Computers, cars, and humans all have some value associated with them. If humans had infinite value, then there wouldn't be a question of whether tests were "worth" running, doctors'd run every test just to be sure. And when people die from incompetence, there are lawsuits with rewards based on some calculus of the value of a human.
In the US, as I understand it, humans all have different values based on willingness to pay. In Canada, all humans have the same value, calculated by unseen technocrats.
Yeah, without a doubt. And we pay them more than a car mechanic simply because humans are that much more complicated and it takes more years of school to learn how to fix them. Therefore a computer technician should be paid somewhere in between the two.
TTYT, I don't really know about the Canadian military either -- they do just as poor a job at advertising what recruits actually do. I just figured that if Bachelor's degree holders are automatically 2nd Lieutenants, then 2nd Lt must do some programming because surely they'd want to get at least a bit of work out of CompSci grads? Similarly, Professors at the Royal Military College are Majors, even if they don't have any subordinates.
Unfortunately, the optimistic slogan rarely seems to reflect reality. But that's for the best, because the proletariat still think they're free and brave.
Cable broadband in Canada is in trouble because of Bell and Telus' low-end DSL offerings. Because cable is fixed bandwidth, it only has the option of competing for the higher-end customers. Luckily these are often the same people who want digital cable, so bundling them allows competitive pricing. But to stay competitive, cable needs to start attacking the phone company's monopoly on landlines either by offering phone-over-cable or investing in VoIP.
The only thing that would really save the movie is if it turns out the robots act evil because of Law 0. That could have pop-philosophical implications as deep as Minority Report's were before the text at the end was added to make it more "fair and balanced". It would also supports Asimov's idea that Law 0 should only be implemented in very advanced robots and if someone made the mistake of implementing it too soon it could lead to catastrophe.
Probably too much to ask, but wouldn't it be nice?
The American existential position has more in common with the Ancient Roman Empire than anyone else living or dead. As a citizen of a vassal state of the American Empire, I'm rather eager to hear what insight they can give us into what it is like to be a citizen of an empire as it crests its peak...
Hockey was invented somewhere in Europe or European North America in the 19th century. Lacrosse was invented by Indians near the St. Lawrence and is played on grass rather than snow, so I doubt the Inuit were involved.
Inuit inventions include snowshoes, toboggans, dogsleds, kayaks, toggle harpoons, and various other tools for hunting and travelling in the North as well as snow and ice civil engineering techniques. Pretty impressive, I'd say, for a culture with almost no wood, rock, or metal. They've probably contributed as much as any other non-Eurasian colonialised culture, and they make some really cool art.
At least up here in the Canadian military, pretty much all the software developers are officers and all the operators are grunts. So what is it that this draft is going to be gathering -- officers or grunts? Because if it's grunts, then maybe most of/. has nothing to worry about.
Oh I totally agree that Phillips are excellently designed for their purpose, but it's really unfortunate that they end up being used in all sorts of inappropriate applications. I also fail to understand why all multitools aren't available with Robertson drivers -- it'd only require replacing their Phillips driver in the production line.
The problem is that Robertsons are so ubiquitous in Canada that you'd end up having to haul around the adapter any time you expect to encounter any screw, which kind of defeats the purpose of a multitool.
And so you're criticising them because in a few years time, when the bad guys are from Slovakia and Karjakistan, they'll be running around trying to find enough Slavic language speakers, right? I mostly agree although I have to ask: what did you expect them to have you do until then? Translate love letters sent by the Karjakian ambassador?
Who do you think is going to build and maintain those very small robots?
But seriously, the problem is that it's cheaper to pay for the college educations of cannon fodder than invest in the R&D to produce technology to lower the bodybags. The Pentagon have done careful cost-benefit analysis and they only spend as much as they need to on protecting US lives. The rest is spent on shock&awe, because that's way cooler.
Mature and disciplined maybe, but I believe very few employers would treat the military service as equivalent to a manager training program, which is what it has the potential to be. At least part of the problem is that the military is regarded as yet another hopeless public bureaucracy and therefore officers are nothing more than hapless technocrats.
To get me to join the military, which has lower pay and higher risk, I'd need it to be at least as beneficial to my career as a similar period of work as a civilian, and right now, it just isn't.
I've heard that there are 9 military support personnell for every soldier on the front-lines. I'd guess that many, if not most, officers spend their entire enlistment without touching a weapon after bootcamp. And yet the image the military sells is of people running around on maneuvers if not real wars.
The forcing is certainly a problem. I have no idea whether officers have the career path flexibility to choose positions with low probability of combat. Certainly there is a PR gap there, as well.
I have a pretty good idea that officers are not treated as cannon fodder, but they seem to spend almost no advertising dollars reassuring me of that fact. The military image is, at most, a way to pay for college or a career for those who can't hack private industry. Why isn't it positioned as valuable post-grad leadership training, instead?
I guess we agree on the ends, and just differ on the means: I think that parents should do everything in their power to improve their children, and I make no distinction between parenting skills and drugs, I am only concerned with the end result. I'd even go so far as to say that some parents should take a risk with their children, whether using untested techniques or less-than-fully understood drugs (as to completely understand the effects of a drug takes two full generations). Evolution works by taking risks, although usually very small ones.
We have failed if our children are only as intelligent as we are.
The US military has a don't-ask-don't-tell policy about homosexuality, right? So if you've outed yourself as a civilian, doesn't that prevent them from drafting you?
If those are there excuses for women, what are their excuses for keeping gays out of the military? Will they be distracted by their comrades' wiles? Are they worried about the Muslim enemies raping them?
How did the military manage to get such a bad reputation in the private sector? If they played their cards right, those 5 years after college should look like an MBA or Professional Project Manager on your resume, but instead they look about as good as 5 years at McDonalds. Remember: staff officer schools in Europe invented the very style of education (plus much of the content) that is being taught in business schools today, and yet look how far they have fallen.
If the military was seen as providing something to their employees, they wouldn't have a recruiting problem.
My friends and I (all mono-lingual CS degree holders) have all speculated about joining the military since graduation, but it just doesn't have much of a draw these days.
All the ads are about learning basic skills and putting yourself through college -- what about officer recruiting? Don't they realise they're better off getting people who already have the skills?
And I get the distinct impression reading/. that all the interesting stuff in the military has been outsourced a decade ago, so what exactly is it that we'd be doing there? They should be competing with MBA programs, not private sector jobs, because it sounds like there isn't that much hands-on work to be done.
Of course I'm talking about the Canadian military here. I imagine a draft would be pretty much required after watching how the US military has been using the cannon fodder they had so far.:)
Here you go, getting all practical and real-world on me! You're right that there's nothing to power the Hammer in the US, but some European countries such as Belgium are at least experimenting with social labelling right now.
What kind of sick parent would not wish that his children have better opportunities than he had? Who would be so abusive as to deny his children a superior physiology?
Granted, choline might have negative side effects that outweight the benefits, but in general it is natural to do everything we can to improve the lot of our offspring. To do otherwise is to fight against our genes and (for most of us) our memes. And we do so much to improve ourselves with our technology after birth that it is not a significant stretch to apply technology before birth.
The only counter-argument I can conceive of is that stupidity is a cultural trait in the same way that some deaf parents are arguing that they should be allowed to try and have deaf children because they have a flourishing subculture. Considering the attacks on intelligence in the US media and highschools throughout the Western world, I might even buy it, but it's damn sad that you're promoting it.
MPlayer plays normal QuickTime no sweat, but what's this application/x-esm MIME type? And what Debian package do I have to install to view it?
I imagine even Windows and Mac users aren't too happy at having to install yet-another-codec when plenty of other streaming video works just fine. Or is ESM some kind of fancy research project and CMU is just forcing all of us to be beta testers?
Do you think the labels on food are often false? Do companies claim lower levels of fat than are actually in the food? I suppose the difference is that the food labels are about what is in the package, so are easier to independently verify, but I think labelling legislation still works to a certain extent.
I'm not suggesting we have labels that say "Sweatshop Produced" or "Fair Trade" the way many leftist extremists seem to see the world now. Instead we put objective information on the labels like the wages paid to the workers and whether any International Labour Organisation conventions are not being followed. Sure there'd be some deception, but at least it allows legal action against the deception unlike PR now.
What's up with that whole continuous-Ramen-consumption, anyway? I thought the whole point of this capitalist thing was that I could sell my risk to someone else? Why does every entrepreneurial endeavour have to be all-or-nothing? I don't want to get rich, I just want to get a salary without having to work for someone else. If I'm willing to accept minimal returns, why do I still have to accept so much risk?
Slashdot Mirror
Damn, that's not a bad idea. I can see why resourceful people are so enamoured of their local machine shops...
Computers, cars, and humans all have some value associated with them. If humans had infinite value, then there wouldn't be a question of whether tests were "worth" running, doctors'd run every test just to be sure. And when people die from incompetence, there are lawsuits with rewards based on some calculus of the value of a human.
In the US, as I understand it, humans all have different values based on willingness to pay. In Canada, all humans have the same value, calculated by unseen technocrats.
Yeah, without a doubt. And we pay them more than a car mechanic simply because humans are that much more complicated and it takes more years of school to learn how to fix them. Therefore a computer technician should be paid somewhere in between the two.
TTYT, I don't really know about the Canadian military either -- they do just as poor a job at advertising what recruits actually do. I just figured that if Bachelor's degree holders are automatically 2nd Lieutenants, then 2nd Lt must do some programming because surely they'd want to get at least a bit of work out of CompSci grads? Similarly, Professors at the Royal Military College are Majors, even if they don't have any subordinates.
Unfortunately, the optimistic slogan rarely seems to reflect reality. But that's for the best, because the proletariat still think they're free and brave.
Cable broadband in Canada is in trouble because of Bell and Telus' low-end DSL offerings. Because cable is fixed bandwidth, it only has the option of competing for the higher-end customers. Luckily these are often the same people who want digital cable, so bundling them allows competitive pricing. But to stay competitive, cable needs to start attacking the phone company's monopoly on landlines either by offering phone-over-cable or investing in VoIP.
The only thing that would really save the movie is if it turns out the robots act evil because of Law 0. That could have pop-philosophical implications as deep as Minority Report's were before the text at the end was added to make it more "fair and balanced". It would also supports Asimov's idea that Law 0 should only be implemented in very advanced robots and if someone made the mistake of implementing it too soon it could lead to catastrophe.
Probably too much to ask, but wouldn't it be nice?
The American existential position has more in common with the Ancient Roman Empire than anyone else living or dead. As a citizen of a vassal state of the American Empire, I'm rather eager to hear what insight they can give us into what it is like to be a citizen of an empire as it crests its peak...
Hockey was invented somewhere in Europe or European North America in the 19th century. Lacrosse was invented by Indians near the St. Lawrence and is played on grass rather than snow, so I doubt the Inuit were involved.
Inuit inventions include snowshoes, toboggans, dogsleds, kayaks, toggle harpoons, and various other tools for hunting and travelling in the North as well as snow and ice civil engineering techniques. Pretty impressive, I'd say, for a culture with almost no wood, rock, or metal. They've probably contributed as much as any other non-Eurasian colonialised culture, and they make some really cool art.
At least up here in the Canadian military, pretty much all the software developers are officers and all the operators are grunts. So what is it that this draft is going to be gathering -- officers or grunts? Because if it's grunts, then maybe most of /. has nothing to worry about.
Oh I totally agree that Phillips are excellently designed for their purpose, but it's really unfortunate that they end up being used in all sorts of inappropriate applications. I also fail to understand why all multitools aren't available with Robertson drivers -- it'd only require replacing their Phillips driver in the production line.
The problem is that Robertsons are so ubiquitous in Canada that you'd end up having to haul around the adapter any time you expect to encounter any screw, which kind of defeats the purpose of a multitool.
And so you're criticising them because in a few years time, when the bad guys are from Slovakia and Karjakistan, they'll be running around trying to find enough Slavic language speakers, right? I mostly agree although I have to ask: what did you expect them to have you do until then? Translate love letters sent by the Karjakian ambassador?
Who do you think is going to build and maintain those very small robots?
But seriously, the problem is that it's cheaper to pay for the college educations of cannon fodder than invest in the R&D to produce technology to lower the bodybags. The Pentagon have done careful cost-benefit analysis and they only spend as much as they need to on protecting US lives. The rest is spent on shock&awe, because that's way cooler.
Mature and disciplined maybe, but I believe very few employers would treat the military service as equivalent to a manager training program, which is what it has the potential to be. At least part of the problem is that the military is regarded as yet another hopeless public bureaucracy and therefore officers are nothing more than hapless technocrats.
To get me to join the military, which has lower pay and higher risk, I'd need it to be at least as beneficial to my career as a similar period of work as a civilian, and right now, it just isn't.
I've heard that there are 9 military support personnell for every soldier on the front-lines. I'd guess that many, if not most, officers spend their entire enlistment without touching a weapon after bootcamp. And yet the image the military sells is of people running around on maneuvers if not real wars.
The forcing is certainly a problem. I have no idea whether officers have the career path flexibility to choose positions with low probability of combat. Certainly there is a PR gap there, as well.
I have a pretty good idea that officers are not treated as cannon fodder, but they seem to spend almost no advertising dollars reassuring me of that fact. The military image is, at most, a way to pay for college or a career for those who can't hack private industry. Why isn't it positioned as valuable post-grad leadership training, instead?
I guess we agree on the ends, and just differ on the means: I think that parents should do everything in their power to improve their children, and I make no distinction between parenting skills and drugs, I am only concerned with the end result. I'd even go so far as to say that some parents should take a risk with their children, whether using untested techniques or less-than-fully understood drugs (as to completely understand the effects of a drug takes two full generations). Evolution works by taking risks, although usually very small ones.
We have failed if our children are only as intelligent as we are.
The US military has a don't-ask-don't-tell policy about homosexuality, right? So if you've outed yourself as a civilian, doesn't that prevent them from drafting you?
If those are there excuses for women, what are their excuses for keeping gays out of the military? Will they be distracted by their comrades' wiles? Are they worried about the Muslim enemies raping them?
Crazy country you guys got down there...
How did the military manage to get such a bad reputation in the private sector? If they played their cards right, those 5 years after college should look like an MBA or Professional Project Manager on your resume, but instead they look about as good as 5 years at McDonalds. Remember: staff officer schools in Europe invented the very style of education (plus much of the content) that is being taught in business schools today, and yet look how far they have fallen.
If the military was seen as providing something to their employees, they wouldn't have a recruiting problem.
My friends and I (all mono-lingual CS degree holders) have all speculated about joining the military since graduation, but it just doesn't have much of a draw these days.
/. that all the interesting stuff in the military has been outsourced a decade ago, so what exactly is it that we'd be doing there? They should be competing with MBA programs, not private sector jobs, because it sounds like there isn't that much hands-on work to be done.
:)
All the ads are about learning basic skills and putting yourself through college -- what about officer recruiting? Don't they realise they're better off getting people who already have the skills?
And I get the distinct impression reading
Of course I'm talking about the Canadian military here. I imagine a draft would be pretty much required after watching how the US military has been using the cannon fodder they had so far.
Here you go, getting all practical and real-world on me! You're right that there's nothing to power the Hammer in the US, but some European countries such as Belgium are at least experimenting with social labelling right now.
What kind of sick parent would not wish that his children have better opportunities than he had? Who would be so abusive as to deny his children a superior physiology?
Granted, choline might have negative side effects that outweight the benefits, but in general it is natural to do everything we can to improve the lot of our offspring. To do otherwise is to fight against our genes and (for most of us) our memes. And we do so much to improve ourselves with our technology after birth that it is not a significant stretch to apply technology before birth.
The only counter-argument I can conceive of is that stupidity is a cultural trait in the same way that some deaf parents are arguing that they should be allowed to try and have deaf children because they have a flourishing subculture. Considering the attacks on intelligence in the US media and highschools throughout the Western world, I might even buy it, but it's damn sad that you're promoting it.
MPlayer plays normal QuickTime no sweat, but what's this application/x-esm MIME type? And what Debian package do I have to install to view it?
I imagine even Windows and Mac users aren't too happy at having to install yet-another-codec when plenty of other streaming video works just fine. Or is ESM some kind of fancy research project and CMU is just forcing all of us to be beta testers?
Do you think the labels on food are often false? Do companies claim lower levels of fat than are actually in the food? I suppose the difference is that the food labels are about what is in the package, so are easier to independently verify, but I think labelling legislation still works to a certain extent.
I'm not suggesting we have labels that say "Sweatshop Produced" or "Fair Trade" the way many leftist extremists seem to see the world now. Instead we put objective information on the labels like the wages paid to the workers and whether any International Labour Organisation conventions are not being followed. Sure there'd be some deception, but at least it allows legal action against the deception unlike PR now.
What's up with that whole continuous-Ramen-consumption, anyway? I thought the whole point of this capitalist thing was that I could sell my risk to someone else? Why does every entrepreneurial endeavour have to be all-or-nothing? I don't want to get rich, I just want to get a salary without having to work for someone else. If I'm willing to accept minimal returns, why do I still have to accept so much risk?