The fact that companies are actually settling might suggest there is some validity to the patent.
The whole point of patent trolling is to make settling cheaper than fighting a prolonged legal battle. Even if the companies win in court, they do so by spending more money than they would by just settling.
"But as the woman running Hsieh's hardware investments can tell you, getting those grand plans actually built overseas is the hard part."
So lets build them here (the US, for this writer) instead of overseas? Or if someone in Germany comes up with a startup idea, build it there. Why must everything be outsourced? Keep production local with design and management for faster communication, better quality, and better paying jobs in your area!
It says right in the article:
“We faced this kind of valley of utter despair that most hardware companies face,” McCabe recalls. “You realize that you can’t make many more products in-house, and you can’t do it in the United States—you have to go overseas.”
OK, it doesn't say in the article. Someone should elaborate on that "despair of the hardware companies".
Surely, they aren't offering to sign you up with their roll-your-own credit-monitoring system, right? (Because I wouldn't go for that either.) Last time I had a credit card possibly compromised, the retailer at fault gave me a free one year subscription to Equifax's credit monitoring service. I got a coupon code from the retailer, but all the interaction was with the credit bureau.
(For the sake of closure on that anecdote, nothing weird happened over the following year.)
I got an e-mail from Target offering me free credit monitoring.
Yeah, they leaked my name, address, credit card number etc and now they want me to sign up for credit monitoring with them. Just input your social security number and answer a few questions...
We have been hearing about how Target figures out if you're pregnant before your family does. They have been doing all sorts of data mining on people.
I suspect what is leaked is just not the name, address and credit card info on their subscribers. What if they have a profile on each of their customers that is also leaked? What if they compiled all sorts of data about their customers from various sources, like relationships, employment field, estimated incomes and other bits of info from the credit history? What if all that was leaked?
Sorry Moosh, but you obviously don't know anyone who lives in a ghetto. Nearly all of the neighborhoods grocery stores have been closed for over a decade, the one store that still exists has the creepiest looking packaged meat you've ever seen, and your idea of knowing how to cook must involve eating hamburger helper every night. My experience with my poor friends is the opposite of your claims.
Well, I guess different ghettos end up having different characteristics. Our south side of town is a food paradise - cheap produce and meat and lots of variety. Everywhere else here there are national supermarkets which focus on selling packaged foods as "on sale!" items and gouging on the produce and meats.
Also people are focused on creating soul food and focused on social food gatherings that there is a cooking culture. So, grocery store that sell produce and meat are able to thrive.
Grocery stores are a bit rare in the ghetto, and those few which exist usually charge exorbitant prices while providing very little in the way of variety (and don't ask about the produce.)
Most of these mothers have a shit education courtesy of public schooling (assuming the mother actually completed high school - usually she didn't), so "dinner" usually means fast-food takeout, or whatever the local bodega has in the way of food (imagine growing up on convenience store burritos and soda every night...)
Is that even true? Ghettos are the best place for grocery stores. There is all that food stamp money that has to be spent or its gone. People in ghettos have lots of time and little money and so they aren't going to restaurants to eat and so must buy groceries and cook them to feed themselves. Plus, ghettos have low rent, ample labor and grocery stores have to have very little investment to get started and the goods have very short turnover.
In a rich neighborhood, the grocery stores are more of a semi-prepared food outlet than a real grocery store. Produce is over-priced and mostly for show (now even worse with organic stuff encroaching the limited spaces). There is the prepared meat section, the prepared dinner section, lunch salad section and lots and lots of packaged fancy food health sections. They also serve as a minimalist one stop stations selling all sorts of junk.
In the ghetto grocery store, there is no organic section, no salad bar section, no exotic cheese section, no fancy seafood section, no health food section, no deli and rotisserie chicken section and aren't selling anything except food. It piles of produce and meat that are half on "quick sale" because they don't have any fancy facilities to keep them fresh. Because they are the ghetto, the stores are enormous. You can with very little money buy a lot of groceries.
Mothers lacking in education can't cook? The ghetto mamas can cook, let me tell you that. You have the whole day and cooking is a good way to spend the time. It's only when you get richer than you sacrifice time for fast food. Its the working stiffs that are plagued by the ills of fast food. The jobless with all the time in their hands certainly cook. I buy groceries in the "ghetto" and sometimes end up in conversations with people (they buy everything off the food stamp debit card so that's how I know). They are cooking for their church, school, some get-together, party and endless engagements in the near future.
The question is: what can we do to permanently remove illegal filesharing from the web? It's offensive to everyone who creates digital media for a living that these kinds of sites operate with impunity.
First of all, if you are someone who creates digital content and is starting out, this is an amazing boon since it can get your work out to potentially a large audience without any middlemen.
If you are one of those big corporate digital media creators, then create alternatives where buying digital content is preferable to getting them from filesharing networks!
Movies and music downloaded from "official" sources have lower quality than from filesharing. Software, ebooks and other DRM riddled stuff are less restrictive and easy to use downloaded from filesharing.
Last of all, as a lawmaker, don't make copyright essentially last forever. After time, creations become culture and let people share old stuff. Demonoid was great because it had a large repository of stuff that was mostly of historical, nostalgic or cultural interest. Yes, there is still a few drops of blood to be squeezed from old stuff but let it go free so it adds immensely to cultural wealth.
That said while I was all jazzed up about Steamboxes, now? Its a big meh. i mean the STARTING price is the same as the Xbone, and that is for the LOW END bottom o' the line system? Really? When you can get the octocore PS4 for $100 cheaper? I have a feeling this will go over like a lead balloon, the PC gamers already have Win 7 and DIY, the console gamers aren't gonna pay $100 more than a PS4 for an i3 unit that frankly if it weren't for the stylish case would go for $350 at Worst Buy, and the icing on the fail cake is just how little of the Steam catalog actually runs on the thing. I mean who is gonna want to pay $500 for a machine that gives you a worse catalog than just buying a $299 i3 Worst Buy special and adding an $80 HD7750?
PS4 price is the fixed price and they will not have sales on it until 4-5 years down the road.
With Dell products they have sales, coupons, outlets, clearances, price drops and what nots. With Dell products, you have to look at 60% of the price as the price Dell will be happy selling them at.
Because the tablet is slow and clunky and Google (and possibly Apple) are tracking your every move? I left my laptop at home last time I traveled and took the tablet instead, but I went back to the laptop (and the desktop for anything CPU or graphics intensive) as soon as I returned home.
Most PCs come with spyware installed.
You can do word processing on a tablet, but it's god-awfully painful compared to a desktop or laptop. Even emails are clunky if you're sending more than two lines.
It is difficult to use a PC/laptop on anything other than a desk and chair.
Plus, most Chinese would probably publish in Chinese journals.
Nope. Segregating your country's scientific literature from the rest of the world is a good way to ensure that your scientific community remains isolated and disconnected. Besides, publishing in big-name Western journals like Science/Nature/Cell is a prestige thing, and above all the Chinese want to be taken seriously as a Major Power. (Otherwise they wouldn't be wasting time and effort trying to grab a handful of uninhabited rocks from Japan.)
Absolute bullshit.
There are plenty of such Russian and French journals, and if you want to explore what the state of the art in some of those specific fields of physics, math or statistics are, then you better learn to translate from those languages.
And seems like you have never seen research communities in theoretical fields. They are isolated and publish for one another because their work is probably going to be understood by at most a dozen of people and their students.
Science/Nature has been known to be a prestige thing but it is also somewhat biased. There is some politics involved in getting your work published into those journals. If you are a foreigner, then there is absolute no chance that you will be published there because nobody will know who you are. The pure merit based thing is a somewhat fictitious and there is a lot of favoritism involved.
Because Japan's economic growth after WWII did depend heavily on inexpensive knock-off copies. That only changed several decades after WWII, when their economy had reached a higher level.
There are also important difference between Japan and China though. Japan heavily emphasized quality. The Deming prize for improved quality is awarded in Japan, and it's quite prestigious. Ironically it's named for W. Edwards Deming - an American. He had some excellent ideas for quality improvement that the Japanese took very seriously. Unfortunately many American manufacturers didn't (especially car companies).
Another difference is that Japan always discouraged foreign direct investment.
Quality control is a well studied field now. China could easily improve quality control if they decide to raise prices. It's not a mysterious field anymore, not anything more than Henry Ford's manufacturing.
The future is possibly automation. If production gets more and more automated, then China will be increasingly marginalized because robot manufacturing will be undercut cheap labor. If Apple could make iPhones with robots in the US for a similar price to China, they would do it in a heartbeat.
They might spend more, but considering all the false papers that come out of China, they're not getting much for their money. They'll continue to pirate our research for the considerable future.
Why do we assume that China will have to come up the exact path we have been through?
The whole models of quantity of research papers as the measure of research output is old an dated.
Plus, most Chinese would probably publish in Chinese journals.There is no point submitting to US based journals for free and then paying hefty fees to be accessible to others.
You may have more access than you think. Many universities offer access to their library systems to members of the local community for a nominal fee.
Or perhaps less than you think.
At my local university, they tied all the computer services to one login system. So, getting a library card only allows you to borrow books. All computer resources can only be accessed by logging in with the student account and if you are not a student, you can't access it.
Most universities don't bother with physical copies of journals anymore.
cat, just because we dont have a large manned space program does not mean we dont have a space program. I would say that we have found out more about space and moons and planets and stars in the previous 10 years than at any time in the past. Sure it is not as flashy as sending an astronaut to the moon or mars, which I am in agreement with you that we need to be working harder on our manned missions, but to say our space program is dead is just simply wrong
I hope this is not one of those five year technologies.
Slashdot is full of stories about this new technology and that new technology that will be ready in five years. These then just vanish after the story first appears.
After the story is published and we comment, it is forgotten and nobody is held accountable for publishing bullshit.
Maybe someone should do a review of stories published 5 years ago of new technologies that have never materialized. I remember five years ago there used to be so many stories of new storage technologies about storing in DNA, some crystal lattices. nano-structures and so on.
14 errors in font-awesome.css, over 50 errors in application.css, "Expected media feature name but found 'touch-enabled'" I don't even know what that means, but it came up a dozen times, downloadable font format unrecognized, another 50 errors in providers.css...
That sideways scrolling thing makes me queasy.
There has got to be a zillion better ways to do it than that.
When Netflix has the data mining contest, I thought they were such a cool company. Now they look like a stagnant company.
There are lots of other minor issues - bureaucracy, risk aversion, aging workforce.
I may be an American citizen but I came from China. I still keep track of what's going on inside China.
From what I know, all the problems that you've outlined above China also got them.
Bureaucracy
You just couldn't imagine how bureaucratic the Chinese system is
Risk Aversion
Do you know why China's space program schedule is limited to one-spaceship every year ?
You guess it, risk aversion
Aging workforce
All the leading scientists in Chinese space programs are in their 60's, and older. That is because China practically lost an entire generation of scientist due to the social upheaval during the 1950's to the 1970's.
Yes, a new generation of young scientists are growing up, but they are still seriously lacking in practical experiences.
If you want to find fault in something, you'll always find something. If you want to find positives in something, you'll also always find something. All your post says is that you really wanted to believe that there are problems with the Chinese scientific institutions for whatever your own reasons*.
Just let it go. Enjoy the achievement and whatever comes off it. We're all a little better off, however little from the success.
Unless you have done extensive statistical analysis of the Chinese scientific institutions and community and claim to be one of the leading researchers in such a field, then my apologies and I acknowledge that I am getting the best opinion there can be on this topic.
Just like most mutations are unsuccessful, most creative ideas are not "welfare increasing", after all, the status quo came about for a reason and your idea has to be pretty clever to beat it in all, or even most, metrics.
Of course, on the off chance a creative idea *is* successful, we're all for it, but that's pretty hard to determine in advance. And more importantly, after the fact, all the discomfort from change (and one shouldn't underestimate how much change hurts psychologically) has already been paid for, so we can simply enjoy the benefits.
The status quo doesn't have to come about because it is the best solution to a problem. There are many times when status quo can appear because it was first to the market, or because it was pushed by the giant gorilla of the market etc. Just look at web standards and internet and there are so many status quo ideas that are established not because they are the best but for a variety of different reasons.
Gene mutations are random whereas creative ideas are directed. Perhaps gene mutations would be comparable to random thoughts in people's heads. Creative ideas are more refined than that.
I agree that its hard to determine which creative idea is going to be successful and maybe even successful for completely different reasons. I admit than when Twitter first came out, I thought it was a dumb idea. But, there lies the problem. Out society of innovation is based on creative ideas and there are no ways of determining which ideas are great and which are not. As the article suggests, the only way to make your idea take effect is through extreme perseverance and mountains of rejection. I remember reading that JK Rowling had her Harry Potter manuscript rejected over a dozen times.
If there is an inherent psychological bias against new ideas, then maybe the psychologists should create a procedure in which we can develop new ideas without having the creative idea having to face rejections.
Once people become obese though getting enough exercise to burn any serious calories can be very difficult. They can't walk to the store to do their shopping or spend 20min on the elliptical at home because they'd be exhausted after five. Yet they have all these fat cells their body now thinks it needs to maintain screaming eat constantly.
This is something that I've found very strange.
Why do people come up with strange beliefs? Fat cells screaming to eat! Maybe a good analogy but is it really true?
If someone challenges them, then they hit Google and find some article and reaffirm their beliefs.
My weight touched that obese BMI of 30 but managed to get my BMI down to the low 20s by losing over 50lbs. In my case, I find that my weight problem was due to some very strange beliefs I had been keeping and so questioning these beliefs and experimenting out of them was what worked. Everyone has different reasons for the weight problem but for me that was the problem.
When I wanted to lose weight, I would cut out fat and meat and go vegetarian. I would eat lots of rice, cereal and bread instead.I would buy lots of fruits and eat glasses after glasses of apple and banana smoothies all day. Add to that, I would try to exercise and make it a point to use the elliptical machine for 30 minutes every day. I would lose weight but it would come back if there was a deadline or some stressful event.
My point is that maybe we should be experimental and not dogmatic when it comes to weight loss. Try different things and keep experimenting until you find something that puts in normal weight that you are able to maintain. Question beliefs because there might be that one belief that you use everyday to make food choices that over months and years is causing your weight problems.
Making high-quality music used to require investment. Expensive instruments at a minimum - but if you didn't want to sound like Kenny, you'd also need high quality microphones, sound damped recording studio, mixing desk, specialist technician to operate it and several high-end recorders capable of syncronised operation.
That's all changed now. One person working on consumer, affordable equipment can - on a purely technical level - match that quality with comparative ease. It's down to the level where people can and do make music as a hobby, without any expectation of payment.
Only in select genres. A lot of music produced right now is just computer created and so quality is easily matched.
Try matching drums, guitar sounds, acoustic instruments or vocals with consumer grade equipment. The quality of the instruments, room, microphones and the skills of the engineer play a huge part in the quality.
You wouldn't need to record light timings. Upon yellow light, determine if safe stop is possible based on distance to light and current speed. If yes, then do so.
There will always be a grey area in the decision between if it is safe to stop or not.
Whatever the condition to determine if it is safe or not, there will always be situations when it will be close the decision boundary.
Out of the millions stop light encounters, there will be thousands where the decision on either side could be taken depending on the variability of measurements. Two cars taking two different decisions because of minute variations in their sensor measurements could result in a crash.
If you take the light timings out, you increase the margin to probably unacceptable high levels.
Freeway driving is trivial: you don't hit what's in front of you, you don't hit what's beside you. Basic sensors can pull off both of these feats. You get bonus points if you can stay in a lane, but plenty of shitty human drivers manage to pull it off following those two basic rules.
Getting off the freeway is where it starts getting difficult. Even google maps sometimes misses the exit and tells me to turn right while I'm doing 60 over an overpass.
Freeway travel everywhere is pretty much the same.
On local streets, there are quirks.
However, this problem can also be solved by doing a Google street view style of predetermined intentions of how the roads were designed instead of computing them on the fly.
The traffic signals are also not standardized. The yellow in a 45mph road going downhill is shorter than the yellow at a 20mph road. Also, this behavior changes with time of day in some lights. So, when the light turns yellow, the car has to make a decision to keep going or brake for a stop.
So, here also the entire traffic light timings need to be recorded and stored to make right decisions.
Construction again changes things. But, they are easiest because they can be easily standardized.
Snow in Michigan changes things but I guess if you can automate the snow plows also, then it will make things easier for self-driving cars since the snow is plowed in some pre-defined method.
When a majority of the cars are self-driving, then the problem will be simpler. It is the phase when a few cars are self-driving and most are human drivers, then it becomes tricky.
But hopefully in the next decade, all the cars will be self-driving.
Perhaps all cars will be rentals in the future. You can have a car pick you up and drop you off and then go somewhere else. This will make car sizes smaller because people will not have to buy cars with the worst case use in mind. I see huge trucks with just a single driver on the freeway all the time. People will rent cars depending on passengers and how much stuff they have to move.
This is not to say that it'll be hard to stop the proliferation of military robots, but - is this really a good idea?
Sure, us Westerners, we can say how good a thing this may be - on the other hand, Gaddafi had some problems after a while with his troops seeing the misery they were spreading. To some extent, the same is true for Assad's Syria..
Can you picture what would happen, if rulers like those got their hands on military robots that will just unquestioningly mow down their own people, if the people don't like their "esteemed" ruler any more?
Or - picture them in the hands of North Korea...
Once they get deployed in one nation, no matter how well "behaved" that one nation will be, they will appear in other places - under less enlightened "leadership".
Why do people even try to predict the future of military strategies and technology? When we went to the gulf war, we had a vastly different set of technology and strategy than when we left. Afghanistan is so much about drones now but we didn't even use drones when the war in Afghanistan started.
The exact opposite of what you predict could happen. Robots in the hands of civilians could render military actions ineffective because civilians will always be able to deploy more and gain understanding of movements of small groups of men. So, civilians would have more knowledge and information and avoid military offenses. China could manufacture controllers and parts for super cheap and so people could put together batteries, cameras, controllers, communications for civilian robots very easily.
My point is anything could happen. Unless you are from the future, this kind of talk is bogus. If you read 10 year old slashdot articles, you will see almost painful amount of bad predictions.
Sad Really, Sears used to stand for something and unfortunately bad management and ineffective reaction to the marketplace has left them in the position of closing for good. I stopped shopping there permanently after a problem with an appliance, that had the service package and was still under warranty, wouldn't be serviced by them for weeks. They just couldn't get us an appointment. Much of what they sell you can get online from other vendors with better service and for better prices and that unfortunately will be the undoing of a lot of these chains so for me good riddance!
The only alternative for appliances are now Home Depot, Lowes or Best Buy. I doubt they are much better. There is no way any company is going to come running out to fix your appliance for a free warranty claim.
Sears has as good a price or better as Amazon on many products. Nothing beats placing the order and picking it up 20 minutes later at a local Sears or Kmart.
Amazon has gone heavily into data center business as well. It makes as much sense for Sears to do the same. Sears can attract the small local businesses who want IT services like mail, storage and custom apps without paying for an in-house IT and a local venue to go to if there is something wrong or if they want custom services.
There are many places as well where capitalism has failed miserably and resulted in anarchy as well.
Please, give an example or two.
Spectacular failures are Somalia, Hailti and many African countries. Slow failures: Shah era Iran, India and the third world.
The recent success of China would say communism can work though their approach is to use a combination of free market and state ownership not for a political fantasy philosophy but economic metrics.
They don't do communism any more.
If China doesn't do communism anymore, then we don't do capitalism anymore.
Even if the Chinese implement more free market policies and we let our government grow bigger and reach the same portion of government size, we will call ourselves capitalists and China communists.
Rhetoric doesn't match reality. Film at 11. I have this vague suspicion that what you consider "capitalist" societies won't end up being such.
We now call it socialism and remark at how awesome Sweden, Norway, Canada are. Even we don't want to be capitalists. Capitalists will let someone die because they don't have good enough health insurance and capitalism creates 1%ers and 99%ers.
What's funny is the ones who say communism is a good idea that just hasn't been done right never really pay attention to the times it has been done exactly according to plan and still failed anyways.
I like to cite the example of the Icarians in Nauvoo, IL. They had a whole town - facilities and all - literally just handed to them free and clear, and even got to cherry pick who would live there in their commune (picking only those who had a known good work ethic) and had a democratic policy making process. Things were going ok at first, but over time their productivity was on a steady decline. It soon got to the point where workers had to be forced to work harder (policies like no talking while on the job were enacted) and the once idealistic leaders became douches hell bent on seeing their commune succeed at any cost. In the end, people just got miserable and went their separate ways. Had it continued longer and that option not been available, an autocracy would have to have taken over to force people to go to work whether they liked it or not. This is what later happened in Russia, Korea, Vietnam, China, and others when communism was tried on a national scale.
In the early days, Russia even had a system in place where they even wanted to get rid of laws and codes and remove lawyers from trials...it failed miserably as without laws, going "against the betterment of the people" was so selectively enforced, so they discovered the hard way why rules are critical.
Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam originally wanted democracy, even having read the US declaration of independence and parts of the constitution in front of his followers as if that were ideal, only with communism for their economy. That too failed, requiring them to resort to indoctrination camps and effective slavery.
Capitalism sort of happens own (even currency does - in the absence of one, people tend to create one on their own - after the fall of the soviet union, Russian denizens replaced the ruble with cigarettes and vodka as their currency until a new official one came about.) Communism, however, requires force to implement. That fact alone should tell you why communism will never work, and this "not exactly communism" that Venezuela is doing is likely to result in the same (indeed, they are sending the owners of these electronics shops to jail.)
It is not the philosophy but the implementation.
There are many places as well where capitalism has failed miserably and resulted in anarchy as well.
Plus, as anyone would say, what we call capitalism has an enormous government sector and our government spending is about 40% of the GDP.
There great failures in government have been when there have been enormous failures of communication and policies were not adjusted to reflect reality but pushed on by fantasy.
The recent success of China would say communism can work though their approach is to use a combination of free market and state ownership not for a political fantasy philosophy but economic metrics. Of course, Chinese economic metrics are always suspect and if they become super inaccurate they could also be in the way of fantasy.
Even if the Chinese implement more free market policies and we let our government grow bigger and reach the same portion of government size, we will call ourselves capitalists and China communists.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that companies are actually settling might suggest there is some validity to the patent.
The whole point of patent trolling is to make settling cheaper than fighting a prolonged legal battle. Even if the companies win in court, they do so by spending more money than they would by just settling.
"But as the woman running Hsieh's hardware investments can tell you, getting those grand plans actually built overseas is the hard part."
So lets build them here (the US, for this writer) instead of overseas? Or if someone in Germany comes up with a startup idea, build it there. Why must everything be outsourced? Keep production local with design and management for faster communication, better quality, and better paying jobs in your area!
It says right in the article:
“We faced this kind of valley of utter despair that most hardware companies face,” McCabe recalls. “You realize that you can’t make many more products in-house, and you can’t do it in the United States—you have to go overseas.”
OK, it doesn't say in the article. Someone should elaborate on that "despair of the hardware companies".
Surely, they aren't offering to sign you up with their roll-your-own credit-monitoring system, right? (Because I wouldn't go for that either.) Last time I had a credit card possibly compromised, the retailer at fault gave me a free one year subscription to Equifax's credit monitoring service. I got a coupon code from the retailer, but all the interaction was with the credit bureau.
(For the sake of closure on that anecdote, nothing weird happened over the following year.)
Yes, it is through Equifax they say.
The website is here. https://creditmonitoring.target.com/
I got an e-mail from Target offering me free credit monitoring.
Yeah, they leaked my name, address, credit card number etc and now they want me to sign up for credit monitoring with them. Just input your social security number and answer a few questions ...
We have been hearing about how Target figures out if you're pregnant before your family does. They have been doing all sorts of data mining on people.
I suspect what is leaked is just not the name, address and credit card info on their subscribers. What if they have a profile on each of their customers that is also leaked? What if they compiled all sorts of data about their customers from various sources, like relationships, employment field, estimated incomes and other bits of info from the credit history? What if all that was leaked?
Sorry Moosh, but you obviously don't know anyone who lives in a ghetto. Nearly all of the neighborhoods grocery stores have been closed for over a decade, the one store that still exists has the creepiest looking packaged meat you've ever seen, and your idea of knowing how to cook must involve eating hamburger helper every night. My experience with my poor friends is the opposite of your claims.
Well, I guess different ghettos end up having different characteristics. Our south side of town is a food paradise - cheap produce and meat and lots of variety. Everywhere else here there are national supermarkets which focus on selling packaged foods as "on sale!" items and gouging on the produce and meats.
Also people are focused on creating soul food and focused on social food gatherings that there is a cooking culture. So, grocery store that sell produce and meat are able to thrive.
Grocery stores are a bit rare in the ghetto, and those few which exist usually charge exorbitant prices while providing very little in the way of variety (and don't ask about the produce.) Most of these mothers have a shit education courtesy of public schooling (assuming the mother actually completed high school - usually she didn't), so "dinner" usually means fast-food takeout, or whatever the local bodega has in the way of food (imagine growing up on convenience store burritos and soda every night...)
Is that even true? Ghettos are the best place for grocery stores. There is all that food stamp money that has to be spent or its gone. People in ghettos have lots of time and little money and so they aren't going to restaurants to eat and so must buy groceries and cook them to feed themselves. Plus, ghettos have low rent, ample labor and grocery stores have to have very little investment to get started and the goods have very short turnover.
In a rich neighborhood, the grocery stores are more of a semi-prepared food outlet than a real grocery store. Produce is over-priced and mostly for show (now even worse with organic stuff encroaching the limited spaces). There is the prepared meat section, the prepared dinner section, lunch salad section and lots and lots of packaged fancy food health sections. They also serve as a minimalist one stop stations selling all sorts of junk.
In the ghetto grocery store, there is no organic section, no salad bar section, no exotic cheese section, no fancy seafood section, no health food section, no deli and rotisserie chicken section and aren't selling anything except food. It piles of produce and meat that are half on "quick sale" because they don't have any fancy facilities to keep them fresh. Because they are the ghetto, the stores are enormous. You can with very little money buy a lot of groceries.
Mothers lacking in education can't cook? The ghetto mamas can cook, let me tell you that. You have the whole day and cooking is a good way to spend the time. It's only when you get richer than you sacrifice time for fast food. Its the working stiffs that are plagued by the ills of fast food. The jobless with all the time in their hands certainly cook. I buy groceries in the "ghetto" and sometimes end up in conversations with people (they buy everything off the food stamp debit card so that's how I know). They are cooking for their church, school, some get-together, party and endless engagements in the near future.
The question is: what can we do to permanently remove illegal filesharing from the web? It's offensive to everyone who creates digital media for a living that these kinds of sites operate with impunity.
First of all, if you are someone who creates digital content and is starting out, this is an amazing boon since it can get your work out to potentially a large audience without any middlemen.
If you are one of those big corporate digital media creators, then create alternatives where buying digital content is preferable to getting them from filesharing networks!
Movies and music downloaded from "official" sources have lower quality than from filesharing. Software, ebooks and other DRM riddled stuff are less restrictive and easy to use downloaded from filesharing.
Last of all, as a lawmaker, don't make copyright essentially last forever. After time, creations become culture and let people share old stuff. Demonoid was great because it had a large repository of stuff that was mostly of historical, nostalgic or cultural interest. Yes, there is still a few drops of blood to be squeezed from old stuff but let it go free so it adds immensely to cultural wealth.
That said while I was all jazzed up about Steamboxes, now? Its a big meh. i mean the STARTING price is the same as the Xbone, and that is for the LOW END bottom o' the line system? Really? When you can get the octocore PS4 for $100 cheaper? I have a feeling this will go over like a lead balloon, the PC gamers already have Win 7 and DIY, the console gamers aren't gonna pay $100 more than a PS4 for an i3 unit that frankly if it weren't for the stylish case would go for $350 at Worst Buy, and the icing on the fail cake is just how little of the Steam catalog actually runs on the thing. I mean who is gonna want to pay $500 for a machine that gives you a worse catalog than just buying a $299 i3 Worst Buy special and adding an $80 HD7750?
PS4 price is the fixed price and they will not have sales on it until 4-5 years down the road.
With Dell products they have sales, coupons, outlets, clearances, price drops and what nots. With Dell products, you have to look at 60% of the price as the price Dell will be happy selling them at.
Because the tablet is slow and clunky and Google (and possibly Apple) are tracking your every move? I left my laptop at home last time I traveled and took the tablet instead, but I went back to the laptop (and the desktop for anything CPU or graphics intensive) as soon as I returned home.
Most PCs come with spyware installed.
You can do word processing on a tablet, but it's god-awfully painful compared to a desktop or laptop. Even emails are clunky if you're sending more than two lines.
It is difficult to use a PC/laptop on anything other than a desk and chair.
Plus, most Chinese would probably publish in Chinese journals.
Nope. Segregating your country's scientific literature from the rest of the world is a good way to ensure that your scientific community remains isolated and disconnected. Besides, publishing in big-name Western journals like Science/Nature/Cell is a prestige thing, and above all the Chinese want to be taken seriously as a Major Power. (Otherwise they wouldn't be wasting time and effort trying to grab a handful of uninhabited rocks from Japan.)
Absolute bullshit.
There are plenty of such Russian and French journals, and if you want to explore what the state of the art in some of those specific fields of physics, math or statistics are, then you better learn to translate from those languages.
And seems like you have never seen research communities in theoretical fields. They are isolated and publish for one another because their work is probably going to be understood by at most a dozen of people and their students.
Science/Nature has been known to be a prestige thing but it is also somewhat biased. There is some politics involved in getting your work published into those journals. If you are a foreigner, then there is absolute no chance that you will be published there because nobody will know who you are. The pure merit based thing is a somewhat fictitious and there is a lot of favoritism involved.
Really? Why?
Because Japan's economic growth after WWII did depend heavily on inexpensive knock-off copies. That only changed several decades after WWII, when their economy had reached a higher level.
There are also important difference between Japan and China though. Japan heavily emphasized quality. The Deming prize for improved quality is awarded in Japan, and it's quite prestigious. Ironically it's named for W. Edwards Deming - an American. He had some excellent ideas for quality improvement that the Japanese took very seriously. Unfortunately many American manufacturers didn't (especially car companies).
Another difference is that Japan always discouraged foreign direct investment.
Quality control is a well studied field now. China could easily improve quality control if they decide to raise prices. It's not a mysterious field anymore, not anything more than Henry Ford's manufacturing.
The future is possibly automation. If production gets more and more automated, then China will be increasingly marginalized because robot manufacturing will be undercut cheap labor. If Apple could make iPhones with robots in the US for a similar price to China, they would do it in a heartbeat.
They might spend more, but considering all the false papers that come out of China, they're not getting much for their money. They'll continue to pirate our research for the considerable future.
Why do we assume that China will have to come up the exact path we have been through?
The whole models of quantity of research papers as the measure of research output is old an dated.
Plus, most Chinese would probably publish in Chinese journals.There is no point submitting to US based journals for free and then paying hefty fees to be accessible to others.
You may have more access than you think. Many universities offer access to their library systems to members of the local community for a nominal fee.
Or perhaps less than you think.
At my local university, they tied all the computer services to one login system. So, getting a library card only allows you to borrow books. All computer resources can only be accessed by logging in with the student account and if you are not a student, you can't access it.
Most universities don't bother with physical copies of journals anymore.
cat, just because we dont have a large manned space program does not mean we dont have a space program. I would say that we have found out more about space and moons and planets and stars in the previous 10 years than at any time in the past. Sure it is not as flashy as sending an astronaut to the moon or mars, which I am in agreement with you that we need to be working harder on our manned missions, but to say our space program is dead is just simply wrong
I hope this is not one of those five year technologies.
Slashdot is full of stories about this new technology and that new technology that will be ready in five years. These then just vanish after the story first appears.
After the story is published and we comment, it is forgotten and nobody is held accountable for publishing bullshit.
Maybe someone should do a review of stories published 5 years ago of new technologies that have never materialized. I remember five years ago there used to be so many stories of new storage technologies about storing in DNA, some crystal lattices. nano-structures and so on.
14 errors in font-awesome.css, over 50 errors in application.css, "Expected media feature name but found 'touch-enabled'" I don't even know what that means, but it came up a dozen times, downloadable font format unrecognized, another 50 errors in providers.css...
That sideways scrolling thing makes me queasy.
There has got to be a zillion better ways to do it than that.
When Netflix has the data mining contest, I thought they were such a cool company. Now they look like a stagnant company.
There are lots of other minor issues - bureaucracy, risk aversion, aging workforce.
I may be an American citizen but I came from China. I still keep track of what's going on inside China.
From what I know, all the problems that you've outlined above China also got them.
Bureaucracy You just couldn't imagine how bureaucratic the Chinese system is
Risk Aversion Do you know why China's space program schedule is limited to one-spaceship every year ?
You guess it, risk aversion
Aging workforce All the leading scientists in Chinese space programs are in their 60's, and older. That is because China practically lost an entire generation of scientist due to the social upheaval during the 1950's to the 1970's.
Yes, a new generation of young scientists are growing up, but they are still seriously lacking in practical experiences.
If you want to find fault in something, you'll always find something. If you want to find positives in something, you'll also always find something. All your post says is that you really wanted to believe that there are problems with the Chinese scientific institutions for whatever your own reasons*.
Just let it go. Enjoy the achievement and whatever comes off it. We're all a little better off, however little from the success.
Unless you have done extensive statistical analysis of the Chinese scientific institutions and community and claim to be one of the leading researchers in such a field, then my apologies and I acknowledge that I am getting the best opinion there can be on this topic.
Just like most mutations are unsuccessful, most creative ideas are not "welfare increasing", after all, the status quo came about for a reason and your idea has to be pretty clever to beat it in all, or even most, metrics.
Of course, on the off chance a creative idea *is* successful, we're all for it, but that's pretty hard to determine in advance. And more importantly, after the fact, all the discomfort from change (and one shouldn't underestimate how much change hurts psychologically) has already been paid for, so we can simply enjoy the benefits.
The status quo doesn't have to come about because it is the best solution to a problem. There are many times when status quo can appear because it was first to the market, or because it was pushed by the giant gorilla of the market etc. Just look at web standards and internet and there are so many status quo ideas that are established not because they are the best but for a variety of different reasons.
Gene mutations are random whereas creative ideas are directed. Perhaps gene mutations would be comparable to random thoughts in people's heads. Creative ideas are more refined than that.
I agree that its hard to determine which creative idea is going to be successful and maybe even successful for completely different reasons. I admit than when Twitter first came out, I thought it was a dumb idea. But, there lies the problem. Out society of innovation is based on creative ideas and there are no ways of determining which ideas are great and which are not. As the article suggests, the only way to make your idea take effect is through extreme perseverance and mountains of rejection. I remember reading that JK Rowling had her Harry Potter manuscript rejected over a dozen times.
If there is an inherent psychological bias against new ideas, then maybe the psychologists should create a procedure in which we can develop new ideas without having the creative idea having to face rejections.
Once people become obese though getting enough exercise to burn any serious calories can be very difficult. They can't walk to the store to do their shopping or spend 20min on the elliptical at home because they'd be exhausted after five. Yet they have all these fat cells their body now thinks it needs to maintain screaming eat constantly.
This is something that I've found very strange.
Why do people come up with strange beliefs? Fat cells screaming to eat! Maybe a good analogy but is it really true?
If someone challenges them, then they hit Google and find some article and reaffirm their beliefs.
My weight touched that obese BMI of 30 but managed to get my BMI down to the low 20s by losing over 50lbs. In my case, I find that my weight problem was due to some very strange beliefs I had been keeping and so questioning these beliefs and experimenting out of them was what worked. Everyone has different reasons for the weight problem but for me that was the problem.
When I wanted to lose weight, I would cut out fat and meat and go vegetarian. I would eat lots of rice, cereal and bread instead.I would buy lots of fruits and eat glasses after glasses of apple and banana smoothies all day. Add to that, I would try to exercise and make it a point to use the elliptical machine for 30 minutes every day. I would lose weight but it would come back if there was a deadline or some stressful event.
My point is that maybe we should be experimental and not dogmatic when it comes to weight loss. Try different things and keep experimenting until you find something that puts in normal weight that you are able to maintain. Question beliefs because there might be that one belief that you use everyday to make food choices that over months and years is causing your weight problems.
Making high-quality music used to require investment. Expensive instruments at a minimum - but if you didn't want to sound like Kenny, you'd also need high quality microphones, sound damped recording studio, mixing desk, specialist technician to operate it and several high-end recorders capable of syncronised operation.
That's all changed now. One person working on consumer, affordable equipment can - on a purely technical level - match that quality with comparative ease. It's down to the level where people can and do make music as a hobby, without any expectation of payment.
Only in select genres. A lot of music produced right now is just computer created and so quality is easily matched.
Try matching drums, guitar sounds, acoustic instruments or vocals with consumer grade equipment. The quality of the instruments, room, microphones and the skills of the engineer play a huge part in the quality.
You wouldn't need to record light timings. Upon yellow light, determine if safe stop is possible based on distance to light and current speed. If yes, then do so.
There will always be a grey area in the decision between if it is safe to stop or not.
Whatever the condition to determine if it is safe or not, there will always be situations when it will be close the decision boundary.
Out of the millions stop light encounters, there will be thousands where the decision on either side could be taken depending on the variability of measurements. Two cars taking two different decisions because of minute variations in their sensor measurements could result in a crash.
If you take the light timings out, you increase the margin to probably unacceptable high levels.
Freeway driving is trivial: you don't hit what's in front of you, you don't hit what's beside you. Basic sensors can pull off both of these feats. You get bonus points if you can stay in a lane, but plenty of shitty human drivers manage to pull it off following those two basic rules.
Getting off the freeway is where it starts getting difficult. Even google maps sometimes misses the exit and tells me to turn right while I'm doing 60 over an overpass.
Freeway travel everywhere is pretty much the same.
On local streets, there are quirks.
However, this problem can also be solved by doing a Google street view style of predetermined intentions of how the roads were designed instead of computing them on the fly.
The traffic signals are also not standardized. The yellow in a 45mph road going downhill is shorter than the yellow at a 20mph road. Also, this behavior changes with time of day in some lights. So, when the light turns yellow, the car has to make a decision to keep going or brake for a stop.
So, here also the entire traffic light timings need to be recorded and stored to make right decisions.
Construction again changes things. But, they are easiest because they can be easily standardized.
Snow in Michigan changes things but I guess if you can automate the snow plows also, then it will make things easier for self-driving cars since the snow is plowed in some pre-defined method.
When a majority of the cars are self-driving, then the problem will be simpler. It is the phase when a few cars are self-driving and most are human drivers, then it becomes tricky.
But hopefully in the next decade, all the cars will be self-driving.
Perhaps all cars will be rentals in the future. You can have a car pick you up and drop you off and then go somewhere else. This will make car sizes smaller because people will not have to buy cars with the worst case use in mind. I see huge trucks with just a single driver on the freeway all the time. People will rent cars depending on passengers and how much stuff they have to move.
This is not to say that it'll be hard to stop the proliferation of military robots, but - is this really a good idea?
Sure, us Westerners, we can say how good a thing this may be - on the other hand, Gaddafi had some problems after a while with his troops seeing the misery they were spreading. To some extent, the same is true for Assad's Syria..
Can you picture what would happen, if rulers like those got their hands on military robots that will just unquestioningly mow down their own people, if the people don't like their "esteemed" ruler any more?
Or - picture them in the hands of North Korea...
Once they get deployed in one nation, no matter how well "behaved" that one nation will be, they will appear in other places - under less enlightened "leadership".
Why do people even try to predict the future of military strategies and technology? When we went to the gulf war, we had a vastly different set of technology and strategy than when we left. Afghanistan is so much about drones now but we didn't even use drones when the war in Afghanistan started.
The exact opposite of what you predict could happen. Robots in the hands of civilians could render military actions ineffective because civilians will always be able to deploy more and gain understanding of movements of small groups of men. So, civilians would have more knowledge and information and avoid military offenses. China could manufacture controllers and parts for super cheap and so people could put together batteries, cameras, controllers, communications for civilian robots very easily.
My point is anything could happen. Unless you are from the future, this kind of talk is bogus. If you read 10 year old slashdot articles, you will see almost painful amount of bad predictions.
Sad Really, Sears used to stand for something and unfortunately bad management and ineffective reaction to the marketplace has left them in the position of closing for good. I stopped shopping there permanently after a problem with an appliance, that had the service package and was still under warranty, wouldn't be serviced by them for weeks. They just couldn't get us an appointment. Much of what they sell you can get online from other vendors with better service and for better prices and that unfortunately will be the undoing of a lot of these chains so for me good riddance!
The only alternative for appliances are now Home Depot, Lowes or Best Buy. I doubt they are much better. There is no way any company is going to come running out to fix your appliance for a free warranty claim.
Sears has as good a price or better as Amazon on many products. Nothing beats placing the order and picking it up 20 minutes later at a local Sears or Kmart.
Amazon has gone heavily into data center business as well. It makes as much sense for Sears to do the same. Sears can attract the small local businesses who want IT services like mail, storage and custom apps without paying for an in-house IT and a local venue to go to if there is something wrong or if they want custom services.
It is not the philosophy but the implementation.
The implementation of communism has never worked.
Working for China right now
There are many places as well where capitalism has failed miserably and resulted in anarchy as well.
Please, give an example or two.
Spectacular failures are Somalia, Hailti and many African countries. Slow failures: Shah era Iran, India and the third world.
The recent success of China would say communism can work though their approach is to use a combination of free market and state ownership not for a political fantasy philosophy but economic metrics.
They don't do communism any more.
If China doesn't do communism anymore, then we don't do capitalism anymore.
Even if the Chinese implement more free market policies and we let our government grow bigger and reach the same portion of government size, we will call ourselves capitalists and China communists.
Rhetoric doesn't match reality. Film at 11. I have this vague suspicion that what you consider "capitalist" societies won't end up being such.
We now call it socialism and remark at how awesome Sweden, Norway, Canada are. Even we don't want to be capitalists. Capitalists will let someone die because they don't have good enough health insurance and capitalism creates 1%ers and 99%ers.
What's funny is the ones who say communism is a good idea that just hasn't been done right never really pay attention to the times it has been done exactly according to plan and still failed anyways.
I like to cite the example of the Icarians in Nauvoo, IL. They had a whole town - facilities and all - literally just handed to them free and clear, and even got to cherry pick who would live there in their commune (picking only those who had a known good work ethic) and had a democratic policy making process. Things were going ok at first, but over time their productivity was on a steady decline. It soon got to the point where workers had to be forced to work harder (policies like no talking while on the job were enacted) and the once idealistic leaders became douches hell bent on seeing their commune succeed at any cost. In the end, people just got miserable and went their separate ways. Had it continued longer and that option not been available, an autocracy would have to have taken over to force people to go to work whether they liked it or not. This is what later happened in Russia, Korea, Vietnam, China, and others when communism was tried on a national scale.
In the early days, Russia even had a system in place where they even wanted to get rid of laws and codes and remove lawyers from trials...it failed miserably as without laws, going "against the betterment of the people" was so selectively enforced, so they discovered the hard way why rules are critical.
Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam originally wanted democracy, even having read the US declaration of independence and parts of the constitution in front of his followers as if that were ideal, only with communism for their economy. That too failed, requiring them to resort to indoctrination camps and effective slavery.
Capitalism sort of happens own (even currency does - in the absence of one, people tend to create one on their own - after the fall of the soviet union, Russian denizens replaced the ruble with cigarettes and vodka as their currency until a new official one came about.) Communism, however, requires force to implement. That fact alone should tell you why communism will never work, and this "not exactly communism" that Venezuela is doing is likely to result in the same (indeed, they are sending the owners of these electronics shops to jail.)
It is not the philosophy but the implementation.
There are many places as well where capitalism has failed miserably and resulted in anarchy as well.
Plus, as anyone would say, what we call capitalism has an enormous government sector and our government spending is about 40% of the GDP.
There great failures in government have been when there have been enormous failures of communication and policies were not adjusted to reflect reality but pushed on by fantasy.
The recent success of China would say communism can work though their approach is to use a combination of free market and state ownership not for a political fantasy philosophy but economic metrics. Of course, Chinese economic metrics are always suspect and if they become super inaccurate they could also be in the way of fantasy.
Even if the Chinese implement more free market policies and we let our government grow bigger and reach the same portion of government size, we will call ourselves capitalists and China communists.