When a robot takes a human task, that human task should be measured similarly- how long would an average human take to do the job, and what pay grade would have applied? Then we know the value of the work, and the cost in human displacement, and we have a basis for taxing the robot.
And what about the work a human cannot do? Like searching a billion webpages for the one page you're looking for in less than a second? Or applying 50,000 tons of pressure to a piece of metal to bend it into shape?
A librarian can only sift through a dozen webpages every minute. If the government charged the tax based on how long a human takes to do the work, you'd be paying thousands of dollars in taxes each time you visit Google.
I understand that the readers are a mess of incompatibilities, and I don't think there's a way to fix it. That's why we should drop the whole epub idea entirely and serve those books as webpages and display them in the browser.
epub is basically html or xhtml with css
That's not the same. HTML has a standard, which all major browsers complies with. This is what you need if you want a consistent format to work across devices.
how about centering an image or text on a page. can't do that consistently
You can do that just fine in HTML. Any standards-compliant browser will render it correctly. They also don't ignore your font choices and they always report viewport size. And RTL support is built-in.
Just look at Wikipedia. Those pages looks great on every screen size. And the best part is that most EReaders already have a browser. If publishers would just start selling ebooks in HTML, all of those problems would go away.
I would say of all the problems a president has, space exploration is actually a relatively easy one. You pay money (or lip service), and you get good publicity. Actually getting the rocket off of the launch pad is a hard problem, but it's not one for the president to solve.
On a related note, unlike terrorism, the problem of space exploration doesn't get any harder over time. It'll be just as easy (or hard) to get to the moon in 100 years as it was back in 1969*. Technology, however, will definitely improve significantly in that timespan.
* Yes I know the moon is moving further away every year, but really, 6 meters over 150 years is not a big deal.
So... there's this thing called HTML that they created back in 1993 specifically for displaying digital text and images. It supports flexible layouts, fixed layouts, adjustable fonts, charts, links, sounds, videos, even real-time 3D renderings! And on top of all that, it's also supported by billions of consumer electronic devices worldwide and there is a huge variety of free tools you can use to create it.
Seriously though, publishers seems to be stuck in the 80's, and that's not limited to book publishers either.
But no, I'm sure tech work is so different and white men really are better than everyone else.
Please explain asians then. Did they also get preferential treatment? How did they get the bigots to like them? Why can't blacks do the same?
You know they've done studies where they take identical resumes and send them out, some with male names and some with female names. The male names get more responses.
Is "Zhang Xulan" male or female? What about "Bhimadevi Maraj"?
Other posters have already mentioned this, but there's also the option of that side project coming back to benefit the company, either by being directly useful or the person learning something new that they could apply to work.
I say this simply because as a developer with no CS background.
I always hear people who don't have a CS degree bash on it. If you have no CS background, how are you qualified to comment on whether a CS degree is useful? Do you even know what getting a CS degree entails?
I've worked with graduates who could belt off different concepts from definitions they've memorized but don't know how to implement it or more importantly, don't know how to spot errors.
Why are you comparing yourself to graduates? They'll get a 50% raise as soon as they get a few years of experience. You also didn't say anything about the schools they came from or their GPA. How many were from MIT or Stanford vs. Trump University? How many had > 3.0 GPA?
What's wrong with dying at work? If I had the choice of having 10 years of freedom to just enjoy myself, I'd pick my 20's and 30's rather than my 60's and 70's. Sure, it might suck to be working as a very old person, but is it any worse than giving the company your youth? Plus we might have technological singularity or basic income by then.
Isn't this like saying the flaming pile of shit is no longer on fire? How about comparing themselves to someone who actually has good customer service? Like your local pizza place for example.
Quake 1 isn't nearly as popular as StarCraft though. I remember playing a Gundam TC that worked with the Broodwar expansion, so even if they don't release assets, there'd be a few versions of alternative assets ready to go on day 1.
On an unrelated note, the source code will probably be a good educational tool for people trying to study video game programming.
If the US isn't going to let them in, they'll just go somewhere else, like Europe. If they were the kind of people who would go out of their way to help their own kind, then you wouldn't need to force them to go back.
Sending those smart people back won't do any good anyways. Almost all poor country problems are political. South Africa had a good run until the black-on-white racism went overboard. Somalia was also doing fine until it got fucked by Islamists. But Nigeria is growing rapidly because they kicked out the junta and established a stable government. It doesn't take a very smart person to figure out that constant civil war hurts economic development.
If they changed a movie's rating because a studio called them (or worse, paid them), then their ratings would go from sometimes useful to completely useless. They certainly "can", in the same sense you "can" go outside and murder someone, but not if they want to stay in business.
There's a simple solution: fix the training data. The AI cannot learn about humans except through its training data. It doesn't interact with men or women and has no idea what those words represent, except in relation to the other words it was given. If we give it racist data, it will learn to be racist, as Microsoft's chat bot learned last year. If we give it PC data, it will be PC. In the end it's the fault of whoever trained the program if it became biased.
Obviously $2 a day is not possible in places with higher CoL. I mentioned it because anyone can use those people as inspiration. I met a cab driver in India who made $23 a month. That's his total income. The government does nothing for him. Plus he has a wife and 2 kids. Yet somehow he shows up to work with a clean shirt and good manners.
What makes this so difficult for many people is that their expenses are nearly as much as their income with little to no room to decrease expenses.
I really doubt that. It's easy to say your expenses are fixed and you can't get by with less, but that's almost never the case.
Unless you are:
* Eating rice and beans for every meal
* Sharing a room with 3 others
* Driving a car that costs $3k
* Sharing an internet connection with your roommates
* Wearing clothes bought more than 2 years ago
* And paying for absolutely 0 subscription services
You absolutely have room to reduce your "fixed" expenses. If you find it hard to live like that, go take a look at how billions of 3rd-world people survive on $2 a day. Their ingenuity might surprise you.
What I don't understand is where people even find the time to buy things. Accounting for traffic, a trip to Walmart is 40 minutes minimum. It's time that could be spent working, cooking or sleeping.
The hour and half I save on the commute every day is worth far than the cost of an always-on VC unit at the office. The VC's camera allows me to literally look over my coworker's shoulders, and if I wanted to, I could also have my face on a 50 inch TV.
If you were in a car accident, crawl to the class on bloody stumps to hand it in or find someone to do it for you, but there would be no leniency for a late submission.
What if I have ebola and am bleeding from all orifices?
For the annual military budget of $600 billion, you can buy 450 nuclear submarines
Yeah, but who is going to operate those subs?
I guess it never occurred to you that I could spend a quarter on the subs and the rest on maintenance?
And great job on missing the point entirely, which is: $600 billion is far too much for a defensive force. The US is perfectly safe with just a dozen nuclear subs, which could be had for $20 billion, plus a few more billion per year for maintenance.
Slashdot Mirror
When a robot takes a human task, that human task should be measured similarly- how long would an average human take to do the job, and what pay grade would have applied? Then we know the value of the work, and the cost in human displacement, and we have a basis for taxing the robot.
And what about the work a human cannot do? Like searching a billion webpages for the one page you're looking for in less than a second? Or applying 50,000 tons of pressure to a piece of metal to bend it into shape?
A librarian can only sift through a dozen webpages every minute. If the government charged the tax based on how long a human takes to do the work, you'd be paying thousands of dollars in taxes each time you visit Google.
epub is basically html or xhtml with css
That's not the same. HTML has a standard, which all major browsers complies with. This is what you need if you want a consistent format to work across devices.
how about centering an image or text on a page. can't do that consistently
You can do that just fine in HTML. Any standards-compliant browser will render it correctly. They also don't ignore your font choices and they always report viewport size. And RTL support is built-in.
Just look at Wikipedia. Those pages looks great on every screen size. And the best part is that most EReaders already have a browser. If publishers would just start selling ebooks in HTML, all of those problems would go away.
I would say of all the problems a president has, space exploration is actually a relatively easy one. You pay money (or lip service), and you get good publicity. Actually getting the rocket off of the launch pad is a hard problem, but it's not one for the president to solve.
On a related note, unlike terrorism, the problem of space exploration doesn't get any harder over time. It'll be just as easy (or hard) to get to the moon in 100 years as it was back in 1969*. Technology, however, will definitely improve significantly in that timespan.
* Yes I know the moon is moving further away every year, but really, 6 meters over 150 years is not a big deal.
In Kansas, they still are apes.
So... there's this thing called HTML that they created back in 1993 specifically for displaying digital text and images. It supports flexible layouts, fixed layouts, adjustable fonts, charts, links, sounds, videos, even real-time 3D renderings! And on top of all that, it's also supported by billions of consumer electronic devices worldwide and there is a huge variety of free tools you can use to create it.
Seriously though, publishers seems to be stuck in the 80's, and that's not limited to book publishers either.
But no, I'm sure tech work is so different and white men really are better than everyone else.
Please explain asians then. Did they also get preferential treatment? How did they get the bigots to like them? Why can't blacks do the same?
You know they've done studies where they take identical resumes and send them out, some with male names and some with female names. The male names get more responses.
Is "Zhang Xulan" male or female? What about "Bhimadevi Maraj"?
Other posters have already mentioned this, but there's also the option of that side project coming back to benefit the company, either by being directly useful or the person learning something new that they could apply to work.
CS degrees are overrated
I say this simply because as a developer with no CS background.
I always hear people who don't have a CS degree bash on it. If you have no CS background, how are you qualified to comment on whether a CS degree is useful? Do you even know what getting a CS degree entails?
I've worked with graduates who could belt off different concepts from definitions they've memorized but don't know how to implement it or more importantly, don't know how to spot errors.
Why are you comparing yourself to graduates? They'll get a 50% raise as soon as they get a few years of experience. You also didn't say anything about the schools they came from or their GPA. How many were from MIT or Stanford vs. Trump University? How many had > 3.0 GPA?
This is why you can't find tech people in Portland. Nobody wants to have "code monkey" as their official title.
What's wrong with dying at work? If I had the choice of having 10 years of freedom to just enjoy myself, I'd pick my 20's and 30's rather than my 60's and 70's. Sure, it might suck to be working as a very old person, but is it any worse than giving the company your youth? Plus we might have technological singularity or basic income by then.
A shitty, flesh and blood taxi driver can do all of these already. Good thing we have laws against them.
Isn't this like saying the flaming pile of shit is no longer on fire? How about comparing themselves to someone who actually has good customer service? Like your local pizza place for example.
It isn't the end of the world if you miss the light either.
I'm a cynic. That $45k will go to the military. And pork.
Quake 1 isn't nearly as popular as StarCraft though. I remember playing a Gundam TC that worked with the Broodwar expansion, so even if they don't release assets, there'd be a few versions of alternative assets ready to go on day 1.
On an unrelated note, the source code will probably be a good educational tool for people trying to study video game programming.
If the US isn't going to let them in, they'll just go somewhere else, like Europe. If they were the kind of people who would go out of their way to help their own kind, then you wouldn't need to force them to go back.
Sending those smart people back won't do any good anyways. Almost all poor country problems are political. South Africa had a good run until the black-on-white racism went overboard. Somalia was also doing fine until it got fucked by Islamists. But Nigeria is growing rapidly because they kicked out the junta and established a stable government. It doesn't take a very smart person to figure out that constant civil war hurts economic development.
If they changed a movie's rating because a studio called them (or worse, paid them), then their ratings would go from sometimes useful to completely useless. They certainly "can", in the same sense you "can" go outside and murder someone, but not if they want to stay in business.
You have an algorithmic way of deleting racist data?
Train another AI based on a group of SJW's. If the SJW AI screams at something, that thing is racist.
Do the same for every politically powerful group in the US.
There's a simple solution: fix the training data. The AI cannot learn about humans except through its training data. It doesn't interact with men or women and has no idea what those words represent, except in relation to the other words it was given. If we give it racist data, it will learn to be racist, as Microsoft's chat bot learned last year. If we give it PC data, it will be PC. In the end it's the fault of whoever trained the program if it became biased.
Obviously $2 a day is not possible in places with higher CoL. I mentioned it because anyone can use those people as inspiration. I met a cab driver in India who made $23 a month. That's his total income. The government does nothing for him. Plus he has a wife and 2 kids. Yet somehow he shows up to work with a clean shirt and good manners.
What makes this so difficult for many people is that their expenses are nearly as much as their income with little to no room to decrease expenses.
I really doubt that. It's easy to say your expenses are fixed and you can't get by with less, but that's almost never the case.
Unless you are:
You absolutely have room to reduce your "fixed" expenses. If you find it hard to live like that, go take a look at how billions of 3rd-world people survive on $2 a day. Their ingenuity might surprise you.
What I don't understand is where people even find the time to buy things. Accounting for traffic, a trip to Walmart is 40 minutes minimum. It's time that could be spent working, cooking or sleeping.
The hour and half I save on the commute every day is worth far than the cost of an always-on VC unit at the office. The VC's camera allows me to literally look over my coworker's shoulders, and if I wanted to, I could also have my face on a 50 inch TV.
If you were in a car accident, crawl to the class on bloody stumps to hand it in or find someone to do it for you, but there would be no leniency for a late submission.
What if I have ebola and am bleeding from all orifices?
Yeah, but who is going to operate those subs?
I guess it never occurred to you that I could spend a quarter on the subs and the rest on maintenance?
And great job on missing the point entirely, which is: $600 billion is far too much for a defensive force. The US is perfectly safe with just a dozen nuclear subs, which could be had for $20 billion, plus a few more billion per year for maintenance.