I thought EULAs were by and large found to be toothless since the customer must open the package to agree to it. By which point the transaction is complete sans EULA.
EULAs are in my book stupid but mostly harmless. It makes the company feel like its ass is covered but you can't agree to sign away rights. You can't agree to be a slave regardless what you sign.
I suppose the FTC could make them officially impotent but it's not high on my list of priorities.
I think that it should be high on the FTC's list of priorities even if you don't care about it. If they've got it on the books, that EULAs can't do X, or only limited to Y set of stuff, then when they need to use the iron club over a company/group, they'll have the legal prep work ammo that they need.
Or the obvious answer - hire people from the US.H1B visas were designed to expedite bringing in people when there was a legitimate shortage of people to fill a position, not to ensure that employers were guaranteed a low cost workforce. Per the last stats I saw, H1B recipients were making 75% of the standard wages for their professions.
I find it preposterous that a bank was unable to find qualified Sales agents within the US. What they couldn't find was people willing to work for 3/4 of the salary of everyone else in the office.
Easy way to fix this. Let's write a law that H1B visa workers cost companies 4 times as much. Why 4 times as much? Well, you need 4 cuts. You have the federal government take 100% equal measure of their salary as "tax", you give the government that they were coming from 100% of their salary as a "thank you for educating this person" tax, you pay the H1B visa holder 100% more because you are only aiming at that top 99.999% and they are worth it, and 100% more of their salary should be paid to the local city/town government where the business is located as a general "unemployment reduction" bribe/tax.
I bet that would magically solve most H1B visa abuses.
Moreover, if your colleges and universities weren't desperately seeking for foreign talent to enrol in their school program then they wouldn't spend their valuable funds on foreign recruitment programs, such as the recruitment program that MIT and Carnegie Mellon are running on the university I've enrolled, along with other top schools of my country.
Are you kidding? I can understand foreigners hearing about MIT, Berkley, and Carnegie Mellon. I went to UCA in Conway, AR. You'd be utterly amazed how many foreigners ended up at AR State University. The question wasn't why they were studying aboard, but WTH did you pick this school? You know the answer?
Price and/or scholarship.
I remember that UCA gave pretty much everyone with a 24 on the ACT a full tuition scholarship. This worked out very well for them since you had to keep a 3.25 GPA per semester or lose it. Most of those that got the free ride into UCA, ended up losing their scholarship the first or second semester. There were many that kept on paying for several more years though. We gave UCA alot of grief due to some of their rather insane policies. That no one AR born, out-of state, or foreign born thought was a stupid policy though. I can't give complaints to foreigners that actually jump through the hoops that US students fail at. They are the same exact hoops.
If an operation in the US (or here in Aus) wishes to run the bulk of its operation in a third world country then the executive should have to live there as well. See how long the pro offshoring arguments would carry on for then.
This would really bite us on the butt. It'd be cheaper for those CEOs to live there. They can buy more labor for less for their personal mansions and such. In some places, they might have to even build up their own mini defensive force purely for self interest and preservation of their wealth.
You'd also have to think that it'd be difficult to wire up the entire US to eco-nutt ideas of how the world should be. If you forced the CEOs over into the third world, they'd buy/develop the tech to power/run their estates and businesses. It'd be screw everyone else, but let's build our castle/complex so that it doesn't matter if the rest of the nation even exists. (You build a nuclear power plant not to power the nation, but to power your complex for the next 100-200 years.)
Remember seeing some of those designs of what would basically be Dubai Arcologies? I think neo-corporate feudalism will be building them soon.
Labview has the advantage of being easy to learn for non-computer-savvy people that want to control and read special hardware (electrical monitoring equipment, servo motors, etc.). Unfortunately, it rather terrible for complex programs that do not naturally fit in LabVIEW's paradigm of deterministic data flow paths from user input to screen or file output. For example, storing things in persistent variables that are not visible to the end user are a horrible kludge. Reusing VIs (program modules) in other projects require you to endlessly draw wires on your screen rather than simply copy/paste something in an editor. Data processing that involves anything else than applying a standard library function (such as searching arrays for special conditions) that would have been 20 lines of straightforward C code will take you half an hour in LabVIEW, even if you use the "C formula node" that has no debugging facilities whatsoever. You will find yourself spending most of your time moving lines on your screen because there is no free space left on the flow diagram for that extra feature that you need to implement. Stay away from Labview if you can. Even Labview representatives will tell you that more experienced programmers tend to not like Labview so much.
So you are telling me that basically high end scientists/PHds use something similar to this (http://info.scratch.mit.edu/About_Scratch) to program there toys to gather their data?
Why did everything that you mention equally remind me of the US? The big exception is that its been a long time since we've tried isolationism though we were attached to it for a long while.
and it's why a toughbook 30 is $5800.00 for lessthan 1/2 the processing power of the Alienware laptop. OLPC = toughbook netbook. They cost more plus they dont want to force all cultures to learn english to use it. Unlike all netbooks.
Which is the main reason their main customers the police have been moving away in droves. First it was the CF-48 semi-rugged for $1.6K. After 5 years of that, it was why can't we just use off the shelf Dells. So now we are spending just under 1K for Dell laptops. Generally the CF-48s would last 5 years with only 3 classes of issues. 1 batteries need to be replaced at the 2-3 year mark. 2 a few HD crashes. 3 wrecks total the car. The insurance pays for the cost the laptop in that case. (Trust me we didn't like putting the fully rugged CF-25s back into service after wrecks even though we could.)
Now we've only had the Dells for about a year and a half. We've not had any wrecks or HD crashes yet. We've had a charging issue or two. Usually that's due to the car electrical stuff being wired wrong and not the laptop though.
Trust me, if those $350 minilaptops could run our 3rd party software, we'd seriously think about sticking those in the cars. So cheaper laptops are taking over due to price where fully rugged laptops used to completely monopolize the niche. If we tried mounting one of those minilaptops in a police car the two issues that we will run into are mounts and power chargers for them. That's the two issues we have for any different models of laptops that we chose to stick in there though.
Now, sure netbooks can't hold a candle to real toughbooks, but about the only one's that can really afford real toughbooks are the US military. No one else can afford the price/performance penalty. You were usually 2 generations behind off the shelf laptop tech in a toughbook. This was due to heat build up and being completely sealed.
You imagine that you can build a toughbook for less than $100? Trust me, even your third world folks are more realistic than that. If it were remotely easy for a slight price increase every freaking laptop on the market would have toughbook standard features. It's not a cheap or easy add on though so you rarely see semi-rugged much less rugged laptops.
The problem with this theory : it assumes that each universe has the capacity in terms of available matter that could build a computer capable of simulating an entire universe THE SAME SIZE as the one above it. Not possible.
Um as far as we know or have been taught. Imagine if you had the tech base that you didn't need matter to run your universe. Now imagine if you played with time and space like they were nothing. Imagine if you could a box that's bigger on the inside than on the side. Think if you could create a single 1 centimeter sphere of space/time that does have an entire universe of time, space, matter all in side of it and that you've figured out a means to make it to keep on growing/expanding on the inside, yet never exceed the 1 centimeter exterior size.
We can't do these things, but if you could hey, you are able to create a private universe. The other huge thing though is who says that your simulated universe has to be the same size as your existing universe? You'd likely actually want to model thousands or millions of universes. Of course, none of them would be the same size as your existing universe.
One thing most 'futurists' agree on is that the ultimate 'end game' of technology appears to be the conversion of all matter in the solar system into machine parts and computational elements. It's a logical end result of exponential growth. (and, actually, would be only the beginning : such a 'civilization' would eventually grow to convert the entire universe, but this would take much longer due to the snails pace of light)
What makes you think this hasn't already happened? Maybe we're part of a big computer thats trying to answer some kind of big question or something. Actually, never mind. That seems infinitely improbable to me.
How did you think souls were supposed to work? With this tech, you could record everything and provide your folks with an immortal afterlife as well. You can also do reincarnation if you really wanted to as well. I kinda giggle about the entire pace of light. I mean come on by the time that you've figured out how to use all the matter of your solar system for useful work; you'd most likely figure out some sort of FTL com if not an FTL drive. The real trick would be throwing out your probes at a FTL speed. I'm sure if you had that kinda power, it wouldn't take you long to throw a few self replicating to the nearest hundred stars in a short instant and have your galaxy net start spreading. The big question is would we even notice this galaxy net if it was already in place and monitoring us? It could have easily been in place for millions of years just observing and recording events about the galaxy. Heck, could the quantum observer not be a fundamental universe thing, but an artifact built by some really advanced species to instantly do the same thing to the entire universe. Once done, it would look like to us lesser species if that's the way the universe has always been.
Let's face it; if god didn't exist to create the universe, then sooner or later some entity would eventually build god and that's what we seem to be discussing about building. God's supposed to know everything in the universe, predict or just know what'll happen, and be able to alter events to suit its purposes. What kinda awesome tech base do you need to build god as your toy?
How would the world be different if we gave elementary school kids the same questioning for lies tools that are usually taught to police detectives?
Very little. When a teacher explains that passing out copies of Ubuntu is piracy, he's not lying; he's a misinformed jackass. I think that honest jackasses outnumber liars by a wide margin, and that we're far better off teaching critical thinking (of which lie detection is just a subset).
I think that they are both the same thing. The difference is that being able to tell when some one is directly lying to you generally might come in "handier" to you than generic "critical thinking" would. The problem is those that are honest fanatics on their subject. That applies to religious folks, teachers, and sales clerks. Your built-in lie detector pretty much tells you that they believe what they are saying. Then you've got to actually think. I'd say that critical thinking is "hard."
We don't really want to find or look at holes in the religious doctrine that we taught. We want to believe that teachers have all the answers. We trust sales clerks to know just enough about their products to get the average customer to buy it and nothing more. About the only time that we actually turn on our critical thinking with sales men is with buying a car or house and then your brain turns to mush by being overloaded.
We know how we work; we just don't really want to look closely at any given thing because it breaks our illusions.
I know lie detectors have only been more of toys or threats than really useful tools. A trained questioner doesn't need a lie detector. A lie detector is more for them to let you know that they are almost positive that you've lied on the subject.
There are folks that want lie detectors to work like in the movies or have it on their cell phones so that they know when the other person is lying. They'd hate to have it used on them though. I have news for you.
Everyone has a built-in lie detector. It's just how well that it's been trained to work. How would the world be different if we gave elementary school kids the same questioning for lies tools that are usually taught to police detectives? Short answer; not too different. They'd just know faster when the teachers are lost and clueless, and any attempts to bring new information that you know the teacher doesn't have would just be punished faster. We would get politicians that are even better at lying though.
Do you notice where the stuff for roads comes from or what Roman engineer built the most or best roads? That's generally what they'll think of any computing device older than 20 years.
The difference being that some of those old Roman roads are still used today !
Nah, due to IBM and COBOL there will be lots of legacy things that people use, but just are kinda afraid to touch to break it. It's like those long lived light bulbs. They'll have 'em and keep on using 'em because trying out how to refit anything new into the areas that are tied to those machines would be a nightmare. Why is our business process like this? Because that's how we had our original IBM server setup, and we've been doing the same way since.
I don't mind advertising, just as long as it's a natural fit in the game, and not some 10 second cut scene of someone drinking a soft drink.
Of course that won't happen becasue advertiser want to 'grab your eyes' and in order to do that they must stand out. So instead of a racing car with stickers from advertiser you would expect, we will get flashing ads, ads on the car radio, ads when the character watches TV, and so on.
I think racing games are a natural fit for ads. Actually many games could do it. What would you need? Internet connection, storage space, and a variety of ads. As a company pitching to advertisers, you say that you have a such and such formatted texture that appears X number of times in a game, or X number of times on a given track and stats show that players race the track Y number of times. Well, when you start the game, it would check for updates and download the selected ads and where they go.
You don't have to have flash ads or interactive anything. You just give the ad companies a selection of textures that are currently in the game that they'd replace/update with your stuff. Racing games would make the best place to introduce this. The second best place would be sports games in any arenas. You just have a selection of ads on the arena walls.
What the ad company will really want though, is to have their logo on your med pack or part of the game where the player actually has to hunt for the ads. Actually there are several good ways of doing that. Number obvious is hide the item/chest behind the ads. You've got to find the certain ad to find the certain power up. Find a real world drink add, find a drink behind it.
Fun racing games you could have short cuts or power ups behind the sign so you have to find that coke sign and ram through it. I'd try to find a way where one of the ultimate weapon was named after our product. You don't want that Japanese sounding sword; you want the Dr. Pepper sword.
But behavioral preference and turning people into something is not the same thing. I personally think violent movies are just as bad/harmless as violent games. But surely the think-of-the-children zealots will keep doing their thing, just like they always have...
I just finished Dark Cloud. It felt alot like zelda cuteness except for the intro movie and one word in the entire game. In the intro village a villager calls the evil bad guy a bastard. It's brief and over and never repeated. I was actually o.k. with it.
Now contrast those with Shadow Hearts or XenoSaga. I've already finished SH2 & SH3 so I finally started SH1. It's good, just don't let any kids under say 15 years old see it. It's not gory so much as walking in on a crime scene or having your head slightly turned when the violence is done, but seeing very realistic blood fly and drip or dismembered/slaughtered soldiers. XenoSaga was o.k. for awhile until the first time your enemies come in... That's when a random orge type monster grabs random soilder with their hand and crushes the head...
I actually stopped playing SH for now. I'll pick it up later. I've started playing FF5 the PS1 game. I think that's a bit cleaner and that the kids can watch/play it with me, which is actually far more important.
Like what if in a Pepsi/Coke video game, Coke gives you Health and Pepsi hurts you... would these people start preferring Coke over Pepsi? Or maybe there would be some reverse psychology where since people -can't- have Pepsi in the game world, they will intrinsically want it more in the real world.
If the default medical unit stopped being a white box with a red cross on it and started being a product logo, I'd expect instant health stat improvements if I took it! I'd get pissed if I didn't get the health stat boosts though. I think that it's safe that we won't see product themed elixirs anytime soon.
What good is "Free Software" when it only runs on a proprietary platform? It's like saying "free food" but neglecting to mention the cover charge.
Well, if I say free food from 5-6 pm at this GPS address and you want any of it, you'll have to get off your butt and spend your effort/resources getting to that GPS address. If the address were one house down from yours, you'd like walk and try it out. If it were across town, which would mean 15-30 minutes travel out of your way to get there, you might only show up if you know some else that was going to attend. If it were 1+ hour or cost more than $5 in transportation costs then you'd say, I couldn't careless.
Face it there isn't anything completely free. Everyone's internal question is how much of my own effort/resources do I have to put into to install/implement/run this "free" solution?
I can buy a $350 mini laptop, $500 decently speced laptop, or a $500 desktop with what would have been unbelievable specs not long ago. I remember when I picked up computer shopper and was thrilled that there were any bare bones dekstops that sold at the $1K mark. Now you can get full featured systems for under.5K that do things that $2-3K machines couldn't do.
Really, there is no such thing as a "Moore's Law." It's Moore's trend lines that have been holding. That it lasted 10 years, much less this long has been utterly amazing. I fully expect for us to run into problems keeping with "Moore's Law" before 2100. 5-10 years after the trend is broken it'll be something the future folks will either forget about it entirely or look back and kinda giggle at us like we were just silly about it all. 50-100 years later no one will care though every one will be making use of the by products of it. Do you notice where the stuff for roads comes from or what Roman engineer built the most or best roads? That's generally what they'll think of any computing device older than 20 years. If Moore's law holds until 2050, every computing device that we've currently made will be either trash or museum pieces by that time. Heck, you have people getting rid/upgrading of cell phones almost every 3-6 months already.
We imagine replicators in Star Trek, but we don't need them with Walmart and 3-6 months for new products to come out. Consider Amazon+UPS next day shipping. Replicator tech would have to be cheaper and faster than that to compete. I think that it's more likely that we'll keep on improving our current tech. What happens when UPS can do 1 hour delivery to most places on the globe? Replicators might spring up, but only for the designers to use them to spend a week making 10K of a unit, to put it went on sale today, which would be sold out in two weeks and discounted by the week after. Face it; we are already living in a magical golden age. We just want it to be 1000x better in 50 years.
They should keep overlooking it. H20 is a greenhouse gas, but it's close to saturated nearly everywhere on the planet already. If you put a little more in, it'll just rain out. In the places where it's not saturated (which is pretty much only near the poles), it'll freeze out.
Flooding or massive non seasonal storms are nothing that we need to worry about as a side effect.
Actually we aren't that foresighted. We'd do it; get the massive flooding/non-seasonal storms, and then go back to see who to blame for it.
That's why I'm iffy on the entire climate change thing. It's more like us to do nothing now. When it hits, we'd change stuff, and then who ever comes out on top would punish who ever they pulled out of the hat to blame. This looking ahead and actually planning and taking species wide collective action is definitely generally non-human behavior from what we've seen before.;)
Aren't current UAVs capable of flying from waypoint to waypoint with little human intervention. Call me back when they're capable of landing in a crowded urban area autonomously, then taking off again.
Um, that's not in the mission profile of any UAV that I've seen. 90% of the mission profiles for UAVs are take off from this airport/base point, fly to x location, and then cycle/wait for y event or until fuel runs low. When fuel runs low, it comes to base and parks exactly in its spot to be refueled. (Some of the really long range planning stuff uses solar cells and stuff to basically stay over location for months at a time or until something else goes wrong with it.) Now, your monitoring missions could be anything. It could be take still pictures, record video, retransmit that video, or have any number of environmental probes. (Think IR, UV, or other stuff.)
Very few of theses UAVs are for going to X, and dropping a package to Y or trying to shoot Y. In video game land, you might have your UPS UAV land directly by the player, deliver the power up item, and then fly off after it was signed for. In real life, the UPS UAV would be loaded at airport A, fly to airport B, and then be unloaded. The rest of the UPS chain is responsible for getting the package to you.
I could envision UPS UAVs homing into your GPS cell phone to air bomb your package to you. Do we really want that? I'd rather have R2D2 or such unloading the UPS truck onto our doorstep rather than UAV dropping a package or landing to by me to be unloaded and then to have area to take off again. Come on, be realistic about what to expect.
Re:1984? You have got to be kidding?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Out of all the slashdot stories posted in the last fortnight - you choose a story on a game to post your 1984 excerpt? Jeepers! My guess is that you're Mum is trying to get your pudgy ass to do some exercise and you feel oppressed. Tell me I'm right.
Just wait for them to release the great real world GPS FF. You play it on your GPS enabled phone and walk around to certain locations battling the random moster every now and then or being guided to meet up with any other players to form real world quest parties. It's all to get you out of the house and walk about 5-10 miles and meet other local gamers that are actually into your game.
Combine it with some glove and shoe monitors, and shortly your super duper cell phone gaming platform could accurately animate you and show your moves. I could see many side quests where basically to get the power up or what ever, you've got to do x number of exercises with at least one additional player and/or certain character classes. (It would all be about meeting strangers and giving them all a known task to do. Basically, they are all in it for the quest items, but to get said item, they've got to get out and exercise and meet various people.
I could see people doing bad things with it, but generally more people would use something like that as intended rather than for bad.
In short, I would be very cautious about any application which claimed to be able to give detailed fitness advice on the basis of your Wii-Fit body test results. Professional advice from a doctor or fitness professional will be far safer and more useful.
Nah, I bet half of us could write a small app taking data from the average college health/PE class as a guideline. I hate to say you don't need any data points on the subject, but that's why you pick good general source material. (Those that wrote the health/PE class book did do most of the research that you need.) Now, you can just take all the general crap found in there throw it into a game, and be fairly sure that it'd be safe for 80% of the population to get on and stick with. What about that other 20%? Well, they either have some pre-existing medical condition that'll kill them if they do any exercises, or have allowed themselves to get so out of shape that it would be "difficult" to start a basic fitness routine and calling a "doctor or fitness expert" would be "embarrassing." Trust me things like DDR and WII Fit are targeted just right. The only way to really drastically increase gamers exercise is to integrate WII Fit/DDR into other games.
Think a fighting game where you had to put your body into certain positions to set off special moves. Think if there was a good way to integrate the DDR pad into FF or Mario that would force folks to get up and bounce around to pull of "those special moves" that are just near impossible otherwise. Heck, there are tons of games that are quite repeative, if you could get your gamers to do any basic movement as part of the play style or leveling process, you'd have the make'em do a 100 of these exercise things licked. We are only beginning to really explore that world of fitness/games. Most of the ones that I've seen have been tied directly to an exercise device and all you do is peddle or such and then watch your marker go out in front of the others. We should be able to do much, much better than that.
I say screw Iraq and military R&D toys. Yes I love Darpa toys too, but playing by the numbers I'm much more likely to get heart disease, cancer, or a stroke than have any foreigner try to kill me. Those numbers are generally yearly numbers! We loose more to heart disease, cancer, and a stroke per year than in any military conflict. If they want a forever war, I don't want a war on mythical enemies. I'd be happy if the government declared forever war on known proven mass killers US citizens. We need a War on Disease and ill/poor health. The top ten statistical killers will always change over time, but it gives us a real solid enemy to aim at.
I agree and disagree with this. You have to be in an H1B shoes to appreciate this. I have seen folks laid off as H1B with unsold houses and cars. They had to just get a ticket, and leave the country. Barring the Native Indians, I think it is a hypocrisy on most Americans. Would you be here commenting, if the same was done to your forefathers. Being an Asian with H1B is taking jobs, but being from Europe, it is heritage.
I get whimsical on the entire subject. I think anyone that's managed to live in the US for 6 months without coming to local police attention should be granted automatic US citizenship even or perhaps esp if they don't want it. (If you don't want to be a US citizen, then don't come over here to work or go to school for more than 6 months!)
My flippant redneck response to your remark is more along the lines of those damn white Europeans killed off or pushed most of the natives off the land that the US currently claims. Heck even the few that they have treaties with the US has ignored those treaties whenever it wanted. The only times that the US really honors them is when the natives where armed and annoying enough to put up a fight. If H1B folks were going to treat us like we treated the native Americans, they'd actually kill us, or use every trick up their sleeves to get us to move the less desirable parts of the US while they claimed here for their own. It's not a matter of the natives treated the superior tech invaders to their standards. It's a matter of the superior tech/organization of the invaders leaving anything left of the natives afterwords.
I'm sure if the native Americans knew how things would turn out that they'd have setup tons of immigration controls and had any European ships with colonists sent back home. This would be have been for there net benefit.
I would have thought so, too, until I spent a few years in the US military. You'd be amazed how much and what kind of stuff makes it past policies (exit or otherwise). When I lived in a military town, it seems like I'd see a story every year or so about about service members getting caught with garages full of new and/or used stuff.
Those are only the guys that they catch. Imagine being in that environment and knowing how to really cover your tracks or to surplus some stuff and have a local base garage sale where its been posted on base and base folks show up and spend bottom dollar on slightly used or near new stuff. I'm sure that happens far more than anyone's aware of and is considered a perk of being employed or in the know of certain organizations. I think that its wasteful to be throwing away/surplussing/upgrading anything that others would want.
I work at a local PD. Trust me the crap that we finally get rid of is so old/used that even the stuff in perfect unused condition is still 10 years old. (I hate knowing that some nameless individual has had a laptop for 10 years and it's been listed that they spend $3K on the thing and it looks like they never really booted the thing on. It's trash when we can't install anything current on the Win95 laptop though.) Stuff like that you are happy to have some one buy an entire lot of for $20. Heck, if you want to buy a replacement battery for most older laptops that'll cost at least $150 right there.
I'd be amazed at useful stuff that actually makes it out of local government offices. We don't surplus anything "current" or half way usable.
I am just trying to work this out. How is a New Zealand citizen able to commit treason against the US? treason: (noun) the crime of betraying one's country
Cause everyone knows that New Zealand, Australia, and Great Britain are all secret US states.;)
If you want a more whimsical reason, it's because lots of US movies were made there so we've declared them a special kinda of state since all of our media gets made there now a days.;)
Do you really want the third reason? You won't like it. There are 50 US states and the average US citizen confuses Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Britain as part of the English speaking states on the other side of us. Those on border states may know better, but pick a state that's several states away, and you'd be surprised/stunned how many confuse national states as US states.
I can't even blame it on our educational system. When I was in HS, we had at least 4 geography/US/World history classes where they tried to pound in the US states and foreign states thing by making us name, color and make maps of each. Judging by the class scores back then, I can't say that I'm too surprised. We just happen to be stupid in the US.
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I thought EULAs were by and large found to be toothless since the customer must open the package to agree to it. By which point the transaction is complete sans EULA.
EULAs are in my book stupid but mostly harmless. It makes the company feel like its ass is covered but you can't agree to sign away rights. You can't agree to be a slave regardless what you sign.
I suppose the FTC could make them officially impotent but it's not high on my list of priorities.
I think that it should be high on the FTC's list of priorities even if you don't care about it. If they've got it on the books, that EULAs can't do X, or only limited to Y set of stuff, then when they need to use the iron club over a company/group, they'll have the legal prep work ammo that they need.
Or the obvious answer - hire people from the US.H1B visas were designed to expedite bringing in people when there was a legitimate shortage of people to fill a position, not to ensure that employers were guaranteed a low cost workforce. Per the last stats I saw, H1B recipients were making 75% of the standard wages for their professions.
I find it preposterous that a bank was unable to find qualified Sales agents within the US. What they couldn't find was people willing to work for 3/4 of the salary of everyone else in the office.
Easy way to fix this. Let's write a law that H1B visa workers cost companies 4 times as much. Why 4 times as much? Well, you need 4 cuts. You have the federal government take 100% equal measure of their salary as "tax", you give the government that they were coming from 100% of their salary as a "thank you for educating this person" tax, you pay the H1B visa holder 100% more because you are only aiming at that top 99.999% and they are worth it, and 100% more of their salary should be paid to the local city/town government where the business is located as a general "unemployment reduction" bribe/tax.
I bet that would magically solve most H1B visa abuses.
Moreover, if your colleges and universities weren't desperately seeking for foreign talent to enrol in their school program then they wouldn't spend their valuable funds on foreign recruitment programs, such as the recruitment program that MIT and Carnegie Mellon are running on the university I've enrolled, along with other top schools of my country.
Are you kidding? I can understand foreigners hearing about MIT, Berkley, and Carnegie Mellon. I went to UCA in Conway, AR. You'd be utterly amazed how many foreigners ended up at AR State University. The question wasn't why they were studying aboard, but WTH did you pick this school? You know the answer?
Price and/or scholarship.
I remember that UCA gave pretty much everyone with a 24 on the ACT a full tuition scholarship. This worked out very well for them since you had to keep a 3.25 GPA per semester or lose it. Most of those that got the free ride into UCA, ended up losing their scholarship the first or second semester. There were many that kept on paying for several more years though. We gave UCA alot of grief due to some of their rather insane policies. That no one AR born, out-of state, or foreign born thought was a stupid policy though. I can't give complaints to foreigners that actually jump through the hoops that US students fail at. They are the same exact hoops.
If an operation in the US (or here in Aus) wishes to run the bulk of its operation in a third world country then the executive should have to live there as well. See how long the pro offshoring arguments would carry on for then.
This would really bite us on the butt. It'd be cheaper for those CEOs to live there. They can buy more labor for less for their personal mansions and such. In some places, they might have to even build up their own mini defensive force purely for self interest and preservation of their wealth.
You'd also have to think that it'd be difficult to wire up the entire US to eco-nutt ideas of how the world should be. If you forced the CEOs over into the third world, they'd buy/develop the tech to power/run their estates and businesses. It'd be screw everyone else, but let's build our castle/complex so that it doesn't matter if the rest of the nation even exists. (You build a nuclear power plant not to power the nation, but to power your complex for the next 100-200 years.)
Remember seeing some of those designs of what would basically be Dubai Arcologies? I think neo-corporate feudalism will be building them soon.
Labview has the advantage of being easy to learn for non-computer-savvy people that want to control and read special hardware (electrical monitoring equipment, servo motors, etc.). Unfortunately, it rather terrible for complex programs that do not naturally fit in LabVIEW's paradigm of deterministic data flow paths from user input to screen or file output. For example, storing things in persistent variables that are not visible to the end user are a horrible kludge. Reusing VIs (program modules) in other projects require you to endlessly draw wires on your screen rather than simply copy/paste something in an editor. Data processing that involves anything else than applying a standard library function (such as searching arrays for special conditions) that would have been 20 lines of straightforward C code will take you half an hour in LabVIEW, even if you use the "C formula node" that has no debugging facilities whatsoever. You will find yourself spending most of your time moving lines on your screen because there is no free space left on the flow diagram for that extra feature that you need to implement. Stay away from Labview if you can. Even Labview representatives will tell you that more experienced programmers tend to not like Labview so much.
So you are telling me that basically high end scientists/PHds use something similar to this (http://info.scratch.mit.edu/About_Scratch) to program there toys to gather their data?
Why did everything that you mention equally remind me of the US? The big exception is that its been a long time since we've tried isolationism though we were attached to it for a long while.
and it's why a toughbook 30 is $5800.00 for lessthan 1/2 the processing power of the Alienware laptop.
OLPC = toughbook netbook. They cost more plus they dont want to force all cultures to learn english to use it. Unlike all netbooks.
Which is the main reason their main customers the police have been moving away in droves. First it was the CF-48 semi-rugged for $1.6K. After 5 years of that, it was why can't we just use off the shelf Dells. So now we are spending just under 1K for Dell laptops. Generally the CF-48s would last 5 years with only 3 classes of issues. 1 batteries need to be replaced at the 2-3 year mark. 2 a few HD crashes. 3 wrecks total the car. The insurance pays for the cost the laptop in that case. (Trust me we didn't like putting the fully rugged CF-25s back into service after wrecks even though we could.)
Now we've only had the Dells for about a year and a half. We've not had any wrecks or HD crashes yet. We've had a charging issue or two. Usually that's due to the car electrical stuff being wired wrong and not the laptop though.
Trust me, if those $350 minilaptops could run our 3rd party software, we'd seriously think about sticking those in the cars. So cheaper laptops are taking over due to price where fully rugged laptops used to completely monopolize the niche. If we tried mounting one of those minilaptops in a police car the two issues that we will run into are mounts and power chargers for them. That's the two issues we have for any different models of laptops that we chose to stick in there though.
Now, sure netbooks can't hold a candle to real toughbooks, but about the only one's that can really afford real toughbooks are the US military. No one else can afford the price/performance penalty. You were usually 2 generations behind off the shelf laptop tech in a toughbook. This was due to heat build up and being completely sealed.
You imagine that you can build a toughbook for less than $100? Trust me, even your third world folks are more realistic than that. If it were remotely easy for a slight price increase every freaking laptop on the market would have toughbook standard features. It's not a cheap or easy add on though so you rarely see semi-rugged much less rugged laptops.
The problem with this theory : it assumes that each universe has the capacity in terms of available matter that could build a computer capable of simulating an entire universe THE SAME SIZE as the one above it. Not possible.
Um as far as we know or have been taught. Imagine if you had the tech base that you didn't need matter to run your universe. Now imagine if you played with time and space like they were nothing. Imagine if you could a box that's bigger on the inside than on the side. Think if you could create a single 1 centimeter sphere of space/time that does have an entire universe of time, space, matter all in side of it and that you've figured out a means to make it to keep on growing/expanding on the inside, yet never exceed the 1 centimeter exterior size.
We can't do these things, but if you could hey, you are able to create a private universe. The other huge thing though is who says that your simulated universe has to be the same size as your existing universe? You'd likely actually want to model thousands or millions of universes. Of course, none of them would be the same size as your existing universe.
One thing most 'futurists' agree on is that the ultimate 'end game' of technology appears to be the conversion of all matter in the solar system into machine parts and computational elements. It's a logical end result of exponential growth. (and, actually, would be only the beginning : such a 'civilization' would eventually grow to convert the entire universe, but this would take much longer due to the snails pace of light)
What makes you think this hasn't already happened? Maybe we're part of a big computer thats trying to answer some kind of big question or something.
Actually, never mind. That seems infinitely improbable to me.
How did you think souls were supposed to work? With this tech, you could record everything and provide your folks with an immortal afterlife as well. You can also do reincarnation if you really wanted to as well. I kinda giggle about the entire pace of light. I mean come on by the time that you've figured out how to use all the matter of your solar system for useful work; you'd most likely figure out some sort of FTL com if not an FTL drive. The real trick would be throwing out your probes at a FTL speed. I'm sure if you had that kinda power, it wouldn't take you long to throw a few self replicating to the nearest hundred stars in a short instant and have your galaxy net start spreading. The big question is would we even notice this galaxy net if it was already in place and monitoring us? It could have easily been in place for millions of years just observing and recording events about the galaxy. Heck, could the quantum observer not be a fundamental universe thing, but an artifact built by some really advanced species to instantly do the same thing to the entire universe. Once done, it would look like to us lesser species if that's the way the universe has always been.
Let's face it; if god didn't exist to create the universe, then sooner or later some entity would eventually build god and that's what we seem to be discussing about building. God's supposed to know everything in the universe, predict or just know what'll happen, and be able to alter events to suit its purposes. What kinda awesome tech base do you need to build god as your toy?
How would the world be different if we gave elementary school kids the same questioning for lies tools that are usually taught to police detectives?
Very little. When a teacher explains that passing out copies of Ubuntu is piracy, he's not lying; he's a misinformed jackass. I think that honest jackasses outnumber liars by a wide margin, and that we're far better off teaching critical thinking (of which lie detection is just a subset).
I think that they are both the same thing. The difference is that being able to tell when some one is directly lying to you generally might come in "handier" to you than generic "critical thinking" would. The problem is those that are honest fanatics on their subject. That applies to religious folks, teachers, and sales clerks. Your built-in lie detector pretty much tells you that they believe what they are saying. Then you've got to actually think. I'd say that critical thinking is "hard."
We don't really want to find or look at holes in the religious doctrine that we taught. We want to believe that teachers have all the answers. We trust sales clerks to know just enough about their products to get the average customer to buy it and nothing more. About the only time that we actually turn on our critical thinking with sales men is with buying a car or house and then your brain turns to mush by being overloaded.
We know how we work; we just don't really want to look closely at any given thing because it breaks our illusions.
I know lie detectors have only been more of toys or threats than really useful tools. A trained questioner doesn't need a lie detector. A lie detector is more for them to let you know that they are almost positive that you've lied on the subject.
There are folks that want lie detectors to work like in the movies or have it on their cell phones so that they know when the other person is lying. They'd hate to have it used on them though. I have news for you.
Everyone has a built-in lie detector. It's just how well that it's been trained to work. How would the world be different if we gave elementary school kids the same questioning for lies tools that are usually taught to police detectives? Short answer; not too different. They'd just know faster when the teachers are lost and clueless, and any attempts to bring new information that you know the teacher doesn't have would just be punished faster. We would get politicians that are even better at lying though.
Do you notice where the stuff for roads comes from or what Roman engineer built the most or best roads? That's generally what they'll think of any computing device older than 20 years.
The difference being that some of those old Roman roads are still used today !
Nah, due to IBM and COBOL there will be lots of legacy things that people use, but just are kinda afraid to touch to break it. It's like those long lived light bulbs. They'll have 'em and keep on using 'em because trying out how to refit anything new into the areas that are tied to those machines would be a nightmare. Why is our business process like this? Because that's how we had our original IBM server setup, and we've been doing the same way since.
I don't mind advertising, just as long as it's a natural fit in the game, and not some 10 second cut scene of someone drinking a soft drink.
Of course that won't happen becasue advertiser want to 'grab your eyes' and in order to do that they must stand out. So instead of a racing car with stickers from advertiser you would expect, we will get flashing ads, ads on the car radio, ads when the character watches TV, and so on.
I think racing games are a natural fit for ads. Actually many games could do it. What would you need? Internet connection, storage space, and a variety of ads. As a company pitching to advertisers, you say that you have a such and such formatted texture that appears X number of times in a game, or X number of times on a given track and stats show that players race the track Y number of times. Well, when you start the game, it would check for updates and download the selected ads and where they go.
You don't have to have flash ads or interactive anything. You just give the ad companies a selection of textures that are currently in the game that they'd replace/update with your stuff. Racing games would make the best place to introduce this. The second best place would be sports games in any arenas. You just have a selection of ads on the arena walls.
What the ad company will really want though, is to have their logo on your med pack or part of the game where the player actually has to hunt for the ads. Actually there are several good ways of doing that. Number obvious is hide the item/chest behind the ads. You've got to find the certain ad to find the certain power up. Find a real world drink add, find a drink behind it.
Fun racing games you could have short cuts or power ups behind the sign so you have to find that coke sign and ram through it. I'd try to find a way where one of the ultimate weapon was named after our product. You don't want that Japanese sounding sword; you want the Dr. Pepper sword.
But behavioral preference and turning people into something is not the same thing. I personally think violent movies are just as bad/harmless as violent games. But surely the think-of-the-children zealots will keep doing their thing, just like they always have...
I just finished Dark Cloud. It felt alot like zelda cuteness except for the intro movie and one word in the entire game. In the intro village a villager calls the evil bad guy a bastard. It's brief and over and never repeated. I was actually o.k. with it.
Now contrast those with Shadow Hearts or XenoSaga. I've already finished SH2 & SH3 so I finally started SH1. It's good, just don't let any kids under say 15 years old see it. It's not gory so much as walking in on a crime scene or having your head slightly turned when the violence is done, but seeing very realistic blood fly and drip or dismembered/slaughtered soldiers. XenoSaga was o.k. for awhile until the first time your enemies come in... That's when a random orge type monster grabs random soilder with their hand and crushes the head...
I actually stopped playing SH for now. I'll pick it up later. I've started playing FF5 the PS1 game. I think that's a bit cleaner and that the kids can watch/play it with me, which is actually far more important.
Like what if in a Pepsi/Coke video game, Coke gives you Health and Pepsi hurts you... would these people start preferring Coke over Pepsi? Or maybe there would be some reverse psychology where since people -can't- have Pepsi in the game world, they will intrinsically want it more in the real world.
If the default medical unit stopped being a white box with a red cross on it and started being a product logo, I'd expect instant health stat improvements if I took it! I'd get pissed if I didn't get the health stat boosts though. I think that it's safe that we won't see product themed elixirs anytime soon.
What good is "Free Software" when it only runs on a proprietary platform? It's like saying "free food" but neglecting to mention the cover charge.
Well, if I say free food from 5-6 pm at this GPS address and you want any of it, you'll have to get off your butt and spend your effort/resources getting to that GPS address. If the address were one house down from yours, you'd like walk and try it out. If it were across town, which would mean 15-30 minutes travel out of your way to get there, you might only show up if you know some else that was going to attend. If it were 1+ hour or cost more than $5 in transportation costs then you'd say, I couldn't careless.
Face it there isn't anything completely free. Everyone's internal question is how much of my own effort/resources do I have to put into to install/implement/run this "free" solution?
I can buy a $350 mini laptop, $500 decently speced laptop, or a $500 desktop with what would have been unbelievable specs not long ago. I remember when I picked up computer shopper and was thrilled that there were any bare bones dekstops that sold at the $1K mark. Now you can get full featured systems for under .5K that do things that $2-3K machines couldn't do.
Really, there is no such thing as a "Moore's Law." It's Moore's trend lines that have been holding. That it lasted 10 years, much less this long has been utterly amazing. I fully expect for us to run into problems keeping with "Moore's Law" before 2100. 5-10 years after the trend is broken it'll be something the future folks will either forget about it entirely or look back and kinda giggle at us like we were just silly about it all. 50-100 years later no one will care though every one will be making use of the by products of it. Do you notice where the stuff for roads comes from or what Roman engineer built the most or best roads? That's generally what they'll think of any computing device older than 20 years. If Moore's law holds until 2050, every computing device that we've currently made will be either trash or museum pieces by that time. Heck, you have people getting rid/upgrading of cell phones almost every 3-6 months already.
We imagine replicators in Star Trek, but we don't need them with Walmart and 3-6 months for new products to come out. Consider Amazon+UPS next day shipping. Replicator tech would have to be cheaper and faster than that to compete. I think that it's more likely that we'll keep on improving our current tech. What happens when UPS can do 1 hour delivery to most places on the globe? Replicators might spring up, but only for the designers to use them to spend a week making 10K of a unit, to put it went on sale today, which would be sold out in two weeks and discounted by the week after. Face it; we are already living in a magical golden age. We just want it to be 1000x better in 50 years.
They should keep overlooking it. H20 is a greenhouse gas, but it's close to saturated nearly everywhere on the planet already. If you put a little more in, it'll just rain out. In the places where it's not saturated (which is pretty much only near the poles), it'll freeze out.
Flooding or massive non seasonal storms are nothing that we need to worry about as a side effect.
Actually we aren't that foresighted. We'd do it; get the massive flooding/non-seasonal storms, and then go back to see who to blame for it.
That's why I'm iffy on the entire climate change thing. It's more like us to do nothing now. When it hits, we'd change stuff, and then who ever comes out on top would punish who ever they pulled out of the hat to blame. This looking ahead and actually planning and taking species wide collective action is definitely generally non-human behavior from what we've seen before. ;)
Aren't current UAVs capable of flying from waypoint to waypoint with little human intervention. Call me back when they're capable of landing in a crowded urban area autonomously, then taking off again.
Um, that's not in the mission profile of any UAV that I've seen. 90% of the mission profiles for UAVs are take off from this airport/base point, fly to x location, and then cycle/wait for y event or until fuel runs low. When fuel runs low, it comes to base and parks exactly in its spot to be refueled. (Some of the really long range planning stuff uses solar cells and stuff to basically stay over location for months at a time or until something else goes wrong with it.) Now, your monitoring missions could be anything. It could be take still pictures, record video, retransmit that video, or have any number of environmental probes. (Think IR, UV, or other stuff.)
Very few of theses UAVs are for going to X, and dropping a package to Y or trying to shoot Y. In video game land, you might have your UPS UAV land directly by the player, deliver the power up item, and then fly off after it was signed for. In real life, the UPS UAV would be loaded at airport A, fly to airport B, and then be unloaded. The rest of the UPS chain is responsible for getting the package to you.
I could envision UPS UAVs homing into your GPS cell phone to air bomb your package to you. Do we really want that? I'd rather have R2D2 or such unloading the UPS truck onto our doorstep rather than UAV dropping a package or landing to by me to be unloaded and then to have area to take off again. Come on, be realistic about what to expect.
Out of all the slashdot stories posted in the last fortnight - you choose a story on a game to post your 1984 excerpt?
Jeepers! My guess is that you're Mum is trying to get your pudgy ass to do some exercise and you feel oppressed. Tell me I'm right.
Just wait for them to release the great real world GPS FF. You play it on your GPS enabled phone and walk around to certain locations battling the random moster every now and then or being guided to meet up with any other players to form real world quest parties. It's all to get you out of the house and walk about 5-10 miles and meet other local gamers that are actually into your game.
Combine it with some glove and shoe monitors, and shortly your super duper cell phone gaming platform could accurately animate you and show your moves. I could see many side quests where basically to get the power up or what ever, you've got to do x number of exercises with at least one additional player and/or certain character classes. (It would all be about meeting strangers and giving them all a known task to do. Basically, they are all in it for the quest items, but to get said item, they've got to get out and exercise and meet various people.
I could see people doing bad things with it, but generally more people would use something like that as intended rather than for bad.
In short, I would be very cautious about any application which claimed to be able to give detailed fitness advice on the basis of your Wii-Fit body test results. Professional advice from a doctor or fitness professional will be far safer and more useful.
Nah, I bet half of us could write a small app taking data from the average college health/PE class as a guideline. I hate to say you don't need any data points on the subject, but that's why you pick good general source material. (Those that wrote the health/PE class book did do most of the research that you need.) Now, you can just take all the general crap found in there throw it into a game, and be fairly sure that it'd be safe for 80% of the population to get on and stick with. What about that other 20%? Well, they either have some pre-existing medical condition that'll kill them if they do any exercises, or have allowed themselves to get so out of shape that it would be "difficult" to start a basic fitness routine and calling a "doctor or fitness expert" would be "embarrassing." Trust me things like DDR and WII Fit are targeted just right. The only way to really drastically increase gamers exercise is to integrate WII Fit/DDR into other games.
Think a fighting game where you had to put your body into certain positions to set off special moves. Think if there was a good way to integrate the DDR pad into FF or Mario that would force folks to get up and bounce around to pull of "those special moves" that are just near impossible otherwise. Heck, there are tons of games that are quite repeative, if you could get your gamers to do any basic movement as part of the play style or leveling process, you'd have the make'em do a 100 of these exercise things licked. We are only beginning to really explore that world of fitness/games. Most of the ones that I've seen have been tied directly to an exercise device and all you do is peddle or such and then watch your marker go out in front of the others. We should be able to do much, much better than that.
One or two things a year? Screw that. I want them working to solve these problems:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/FASTATS/lcod.htm
Number of deaths for leading causes of death
Heart disease: 652,091
Cancer: 559,312
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 143,579
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 130,933
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 117,809
Diabetes: 75,119
Alzheimer's disease: 71,599
Influenza/Pneumonia: 63,001
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 43,901
Septicemia: 34,136
I say screw Iraq and military R&D toys. Yes I love Darpa toys too, but playing by the numbers I'm much more likely to get heart disease, cancer, or a stroke than have any foreigner try to kill me. Those numbers are generally yearly numbers! We loose more to heart disease, cancer, and a stroke per year than in any military conflict. If they want a forever war, I don't want a war on mythical enemies. I'd be happy if the government declared forever war on known proven mass killers US citizens. We need a War on Disease and ill/poor health. The top ten statistical killers will always change over time, but it gives us a real solid enemy to aim at.
I agree and disagree with this. You have to be in an H1B shoes to appreciate this. I have seen folks laid off as H1B with unsold houses and cars. They had to just get a ticket, and leave the country. Barring the Native Indians, I think it is a hypocrisy on most Americans. Would you be here commenting, if the same was done to your forefathers. Being an Asian with H1B is taking jobs, but being from Europe, it is heritage.
I get whimsical on the entire subject. I think anyone that's managed to live in the US for 6 months without coming to local police attention should be granted automatic US citizenship even or perhaps esp if they don't want it. (If you don't want to be a US citizen, then don't come over here to work or go to school for more than 6 months!)
My flippant redneck response to your remark is more along the lines of those damn white Europeans killed off or pushed most of the natives off the land that the US currently claims. Heck even the few that they have treaties with the US has ignored those treaties whenever it wanted. The only times that the US really honors them is when the natives where armed and annoying enough to put up a fight. If H1B folks were going to treat us like we treated the native Americans, they'd actually kill us, or use every trick up their sleeves to get us to move the less desirable parts of the US while they claimed here for their own. It's not a matter of the natives treated the superior tech invaders to their standards. It's a matter of the superior tech/organization of the invaders leaving anything left of the natives afterwords.
I'm sure if the native Americans knew how things would turn out that they'd have setup tons of immigration controls and had any European ships with colonists sent back home. This would be have been for there net benefit.
I would have thought so, too, until I spent a few years in the US military. You'd be amazed how much and what kind of stuff makes it past policies (exit or otherwise). When I lived in a military town, it seems like I'd see a story every year or so about about service members getting caught with garages full of new and/or used stuff.
Those are only the guys that they catch. Imagine being in that environment and knowing how to really cover your tracks or to surplus some stuff and have a local base garage sale where its been posted on base and base folks show up and spend bottom dollar on slightly used or near new stuff. I'm sure that happens far more than anyone's aware of and is considered a perk of being employed or in the know of certain organizations. I think that its wasteful to be throwing away/surplussing/upgrading anything that others would want.
I work at a local PD. Trust me the crap that we finally get rid of is so old/used that even the stuff in perfect unused condition is still 10 years old. (I hate knowing that some nameless individual has had a laptop for 10 years and it's been listed that they spend $3K on the thing and it looks like they never really booted the thing on. It's trash when we can't install anything current on the Win95 laptop though.) Stuff like that you are happy to have some one buy an entire lot of for $20. Heck, if you want to buy a replacement battery for most older laptops that'll cost at least $150 right there.
I'd be amazed at useful stuff that actually makes it out of local government offices. We don't surplus anything "current" or half way usable.
I am just trying to work this out. How is a New Zealand citizen able to commit treason against the US?
treason: (noun) the crime of betraying one's country
Cause everyone knows that New Zealand, Australia, and Great Britain are all secret US states. ;)
If you want a more whimsical reason, it's because lots of US movies were made there so we've declared them a special kinda of state since all of our media gets made there now a days. ;)
Do you really want the third reason? You won't like it. There are 50 US states and the average US citizen confuses Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Britain as part of the English speaking states on the other side of us. Those on border states may know better, but pick a state that's several states away, and you'd be surprised/stunned how many confuse national states as US states.
I can't even blame it on our educational system. When I was in HS, we had at least 4 geography/US/World history classes where they tried to pound in the US states and foreign states thing by making us name, color and make maps of each. Judging by the class scores back then, I can't say that I'm too surprised. We just happen to be stupid in the US.