I'll take your word for it. I've read my fair share of thinly disguised slashvertisements. Still articles like this are as a less annoying way for companies to push their products up your nose. Less annoying only because it doesn't suddenly pop up, blink and hog your entire screen.
"Take out my phone, press the "on" button, swipe to unlock, hit "home", find the app, do whatever the hell the app needs me to do and... fuck it, use the fucking credit card. Using a phone to pay for a burger is retarded. It's less convenient, what's the fucking point??"
What you cite isn't a problem intrinsic to payment by phone technology. It's an interface issue. It's like using the Windows 8 UX to conclude that desktop computers suck on principle (well, maybe all of them suck a "little").
Moreover, when you look at it, credit cards as well as debit cards are a form of pay-by-phone technology. Unless you're stuck in the middle of nowhereland where purchases are logged manually, your credit card is connected to a terminal that phones home or somewhere else to verify that the card is genuine and not picked from somebody's pocket. Of course just as with your precious plastic, charges may apply when you pay-by-mobile-phone.
Payment by cellphone is already a much more convenient experience in most 3rd World countries, especially in Africa. Why? Because there you're either too poor to afford a credit card or the application requires jumping through too many hoops. Cheap and readily available credit isn't a universal phenomenon.
"If the content producer hasn't given you permission to consume their content, then you have no right to seek it elsewhere. If I cannot watch a movie through legal channels then I don't watch the movie. Same thing with TV shows and music. I don't consider respecting other peoples' rights to be very onerous, and I don't think I'm missing out on much."
Copyright is a fairly recent concept in the history of human culture. It's not like concepts of liberty, free speech or the right to life which people more ancient than the Greeks have argued and argued against.
The closest analog we have to copyright is the arcana hoarded by some mystical groups or the way the common people were prevented from reading the Bible. Most people were happy to tell and retell each other their stories, stories that became the basis of each country, each civilization's culture.
It's this culture that forms the foundation of every copyrighted work ever produced. So I have to ask, when even they are clearly freeloading off our common culture, what gives "content producers" the right to deny others from enjoying and sharing this new addition to our cultural heritage?
I'm not saying writers, artists, etc, should just let big commercial entities like Walt Disney "steal" their work. All I'm saying is that we should get rid of the monopolistic "all rights reserved" provision, which in today's networked world can only be enforced through NSA-like surveillance, and focus simply on the commercial exploitation aspect.
Actually not just in Japan. You definitely need different licenses to drive a truck and a motorcycle. I see self-parking to fully autonomous vehicles being treated as totally different categories of vehicles.
You don't need fancy biometrics to enforce the system. Right now our driving license system is mostly enforced by the honor system and the medium threat of getting pulled over by a police officer. Even now you can theoretically drive a truck without a license, just don't do something that makes you stand out like swerving between lanes or ramming a fire hydrant..
Unless funding increases for the next year or even if just gets funded at all, this supposed research project is more likely just part of the financial juggling that happens in any agency with a large budget which wants to keep that budget. The simple rule is: if you don't spend it, you lose it in next year's budget. An exchange between the officer-in-charge of a bureau and his subordinate might go:
SUBORDINATE: Sir, we have this $48 million left over from our higgs-boson missile defense shield research research project.
OIC: $48 million? Go spend it somewhere useful.
And so the subordinate, a law-abiding citizen who doesn't want to spend the money on a second honeymoon to the Himalayas, goes around emailing his civilian friends from the academe and industry. Do you have any project that could use $48 million dollars in funding? The only catch is that it must have a military application, no matter how far-fetched. Since practically any high-tech research project will have a military application, this is easier said than done. The subordinate goes through the deluge of project proposals and passes a few over to his boss, who rubberstamps the one with the most current events relevance. Since Wikileaking appears to be very much in the news, the project that gets approved is the one that purports to plug leaks at the human source..
The bureaucratic ideal is to go slightly over the budget. Overspend too much and the guillotine of god (Congress) comes down upon you. Underspend too much and your bureau's budget gets slashed by that amount. You'll receive a letter of appreciation and probably a chance to get kicked up to your level of incompetence.
"You want an example of default, refer to Argentina. They defaulted almost a decade ago and they STILL can't borrow money. Every single thing they import must be paid for with hard currency extracted from products they sell to other nations."
There's a big, and I mean BIG difference between Argentina and the U.S.A. Remember the saying about having a problem when you owe the bank a $100 dollars? If you owe them a $100 M, then it becomes their problem. Argentina is practically a nobody in the world economy (sorry Argentinos), but if the US defaults, expect everybody from China, Japan, the Arabs, to the EU (having their own credit problems) to pitch in and try to solve the problem.
The "only" downside is that the next president will probably be a IMF/WB or some other international finance syndicate puppet.
Now if you're really being paranoid about a US default, then stop thinking local, think about global recession and World War III, as the reicher nations start arming themselves in a free-for-all for resources that could no longer be acquired by normal trade.
"Americans are work-aholics relatively speaking and thus will bury their head in their here-and-now work such that distant knowledge fades quickly as the immediate situation takes over."
Well the Japanese and Koreans are even more workaholic, but that doesn't seem to have as bad as an effect on their skill score. So the difference has to lie somewhere else. Maybe the US is by far the largest country in the set, with the largest immigrant population to boot.
From the Yahoo summary: "Japan, Finland, Canada, Netherlands, Australia, Sweden, Norway, Flanders-Belgium, Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, and Korea all scored significantly higher than the United States in all three areas on the test"
Except for Japan, these are all much smaller countries than the United States. I'd be more interested in a comparison equally large countries like India, China, Russia and Brazil.
Make tablets a part of the curriculum only when they've become as disposable as non-graphical scientific calculators. Then whether you like it or not the kids will be bringing their own tablets to school even if they're as dirt poor as the hobo down the street. I already see hobos armed with feature phones so the day shouldn't be far off. Large scale deployments like this smell too much of graft.
"This is more or less what happened to my brother, whose IQ is 10 points higher than mine but who had a hearing disability that made the educational system sideline him. Now he's driving a truck instead of curing cancer or building space probes."
Maybe he's happier driving a truck? When the economy falters, the first to get cut are those useless rocket scientists. Your brother will probbly be driving a truck well into the zombie apocalypse.
The "advantage" men have ovar women exists moslty at the highest levels of sports that focus on strength and lung capacity. Maybe the solution is to introduce more sports that focus on flexibility such as gymnastics. Admittedly judging such events is going to be more subjective than a game where you breast the tape or lift up a fixed series of weights.
"I wouldn't call this "micromanagement". I'd call it "focussed management". "
Mod parent up (little problem with the spelling of "focused"). The great manager delegates the things that need to be delegated and focuses on the things she or he is best at, whether that's the company finances, the product design or simply motivating people to do their best. Even if Jobs "micro-managed" the iProduct line, I'm sure employees would have resigned en masse if his trademark attention to detail had been let loose on the human resources department.
Sorry for those whose accounts were compromised. But speaking as a FOSS user, I see this as karma for all those times that Adobe made Linux look bad because Adobe Crash (aka Flash) ran worse under that OS than under MS Windows. Which isn't to say that it actually ran well under Windows, just that it ran worse under Linux and had 2x the system requirements. I even remember some Adobe engineer blaming the poor support for Linux on its fucktitude of audio (Alsa, OSS, Pulse, etc) and video system software when they could have coded to the lowest common denominator or at least the most widely deployed solutions (Alsa for audio or Open GL or maybe XVideo for accelerated video).
Also, aside from the shortage of A-list gaming titles, among the most common complaints you'd hear from users who have tried but don't want to shift to Linux is the absence of Adobe graphics products, products that ran reasonably well under Wine, but which Adobe has persistently refused to release for Linux even during the time in the late 90s when desktop Linux penetration approached that of Apple.
"Unlike what some would like, Snowden only risked life behind bars."
Only life behind bars? Funny things can happen in jail, you know. And maybe you should tell the innocents that were incarcarated in Guatanamo that they should be happy because they were still set free and not killed on the spot.
...everybody has it. The last thing we need is awesome tech only spies and generals possess (weapons of mass destruction/contamination being a notable exception). So yes, this is unwelcome technology, but since it's already there, we might as well let everybody have it.
If it's any consolation, this dictator has no powerful friends or the oil and mineral weath to prop up his regime. So the chances of a UN intervention are greater if the casaulties go beyond the low thousands. Russia and China might even volunteer troops for a "peacekeeping" mission just to prove they aren't necessarily the best friends of opressive regimes. Certainly, the chances of them using their veto against a UN Security Council mandating sanctions would be much less.
This would work for famous images or images that have a certain similarity threshold to them. New images would have to be vetted. So you need to censor the news so that only photos of fully clothed and smiling children can be seen.
Okay a more concrete example. Would you consider censoring this very famous photo that appears in this Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Thi_Kim_Phuc). The photo meets all the mechanical criteria for a child abuse photo. Sure, it should be easy to put exceptions for such famous images into your child porn recognition algorithm, but this would mean erecting a prude's verion of the Great Firewall, crewed by gatekeepers who decide whether it's okay for the masses to see a controversial image.
"...but gradually they changed things and Gnome bloat got worse..."
Er, I think you're posting in the wrong story (try this: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/09/24/1252243/middle-click-paste-not-for-long). Not that they're doing a particularly good job of it, but Canonical/Ubuntu is moving off Gnome. To cite but two examples, Mir and Unity aren't Gnome technologies. It's beginning to look like a race between these two organizations as to who becomes irrelevant faster.
"It is a popular--and recent--misconception that faith and reasoning are incompatible. Many, if not most, of the great minds of the ages were believers in God or in other forms of religion. The idea that religious people are necessarily irrational fools is simply a lie; there are plenty of both religious and atheistic people who are irrational fools."
You appear to differentiate between religious and atheistic people. That's not always the case. Classical Buddhism is a famous example of an atheistic religion, although in popular versions of the religion Buddha is transformed into some sort of demigod. Some animistic religions could also be considered atheistic ("godless" or creator-less) if the believers consider supernatural beings as simply immortal essences, different but not superior to humans.
Point taken. So let me retcon my post a bit. I was thinking of comparing ridesharing to fund transfer via cellphones. Cellphone-based payment was first widely deployed in the Third World, probably because most people there don't have access to the real Internet.
Incidentally I don't think being Third World is necessarily bad. With a Third World mindset, you easily learn concepts like recycling and repurposing, how one nation's junk can be turned into another nation's transportation, information and even weapons systems. That is the maker spirit at its most basic, making not to satisfy an itch but to survive.
You're assuming that people in the Third World don't have cellphones they can use to send SMS message to the driver/owner of the vehicle for a pickup. While most (Third World) riders would happily and sometimes quite literally hop aboard the nearest passing vehicle for hire, some have made arrangements for scheduled pickups. Probably not the same hi-tech GPS/computer-based dispatch system described by Wikipedia, but if this were another patent story, consider this as prior art.
Wrong. The goal is to spread intelligence beyond this rock. I don't care if that intelligence is human, cyborg, android, or a sentient starship, so long as it is intelligent enough not to want the total extinction of other species.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll take your word for it. I've read my fair share of thinly disguised slashvertisements. Still articles like this are as a less annoying way for companies to push their products up your nose. Less annoying only because it doesn't suddenly pop up, blink and hog your entire screen.
"Take out my phone, press the "on" button, swipe to unlock, hit "home", find the app, do whatever the hell the app needs me to do and... fuck it, use the fucking credit card. Using a phone to pay for a burger is retarded. It's less convenient, what's the fucking point??"
What you cite isn't a problem intrinsic to payment by phone technology. It's an interface issue. It's like using the Windows 8 UX to conclude that desktop computers suck on principle (well, maybe all of them suck a "little").
Moreover, when you look at it, credit cards as well as debit cards are a form of pay-by-phone technology. Unless you're stuck in the middle of nowhereland where purchases are logged manually, your credit card is connected to a terminal that phones home or somewhere else to verify that the card is genuine and not picked from somebody's pocket. Of course just as with your precious plastic, charges may apply when you pay-by-mobile-phone.
Payment by cellphone is already a much more convenient experience in most 3rd World countries, especially in Africa. Why? Because there you're either too poor to afford a credit card or the application requires jumping through too many hoops. Cheap and readily available credit isn't a universal phenomenon.
"If the content producer hasn't given you permission to consume their content, then you have no right to seek it elsewhere. If I cannot watch a movie through legal channels then I don't watch the movie. Same thing with TV shows and music. I don't consider respecting other peoples' rights to be very onerous, and I don't think I'm missing out on much."
Copyright is a fairly recent concept in the history of human culture. It's not like concepts of liberty, free speech or the right to life which people more ancient than the Greeks have argued and argued against.
The closest analog we have to copyright is the arcana hoarded by some mystical groups or the way the common people were prevented from reading the Bible. Most people were happy to tell and retell each other their stories, stories that became the basis of each country, each civilization's culture.
It's this culture that forms the foundation of every copyrighted work ever produced. So I have to ask, when even they are clearly freeloading off our common culture, what gives "content producers" the right to deny others from enjoying and sharing this new addition to our cultural heritage?
I'm not saying writers, artists, etc, should just let big commercial entities like Walt Disney "steal" their work. All I'm saying is that we should get rid of the monopolistic "all rights reserved" provision, which in today's networked world can only be enforced through NSA-like surveillance, and focus simply on the commercial exploitation aspect.
Actually not just in Japan. You definitely need different licenses to drive a truck and a motorcycle. I see self-parking to fully autonomous vehicles being treated as totally different categories of vehicles.
You don't need fancy biometrics to enforce the system. Right now our driving license system is mostly enforced by the honor system and the medium threat of getting pulled over by a police officer. Even now you can theoretically drive a truck without a license, just don't do something that makes you stand out like swerving between lanes or ramming a fire hydrant..
Unless funding increases for the next year or even if just gets funded at all, this supposed research project is more likely just part of the financial juggling that happens in any agency with a large budget which wants to keep that budget. The simple rule is: if you don't spend it, you lose it in next year's budget. An exchange between the officer-in-charge of a bureau and his subordinate might go:
SUBORDINATE: Sir, we have this $48 million left over from our higgs-boson missile defense shield research research project.
OIC: $48 million? Go spend it somewhere useful.
And so the subordinate, a law-abiding citizen who doesn't want to spend the money on a second honeymoon to the Himalayas, goes around emailing his civilian friends from the academe and industry. Do you have any project that could use $48 million dollars in funding? The only catch is that it must have a military application, no matter how far-fetched. Since practically any high-tech research project will have a military application, this is easier said than done. The subordinate goes through the deluge of project proposals and passes a few over to his boss, who rubberstamps the one with the most current events relevance. Since Wikileaking appears to be very much in the news, the project that gets approved is the one that purports to plug leaks at the human source..
The bureaucratic ideal is to go slightly over the budget. Overspend too much and the guillotine of god (Congress) comes down upon you. Underspend too much and your bureau's budget gets slashed by that amount. You'll receive a letter of appreciation and probably a chance to get kicked up to your level of incompetence.
"You want an example of default, refer to Argentina. They defaulted almost a decade ago and they STILL can't borrow money. Every single thing they import must be paid for with hard currency extracted from products they sell to other nations."
There's a big, and I mean BIG difference between Argentina and the U.S.A. Remember the saying about having a problem when you owe the bank a $100 dollars? If you owe them a $100 M, then it becomes their problem. Argentina is practically a nobody in the world economy (sorry Argentinos), but if the US defaults, expect everybody from China, Japan, the Arabs, to the EU (having their own credit problems) to pitch in and try to solve the problem.
The "only" downside is that the next president will probably be a IMF/WB or some other international finance syndicate puppet.
Now if you're really being paranoid about a US default, then stop thinking local, think about global recession and World War III, as the reicher nations start arming themselves in a free-for-all for resources that could no longer be acquired by normal trade.
"Americans are work-aholics relatively speaking and thus will bury their head in their here-and-now work such that distant knowledge fades quickly as the immediate situation takes over."
Well the Japanese and Koreans are even more workaholic, but that doesn't seem to have as bad as an effect on their skill score. So the difference has to lie somewhere else. Maybe the US is by far the largest country in the set, with the largest immigrant population to boot.
From the Yahoo summary: "Japan, Finland, Canada, Netherlands, Australia, Sweden, Norway, Flanders-Belgium, Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, and Korea all scored significantly higher than the United States in all three areas on the test"
Except for Japan, these are all much smaller countries than the United States. I'd be more interested in a comparison equally large countries like India, China, Russia and Brazil.
Make tablets a part of the curriculum only when they've become as disposable as non-graphical scientific calculators. Then whether you like it or not the kids will be bringing their own tablets to school even if they're as dirt poor as the hobo down the street. I already see hobos armed with feature phones so the day shouldn't be far off. Large scale deployments like this smell too much of graft.
"This is more or less what happened to my brother, whose IQ is 10 points higher than mine but who had a hearing disability that made the educational system sideline him. Now he's driving a truck instead of curing cancer or building space probes."
Maybe he's happier driving a truck? When the economy falters, the first to get cut are those useless rocket scientists. Your brother will probbly be driving a truck well into the zombie apocalypse.
The "advantage" men have ovar women exists moslty at the highest levels of sports that focus on strength and lung capacity. Maybe the solution is to introduce more sports that focus on flexibility such as gymnastics. Admittedly judging such events is going to be more subjective than a game where you breast the tape or lift up a fixed series of weights.
"I wouldn't call this "micromanagement". I'd call it "focussed management". "
Mod parent up (little problem with the spelling of "focused"). The great manager delegates the things that need to be delegated and focuses on the things she or he is best at, whether that's the company finances, the product design or simply motivating people to do their best. Even if Jobs "micro-managed" the iProduct line, I'm sure employees would have resigned en masse if his trademark attention to detail had been let loose on the human resources department.
Sorry for those whose accounts were compromised. But speaking as a FOSS user, I see this as karma for all those times that Adobe made Linux look bad because Adobe Crash (aka Flash) ran worse under that OS than under MS Windows. Which isn't to say that it actually ran well under Windows, just that it ran worse under Linux and had 2x the system requirements. I even remember some Adobe engineer blaming the poor support for Linux on its fucktitude of audio (Alsa, OSS, Pulse, etc) and video system software when they could have coded to the lowest common denominator or at least the most widely deployed solutions (Alsa for audio or Open GL or maybe XVideo for accelerated video).
Also, aside from the shortage of A-list gaming titles, among the most common complaints you'd hear from users who have tried but don't want to shift to Linux is the absence of Adobe graphics products, products that ran reasonably well under Wine, but which Adobe has persistently refused to release for Linux even during the time in the late 90s when desktop Linux penetration approached that of Apple.
"Unlike what some would like, Snowden only risked life behind bars."
Only life behind bars? Funny things can happen in jail, you know. And maybe you should tell the innocents that were incarcarated in Guatanamo that they should be happy because they were still set free and not killed on the spot.
...everybody has it. The last thing we need is awesome tech only spies and generals possess (weapons of mass destruction/contamination being a notable exception). So yes, this is unwelcome technology, but since it's already there, we might as well let everybody have it.
If it's any consolation, this dictator has no powerful friends or the oil and mineral weath to prop up his regime. So the chances of a UN intervention are greater if the casaulties go beyond the low thousands. Russia and China might even volunteer troops for a "peacekeeping" mission just to prove they aren't necessarily the best friends of opressive regimes. Certainly, the chances of them using their veto against a UN Security Council mandating sanctions would be much less.
This would work for famous images or images that have a certain similarity threshold to them. New images would have to be vetted. So you need to censor the news so that only photos of fully clothed and smiling children can be seen.
Okay a more concrete example. Would you consider censoring this very famous photo that appears in this Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Thi_Kim_Phuc). The photo meets all the mechanical criteria for a child abuse photo. Sure, it should be easy to put exceptions for such famous images into your child porn recognition algorithm, but this would mean erecting a prude's verion of the Great Firewall, crewed by gatekeepers who decide whether it's okay for the masses to see a controversial image.
So how does a machine recognize the difference between a war photo of a bloodied child and a photo of civilian child abuse?
I'm not (yet) laughing, but a certain independent artist named Madonna is reported to be among the first to sign on.
capcha: unionize
"...but gradually they changed things and Gnome bloat got worse..."
Er, I think you're posting in the wrong story (try this: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/09/24/1252243/middle-click-paste-not-for-long). Not that they're doing a particularly good job of it, but Canonical/Ubuntu is moving off Gnome. To cite but two examples, Mir and Unity aren't Gnome technologies. It's beginning to look like a race between these two organizations as to who becomes irrelevant faster.
"It is a popular--and recent--misconception that faith and reasoning are incompatible. Many, if not most, of the great minds of the ages were believers in God or in other forms of religion. The idea that religious people are necessarily irrational fools is simply a lie; there are plenty of both religious and atheistic people who are irrational fools."
You appear to differentiate between religious and atheistic people. That's not always the case. Classical Buddhism is a famous example of an atheistic religion, although in popular versions of the religion Buddha is transformed into some sort of demigod. Some animistic religions could also be considered atheistic ("godless" or creator-less) if the believers consider supernatural beings as simply immortal essences, different but not superior to humans.
"They lost their spine"
Seeing their imminent defeat at the hands of the coconut-wielding proto-simians, their landlubbing ancestors lost heart and fled to the sea.
Point taken. So let me retcon my post a bit. I was thinking of comparing ridesharing to fund transfer via cellphones. Cellphone-based payment was first widely deployed in the Third World, probably because most people there don't have access to the real Internet.
Incidentally I don't think being Third World is necessarily bad. With a Third World mindset, you easily learn concepts like recycling and repurposing, how one nation's junk can be turned into another nation's transportation, information and even weapons systems. That is the maker spirit at its most basic, making not to satisfy an itch but to survive.
You're assuming that people in the Third World don't have cellphones they can use to send SMS message to the driver/owner of the vehicle for a pickup. While most (Third World) riders would happily and sometimes quite literally hop aboard the nearest passing vehicle for hire, some have made arrangements for scheduled pickups. Probably not the same hi-tech GPS/computer-based dispatch system described by Wikipedia, but if this were another patent story, consider this as prior art.
Wrong. The goal is to spread intelligence beyond this rock. I don't care if that intelligence is human, cyborg, android, or a sentient starship, so long as it is intelligent enough not to want the total extinction of other species.