Bingo. I've been saying this in one way or another for decades. We need it all for things to work, and too often the parts carry distinctions of caste and regard, and from that also a skewed market evaluation of pay.
Quick reality check, how many of us even say "Hello" or "Thank you" to a restaurant server or garbage collector. (And stop already with the inflated titles and such. The person dumping garbage cans into a truck is not a sanitation engineer. The removal of the inflated title in no way detracts from the essential task or its respectability.
For a time years ago I made my living by pumping out septic tanks and cleaning sewers. This is a distinct field from plumbing, but we (a partnership of five) often as not had to do the whole trip from a clogged sink or toilet to unblocking a drain field.
Done well and honestly it's an honorable if shitty profession. I say profession in the sense that to do it well required gaining a fair amount of knowledge of various physical and biological processes or gotchas as well as all the relevant ordinances and laws. We also had to carry a number of bonds, and some of the permits entailed inspections and certifications.
There are polls that have asked in several ways questions about privacy and rights versus giving up some more of that for what is claimed to be more security and safety. The results from the past few show that an increasing number of U.S. citizens want less intrusion into their lives. That is, they do not accept blanket promises if it means less privacy and even more erosion of the basic rights spelled out in their constitution, most especially in the Bill of Rights.
That's to the good.
However, in reality, as we've seen in the past twenty or thirty years, what has happened is that the majority of Americans, whatever their responses to the polls, have almost always elected to office those who are of the totalitarian persuasion who invariably operate under the guise of law and order.
Years back there was a survey done of a large number of scientists from various disciplines asking them for suggestions for use of current and future tech. A (to me) shocking number proposed things along the lines of implanting everyone from an early age with a chip that would include everything from medical records to criminal records, and postulating the eventual inclusion of sensors for brain-wave, endocrine, and other physiological monitoring. The latter could of course alert medicos to strokes and other life-threatening or serious problems; it would also, as we learned better how, lead to what would amount to thought monitoring à la an "intent-o-meter" to detect lawless thinking so's the cops could arrest people before they committed a crime.
We live in interesting times. Some here have stated that CALEA II will never be taken seriously. Given recent events, actions, and laws, I am not so sanguine about that. Some apparently think we are at a cusp, that we have a chance to stop something before it gets out of hand. I tend to think we are already behind the eight-ball. I also tend to think that trying to undo what's already done is akin to a verloren hoop. I hope to be wrong.
True enough, but any scheme that makes me buy and own another thing is failure prone - it could break, get lost or stolen. Too many flawed assumptions about the real world are complicating the pursuit of useful solutions.
Not sure 'boulder' quite qualifies as a metaphor, especially in that we're talking about the same thing, rocks. I was taught that metaphor was used to describe one thing in terms of another, disparate, thing. "A rock the size of a ship" could be a metaphor, for instance.
As for size, I wonder if that might not be generational or possibly geographical. When I was a lad, there were rocks. Unless specified or implied by context, rocks were usually something that one might readily pick up. Boulder, on the other hand, of any size, was something that was generally considered to big and heavy for an un-aided human to pick up. A small boulder might be knee to waist high (a knee high boulder is gonna be easily several hundred pounds). A large boulder might the size of a house. And so on. YMMV, of course, but those are the ways I've long thought of these things, from reading and from direct experience.
Cripes, just when you thought it was safe to enter an IP address again....
Very stupid questions: could this be gotten around by mesh network, for instance? Trust would be an issue, might something like Convergence be useful? If BGP poisoning gets used (and I wouldn't put it past them), how much could that screw up other stuff? (I did warn you these are stupid questions. I don't know enough to ask less-stupid ones, and despair of learning even that much.)
Massively off-topic, thoroughly weird (even for/. - whatever you're taking, stop; whatever you should be taking, please resume, or some kind of thing) yet some-weirdly-how, right. That's even more weird.
All 27,000 of them? (The article, and those before, give the three patents in question.)
Rather a sad end, all those years of Bell Lab's work, now in the hands of a legal department, doing no real good for anyone. (I don't consider feeding some lawyers' bank accounts quite qualifies as doing real good.) If memory serves, Bell Labs was the exemplar for doing pure and applied research on a large scale, and never really equaled elsewhere.
Rather obviously there is no way to have a complete success in just one go.
What Markham leaves out is that from the first neurons formed, inputs of some kind would be needed to simulated the complete sensorium, such as it may be, that is 'known' to the embryo's not-yet-formed brain, and continuing from there. From what I read, it seems he want to build a complete physical model and flip the switch. It's unknown what that might give us, but it is some kind of start.
Can the entire process be shorted, by simply building the whole thing and flipping a power switch? I don't think so. No, I'm guessing it would be more reasonable - and a whole bunch more tedious - to model the whole thing to parallel what we think we know already of brain development and inputs, gaps and unknowns alike, see where it goes. So, I think it'd be possible to build out a 'complete' brain of parts, and enable sections to conform with actual brain development, and all done with continual modeling of inputs. Snapshots would be needed to account for power outages and new learning both - it would allow for a bit of 'do-overs'. Then take what is found, warts and all, and start again.
Eventually we might be able to model the entire process, and that, I think, makes an interesting project, and one worthy of pursuit. It would require some patience and long-term commitment.
Wow, hadn't heard the name or thought of Zoomracks since mid-Nineties, started using it on my ST in '89, I think. Blast for the past, great idea, wish it had continued and grown.
That's some good info, thanks. It's been years since I even tried to keep up with the RC scene. From a strictly tech standpoint this is some neat and amazing stuff, bringing off-the-shelf parts and craft into new uses depending on sensors and software. From the standpoint of a citizen, it has some very chilling prospects to go along with the benign applications.
And that's a big "Yay!" for New Jersey; even the least restrictive bill is not too bad.
But I'm still boggled by the FAA's prediction - 30,000 drones in just 7 more years? U.S. is a large country and all, but _30,000_? Sure, only a fraction, maybe 5 or 6 thousand might be aloft at any given time, and there's a lot of cities and border length to cover, fire watch, etc. That's still a lot of freaking drones, seems like.
I'd heard of Sagan and had read several of his popular books, so enjoyed watching the series and how he brought a mess of stuff together, the subjects, people, and connections.
If deGrasse Tyson does even half so well, which I think likely, the remake should be worth the watching.
Didn't mean to slough you off by not leaving a reply. You make a couple of good points; unfortunately, and perhaps a bit unfairly to you, I don't have much extra energy just now and am rather in a bit of a bad spot due personal crap going on.
My comments weren't so much about disparity of income, they were about disparity of perception of "personhood". Un-realistic perceptions and desires of living standards notwithstanding, and telling comment about where 'disposable' income goes being true for some, I simply stated that our remuneration structure right now guarantees a pool of serfs, those serfs not even earning enough to be considered by most standards to be self-supporting. (Yeah, clumsy language, worse than usual. Said I wasn't feeling good. Best I can do just now, left out some stuff, too.)
And no, I would not propose some external scale to re-assign wage and benefits, unless it were done by mutual consent, as is supposed to happen with all such in a representative republic. What I do urge is for us all to continually examine who we are, who we think we are, apply those thoughts to others, and ask ourselves "why am I so much better/worse a human?" and "Why am I a 'people' and they're not?" - or vice versa. One of the more common traits I've seen on slashdot, and all over, for that matter, is "I've got mine, fuck you." I suggest there's a continuum: me against the world vs. me and the rest of the world understanding and cooperating with ourselves. Everyone picks a place to stand, whether they admit it or not. Some feel the choice has been made for them. Many years ago a buddy in jail said "They've got your body, they fuck with your head. The only thing you have control over is your attitude." To which I added, "Choose carefully."
Speak it. Was a time (up into '70s, anyway) one could support oneself on minimum wage. Nothing fancy, but pay rent, eat regular, own a cheap car. Support a family? Generally no, tho with odd jobs on the side, a garden, some rabbits or pigs, maybe dealing a bit of grass or 'shine, sometimes.
As in, go to prison or starve? Jeez Louise, that's a tough call, especially when it's all you can see in front of you. Seen a guy pull the plug, faced with that one.
Understood. I was never too good at talking my way into a job that used my cerebral side, unless you count process control and management at a photo lab; on the other hand, once in I usually got regular raises, sometimes every paycheck. Thing is I generally really wanted to work and at least employers figured that much out.
Best job 'up my alley' was totally accidental self-employment. Guy I knew from college asked a buddy to write a program for his company's energy audits. My buddy said he was busy, referred job to me. Best damn thing I've done, but after expenses, and the firm's lackluster 'marketing' the pay was shite.
As for anecdotal, I think I likely seen all kinds. Thing is, in my experience, the 'lazy and shiftless' often weren't - they were instead mostly crippled by a range of health issues often including mental, psychological, and emotional probs. They wanted to work, were good at some goodly variety of stuff, but had trouble fitting the procrustean beds available. And, without treatment, often not realistically open to them because of cost, they were mostly screwed. Seen others get a few breaks and do the bootstrap thing.
1755-1780MHz? That seems a mighty thin slice to somehow magically fix the huge need for bandwidth.
Seems to me spectrum is quite finite, but the demand for bandwidth is or will be considerably more than what is available.
Others have pointed out that one thing to help is to do wired to localities, then low-power wireless access points, whether it be an home, a bar or a cell tower. Reserving a small slice of spectrum here and there for emergency systems, for instance, seems reasonable. (I'll leave aside other uses; that's a political discussion, not engineering.) Available spectrum is too valuable to hand over for kitten movies or whatever. The current system for doing wireless is short-term crazy and long-term impossible.
I think Mr. McDonald should learn how to think before he requires job applicants to almost-learn enough about programming to supposedly be able to think enough about programming to be somehow useful to him in a programming context.
Or maybe I should say that I think Mr. McDonald is in this regard an idiot.
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I'd add a yardstick, or at least a ruler: is what you are doing useful or necessary.
Bingo. I've been saying this in one way or another for decades. We need it all for things to work, and too often the parts carry distinctions of caste and regard, and from that also a skewed market evaluation of pay.
Quick reality check, how many of us even say "Hello" or "Thank you" to a restaurant server or garbage collector. (And stop already with the inflated titles and such. The person dumping garbage cans into a truck is not a sanitation engineer. The removal of the inflated title in no way detracts from the essential task or its respectability.
For a time years ago I made my living by pumping out septic tanks and cleaning sewers. This is a distinct field from plumbing, but we (a partnership of five) often as not had to do the whole trip from a clogged sink or toilet to unblocking a drain field.
Done well and honestly it's an honorable if shitty profession. I say profession in the sense that to do it well required gaining a fair amount of knowledge of various physical and biological processes or gotchas as well as all the relevant ordinances and laws. We also had to carry a number of bonds, and some of the permits entailed inspections and certifications.
There are polls that have asked in several ways questions about privacy and rights versus giving up some more of that for what is claimed to be more security and safety. The results from the past few show that an increasing number of U.S. citizens want less intrusion into their lives. That is, they do not accept blanket promises if it means less privacy and even more erosion of the basic rights spelled out in their constitution, most especially in the Bill of Rights.
That's to the good.
However, in reality, as we've seen in the past twenty or thirty years, what has happened is that the majority of Americans, whatever their responses to the polls, have almost always elected to office those who are of the totalitarian persuasion who invariably operate under the guise of law and order.
Years back there was a survey done of a large number of scientists from various disciplines asking them for suggestions for use of current and future tech. A (to me) shocking number proposed things along the lines of implanting everyone from an early age with a chip that would include everything from medical records to criminal records, and postulating the eventual inclusion of sensors for brain-wave, endocrine, and other physiological monitoring. The latter could of course alert medicos to strokes and other life-threatening or serious problems; it would also, as we learned better how, lead to what would amount to thought monitoring à la an "intent-o-meter" to detect lawless thinking so's the cops could arrest people before they committed a crime.
We live in interesting times. Some here have stated that CALEA II will never be taken seriously. Given recent events, actions, and laws, I am not so sanguine about that. Some apparently think we are at a cusp, that we have a chance to stop something before it gets out of hand. I tend to think we are already behind the eight-ball. I also tend to think that trying to undo what's already done is akin to a verloren hoop. I hope to be wrong.
True enough, but any scheme that makes me buy and own another thing is failure prone - it could break, get lost or stolen. Too many flawed assumptions about the real world are complicating the pursuit of useful solutions.
Not sure 'boulder' quite qualifies as a metaphor, especially in that we're talking about the same thing, rocks. I was taught that metaphor was used to describe one thing in terms of another, disparate, thing. "A rock the size of a ship" could be a metaphor, for instance.
As for size, I wonder if that might not be generational or possibly geographical. When I was a lad, there were rocks. Unless specified or implied by context, rocks were usually something that one might readily pick up. Boulder, on the other hand, of any size, was something that was generally considered to big and heavy for an un-aided human to pick up. A small boulder might be knee to waist high (a knee high boulder is gonna be easily several hundred pounds). A large boulder might the size of a house. And so on. YMMV, of course, but those are the ways I've long thought of these things, from reading and from direct experience.
Cripes, just when you thought it was safe to enter an IP address again....
Very stupid questions: could this be gotten around by mesh network, for instance? Trust would be an issue, might something like Convergence be useful? If BGP poisoning gets used (and I wouldn't put it past them), how much could that screw up other stuff? (I did warn you these are stupid questions. I don't know enough to ask less-stupid ones, and despair of learning even that much.)
Oh, man, that is a story scary and funny and instructive at the same time. Hope you've got a better kind of gig now.
Massively off-topic, thoroughly weird (even for /. - whatever you're taking, stop; whatever you should be taking, please resume, or some kind of thing) yet some-weirdly-how, right. That's even more weird.
All 27,000 of them? (The article, and those before, give the three patents in question.)
Rather a sad end, all those years of Bell Lab's work, now in the hands of a legal department, doing no real good for anyone. (I don't consider feeding some lawyers' bank accounts quite qualifies as doing real good.) If memory serves, Bell Labs was the exemplar for doing pure and applied research on a large scale, and never really equaled elsewhere.
Rather obviously there is no way to have a complete success in just one go.
What Markham leaves out is that from the first neurons formed, inputs of some kind would be needed to simulated the complete sensorium, such as it may be, that is 'known' to the embryo's not-yet-formed brain, and continuing from there. From what I read, it seems he want to build a complete physical model and flip the switch. It's unknown what that might give us, but it is some kind of start.
Can the entire process be shorted, by simply building the whole thing and flipping a power switch? I don't think so. No, I'm guessing it would be more reasonable - and a whole bunch more tedious - to model the whole thing to parallel what we think we know already of brain development and inputs, gaps and unknowns alike, see where it goes. So, I think it'd be possible to build out a 'complete' brain of parts, and enable sections to conform with actual brain development, and all done with continual modeling of inputs. Snapshots would be needed to account for power outages and new learning both - it would allow for a bit of 'do-overs'. Then take what is found, warts and all, and start again.
Eventually we might be able to model the entire process, and that, I think, makes an interesting project, and one worthy of pursuit. It would require some patience and long-term commitment.
Wow, hadn't heard the name or thought of Zoomracks since mid-Nineties, started using it on my ST in '89, I think. Blast for the past, great idea, wish it had continued and grown.
I regard coffee as WD-40 for the brain.
Thanks for my first good laugh of the day! Yeah, nice to see a bit of sense break out, even from dem.
That's some good info, thanks. It's been years since I even tried to keep up with the RC scene. From a strictly tech standpoint this is some neat and amazing stuff, bringing off-the-shelf parts and craft into new uses depending on sensors and software. From the standpoint of a citizen, it has some very chilling prospects to go along with the benign applications.
And that's a big "Yay!" for New Jersey; even the least restrictive bill is not too bad.
But I'm still boggled by the FAA's prediction - 30,000 drones in just 7 more years? U.S. is a large country and all, but _30,000_? Sure, only a fraction, maybe 5 or 6 thousand might be aloft at any given time, and there's a lot of cities and border length to cover, fire watch, etc. That's still a lot of freaking drones, seems like.
I'd heard of Sagan and had read several of his popular books, so enjoyed watching the series and how he brought a mess of stuff together, the subjects, people, and connections.
If deGrasse Tyson does even half so well, which I think likely, the remake should be worth the watching.
Didn't mean to slough you off by not leaving a reply. You make a couple of good points; unfortunately, and perhaps a bit unfairly to you, I don't have much extra energy just now and am rather in a bit of a bad spot due personal crap going on.
My comments weren't so much about disparity of income, they were about disparity of perception of "personhood". Un-realistic perceptions and desires of living standards notwithstanding, and telling comment about where 'disposable' income goes being true for some, I simply stated that our remuneration structure right now guarantees a pool of serfs, those serfs not even earning enough to be considered by most standards to be self-supporting. (Yeah, clumsy language, worse than usual. Said I wasn't feeling good. Best I can do just now, left out some stuff, too.)
And no, I would not propose some external scale to re-assign wage and benefits, unless it were done by mutual consent, as is supposed to happen with all such in a representative republic. What I do urge is for us all to continually examine who we are, who we think we are, apply those thoughts to others, and ask ourselves "why am I so much better/worse a human?" and "Why am I a 'people' and they're not?" - or vice versa. One of the more common traits I've seen on slashdot, and all over, for that matter, is "I've got mine, fuck you." I suggest there's a continuum: me against the world vs. me and the rest of the world understanding and cooperating with ourselves. Everyone picks a place to stand, whether they admit it or not. Some feel the choice has been made for them. Many years ago a buddy in jail said "They've got your body, they fuck with your head. The only thing you have control over is your attitude." To which I added, "Choose carefully."
Speak it.
Was a time (up into '70s, anyway) one could support oneself on minimum wage. Nothing fancy, but pay rent, eat regular, own a cheap car. Support a family? Generally no, tho with odd jobs on the side, a garden, some rabbits or pigs, maybe dealing a bit of grass or 'shine, sometimes.
As in, go to prison or starve?
Jeez Louise, that's a tough call, especially when it's all you can see in front of you. Seen a guy pull the plug, faced with that one.
Understood. I was never too good at talking my way into a job that used my cerebral side, unless you count process control and management at a photo lab; on the other hand, once in I usually got regular raises, sometimes every paycheck. Thing is I generally really wanted to work and at least employers figured that much out.
Best job 'up my alley' was totally accidental self-employment. Guy I knew from college asked a buddy to write a program for his company's energy audits. My buddy said he was busy, referred job to me. Best damn thing I've done, but after expenses, and the firm's lackluster 'marketing' the pay was shite.
As for anecdotal, I think I likely seen all kinds. Thing is, in my experience, the 'lazy and shiftless' often weren't - they were instead mostly crippled by a range of health issues often including mental, psychological, and emotional probs. They wanted to work, were good at some goodly variety of stuff, but had trouble fitting the procrustean beds available. And, without treatment, often not realistically open to them because of cost, they were mostly screwed. Seen others get a few breaks and do the bootstrap thing.
Congrats on your gig, man, and your path to it.
Very nicely put, that last sentence.
Beauty. Good thing I'd already swallowed the mouthful of coffee.
1755-1780MHz? That seems a mighty thin slice to somehow magically fix the huge need for bandwidth.
Seems to me spectrum is quite finite, but the demand for bandwidth is or will be considerably more than what is available.
Others have pointed out that one thing to help is to do wired to localities, then low-power wireless access points, whether it be an home, a bar or a cell tower. Reserving a small slice of spectrum here and there for emergency systems, for instance, seems reasonable. (I'll leave aside other uses; that's a political discussion, not engineering.) Available spectrum is too valuable to hand over for kitten movies or whatever. The current system for doing wireless is short-term crazy and long-term impossible.
I think Mr. McDonald should learn how to think before he requires job applicants to almost-learn enough about programming to supposedly be able to think enough about programming to be somehow useful to him in a programming context.
Or maybe I should say that I think Mr. McDonald is in this regard an idiot.