I've seen the power company restore the same lines at least five times over the years. When does it become more economical to accept the upfront investment of burying cables, like all the more advanced countries have been doing for a couple of generations?
And go to three-phase for all homes, for that matter...
I wasn't there for your incident, but a lot of the "dicking around with the patient before loading him" is the reason you call EMTs instead of Uber. Getting the patient to the hospital as quickly as possible isn't necessarily as important as getting the patient stabilized before transport.
That would be fine if so much of the "dicking around" wasn't obtaining all the personal details and insurance cards, ensuring they get paid.
Not to mention following a list of triage steps designed to prevent liability claims, not to actually do the patient any good.
"Sir, when were the onset of your symptoms?" "Right before I called, There's a knife in my thigh!" "Sir, do you have any allergies?" "No. There's a knife in my thigh!" "Sir, do you have any history of substance abuse?" "No. There's a knife in my thigh!" "Sir, what is your weight?" "12 stones. There's a knife in my thigh!" "And how tall are you?" "1.82m. Could you please handle the knife in my thigh now?" "Sir, how do you rate your pain level on a scale from zero to ten?" "What the fuck do you think? THERE'S A BLOODY KNIFE IN MY THIGH!"
Many countries including the US have Good Samaritan [wikipedia.org] laws that compel bystanders to help in a medical emergency
They differ from state to state. Where I live, you're only covered by the good samaritan laws if you have a current state recognized first aid or EMT training. Otherwise, you're fully liable for attempting to help someone. And yes, people who end up with medical bills they can't pay get desperate and will sometimes sue anyone they can, including those who saved their lives.
Compare that to some European countries where you are committing a felony by refusing to help someone in dire need.
Let's continue your logic. A german then should be completely immune to german law if he's remoted into a computer in the US? So he can email holocast denials all over Germany, because he's remoted into a computer in the US?
You must be American, because of your display of binary thinking. It's not either/or, it's both. German law applies in Germany, and US laws in the US. The German in Germany is subject to German law for everything he does. He can also (I know, difficult concept) be subject to US law if he breaks US law on a US server.
A Microsoft employee, a U.S. citizen, sitting at a computer located in the U.S., can easily access the server containing the data in question. Therefore, the actual physical location of the server is irrelevant.
No, that does not follow. A Microsoft employee, a U.S. citizen, sitting at a computer located in the U.S., can easily access a server in Germany and upload holocaust denial material. The physical location of the server is very relevant.
Microsoft owns that data, thus it is Microsoft property, and since Microsoft is an american citizen, it must adhere to American laws.
It's not complicated.
No it is not complicated. American law does not apply outside American territory, period. If an American company owned elephants in India, and Indian law said that exports of elephants was illegal, should an American judge be able to decide that they must ship their elephants to the US? Does not Indian law apply on Indian soil because it's an American company?
I've seen tons of poor spellers use "loose" (not tight or secure) when they should use "lose" (opposite of win), but this is one of the very few I've seen that was wrong the other way.
It would never have happened had I written with a pen...
Are we all going to become brain surgeons? So what's the point? Can you explain why " Hand / Eye Coordination " would be an important metric?
- You stepped on a splinter. Are you going to use a sharp knife and pincers to remove it without breaking it, or are you going to sit down, cry and wait for an ambulance? - A wire came lose in your expensive keyboard, amplifier, headphones, vaporizer, guitar or whatever. Are you going to spend a minute with a soldering iron fixing it, or spend hours looking for somewhere that can repair it, or toss it and buy new? - Your child comes crying with a broken toy and asks if you can fix it. - You received a hand written invitation in the mail, marked RSVP.
There are so many different scenarios where hand coordination is important that you're bound to encounter them regularly. I don't expect my dog to be able to do detail work, but are you a dog?
Kids don't have the hand dexterity to hold a pencil, this also translates to not having the hand dexterity to drive or operate power tools later in life.
To say nothing of hand tools like tweezers, chisels and knives, which are incredibly useful, but require precision and control.
From what I can tell, it still works as a switch hook to let you answer calls or hang up. But the microphone being extended was kind of the entire point of the phone...
This is not so much a recreation of the Nokia 8110 that was in the movie as it is an "homage". It's a completely new, designed-from-the-ground-up piece of hardware (AND software) that just happens to bear a resemblance to the original and takes some design cues from it.
Yes, it's quite different in many ways. Obviously the connectivity is different, because most phone companies no longer support GSM 900 with SSMS gateways. But they have taken some shortcuts elsewhere too, like the buttons, which are way different from the original, and not in a good way. Then there's the lack of a changeable battery with external charger, which was one of the big selling points: you could continue to use the phone while another battery charged. And, perhaps the biggest cheap shortcut is that the microphone is not in the slider, where it can be put in front of your mouth, but is on the phone itself. That completely ruins the advantage the 8110 had over all other phones in that you could put the mic in front of your mouth, like with a real phone. Especially for people with full beards (this is slashdot, right?), this makes quite a difference. I'd say the slider mic is the defining feature of the 8110, and replacing it with just a sliding lid completely misses the entire point of having the slider in the first place.
They fail at math, not because they are bad, but because
Oh, in many cases they fail at maths because they are bad.
It's politically correct to pretend that there is no such thing as aptitude and that everyone is equal. This is a blatant lie, and everybody knows it's a lie, but everybody plays along, because either you benefit from the lie, or it is the least dangerous move if you value your future and career opportunities.
I worked as a maths tutor for people who struggled, and in some cases, they had not been properly taught the underlying fundamentals and "seen the light". Those were very teachable; finding out just where the blockage was would generally lead to going through years of missed teaching in weeks. Others... lacked ability, and the job was making them do the most of the abilities they had, and perhaps become good at particular tasks. But they would never understand it and intuitively be able to apply it for new situations, just be able to do tasks.
Much like a colour blind person can never truly understand the colour differences he (most likely) isn't seeing, someone without the ability to see the logic and abstractions of maths will never truly understand what she (most likely) isn't seeing. Yet both can function well in society despite their handicaps. But part of that is acknowledging that there is a handicap, and that the correct response then isn't go give up and blame the handicap like too many do, but to learn to compensate for the handicap as much as possible.
As for aptitude deficiencies, they vary, and seem mostly based on different levels of abstraction. While most are able to understand concepts like calculus or dimensional transformations, some struggle. A few have a hard time with algebra and statistics, and yet others are unable to intuitively grasp a concept of zero. At the other end, a majority seem unable to grasp relativity, and especially being able to abstract time as a local phenomenon where words like "before" and "ago" loses all meaning.
Teaching can help people cope with the different levels of aptitude, but not change the underlying brain any more than you can teach someone to distinguish colours they just cannot see.
Yeah. But how? They obviously can track and bill all these telemarketing calls. Or they wouldn't let them through.
That's not how it works. The connecting phone company pays the receiver's phone company a small termination fee. The caller pays the connecting phone company, and how much is outside the receiver's phone company's control or knowledge.
And that's the part you're OK with? Or you're saying we should bring the population down before it gets to that point?
I'm OK with the status being different in the future after the transition, but that does not mean that I am OK with the transition. Working to reduce population growth, especially for those who cannot afford a high level of education, will likely help reduce pains.
By that other guy's math, you're talking about the world population dropping to about a billion. Or the US to about 45 million. How would you envision that happening? Just curious.
My take on population control, if that's what you mean, is that reproduction needs to be taxed and not subsidized anymore. Having children should be a privilege, not a right. If that's not how you meant it, my answer is that the growing gaps between the haves and the have-nots will cause civil unrest, wars and starvation until the populations stabilize at a supportable levels.
It seems inevitable that we'll always shift towards new equilibria as disruptive changes happen, and that we'll land there through "adapt or die". I'm in favor of "adapt".
He also sided with Redbox's argument that Disney was misusing its copyrights by trying to restrict the reselling of copies of its movies after they had already been sold.
Yes, the First Sale doctrine is still valid, despite many copyright holders thinking it doesn't apply to them.
That's a nice sentiment, but you seem to forget that not everyone is even capable of getting through high school without significant assistance. For a not insignificant part of the population, there is an upper bounds to where they can go in terms of education that effectively excludes a lot of the higher maths you need to get into CI/ML. As such, we have a lot of people for whom skilled labor is going to be the best they might hope to achieve in terms of employment. If you get rid of those jobs that leaves a lot of people with no prospects for work.
That is a problem that will sort itself out in a generation or two. People will have to adapt, one way or another. It's not going to be a choice. I expect there will be lots of various government actions to deal with this, including protectionism, population control, war, and many other means, which will all just delay the inevitable: humans adapting to being slave owners again, with the slaves being silicon based. Make sure you become an owner, because you won't be good enough to be a slave.
There's no guarantee that people will find ways to make money in the new world juste because it happened before;
There's no guarantee that money is the answer for the future.
Are you OK with that happening to workers unable to adapt to jobs that pay enough?
Absolutely. As long as humanity survives, we're going to be better off in the long run, with more people being liberated from the yoke of menial work. And I think a majority will be able to adapt, and that our children and grandchildren will have a better world for it.
We'll need a basic income for all and higher taxes to pay for it.
And folks who are hung up on insisting that people work are gonna have to get over it because when folks get displaced and have nowhere to make living, they're gonna revolt. So, we gave them basic income to keep them from reaching for the guns and torches.
No, they need to revolt; suppression only causes stagnation and decline. The malcontents need to become the ones in charge, and then like every revolution find out that governing wisely isn't all that easy, that populism is a bad idea, then end up with less than they had, but a newfound pride and ability to grow. It will suck for a generation or two, but change will happen no matter what. Those too conservative to embrace change will fail, as always.
Guess what: your house wouldn't exist without an entire TEAM of carpenters, who know how to build houses.
I guess it depends on your definition of carpentry. House building the modern way doesn't require knowing joinery, understanding how different kinds of wood behave, reading grain or anything that classic carpentry needs. The people who built your house almost certainly didn't have guild papers, but were common workers. Much like the guys at Burger King aren't chefs.
Embrace it? Sorry, but your ignorance isn't helping matters. For hundreds of years, the answer to progress and technology destroying jobs was "Go get an education." Now, automation and AI is targeting educated jobs, so it's stupid and ignorant to simply dismiss this problem under the guise of "Why is this news?", as if the answer of yesteryear still applies.
The answer to that, as always, has been that you need to increase the level of education accordingly. Those who write and maintain AIs are going to have jobs. But a high school diploma isn't going to cut it, any more than finishing 7th grade was going to cut it once we got automation and computers.
Society will always adjust to new circumstances. There's no profit in, nor benefit to society of having a large number of useless people who are just mouths to feed. So they will need to find something else to do. The ability to do so is what is going to separate winners from losers. And judging by what you write, you may not be in the former category.
Sure, disruptive technologies will cost jobs. It always does. The machine loom meant a lot of weavers were out of work. Electric saws and drills meant that carpentry became a niche market. Automobiles made horse breeding rare. It happens. As before, we will adjust, and the average person will have a better life, even if many will lose their jobs and have worse lives during the transition period. We'll establish a new status quo.
Just embrace it, because it is unstoppable. Throwing clogs in the wheels won't prevent it from happening. Instead ask how you can make money in the new improved world, taking advantage of the new technologies. Some will need to write or service the AIs, and some will need to handle the increased inputs and outputs, whether it's designing distribution systems and logistics, or providing secondary services.
Getting to write interesting code means that you will have put in years of learning the ins and outs and tricks and traps of modern coding - mastering this is a mostly solitary experience that demands a special mind-set.
I would say that to be good, you also need to understand the tricks and traps of old fashioned coding which the new coding abstractions are built on top of. It's like the difference between a "new music" musician that pieces samples together and someone who also understands harmony and can create those samples.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen the power company restore the same lines at least five times over the years. When does it become more economical to accept the upfront investment of burying cables, like all the more advanced countries have been doing for a couple of generations?
And go to three-phase for all homes, for that matter...
I wasn't there for your incident, but a lot of the "dicking around with the patient before loading him" is the reason you call EMTs instead of Uber. Getting the patient to the hospital as quickly as possible isn't necessarily as important as getting the patient stabilized before transport.
That would be fine if so much of the "dicking around" wasn't obtaining all the personal details and insurance cards, ensuring they get paid.
Not to mention following a list of triage steps designed to prevent liability claims, not to actually do the patient any good.
"Sir, when were the onset of your symptoms?"
"Right before I called, There's a knife in my thigh!"
"Sir, do you have any allergies?"
"No. There's a knife in my thigh!"
"Sir, do you have any history of substance abuse?"
"No. There's a knife in my thigh!"
"Sir, what is your weight?"
"12 stones. There's a knife in my thigh!"
"And how tall are you?"
"1.82m. Could you please handle the knife in my thigh now?"
"Sir, how do you rate your pain level on a scale from zero to ten?"
"What the fuck do you think? THERE'S A BLOODY KNIFE IN MY THIGH!"
Many countries including the US have Good Samaritan [wikipedia.org] laws that compel bystanders to help in a medical emergency
They differ from state to state. Where I live, you're only covered by the good samaritan laws if you have a current state recognized first aid or EMT training. Otherwise, you're fully liable for attempting to help someone. And yes, people who end up with medical bills they can't pay get desperate and will sometimes sue anyone they can, including those who saved their lives.
Compare that to some European countries where you are committing a felony by refusing to help someone in dire need.
Let's continue your logic. A german then should be completely immune to german law if he's remoted into a computer in the US? So he can email holocast denials all over Germany, because he's remoted into a computer in the US?
You must be American, because of your display of binary thinking. It's not either/or, it's both. German law applies in Germany, and US laws in the US. The German in Germany is subject to German law for everything he does. He can also (I know, difficult concept) be subject to US law if he breaks US law on a US server.
A Microsoft employee, a U.S. citizen, sitting at a computer located in the U.S., can easily access the server containing the data in question. Therefore, the actual physical location of the server is irrelevant.
No, that does not follow. A Microsoft employee, a U.S. citizen, sitting at a computer located in the U.S., can easily access a server in Germany and upload holocaust denial material. The physical location of the server is very relevant.
Microsoft owns that data, thus it is Microsoft property, and since Microsoft is an american citizen, it must adhere to American laws.
It's not complicated.
No it is not complicated. American law does not apply outside American territory, period.
If an American company owned elephants in India, and Indian law said that exports of elephants was illegal, should an American judge be able to decide that they must ship their elephants to the US? Does not Indian law apply on Indian soil because it's an American company?
Argh!
I've seen tons of poor spellers use "loose" (not tight or secure) when they should use "lose" (opposite of win), but this is one of the very few I've seen that was wrong the other way.
It would never have happened had I written with a pen...
Are we all going to become brain surgeons? So what's the point? Can you explain why " Hand / Eye Coordination " would be an important metric?
- You stepped on a splinter. Are you going to use a sharp knife and pincers to remove it without breaking it, or are you going to sit down, cry and wait for an ambulance?
- A wire came lose in your expensive keyboard, amplifier, headphones, vaporizer, guitar or whatever. Are you going to spend a minute with a soldering iron fixing it, or spend hours looking for somewhere that can repair it, or toss it and buy new?
- Your child comes crying with a broken toy and asks if you can fix it.
- You received a hand written invitation in the mail, marked RSVP.
There are so many different scenarios where hand coordination is important that you're bound to encounter them regularly. I don't expect my dog to be able to do detail work, but are you a dog?
Kids don't have the hand dexterity to hold a pencil, this also translates to not having the hand dexterity to drive or operate power tools later in life.
To say nothing of hand tools like tweezers, chisels and knives, which are incredibly useful, but require precision and control.
Seriously? It's just decorative now?
From what I can tell, it still works as a switch hook to let you answer calls or hang up. But the microphone being extended was kind of the entire point of the phone...
This is not so much a recreation of the Nokia 8110 that was in the movie as it is an "homage". It's a completely new, designed-from-the-ground-up piece of hardware (AND software) that just happens to bear a resemblance to the original and takes some design cues from it.
Yes, it's quite different in many ways. Obviously the connectivity is different, because most phone companies no longer support GSM 900 with SSMS gateways.
But they have taken some shortcuts elsewhere too, like the buttons, which are way different from the original, and not in a good way.
Then there's the lack of a changeable battery with external charger, which was one of the big selling points: you could continue to use the phone while another battery charged.
And, perhaps the biggest cheap shortcut is that the microphone is not in the slider, where it can be put in front of your mouth, but is on the phone itself. That completely ruins the advantage the 8110 had over all other phones in that you could put the mic in front of your mouth, like with a real phone. Especially for people with full beards (this is slashdot, right?), this makes quite a difference.
I'd say the slider mic is the defining feature of the 8110, and replacing it with just a sliding lid completely misses the entire point of having the slider in the first place.
They fail at math, not because they are bad, but because
Oh, in many cases they fail at maths because they are bad.
It's politically correct to pretend that there is no such thing as aptitude and that everyone is equal. This is a blatant lie, and everybody knows it's a lie, but everybody plays along, because either you benefit from the lie, or it is the least dangerous move if you value your future and career opportunities.
I worked as a maths tutor for people who struggled, and in some cases, they had not been properly taught the underlying fundamentals and "seen the light". Those were very teachable; finding out just where the blockage was would generally lead to going through years of missed teaching in weeks.
Others... lacked ability, and the job was making them do the most of the abilities they had, and perhaps become good at particular tasks. But they would never understand it and intuitively be able to apply it for new situations, just be able to do tasks.
Much like a colour blind person can never truly understand the colour differences he (most likely) isn't seeing, someone without the ability to see the logic and abstractions of maths will never truly understand what she (most likely) isn't seeing. Yet both can function well in society despite their handicaps. But part of that is acknowledging that there is a handicap, and that the correct response then isn't go give up and blame the handicap like too many do, but to learn to compensate for the handicap as much as possible.
As for aptitude deficiencies, they vary, and seem mostly based on different levels of abstraction. While most are able to understand concepts like calculus or dimensional transformations, some struggle. A few have a hard time with algebra and statistics, and yet others are unable to intuitively grasp a concept of zero. At the other end, a majority seem unable to grasp relativity, and especially being able to abstract time as a local phenomenon where words like "before" and "ago" loses all meaning.
Teaching can help people cope with the different levels of aptitude, but not change the underlying brain any more than you can teach someone to distinguish colours they just cannot see.
There is no problem finding good mathematicians that knows jack shit about logic
Name one.
Yeah. But how? They obviously can track and bill all these telemarketing calls. Or they wouldn't let them through.
That's not how it works. The connecting phone company pays the receiver's phone company a small termination fee. The caller pays the connecting phone company, and how much is outside the receiver's phone company's control or knowledge.
And that's the part you're OK with? Or you're saying we should bring the population down before it gets to that point?
I'm OK with the status being different in the future after the transition, but that does not mean that I am OK with the transition. Working to reduce population growth, especially for those who cannot afford a high level of education, will likely help reduce pains.
By that other guy's math, you're talking about the world population dropping to about a billion. Or the US to about 45 million. How would you envision that happening? Just curious.
My take on population control, if that's what you mean, is that reproduction needs to be taxed and not subsidized anymore. Having children should be a privilege, not a right.
If that's not how you meant it, my answer is that the growing gaps between the haves and the have-nots will cause civil unrest, wars and starvation until the populations stabilize at a supportable levels.
It seems inevitable that we'll always shift towards new equilibria as disruptive changes happen, and that we'll land there through "adapt or die". I'm in favor of "adapt".
He also sided with Redbox's argument that Disney was misusing its copyrights by trying to restrict the reselling of copies of its movies after they had already been sold.
Yes, the First Sale doctrine is still valid, despite many copyright holders thinking it doesn't apply to them.
That's a nice sentiment, but you seem to forget that not everyone is even capable of getting through high school without significant assistance. For a not insignificant part of the population, there is an upper bounds to where they can go in terms of education that effectively excludes a lot of the higher maths you need to get into CI/ML. As such, we have a lot of people for whom skilled labor is going to be the best they might hope to achieve in terms of employment. If you get rid of those jobs that leaves a lot of people with no prospects for work.
That is a problem that will sort itself out in a generation or two. People will have to adapt, one way or another. It's not going to be a choice.
I expect there will be lots of various government actions to deal with this, including protectionism, population control, war, and many other means, which will all just delay the inevitable: humans adapting to being slave owners again, with the slaves being silicon based. Make sure you become an owner, because you won't be good enough to be a slave.
There's no guarantee that people will find ways to make money in the new world juste because it happened before;
There's no guarantee that money is the answer for the future.
Are you OK with that happening to workers unable to adapt to jobs that pay enough?
Absolutely. As long as humanity survives, we're going to be better off in the long run, with more people being liberated from the yoke of menial work. And I think a majority will be able to adapt, and that our children and grandchildren will have a better world for it.
We'll need a basic income for all and higher taxes to pay for it.
And folks who are hung up on insisting that people work are gonna have to get over it because when folks get displaced and have nowhere to make living, they're gonna revolt. So, we gave them basic income to keep them from reaching for the guns and torches.
No, they need to revolt; suppression only causes stagnation and decline.
The malcontents need to become the ones in charge, and then like every revolution find out that governing wisely isn't all that easy, that populism is a bad idea, then end up with less than they had, but a newfound pride and ability to grow. It will suck for a generation or two, but change will happen no matter what. Those too conservative to embrace change will fail, as always.
And it will be a scant few. And everyone else is supposed to gracefully starve.
You sound just like those who feared the industrial revolution, which we are all much better off for having gone through.
Adapt or die. You'll die.
Guess what: your house wouldn't exist without an entire TEAM of carpenters, who know how to build houses.
I guess it depends on your definition of carpentry. House building the modern way doesn't require knowing joinery, understanding how different kinds of wood behave, reading grain or anything that classic carpentry needs. The people who built your house almost certainly didn't have guild papers, but were common workers. Much like the guys at Burger King aren't chefs.
Embrace it? Sorry, but your ignorance isn't helping matters. For hundreds of years, the answer to progress and technology destroying jobs was "Go get an education." Now, automation and AI is targeting educated jobs, so it's stupid and ignorant to simply dismiss this problem under the guise of "Why is this news?", as if the answer of yesteryear still applies.
The answer to that, as always, has been that you need to increase the level of education accordingly. Those who write and maintain AIs are going to have jobs. But a high school diploma isn't going to cut it, any more than finishing 7th grade was going to cut it once we got automation and computers.
Society will always adjust to new circumstances. There's no profit in, nor benefit to society of having a large number of useless people who are just mouths to feed. So they will need to find something else to do. The ability to do so is what is going to separate winners from losers. And judging by what you write, you may not be in the former category.
Sure, disruptive technologies will cost jobs. It always does. The machine loom meant a lot of weavers were out of work. Electric saws and drills meant that carpentry became a niche market. Automobiles made horse breeding rare. It happens.
As before, we will adjust, and the average person will have a better life, even if many will lose their jobs and have worse lives during the transition period. We'll establish a new status quo.
Just embrace it, because it is unstoppable. Throwing clogs in the wheels won't prevent it from happening. Instead ask how you can make money in the new improved world, taking advantage of the new technologies. Some will need to write or service the AIs, and some will need to handle the increased inputs and outputs, whether it's designing distribution systems and logistics, or providing secondary services.
Getting to write interesting code means that you will have put in years of learning the ins and outs and tricks and traps of modern coding - mastering this is a mostly solitary experience that demands a special mind-set.
I would say that to be good, you also need to understand the tricks and traps of old fashioned coding which the new coding abstractions are built on top of. It's like the difference between a "new music" musician that pieces samples together and someone who also understands harmony and can create those samples.