I don't think venture capital means what you think it means.
They're just trying to tap another avenue to get this done. They could easily put a RFP out for open bid to get this done in the typical megacorp way. This smells more like "Hey, I wonder if we can get some random to come up with something clever..." so they're offering an amount of money that's a lot if you're some clever kid or adult with time on your hands who likes banging on problems like this.
Well fucking hold them accountable when that happens.
Who? If you mean the government who writes the RFPs that are unclear, imprecise, and sometimes just wrong, I agree. You should really read a government RFP sometime. A lot of them are public, and you'll find that they don't spec things to anything like the degree of detail you might think. We actually DO get what we specified for the price it was promised most of the time. Sometimes we just fail to spec what we really want, so we get something else.
Here's an idea, why don't we just shut down 20 of the 21 sections of the Department of Agriculture so they only have one email system?
Actually, I'd like to fire every single CIO who things which email systems division A or B is running is even important. This is why standards exist. You speak SMTP, I speak SMTP, we all (mostly) get along. I have NEVER seen an email consolidation that wasn't a giant clusterfsck. Often the cost of getting everybody on to the same thing is about what it would have cost to leave them alone for the next decade.
We all tend to think of ourselves as rats in a maze. This corporation owns that, this regulation prohibits this, etc. We forget that our great-great-great-grand rats built the maze. It's not necessarily the right maze, it's just the one we have now. If it becomes effectively free to produce some good, I expect a future society will ask whether it's the right thing to promulgate rules that let one segment of society profit by denying that free thing to another. It would be much like charging for air today.
Believe me, I understand. I'm not some genius sitting here with the answers, I'm just one of the herd who realizes there's a question. What's it going to be like if/when we move from a scarcity economy to one based on plenty? The premise is just a couple of what ifs. What if we can automate lots of things? What if power becomes close to free? I do realize this has NEVER happened before. In any economy/ecology, the number of consumers rises to consume everything until there's scarcity again. If it never does happen, this line of inquiry is moot. If not, yeah, we're talking about a radical reinvention of how society works.
Not surprising, and basically true
on
The Real Job Threat
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I've had similar thoughts myself. The problem isn't that machines are going to do jobs people now do, it's that people have been misled to believe their function is to do jobs. Your "job" is to live. Go outside. Have fun. Play with your kids. If we're lucky, someday all these mundane things we have to do now will not need to be done in the future. Your lawnba will cut your grass. Something will crawl up and down your house to paint it.
That said, there's really not a lack of useful work to be done. There's tons to be done in the sciences, for example. Medical research is wide open. There's so much we don't know yet.
I don't know...I still dislike Windows and Microsoft, but I get the genuine impression Gates doesn't think he has a thing in the world to prove to anyone. He built a colossus of a company, became fantastically wealthy, and is now trying to do something that really matters.
You make that sound like a bad thing. The reason why most universities provide tenure is so that the professors don't have to worry about being fired when a new dean comes in and decides that a teacher is being controversial.
Why do professors or teachers get a special deal here? Do you think it's any different for the rest of us? When the powers that be shift, sometimes the powers that become clean house. The instances I've seen where that have happened have largely revolved around cronyism and racism.
I have, and agree that what you describe is true. That was a period where corps had most of the power. Note also that I said "Some regulation is useful because both sides will screw the other over when they have the power." Did corporations do that when they had too much? Of course they did.
the market will naturally, i said NATURALLY, gravitate all power and wealth into the hands of a few.
why don't some of you idiots understand this?
Because it's not true. The market will naturally gravitate power and wealth towards corporations until the workers are upset enough to bend the corps over a proverbial barrel and stick it to 'em. See labor unions. Labor unions do a fine job of strangling corporations. See the US automotive industry. In more extreme circumstances, the few are hunted down like dogs. See Libya. Some regulation is useful because both sides will screw the other over when they have the power and the length of times the situation can remain in an ugly state can be long.
The government runs many universities, including one of the ones I attended. Public universities run much the same as private ones do. A lot of the money that comes in doesn't actually go to teaching, and the way to success in one's department is not to be a stellar teacher, it's to get published a lot. The difference in tuition between the cheap public university and expensive private university I attended was that taxpayers payed most of my bill when I went to a cheap public university.
Or if they simply object on principle. I don't want any of my transactions traced. Precisely none of my transactions are illegal or even interesting. I simply think it's not the business of my government to be snooping around law abiding citizens on the off chance that they'll do something wrong. Until the probable cause threshold is met, I expect to be left strictly alone. Everyone should expect that.
...competitors have leapfrogged Microsoft in the last decade - in Search, Phone, Tablet, Social, to name a few obvious ones, but also the whole overall web service / cloud movement that it's taken Microsoft over a decade to finally get a handle on.
And who could have seen that coming, with how lightning-quick MS was with that whole Internet thing.
You're a realtor, then, or have one in the family?
I used a realtor but for some reason still needed a real estate lawyer, so the realtor didn't "take care of all the paperwork". The realtor didn't advertise anything, unless by that you mean "put a sign in the yard" and post it on MLS. Posting things on a web site isn't exactly something that we should pay much for these days. Yes, realtors show people houses, too, which near as I can tell is the bulk of the work. For that, we pay the princely sum of 6% of the sale price of the house, or $6,000-$9,000 for a modestly priced house in these parts. Of course that gets split between the buyer and seller agent, and the actual person you deal with doesn't remotely get all of it. The majority is swallowed by the company before the lowly agent gets his cut. Yes, I too have a realtor in the family.
Realtors are going to be replaced by something cheaper. Right now, they've got most of the market tied up because they own the MLS, and when someone goes to a realtor looking for a house, they're only shown houses from the MLS. The value they provide is entirely artificial. They grant you access to a resource that is only scarce because they make it so.
It doesn't "hurt" to everyone. There's something pleasant about the experience to me, though of course it's not exactly like getting a backrub or something. It's pleasantly intense. I put spicy sauces, including those made mostly of habanero or bhut jolokia, on many things, including when no one else is around, so I'm certainly not doing it to prove anything to anyone.
I do agree there's a desensitization effect, unfortunately. I've tried "hot" sauces of the more pedestrian variety and found no spice at all in them that I could detect. This is also true of things that used to seem hot to me in my youth. When I was a kid, tabasco sauce seemed hot. Now it's not much hotter than water.
I don't know about Missouri, but according to a U.S. Dept of Justice prosecutor who taught I class I took, yes, if you discover CP, you are required to report it. Always. We were, in fact, told that failure to report was itself a crime. Happily, it's not something I ever stumbled across in any of the investigations I've done, but there's no doubt in my mind that if I had, I'd be making the call.
Maybe, just maybe, the bad actors in this scenario aren't the so-called MBAs, but the nitwits who set up incentive systems where driving a company into the ground is a lucrative move.
This is, for example, what gives supermarkets the "right" (it isn't a right, you've just given permission) to search your bags where this is stipulated in the conditions of entry.
And when I rescind permission, as for example I always do when some "greeter" demands to see the receipt for merchandise I just paid for not 15' away? The signs I always see say "$PLACE reserves the right to search blah blah", which I interpret to be nonsense. You simply can't reserve a right you don't have. Now if it said something like "In exchange for right of entry, you agree to the following..." well, yeah, I'd have to think harder about it. But as it is, I don't think those signs have any more legal force than if they said they "reserved the right" to sell me into slavery.
I do buy the notion that a company COULD set up such conditions of entry and deny me the right to enter if I choose not to abide by them, but I don't for a second accept that they can forcibly make me abide by them. They should be able to do no more than cease honoring THEIR portion of the contract (allowing me in the store) or seek redress of their grievance in court, not have some goon strong arming their customer.
I shouldn't joke, though. While I'm not an Apple fanboy, there's really no denying what the man accomplished was, well, insanely great. Truth is, even Windows would suck a lot more if it didn't have Apple to chase in the UI/usability department.
Kara DioWhateverhername is flashing "jazz hands" is also front page news on CNN. CNN is not what it used to be, by which I mean a credible news organization.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think venture capital means what you think it means.
They're just trying to tap another avenue to get this done. They could easily put a RFP out for open bid to get this done in the typical megacorp way. This smells more like "Hey, I wonder if we can get some random to come up with something clever..." so they're offering an amount of money that's a lot if you're some clever kid or adult with time on your hands who likes banging on problems like this.
Who? If you mean the government who writes the RFPs that are unclear, imprecise, and sometimes just wrong, I agree. You should really read a government RFP sometime. A lot of them are public, and you'll find that they don't spec things to anything like the degree of detail you might think. We actually DO get what we specified for the price it was promised most of the time. Sometimes we just fail to spec what we really want, so we get something else.
Actually, I'd like to fire every single CIO who things which email systems division A or B is running is even important. This is why standards exist. You speak SMTP, I speak SMTP, we all (mostly) get along. I have NEVER seen an email consolidation that wasn't a giant clusterfsck. Often the cost of getting everybody on to the same thing is about what it would have cost to leave them alone for the next decade.
Interesting. I want all of them to realize it's MY bacon and to keep their damn hands off it.
Maybe it does.
We all tend to think of ourselves as rats in a maze. This corporation owns that, this regulation prohibits this, etc. We forget that our great-great-great-grand rats built the maze. It's not necessarily the right maze, it's just the one we have now. If it becomes effectively free to produce some good, I expect a future society will ask whether it's the right thing to promulgate rules that let one segment of society profit by denying that free thing to another. It would be much like charging for air today.
Believe me, I understand. I'm not some genius sitting here with the answers, I'm just one of the herd who realizes there's a question. What's it going to be like if/when we move from a scarcity economy to one based on plenty? The premise is just a couple of what ifs. What if we can automate lots of things? What if power becomes close to free? I do realize this has NEVER happened before. In any economy/ecology, the number of consumers rises to consume everything until there's scarcity again. If it never does happen, this line of inquiry is moot. If not, yeah, we're talking about a radical reinvention of how society works.
I've had similar thoughts myself. The problem isn't that machines are going to do jobs people now do, it's that people have been misled to believe their function is to do jobs. Your "job" is to live. Go outside. Have fun. Play with your kids. If we're lucky, someday all these mundane things we have to do now will not need to be done in the future. Your lawnba will cut your grass. Something will crawl up and down your house to paint it.
That said, there's really not a lack of useful work to be done. There's tons to be done in the sciences, for example. Medical research is wide open. There's so much we don't know yet.
I don't know...I still dislike Windows and Microsoft, but I get the genuine impression Gates doesn't think he has a thing in the world to prove to anyone. He built a colossus of a company, became fantastically wealthy, and is now trying to do something that really matters.
Good for him.
Why do professors or teachers get a special deal here? Do you think it's any different for the rest of us? When the powers that be shift, sometimes the powers that become clean house. The instances I've seen where that have happened have largely revolved around cronyism and racism.
Your mileage may vary. I complained on a number of occasions that a particular teacher was doing a poor job. That teacher won "teacher of the year".
I have, and agree that what you describe is true. That was a period where corps had most of the power. Note also that I said "Some regulation is useful because both sides will screw the other over when they have the power." Did corporations do that when they had too much? Of course they did.
Because it's not true. The market will naturally gravitate power and wealth towards corporations until the workers are upset enough to bend the corps over a proverbial barrel and stick it to 'em. See labor unions. Labor unions do a fine job of strangling corporations. See the US automotive industry. In more extreme circumstances, the few are hunted down like dogs. See Libya. Some regulation is useful because both sides will screw the other over when they have the power and the length of times the situation can remain in an ugly state can be long.
The government runs many universities, including one of the ones I attended. Public universities run much the same as private ones do. A lot of the money that comes in doesn't actually go to teaching, and the way to success in one's department is not to be a stellar teacher, it's to get published a lot. The difference in tuition between the cheap public university and expensive private university I attended was that taxpayers payed most of my bill when I went to a cheap public university.
Or if they simply object on principle. I don't want any of my transactions traced. Precisely none of my transactions are illegal or even interesting. I simply think it's not the business of my government to be snooping around law abiding citizens on the off chance that they'll do something wrong. Until the probable cause threshold is met, I expect to be left strictly alone. Everyone should expect that.
And who could have seen that coming, with how lightning-quick MS was with that whole Internet thing.
You're a realtor, then, or have one in the family?
I used a realtor but for some reason still needed a real estate lawyer, so the realtor didn't "take care of all the paperwork". The realtor didn't advertise anything, unless by that you mean "put a sign in the yard" and post it on MLS. Posting things on a web site isn't exactly something that we should pay much for these days. Yes, realtors show people houses, too, which near as I can tell is the bulk of the work. For that, we pay the princely sum of 6% of the sale price of the house, or $6,000-$9,000 for a modestly priced house in these parts. Of course that gets split between the buyer and seller agent, and the actual person you deal with doesn't remotely get all of it. The majority is swallowed by the company before the lowly agent gets his cut. Yes, I too have a realtor in the family.
Realtors are going to be replaced by something cheaper. Right now, they've got most of the market tied up because they own the MLS, and when someone goes to a realtor looking for a house, they're only shown houses from the MLS. The value they provide is entirely artificial. They grant you access to a resource that is only scarce because they make it so.
It doesn't "hurt" to everyone. There's something pleasant about the experience to me, though of course it's not exactly like getting a backrub or something. It's pleasantly intense. I put spicy sauces, including those made mostly of habanero or bhut jolokia, on many things, including when no one else is around, so I'm certainly not doing it to prove anything to anyone.
I do agree there's a desensitization effect, unfortunately. I've tried "hot" sauces of the more pedestrian variety and found no spice at all in them that I could detect. This is also true of things that used to seem hot to me in my youth. When I was a kid, tabasco sauce seemed hot. Now it's not much hotter than water.
I don't know about Missouri, but according to a U.S. Dept of Justice prosecutor who taught I class I took, yes, if you discover CP, you are required to report it. Always. We were, in fact, told that failure to report was itself a crime. Happily, it's not something I ever stumbled across in any of the investigations I've done, but there's no doubt in my mind that if I had, I'd be making the call.
Then again, he ceased to be relevant to Apple, oh, a couple decades ago. Why aren't we over this guy yet? And by "we", I don't really mean "we".
Maybe, just maybe, the bad actors in this scenario aren't the so-called MBAs, but the nitwits who set up incentive systems where driving a company into the ground is a lucrative move.
And when I rescind permission, as for example I always do when some "greeter" demands to see the receipt for merchandise I just paid for not 15' away? The signs I always see say "$PLACE reserves the right to search blah blah", which I interpret to be nonsense. You simply can't reserve a right you don't have. Now if it said something like "In exchange for right of entry, you agree to the following..." well, yeah, I'd have to think harder about it. But as it is, I don't think those signs have any more legal force than if they said they "reserved the right" to sell me into slavery.
I do buy the notion that a company COULD set up such conditions of entry and deny me the right to enter if I choose not to abide by them, but I don't for a second accept that they can forcibly make me abide by them. They should be able to do no more than cease honoring THEIR portion of the contract (allowing me in the store) or seek redress of their grievance in court, not have some goon strong arming their customer.
Ha! I still remember being afraid it was some trick and I was being fooled into erasing my disk. :)
That nearly caused hot chocolate to spew forth from my nose upon my keyboard. Well played, sir.
Don't you mean Stevebearers?
I shouldn't joke, though. While I'm not an Apple fanboy, there's really no denying what the man accomplished was, well, insanely great. Truth is, even Windows would suck a lot more if it didn't have Apple to chase in the UI/usability department.
Rest well, Steve. Ya done good.
Kara DioWhateverhername is flashing "jazz hands" is also front page news on CNN. CNN is not what it used to be, by which I mean a credible news organization.