The simple fact is that humans are expensive. Even the cheapest human is going to cost you $20-25,000* a year, and you'll need 3-4 humans to provide a single labor slot for full time service in a business which is staffed 5a-9p 7 days a week. Account for downtime, scheduling, and turnover, plus the continuing reduction in cost for complex robotic or electronic replacements, and you'd be a fool to think humans have any chance at competing for these jobs.
This is the 10 hour a week that computers and robots promised us in the 70s. Except that it's not a 10 hour week, but rather a 40 hour week with only one in four people working, because it makes no sense to hire four people part time when you can get one to do the job.
“As it turns out, what looks chaotic and random on a city street to the human eye is actually fairly predictable to a computer. As we’ve encountered thousands of different situations, we’ve built software models of what to expect, from the likely (a car stopping at a red light) to the unlikely (blowing through it).
“We still have lots of problems to solve, including teaching the car to drive more streets in Mountain View before we tackle another town, but thousands of situations on city streets that would have stumped us two years ago can now be navigated autonomously,” Urmson writes. (Chris Urmson is head of the self-driving car project at Google)
Smarter people than you have been working on these problems for years already and have made significant progress. Other locations also have research going on. Virginia Tech, for example has a self-driving/autonomous vehicle program that is also working on navigation of complex environments. Hazard collision detection and autonomous steering and pacing is already in production vehicles (and has been for a couple of years).
The good thing about computers is that they can be programmed to fail gracefully, stopping when conditions do not meet the requirements for safe continuation. Unlike humans, who can't figure out when they're too drunk, tired, old, or distracted to drive safely. Everything will come in steps - collision avoidance assistance, then highway autonomy, then known-city autonomy, then full autonomy with driver, and finally full autonomy without driver (passengers w/o driving skills). You won't get that last phase in the next couple of years, but I anticipate it will happen before I'm too old to safely navigate the roads.
100% turnover doesn't mean everyone quits, it means that for 1000 drivers average on the road, there are more than 1000 drivers who leave. If you have two people who only last 6 months each as a driver, that's 200% turnover.
You must be a dude. Women's clothes are generally not labeled by measurements but by a non-dimensional number which means almost nothing from brand to brand, and even from year to year. To wit:a young women's clothing store near me recently changed all their sizes. Everything changed by one value (what used to be and 8 is now labeled as a 6). They even had convenient "conversion" charts in the store listing the "old" size, and then a column with the "new" size, exactly one size smaller.
Men's clothes are less variable, especially with pants (though different styles do vary by 2-4 inches in actual measurement/fit). However; shirts are notoriously inaccurate, and a full size difference (M-L or L-XL) is common between manufacturers.
For online shopping, if the vendors could accurately identify the fit (doubtful), it would make for a lot less guesswork.
Now that we know it's happening we can all join the class action lawsuit which will utterly bankrupt FTDI because what they are doing is illegal and they can be held liable for damages, which could easily run into the billions.
Look - if there's one thing that humans need, it's one ass to kick. Some dude to be the top of the pyramid. A face of the effort. A single point for organization. President, CEO, Principal - it doesn't matter the organization, you need a person in charge. And a person to take the fall if things go wrong. What you want is someone organizing and coordinating all of the response to the epidemic (of three). You can call him a Czar, a Director, or whatever - you still want *somebody* in charge. And somebody to fire (and/or crucify in public) if things go wrong.
No, that's not leadership, it's damage control and/or preemptive excuses.
Do you remember the last time Obama declared that we "don't have a plan" because the conditions in Syria were complex and required addition time to evaluate the various options? Yeah, that honesty in leadership went over well, despite the fact that he made it clear that evaluating what was an exceptionally complex set of conditions could go horribly wrong if played incorrectly.
Ebola is just another disease without a (nearly guaranteed) cure. There are others out there, right now, which we know even less about (enterovirus, for example). This one is headline grabbing because you bleed out of your asshole. It's like "Ow, My Balls" but grosser for daytime shock newscasts. I mean, really - a facility takes on a patient with inadequate resources to do so, and fails. We're all somehow surprised.
Instead of stating that hospitals are, generally, bad places to isolate transmitted diseases and recommending facilities and transport set up for such work, we go into shit storm finger pointing mode and massive over-reaction. That's not leadership. That's damage control.
Wow, that sounded terribly elitist - sorry, it's been a long day. Seriously, though, we can debate all we want but human nature is going to push us to these irrational conclusions. I've learned to (mostly) ignore it and get on with life.
Look, every idiot out there wants to see a "response". Take anyone below the 90th percentile a they won't have the intellectual ability to process any probability less than 1 in 4. It's like the entire airline screening process - people feel safer if they see someone doing something. In reality it does little or no good, but until you figure out how to instantly make people smarter and less gullible you will get irrational panic and calls to "do something."
If they are violating the TOS, Facebook can simply ban them - no laws required. It's nice they've made a public display of calling them out, and it may suffice as a blanket "first warning" to all operations from the DEA.
And, of course, they could always take affirmative action against them by flagging DEA IP addresses if they should come up, notifying the user of the access violation, suspending the account until it is re-verified, and posting to the persons page that the page may have been accessed by the DEA. That's kicking sand in a bully's face, of course, but it could be done if they were serious about it.
So I'm going to install an app which is used to open a picture I don't know the origin of and which has been tampered with to append a second app, and if the first app opens the "picture" of choice it then installs another app which triggers a permission request (which they say they can work around).
I'd say this is implausible, but between porn and LOLcats there are going to be some unsuspecting idiots out there who might actually get caught.
I'm not sure the G3 should be held up as a poster child for good battery life. I have one, and when it's running full out it can chew through a battery. It's the downside of the hires screen. It's not bad, but under normal conditions I'll be at 35-40% after a full day of use, and if I'm going to be on it continuously I can burn through the battery in 5-6 hours. OTOH, it's got a replaceable battery, so there's never any real battery anxiety. I think the G2 was pretty good with battery life, though.
They should seriously try a Taichi*-like phone with a pair of screens. IPS/OLED on one side and eInk on the other. A B/W interface would work fine for 90% of the time, and the color screen would be there for camera ops, video, and the like. Apple put glass on two sides of a phone and it made for a pretty damned durable device, imho.
*Asus' dual screen laptop/tablet hybrid, with a screen on both sides of the lid (though both were IPS).
Power on a cell phone? Maybe to the rarified gamer on/. but to little Andrea or her grandmother all they want is a phone that doesn't stutter and plays music and videos. And they make up 90% of the market segment for smartphones. That's not to say having a fast phone isn't nice, especially since the UI designers seem to be determined to max the bling, requiring lots of processing for that stutter free experience.
And if you are worried about your phones power, then battery life matters even less when you can swap in a fresh battery in a matter of seconds. It matters a lot when a dead phone means an hour or two soak at a charging station before you can go anywhere, or so you can play your physics-charged games untethered. Apple was the company which has so famously cheered the "no extra batteries, no extra memory" mantra which has cause battery life anxiety over the past couple of years. It's the copycat part of Android I like the least. (okay, I like it as little as the fixed-memory condition)
I'm curious what calculations you would be doing on a smartphone which would take a noticeable amount of time on a regular basis. GPS is pretty intensive, though that's done in dedicated HW. Video playback and scaling is intensive, but that's done in dedicated HW. The only things you see on a regular basis, outside of games, are UI animations and JIT code compilation. Maybe long trip calculations in a mapping programs - those do take several seconds for trips of hundreds of miles - but those calculations are generally one once at the beginning when you notice, and then are optimized in the background (for traffic aware apps like Waze) with no apparent lag.
I owned every other iPhone from the 3G on. If I left it idle most of the time (take calls, check mail occasionally, get notifications), it could make it to the evening of the second day. I currently own an LG G3 as well, and under the same conditions it lasts almost the same length of time (last week I forgot to set it on the charger at night and when I went to bed the second night it was at 10%).
Maybe it was that I was using Verizon, but the call quality was like a rollercoaster. I had bounceback issues, echoes, and some automated phone systems wouldn't recognize my DTMF tones. It's an idea I'd like to visit again, in the future, but I think the LTE nets aren't the best bet for VoIP.
That's true of VoIP riding on both DSL and Cable internet connections (both wired and wireless) as well. I've had VoIP for my home and office line for almost 3 years, and in the beginning we definitely had issues with both quality and DTMF. I still have issues with DTMF occasionally, and echos and call quality (esp. outgoing) less frequently.
And, interestingly, HFSC and Cane Sugar (Sucrose), differ by only 10% in the respective fructose and glucose mix. I suspect it wouldn't have mattered, otherwise they would have warned of the (nonexistnt) devastating effect of apple juice (90% Fructose/10%glucose) or pear juice (70%fructose/30%sucrose) or the use of honey (53% fructose) in sweetening your afternoon tea.
HFCS is (depending on the grade) generall 55% fructose / 42(ish)% glucose, and some small amounts of other sugars. Corn is the donor plant.
In comparison, Apple sugars are 90% fructose and Pears are 70% fructose, way above HF corn syrup sugars. Honey is about 53% (very, very close). None of those appear to be in the "oh my God we're gonna die" list for worrying that you're brain doesn't realize it's full yet.
It's worth noting that corn starch is coverted to HFCS using hydrochloric acid (the same acid found in the human stomach), followed by a water washing, followed by an enzymatic conversion of dextrose (similar to the same process which is used in baking bread, where enzymes convert starch to simple sugars like fructose to be used by the yeast in the fermentation process), followed by water washing and distillation. It's the same process used for countless "all natural" products which we have consumed for thousands of years, but done more precisely and on a much larger scale.
It will still make you fat if you eat too much of it, but it's not magical and doesn't have some insurmountable effect on the brain. No more than a good steak, a loaf of awesome fresh bread, or a decadent wedge cheese. You'll eat way more of all of those than you need before your brain tells you you're full.
And they're present in significant quantites in the final HFCS product? The chemical information I've seen on HFCS from food processing shows different G/S ratios, but never anything other than glucose and sucrose as constituents.
Slashdot Mirror
The simple fact is that humans are expensive. Even the cheapest human is going to cost you $20-25,000* a year, and you'll need 3-4 humans to provide a single labor slot for full time service in a business which is staffed 5a-9p 7 days a week. Account for downtime, scheduling, and turnover, plus the continuing reduction in cost for complex robotic or electronic replacements, and you'd be a fool to think humans have any chance at competing for these jobs.
This is the 10 hour a week that computers and robots promised us in the 70s. Except that it's not a 10 hour week, but rather a 40 hour week with only one in four people working, because it makes no sense to hire four people part time when you can get one to do the job.
To busy reviewing the Apple/Microsoft bling to realize that computer OSes really shouldn't be about what color the drapes are.
And no matter what the charter is, if they are liquidated the court will sell all of your data to the highest bidder to pay off creditors.
“As it turns out, what looks chaotic and random on a city street to the human eye is actually fairly predictable to a computer. As we’ve encountered thousands of different situations, we’ve built software models of what to expect, from the likely (a car stopping at a red light) to the unlikely (blowing through it).
“We still have lots of problems to solve, including teaching the car to drive more streets in Mountain View before we tackle another town, but thousands of situations on city streets that would have stumped us two years ago can now be navigated autonomously,” Urmson writes. (Chris Urmson is head of the self-driving car project at Google)
Smarter people than you have been working on these problems for years already and have made significant progress. Other locations also have research going on. Virginia Tech, for example has a self-driving/autonomous vehicle program that is also working on navigation of complex environments. Hazard collision detection and autonomous steering and pacing is already in production vehicles (and has been for a couple of years).
The good thing about computers is that they can be programmed to fail gracefully, stopping when conditions do not meet the requirements for safe continuation. Unlike humans, who can't figure out when they're too drunk, tired, old, or distracted to drive safely. Everything will come in steps - collision avoidance assistance, then highway autonomy, then known-city autonomy, then full autonomy with driver, and finally full autonomy without driver (passengers w/o driving skills). You won't get that last phase in the next couple of years, but I anticipate it will happen before I'm too old to safely navigate the roads.
100% turnover doesn't mean everyone quits, it means that for 1000 drivers average on the road, there are more than 1000 drivers who leave. If you have two people who only last 6 months each as a driver, that's 200% turnover.
You must be a dude. Women's clothes are generally not labeled by measurements but by a non-dimensional number which means almost nothing from brand to brand, and even from year to year. To wit:a young women's clothing store near me recently changed all their sizes. Everything changed by one value (what used to be and 8 is now labeled as a 6). They even had convenient "conversion" charts in the store listing the "old" size, and then a column with the "new" size, exactly one size smaller.
Men's clothes are less variable, especially with pants (though different styles do vary by 2-4 inches in actual measurement/fit). However; shirts are notoriously inaccurate, and a full size difference (M-L or L-XL) is common between manufacturers.
For online shopping, if the vendors could accurately identify the fit (doubtful), it would make for a lot less guesswork.
Now that we know it's happening we can all join the class action lawsuit which will utterly bankrupt FTDI because what they are doing is illegal and they can be held liable for damages, which could easily run into the billions.
...when referring to connected/connectable devices as IoT dies.
"How is "OMG I can't afford to stream 8 hours of video a day any more" going to set society back 20 years?"
"Raise the price, they cut back and substitute another product (dvds..."
Which part of the 1990s did you miss?
Look - if there's one thing that humans need, it's one ass to kick. Some dude to be the top of the pyramid. A face of the effort. A single point for organization. President, CEO, Principal - it doesn't matter the organization, you need a person in charge. And a person to take the fall if things go wrong. What you want is someone organizing and coordinating all of the response to the epidemic (of three). You can call him a Czar, a Director, or whatever - you still want *somebody* in charge. And somebody to fire (and/or crucify in public) if things go wrong.
No, that's not leadership, it's damage control and/or preemptive excuses.
Do you remember the last time Obama declared that we "don't have a plan" because the conditions in Syria were complex and required addition time to evaluate the various options? Yeah, that honesty in leadership went over well, despite the fact that he made it clear that evaluating what was an exceptionally complex set of conditions could go horribly wrong if played incorrectly.
Ebola is just another disease without a (nearly guaranteed) cure. There are others out there, right now, which we know even less about (enterovirus, for example). This one is headline grabbing because you bleed out of your asshole. It's like "Ow, My Balls" but grosser for daytime shock newscasts. I mean, really - a facility takes on a patient with inadequate resources to do so, and fails. We're all somehow surprised.
Instead of stating that hospitals are, generally, bad places to isolate transmitted diseases and recommending facilities and transport set up for such work, we go into shit storm finger pointing mode and massive over-reaction. That's not leadership. That's damage control.
Wow, that sounded terribly elitist - sorry, it's been a long day. Seriously, though, we can debate all we want but human nature is going to push us to these irrational conclusions. I've learned to (mostly) ignore it and get on with life.
Look, every idiot out there wants to see a "response". Take anyone below the 90th percentile a they won't have the intellectual ability to process any probability less than 1 in 4. It's like the entire airline screening process - people feel safer if they see someone doing something. In reality it does little or no good, but until you figure out how to instantly make people smarter and less gullible you will get irrational panic and calls to "do something."
If they are violating the TOS, Facebook can simply ban them - no laws required. It's nice they've made a public display of calling them out, and it may suffice as a blanket "first warning" to all operations from the DEA.
And, of course, they could always take affirmative action against them by flagging DEA IP addresses if they should come up, notifying the user of the access violation, suspending the account until it is re-verified, and posting to the persons page that the page may have been accessed by the DEA. That's kicking sand in a bully's face, of course, but it could be done if they were serious about it.
So I'm going to install an app which is used to open a picture I don't know the origin of and which has been tampered with to append a second app, and if the first app opens the "picture" of choice it then installs another app which triggers a permission request (which they say they can work around).
I'd say this is implausible, but between porn and LOLcats there are going to be some unsuspecting idiots out there who might actually get caught.
I'm not sure the G3 should be held up as a poster child for good battery life. I have one, and when it's running full out it can chew through a battery. It's the downside of the hires screen. It's not bad, but under normal conditions I'll be at 35-40% after a full day of use, and if I'm going to be on it continuously I can burn through the battery in 5-6 hours. OTOH, it's got a replaceable battery, so there's never any real battery anxiety. I think the G2 was pretty good with battery life, though.
They should seriously try a Taichi*-like phone with a pair of screens. IPS/OLED on one side and eInk on the other. A B/W interface would work fine for 90% of the time, and the color screen would be there for camera ops, video, and the like. Apple put glass on two sides of a phone and it made for a pretty damned durable device, imho.
*Asus' dual screen laptop/tablet hybrid, with a screen on both sides of the lid (though both were IPS).
Power on a cell phone? Maybe to the rarified gamer on /. but to little Andrea or her grandmother all they want is a phone that doesn't stutter and plays music and videos. And they make up 90% of the market segment for smartphones. That's not to say having a fast phone isn't nice, especially since the UI designers seem to be determined to max the bling, requiring lots of processing for that stutter free experience.
And if you are worried about your phones power, then battery life matters even less when you can swap in a fresh battery in a matter of seconds. It matters a lot when a dead phone means an hour or two soak at a charging station before you can go anywhere, or so you can play your physics-charged games untethered. Apple was the company which has so famously cheered the "no extra batteries, no extra memory" mantra which has cause battery life anxiety over the past couple of years. It's the copycat part of Android I like the least. (okay, I like it as little as the fixed-memory condition)
I'm curious what calculations you would be doing on a smartphone which would take a noticeable amount of time on a regular basis. GPS is pretty intensive, though that's done in dedicated HW. Video playback and scaling is intensive, but that's done in dedicated HW. The only things you see on a regular basis, outside of games, are UI animations and JIT code compilation. Maybe long trip calculations in a mapping programs - those do take several seconds for trips of hundreds of miles - but those calculations are generally one once at the beginning when you notice, and then are optimized in the background (for traffic aware apps like Waze) with no apparent lag.
I owned every other iPhone from the 3G on. If I left it idle most of the time (take calls, check mail occasionally, get notifications), it could make it to the evening of the second day. I currently own an LG G3 as well, and under the same conditions it lasts almost the same length of time (last week I forgot to set it on the charger at night and when I went to bed the second night it was at 10%).
Maybe it was that I was using Verizon, but the call quality was like a rollercoaster. I had bounceback issues, echoes, and some automated phone systems wouldn't recognize my DTMF tones. It's an idea I'd like to visit again, in the future, but I think the LTE nets aren't the best bet for VoIP.
That's true of VoIP riding on both DSL and Cable internet connections (both wired and wireless) as well. I've had VoIP for my home and office line for almost 3 years, and in the beginning we definitely had issues with both quality and DTMF. I still have issues with DTMF occasionally, and echos and call quality (esp. outgoing) less frequently.
And, interestingly, HFSC and Cane Sugar (Sucrose), differ by only 10% in the respective fructose and glucose mix. I suspect it wouldn't have mattered, otherwise they would have warned of the (nonexistnt) devastating effect of apple juice (90% Fructose/10%glucose) or pear juice (70%fructose/30%sucrose) or the use of honey (53% fructose) in sweetening your afternoon tea.
HFCS is (depending on the grade) generall 55% fructose / 42(ish)% glucose, and some small amounts of other sugars. Corn is the donor plant.
In comparison, Apple sugars are 90% fructose and Pears are 70% fructose, way above HF corn syrup sugars. Honey is about 53% (very, very close). None of those appear to be in the "oh my God we're gonna die" list for worrying that you're brain doesn't realize it's full yet.
It's worth noting that corn starch is coverted to HFCS using hydrochloric acid (the same acid found in the human stomach), followed by a water washing, followed by an enzymatic conversion of dextrose (similar to the same process which is used in baking bread, where enzymes convert starch to simple sugars like fructose to be used by the yeast in the fermentation process), followed by water washing and distillation. It's the same process used for countless "all natural" products which we have consumed for thousands of years, but done more precisely and on a much larger scale.
It will still make you fat if you eat too much of it, but it's not magical and doesn't have some insurmountable effect on the brain. No more than a good steak, a loaf of awesome fresh bread, or a decadent wedge cheese. You'll eat way more of all of those than you need before your brain tells you you're full.
Gah, stupid fingers; Fructose and Glucose (sucrose being f+g, of course)
And they're present in significant quantites in the final HFCS product? The chemical information I've seen on HFCS from food processing shows different G/S ratios, but never anything other than glucose and sucrose as constituents.