a decade already before releasing it.
Ignorance at its finest.
When those 80,000 lab-bred Wolbachia-infected, male mosquitoes mate with their counterpart females in the wild, the result is stealth annihilation: the offspring never hatch.
Emphasis mine. In case you're not aware, male mosquitos don't bite.
Oh sure, current copyright law is so great that people still think Apple invented the portable music player and Tesla invented the electric car.
Because of how widely known the larger agency is, the smaller might not necessarily be easily found when trying to find the source code, and that's even *if* somebody bothers to look, and the creator's intent of wanting to keep the work's source code freely available is effectively destroyed
You are out of touch with reality. In this day and age, if it exists on the internet and the author wants it found, then it will be found.
Unless you want the country to be even more run by the media than it is already. Because all you'd get with direct democracy and people voting on everything is that the "news" (I'll use the word very broadly here) will be even more an instrument of public opinion swaying than they are already.
We can implement a simple process change to fix that.
For a bill to become law, it must:
1. Be voted on twice, with the second time more than 2 years after the first
2. Pass with a majority in the first round
3. Pass with a super majority in the second round, e.g. 60%
Alternatively, if a bill passes with an even higher super-majority, e.g. 75%, then the 2nd round can be skipped.
I believe at least 30% of the country are conservatives (with a small c) who like things exactly as they are. Combined with the folks who distrusts MSM, they'd be more than enough to stop news-driven policies.
Take the Iraq war for example. It happened in 2003 and began with 70% support. That is not enough to be passed immediately. So it would be voted on again in 2005, but by then support has fallen to less than 50%, which is not enough to pass. So this huge expense that the vast majority of people now agree was a mistake could've been avoided completely under a direct democracy.
If the event organizers cared at all, they also completely solve the problem with a simple auction.
Let's say there's 5000 seats. Everyone put in the highest bid they're willing to pay, then the top 5000 bids get tickets at the lowest accepted bid price. If someone is willing to pay $500 for it, then they just bid $500. Maybe they'll only end up paying $50, but they can have certainty that they will not only get the ticket, but also at the best possible price.
Git (and really any DVCS) already handles this problem. Since a complete copy is always stored locally, any attempt to rewrite Git history will cause people to see unexpected merges or errors when updating their local repo. Not to mention if any of them issue a "git diff master origin/master", they would immediately see the changes. For the very paranoid, they can also add another remote repo that belongs to someone they trust, and compare it with the one on GitHub.
Creating a Git repo is probably one of the most robust way to ensure it cannot be tampered with. Even the alternative of storing it on paper is not as good because a surreptitiously modified copy could not be easily compared to other copies. So the changes could be undiscovered a long period of time. With Git, there would be thousands of lawyers, judges and special interest groups, each with their own copy of the law to which any changes would be easily noticeable. The fact that the copy GitHub hosts is canonical does not compromise its integrity at all.
All analog video outputs must be SD only. HD output in analog form (ie, VGA connectors or RGB cables) was strictly prohibited. DVDs were allowed to output on VGA, as they were only standard definition anyway. HD outputs were only permitted via encrypted digital.
This is all very interesting, but I think you misunderstood. I mean that someone can put a camera in front of an HD screen, then do some post-processing to remove the distortion.
Unless they planned to prevent people from seeing the HD stream entirely, the photons traveling between the screen and your eyes needs to transmit the decoded HD analog stream. As far as I know, nobody has secretly invented cyborg eyes that can see an encrypted video stream, or decryption modules that works on the signals passing through your optic nerve.
The watermark - the plan was to use a watermark for all analog outputs, including audio, which marked them as 'encrypted distribution only.' So you could play your legal music, plug a recorder into the headphone socket, and thus generate a decrypted copy - but if you then put that file onto your CPSA-complient media player, it would detect that watermarked audio was present in unencrypted form and refuse to play.
That only works as long as:
1. Non-compliant players are unavailable and cannot be built
2. The watermark is easy to detect by a compliant player, despite having been re-encoded from the lossy analog output
3. The pirate does not know where the watermark is, and thus cannot simply remove it from the stream before re-encoding it
Corollary to #3 includes:
1. No compliant media player can be reverse-engineered to reveal the location of the watermark
2. No compliant media player manufacturer or content producer would reveal the location of the watermark by accident or through being hacked
3. No compliant media player manufacturer or content producer employee could be bribed or be otherwise convinced to reveal the location of the watermark
4. No pirate can successfully pretend to be a compliant media player manufacturer or content producer
You left out the other critical flaw, which is having no way of tracking the photons after it left the screen. Until our eyes and brains are digital, there's absolutely no way to close the analog hole.