There are other fundamental problems with driver-less cars: Illusion of control, exchange of information, and unmodeled conditions
The illusion of control is why some people are scared to death of flying, but feel confident of getting behind the wheel: even though the stats say that people are safer in an aircraft than on the road, people hate to give up the control. Even if the control is just an illusion (you can do little if a drunk driver slams into your car).
The exchange of information is crucial to any large-scale automated technology. Right now, you try to infer the intentions of other drivers and account for them. If someone ahead of you turns on their indicator lights, you slow down and give them space (except if you live in a major city, where you speed up to avoid giving up an inch - God, I hate San Diego and LA drivers). If every automated car tries a greedy algorithm, it will be havoc.
The unmodeled conditions are the outliers that might not occur often, but a human is much better equipped to deal with them. What happens in a storm when some underpass might be flooded? A human would take a look out the window and decide to try a different route from the start. This could come under exchange of information as well - basically an automated system cannot make "judgement calls". It needs accurate information to function.
Given information, the technology today has enough bandwidth to control an unstable aircraft into a standing position; I think we can handle a car on a road. A basic problem relates to how information is collected and shared - an offline car is limited by having only local information, and little predictive abilities.
That's the 'noble primitive' myth. It's only a myth.
I wasn't talking about the idea that people in smaller tribes were inherently more moral people (which is what the noble primitive myth deals with), but that crime is low because of social pressures in small groups (where everyone knows everyone, and it is harder to get away with crime) or for other reasons. My point was that crime rate is smaller in a smaller social group, but more and more people prefer to live in/around cities.
Except right now even before launch it has potentially more games than xbox360, ps3; and wii combined...and cheap too, most under a dollar. Everything from throwaway games to 20hr RPG's, Lets be honest most modern game engines work on Android. In fact the only problem it has is making out the quality from the...not so quality
However, people who want to play Android games will play them on their Android phones (if they have one). If not, Angry Birds (and its ilk) are likely available on their current phone platform. What you are missing is that people buy console games to play console-type games: 20+ hours of gameplay, with detailed story lines, excellent graphics, good music (don't underestimate the impact of this), and reasonable level of control.
Now, I agree that there are some Android games that could do well - Team 17's Worms comes to mind. But that is not the norm. I buy the Xbox to play Halo, the PS3 to play CoD. Don't get me wrong - Android games are nice for a phone platform. But there has never been an Android game that I wished was available for my console.
When people were in small tribes and villages, crime was low. You knew everyone. You needed to work together to survive, and if you committed a crime, you were very likely killed or driven out. However, the rise of cities helped criminals hide among millions of anonymous people.
The truth is, the internet is almost indispensable now. Security will be addressed, as it has always been addressed, after the fact. People will learn to be careful (just as, you know, you don't walk around in certain neighborhoods in the middle of the night wearing jewelry). The reason the internet has so many problems is because it became too popular too fast. It was an attractive target before anyone thought of the security flaws. But they can and will be addressed - there is no alternative.
What you should be worried about is the crippling of the internet. Legislators will try to pass laws based on physical-world-analogies (and corporate interests). That is a far bigger problem than crime on the internet. E-crime won't make things unusable, but stupid laws will.
Math is reduced to pre-chewed problems where students are looking for identifiers so they know what formula to use and what values to put where.
Tell me when this wasn't true? I think you are nostalgic for an era that never was. Mathematics in Engineering has always been about number crunching. Students in engineering have always been taught "mathematics" as if it is a tool to solve a problem, no more and no less. I suggest you read Lockhart's Lament to get a better understanding of what mathematics is like, and how it is taught..
I went to undergraduate (and graduate) school in Electrical Engineering. You would be shocked at the number of students (even Ph.D. level) who think of complex numbers like vectors (complex numbers are scalars, and form a field). You don't need measure theory to be a good engineer. Real analysis, functional analysis, etc. are never offered in the Engineering department - only in the Mathematics dept.
Most engineers don't take Mathematics - they take a dumbed-down "here is how you use the math as a tool" version without rigor, proofs, and analysis.This has always been true - and for a good reason. Do you need to understand Hilbert spaces and Banach spaces to design a filter? Not really (it helps to get a deeper understanding, but you don't really need it)..
Quick - what brand of tires/stereo is in your car? Do Ford ads mention it at all? Do they know that Bridgestone will scare people away?
I know people who don't even know that Android is a Google product - they know they bought their phone from Samsung, and it comes preloaded with Google Apps, an AppStore, and Skype, Facebook etc. Why should they care about the kernel? Will it make their life easier if they know which processor is in their microwave? You don't hear TI whining about how it doesn't get recognition.
And if you think the lack of recognition is what keeps people scared of Linux, then you have no idea what problem you are trying to fix. If you market Android as Linux, and expect people to adopt Linux on the desktop in droves, you are sadly mistaken. They might try it, find it is nothing like their phone/Chromebook, and leave.
What other tasks? The only task of the professor is to teach students. Anyway, this is probably at least third submission about automated grading systems over last 6 months, and it really is getting tired.
To any sane person it is obvious that the idea is retarded, so why do we keep discussing it?
Really? The last time I checked, no one got denied tenure for poor teaching. The faculty are there to bring money to the university - if they manage to teach well, that is an added bonus. However, they could be great teachers (I've known a few) who get fired because they didn't bring in hundred-thousand/million dollar grants every year of their assistant professorship.
While the idea is retarded, you seem to be missing the danger. When the university/faculty see the benefits of doing this, they will do it in a heartbeat. It frees up the teachers to spend more time on research and grant applications. It frees up teaching assistants (who are often hired as TAs to save grant money - they still have to do research). Everyone except the students (who have already paid for the class) benefit.
Creationism vs. Evolution seems retarded too - but because some people saw some idealogical/political benefit to pushing it through into the classroom, it did.
If I, as a software developer, cannot read a software patent and understand how it is implemented then the patent has no value . None. Patents are meant to be used by engineers to reproduce the patented mechanism.
I hate to be on the side of IV, but that is not at all true. The problem is that a patent is (in a way) like a legal document - you assumed the purpose is that any programmer should be able to implement it. The purpose is to defend the intellectual property rights of the patent holder against challenges in a court. It would have all the bits and pieces of the complete algorithm/device description, plus a lot of fluff thrown in that makes it hard to read. I'm not sure if software patents must include pseudo-code (I'm only familiar with electromechanical patents).
The same is true of many research papers I've read in mathematics. If I want to implement the algorithm quickly, I'd look at a book. A paper (like a patent) is for more than just helping others recreate their work. Just because I know how to program, doesn't mean I would be able to easily implement an algorithm for optimization from a paper on Tychonoff spaces (hint: I threw Tychonoff in there to make a point - I just deal with metric spaces, so the technical jargon would be irrelevant).
. The basics: Make work fun; weed out the naysayers; celebrate failure, and then learn from it; allow employees to take short naps during the day; and don't shy away from hiring talented people just because they look sloppy or lack college credentials. Bushnell is convinced that there are all sorts of creative and unconventional people out there working at companies today. The problem is that corporate managers don't recognize them. Or when they do, they push them to conform rather than create.
All good advice that MIGHT work. Or might backfire tremendously. It is the same mentality - no one got fired for choosing IBM/Microsoft/Google.
If you actually try to apply this principle, I believe it will lead to a loss in productivity in general. Outliers are just that - outliers. Listing a few big-names and saying that these guys made it despite their lack of credentials/oddness shouldn't cloud the fact that for a majority of people with lack of credentials is because they are not competent. That is like saying XYZ was a great researcher despite doing poorly in school, so colleges are losing a lot of talented individuals because they don't give people with C- average full scholarships. Given a limited time to hire or monitor people, it is easier/faster to just weed out people for trivial (or not so trivial) reasons.
Also, most jobs don't require really talented individuals. If you are just good enough, it suffices. Do you need a superstar in most jobs? No (it won't hurt, but isn't really essential to keeping the door open and the company growing). However, a single jerk who doesn't conform can lead to bad feelings in a group. Yes, you might lose something special they bring. But not doing it would almost certainly lead to problems. Unless you have other jerks who can give as good as they can take. Put them together and you would get a dysfunctional group.
A jerk in a suit, especially with an 'old-boys' network, however, would get hired instantly
Nothing for/against Jobs per se (I didn't know him), but it seems like the jerk part doesn't seem to be a problem with many managers and top level executives. A jerk who would drive employees to the brink of exhaustion would be welcome.
And to be fair the manager/executive is not hired to improve moral - short term gains outweigh employee happiness nowadays. It is easier to motivate employees to work hard by being a scary control freak, than by being a kind and caring person who looks out for you. Especially when times are tough and it isn't easy to get a job. And this mentality filters down - if my boss's boss screams at him, he vents at me.
The problem is cultural. 2 weeks of vacation is the norm in certain parts of the world - money is seen by many (especially the younger crowd) to be the deciding factor in taking any job. A consumerist mentality only compounds the problem.
The point is that just about any hobby you have will only make you happy in the short-term
What? The examples given provide lasting value. Things like watching TV and playing games are generally more limited in scope.
You're flipping things around. Most any hobby will provide happiness on the short term, but not all will provide happiness in the long term. The idea here is that the ones that provide both short and long term happiness are better than the ones that merely provide for the short term.
I've known lots of people who played a musical instrument for a few years, and then it just collects dust in the corner. It doesn't provide any long term happiness necessarily.
If you claim that active hobbies have greater than chances of providing you with long term happiness than passive term hobbies, you might be on to something - because they are active, they can be followed on for many years, instead of at the whim of the source.
Reading, for example, has provided me with many years of happiness, and I expect it will continue to do so. Is reading any different from watching a TV show? Not really. It is still a passive activity - though I have a greater choice in books (though it is slowly changing, since I am not restricted in watching what passes for entertainment in my part of the world). Now, reading might involve imagination (like a kid who imagines himself as a Knight), but it doesn't have to.
Lasting happiness is a very strange concept - you are happy doing something now. I doubt I'd get much happiness remembering the violin I played as a kid, or the scuba diving trip I took a few years ago, or the TV show I saw a decade ago.
But if you don't have feedback, what do you mean by a 'control-system'? An open loop control system would be like a look-up table or something: decide apriori what you want to do, and then apply the pre-computed action without any measurements or correction system. But then, there really isn't a control-system, because it doesn't account for errors (the only way to know if there are errors is via measurements, which constitutes feedback).
For such a complex system, I'd be very surprised if they are doing open-loop actuation.
I was under the impression that a control system implies a closed loop or feedback mechanism i.e. a system that measures the current state, and decides an actuation mechanism to get to where it wants to go. Do they mean autonomous and non-autonomous modes instead?
If it's a password that they use every single day, any user with a brain larger then a goldfish can remember it after a week or two. Those who can't - should probably be working the checkout line at the local grocery store and not handling sensitive data.
Two things: (1) The password might have no relation to how well I can do my job ONCE I have access to the necessary information, and (2) You seem to imply passwords is like the keys to the vault - very few people have it, and anyone with the right password should be allowed to access the vault.
The truth is, a person might be great at marketing or sales or design or whatever, but they are forced by the system to do things (like remember passwords) - which they might have no interest/aptitude for - just to access information for their job. Computers have become so common, and everyone is forced to do things that they would rather not. I'm sure there are very smart people in lots of areas who can't do the simplest things with their computers - that doesn't make them lousy at their main job, it just means that the technology is preventing them from doing it.
The problem is, passwords have become a form of identification - kind of like a social security number. They are more like keys. A bank won't agree to give me money if I just show up without picture identification that matches my account details. The password => person is flawed, because that is simply not true. That would be like someone showing up to your bank with your house key and claiming that they now have access to everything you own. What is worse is that we know passwords are not person identification tools, and our solution is to make passwords harder.
"... to rational and independent individuals in modern civilization"
I'm not sure where the author is really coming from, but he seems to claim that modern individuals are (a) less herd-like, and (b) innovation was helped by drinking
The only reason we are less herd-like (and we still are very herd like in our thinking - just look at how certain topics are still taboo) is that our survival doesn't directly depend on acceptance by those around us. Sure, I might not have a job if I'm a douche-bag, but chances are I can still find a way to survive. On the other hand, getting kicked out of a prehistoric tribe meant you would pretty much have to hunt alone (assuming you ran away from the tribe before they butchered you), and you wouldn't survive for long.
Also, the reaction to alcohol varies by culture. You have this idea that people lose inhibition when they drink, but in some cultures they become more harmonious (less likely to cause trouble or act out - see here).
I'd say that the leaps and bounds in infrastructure and tech have allowed us to lead more solitary lives, which also means we have less inclination to conform. Now, if you can claim that a lot of innovation/changes was created under the influence (Windows 8 design?;) ), that would be cool (I'm not an alcoholic, I'm just creative).
When Consumer Reports wants to test a product (including cars), they don't go to the manufacturer, much less let the manufacturer run the testing process! They buy the product anonymously at normal retail, and then test it in their own labs. Why can't regulatory agencies like the EPA and its European Union equivalent do the same thing?
I might be wrong, but doesn't the EPA/EU have to run the tests before the car is released to the public? Kind of like how you need FDA approval before you can sell a drug on the market? And so if the manufacturer knows that they are giving it to the regulators, there will be some cheating (though much less than stripping the internals out to reduce weight).
Obvious depends on your point of view. If your aim is to inflate the metrics, it is obvious that you do whatever (is legal) you can to make your car do well on the metrics. It is obvious that manufacturers would game the system. And if a customer complains? Well, it is obvious you trade off lawsuit costs against profits.
What is more striking to me is that we seem to be relying on the manufacturers to run the tests and report their figures. This is "obviously" wrong. If a regulator were to drive the car, they would see any taping over. They would notice that the interiors have been stripped down. And they should put a stop to it. Basically, they should be given a car by the manufacturers, and the regulator should hire someone to do the road tests. What next, the safety dummy has sensors in places that won't get triggered or exposed to large shocks to game safety requirements? "Obviously" the car tested will not be the same as the one I buy off a dealership: they might tweak the code to change firing timings or something similar. But it shouldn't be significantly different.
I detest it when cars are tested on the Nurburgring to tweak their design. I will mostly never get a chance to drive that circuit. Yet many manufacturers test on those conditions. It isn't the unrealistic nature that bothers me. I feel that all tests should be conservative (drive the car at 150 mph or some such ridiculous speed - much larger than any car would go - to do crash tests). Instead, they go to wrong extreme of unrealistic tests - instead of being conservative, they are optimistic.
Anyone who can use bookmarks and Google has no need for an RSS reader. RSS as a whole is just a solution to a problem that never existed in the first place.
But how do you know the site updated its contents in the first place? Would you manually go to 24 sites (the number of RSS feeds I currently have) just to find out if any of them have updated their contents? Also, don't diss on snippets. Why do papers have abstracts/summaries when I can read the whole thing I am interested in? A snippet is somewhere between a sensational headline and a long text that (should) give me a good 10 second idea on whether I want to read the whole article. If you have feeds that might have 10-20 updates each cycle, it can be quite tedious to go to each article and peruse it trying to get a summary of the article.
BeyondPod is my RSS client of choce. It is for mobile platforms (Windows and Android), and has a ton of features (including an in-built media player for podcasts, scheduling capabilities, etc.).
The US navy has been training orcas to attack dolphins who are attacking enemy swimmers. Don't woory folks, soon the oceans will be off limits to everyone except for trained combat specialists.
Obligatory Simpsons
Skinner: Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're
overrun by lizards?
Skinner: No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese
needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?
Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous
type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around,
the gorillas simply freeze to death.
Microsoft was forced to put that ballot list up after they deliberately used bundling and threats of OEMs having their Windows license revoked unless they shunned a Microsoft competitor. This tactic was successful in that it ruined Netscape.
I'm sorry, but Netscape ruined Netscape. It wasn't mainly what Microsoft did (though that must have helped, and it was definitely illegal), but rather what Netscape did. I know lots and lots of people who liked Netscape Navigator (including me), but dropped it after it became Communicator (especially after version 4). Their browser was not as good as IE at that point.
Now I use Mozilla Firefox, and have doing so for a long time (though their poor design choices might have me switching to SRWare Iron or Opera).
There needs to be less "Us vs. Them" in American politics. There needs to be more "Right vs. Wrong".
One of the problems I see is that people are far too quick to perceive criticism of position as criticism of person, which leads to more of the "My camp or the Enemy's camp" mentality. And since politics is almost all about people (and their positions on several gray-area topics), it often easier (and publicly entertaining) to demonize and lash out against your critics rather than their arguments. Just look at how Clinton would be vilified as being a liar and a cheat (no matter what issue he is discussing) because he cheated on his wife - even if his infidelity has nothing to do with the issue under question.
So yeah, it would be nice to have a "Right vs. Wrong" discussion. But people are elected or not elected for a variety of reasons - some of which include personality traits, social skills, etc. Is it any wonder then that we get people who try to steer each discussion into a mud-slinging contest? Especially since you want re-election next term?
I have often wished that we were not allowed to know anything about the personal life of a politician - before an election, we should just be given a history of their stand on various positions, a one-page bio, and a financial background (who pays them, what jobs did they hold, what are their qualifications, etc.). I'm not having my congress-person over for tea. Why should I care if they are married, have a dog, have a perfect smile, sexual orientation, etc.?
Hah, automation again! Control systems, robots and stuff. The best paying job is putting hard-working people out of business!:-) Well, it makes sense.
Really? Even your computer has lots of automation (frequency control, fan speeds - I know of a person at Intel working on exactly this), your power line does (regulators), aircrafts do (autopilots/guidance systems), your car does (cruise control, temperature control), etc. There is almost no modern electronics that does not have a form of controls. Not every application involves replacing people - and in any case, from an individual's point of view, it is better to have a job enabling automation than not having a job at all.
Google does not sell personal information to third parties. And they never have.
At worst, they will use this as a signal to match ads to users.
So if you have a physical mail, and someone gets to read it and insert ads with it (without knowing who you are - say they aren't allowed to see the address), it would be fine?
While I get it that Gmail is "free", I also believe that certain expectations of privacy/regulations should translate from existing laws we have (or rather had) in place. No wiretapping? Then no reading my email either. Just changing the technology shouldn't require us to enact new rules and regulations.
Slashdot Mirror
There are other fundamental problems with driver-less cars: Illusion of control, exchange of information, and unmodeled conditions
The illusion of control is why some people are scared to death of flying, but feel confident of getting behind the wheel: even though the stats say that people are safer in an aircraft than on the road, people hate to give up the control. Even if the control is just an illusion (you can do little if a drunk driver slams into your car).
The exchange of information is crucial to any large-scale automated technology. Right now, you try to infer the intentions of other drivers and account for them. If someone ahead of you turns on their indicator lights, you slow down and give them space (except if you live in a major city, where you speed up to avoid giving up an inch - God, I hate San Diego and LA drivers). If every automated car tries a greedy algorithm, it will be havoc.
The unmodeled conditions are the outliers that might not occur often, but a human is much better equipped to deal with them. What happens in a storm when some underpass might be flooded? A human would take a look out the window and decide to try a different route from the start. This could come under exchange of information as well - basically an automated system cannot make "judgement calls". It needs accurate information to function.
Given information, the technology today has enough bandwidth to control an unstable aircraft into a standing position; I think we can handle a car on a road. A basic problem relates to how information is collected and shared - an offline car is limited by having only local information, and little predictive abilities.
That's the 'noble primitive' myth. It's only a myth.
I wasn't talking about the idea that people in smaller tribes were inherently more moral people (which is what the noble primitive myth deals with), but that crime is low because of social pressures in small groups (where everyone knows everyone, and it is harder to get away with crime) or for other reasons. My point was that crime rate is smaller in a smaller social group, but more and more people prefer to live in/around cities.
Except right now even before launch it has potentially more games than xbox360, ps3; and wii combined...and cheap too, most under a dollar. Everything from throwaway games to 20hr RPG's, Lets be honest most modern game engines work on Android. In fact the only problem it has is making out the quality from the...not so quality
However, people who want to play Android games will play them on their Android phones (if they have one). If not, Angry Birds (and its ilk) are likely available on their current phone platform. What you are missing is that people buy console games to play console-type games: 20+ hours of gameplay, with detailed story lines, excellent graphics, good music (don't underestimate the impact of this), and reasonable level of control.
Now, I agree that there are some Android games that could do well - Team 17's Worms comes to mind. But that is not the norm. I buy the Xbox to play Halo, the PS3 to play CoD. Don't get me wrong - Android games are nice for a phone platform. But there has never been an Android game that I wished was available for my console.
When people were in small tribes and villages, crime was low. You knew everyone. You needed to work together to survive, and if you committed a crime, you were very likely killed or driven out. However, the rise of cities helped criminals hide among millions of anonymous people.
The truth is, the internet is almost indispensable now. Security will be addressed, as it has always been addressed, after the fact. People will learn to be careful (just as, you know, you don't walk around in certain neighborhoods in the middle of the night wearing jewelry). The reason the internet has so many problems is because it became too popular too fast. It was an attractive target before anyone thought of the security flaws. But they can and will be addressed - there is no alternative.
What you should be worried about is the crippling of the internet. Legislators will try to pass laws based on physical-world-analogies (and corporate interests). That is a far bigger problem than crime on the internet. E-crime won't make things unusable, but stupid laws will.
Math is reduced to pre-chewed problems where students are looking for identifiers so they know what formula to use and what values to put where.
Tell me when this wasn't true? I think you are nostalgic for an era that never was. Mathematics in Engineering has always been about number crunching. Students in engineering have always been taught "mathematics" as if it is a tool to solve a problem, no more and no less. I suggest you read Lockhart's Lament to get a better understanding of what mathematics is like, and how it is taught..
I went to undergraduate (and graduate) school in Electrical Engineering. You would be shocked at the number of students (even Ph.D. level) who think of complex numbers like vectors (complex numbers are scalars, and form a field). You don't need measure theory to be a good engineer. Real analysis, functional analysis, etc. are never offered in the Engineering department - only in the Mathematics dept.
Most engineers don't take Mathematics - they take a dumbed-down "here is how you use the math as a tool" version without rigor, proofs, and analysis.This has always been true - and for a good reason. Do you need to understand Hilbert spaces and Banach spaces to design a filter? Not really (it helps to get a deeper understanding, but you don't really need it)..
Quick - what brand of tires/stereo is in your car? Do Ford ads mention it at all? Do they know that Bridgestone will scare people away?
I know people who don't even know that Android is a Google product - they know they bought their phone from Samsung, and it comes preloaded with Google Apps, an AppStore, and Skype, Facebook etc. Why should they care about the kernel? Will it make their life easier if they know which processor is in their microwave? You don't hear TI whining about how it doesn't get recognition.
And if you think the lack of recognition is what keeps people scared of Linux, then you have no idea what problem you are trying to fix. If you market Android as Linux, and expect people to adopt Linux on the desktop in droves, you are sadly mistaken. They might try it, find it is nothing like their phone/Chromebook, and leave.
What other tasks? The only task of the professor is to teach students. Anyway, this is probably at least third submission about automated grading systems over last 6 months, and it really is getting tired.
To any sane person it is obvious that the idea is retarded, so why do we keep discussing it?
Really? The last time I checked, no one got denied tenure for poor teaching. The faculty are there to bring money to the university - if they manage to teach well, that is an added bonus. However, they could be great teachers (I've known a few) who get fired because they didn't bring in hundred-thousand/million dollar grants every year of their assistant professorship.
While the idea is retarded, you seem to be missing the danger. When the university/faculty see the benefits of doing this, they will do it in a heartbeat. It frees up the teachers to spend more time on research and grant applications. It frees up teaching assistants (who are often hired as TAs to save grant money - they still have to do research). Everyone except the students (who have already paid for the class) benefit.
Creationism vs. Evolution seems retarded too - but because some people saw some idealogical/political benefit to pushing it through into the classroom, it did.
If I, as a software developer, cannot read a software patent and understand how it is implemented then the patent has no value . None. Patents are meant to be used by engineers to reproduce the patented mechanism.
I hate to be on the side of IV, but that is not at all true. The problem is that a patent is (in a way) like a legal document - you assumed the purpose is that any programmer should be able to implement it. The purpose is to defend the intellectual property rights of the patent holder against challenges in a court. It would have all the bits and pieces of the complete algorithm/device description, plus a lot of fluff thrown in that makes it hard to read. I'm not sure if software patents must include pseudo-code (I'm only familiar with electromechanical patents).
The same is true of many research papers I've read in mathematics. If I want to implement the algorithm quickly, I'd look at a book. A paper (like a patent) is for more than just helping others recreate their work. Just because I know how to program, doesn't mean I would be able to easily implement an algorithm for optimization from a paper on Tychonoff spaces (hint: I threw Tychonoff in there to make a point - I just deal with metric spaces, so the technical jargon would be irrelevant).
. The basics: Make work fun; weed out the naysayers; celebrate failure, and then learn from it; allow employees to take short naps during the day; and don't shy away from hiring talented people just because they look sloppy or lack college credentials. Bushnell is convinced that there are all sorts of creative and unconventional people out there working at companies today. The problem is that corporate managers don't recognize them. Or when they do, they push them to conform rather than create.
All good advice that MIGHT work. Or might backfire tremendously. It is the same mentality - no one got fired for choosing IBM/Microsoft/Google.
If you actually try to apply this principle, I believe it will lead to a loss in productivity in general. Outliers are just that - outliers. Listing a few big-names and saying that these guys made it despite their lack of credentials/oddness shouldn't cloud the fact that for a majority of people with lack of credentials is because they are not competent. That is like saying XYZ was a great researcher despite doing poorly in school, so colleges are losing a lot of talented individuals because they don't give people with C- average full scholarships. Given a limited time to hire or monitor people, it is easier/faster to just weed out people for trivial (or not so trivial) reasons.
Also, most jobs don't require really talented individuals. If you are just good enough, it suffices. Do you need a superstar in most jobs? No (it won't hurt, but isn't really essential to keeping the door open and the company growing). However, a single jerk who doesn't conform can lead to bad feelings in a group. Yes, you might lose something special they bring. But not doing it would almost certainly lead to problems. Unless you have other jerks who can give as good as they can take. Put them together and you would get a dysfunctional group.
A jerk in a suit, especially with an 'old-boys' network, however, would get hired instantly
Nothing for/against Jobs per se (I didn't know him), but it seems like the jerk part doesn't seem to be a problem with many managers and top level executives. A jerk who would drive employees to the brink of exhaustion would be welcome.
And to be fair the manager/executive is not hired to improve moral - short term gains outweigh employee happiness nowadays. It is easier to motivate employees to work hard by being a scary control freak, than by being a kind and caring person who looks out for you. Especially when times are tough and it isn't easy to get a job. And this mentality filters down - if my boss's boss screams at him, he vents at me.
The problem is cultural. 2 weeks of vacation is the norm in certain parts of the world - money is seen by many (especially the younger crowd) to be the deciding factor in taking any job. A consumerist mentality only compounds the problem.
The point is that just about any hobby you have will only make you happy in the short-term
What? The examples given provide lasting value. Things like watching TV and playing games are generally more limited in scope.
You're flipping things around. Most any hobby will provide happiness on the short term, but not all will provide happiness in the long term. The idea here is that the ones that provide both short and long term happiness are better than the ones that merely provide for the short term.
I've known lots of people who played a musical instrument for a few years, and then it just collects dust in the corner. It doesn't provide any long term happiness necessarily.
If you claim that active hobbies have greater than chances of providing you with long term happiness than passive term hobbies, you might be on to something - because they are active, they can be followed on for many years, instead of at the whim of the source.
Reading, for example, has provided me with many years of happiness, and I expect it will continue to do so. Is reading any different from watching a TV show? Not really. It is still a passive activity - though I have a greater choice in books (though it is slowly changing, since I am not restricted in watching what passes for entertainment in my part of the world). Now, reading might involve imagination (like a kid who imagines himself as a Knight), but it doesn't have to.
Lasting happiness is a very strange concept - you are happy doing something now. I doubt I'd get much happiness remembering the violin I played as a kid, or the scuba diving trip I took a few years ago, or the TV show I saw a decade ago.
But if you don't have feedback, what do you mean by a 'control-system'? An open loop control system would be like a look-up table or something: decide apriori what you want to do, and then apply the pre-computed action without any measurements or correction system. But then, there really isn't a control-system, because it doesn't account for errors (the only way to know if there are errors is via measurements, which constitutes feedback).
For such a complex system, I'd be very surprised if they are doing open-loop actuation.
I was under the impression that a control system implies a closed loop or feedback mechanism i.e. a system that measures the current state, and decides an actuation mechanism to get to where it wants to go. Do they mean autonomous and non-autonomous modes instead?
If it's a password that they use every single day, any user with a brain larger then a goldfish can remember it after a week or two. Those who can't - should probably be working the checkout line at the local grocery store and not handling sensitive data.
Two things: (1) The password might have no relation to how well I can do my job ONCE I have access to the necessary information, and (2) You seem to imply passwords is like the keys to the vault - very few people have it, and anyone with the right password should be allowed to access the vault.
The truth is, a person might be great at marketing or sales or design or whatever, but they are forced by the system to do things (like remember passwords) - which they might have no interest/aptitude for - just to access information for their job. Computers have become so common, and everyone is forced to do things that they would rather not. I'm sure there are very smart people in lots of areas who can't do the simplest things with their computers - that doesn't make them lousy at their main job, it just means that the technology is preventing them from doing it.
The problem is, passwords have become a form of identification - kind of like a social security number. They are more like keys. A bank won't agree to give me money if I just show up without picture identification that matches my account details. The password => person is flawed, because that is simply not true. That would be like someone showing up to your bank with your house key and claiming that they now have access to everything you own. What is worse is that we know passwords are not person identification tools, and our solution is to make passwords harder.
" ... to rational and independent individuals in modern civilization"
I'm not sure where the author is really coming from, but he seems to claim that modern individuals are (a) less herd-like, and (b) innovation was helped by drinking
The only reason we are less herd-like (and we still are very herd like in our thinking - just look at how certain topics are still taboo) is that our survival doesn't directly depend on acceptance by those around us. Sure, I might not have a job if I'm a douche-bag, but chances are I can still find a way to survive. On the other hand, getting kicked out of a prehistoric tribe meant you would pretty much have to hunt alone (assuming you ran away from the tribe before they butchered you), and you wouldn't survive for long.
Also, the reaction to alcohol varies by culture. You have this idea that people lose inhibition when they drink, but in some cultures they become more harmonious (less likely to cause trouble or act out - see here).
I'd say that the leaps and bounds in infrastructure and tech have allowed us to lead more solitary lives, which also means we have less inclination to conform. Now, if you can claim that a lot of innovation/changes was created under the influence (Windows 8 design? ;) ), that would be cool (I'm not an alcoholic, I'm just creative).
Fill the room with breasts. Attached to beautiful coeds. You won't hear a thing.
But I have ADHD. Every time a new pair of breasts comes in, I forget all about the pair in my face!
When Consumer Reports wants to test a product (including cars), they don't go to the manufacturer, much less let the manufacturer run the testing process! They buy the product anonymously at normal retail, and then test it in their own labs. Why can't regulatory agencies like the EPA and its European Union equivalent do the same thing?
I might be wrong, but doesn't the EPA/EU have to run the tests before the car is released to the public? Kind of like how you need FDA approval before you can sell a drug on the market? And so if the manufacturer knows that they are giving it to the regulators, there will be some cheating (though much less than stripping the internals out to reduce weight).
Obvious depends on your point of view. If your aim is to inflate the metrics, it is obvious that you do whatever (is legal) you can to make your car do well on the metrics. It is obvious that manufacturers would game the system. And if a customer complains? Well, it is obvious you trade off lawsuit costs against profits.
What is more striking to me is that we seem to be relying on the manufacturers to run the tests and report their figures. This is "obviously" wrong. If a regulator were to drive the car, they would see any taping over. They would notice that the interiors have been stripped down. And they should put a stop to it. Basically, they should be given a car by the manufacturers, and the regulator should hire someone to do the road tests. What next, the safety dummy has sensors in places that won't get triggered or exposed to large shocks to game safety requirements? "Obviously" the car tested will not be the same as the one I buy off a dealership: they might tweak the code to change firing timings or something similar. But it shouldn't be significantly different.
I detest it when cars are tested on the Nurburgring to tweak their design. I will mostly never get a chance to drive that circuit. Yet many manufacturers test on those conditions. It isn't the unrealistic nature that bothers me. I feel that all tests should be conservative (drive the car at 150 mph or some such ridiculous speed - much larger than any car would go - to do crash tests). Instead, they go to wrong extreme of unrealistic tests - instead of being conservative, they are optimistic.
Anyone who can use bookmarks and Google has no need for an RSS reader. RSS as a whole is just a solution to a problem that never existed in the first place.
But how do you know the site updated its contents in the first place? Would you manually go to 24 sites (the number of RSS feeds I currently have) just to find out if any of them have updated their contents? Also, don't diss on snippets. Why do papers have abstracts/summaries when I can read the whole thing I am interested in? A snippet is somewhere between a sensational headline and a long text that (should) give me a good 10 second idea on whether I want to read the whole article. If you have feeds that might have 10-20 updates each cycle, it can be quite tedious to go to each article and peruse it trying to get a summary of the article.
BeyondPod is my RSS client of choce. It is for mobile platforms (Windows and Android), and has a ton of features (including an in-built media player for podcasts, scheduling capabilities, etc.).
The US navy has been training orcas to attack dolphins who are attacking enemy swimmers. Don't woory folks, soon the oceans will be off limits to everyone except for trained combat specialists.
Obligatory Simpsons
Skinner: Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
Skinner: No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?
Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
Microsoft was forced to put that ballot list up after they deliberately used bundling and threats of OEMs having their Windows license revoked unless they shunned a Microsoft competitor. This tactic was successful in that it ruined Netscape.
I'm sorry, but Netscape ruined Netscape. It wasn't mainly what Microsoft did (though that must have helped, and it was definitely illegal), but rather what Netscape did. I know lots and lots of people who liked Netscape Navigator (including me), but dropped it after it became Communicator (especially after version 4). Their browser was not as good as IE at that point.
Now I use Mozilla Firefox, and have doing so for a long time (though their poor design choices might have me switching to SRWare Iron or Opera).
There needs to be less "Us vs. Them" in American politics. There needs to be more "Right vs. Wrong".
One of the problems I see is that people are far too quick to perceive criticism of position as criticism of person, which leads to more of the "My camp or the Enemy's camp" mentality. And since politics is almost all about people (and their positions on several gray-area topics), it often easier (and publicly entertaining) to demonize and lash out against your critics rather than their arguments. Just look at how Clinton would be vilified as being a liar and a cheat (no matter what issue he is discussing) because he cheated on his wife - even if his infidelity has nothing to do with the issue under question.
So yeah, it would be nice to have a "Right vs. Wrong" discussion. But people are elected or not elected for a variety of reasons - some of which include personality traits, social skills, etc. Is it any wonder then that we get people who try to steer each discussion into a mud-slinging contest? Especially since you want re-election next term?
I have often wished that we were not allowed to know anything about the personal life of a politician - before an election, we should just be given a history of their stand on various positions, a one-page bio, and a financial background (who pays them, what jobs did they hold, what are their qualifications, etc.). I'm not having my congress-person over for tea. Why should I care if they are married, have a dog, have a perfect smile, sexual orientation, etc.?
Hah, automation again! Control systems, robots and stuff. The best paying job is putting hard-working people out of business! :-) Well, it makes sense.
Really? Even your computer has lots of automation (frequency control, fan speeds - I know of a person at Intel working on exactly this), your power line does (regulators), aircrafts do (autopilots/guidance systems), your car does (cruise control, temperature control), etc. There is almost no modern electronics that does not have a form of controls. Not every application involves replacing people - and in any case, from an individual's point of view, it is better to have a job enabling automation than not having a job at all.
Google does not sell personal information to third parties. And they never have.
At worst, they will use this as a signal to match ads to users.
So if you have a physical mail, and someone gets to read it and insert ads with it (without knowing who you are - say they aren't allowed to see the address), it would be fine?
While I get it that Gmail is "free", I also believe that certain expectations of privacy/regulations should translate from existing laws we have (or rather had) in place. No wiretapping? Then no reading my email either. Just changing the technology shouldn't require us to enact new rules and regulations.