Do electric cars require that politicians do even more than mandate that you must buy them? Or another rephrasing:
If electric cars can't work even even in a place where the political forces not only encourage them, but actually MANDATE that people buy them, would that not mean that the problem is something other than politics? It's really not a difficult question.
On to your misunderstanding of anti-monopoly franchise laws. Way back before you or I were born, states passed laws to deal with some problems that were happening. The laws say that an automobile manufacturer must treat dealers fairly in certain ways, and may not own the retail dealerships. You can imagine if Coke and General Mills owned all of grocery stores it could create certain problems. Same with car retailers. This happened way before Tesla was a car company. Decades later, Tesla comes along and they want to manufacturer cars, but they don't want to follow the laws that apply to all manufacturers. There's no law anywhere forbidding Tesla dealerships. You can legally open a Tesla dealership today if you want to. It woule be legal to do so, but TESLA won't allow you to. They'd rather violate decades-old law and own all the dealerships themselves. I'm sure Coke would like to own a controlling interest in the grocery stores too, but obviously that would be bad for consumers so it's contrary to public policy.
We see from this story that the political support in Norway is so much that they are REQUIRING electric cars. Not encouraging them, but requiring them. Certainly that's a HUGE political advantage, right?
Therefore, if it turns out to be a huge failure, that's not because of political opposition, but due to some other problem. So we can agree that if it fails in Norway, you'll need to reconsider your current thinking, correct?
Norway's geography and population distribution is ideally suited for hydroelectric, so they get most of their electricity that way. Whether they import or export, and their cost, depends on recent rains. During the rainy season of years with lots of rain, they have plenty of inexpensive electricity. They export a small amount of electricity during those times. During the drier months and during years with less precipitation, electricity is more scarce and more expensive. They import electricity during this time.
Powering passenger cars, but not busses, trucks, etc would require increasing electric capacity by about 30%. I don't know that they could increase hydro by that much. They would probably import much of the electricity needed for cars from neighboring countries. Because this would increase the market rate in neighboring countries, those other countries would effectively absorb some of the cost (by paying higher electric bills).
It will be interesting to see how this works, if they pull it off at all and how much it costs them. I predict one of two things will happen:
A) It will work pretty well in Norway, and half of Slashdot will spend far too many words arguing why it can't work in their country. B) It will completely and utterly fail in Norway, yet half of Slashdot will spend far too many words arguing why it'll definitely work in their country.
Can just a few of us agree now that however this turns out in Norway, it'll be a pretty good indication of how well it might work elsewhere?
Of course there is a third possibilty of how it might turn out: C) They do it, at an additional cost of 40,000USD per vehicle over the vehicle's life.
If that happens, there may be somewhat reasonable debate.
Think about the difference between HTML and PDF. We already had Postscript, HTML was invented to do something differently.
I watched people build AOL versions of their sites, and WebTV versions, Playstation versions, 800x600 and 1024x768 versions. Designing for a specific size, they may as wellbhave been using Postscript (pdf). Mine never needed any of that because it was built using html as it was intended to be used; the BROWSER'S job is to layout the page appropriately for the size of the window, the screen resolution, user's font size preferences, etc. My html declared what should be on the page, not how many pixels wide it should be.
The WML and WAP stage was the exception - WML isn't html. It was a different language for feature phones. Smart phones, including the early iphones, could handle the same html that worked on the desktop, on AOL, on WebTV, and on Playstation. (If you used width attributes, which were legal for a only a few months before being deprecated, your html would be problematic everywhere. Even on a "standard" 1024x768 desktop the window wasn't always full size.
So yeah, the year or two of WML and WAP was the time it made sense to have a device-specific web site.
> doing it like.. say, slashdot, is an idiots way.
Yeah funny thing is, Slashdot does it both very well and the silly way. mobile.slashdot.org is rather annoying, meaning it was a waste of time for them to build it. On the other hand, if click "use Classic" you find that the old 1990s Slashdot works pretty darn well - regardless of which device. Classic works fine on my little phone, my tablet, my giant desktop screen - mostly because it doesn't presume any particular size or resolution. It lets the browser handle that.
> So then/you're/ suggesting just write a plugin, which also avoids someone else's shitty plugin's problems.
Yes, I'm saying that if you want to modify Wordpress behavior, that's best done via plugin. From a security point of view, that allows you to upgrade Wordpress as normal. Obviously there are also lots of other benefits to modules, such as plugins, over "wall of code". Excellent support for modules/plugins is a main reason that Wordpress, Apache, and many others are so popular.
Yes, obviously I prefer to not have shitty code, in a plugin or anywhere else. After 20 years of professional programming, I've become a bit picky actually. There's not much truly high-quality code written, but we can avoid really crappy code.
> you're also attacking the core functionality of the plugin, so is the story here "plugin built to solve problems in foolish way was designed poorly" ?
Maybe people who don't know much, don't know much.:) I'm kinda kidding there. People who own web sites sometimes ask for this kind of functionallity. This plugin gave them what they asked for. Maybe allowing the web browser to do it's job and render the page appropriately for the device would have given them what they actually wanted, but the plugin gave them what they asked for, I suppose.
> Given that a lot of plugins do things that a developer can build into wordpress,
It almost sounds like you're suggesting editing the core Wordpress code, meaning you can no longer update easily to get security fixes. That would, of course, be a very bad idea, especially with Wordpress since it's so dead simple to write a plugin, but write it correctly.
This particular plugin was supposed to switch themes based on whether it's a mobile device or not. Putting aside the 1999 mentality of that, it also allowed admins to upload images. It was the upload that got them into trouble. Upload often gets people in trouble because doing it securely is more difficult than it first appears.
Top ways scripts get owned (avoid these things or be very careful, maybe get an expert to spend a few minutes reviewing these parts of the code): Uploading files Running external programs (imagemagick, etc) Sending email DOWNLOADING files, often download.php is written for videos.
Of the above, the email one has two pretty easy ways to avoid most hacks. A) Let the user choose WHERE to send the email to, OR something in the body of the email (sent to the webmaster). Never let them enter both a To address and any part of the message. B) Use well-vetted modules, don't pope directly to sendmail.
> One, Iran is not "the enemy." They might not be our BFF, but we aren't at war and we have open diplomatic relations with them.
The US ceased diplomatic relations with Iran on April 7th, 1980, after the 1979 Iranian revolution. That's when Iran was taken over by a party whose official stance is that America must be destroyed because it is "the Great Satan". We've been enforcing a trade embargo since then, with various exclusions at different times.
The US Congress stopped declaring war after WWII, Iran declares their intention to destroy the United States at every opportunity.
Treason is "giving aid and comfort to the enemy". Senator Cotton tried to PREVENT Obama from giving aid and comfort to the Iran.
I don't assume that either Cotton or Obama was motivated by anything other than greed, but Obama's actions better fit defintion of treason. You seem to be under the impression that treason is defined as "disagreeing with the president/community organizer"in chief"?
Windows 8.1 was released less than two years ago. If you switch to Windows 10 today, you're pretty much signing up for the same crap later, being forced to Windows 365 in 2018.
I use CentOS on most of my machines. Each version of CentOS has a ten-year life (longer if you choose to handle your own security updates). For me, a "long term" operating system is ten years. Maybe you consider a year and a half until you have to switch operating systems to be "long term".
That sounds right at first reading, but then I realise it's not necesarily so. When I started my current job, I had 20 years of experience in the specific field I was hired in. I still needed a LOT of training in this company's product, their procedures, their coding standards and process, their complex infrastructure and networks, etc. If we hired Linus Torvalds tomorrow he'd need a lot of training.
On my last job I needed far less training. A lot of that has to do with the available documentation and following standards or not. At the last job, company network resources were accessible on the network as normal. My current job has multiple VPNs you have to use even when you're in the office.
So anyway, the specific TYPE of training that the replacements needed could be strong evidence either way.
SOME people, in some cases, might not speak if doing so could expose them criminal liabilty. On the other hand, history is full of courageous people who spoke up in the face of death threats. "We must all hang together, or we shall surely hang seperately" wasn't a joke. If you'd like a more recent example, espionage carries the death penalty, yet Edward Snowden exists.
So we can say that criminal liabilty may sometimes have an effect similar to what censorship does directly.
Similarly, some people die from the flu. The flu sometimes has an effect similar to what beheading does directly.
Therefore the flu is a form of beheading?
No, beheading is one way a person can die, the flu is a completely different way. Censorship is one way to regulate expression, criminal liability is a completely different way.
Criminal liabilty IS a form of "regulation of expression". It's not censorship any more than a frog is a giraffe just because both are animals.
I know Greg's been using that "must upgrade" line for a while. For example in 2013 he did "The Linux Kernel 3.12.1 is now available for the users and all the users of 3.12 kernel series must upgrade". Does anybody know if that's a reference to some pop culture or something?
As you mentioned, pumping water up hill requires specific geography - the same as hydroelectric, basically. Hydroelectric is pretty cool, so that's been done in the locations it can be done. It covers 1%-2% of our energy needs. For the US as an example, 48 hours of energy storage would require flooding most of the US west of the Mississippi river. It works on a small scale, can't ever be a primary source of energy.
In 7th grade I wrote a paper about splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen and I was excited about the prospect. Since then, I've learned that hydrogen is a bitch. Without going into details, it's a bitch to store, a bitch to transport, and not particularly efficient. However...
The general concept of combining hydrogen and oxygen to release energy does work extremely well, if you add one other ingredient. In fact, it is the world's primary method of energy storage and transportation. Along with the hydrogen, you add carbon, creating hydrocarbons. (Combining them the other way around produces carbohydrates, the energy source your body uses). We know hydrocarbons are a very effective way to store and transport energy, and the infrastructure is already in place. Perhaps we could do almost exactly what nature does. Perhaps we could PRODUCE hydrocarbons using atmospheric carbon and solar energy. So the produces turns atmospheric CO2 and H20 into hydrocarbons and oxygen, the car or factory burns the hydrocarbon back into C02 and water, in a cycle. That's exactly what nature does with carbohydrates - plants convert Co2 and H20 into carbohydrate using solar energy, animals convert it back, in a balanced cycle. I know of no reason we couldn't have a similar balanced cycle for hydrocarbons, using solar energy to capture atmospheric C02 into hydrocarbons.
You're right, of course. One solution that offers some protection both ways is to avoid CENSORSHIP (prior restraint) and instead impose penalties AFTERWARDS for libelous or otherwise unlawful utterances. That way the people as a whole hear what is said and judge whether or not the government is being reasonable and just.
This is why it bugs me so much when people call any penalties for unlawful speech "censorship". It may or may not be bad, but it's not censorship if everyone can hear what you have to say and come to your defense if need be. Censorship is worse because the public never knows what it is they weren't allowed to hear.
Thanks for posting that, it got me thinking. Reading your post, it seems there are two seperated but related problems that may come up. Before addressing those, it might be worthwhile to address this:
> Also, to shift jobs wasn't such a big deal in the sense that one didn't need an entirely different and technology based skill set
Certainly the finishers, who did the tops of stockings, considered that a special skill, if we restrict the discussion to actual Luddites. The new jobs, for machine operators and engineers, were certainly technology driven. Nineteenth century technology, but technology indeed, technology that was new. Outside of the actual Luddites, the glassblowers, silversmiths, etc were clearly skilled tradesmen. They lobbied for laws enforcing the continuation of the apprentice system they were accustomed to (because years of apprenticeship were needed to develop the skills). Machines have been replacing skilled workers for hundreds of years.
One issue that comes up is related to increased productivity generally, the other to low-skill workers specifically.
If machines are doing all the work, what will people do? In 1812, when the Luddites were around, they typically worked 10 hours per day, 6 days per week, starting at age 12-14. Now, we go to work 8 hours per day (and actually work 5), five days per week, starting around age 20. So we work fewer hours, on fewer days, for fewer years. That doesn't seem to have been too damaging. We've also simply spent a ton more. We went from scrunging to afford food to happily waiting for the new ipad to be released so we can buy it. Even since the 1950s, median home size has doubled. That seems to be okay, more or less.
About low-skilled workers. As you said: > Most people don't go to uni, what do they do with low skill
> sets when low skill set jobs are being done by machine?
In 1812, 55% of British and 70% of Americans could read. Now it's about 99% in both countries. Few went to high school back then, now most have, and anybody who wants to go to college can. So the statement you made about university is exactly what they said about high school 200 years ago. We may well see that in 100 years most people will have post-secondary education. It seems to have worked well in the past for people to get whatever education is needed for them to do jobs that can't be done by machine.
Loss of jobs to automation has certainly been a big concern. Workers were very worried when the gin mill started being used - it was a direct threat to their jobs, which paid 32 cents per day (a decent wage in 1812, when half that could rent an apartment with a bedroom seperate from the kitchen).
Their primary asset is their customer base, and their proven ability to get more customers. Your right that the software, the core is the business, could be reproduced for under a million dollars. Getting millions of customers and putting together a team who can consistently run the business so succesfully is quite a bit more difficult.
Ultimately the value of a company (to an investor) is based on a) their projected profit over the next five to ten years or so and b) how consistently they meet projections. Uber's revenue has been more than doubling each year, and they've hit pretty close to their projections. They achieved profitability in the US just a couple of months ahead of schedule.
On the other hand(s), their current numbers don't justify a $50 billion valuation, especially given the legal issues - most cities do in fact have licensing laws for taxis and car services. (Love the laws or hate them, the laws do exist.) The investment money is increased by the fact that people want to invest in the hot new thing, Uber is hip.
If you choose some of those options, then yeah they'll need to click the link. The font etc you can probably just use in your email to them. Give em ten minutes, they'll click that "new email" notification without being asked.
The article claims that in the last 90 days, there were 150 million new LTE subscriptions. They claim that bandwidth usage in the US has increased 1000% in the last few years. As any regular reader of Slashdot knows, that's not possible.
It's been pointed out many times by Slashdot commenters that the cell companies built their networks ONCE, and have been rolling in the profit ever since. They never replaced all the 2G equipment that provided 50Kbps, 3G never happened. 4G is make believe. They aren't constantly upgrading the networks, spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year, so there can be no increase in mobile bandwidth. GPRS is all there has ever been, and all there will ever be. Slashdot comments always remind us, the mobile networks were built once - nothing is ever replaced with newer equipment and faster interconnects.
Actually it isn't so much that I expect everything to be that level of quality, but the kernel about 20 million lines of code (up from 5 million about three years ago). I was thinking few projects should be far LARGER than that. Others pointed out that C++ takes much, much longer to compile.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me try restating the question for you:
Do electric cars require that politicians do even more than mandate that you must buy them? Or another rephrasing:
If electric cars can't work even even in a place where the political forces not only encourage them, but actually MANDATE that people buy them, would that not mean that the problem is something other than politics? It's really not a difficult question.
On to your misunderstanding of anti-monopoly franchise laws. Way back before you or I were born, states passed laws to deal with some problems that were happening. The laws say that an automobile manufacturer must treat dealers fairly in certain ways, and may not own the retail dealerships.
You can imagine if Coke and General Mills owned all of grocery stores it could create certain problems. Same with car retailers. This happened way before Tesla was a car company. Decades later, Tesla comes along and they want to manufacturer cars, but they don't want to follow the laws that apply to all manufacturers. There's no law anywhere forbidding Tesla dealerships. You can legally open a Tesla dealership today if you want to. It woule be legal to do so, but TESLA won't allow you to. They'd rather violate decades-old law and own all the dealerships themselves. I'm sure Coke would like to own a controlling interest in the grocery stores too, but obviously that would be bad for consumers so it's contrary to public policy.
We see from this story that the political support in Norway is so much that they are REQUIRING electric cars. Not encouraging them, but requiring them. Certainly that's a HUGE political advantage, right?
Therefore, if it turns out to be a huge failure, that's not because of political opposition, but due to some other problem. So we can agree that if it fails in Norway, you'll need to reconsider your current thinking, correct?
Norway's geography and population distribution is ideally suited for hydroelectric, so they get most of their electricity that way. Whether they import or export, and their cost, depends on recent rains. During the rainy season of years with lots of rain, they have plenty of inexpensive electricity. They export a small amount of electricity during those times. During the drier months and during years with less precipitation, electricity is more scarce and more expensive. They import electricity during this time.
Powering passenger cars, but not busses, trucks, etc would require increasing electric capacity by about 30%. I don't know that they could increase hydro by that much. They would probably import much of the electricity needed for cars from neighboring countries. Because this would increase the market rate in neighboring countries, those other countries would effectively absorb some of the cost (by paying higher electric bills).
It will be interesting to see how this works, if they pull it off at all and how much it costs them. I predict one of two things will happen:
A) It will work pretty well in Norway, and half of Slashdot will spend far too many words arguing why it can't work in their country.
B) It will completely and utterly fail in Norway, yet half of Slashdot will spend far too many words arguing why it'll definitely work in their country.
Can just a few of us agree now that however this turns out in Norway, it'll be a pretty good indication of how well it might work elsewhere?
Of course there is a third possibilty of how it might turn out:
C) They do it, at an additional cost of 40,000USD per vehicle over the vehicle's life.
If that happens, there may be somewhat reasonable debate.
Think about the difference between HTML and PDF. We already had Postscript, HTML was invented to do something differently.
I watched people build AOL versions of their sites, and WebTV versions, Playstation versions, 800x600 and 1024x768 versions. Designing for a specific size, they may as wellbhave been using Postscript (pdf). Mine never needed any of that because it was built using html as it was intended to be used; the BROWSER'S job is to layout the page appropriately for the size of the window, the screen resolution, user's font size preferences, etc. My html declared what should be on the page, not how many pixels wide it should be.
The WML and WAP stage was the exception - WML isn't html. It was a different language for feature phones. Smart phones, including the early iphones, could handle the same html that worked on the desktop, on AOL, on WebTV, and on Playstation. (If you used width attributes, which were legal for a only a few months before being deprecated, your html would be problematic everywhere. Even on a "standard" 1024x768 desktop the window wasn't always full size.
So yeah, the year or two of WML and WAP was the time it made sense to have a device-specific web site.
> doing it like .. say, slashdot, is an idiots way.
Yeah funny thing is, Slashdot does it both very well and the silly way. mobile.slashdot.org is rather annoying, meaning it was a waste of time for them to build it. On the other hand, if click "use Classic" you find that the old 1990s Slashdot works pretty darn well - regardless of which device. Classic works fine on my little phone, my tablet, my giant desktop screen - mostly because it doesn't presume any particular size or resolution. It lets the browser handle that.
> So then /you're/ suggesting just write a plugin, which also avoids someone else's shitty plugin's problems.
Yes, I'm saying that if you want to modify Wordpress behavior, that's best done via plugin. From a security point of view, that allows you to upgrade Wordpress as normal. Obviously there are also lots of other benefits to modules, such as plugins, over "wall of code". Excellent support for modules/plugins is a main reason that Wordpress, Apache, and many others are so popular.
Yes, obviously I prefer to not have shitty code, in a plugin or anywhere else. After 20 years of professional programming, I've become a bit picky actually. There's not much truly high-quality code written, but we can avoid really crappy code.
> you're also attacking the core functionality of the plugin, so is the story here "plugin built to solve problems in foolish way was designed poorly" ?
Maybe people who don't know much, don't know much. :)
I'm kinda kidding there. People who own web sites sometimes ask for this kind of functionallity. This plugin gave them what they asked for. Maybe allowing the web browser to do it's job and render the page appropriately for the device would have given them what they actually wanted, but the plugin gave them what they asked for, I suppose.
> Given that a lot of plugins do things that a developer can build into wordpress,
It almost sounds like you're suggesting editing the core Wordpress code, meaning you can no longer update easily to get security fixes. That would, of course, be a very bad idea, especially with Wordpress since it's so dead simple to write a plugin, but write it correctly.
This particular plugin was supposed to switch themes based on whether it's a mobile device or not. Putting aside the 1999 mentality of that, it also allowed admins to upload images. It was the upload that got them into trouble. Upload often gets people in trouble because doing it securely is more difficult than it first appears.
Top ways scripts get owned (avoid these things or be very careful, maybe get an expert to spend a few minutes reviewing these parts of the code):
Uploading files
Running external programs (imagemagick, etc)
Sending email
DOWNLOADING files, often download.php is written for videos.
Of the above, the email one has two pretty easy ways to avoid most hacks. A) Let the user choose WHERE to send the email to, OR something in the body of the email (sent to the webmaster). Never let them enter both a To address and any part of the message. B) Use well-vetted modules, don't pope directly to sendmail.
> One, Iran is not "the enemy." They might not be our BFF, but we aren't at war and we have open diplomatic relations with them.
The US ceased diplomatic relations with Iran on April 7th, 1980, after the 1979 Iranian revolution. That's when Iran was taken over by a party whose official stance is that America must be destroyed because it is "the Great Satan". We've been enforcing a trade embargo since then, with various exclusions at different times.
The US Congress stopped declaring war after WWII, Iran declares their intention to destroy the United States at every opportunity.
Treason is "giving aid and comfort to the enemy".
Senator Cotton tried to PREVENT Obama from giving aid and comfort to the Iran.
I don't assume that either Cotton or Obama was motivated by anything other than greed, but Obama's actions better fit defintion of treason. You seem to be under the impression that treason is defined as "disagreeing with the president/community organizer"in chief"?
Correction: two and half years. Not what _I_ consider "long term" for switching OS.
Windows 8.1 was released less than two years ago. If you switch to Windows 10 today, you're pretty much signing up for the same crap later, being forced to Windows 365 in 2018.
I use CentOS on most of my machines. Each version of CentOS has a ten-year life (longer if you choose to handle your own security updates). For me, a "long term" operating system is ten years. Maybe you consider a year and a half until you have to switch operating systems to be "long term".
That sounds right at first reading, but then I realise it's not necesarily so. When I started my current job, I had 20 years of experience in the specific field I was hired in. I still needed a LOT of training in this company's product, their procedures, their coding standards and process, their complex infrastructure and networks, etc. If we hired Linus Torvalds tomorrow he'd need a lot of training.
On my last job I needed far less training. A lot of that has to do with the available documentation and following standards or not. At the last job, company network resources were accessible on the network as normal. My current job has multiple VPNs you have to use even when you're in the office.
So anyway, the specific TYPE of training that the replacements needed could be strong evidence either way.
SOME people, in some cases, might not speak if doing so could expose them criminal liabilty. On the other hand, history is full of courageous people who spoke up in the face of death threats. "We must all hang together, or we shall surely hang seperately" wasn't a joke. If you'd like a more recent example, espionage carries the death penalty, yet Edward Snowden exists.
So we can say that criminal liabilty may sometimes have an effect similar to what censorship does directly.
Similarly, some people die from the flu. The flu sometimes has an effect similar to what beheading does directly.
Therefore the flu is a form of beheading?
No, beheading is one way a person can die, the flu is a completely different way.
Censorship is one way to regulate expression, criminal liability is a completely different way.
Criminal liabilty IS a form of "regulation of expression". It's not censorship any more than a frog is a giraffe just because both are animals.
I know Greg's been using that "must upgrade" line for a while. For example in 2013 he did "The Linux Kernel 3.12.1 is now available for the users and all the users of 3.12 kernel series must upgrade". Does anybody know if that's a reference to some pop culture or something?
As you mentioned, pumping water up hill requires specific geography - the same as hydroelectric, basically. Hydroelectric is pretty cool, so that's been done in the locations it can be done. It covers 1%-2% of our energy needs. For the US as an example, 48 hours of energy storage would require flooding most of the US west of the Mississippi river. It works on a small scale, can't ever be a primary source of energy.
In 7th grade I wrote a paper about splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen and I was excited about the prospect. Since then, I've learned that hydrogen is a bitch. Without going into details, it's a bitch to store, a bitch to transport, and not particularly efficient. However ...
The general concept of combining hydrogen and oxygen to release energy does work extremely well, if you add one other ingredient. In fact, it is the world's primary method of energy storage and transportation. Along with the hydrogen, you add carbon, creating hydrocarbons. (Combining them the other way around produces carbohydrates, the energy source your body uses). We know hydrocarbons are a very effective way to store and transport energy, and the infrastructure is already in place. Perhaps we could do almost exactly what nature does. Perhaps we could PRODUCE hydrocarbons using atmospheric carbon and solar energy. So the produces turns atmospheric CO2 and H20 into hydrocarbons and oxygen, the car or factory burns the hydrocarbon back into C02 and water, in a cycle. That's exactly what nature does with carbohydrates - plants convert Co2 and H20 into carbohydrate using solar energy, animals convert it back, in a balanced cycle. I know of no reason we couldn't have a similar balanced cycle for hydrocarbons, using solar energy to capture atmospheric C02 into hydrocarbons.
You're right, of course. One solution that offers some protection both ways is to avoid CENSORSHIP (prior restraint) and instead impose penalties AFTERWARDS for libelous or otherwise unlawful utterances. That way the people as a whole hear what is said and judge whether or not the government is being reasonable and just.
This is why it bugs me so much when people call any penalties for unlawful speech "censorship". It may or may not be bad, but it's not censorship if everyone can hear what you have to say and come to your defense if need be. Censorship is worse because the public never knows what it is they weren't allowed to hear.
Thanks for posting that, it got me thinking. Reading your post, it seems there are two seperated but related problems that may come up. Before addressing those, it might be worthwhile to address this:
> Also, to shift jobs wasn't such a big deal in the sense that one didn't need an entirely different and technology based skill set
Certainly the finishers, who did the tops of stockings, considered that a special skill, if we restrict the discussion to actual Luddites. The new jobs, for machine operators and engineers, were certainly technology driven. Nineteenth century technology, but technology indeed, technology that was new. Outside of the actual Luddites, the glassblowers, silversmiths, etc were clearly skilled tradesmen. They lobbied for laws enforcing the continuation of the apprentice system they were accustomed to (because years of apprenticeship were needed to develop the skills). Machines have been replacing skilled workers for hundreds of years.
One issue that comes up is related to increased productivity generally, the other to low-skill workers specifically.
If machines are doing all the work, what will people do? In 1812, when the Luddites were around, they typically worked 10 hours per day, 6 days per week, starting at age 12-14. Now, we go to work 8 hours per day (and actually work 5), five days per week, starting around age 20. So we work fewer hours, on fewer days, for fewer years. That doesn't seem to have been too damaging. We've also simply spent a ton more. We went from scrunging to afford food to happily waiting for the new ipad to be released so we can buy it. Even since the 1950s, median home size has doubled. That seems to be okay, more or less.
About low-skilled workers. As you said:
> Most people don't go to uni, what do they do with low skill
> sets when low skill set jobs are being done by machine?
In 1812, 55% of British and 70% of Americans could read. Now it's about 99% in both countries. Few went to high school back then, now most have, and anybody who wants to go to college can. So the statement you made about university is exactly what they said about high school 200 years ago. We may well see that in 100 years most people will have post-secondary education. It seems to have worked well in the past for people to get whatever education is needed for them to do jobs that can't be done by machine.
Loss of jobs to automation has certainly been a big concern. Workers were very worried when the gin mill started being used - it was a direct threat to their jobs, which paid 32 cents per day (a decent wage in 1812, when half that could rent an apartment with a bedroom seperate from the kitchen).
Their primary asset is their customer base, and their proven ability to get more customers. Your right that the software, the core is the business, could be reproduced for under a million dollars. Getting millions of customers and putting together a team who can consistently run the business so succesfully is quite a bit more difficult.
Ultimately the value of a company (to an investor) is based on a) their projected profit over the next five to ten years or so and b) how consistently they meet projections. Uber's revenue has been more than doubling each year, and they've hit pretty close to their projections. They achieved profitability in the US just a couple of months ahead of schedule.
On the other hand(s), their current numbers don't justify a $50 billion valuation, especially given the legal issues - most cities do in fact have licensing laws for taxis and car services. (Love the laws or hate them, the laws do exist.) The investment money is increased by the fact that people want to invest in the hot new thing, Uber is hip.
If you choose some of those options, then yeah they'll need to click the link. The font etc you can probably just use in your email to them. Give em ten minutes, they'll click that "new email" notification without being asked.
The article claims that in the last 90 days, there were 150 million new LTE subscriptions. They claim that bandwidth usage in the US has increased 1000% in the last few years. As any regular reader of Slashdot knows, that's not possible.
It's been pointed out many times by Slashdot commenters that the cell companies built their networks ONCE, and have been rolling in the profit ever since. They never replaced all the 2G equipment that provided 50Kbps, 3G never happened. 4G is make believe. They aren't constantly upgrading the networks, spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year, so there can be no increase in mobile bandwidth. GPRS is all there has ever been, and all there will ever be. Slashdot comments always remind us, the mobile networks were built once - nothing is ever replaced with newer equipment and faster interconnects.
> Windows's remote support
For Windows, here are a few options to take over their system which don't require the user to click anything:
https://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/...
Actually it isn't so much that I expect everything to be that level of quality, but the kernel about 20 million lines of code (up from 5 million about three years ago). I was thinking few projects should be far LARGER than that. Others pointed out that C++ takes much, much longer to compile.
> If your standard for production software quality is "the Linux kernel", then you must really look down on almost every software project!
Yes, I do. I'm with Sturgeon when he said "90% of everything is crap." :)