This being slashdot, I didn't bother clicking through to read the whole thing. But the most important advantage that the car companies have wasn't in the summary: regulatory capture.
They own the legislatures in several midwestern states and they own the state and federal regulatory agencies as much as the agencies own them.
They have already managed to get a law passed in Michigan that was hailed as the most permissive framework in the nation for autonomous cars. The one thing that everyone missed is that only car manufacturers can apply for a license. So no google, no apple, no any of the other parts manufacturers who are building autonomous driving subsystems. (Actually google fought for and received a "grandfathered" status for their tests)
The car companies are currently pushing the same legislation in neighboring states.
Didn't GM pay Ross Perot a couple of billion dollars to go away when he was on the board after they bought his company? Apparently there is "speaking your mind" and then there is "being $2 billion worth of annoying".
That's good work if you can get it. A couple of hours per quarter, and the company usually flies you in and puts you up in swanky digs and takes you out for expensive dinners.
And for the effort he managed to pull in some $60+ million in bonus incentives. Nice.
Although, given his history as a politician who complained of many things of "the rich", including CEOs making exorbitant salaries and bonuses..... Doesn't that make this..... I dunno, ironic seems inadequate.
Still, if you are looking for someone to sit on your board, I'll be happy to do it at half that rate!
And these are not easily dismissed reasons. Muscle mass is important as you move into your 70's and 80's for more than vanity.
I wish our obsession with sports didn't taint this area so much. So there's a couple of thousand people who would like to take steroids and hormones to enhance their chances in athletics at the top level.... big deal. There are tens of million of people who would love to have a safe and effective way to convert a couple of pounds of fat into muscle and improve the resiliency of their tendons and ligaments.
When I was in grad school back around 1990 there was a study on genetically obese rabbits that showed that doses of angesterone had a dramatic effect on the male rabbits. They didn't lose weight, but they converted fat to muscle without exercise. And they had a reduction in heart and coronary disease. And they had an increase in libido. All with small doses of angesterone.
Now, I don't know where that led. But how many people would line up for a pill or shot that would convert fat to muscle without exercise, make your heart healthier and increase your sex drive? But it gets squashed as an area of medicine because of fears of doping in sports.
$me: Yes, I understand it was a Word doc... but where did you save it? Was it in your network documents folder? On your team's shared folder?
$user: Oh, yeah. Sorry. It was in Word..... Fast forward 10 minutes as I look through recent documents and other breadcrumb trails and ask questions about the contents of the document in question.
$me: Is this what you were looking for? (pointing to an excel spreadsheet)
$user: Yes! That's it! Thank you so much! I hate this computer..... it is always losing my documents! Can I get a new computer?
This was exactly my reaction. It entirely depends on the people involved and the job to be done.
The most productive programmer I ever worked with was remote for more than half the time we worked together. She'd have her kids running around in the background while we were collaborating. But as I'd describe an idea I had for solving some tricky multi-system, multi-business problem you'd here the clickety-clack of a keyboard mixed with the sounds of preschool children playing. And usually by the time I had finished explaining the idea to the team she'd say, "you mean something like this" and post a preliminary version of the solution I was describing.
She was crazy fast - both mentally and with her keyboard skills. So you could work with her being anywhere. And in her particular case, I think she was better remote... because she didn't have to do the office dance and chat in the breakroom or any of the other stuff that wasn't really her thing. She could just build amazing stuff.
On the other hand, I have worked with guys who needed their hand held in order to get their best work. Not just someone looking to make sure they were working instead of goofing off, but also a team concept to make sure they kept moving in the right direction. There are a lot of programmers who get excited about an idea they have and can go off on a tangent. I've had several guys who would, if left to their own devices, build a really cool bit of code that doesn't actually address the issue at hand. Because they lost sight of the forest and got way too interested in the trees. For these sort of folks, having a team in the same room is a big help. Because they are going to say "hey, check this out" before they get too far down the wrong path. Whereas they might work for 5 hours on the wrong thing before saying anything if they were remote.
I wonder how long it will be before these are more than just a prototype?
They'll be ready for production in about 5 years. Cool tech always is about 5 years away from production. New batteries with double the capacity, new processor with half the power consumption, new hard drive tech that exponentially increases capacity..... all 5 years out.
It is 10 years if it is a basic science breakthrough, like room temperature superconductors or desktop fusion reactors.
It looks to me like your logic is completely backwards on this one.
Cajoling, threatening, ostracizing and assaulting people who take on non-traditional gender roles would certainly reduce the number of people who chose to outwardly express this desire. But would the absence of such coercion really increase the number of people who had those feelings in the first place?
Bruce Jenner lived the life of the uber-male, being a world-renowned athlete and spokesman. The entire time he felt that he was truly a woman. But he was too afraid to admit it in public. Or even in private. Precisely because of the social mores you are talking about.
If "The World's Greatest Athlete" can be transgender but be too afraid to admit it, the same could certainly be true for a whole bunch of skinny little kids who aren't likely to ever win a fist fight.
No, this knife cuts the other way. It is prima-facia evidence that people are being coerced into hiding their true feelings out of fear.
All that being said.... I agree that running around calling the other 95+% of people "cis" is a bit weird. I realize that we are just trying like the dickens to avoid using words like "normal" because that might hurt someone else's feelings by indirectly implying that they might not be "normal".... but really folks, it is a bit goofy. When a label applies to well north of 90% of the population, we don't usually see fit to mention it. You don't go around calling everyone who can see "sighted". Nor do you run around prefixing everyone who can walk with "ambulatory".
But we are in a transition phase, so some of this overreach is to be expected. Give it another 10 or 15 years and this goofiness should all be a distant memory. The activists will quit trying to insist that everyone use nonsensical pronouns like "Xe", and the throwbacks will quit insulting people by refusing to call them by the name they chose or by a gender other than their choice.
New York state has committed $750 million to build and outfit the plant at Buffalo's RiverBend site, the centerpiece of Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo's "Buffalo Billion" program to revitalize the upstate region's largest city.
To put that in perspective, they could have simply given each of the 1,400 people expected to be employed in this operation a half million dollars and still come out ahead on the deal.
Not that it is necessarily a bad investment long term, but a half million per job up front for something in this tough and competitive of a market is risky, to say the least.
No, they were pretty explicit about what the disagreement was. California wanted to permit them as special driverless cars that required extra permits, dollars and hurdles. Uber insisted that because they had drivers in the seat who could take control at any time, they were no more "driverless" than a Tesla, Mercedes, BMW etc. equipped with autonomous cruise control. Since they don't require the extra permitting for the owner of a Mercedes E class with Drive Pilot, Uber says they shouldn't be required to pay the extra vig to the state and put up with the extra paperwork for their version.
Oh, and whoever modded wisebabo offtopic is a little slow.
The adaptation of the solid rocket boosters from the HII-A into a stand-alone rocket has always had military implications. I don't think anyone is pretending otherwise - at least not with more than a fig leaf.
Just because his tack-on attack on Trump was silly doesn't make discussions of the possibilities as an ICBM offtopic.
In November 2012, JAXA reported that there had been a possible leak of rocket data due to a computer virus. JAXA had previously been a victim of cyber-attacks, possibly for espionage purposes.[23] Solid-fuel rocket data potentially has military value,[23] and Epsilon is considered as potentially adaptable to an intercontinental ballistic missile.[24]
So way back in 2012 someone was trying to find out about this rocket, and probably because of its potential as an ICBM.
Why would Japan want such a thing after having avowed a no nuclear policy after being subjected to the only nuclear attack in history? Because Trump has declared S. Korea and Japan to no longer be protected by the American nuclear umbrella.
Yes. So much this! Japan anticipated Trump taking office in 2017 a couple of decades ago and rushed the development of the Epsilon, which first launched in 2013. All of this so that they could have an enhanced version of the Epsilon ready for its first satellite launch in 2016, a couple of months before Trump takes office. Brilliant insight there....
No, it is not remotely why any of this is happening.
We are having a conversation about "fake news" because a small cadre of politicos were emotionally invested in their team winning. And they cannot accept that they lost. So they are insisting that it had to be some sort of dirty trick. Like "Fake News!"
But what made them think of "fake news" as a thing to be fought? It didn't exist a couple of months ago, and suddenly it is the greatest threat to democracy, ever. Perhaps there is a bit of projection operating here?
So the actual story that we have where fake news was used to impact the election is about a Clinton disinformation campaign, willingly assisted by MSNBC. But somehow this means that we need to suppress stories from conservative websites like Breitbart.
For those of you who are lacking a context for threats to free speech, this sort of thing has been the Democrat's dream for at least 40 years. They keep trying to bring back the "fairness doctrine" so they can get people like Rush Limbaugh off the air - or at least force stations to put on their guy for the same number of hours.
So now they have a new angle. But the result is always the same. "We need to make sure that our political enemies are not allowed to speak to 'the people', because they are dangerous and evil"
All of you who are cheerleading this sort of effort should be ashamed of yourselves. There is nobody on Slashdot who is so stupid and so devoid of knowledge of the importance of free speech that they don't know better than this. This used to be a place where suggesting a proprietary protocol for network traffic was considered a flagrant violation of our freedoms. And now we have people openly advocating for the suppression of online speech that they disagree with. On Slashdot.
Good lord, people..... this isn't The Daily Kos or The Daily Beast. This is Slashdot. "Information wants to be free" has been our mantra forever. Now because the other team elected a guy you can't stomach, you want to toss out everything you believe in? Just in the name of political power?
Go find your 1997 self and ask him what he thinks about your online censorship scheme. I really, really doubt he'd be all in on the plan just because you hang a "not the government" fig leaf on it.
I have hired one H1B worker. She is an amazing lady with loads of talent and twice as much work ethic. She went to school here and then got a job working for me under her training visa, at the same wage as everyone else. In her H1B application we wrote up the requirements specific to her position. The expertise she gained working for us meant that it was not terribly likely there would be any US citizens applying with her qualifications. And even so, she's a top 1% person. Maybe top 0,1%, so no rational employer would pick an average candidate when they could have her. That was almost 20 years ago.
After she was eligible, I sponsored her citizenship and paid for her attorney's fees. She is now a citizen, married with 3 kids and a tremendous asset to the community. Her husband was also a college immigrant who got a job with an H1B and eventually became a citizen. He started his own company and now he's doing really well, employing lots of Americans.
That is my only H1B experience. If everyone on an H1B is like them, then we need more H1B visas, not less.
Yup. Have used it for years too. It rings all of my devices and filters out spam texts. Also quite nice getting an emailed transcript of voicemails.
-Matt
For those who haven't tried it, you can use google voice as your voicemail for your cell phone without using any of the other features. So you can get voicemail to text for free from google, instead of paying a monthly vig to your carrier... plus you get to keep your voice mail box as it is when you move from carrier to carrier.
It is a nice service, and you can't beat the price. With the text-to-speech and streaming audio, I never dial in to my voicemail account.
Setup under Verizon was a minor league pain, but switching to T-mobile was a breeze - I just used the "google voice" option on the phone's voicemail menu and it switched my voicemail to google. So I didn't lose any of my saved messages, I didn't have to redo my outgoing announcements and I didn't have to learn new prompts. Very pleasant experience.
The "every small part you ever need at your fingertips at home" revolution didn't happen.... or maybe hasn't happened yet.
But 3D printing is definitely revolutionary in the business world. People are just figuring out how to use the technology now, but it is already having an impact at the very high end... like SpaceX making parts of their super-draco engines with 3D printing. Or 3D printed automotive parts.
Sure, we don't have laser-sintered makerbots available for $75 that can print any tool or part you need in your garage.... but it isn't like 3D printing is a bust.
I concur. The "because Trump" part is just plain silly projection.
But I was quite surprised to learn that they don't have a multi-continent presence. I would have assumed they had multiple copies located all around the globe. It is a pretty huge site with what I would assume is a large volume of traffic from around the globe.
Why, back in my day we had to type our wares in from Compute's Gazette. And we didn't have a tape drive either! No, we had to put a sign on the keyboard that said "do not touch". Then we could run our wares..... if we were lucky!
Slashdot Mirror
Fondness for the organs, contempt for the person. It really isn't that complicated.
This being slashdot, I didn't bother clicking through to read the whole thing. But the most important advantage that the car companies have wasn't in the summary: regulatory capture.
They own the legislatures in several midwestern states and they own the state and federal regulatory agencies as much as the agencies own them.
They have already managed to get a law passed in Michigan that was hailed as the most permissive framework in the nation for autonomous cars. The one thing that everyone missed is that only car manufacturers can apply for a license. So no google, no apple, no any of the other parts manufacturers who are building autonomous driving subsystems. (Actually google fought for and received a "grandfathered" status for their tests)
The car companies are currently pushing the same legislation in neighboring states.
Didn't GM pay Ross Perot a couple of billion dollars to go away when he was on the board after they bought his company? Apparently there is "speaking your mind" and then there is "being $2 billion worth of annoying".
Also, good work if you can get it.
That's good work if you can get it. A couple of hours per quarter, and the company usually flies you in and puts you up in swanky digs and takes you out for expensive dinners.
And for the effort he managed to pull in some $60+ million in bonus incentives. Nice.
Although, given his history as a politician who complained of many things of "the rich", including CEOs making exorbitant salaries and bonuses..... Doesn't that make this..... I dunno, ironic seems inadequate.
Still, if you are looking for someone to sit on your board, I'll be happy to do it at half that rate!
This was exactly my first impression.
And these are not easily dismissed reasons. Muscle mass is important as you move into your 70's and 80's for more than vanity.
I wish our obsession with sports didn't taint this area so much. So there's a couple of thousand people who would like to take steroids and hormones to enhance their chances in athletics at the top level.... big deal. There are tens of million of people who would love to have a safe and effective way to convert a couple of pounds of fat into muscle and improve the resiliency of their tendons and ligaments.
When I was in grad school back around 1990 there was a study on genetically obese rabbits that showed that doses of angesterone had a dramatic effect on the male rabbits. They didn't lose weight, but they converted fat to muscle without exercise. And they had a reduction in heart and coronary disease. And they had an increase in libido. All with small doses of angesterone.
Now, I don't know where that led. But how many people would line up for a pill or shot that would convert fat to muscle without exercise, make your heart healthier and increase your sex drive? But it gets squashed as an area of medicine because of fears of doping in sports.
I think I used to work with her!
My favorite is:
$user: I can't find my document!
$me: Where did you save it?
$user: In Word.
$me: Yes, I understand it was a Word doc... but where did you save it? Was it in your network documents folder? On your team's shared folder?
$user: Oh, yeah. Sorry. It was in Word. .... Fast forward 10 minutes as I look through recent documents and other breadcrumb trails and ask questions about the contents of the document in question.
$me: Is this what you were looking for? (pointing to an excel spreadsheet)
$user: Yes! That's it! Thank you so much! I hate this computer..... it is always losing my documents! Can I get a new computer?
This was exactly my reaction. It entirely depends on the people involved and the job to be done.
The most productive programmer I ever worked with was remote for more than half the time we worked together. She'd have her kids running around in the background while we were collaborating. But as I'd describe an idea I had for solving some tricky multi-system, multi-business problem you'd here the clickety-clack of a keyboard mixed with the sounds of preschool children playing. And usually by the time I had finished explaining the idea to the team she'd say, "you mean something like this" and post a preliminary version of the solution I was describing.
She was crazy fast - both mentally and with her keyboard skills. So you could work with her being anywhere. And in her particular case, I think she was better remote... because she didn't have to do the office dance and chat in the breakroom or any of the other stuff that wasn't really her thing. She could just build amazing stuff.
On the other hand, I have worked with guys who needed their hand held in order to get their best work. Not just someone looking to make sure they were working instead of goofing off, but also a team concept to make sure they kept moving in the right direction. There are a lot of programmers who get excited about an idea they have and can go off on a tangent. I've had several guys who would, if left to their own devices, build a really cool bit of code that doesn't actually address the issue at hand. Because they lost sight of the forest and got way too interested in the trees. For these sort of folks, having a team in the same room is a big help. Because they are going to say "hey, check this out" before they get too far down the wrong path. Whereas they might work for 5 hours on the wrong thing before saying anything if they were remote.
They'll be ready for production in about 5 years. Cool tech always is about 5 years away from production. New batteries with double the capacity, new processor with half the power consumption, new hard drive tech that exponentially increases capacity..... all 5 years out.
It is 10 years if it is a basic science breakthrough, like room temperature superconductors or desktop fusion reactors.
Well, once the deal goes through, that analysis will show that 100% of Sprint users are subscribers. So their analysis is gonna look pretty good....
It looks to me like your logic is completely backwards on this one.
Cajoling, threatening, ostracizing and assaulting people who take on non-traditional gender roles would certainly reduce the number of people who chose to outwardly express this desire. But would the absence of such coercion really increase the number of people who had those feelings in the first place?
Bruce Jenner lived the life of the uber-male, being a world-renowned athlete and spokesman. The entire time he felt that he was truly a woman. But he was too afraid to admit it in public. Or even in private. Precisely because of the social mores you are talking about.
If "The World's Greatest Athlete" can be transgender but be too afraid to admit it, the same could certainly be true for a whole bunch of skinny little kids who aren't likely to ever win a fist fight.
No, this knife cuts the other way. It is prima-facia evidence that people are being coerced into hiding their true feelings out of fear.
All that being said.... I agree that running around calling the other 95+% of people "cis" is a bit weird. I realize that we are just trying like the dickens to avoid using words like "normal" because that might hurt someone else's feelings by indirectly implying that they might not be "normal".... but really folks, it is a bit goofy. When a label applies to well north of 90% of the population, we don't usually see fit to mention it. You don't go around calling everyone who can see "sighted". Nor do you run around prefixing everyone who can walk with "ambulatory".
But we are in a transition phase, so some of this overreach is to be expected. Give it another 10 or 15 years and this goofiness should all be a distant memory. The activists will quit trying to insist that everyone use nonsensical pronouns like "Xe", and the throwbacks will quit insulting people by refusing to call them by the name they chose or by a gender other than their choice.
$256 Million! Hey, that's about 1/3 of the amount the state of New York is investing in this project!
To put that in perspective, they could have simply given each of the 1,400 people expected to be employed in this operation a half million dollars and still come out ahead on the deal.
Not that it is necessarily a bad investment long term, but a half million per job up front for something in this tough and competitive of a market is risky, to say the least.
I didn't get suckered in to anything. I'm clarifying their argument which has been straw-manned into obscurity by this crowd.
I don't have to agree with them to be able to understand and articulate their argument.
No, they were pretty explicit about what the disagreement was. California wanted to permit them as special driverless cars that required extra permits, dollars and hurdles. Uber insisted that because they had drivers in the seat who could take control at any time, they were no more "driverless" than a Tesla, Mercedes, BMW etc. equipped with autonomous cruise control. Since they don't require the extra permitting for the owner of a Mercedes E class with Drive Pilot, Uber says they shouldn't be required to pay the extra vig to the state and put up with the extra paperwork for their version.
They do have a point, from that point of view.
Lots more info over at Spaceflightnow.com
Oh, and whoever modded wisebabo offtopic is a little slow.
The adaptation of the solid rocket boosters from the HII-A into a stand-alone rocket has always had military implications. I don't think anyone is pretending otherwise - at least not with more than a fig leaf.
Just because his tack-on attack on Trump was silly doesn't make discussions of the possibilities as an ICBM offtopic.
That's funny.
And the "this could be a missile" take isn't new, nor is it in anyway a response to today's political news.
To the wiki!
So way back in 2012 someone was trying to find out about this rocket, and probably because of its potential as an ICBM.
But yeah... because Trump.
Why would Japan want such a thing after having avowed a no nuclear policy after being subjected to the only nuclear attack in history? Because Trump has declared S. Korea and Japan to no longer be protected by the American nuclear umbrella.
Yes. So much this! Japan anticipated Trump taking office in 2017 a couple of decades ago and rushed the development of the Epsilon, which first launched in 2013. All of this so that they could have an enhanced version of the Epsilon ready for its first satellite launch in 2016, a couple of months before Trump takes office. Brilliant insight there....
No, it is not remotely why any of this is happening.
We are having a conversation about "fake news" because a small cadre of politicos were emotionally invested in their team winning. And they cannot accept that they lost. So they are insisting that it had to be some sort of dirty trick. Like "Fake News!"
But what made them think of "fake news" as a thing to be fought? It didn't exist a couple of months ago, and suddenly it is the greatest threat to democracy, ever. Perhaps there is a bit of projection operating here?
So... Glenn Greenwald ( the reporter who brought you Edward Snowden) has a nice piece about how team Clinton manufactured fake news to discredit Wikileaks.
So the actual story that we have where fake news was used to impact the election is about a Clinton disinformation campaign, willingly assisted by MSNBC. But somehow this means that we need to suppress stories from conservative websites like Breitbart.
For those of you who are lacking a context for threats to free speech, this sort of thing has been the Democrat's dream for at least 40 years. They keep trying to bring back the "fairness doctrine" so they can get people like Rush Limbaugh off the air - or at least force stations to put on their guy for the same number of hours.
So now they have a new angle. But the result is always the same. "We need to make sure that our political enemies are not allowed to speak to 'the people', because they are dangerous and evil"
All of you who are cheerleading this sort of effort should be ashamed of yourselves. There is nobody on Slashdot who is so stupid and so devoid of knowledge of the importance of free speech that they don't know better than this. This used to be a place where suggesting a proprietary protocol for network traffic was considered a flagrant violation of our freedoms. And now we have people openly advocating for the suppression of online speech that they disagree with. On Slashdot.
Good lord, people..... this isn't The Daily Kos or The Daily Beast. This is Slashdot. "Information wants to be free" has been our mantra forever. Now because the other team elected a guy you can't stomach, you want to toss out everything you believe in? Just in the name of political power?
Go find your 1997 self and ask him what he thinks about your online censorship scheme. I really, really doubt he'd be all in on the plan just because you hang a "not the government" fig leaf on it.
I have hired one H1B worker. She is an amazing lady with loads of talent and twice as much work ethic. She went to school here and then got a job working for me under her training visa, at the same wage as everyone else. In her H1B application we wrote up the requirements specific to her position. The expertise she gained working for us meant that it was not terribly likely there would be any US citizens applying with her qualifications. And even so, she's a top 1% person. Maybe top 0,1%, so no rational employer would pick an average candidate when they could have her. That was almost 20 years ago.
After she was eligible, I sponsored her citizenship and paid for her attorney's fees. She is now a citizen, married with 3 kids and a tremendous asset to the community. Her husband was also a college immigrant who got a job with an H1B and eventually became a citizen. He started his own company and now he's doing really well, employing lots of Americans.
That is my only H1B experience. If everyone on an H1B is like them, then we need more H1B visas, not less.
Yup. Have used it for years too. It rings all of my devices and filters out spam texts. Also quite nice getting an emailed transcript of voicemails.
-Matt
For those who haven't tried it, you can use google voice as your voicemail for your cell phone without using any of the other features. So you can get voicemail to text for free from google, instead of paying a monthly vig to your carrier... plus you get to keep your voice mail box as it is when you move from carrier to carrier.
It is a nice service, and you can't beat the price. With the text-to-speech and streaming audio, I never dial in to my voicemail account.
Setup under Verizon was a minor league pain, but switching to T-mobile was a breeze - I just used the "google voice" option on the phone's voicemail menu and it switched my voicemail to google. So I didn't lose any of my saved messages, I didn't have to redo my outgoing announcements and I didn't have to learn new prompts. Very pleasant experience.
The "every small part you ever need at your fingertips at home" revolution didn't happen.... or maybe hasn't happened yet.
But 3D printing is definitely revolutionary in the business world. People are just figuring out how to use the technology now, but it is already having an impact at the very high end... like SpaceX making parts of their super-draco engines with 3D printing. Or 3D printed automotive parts.
Sure, we don't have laser-sintered makerbots available for $75 that can print any tool or part you need in your garage.... but it isn't like 3D printing is a bust.
Well, except for the iPhone.
And the Samsung Galaxy line...
And probably the Pixel.
But if we exclude multi-function imaging devices....
I concur. The "because Trump" part is just plain silly projection.
But I was quite surprised to learn that they don't have a multi-continent presence. I would have assumed they had multiple copies located all around the globe. It is a pretty huge site with what I would assume is a large volume of traffic from around the globe.
It is rare that an early internet meme is perfectly applicable. Yet here we are. And still no one has posted the obvious.... so here it goes:
They are proposing a massive system to become the final arbiter of truth.
What could possibly go wrong?
You got to download drivers and run your wares?
Luxury!
Why, back in my day we had to type our wares in from Compute's Gazette. And we didn't have a tape drive either! No, we had to put a sign on the keyboard that said "do not touch". Then we could run our wares..... if we were lucky!