Which is basically that everyone bought into the myth that the only person who matters is the person at the top. They demand it, we give it to them. Non-executive workers get told that they have no value, can be replaced by foreigners, should work longer/smarter/harder - and cheaper. And do.
the IDEAL end result is that the work output of just few guys will feed the entire nation and the rest can just fuck off with their social security doing arts & etc to get the social security extra bucks from the other guys on social security if they want extra hookers&blow. of course the ten individuals who manage to do the actual work would be pretty rich.
we're already way further that road than people would imagine, but really, think about how few jobs are actually connected to the basic human needs of medical care, food supply, shelter and clothing.
it used to be that the vast majority had to toil on farms just to keep the nations from starving.
I wouldn't be surprised. However, as current discourse goes, a large number of people will be arguing for (and voting for) the removal of any sort of taxes for those 10 people, thus also eliminating the source of the social security bucks to keep the other 300+ million people fed.
We may just end up having to revive the virtually-extinct trades of shoe-shine boys, gas station attendants, bank tellers and so forth, just to have something to do.
As a general rule, you are allowed one "impossible" thing in sci-fi.
I'm really interested to know who made up this "rule", and when it was they made it up. Because by that definition, pretty much every last classic work of Sci-Fi wouldn't count as Sci-Fi.
Good question, but I suspect that it was someone like Clarke and/or Asimov who posited it. Then again, it could go a lot further back than that. Every so often while reading forewords, some author will toss it out, and I never bothered to record who, myself. I suggest consulting someone in the profession who's up on the history of hard SF.
In recent times, we're seen Clarke's Law vindicated, with so much of what we do everyday being pretty much magic to begin with that people don't need or perhaps even want their SF grounded so thoroughly in today's "possible" things. Back when technological wizardry wasn't leaking around everything and anything and the dividing lines were better defined, keeping to the "one impossible thing" rule allowed people to call it "Science Fiction" without being accused of outright Fantasy.
Nowadays, I literally have a "magic wand" TV remote. Once, TV itself was an "impossible thing".
I really only read the "Big 4" Dune books, so I'm hardly expert on the minutae. I thought I recalled a remark in them that the top-level Guild Navigators could "fold space", which possibly could be such a complex operation that only a computer or Mentat-level mind could manage it. And Herbert did do something similar in the BuSab books organically. But whether wholly organic or wholly mechanical or some hybrid, jumping space was not a major plot element.
Obviously, keeping an entire race's memories in ones genes is absurd for any number of reasons, but I always considered the DNA chain to be more of the anchor cable that directed how the person's mind could voyage down the 4-dimensional Universe than a literal recording mechanism, so I'm cool with it.
Actually, one of my biggest nits was the other aspect of the spice. Its geriatric properties were alluded to, but never (in the core books, at least), expounded on, nor did I see any actual indication that anyone's life was significantly prolonged. More tellingly, the lifespans of most drug users are likely to be shorter, not longer. It's not impossible for a drug to have multiple benefits, just not that common. And usually not without caveats and consequences.
... make it part of the English lit. curriculum. All of the "classics" were popular literature in their time. Shakespeare was extremely popular in the USA in the 19th century. Now, though, few read the classics for pleasure. I think that's partly because in high school most are taught to hate them.
No, fond Varlet! 'Tis that the English of the Time is scarce the English of our own!
Nor, for that matter, are the more recent tomes of the 19th Century much better, with much of the writing done in a dry, passive voice in long tedious sentences and strong concern on the behalf of the characters as to one's proper place in Society.
Might as well them them a foreign language first, just to get them thinking about alternative grammars and sentence structures.
There was a post here recently from a teacher who was looking for inspiring SF books to give his students as a summer project.
As a result, I discovered "The Martian", (it's on Amazon for a buck), which, with expletives removed, would be perfect for young kids. This old kid enjoyed it "as is".
So, how hard would it be to encourage publishers to adapt SciFi classics for the younger audience?
Expletives removed??
If you want today's kids to identify with it, you need more expletives added.
I'm quite interested in Dune not being sci-fi, because that's so ridiculous it should be on a meme.
This one puzzles me as well. As a general rule, you are allowed one "impossible" thing in sci-fi. In Dune, that one thing is the spice. Admittedly, it both warps perceptions of time and space in addition to allowing the Spacing Guild to warp space to match their imposed perception, but that's still all tied to to one thing.
Everything else I can think of is scientifically credible, though much of it requires more discipline than today's human race can generally summon. But that was Herbert's genius. His humans 10K years into the future were evolutionarily more advanced, but still fundamentally humans and not, for example, aliens in human costumes or vice versa.
The problem with that can end up being "when it is broke, how are you going to fix it?"
What I want to know is where do they get their blank card stock? Do they pay a junior person to cut out blanks from sheets of Manila paper?
Bad enough that you probably have to machine custom replacement parts for the hardware, since the scrapyards are likely mined out by now, but a Hollerith card can only make about 2 dozen trips through the machine before it gets too worn to keep using.
In not sure why anyone thinks this funny, because it's absolutely true.
No matter how much experience you have, there will *always* be that huge feature you initially thought would be a minor thing, there will *always* be those impossible-to-predict functionality hangups that take forever to solve and the client will *always* have "oh, yeah, and..." types of changes to the project requirements that completely alter the scope.
Well, MY experience it that usually the complicated tricky stuff that made you sweat bullets will take a lot less time than expected.
But that doesn't matter, because somewhere there's a misplaced comma or mis-capitalized letter that you can never see because you see what you expect to see and it will totally stall you for days, eating up every bit of the time the complex thing was expected to take and more.
Pi is funny, but I do triple it and it's about right. Unfortunately, it makes Management very unhappy.
The problem with estimation is something I've meditated on for a long time, and I blame it on several factors.
1. The users/managers saying "It's Simple! All You Have To Do Is...". Frequently accompanied by the pointed observation that "My 8-year old niece could do it."
2. The developers/designers saying "It's Simple! All I Have To Do Is...".
3. A refusal on the the part of management to accept an honest estimate. I used to tell students in the college lab that their printouts would come out faster if they grabbed the paper and pulled, and that's about what management tries to do. This works especially poorly when the honest estimates were already unrealistically optimistic. Give them a realistic number and they'll pressure you until you give them a number they like. And I guarantee it will be a lot smaller that the realistic one.
Where does the AYHTDI effect come from? In the case of the developers, some of it is ego, but some of it is ignoring reality. My suspicion is that development estimates are scaled on the unconscious premise of how long it would take to instruct a human to do something and computers are a lot stupider than humans when it comes to seeing what needs to be done and doing it on their own. Most humans, anyway. Well, some humans.
The other thing that contributes to false expectations is the Modelling Effect. In most fields, a model is visibly a flimsy representation of the final product that cannot possibly be mistaken for the final product itself. These days, most computer systems are all about the UI. A final-looking UI can be knocked together in a matter of hours often as not, but it's no more the final product than a mask is a human being. The difference being that it makes the application look like its finished long before it really is. Add the "instant gratification" frameworks that use can put together basic functions in an hour, even though the industrial-grade equivalent may take weeks, and there's all sort of room for disappointment.
APK was arrested last night for disturbing the public and public indecency. Basically, his meds weren't adjusted (yeah, you probably noticed) and police officers don't like it when you masturbate in public, run around naked, and hurl your shit at them.
Well, there go about half the people on the Internet.
We write much of our documentation while the software is being developed--it's descriptive, not prescriptive. Works for us. Much better than waterfall.
I write a lot of MY documentation BEFORE the software is coded. Basically, I was doing Literate Programming before Knuth named it. I also wised up to Agile before it was a Big Deal when I realized that every time I delivered something to users, they said "That's great! Now I can do this! Oh wait, now I see that it would be even better it could do that!"
Fred Brook's Chief Programmer Team concept (speaking of silver bullets that didn't Solve Everything) included a librarian as part of the team.
Of course that was back before the days when the Chief Programmer was also supposed to be the Network Administrator and DBA.
How would living wage be cut proportionally? People still need to pay mortgages, car notes, buy groceries (robots aren't going to pick vegetables and then deliver them any time soon). A lot of things we buy and use daily are already produced or manufactured through methods that are automated as much as possible, yet it still takes $20-30k for a single person to live comfortably (and this only grows as you have a family, buy a house, etc).
I'm thinking that by "pick vegetables" you mean at the grocery store. Automated harvesting has been done for years and the agriculture industry is constantly looking for ways to harvest items such as tomatoes that are either too fragile to harvest mechanically or don't all ripen at the same time.
So "as much as possible" is a moving target, not a fixed point.
Interestingly, there were proposals made for automated grocery delivery as far back as the 1890s, I think. At the time, underground conveyors or pneumatic tubes were the "in" thing. More recently, of course, people have suggested using drones.
Expect to see more automatons involved in house-building, but at the same time, we do make certain assumptions about how we are "supposed" to live and work, and given the right circumstances, those assumptions may change.
We are only beginning to see the real impact of "intelligent" machines, which is to say machines that can move in a flexible manner, adapt to their surrounding and circumstances and do things that once only humans could do.
WTF What gives you the right to complain about China if you live in USA or EU . Christ you've been fucking up the planet for decades - no centuries, and now you have the gall to complain about China. Where was all the work you did to avoid it? Oh yes that's right into the pockets of "Global Corporations" global rapists more like......... Geez I though I'd heard it all!
I'd prefer to think of it as "learning from our mistakes". And I think they will. But they still have mistakes of their own to make.
Does it really matter what he used to post it with? Everything's made in china nowdays, in case you haven't noticed.
Actually I bought a shirt this weekend and was astonished to see that it was made somewhere else. Could Chinese economic hegemony already be coming to an end? Is that one shirt the crack in the dam?
Well, China isn't as cheap as it used to by, but clothing isn't as single-sourced as you might believe. I took inventory of my shirts once, just for giggles. I think I came up with China, India, Malaysia, Mexico, various Caribbean islands and even one or 2 USA.
You'll know when the End is Nigh for Chinese hegemony. Just walk into Wal-Mart.
So, in other words, you are going to compile a textbook?
I agree that you can find almost anything you want somewhere on the Internet. The advantage of a text book is having it organized, winnowed for obsolete material (in my field, one of the biggest problems is newbies with old knowledge), and (hopefully) all this structured in a way that's consistent with the course being taught. Done in a more or less consistent style and at a consistent level. With exercises for the student - which is one of the main distinctions between a text book and a reference book.
If I know enough to organize such a work decently myself, - and I have some really good tools for that kind of stuff - I don't need to be taking the course. If you do, and you are willing to do the work, you are a public benefactor. Bless You. Publishers typically pay entire teams of people to do all those various tasks.
In the last decade or so, we have sacrificed a lot of our traditional ideals to the God Terror. Today was a day to pay it back. To prove that we don't need to give up more freedom to be what we are supposed to be. We didn't win this fight by bringing in the armies or permanently suspending our legal processes. We did it using our domestic law enforcement resources in co-operation with our citizens.
Did you watch the same news coverage I did? They literally shut down an entire city, brought in the National Guard, and flew black helicopters overhead! And I mean LITERALLY all of that happened, even the black helicopters.
How is that not offering up our ideals and freedoms to God Terror?
And for what? Did they find their man? Nope. Instead he snuck away while the police played war.
He wasn't found until the martial law was LIFTED and people were allowed out of their houses without having to worry about being stripped naked at gunpoint and paraded around on CNN. (Which, again, is not a joke.) Only then did a private citizen notice blood on their private property and call the police.
So, yeah, good ol' fashion police work did win out in the end (if you can call not doing anything but waiting for tips from private citizens police "work") - but that didn't stop Boston from sacrificing freedoms and a ton of our tax dollars to God Terror for no results.
Yes they did find their man (men). Shot them so full of holes that one died and the other ran to earth instead of through the streets as expected.
As to National Guard, I didn't notice, only State Police. The National Guard is, however, not Federal troops, nor were there troops marching in the streets directing civilians. The words "martial law" - which do have a very specific meaning when formally pronounced - were never used. People COULD leave their houses, and people often do in situations like that, but not that day. It wasn't until after the "stay-home" order was lifted that the guy who actually discovered Suspect #2 went outside.
One thing that I see over and over, however, is that events of this magnitude are rarely the work of one single agency, public or private. Law enforcement agencies obtained the security camera footage that helped get the first blurry pictures. The general public ran with that, finding better-quality photos of the scene. The FBI apparently put the names to the suspects and got them running. Once flushed, it became a police chase, with various local forces tracking, pursuing, and ultimately engaging in a firefight. They literally "got their man" in Suspect #1, and, as mentioned, severely incapacitated Suspect #2. It's 20-20 hindsight to say that if the lockdown had been lifted earlier, Suspect #2 would have been captured sooner. No one really knew what shape he was in. 12 hours earlier, he might still have been in good enough shape to blow away his discoverer. Keeping people off the streets meant that he was more visible, and also that if another firefight ensued, the civilian toll wouldn't be further augmented. As it is, a number of people had their homes perforated, and people do get killed by bullets coming through walls.
But the police cannot take all the credit. It did take a civilian to discover Suspect #2's hiding place - in large part because the police left him leaking enough blood to be visible even though he wasn't. The police then took over the actual job of arrest, but not before more rounds were discharged.
The police didn't do it all. The FBI didn't do it all. Civilians didn't do it all. None of them could do it all. It was only all of them together that brought the bombers to justice.
You're not addressing what I said at all. I stated that these are immigrants, and that they are not "home grown". I might be from Zimbabwe, or Canada, or Mars, - if I wasn't born and raised in Moscow, then I can't claim to be a "home grown" Muscovite, now can I? It wouldn't matter how many times the successors of the KGB interviewed me - I still wouldn't be a native Muscovite.
Our only real defense against terrorists is that terrorists are A) stupid and B) incompetent. Only where something new and radical is tried do they tend to have success, and that generally isn't repeatable. We adapt. They don't.
Wrong on all counts. Read the news just once in a while. All the 9/11 terrorists were college educated. Pretty competent for what they planned to do. There are terrorist bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan almost weekly. The toll is seldom less than 50 people. Pretty repeatable if you ask me.
I'll give you half marks. Education is not the same thing as intelligence, as numerous degree-bearing idiots in my field demonstrate on a daily basis. Furthermore, "stupid" in this context means simply that they are unwilling to adapt. Plenty of high-IQ people do stupid things.
It is true that overseas suicide bombings take a horrendous toll, but they are almost exclusively limited to regions that are unstable. Relatively few such attacks are attempted in "civilized" countries, except, perhaps for Russia. Why this should be would make an interesting study, but I suspect that some of it is simply because there are more sympathisers in the vicinity. In any event, the attacks that succeed are almost invariably made in public gathering places, and about the closest that the USA has seen to that was the Boston Marathon bombing.
If two people with makeshift bombs can cause a major city to go on lockdown, isn't the message to terrorists that a multi-city disruption -- say, shutting down from Boston to Philly -- wouldn't take very many people or that much coordination?
Our only real defense against terrorists is that terrorists are A) stupid and B) incompetent. Terrorists fixate on certain targets, such as airplanes. We all know that if you wanted to disrupt air transportation these days, the airplane itself is one of the least vulnerable targets, but they keep focusing on the airplanes.
As for the stupid part, Wile E. Coyote could do better than most of them.
Only where something new and radical is tried do they tend to have success, and that generally isn't repeatable. We adapt. They don't.
Two devices went off, police were looking for two suspects... there was no particularly strong evidence that there would be dozens of people out there or something. I suspect it comes down to just the word "terrorism" causing people to refuse to apply the kind of logic they normally apply.
I've lived in neighborhoods where people were shot, and the gunman was an fugitive. It was more likely in those cases that there could be wider involvement of a larger group, because often people who perpetrate shootings are gang members. While it's rare, occasionally these fugitive scenarios actually do end up in a shootout that involves a dozen people. Yet, the police don't lock down all of Atlanta every other week just in case.
I think the key here is predictability. Neighbourhood criminals have known haunts. We were dealing with people who were extremely mobile and armed with explosives. We didn't know who their partners in crime (if any) were, we didn't know where they were likely to go. They had been located in downtown Boston, Cambridge, and Watertown. Their last known location was Watertown, and that's where the actual door-to-door searching was going on, but the danger was that they'd break free and head in a random direction. By clearing the streets, the citizens of Boston ensured that they'd stick out like a sore thumb. Terrorists hate standing out except while they are actively creating terror. They'd much rather fade into the crowd, unless they're making a suicide stand.
This was as much a statement by the populace as it was an exercise in police powers. The police routinely do stuff more intrusive than that in the event of natural disaster, but there are invariably holdouts. Wait until hurricane season, and see. Any holdouts in Boston didn't make it to the news.
Some may claim this is a slippery slope, but I'd say it's closer to "You can run, but you cannot hide". It was actually a turn up from the recent trends that the populace are helpless sheep and the wise people in the government will handle it all. Sometimes the best action you can take is to stay out of the way.
Human nature being what it is, however, I doubt that any future voluntary lockdowns will be as successful. People will only put up with so much of it. Especially if there's no compelling demonstration that such extremes are necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
This chart indicates productivity has increased, but the gains have gone to the 1% at the top:
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/09/04/opinion/04reich-graphic.html?ref=sunday
Which is basically that everyone bought into the myth that the only person who matters is the person at the top. They demand it, we give it to them. Non-executive workers get told that they have no value, can be replaced by foreigners, should work longer/smarter/harder - and cheaper. And do.
look.
the IDEAL end result is that the work output of just few guys will feed the entire nation and the rest can just fuck off with their social security doing arts & etc to get the social security extra bucks from the other guys on social security if they want extra hookers&blow. of course the ten individuals who manage to do the actual work would be pretty rich.
we're already way further that road than people would imagine, but really, think about how few jobs are actually connected to the basic human needs of medical care, food supply, shelter and clothing.
it used to be that the vast majority had to toil on farms just to keep the nations from starving.
I wouldn't be surprised. However, as current discourse goes, a large number of people will be arguing for (and voting for) the removal of any sort of taxes for those 10 people, thus also eliminating the source of the social security bucks to keep the other 300+ million people fed.
We may just end up having to revive the virtually-extinct trades of shoe-shine boys, gas station attendants, bank tellers and so forth, just to have something to do.
As a general rule, you are allowed one "impossible" thing in sci-fi.
I'm really interested to know who made up this "rule", and when it was they made it up. Because by that definition, pretty much every last classic work of Sci-Fi wouldn't count as Sci-Fi.
Good question, but I suspect that it was someone like Clarke and/or Asimov who posited it. Then again, it could go a lot further back than that. Every so often while reading forewords, some author will toss it out, and I never bothered to record who, myself. I suggest consulting someone in the profession who's up on the history of hard SF.
In recent times, we're seen Clarke's Law vindicated, with so much of what we do everyday being pretty much magic to begin with that people don't need or perhaps even want their SF grounded so thoroughly in today's "possible" things. Back when technological wizardry wasn't leaking around everything and anything and the dividing lines were better defined, keeping to the "one impossible thing" rule allowed people to call it "Science Fiction" without being accused of outright Fantasy.
Nowadays, I literally have a "magic wand" TV remote. Once, TV itself was an "impossible thing".
I really only read the "Big 4" Dune books, so I'm hardly expert on the minutae. I thought I recalled a remark in them that the top-level Guild Navigators could "fold space", which possibly could be such a complex operation that only a computer or Mentat-level mind could manage it. And Herbert did do something similar in the BuSab books organically. But whether wholly organic or wholly mechanical or some hybrid, jumping space was not a major plot element.
Obviously, keeping an entire race's memories in ones genes is absurd for any number of reasons, but I always considered the DNA chain to be more of the anchor cable that directed how the person's mind could voyage down the 4-dimensional Universe than a literal recording mechanism, so I'm cool with it.
Actually, one of my biggest nits was the other aspect of the spice. Its geriatric properties were alluded to, but never (in the core books, at least), expounded on, nor did I see any actual indication that anyone's life was significantly prolonged. More tellingly, the lifespans of most drug users are likely to be shorter, not longer. It's not impossible for a drug to have multiple benefits, just not that common. And usually not without caveats and consequences.
... make it part of the English lit. curriculum. All of the "classics" were popular literature in their time. Shakespeare was extremely popular in the USA in the 19th century. Now, though, few read the classics for pleasure. I think that's partly because in high school most are taught to hate them.
No, fond Varlet! 'Tis that the English of the Time is scarce the English of our own!
Nor, for that matter, are the more recent tomes of the 19th Century much better, with much of the writing done in a dry, passive voice in long tedious sentences and strong concern on the behalf of the characters as to one's proper place in Society.
Might as well them them a foreign language first, just to get them thinking about alternative grammars and sentence structures.
There was a post here recently from a teacher who was looking for inspiring SF books to give his students as a summer project.
As a result, I discovered "The Martian", (it's on Amazon for a buck), which, with expletives removed, would be perfect for young kids.
This old kid enjoyed it "as is".
So, how hard would it be to encourage publishers to adapt SciFi classics for the younger audience?
Expletives removed??
If you want today's kids to identify with it, you need more expletives added.
I'm quite interested in Dune not being sci-fi, because that's so ridiculous it should be on a meme.
This one puzzles me as well. As a general rule, you are allowed one "impossible" thing in sci-fi. In Dune, that one thing is the spice. Admittedly, it both warps perceptions of time and space in addition to allowing the Spacing Guild to warp space to match their imposed perception, but that's still all tied to to one thing.
Everything else I can think of is scientifically credible, though much of it requires more discipline than today's human race can generally summon. But that was Herbert's genius. His humans 10K years into the future were evolutionarily more advanced, but still fundamentally humans and not, for example, aliens in human costumes or vice versa.
The problem with that can end up being "when it is broke, how are you going to fix it?"
What I want to know is where do they get their blank card stock? Do they pay a junior person to cut out blanks from sheets of Manila paper?
Bad enough that you probably have to machine custom replacement parts for the hardware, since the scrapyards are likely mined out by now, but a Hollerith card can only make about 2 dozen trips through the machine before it gets too worn to keep using.
In not sure why anyone thinks this funny, because it's absolutely true.
No matter how much experience you have, there will *always* be that huge feature you initially thought would be a minor thing, there will *always* be those impossible-to-predict functionality hangups that take forever to solve and the client will *always* have "oh, yeah, and..." types of changes to the project requirements that completely alter the scope.
Well, MY experience it that usually the complicated tricky stuff that made you sweat bullets will take a lot less time than expected.
But that doesn't matter, because somewhere there's a misplaced comma or mis-capitalized letter that you can never see because you see what you expect to see and it will totally stall you for days, eating up every bit of the time the complex thing was expected to take and more.
Pi is funny, but I do triple it and it's about right. Unfortunately, it makes Management very unhappy.
The problem with estimation is something I've meditated on for a long time, and I blame it on several factors.
1. The users/managers saying "It's Simple! All You Have To Do Is...". Frequently accompanied by the pointed observation that "My 8-year old niece could do it."
2. The developers/designers saying "It's Simple! All I Have To Do Is...".
3. A refusal on the the part of management to accept an honest estimate. I used to tell students in the college lab that their printouts would come out faster if they grabbed the paper and pulled, and that's about what management tries to do. This works especially poorly when the honest estimates were already unrealistically optimistic. Give them a realistic number and they'll pressure you until you give them a number they like. And I guarantee it will be a lot smaller that the realistic one.
Where does the AYHTDI effect come from? In the case of the developers, some of it is ego, but some of it is ignoring reality. My suspicion is that development estimates are scaled on the unconscious premise of how long it would take to instruct a human to do something and computers are a lot stupider than humans when it comes to seeing what needs to be done and doing it on their own. Most humans, anyway. Well, some humans.
The other thing that contributes to false expectations is the Modelling Effect. In most fields, a model is visibly a flimsy representation of the final product that cannot possibly be mistaken for the final product itself. These days, most computer systems are all about the UI. A final-looking UI can be knocked together in a matter of hours often as not, but it's no more the final product than a mask is a human being. The difference being that it makes the application look like its finished long before it really is. Add the "instant gratification" frameworks that use can put together basic functions in an hour, even though the industrial-grade equivalent may take weeks, and there's all sort of room for disappointment.
APK was arrested last night for disturbing the public and public indecency. Basically, his meds weren't adjusted (yeah, you probably noticed) and police officers don't like it when you masturbate in public, run around naked, and hurl your shit at them.
Well, there go about half the people on the Internet.
Oh, my kingdom for modpoints. This.
Modded down for "This."
Just kidding. I think.
We write much of our documentation while the software is being developed--it's descriptive, not prescriptive. Works for us. Much better than waterfall.
I write a lot of MY documentation BEFORE the software is coded. Basically, I was doing Literate Programming before Knuth named it. I also wised up to Agile before it was a Big Deal when I realized that every time I delivered something to users, they said "That's great! Now I can do this! Oh wait, now I see that it would be even better it could do that!"
Fred Brook's Chief Programmer Team concept (speaking of silver bullets that didn't Solve Everything) included a librarian as part of the team.
Of course that was back before the days when the Chief Programmer was also supposed to be the Network Administrator and DBA.
How would living wage be cut proportionally? People still need to pay mortgages, car notes, buy groceries (robots aren't going to pick vegetables and then deliver them any time soon). A lot of things we buy and use daily are already produced or manufactured through methods that are automated as much as possible, yet it still takes $20-30k for a single person to live comfortably (and this only grows as you have a family, buy a house, etc).
I'm thinking that by "pick vegetables" you mean at the grocery store. Automated harvesting has been done for years and the agriculture industry is constantly looking for ways to harvest items such as tomatoes that are either too fragile to harvest mechanically or don't all ripen at the same time.
So "as much as possible" is a moving target, not a fixed point.
Interestingly, there were proposals made for automated grocery delivery as far back as the 1890s, I think. At the time, underground conveyors or pneumatic tubes were the "in" thing. More recently, of course, people have suggested using drones.
Expect to see more automatons involved in house-building, but at the same time, we do make certain assumptions about how we are "supposed" to live and work, and given the right circumstances, those assumptions may change.
We are only beginning to see the real impact of "intelligent" machines, which is to say machines that can move in a flexible manner, adapt to their surrounding and circumstances and do things that once only humans could do.
WTF
What gives you the right to complain about China if you live in USA or EU . Christ you've been fucking up the planet for decades - no centuries, and now you have the gall to complain about China. Where was all the work you did to avoid it? Oh yes that's right into the pockets of "Global Corporations" global rapists more like......... Geez I though I'd heard it all!
I'd prefer to think of it as "learning from our mistakes". And I think they will. But they still have mistakes of their own to make.
Does it really matter what he used to post it with? Everything's made in china nowdays, in case you haven't noticed.
Actually I bought a shirt this weekend and was astonished to see that it was made somewhere else. Could Chinese economic hegemony already be coming to an end? Is that one shirt the crack in the dam?
Well, China isn't as cheap as it used to by, but clothing isn't as single-sourced as you might believe. I took inventory of my shirts once, just for giggles. I think I came up with China, India, Malaysia, Mexico, various Caribbean islands and even one or 2 USA.
You'll know when the End is Nigh for Chinese hegemony. Just walk into Wal-Mart.
So, in other words, you are going to compile a textbook?
I agree that you can find almost anything you want somewhere on the Internet. The advantage of a text book is having it organized, winnowed for obsolete material (in my field, one of the biggest problems is newbies with old knowledge), and (hopefully) all this structured in a way that's consistent with the course being taught. Done in a more or less consistent style and at a consistent level. With exercises for the student - which is one of the main distinctions between a text book and a reference book.
If I know enough to organize such a work decently myself, - and I have some really good tools for that kind of stuff - I don't need to be taking the course. If you do, and you are willing to do the work, you are a public benefactor. Bless You. Publishers typically pay entire teams of people to do all those various tasks.
In Bend Her, Bender was transsexual. Bender is dishonest and a sexual deviant. QED.
Whereas non-transsexual Bender is into Religion. With blackjack. And hookers.
And Amy still hasn't figured out why she's always short of cash.
In the last decade or so, we have sacrificed a lot of our traditional ideals to the God Terror. Today was a day to pay it back. To prove that we don't need to give up more freedom to be what we are supposed to be. We didn't win this fight by bringing in the armies or permanently suspending our legal processes. We did it using our domestic law enforcement resources in co-operation with our citizens.
Did you watch the same news coverage I did? They literally shut down an entire city, brought in the National Guard, and flew black helicopters overhead! And I mean LITERALLY all of that happened, even the black helicopters.
How is that not offering up our ideals and freedoms to God Terror?
And for what? Did they find their man? Nope. Instead he snuck away while the police played war.
He wasn't found until the martial law was LIFTED and people were allowed out of their houses without having to worry about being stripped naked at gunpoint and paraded around on CNN. (Which, again, is not a joke.) Only then did a private citizen notice blood on their private property and call the police.
So, yeah, good ol' fashion police work did win out in the end (if you can call not doing anything but waiting for tips from private citizens police "work") - but that didn't stop Boston from sacrificing freedoms and a ton of our tax dollars to God Terror for no results.
Yes they did find their man (men). Shot them so full of holes that one died and the other ran to earth instead of through the streets as expected.
As to National Guard, I didn't notice, only State Police. The National Guard is, however, not Federal troops, nor were there troops marching in the streets directing civilians. The words "martial law" - which do have a very specific meaning when formally pronounced - were never used. People COULD leave their houses, and people often do in situations like that, but not that day. It wasn't until after the "stay-home" order was lifted that the guy who actually discovered Suspect #2 went outside.
One thing that I see over and over, however, is that events of this magnitude are rarely the work of one single agency, public or private. Law enforcement agencies obtained the security camera footage that helped get the first blurry pictures. The general public ran with that, finding better-quality photos of the scene. The FBI apparently put the names to the suspects and got them running. Once flushed, it became a police chase, with various local forces tracking, pursuing, and ultimately engaging in a firefight. They literally "got their man" in Suspect #1, and, as mentioned, severely incapacitated Suspect #2. It's 20-20 hindsight to say that if the lockdown had been lifted earlier, Suspect #2 would have been captured sooner. No one really knew what shape he was in. 12 hours earlier, he might still have been in good enough shape to blow away his discoverer. Keeping people off the streets meant that he was more visible, and also that if another firefight ensued, the civilian toll wouldn't be further augmented. As it is, a number of people had their homes perforated, and people do get killed by bullets coming through walls.
But the police cannot take all the credit. It did take a civilian to discover Suspect #2's hiding place - in large part because the police left him leaking enough blood to be visible even though he wasn't. The police then took over the actual job of arrest, but not before more rounds were discharged.
The police didn't do it all. The FBI didn't do it all. Civilians didn't do it all. None of them could do it all. It was only all of them together that brought the bombers to justice.
So, you don't have a wife and children who depend on you?
Did the Founding Fathers?
Christians beat the crap out of assholes?
You're not addressing what I said at all. I stated that these are immigrants, and that they are not "home grown". I might be from Zimbabwe, or Canada, or Mars, - if I wasn't born and raised in Moscow, then I can't claim to be a "home grown" Muscovite, now can I? It wouldn't matter how many times the successors of the KGB interviewed me - I still wouldn't be a native Muscovite.
So. Is John McCain "home grown"?
Our only real defense against terrorists is that terrorists are A) stupid and B) incompetent. Only where something new and radical is tried do they tend to have success, and that generally isn't repeatable. We adapt. They don't.
Wrong on all counts.
Read the news just once in a while.
All the 9/11 terrorists were college educated. Pretty competent for what they planned to do.
There are terrorist bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan almost weekly. The toll is seldom less than 50 people. Pretty repeatable if you ask me.
I'll give you half marks. Education is not the same thing as intelligence, as numerous degree-bearing idiots in my field demonstrate on a daily basis. Furthermore, "stupid" in this context means simply that they are unwilling to adapt. Plenty of high-IQ people do stupid things.
It is true that overseas suicide bombings take a horrendous toll, but they are almost exclusively limited to regions that are unstable. Relatively few such attacks are attempted in "civilized" countries, except, perhaps for Russia. Why this should be would make an interesting study, but I suspect that some of it is simply because there are more sympathisers in the vicinity. In any event, the attacks that succeed are almost invariably made in public gathering places, and about the closest that the USA has seen to that was the Boston Marathon bombing.
If two people with makeshift bombs can cause a major city to go on lockdown, isn't the message to terrorists that a multi-city disruption -- say, shutting down from Boston to Philly -- wouldn't take very many people or that much coordination?
Our only real defense against terrorists is that terrorists are A) stupid and B) incompetent. Terrorists fixate on certain targets, such as airplanes. We all know that if you wanted to disrupt air transportation these days, the airplane itself is one of the least vulnerable targets, but they keep focusing on the airplanes.
As for the stupid part, Wile E. Coyote could do better than most of them.
Only where something new and radical is tried do they tend to have success, and that generally isn't repeatable. We adapt. They don't.
Two devices went off, police were looking for two suspects... there was no particularly strong evidence that there would be dozens of people out there or something. I suspect it comes down to just the word "terrorism" causing people to refuse to apply the kind of logic they normally apply.
I've lived in neighborhoods where people were shot, and the gunman was an fugitive. It was more likely in those cases that there could be wider involvement of a larger group, because often people who perpetrate shootings are gang members. While it's rare, occasionally these fugitive scenarios actually do end up in a shootout that involves a dozen people. Yet, the police don't lock down all of Atlanta every other week just in case.
I think the key here is predictability. Neighbourhood criminals have known haunts. We were dealing with people who were extremely mobile and armed with explosives. We didn't know who their partners in crime (if any) were, we didn't know where they were likely to go. They had been located in downtown Boston, Cambridge, and Watertown. Their last known location was Watertown, and that's where the actual door-to-door searching was going on, but the danger was that they'd break free and head in a random direction. By clearing the streets, the citizens of Boston ensured that they'd stick out like a sore thumb. Terrorists hate standing out except while they are actively creating terror. They'd much rather fade into the crowd, unless they're making a suicide stand.
This was as much a statement by the populace as it was an exercise in police powers. The police routinely do stuff more intrusive than that in the event of natural disaster, but there are invariably holdouts. Wait until hurricane season, and see. Any holdouts in Boston didn't make it to the news.
Some may claim this is a slippery slope, but I'd say it's closer to "You can run, but you cannot hide". It was actually a turn up from the recent trends that the populace are helpless sheep and the wise people in the government will handle it all. Sometimes the best action you can take is to stay out of the way.
Human nature being what it is, however, I doubt that any future voluntary lockdowns will be as successful. People will only put up with so much of it. Especially if there's no compelling demonstration that such extremes are necessary.