I want Yahoo groups to die a quick, painless death.
No, I take that back, I want yahoo groups to die s slow, agonizing death that would make purgatory seem like a walk in the park. I just don't have time to savor such a delicious revenge and would rather the idiots who insist on using Yahoo groups go find a better solution.
If you think maintenance and enforcement of regulation is free, you should try it some time.
The largest slice of the pie we (taxpayers) pay for is the military - hence the speaking English tongue-in-cheek comment. Do we need a military to defend America? That's another question entirely, though had you asked that in 1937, or in 1958, you'd probably get the same answer as today - a big shrug. Though in a world with nuclear subs, rockets, and fighter jets it may no longer be sufficient to rely on personal arsenals - even unrestricted ones - to defend against an organized attack by an outside standing army. And, besides, if you took a trillion dollars/yr out of the US economy tommorrow, life would suck.
Water, food, electricity, flight control, radio communications, the internet - all the result of FEDERAL government regulations. Without those, you have unfettered capitalism and race-to-the bottom economics. There's a reason most US cities are no longer completely socked in with smog, and it has nothing to do with local government spending or private sector voluntary efforts to reduce pollution.
For all the bullshit money-wasting stuff the feds do, there is still a lot that you would sorely miss if it were never here or were to disappear tomorrow.
Is the water you drink clean? Is your food supply safe? Do the lights come on when you flip a switch? Can you travel through the air at nearly the speed of sound for a few hundred dollars? When you turn on the radio in your car, do you hear voices/music coming out of the speakers? Can you read this message? Are you speaking English?
Because if you are, you can be assured that your government is doing at least some things you find useful. There are places - quite a few actually - for which the above do not all apply. The taxes there are exceptionally low, and you may wish to consider relocating to take advantage of the savings and buy the above items yourself. Note: if you form a group to provide such services, that's cheating. another word for that kind of cheating is called "Government."
So for $1000 I can get 1.5x the peak multithreaded performance over the $300 processor released three months ago. And if you run lightly threaded apps, the processor from earlier in the summer may still be faster. Wow...what a bargain. I'd say sign me up for two but, alas, Intel won't let you run multiple processors without paying the xeon tax.
No, that's the effect. The point is dissemination of engineering information for the advancement of science.
The average person has little actual knowledge of patents and therefore expects that it's a natural condition, not a theoretical construct created from thin air for a specific purpose.
It's been twisted so that it's primary effect is to wring money from people with nothing more than lawyerly filings. It often doesn't even help the typical individual inventor, as the prosecution of a patent infringement case can easily run over $500k - well out of reach of most individuals.
NASA is, to be honest, mired in congressional directives. They have very little actual control over their programs and budgets primarily because Congress sees it as a way to funnel money to their own state/district as pork. There's no logical reason why you would spread their mission development out over such a huge geographic area.
The other problem: starting (mostly) with Reagan, NASA ceased to be a research institution and transitioned to a contract management organization which directed commercial contractors to do work for them. The contractors then get patents on everything and NASA just kept paying them by the hour. The idea was that you coulc fire contractors with impunity but you had to keep civil servants for life. The former is not as true as the theory since the government essentially had to guarantee performance of a contract to a minimum basis (pay whether you need them or not), and the latter is sadly true in the case of deadbeat employees thanks to the byzantine HR system in the government. The few *actual* engineers and scientists at NASA are still very good, but if you have to fight management and congress all the time then, yeah, you're going to look for more exciting work elsewhere.
Disclaimer: I used to work for NASA, and we did cool stuff - earth sensing, expendable rocket sats, secondary shuttle science payloads. That whole division has since been dissolved, afaik. I left for non-work reasons; I never had to butt heads with top brass.
Public dismissal, private firestorm. If you think that the internal reviews and procedure modifications following the Snowden breach bear any resemblance to the internal process review which is actually occurring at the NSA, you're in full denial that the NSA is a very, very orderly and methodical organization. These guys make OCD look like a carefree run through the park.
There will always be blind spots, and Snowden lit this one up pretty effectively.
Without those companies, how will those people be able to afford their environment-saving Telsas? And send their kids to private schools so they don't have to mix with the proels. Please, please think of the children.
Letting the air out of your tires to fit under a low bridge ignores the possibility of having someone pay you to design and construct a much nicer, taller bridge. If you're not the one paying for it, you may as well go for the splashiest (!) solution you can dream up.
Which is why we aren't looking at an all-out crisis. But demand is limited by people gainfully employed, and that is lowering. Everything assumes that the markets will continue to grow, and yet we expect that there is a finite limit for human support on this planet.
I'll be dead before things really go to shit, but there is a reckoning coming. Luckly, humans are exceptionally adaptable, but I expect that there's going to be some serious growing pain in the next century to reconcile the condition the capitalists think is working with the workforce that is going to be less than pleased about the coming changes.
Do you really think you can take a relatively unskilled job worker and magically train them for a higher skilled job and not have that affect the balance? Presuming most can barely move up one or two rungs on the intellectual ladder, they just push the next group up. Now, there's a reason they're in a poorly paid, low-skilled position; we're not replete with geniuses assembling cars and driving big rigs because they enjoy the lifestyle.
Eventually you'll push a whole bunch of unqualified people into a more and more crowded middle-level workforce where we will continuously be eliminating those positions through automation and efficiency. A lot of these people are already at the top of their "game" and really don't have anywhere to go.
Most people who think this is a great thing are in the top 10% (or 1%) and forget that most of humanity is really just a machine that gets things done. Class warfare is already brewing, with all of the economies of efficiency being funneled to those at the very top of the pile. With more and more people replaced by machines it will only get worse.
Every wonder why there is more and more un/underemployment? It's because we can do more with less. By eliminating rote jobs we gain efficiency. The utopian ideal envisioned in the 60s is that we would all be working 10-15 hour work weeks by the 90s through automation and computer technology making things more efficient.
What they completely missed is that a human will trade roughly 2000 hours per year of their life to make enough money for food and shelter. Computers and robots don't really matter, it's just that each human can produce more stuff for those 2000 hours. There is no need to let them work less or pay them any more. You just need fewer of them.
The thing is, we're still making humans at an accelerating rate. That's great for everyone who sell things to those people, as it drives demand to make more stuff. It's bad for all the extra people who - quite frankly - are not in a position to excel at a job better than a computer, robot, or other machine. For a creature who evolves over a time span of tens of millennia, this kind of change in a couple of decades (two centuries if you want to count the industrial revolution), this poses quite a challenge.
H1B means nothing except a small eddy in the current of change which will see more and more humans become obsolete.
Slashdot Mirror
This.
I want Yahoo groups to die a quick, painless death.
No, I take that back, I want yahoo groups to die s slow, agonizing death that would make purgatory seem like a walk in the park. I just don't have time to savor such a delicious revenge and would rather the idiots who insist on using Yahoo groups go find a better solution.
...but failure is unacceptable.
Standard operating procedure in nearly all industries today.
If you think maintenance and enforcement of regulation is free, you should try it some time.
The largest slice of the pie we (taxpayers) pay for is the military - hence the speaking English tongue-in-cheek comment. Do we need a military to defend America? That's another question entirely, though had you asked that in 1937, or in 1958, you'd probably get the same answer as today - a big shrug. Though in a world with nuclear subs, rockets, and fighter jets it may no longer be sufficient to rely on personal arsenals - even unrestricted ones - to defend against an organized attack by an outside standing army. And, besides, if you took a trillion dollars/yr out of the US economy tommorrow, life would suck.
Water, food, electricity, flight control, radio communications, the internet - all the result of FEDERAL government regulations. Without those, you have unfettered capitalism and race-to-the bottom economics. There's a reason most US cities are no longer completely socked in with smog, and it has nothing to do with local government spending or private sector voluntary efforts to reduce pollution.
For all the bullshit money-wasting stuff the feds do, there is still a lot that you would sorely miss if it were never here or were to disappear tomorrow.
Turn in your geek card.
I don't care, I just don't want a bunch of undead to start walking out of the plant if the wall fails.
Is the water you drink clean?
Is your food supply safe?
Do the lights come on when you flip a switch?
Can you travel through the air at nearly the speed of sound for a few hundred dollars?
When you turn on the radio in your car, do you hear voices/music coming out of the speakers?
Can you read this message?
Are you speaking English?
Because if you are, you can be assured that your government is doing at least some things you find useful. There are places - quite a few actually - for which the above do not all apply. The taxes there are exceptionally low, and you may wish to consider relocating to take advantage of the savings and buy the above items yourself. Note: if you form a group to provide such services, that's cheating. another word for that kind of cheating is called "Government."
So for $1000 I can get 1.5x the peak multithreaded performance over the $300 processor released three months ago. And if you run lightly threaded apps, the processor from earlier in the summer may still be faster. Wow...what a bargain. I'd say sign me up for two but, alas, Intel won't let you run multiple processors without paying the xeon tax.
No, that's the effect. The point is dissemination of engineering information for the advancement of science.
The average person has little actual knowledge of patents and therefore expects that it's a natural condition, not a theoretical construct created from thin air for a specific purpose.
It's been twisted so that it's primary effect is to wring money from people with nothing more than lawyerly filings. It often doesn't even help the typical individual inventor, as the prosecution of a patent infringement case can easily run over $500k - well out of reach of most individuals.
NASA is, to be honest, mired in congressional directives. They have very little actual control over their programs and budgets primarily because Congress sees it as a way to funnel money to their own state/district as pork. There's no logical reason why you would spread their mission development out over such a huge geographic area.
The other problem: starting (mostly) with Reagan, NASA ceased to be a research institution and transitioned to a contract management organization which directed commercial contractors to do work for them. The contractors then get patents on everything and NASA just kept paying them by the hour. The idea was that you coulc fire contractors with impunity but you had to keep civil servants for life. The former is not as true as the theory since the government essentially had to guarantee performance of a contract to a minimum basis (pay whether you need them or not), and the latter is sadly true in the case of deadbeat employees thanks to the byzantine HR system in the government. The few *actual* engineers and scientists at NASA are still very good, but if you have to fight management and congress all the time then, yeah, you're going to look for more exciting work elsewhere.
Disclaimer: I used to work for NASA, and we did cool stuff - earth sensing, expendable rocket sats, secondary shuttle science payloads. That whole division has since been dissolved, afaik. I left for non-work reasons; I never had to butt heads with top brass.
Public dismissal, private firestorm. If you think that the internal reviews and procedure modifications following the Snowden breach bear any resemblance to the internal process review which is actually occurring at the NSA, you're in full denial that the NSA is a very, very orderly and methodical organization. These guys make OCD look like a carefree run through the park.
There will always be blind spots, and Snowden lit this one up pretty effectively.
These are not the electronic army members you are looking for...
(sorry, couldn't resist)
Screw that. I sold my iPhone 4 for $280 when I got my iPhone 5. The kid can make due with her $99 iTouch for now.
Without those companies, how will those people be able to afford their environment-saving Telsas? And send their kids to private schools so they don't have to mix with the proels. Please, please think of the children.
Happens all the time. Have you seen Detroit? Everybody just up and moved away.
You know why the NSA has gone to wiretapping US communications? Because they're done tapping into all of the international communications.
If you're still speaking English, I can assure you that the intelligence and military complex are doing their job adequately.
Letting the air out of your tires to fit under a low bridge ignores the possibility of having someone pay you to design and construct a much nicer, taller bridge. If you're not the one paying for it, you may as well go for the splashiest (!) solution you can dream up.
I can save them a few trillion dollars: move to higher ground.
Trust requires two people. If you don't trust the party on the other end, you shouldn't be sending them email. It's not the only way to communicate.
Which is why we aren't looking at an all-out crisis. But demand is limited by people gainfully employed, and that is lowering. Everything assumes that the markets will continue to grow, and yet we expect that there is a finite limit for human support on this planet.
I'll be dead before things really go to shit, but there is a reckoning coming. Luckly, humans are exceptionally adaptable, but I expect that there's going to be some serious growing pain in the next century to reconcile the condition the capitalists think is working with the workforce that is going to be less than pleased about the coming changes.
Do you really think you can take a relatively unskilled job worker and magically train them for a higher skilled job and not have that affect the balance? Presuming most can barely move up one or two rungs on the intellectual ladder, they just push the next group up. Now, there's a reason they're in a poorly paid, low-skilled position; we're not replete with geniuses assembling cars and driving big rigs because they enjoy the lifestyle.
Eventually you'll push a whole bunch of unqualified people into a more and more crowded middle-level workforce where we will continuously be eliminating those positions through automation and efficiency. A lot of these people are already at the top of their "game" and really don't have anywhere to go.
I think you vastly overestimate the ability of human pilots. We're pretty fucking awful compared to a fully sensored autonomous vehicle.
Most people who think this is a great thing are in the top 10% (or 1%) and forget that most of humanity is really just a machine that gets things done. Class warfare is already brewing, with all of the economies of efficiency being funneled to those at the very top of the pile. With more and more people replaced by machines it will only get worse.
Ok, maybe that was harsh.
Every wonder why there is more and more un/underemployment? It's because we can do more with less. By eliminating rote jobs we gain efficiency. The utopian ideal envisioned in the 60s is that we would all be working 10-15 hour work weeks by the 90s through automation and computer technology making things more efficient.
What they completely missed is that a human will trade roughly 2000 hours per year of their life to make enough money for food and shelter. Computers and robots don't really matter, it's just that each human can produce more stuff for those 2000 hours. There is no need to let them work less or pay them any more. You just need fewer of them.
The thing is, we're still making humans at an accelerating rate. That's great for everyone who sell things to those people, as it drives demand to make more stuff. It's bad for all the extra people who - quite frankly - are not in a position to excel at a job better than a computer, robot, or other machine. For a creature who evolves over a time span of tens of millennia, this kind of change in a couple of decades (two centuries if you want to count the industrial revolution), this poses quite a challenge.
H1B means nothing except a small eddy in the current of change which will see more and more humans become obsolete.