In the same way I do not always want to wear headphones to listen to music, I do not want to wear glasses all the time when I need a screen.
Interacting with a machine-- or being entertained by one-- should not exclude interacting with the world and people around you. You want to cuddle up on the couch with the missus, don your goggles, and ignore each other's presence for the duration of the movie? How about not being able to find the beer and pretzels you set down during a football game? Having to put on and take off your goggles repeatedly when you want to look up from the website you're reading?
Thin flat displays are definitely a solution-- magic goggles seem like a niche thing with limited usefulness, to me.
You're missing the point. It was not the duty of the press, in this instance, to inform the public.
The duty of the press is to serve the public, and sometimes the public is best served when the press does not reveal what it knows.
The important thing is that the press be allowed to make that call, not that the press always blather indiscriminately. Weighing the good done by revealing this particular piece of information against that done by keeping it under wraps, I can't see how they made the wrong choice here.
Watergate involved a betrayal of the public trust by an elected official. The press served the people by revealing the full extent and circumstances of that betrayal.
Here, our country is on the brink of war with another nation. The press served the people by ensuring that they were not releasing information that compromised a military operation. They were free to print what they knew, but chose not to do so of their own volition. There was no oppression here.
Both situations involve responsible behavior on the part of the press.
My point is that there's a disconnect between what theory tells him and what reality is telling him, in this instance, and it's not useful to choose theory over reality when the two conflict.
Theory says that tabbed browsers should offer inconsistencies that frustrate users. The reality is that users love tabbed browsers. (Really, I can't think of anyone who's told me they don't like to have tabs.)
So instead of descending from the mount and telling us why we don't want what we think we want, figuring out how to make what we want work and doing it is the way to go.
If you really think about it, however, you would realize that adding the tab feature to something like a web browser window is in fact BAD DESIGN. It may be more convenient for you, but it drastically changes what a window represents to the user.
Hi. I am the user. What the hell are you talking about?
With tabs, closing a window can in fact remove the contents of many windows. Something that should only happen when you quit the application. Granted, adding this as a default-off feature might be okay, but I can just see all the grandmas wondering why all their different web pages went away when they only closed the front window.
Speaking as someone who has a grandma, I think you vastly underestimate her intelligence.
There would also need to be a cycle-tabs keystroke, in addition to the cycle-windows keystroke. (Something that does annoy me when I use tabs in Phoenix.)
Yep. There sure would. There are already keystrokes for changing tabs in Chimera and Mozilla, but they're a little unwieldy. I'd like to see simpler ones.
If using tabs is a pain for you, don't use tabs. But don't presume that tabbed browsing befuddles the rest of us. A lot of us use tabbed browsers and actually like it.
Of course. Whenever you automate a task that formerly required special skills-- which is probably most of the time-- the skilled workers who perform that task are going to lose their jobs and quite possibly be relegated to working as "unskilled" laborers.
But those people losing their jobs is inescapable, really, if you wish to automate their tasks. What you do with those people is a matter of ethics that is quite aside from the decision to automate their tasks. If you replace a bunch of skilled workers with machines, you then make further choices regarding whether or not those people will be retrained, moved to other positions, given severance packages, etc.
Remember, though, that such a move will only affect the current generation of workers. That's a small price to pay for the forward progress that automation allows us. Where would we be if we had refused to adopt automatic looms, for instance, on the grounds that the weavers would suddenly be robbed of their economic niche?
Of course automation is driven by the bottom line of profit; profit is return on expenditure, or essentially benefit from work. Work always boils down, in the end, to human work. The more you automate, the more you're getting from the same amount of human work. This can only be bad when the automated task itself is compromised (ie, when the task requires human judgment), in which case the task cannot truly be said to have been automated; in such cases, the task has really been eliminated. But there will always be more work for people to do, because we create work.
To sum up my position, I'll provide a hypothetical scenario. A factory owner decides to automate a task performed by some of his highly skilled workers. I would argue that if such automation is possible, he should do so. I would also argue that he has a moral obligation to try to compensate those workers for making their skills irrelevant, and that such compensation should come in the form of an effort to restore their value as workers. But I consider the decisions to automate and to compensate to be distinct.
Eventually even yours may be [threatened by automation] as well no matter what it is you do.
Er, probably not. I'm sort of in the business of automating things-- I'm a software developer.
My view on job automation is that if it can be done, it should be done; people should be doing work that can only be done by people, and machines should do work where they can. But I am strongly opposed to removing human judgment from systems that require it, which means I'm against things like the "robot pharmacist" (as opposed to the "robot bottle-filler-and-labeler") and mandatory sentencing legislation.
I realize there's an ethical question when you consider that some people are only as competent as machines, through no failing of their own. I don't know where I stand on that yet, but I do think that most people are more capable than machines and will always be so. Automating tasks both enables (through cost and time reduction) us to approach more complex tasks and simultaneously frees up the people necessary to undertake them. This is how we have always progressed, especially since the industrial revolution.
The doctor should be picking out the right prescriptions, but a doctor is not always going to be as knowledgeable about the drugs as a pharmacist (whose whole job is the drugs). Doctors also sometimes make mistakes or oversights, and (currently) do not always communicate with other doctors treating the same patient.
The point is that having one more informed human in the chain from diagnosis to treatment is a good thing, and not something that should be automated away.
To be fair, it doesn't look like these robots really do anything other than measure out the drugs and label them, but I didn't like where the article was going from that-- to the removal of the pharmacist altogether.
If you're an IT worker, your job is to document and automate yourself out of as much work as possible.
This does not make you unnecessary, it makes you immensely valuable. You, when given a task, will make sure the task does not have to be done by a person again-- or if it does, that person will have an easy time of it, thereby saving the company time and effort; then you can be assigned another task. In effect, you can do the jobs of many.
If you think your job is to do repetitive work manually and keep your Sekrit Knowledge to yourself, you're more a liability to your employer than you are an asset.
You are not likely to run out of work to do, no matter how much of it you automate. You can always spend time improving the automation if your current task list gets too short.
Pray tell, how are points 2 and 3 separate discussions? Windows XP is an operating system, ostensibly. If it lets applications throw it to the ground whenever they feel like it, then it has a serious stability problem. "But it's the apps!" is a lousy defense, since running the apps is the whole point.
This is not a commentary on XP's stability. I wouldn't know (and I have trouble believing 26 re boots in a day... that's insane). I just find your argument a little bit disingenuous.
People aren't buying 18 because it doesn't surprise them the way Play did. I was pretty disappointed with it when I first listened to it (I got a copy for my birthday), because I was hoping for another departure.
But after a couple of plays, I'd have to say that 18 is probably the better album, musically. It's more refined; it's generally less repetitive and punctuated; it has a better flow. Those old-timey (heh) vocal samples seem less wedged-in.
If this is Moby's "old samples" phase, so be it. The very fact that people complain of similarities in his songs between two albums says a lot about the impact Play had and the variety he's shown himself to be capable of in the past (Animal Rights, I Like To Score...)
Cripes. This must be the third post I've read saying the same thing, and not one of you get it.
Using the name "Palladium" is intentional, and it's not at all ironic.
It's a brilliant name. They're talking about supplying a Palladium to a Troy, which will thereby prevent things like "Trojan horses" from bringing about the downfall of that Troy. The Palladium provided security. Microsoft wants to supply a Palladium. Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick, man, this isn't that hard to fathom.
If I may, I'd like to thank my grade school teachers for their emphasis on reading comprehension and critical thinking skills.
Yeah, the way around it is not to go ask them where to find stuff.
I can't remember the last time I went to a website that had anything to do with AOL or Microsoft, apart from CNN.com-- which I have no trouble balancing with other, independent news sources.
At any rate, larger media companies have always had more power to influence people simply because of the scope of their operation; this is nothing new. The thing about the web, though, is that you don't have to be particularly "nimble" to avoid any undue bias. It's all pretty much equally accessible.
Slashdot Mirror
The author of this article is talking about the JUnit API. An intuitive API is always a good thing.
What's it matter? It's not like you people have gone to work since last July anyway.
Interacting with a machine-- or being entertained by one-- should not exclude interacting with the world and people around you. You want to cuddle up on the couch with the missus, don your goggles, and ignore each other's presence for the duration of the movie? How about not being able to find the beer and pretzels you set down during a football game? Having to put on and take off your goggles repeatedly when you want to look up from the website you're reading?
Thin flat displays are definitely a solution-- magic goggles seem like a niche thing with limited usefulness, to me.
The duty of the press is to serve the public, and sometimes the public is best served when the press does not reveal what it knows.
The important thing is that the press be allowed to make that call, not that the press always blather indiscriminately. Weighing the good done by revealing this particular piece of information against that done by keeping it under wraps, I can't see how they made the wrong choice here.
Now stop making me defend CNN. I hate CNN.
Here, our country is on the brink of war with another nation. The press served the people by ensuring that they were not releasing information that compromised a military operation. They were free to print what they knew, but chose not to do so of their own volition. There was no oppression here.
Both situations involve responsible behavior on the part of the press.
Theory says that tabbed browsers should offer inconsistencies that frustrate users. The reality is that users love tabbed browsers. (Really, I can't think of anyone who's told me they don't like to have tabs.)
So instead of descending from the mount and telling us why we don't want what we think we want, figuring out how to make what we want work and doing it is the way to go.
Hi. I am the user. What the hell are you talking about?
With tabs, closing a window can in fact remove the contents of many windows. Something that should only happen when you quit the application. Granted, adding this as a default-off feature might be okay, but I can just see all the grandmas wondering why all their different web pages went away when they only closed the front window.
Speaking as someone who has a grandma, I think you vastly underestimate her intelligence.
There would also need to be a cycle-tabs keystroke, in addition to the cycle-windows keystroke. (Something that does annoy me when I use tabs in Phoenix.)
Yep. There sure would. There are already keystrokes for changing tabs in Chimera and Mozilla, but they're a little unwieldy. I'd like to see simpler ones.
If using tabs is a pain for you, don't use tabs. But don't presume that tabbed browsing befuddles the rest of us. A lot of us use tabbed browsers and actually like it.
Dear davesag,
Ouch. Wear a helmet.
Your Friend,
dangermouse
But those people losing their jobs is inescapable, really, if you wish to automate their tasks. What you do with those people is a matter of ethics that is quite aside from the decision to automate their tasks. If you replace a bunch of skilled workers with machines, you then make further choices regarding whether or not those people will be retrained, moved to other positions, given severance packages, etc.
Remember, though, that such a move will only affect the current generation of workers. That's a small price to pay for the forward progress that automation allows us. Where would we be if we had refused to adopt automatic looms, for instance, on the grounds that the weavers would suddenly be robbed of their economic niche?
Of course automation is driven by the bottom line of profit; profit is return on expenditure, or essentially benefit from work. Work always boils down, in the end, to human work. The more you automate, the more you're getting from the same amount of human work. This can only be bad when the automated task itself is compromised (ie, when the task requires human judgment), in which case the task cannot truly be said to have been automated; in such cases, the task has really been eliminated. But there will always be more work for people to do, because we create work.
To sum up my position, I'll provide a hypothetical scenario. A factory owner decides to automate a task performed by some of his highly skilled workers. I would argue that if such automation is possible, he should do so. I would also argue that he has a moral obligation to try to compensate those workers for making their skills irrelevant, and that such compensation should come in the form of an effort to restore their value as workers. But I consider the decisions to automate and to compensate to be distinct.
Er, probably not. I'm sort of in the business of automating things-- I'm a software developer.
My view on job automation is that if it can be done, it should be done; people should be doing work that can only be done by people, and machines should do work where they can. But I am strongly opposed to removing human judgment from systems that require it, which means I'm against things like the "robot pharmacist" (as opposed to the "robot bottle-filler-and-labeler") and mandatory sentencing legislation.
I realize there's an ethical question when you consider that some people are only as competent as machines, through no failing of their own. I don't know where I stand on that yet, but I do think that most people are more capable than machines and will always be so. Automating tasks both enables (through cost and time reduction) us to approach more complex tasks and simultaneously frees up the people necessary to undertake them. This is how we have always progressed, especially since the industrial revolution.
See my other comment
The point is that having one more informed human in the chain from diagnosis to treatment is a good thing, and not something that should be automated away.
To be fair, it doesn't look like these robots really do anything other than measure out the drugs and label them, but I didn't like where the article was going from that-- to the removal of the pharmacist altogether.
I can understand automating away the cashier or the janitor, but automating away a job where human judgment is so crucial is a terrible idea.
This does not make you unnecessary, it makes you immensely valuable. You, when given a task, will make sure the task does not have to be done by a person again-- or if it does, that person will have an easy time of it, thereby saving the company time and effort; then you can be assigned another task. In effect, you can do the jobs of many.
If you think your job is to do repetitive work manually and keep your Sekrit Knowledge to yourself, you're more a liability to your employer than you are an asset.
You are not likely to run out of work to do, no matter how much of it you automate. You can always spend time improving the automation if your current task list gets too short.
Hope you're wrong about that. It's not like there are just a few low-lying cities... we've built many of our biggest cities on the coast on purpose.
You want to pack up New York and move it inland? How 'bout building a dyke around it?
I mean, come on. Look at the way they're dressed.
I'll save you the trouble.
It was porcelain.
Yeah, that's why I use Chimera.
Funny thing, it's a browser built on the Mozilla platform. If they can build other apps out of Mozilla pieces, then hey, pants.
This is not a commentary on XP's stability. I wouldn't know (and I have trouble believing 26 re boots in a day... that's insane). I just find your argument a little bit disingenuous.
Everyone else who pointed to that article and said "See? I told you Mac users were all elitist assholes", please line up against the wall to my right.
And someone get me that gun.
But after a couple of plays, I'd have to say that 18 is probably the better album, musically. It's more refined; it's generally less repetitive and punctuated; it has a better flow. Those old-timey (heh) vocal samples seem less wedged-in.
If this is Moby's "old samples" phase, so be it. The very fact that people complain of similarities in his songs between two albums says a lot about the impact Play had and the variety he's shown himself to be capable of in the past (Animal Rights, I Like To Score...)
"Source" has always been a noun. "Open" has always been an adjective.
It's a brilliant name. They're talking about supplying a Palladium to a Troy, which will thereby prevent things like "Trojan horses" from bringing about the downfall of that Troy. The Palladium provided security. Microsoft wants to supply a Palladium. Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick, man, this isn't that hard to fathom.
If I may, I'd like to thank my grade school teachers for their emphasis on reading comprehension and critical thinking skills.
I can't remember the last time I went to a website that had anything to do with AOL or Microsoft, apart from CNN.com-- which I have no trouble balancing with other, independent news sources.
At any rate, larger media companies have always had more power to influence people simply because of the scope of their operation; this is nothing new. The thing about the web, though, is that you don't have to be particularly "nimble" to avoid any undue bias. It's all pretty much equally accessible.
... but there's time to do the same thing standing in front of a refrigerator?