Now if a>4, the code inevitably runs into undefined behaviour, and therefore it may assume that a is not larger than 4 right from the start. Therefore it is allowed to compile the complete block to simply
Right. Which means that the a compiler that removes this code (compiler A) will create a smaller executable than a compiler that doesn't(compiler B). This will affect load times, therefore it could cause race conditions to surface that otherwise wouldn't. Also, it could cause all kinds of really subtle memory complications. And there's the timing issues from when it's actually running, as well. It also doesn't matter if you are using compiler A or compiler B. If you switch from one to the other, all kinds of subtle, hard to track down conditions could be exposed.
1) Spider-Tracers were NOT fired from his web shooters, they were thrown by hand.
Sometimes thrown by hand, sometimes from the web shooters. The actual mechanism on the web shooters to fire them is seperate from the regular web shooter mechanism, but still attached to it. It might be modular, not sure.
Not sure what signal they emitted, but it was only detectable via his "spider-sense".
Actually, the earliest ones required a tracking device. Later designs were modified to emit some sort of signal he could follow with his own special senses.
Anyway, the point is that small tracking devices fired from some sort of launcher have been around in fiction for ages. They certainly predate _Ghost in the Shell_.
If we're using fictional examples, Spiderman has been using tracking devices in the comics for 30-40 years now. They are fired from the web shooters and stick to targets. They don't use GPS, of course, they're more traditional tracking devices that emit a signal and have to be tracked by the signal. The point is that this idea is hardly new, but it's interesting that there's this real-world working example
In most states in the United States, if you can't get legally-required automobile insurance, the government forces the insurance carriers to offer it to you at regulated-but-high rates.
Most states also had a "high risk insurance pool" for health insurance before Obamacare. Yes, it was expensive, yes, it was out of reach for even the lower-middle-class, but at least it was something.
For either, if it's unreasonably expensive, then you're effectively excluded, even if you can theoretically participate.
Compilers will remove code that doesn't actually do anything. This could actually affect the program. Code that does nothing can still act essentially as a noop. Code that is never called can make the executable slightly larger, causing longer load times. If you have a race condition or weird timing error, your code could mysteriously work with a delay and not work without it, or vice versa.
If that is happening, of course, you have problems that can't really be fixed by a compiler. "Fixing" this issue in the compiler is just as likely to expose new wierd bugs. The term "unstable code" is, I agree with you, poorly defined at best and utter nonsense at worst.
When Katrina hit, nobody outside the country offered any assistance whatsoever to the people in need, and in fact there were many people in Europe gleefully gloating about the disaster with a nice glow of "ha-ha" schadenfreude.
Well, the rest of the world outside the US is obviously just terrible... At least, maybe you could credibly claim that if what you are saying were actually true. Many, many countries offered and provided aid after Katrina. Some of it was delayed due to the US initially refusing it, of course.
I've been to Phoenix. One thing that's immediately obvious flying in is that, if the water supply to the city is cut off by anything, the whole city needs to be evacuated or everyone dies.
In the auto insurance industry, if you can't get insured, you don't get to drive (legally). In the health insurance industry, if you can't get insured, you die. Slight difference. Also, if you can't get auto insurance, it's generally your own doing. If you can't get health insurance it's generally due to factors beyond your control (regardless of the statistically poorer health of people who take worse care of themselves).
That is a good point. The counterpoint would be stings where the police sell "stolen" merchandise which isn't really stolen, or fake drugs, etc. In those cases, intent is all that counts. On the other hand, they may be prosecuting people in those cases with laws that specifically criminalize intent to buy stolen merchandise, drugs, etc. I'm not sure if there's any such law for unlicensed copyrighted material. It also may matter that it's (presumably) not the police doing it in this case. After all, selling fake drugs is also a crime. I'm not so sure about selling fake stolen merchandise... If you say it's stolen, but it's really not, is it a crime? Maybe fraud? Anyway, the police can get away with it, because no-one will prosecute them for anything they do in a sting, apparently even if undercover officers initiate orders (within the structure of criminal organizations that are known to kill people for disobeying orders) to committ serious crimes.
So... Good point. If it's a private individual doing it, not acting as a police "informant" with all the protection against prosecution for fraud, outright felonious behaviour, and sometimes even murder, that situation provides, then they may have sabotaged themselves by acting fraudulently. It's hard to tell. I'm guessing in a civil case it would swing to the side of the file sharer who was tricked by the site, in any sort of criminal case, the court will follow the all important "get the bad guys" legal principle and ignore the shaky grounds any evidence was obtained under.
Entrapment doesn't really exist as a legal defense any more. The courts accept the catch-22 logic that taking an action is absolute evidence of predisposition to take that action. To win with a defense of entrapment, you'd pretty much have to prove that they held a gun to your head to make you do it. Even then modern courts probably wouldn't consider it entrapment.
You can call it "sweat of the brow" if you want to, but that's not a reasonable description of, say, drug testing. First you need to invent a possible new drug. Then you need to test it on a large number of people. etc. This involves very significant up-front costs. It isn't that it's more inventive, it's that it's a lot more expensive to get it to the working stage.
Ok. In the first sentence, you say that it's not "sweat of the brow", then you go on in the remaining sentences to explain how it's expensive hard work on a large scale, but it's not really inventive... I think it's a very reasonable term.
I think there should be a way to either pay up front, or repay, researchers who do important research. Granting artificial monopolies is not the right way to do that and is completely anti-free market.
Claiming that requiring people to wear yellow stars or pink/red/black/brown/purple triangles is a movement down the "slippery slope" to genocide is ludicrous.
That certainly would be an improvement. One way or another, the PTO needs to become a more responsible actor, rather than an assembly line rubber stamping beaurocracy.
How it works? They take full MSRP (which usually gives you 100% markup) double *that* price then divide up into payments. So as an example a living room set with a $1500 MSRP (which probably cost them $700) would end up being $125 a month OR $57.70 a week (Easy Payments!). If the customer paid through the two years required to own it they would have paid $3000 for a couch they could have gotten for sale elsewhere for about $1200.
That's horrific. If they can afford $57.70 (should that be $28.85?) a week or $125 a month, they should be buying really cheap used furniture and saving up for something nicer, not submitting to exploitation. The problem is obviously our appalling optimism bias. People look towards the future and say: "So what if it costs more, things are going to turn around and get so much better in the future that I'll just be able to pay this off and not worry about the extra cost."
The only time that patents seem to me to be justified is where there are truly significant up-front costs.
The "sweat of the brow" theory of patentable discovery is disturbing. Long term artificial monopolies on scientific discovery should not be granted. There clearly is an interest in providing funds for organizations that do important research, but granting monopoly rents is not the solution. Tax-funded grants for scientific research are a better solution. As for how to assign the grant money, it can be done in a meritocratic fashion, and it can be done retroactively for those who laid out their own funds to discover something important. This is actually the way it works now in some fields of scientific research. The problem is, the organizations involved get granted patents as well after they've taken the public money. Funding scientific research this way makes patents essentially an unfunded mandate. You're being indirectly taxed in a very inefficient manner to support scientific research rather than being directly taxed.
Perhaps what is needed is some sort of additional type of intellectual property for scientific discoveries. One with compulsory licensing and that only comes into effect when the invention is used in a patented invention. Discover insulin, hooray. You get a registered discovery that brings you government grant money and future consideration for more grant money. If someone creates an invention using that registered discovery and patents it, they get taxed on their patent and the tax money goes into funding you.
There's only so much searching we can do, and if we can't find and present evidence that something was already known publicly, we can't just send out rejections based on how many Slashdotters think it's obvious.
The system that you're working in is obviously completely broken. You really should be sending out rejections based on even just one Slashdotter (or any other person) thinking it's obvious. To that, you'll probably respond that everything is obvious in hindsight, so the clear answer is not to use hindsight. Instead, have at least one hired expert in the field (plus as many private individuals who want to participate for free) whose role is to challenge patents. They don't get the full text of the patent, rather they just get presented with the basic idea of the patent: inputs, outputs, a description of what the process or invention is meant to achieve and the problem it solves plus, for patents involving uses for scientific discoveries, all the details of the scientific discovery (for example, if researchers have just discovered a hormone called insulin that regulates carbohydrate metabolism, the research on what it does is presented so that the expert(s) can come up with ideas for what to use it for). The expert (and any random Joe Schmoe off the street who wants to participate) then does a write-up of all the ways they can think of to solve the problem and all those little bullet point "claims" that are in patent applications. If what they come up with is substantially close to what's in the patent application, it's rejected for being obvious to an expert in the field. If it's impossible to create the description I'm talking about without giving away the supposed patentable subject matter, then it's either an obvious invention, a scientific discovery posing as an invention, or they're trying to patent an idea or even the problem itself rather than an invention.
Really, it's time we took a little more care in a process that issues long-standing injunctions against everybody, everywhere for a very long time, based largely on some ridiculous claim. Especially when you consider that the process involves a patent office which basically says: "the courts will sort it out", while the courts assume that the patent office is virtually infallible. The system is a mess.
Now now. The originators of Happy Birthday to you put a huge amount of work into changing a few words from an already existing song to change it into a birthday song.
So you've moved your position from how much they spend (which was wrong and bollocks) to some notional relative spend per race
I'm not the original poster you replied to, so my previous post in this thread is my original position. The original poster wrote:
Team costs per syndicate are in the hundreds of millions making Indie racing or formula 1 a joke in comparison.
That doesn't seem to be inconsistent with my interpretation since it didn't specify that it meant an absolute total. You scaled things in terms of one year of America's cup being worth 1/3rd of a year of racing. I scaled things the other way in terms of three years of America's cup being worth one race. I'm not sure why you feel you should be the absolute arbiter of what elements should be compared and this seems more logical to me. Neither I nor the original poster claimed that the America's cup was financially larger in absolute terms than car racing so, if they're to be compared, race to race seems the best way.
So as they run 19 races (not ten) per year, and have two cars, and we multiply that by three, then we get 114 races over three years which works out at $7.8M per race.
I said "at least ten". I wasn't finding anything stating the exact number, so I just based it on ten named races one of their drivers had competed in during 2012 according to his wikipedia article. So your numbers really do drive down the average cost per race. Obviously that's an economy of scale in action. Now, if there were just one big race every three years it's interesting to consider what they would spend. The cost breakdown on the page they listed says that they spend 50% just on engines. So that would be over three million dollars per race. I don't know how common switching out an engine is during a race, but I imagine they avoid it if they can. In any case, if there were just one big race every three years, it means that the 50% they spend on engines would drop sharply, and plenty of other costs would also drop sharply. It's hard to figure out a good way to scale the costs.
In the end, it appears that we're comparing apples and oranges to a degree. You also said:
I'm a little surprised you didn't argue that the cost per mile makes F1 cheaper as each race is around 200M (or so), so the Americas Cup is even more expensive, but hey, you carry on living in your fantasy world that the Americas Cup costs more than F1 racing in spite of facts.
I did refer to such possibilities when I said: "Ultimately, you can view it pretty much any way you want and say that one outspends the other per this or that." and I also said "Car racing is, obviously, bigger overall in terms of money spent." but, hey, you carry on living in your fantasy world where I'm saying something I didn't say.
Of course, an America's cup team does one challenge with one vehicle in that time frame. As far as I can tell, team Red Bull runs two vehicles and at least ten challenges a year, so they run 60 races in in the time an America's Cup team runs one. So, even if they spend nine times more in total in the same time frame, they're spending less than 1/6th as much per race. Ultimately, you can view it pretty much any way you want and say that one outspends the other per this or that. Car racing is, obviously, bigger overall in terms of money spent. America's cup sailing obviously involves far more money, design time and difficulty on a single vehicle intended essentially for a single use.
I know someone's going to complain "BUT JOBS!!!" but the jobs the tech in TFA are jobs are jobs only the most desperate want.
Well, yes, but if the jobs go away, then the most desperate won't get to work and die in the gutters. Not that I don't think such jobs should be replaced by technology. I absolutely think they should be. There needs to be a safety net for the people who end up structurally unemployed as a result, however.
A phone trace is done by getting the records from the phone company. Back in the days of operators manually switching lines, you actually did have to keep someone on the line to complete a phone trace because a phone trace would have required having the manager at the local switching office call around to find out where the call was coming from. All of those manual operators were replaced by electronic switching and electronic record keeping. As soon as the record-keeping became electronic, it became unnecessary to keep the person on the phone. Just making a phone connection (for that matter, probably just picking up the phone and getting a dial tone) makes an electronic record no matter how long you're on the phone. So, all that was required for a phone trace after that was an electronic records search. Today that records search is very automated and many law enforcement agencies and intelligence agencies have their own direct access to the phone company records or even have their own comms equipment set up in parallel.
So, no citatation needed, it's just another one of those stupid movie things. The record creation is concurrent with the call being made, so it really is a fraction of a second (probably a negative fraction as the record certainly exists before the phone even rings). The interface used to look at the trace information probably is web-based in this day and age, of course, so that probably does take a brief amount of time to load.
Slashdot Mirror
All the hospitals are legally required to do is "stabilize" you, then they can shove you out the door.
Now if a>4, the code inevitably runs into undefined behaviour, and therefore it may assume that a is not larger than 4 right from the start. Therefore it is allowed to compile the complete block to simply
Right. Which means that the a compiler that removes this code (compiler A) will create a smaller executable than a compiler that doesn't(compiler B). This will affect load times, therefore it could cause race conditions to surface that otherwise wouldn't. Also, it could cause all kinds of really subtle memory complications. And there's the timing issues from when it's actually running, as well. It also doesn't matter if you are using compiler A or compiler B. If you switch from one to the other, all kinds of subtle, hard to track down conditions could be exposed.
1) Spider-Tracers were NOT fired from his web shooters, they were thrown by hand.
Sometimes thrown by hand, sometimes from the web shooters. The actual mechanism on the web shooters to fire them is seperate from the regular web shooter mechanism, but still attached to it. It might be modular, not sure.
Not sure what signal they emitted, but it was only detectable via his "spider-sense".
Actually, the earliest ones required a tracking device. Later designs were modified to emit some sort of signal he could follow with his own special senses.
Anyway, the point is that small tracking devices fired from some sort of launcher have been around in fiction for ages. They certainly predate _Ghost in the Shell_.
If we're using fictional examples, Spiderman has been using tracking devices in the comics for 30-40 years now. They are fired from the web shooters and stick to targets. They don't use GPS, of course, they're more traditional tracking devices that emit a signal and have to be tracked by the signal. The point is that this idea is hardly new, but it's interesting that there's this real-world working example
In most states in the United States, if you can't get legally-required automobile insurance, the government forces the insurance carriers to offer it to you at regulated-but-high rates.
Most states also had a "high risk insurance pool" for health insurance before Obamacare. Yes, it was expensive, yes, it was out of reach for even the lower-middle-class, but at least it was something.
For either, if it's unreasonably expensive, then you're effectively excluded, even if you can theoretically participate.
Compilers will remove code that doesn't actually do anything. This could actually affect the program. Code that does nothing can still act essentially as a noop. Code that is never called can make the executable slightly larger, causing longer load times. If you have a race condition or weird timing error, your code could mysteriously work with a delay and not work without it, or vice versa.
If that is happening, of course, you have problems that can't really be fixed by a compiler. "Fixing" this issue in the compiler is just as likely to expose new wierd bugs. The term "unstable code" is, I agree with you, poorly defined at best and utter nonsense at worst.
When Katrina hit, nobody outside the country offered any assistance whatsoever to the people in need, and in fact there were many people in Europe gleefully gloating about the disaster with a nice glow of "ha-ha" schadenfreude.
Well, the rest of the world outside the US is obviously just terrible... At least, maybe you could credibly claim that if what you are saying were actually true. Many, many countries offered and provided aid after Katrina. Some of it was delayed due to the US initially refusing it, of course.
I've been to Phoenix. One thing that's immediately obvious flying in is that, if the water supply to the city is cut off by anything, the whole city needs to be evacuated or everyone dies.
In the auto insurance industry, if you can't get insured, you don't get to drive (legally). In the health insurance industry, if you can't get insured, you die. Slight difference. Also, if you can't get auto insurance, it's generally your own doing. If you can't get health insurance it's generally due to factors beyond your control (regardless of the statistically poorer health of people who take worse care of themselves).
That is a good point. The counterpoint would be stings where the police sell "stolen" merchandise which isn't really stolen, or fake drugs, etc. In those cases, intent is all that counts. On the other hand, they may be prosecuting people in those cases with laws that specifically criminalize intent to buy stolen merchandise, drugs, etc. I'm not sure if there's any such law for unlicensed copyrighted material. It also may matter that it's (presumably) not the police doing it in this case. After all, selling fake drugs is also a crime. I'm not so sure about selling fake stolen merchandise... If you say it's stolen, but it's really not, is it a crime? Maybe fraud? Anyway, the police can get away with it, because no-one will prosecute them for anything they do in a sting, apparently even if undercover officers initiate orders (within the structure of criminal organizations that are known to kill people for disobeying orders) to committ serious crimes.
So... Good point. If it's a private individual doing it, not acting as a police "informant" with all the protection against prosecution for fraud, outright felonious behaviour, and sometimes even murder, that situation provides, then they may have sabotaged themselves by acting fraudulently. It's hard to tell. I'm guessing in a civil case it would swing to the side of the file sharer who was tricked by the site, in any sort of criminal case, the court will follow the all important "get the bad guys" legal principle and ignore the shaky grounds any evidence was obtained under.
He has announced his future retirement, he is not presently retired.
Entrapment doesn't really exist as a legal defense any more. The courts accept the catch-22 logic that taking an action is absolute evidence of predisposition to take that action. To win with a defense of entrapment, you'd pretty much have to prove that they held a gun to your head to make you do it. Even then modern courts probably wouldn't consider it entrapment.
You can call it "sweat of the brow" if you want to, but that's not a reasonable description of, say, drug testing. First you need to invent a possible new drug. Then you need to test it on a large number of people. etc. This involves very significant up-front costs. It isn't that it's more inventive, it's that it's a lot more expensive to get it to the working stage.
Ok. In the first sentence, you say that it's not "sweat of the brow", then you go on in the remaining sentences to explain how it's expensive hard work on a large scale, but it's not really inventive... I think it's a very reasonable term.
I think there should be a way to either pay up front, or repay, researchers who do important research. Granting artificial monopolies is not the right way to do that and is completely anti-free market.
Claiming that requiring people to wear yellow stars or pink/red/black/brown/purple triangles is a movement down the "slippery slope" to genocide is ludicrous.
That certainly would be an improvement. One way or another, the PTO needs to become a more responsible actor, rather than an assembly line rubber stamping beaurocracy.
How it works? They take full MSRP (which usually gives you 100% markup) double *that* price then divide up into payments. So as an example a living room set with a $1500 MSRP (which probably cost them $700) would end up being $125 a month OR $57.70 a week (Easy Payments!). If the customer paid through the two years required to own it they would have paid $3000 for a couch they could have gotten for sale elsewhere for about $1200.
That's horrific. If they can afford $57.70 (should that be $28.85?) a week or $125 a month, they should be buying really cheap used furniture and saving up for something nicer, not submitting to exploitation. The problem is obviously our appalling optimism bias. People look towards the future and say: "So what if it costs more, things are going to turn around and get so much better in the future that I'll just be able to pay this off and not worry about the extra cost."
The only time that patents seem to me to be justified is where there are truly significant up-front costs.
The "sweat of the brow" theory of patentable discovery is disturbing. Long term artificial monopolies on scientific discovery should not be granted. There clearly is an interest in providing funds for organizations that do important research, but granting monopoly rents is not the solution. Tax-funded grants for scientific research are a better solution. As for how to assign the grant money, it can be done in a meritocratic fashion, and it can be done retroactively for those who laid out their own funds to discover something important. This is actually the way it works now in some fields of scientific research. The problem is, the organizations involved get granted patents as well after they've taken the public money. Funding scientific research this way makes patents essentially an unfunded mandate. You're being indirectly taxed in a very inefficient manner to support scientific research rather than being directly taxed.
Perhaps what is needed is some sort of additional type of intellectual property for scientific discoveries. One with compulsory licensing and that only comes into effect when the invention is used in a patented invention. Discover insulin, hooray. You get a registered discovery that brings you government grant money and future consideration for more grant money. If someone creates an invention using that registered discovery and patents it, they get taxed on their patent and the tax money goes into funding you.
There's only so much searching we can do, and if we can't find and present evidence that something was already known publicly, we can't just send out rejections based on how many Slashdotters think it's obvious.
The system that you're working in is obviously completely broken. You really should be sending out rejections based on even just one Slashdotter (or any other person) thinking it's obvious. To that, you'll probably respond that everything is obvious in hindsight, so the clear answer is not to use hindsight. Instead, have at least one hired expert in the field (plus as many private individuals who want to participate for free) whose role is to challenge patents. They don't get the full text of the patent, rather they just get presented with the basic idea of the patent: inputs, outputs, a description of what the process or invention is meant to achieve and the problem it solves plus, for patents involving uses for scientific discoveries, all the details of the scientific discovery (for example, if researchers have just discovered a hormone called insulin that regulates carbohydrate metabolism, the research on what it does is presented so that the expert(s) can come up with ideas for what to use it for). The expert (and any random Joe Schmoe off the street who wants to participate) then does a write-up of all the ways they can think of to solve the problem and all those little bullet point "claims" that are in patent applications. If what they come up with is substantially close to what's in the patent application, it's rejected for being obvious to an expert in the field. If it's impossible to create the description I'm talking about without giving away the supposed patentable subject matter, then it's either an obvious invention, a scientific discovery posing as an invention, or they're trying to patent an idea or even the problem itself rather than an invention.
Really, it's time we took a little more care in a process that issues long-standing injunctions against everybody, everywhere for a very long time, based largely on some ridiculous claim. Especially when you consider that the process involves a patent office which basically says: "the courts will sort it out", while the courts assume that the patent office is virtually infallible. The system is a mess.
Now now. The originators of Happy Birthday to you put a huge amount of work into changing a few words from an already existing song to change it into a birthday song.
Does anyone else ever notice the color of Mickey?
Well, the character design of Mickey mouse draws heavily from Minstrel shows, so it's a fair bet that plenty of people have noticed.
So you've moved your position from how much they spend (which was wrong and bollocks) to some notional relative spend per race
I'm not the original poster you replied to, so my previous post in this thread is my original position. The original poster wrote:
Team costs per syndicate are in the hundreds of millions making Indie racing or formula 1 a joke in comparison.
That doesn't seem to be inconsistent with my interpretation since it didn't specify that it meant an absolute total. You scaled things in terms of one year of America's cup being worth 1/3rd of a year of racing. I scaled things the other way in terms of three years of America's cup being worth one race. I'm not sure why you feel you should be the absolute arbiter of what elements should be compared and this seems more logical to me. Neither I nor the original poster claimed that the America's cup was financially larger in absolute terms than car racing so, if they're to be compared, race to race seems the best way.
So as they run 19 races (not ten) per year, and have two cars, and we multiply that by three, then we get 114 races over three years which works out at $7.8M per race.
I said "at least ten". I wasn't finding anything stating the exact number, so I just based it on ten named races one of their drivers had competed in during 2012 according to his wikipedia article. So your numbers really do drive down the average cost per race. Obviously that's an economy of scale in action. Now, if there were just one big race every three years it's interesting to consider what they would spend. The cost breakdown on the page they listed says that they spend 50% just on engines. So that would be over three million dollars per race. I don't know how common switching out an engine is during a race, but I imagine they avoid it if they can. In any case, if there were just one big race every three years, it means that the 50% they spend on engines would drop sharply, and plenty of other costs would also drop sharply. It's hard to figure out a good way to scale the costs.
In the end, it appears that we're comparing apples and oranges to a degree. You also said:
I'm a little surprised you didn't argue that the cost per mile makes F1 cheaper as each race is around 200M (or so), so the Americas Cup is even more expensive, but hey, you carry on living in your fantasy world that the Americas Cup costs more than F1 racing in spite of facts.
I did refer to such possibilities when I said: "Ultimately, you can view it pretty much any way you want and say that one outspends the other per this or that." and I also said "Car racing is, obviously, bigger overall in terms of money spent." but, hey, you carry on living in your fantasy world where I'm saying something I didn't say.
Of course, an America's cup team does one challenge with one vehicle in that time frame. As far as I can tell, team Red Bull runs two vehicles and at least ten challenges a year, so they run 60 races in in the time an America's Cup team runs one. So, even if they spend nine times more in total in the same time frame, they're spending less than 1/6th as much per race. Ultimately, you can view it pretty much any way you want and say that one outspends the other per this or that. Car racing is, obviously, bigger overall in terms of money spent. America's cup sailing obviously involves far more money, design time and difficulty on a single vehicle intended essentially for a single use.
Finally, the thought of you shouting at the monitor "She had a knitting shop you bastard!" is funny. :^)
It is a pretty funny image.
I know someone's going to complain "BUT JOBS!!!" but the jobs the tech in TFA are jobs are jobs only the most desperate want.
Well, yes, but if the jobs go away, then the most desperate won't get to work and die in the gutters. Not that I don't think such jobs should be replaced by technology. I absolutely think they should be. There needs to be a safety net for the people who end up structurally unemployed as a result, however.
A phone trace is done by getting the records from the phone company. Back in the days of operators manually switching lines, you actually did have to keep someone on the line to complete a phone trace because a phone trace would have required having the manager at the local switching office call around to find out where the call was coming from. All of those manual operators were replaced by electronic switching and electronic record keeping. As soon as the record-keeping became electronic, it became unnecessary to keep the person on the phone. Just making a phone connection (for that matter, probably just picking up the phone and getting a dial tone) makes an electronic record no matter how long you're on the phone. So, all that was required for a phone trace after that was an electronic records search. Today that records search is very automated and many law enforcement agencies and intelligence agencies have their own direct access to the phone company records or even have their own comms equipment set up in parallel.
So, no citatation needed, it's just another one of those stupid movie things. The record creation is concurrent with the call being made, so it really is a fraction of a second (probably a negative fraction as the record certainly exists before the phone even rings). The interface used to look at the trace information probably is web-based in this day and age, of course, so that probably does take a brief amount of time to load.