By the time remote controlled robots would be usable enough to carry around and install office equipment it won't be long before we have robots that can do it without any remote control.
And I doubt there will be a significant time span where robot-maintainer is a useful job; we'll have robots for that too.
There needs to be a serious discussion on what kind of society we are going to have when human labour is obsolete. The current system will start seriously breaking down when capacity outstrips demand by a significant degree and any increase in demand will be met by further automation.
You cannot selectively enforce a law of nature or a mathematical law. Human laws are selectively enforced all the time. Intent and circumstances are often taken into account. Often history is considered. Sometimes even connections, wealth and race. All of those influence whether laws are enforced in any particular case.
Many judicial systems have significant discretionary powers, to the extent where, for better or worse, the letter of the law is often less important than the circumstances of the case.
IP is ultimately a form of taxation and redistribution and as such it contributes to the general cost level of the economy. Saying that IPR is needed because the jobs are the only ones that don't get outsourced to cheaper countries is equivalent to saying that we need higher taxes to pay for government jobs that are the only ones that don't get oursourced.
IPR simply makes an economy less competitive and is part of the reason why everything is too expensive to do in the west.
And frankly I can't see any reason why blockbuster couldn't trivially be outsourced. The script for most films could probably be written by, eh, a script. Effects can certianly be done anywhere and I really doubt actors will last beyond the decade before they start getting replaced by rendered versions.
The idea that more people are alive than have died is an urban myth; if you google it, estimates are that about 100 billion people have lived and died over the last 50k years. So we're outnumbered by dead people by quite a bit.
Exactly. As long as the patent system is built to be an adversarial system where one of the parties has to get screwed for it to function, well, somebody is and chances are it's the little guy.
If someone actually wanted to make inventing and patenting easier and more consistently worthwhile then the system would be reconstructed so, for example, the patent office pays the inventor when his patent gets used, while the funding would be gathered as VAT or something general. It would become just another tax/subsidise scheme (just like it is anyway) handled like every other such scheme, accounted for within state budgets and evaluated for efficiency.
Actually it's a quite interesting topic as it highlights the deficiencies of economic measures like GDP. Measures that could take into account all value created in society, ranging from pro-bono work to free software to the value of free time would be far more useful to maximize the wealth creation in an economy as a whole.
The reason why we would get a world without professional musicians would be that there was a vast surplus of musicians leading to supply massively outstripping demand. Which means we'd have a world with a lot of amateur musicians playing for fun, without pay, because they enjoy doing it. Much like we have today.
To answer the question of what the GP does for a living, one can assume he's doing something that nobody else would do for fun or as a hobby. Probably not trying to be a professional starcraft player or a pro angler. Much like most people who hold paying jobs, making the choice between fun or a paycheck. It's not a question of the value of the work, it's a question of wether the value is available anywhere and everywhere without remuneration or not.
The reaction from 'professional musicians' when Amanda Palmer invited amateurs to play with her on tour locations is an exceptional example of what must be the most spoiled and conceited group of people ever to grace the labour market.
As a general rule it's not 'one company', but many and varying forms of companies in many countries depending on the forms of incorporation that are available in each country. Most countries have variants that can be owned and controlled by outside entities, which is why the local ones don't go around doing their own thing.
This of course creates all sorts of ways to move money around to the place in which profits are best taken, as they can usually make internal sales for imaginary numbers to their subsidiaries which allows them to control exactly where the profit goes. For the specific corporate structure used by google and many others you can look up Double Irish on Wikipedia, which is a structure that allows any corporation to basically pay very close to no taxes at all.
For most of history there has been a large pent-up demand, and a demand whose fulfillment has almost always required labour. There are indications that both of these factors are changing; both the demand side where the demand pretty much only exist if it never has to be paid for (the pre-crash massive credit expansion, do people wan't macmansions, or do they want free macmansions?) and on the labour side where scaling demand simply doesn't create new jobs to any significant extent.
In the economic end game we have all resources extracted and recycled by self-servicing automated machinery, that can be turned into anything you can get a semi-ai blueprint creator to create for you for an automated manufacturing unit to produce. When there's no manual labour involved in the whole process at all, in a functioning competitive free market the price would fall to zero. And if you can get most things that you can reasonably well describe or copy produced for you at zero cost, what exactly do you foresee will be something you want so bad that you're going to foresake a lot of free time to try to find something someone else wants that they can't get for free that you can help them with?
There will be things, of course. But at the point where most things are free, a whole lot of people are going to say, meh, I'll go have a (no-human-labour-was-involved) beer with buddies or play an online (largely ai-generated) game or something.
Price scraping is always a bit iffy and with rarer items even more so, so I think I'd discount the Opteron. A few steps below the top the prices look realistic and have matched what was available locally in retail for me.
Looking at the performance charts at Passmark the top still looks dominated by AMD. Intel has ramped up performance, but it's ramped up price even more.
On the AMD side the sockets have stayed compatible for quite some time over the generations, and I can say that I've upgraded CPU's many, many times. Usually the server side has gotten to inherit CPU's from faster desktops, leading to multiple upgrades as servers then inherit eachother. Old socket AM2 boards that started out running cheap sempron CPU's end up running dualcore X2 chips.
You could, of course, move the whole MB instead or recommission a machine, but frankly there's a lot more specificity of purpose in the MB than in the CPU leading to bad fits and significant price differences to get something that will work well for any purpose. A whole lot of flexibility would be lost.
I've certainly done so a lot of times. Stick a newer more powerful CPU into a desktop or media PC and I get a chain upgrade of 2-4 other machines. 5 faster machines for the price of 1, hard to get a better deal.
Still, even Bujold is fairly recent. Personally I suspect that if men were the ones getting pregnant we'd have had da Vinci making designs for uterine replicators and the Germans would have perfected them in the 30's.
It will be interesting to see how the debate goes when they start being used, particularly as cosmetic and convenience reasons are likely to be significant drivers. I'm certain some groups will find (or make up) a lot of reasons to oppose them, despite the many and obvious advantages.
Why would his mail go to his ISP? Mine certainly doesn't, it routes from my local mail server through a VPN via a VPS and from there to destination and vice versa.
Not that I have anything I'm particularly concerned about, but the asshats in charge can take their retention directive and shove it.
Variance within the groups is far larger than the variance between the groups, which indicates that any selection from culture or race would be wildly inappropriate to use as the main factor that impacts learning performance.
If they for some reason want to grade ability by ability, then they should probably do a battery of learning tests and divide people into groups on that, until everyone gets average grade in their very own grade group, no matter what other groups they may or may not belong to. Which of course negates the entire point of grading at all, for better or worse.
If they actually want to help people who have reduced performance then they can just commit resources to assist anyone who performs badly, and neither race or culture need to enter in to it.
In the case of offensive speech there's certainly a case to be made that it works one way. As offense is a subjective experience and the threshold for offense can reasonably be argued to be related to what can be expected in normal discourse, removing any offensive material will lead to other material being the 'most offensive' and hence cause even stronger subjective feelings of offense in an ever more sensitized audience than it previously would, in turn leading to arguments for its removal from public discourse.
Perhaps it's kept in equilibrium by the tendency of oppressive systems to get violently overthrown and have their standards of offense recalibrated against a curtain of bloodshed and death. But maybe it's better to avoid walking down that road by having people grow up and not base their entire sense of selfworth on whatever verbal diarhea is coming out of some random ass.
If TFA is accurate, "Climate change is happening so fast that caffeine farms would have to move their plantations 50m every decade to survive, he added.", this would be another case of OMG the HORROR.
Of course, calling them caffeine farms may be an indication that 50m might mean something other than 50 meters and that someone hasn't had their morning coffee. In that case one would hope more care is taken with any units used in actual calculations underlying the cause for alarm.
I doubt any governments are going to fix this. They've been bitching about Ireland's corporate tax rate for years now which is utterly irrelevant as the companies in question arent even paying Irelands corporate taxes.
The details of the Double Irish/Dutch sandwich scheme is even on Wikipedia and has been for years. And it will come to no surprise to anyone here, but fantasy pricing of 'intellectual property' finds yet another use as a great way to transfer profits to a shell corporation set up in a place where you just happen to have zero corporate tax.
Just wait 'til the media corps figure they should be able to deduct pirate copies on taxes and demand tax rebates of several trillion dollars.
Indeed, as the ultimate goal of humans is to work as much as possible. Almost everyone on their death bed regrets not having worked more. Or maybe not.
We're rapidly leaving the age of scarcity. Within years whole swaths of current human fields of labour will be rendered obsolete, even now Chinese labour is getting replaced by robots, 3d printing will probably do a lot more in and we're on the cusp of losing vehicle piloting to automation which will wipe out large parts of the transportation industry. Increased demand is simply fulfilled by more automated processes, it doesn't create more need for labour to anywhere near the extent it used to.
Ultimately we will have a choice. Either keep the few employed in productive necessary labour, while directly and indirectly taxing them like hell to support the rest of the population in meaningless make-work or outright welfare. Or we can cut working hours/days until equilibrium is restored and more equitable distribution of labour is achieved.
Personally I prefer the latter. I can live with having more free time, but both working my ass off to keep everyone else fed or, to paraphrase Keynes, doing make-work by burying money and digging it up again just to keep 'money' flowing aren't among the more palatable ways of living life.
While it may be difficult to create a system without leeches attempting to exploit it, it's possible to create systems where the various forces balance eachother.
The fundamental problem with all IPR systems is that all the parties involved in the system gain from having it extended. The government offices managing them, lawyers, holders, they all gain. The paying party, consumers and the aggregate economy, has no representation. The total cost to the economy isn't even calculated and certainly not accounted for.
Imagine a different system, for example if patents didn't grant monopoly rights but instead a renumeration right where the patent office paid out a certain amount out of a fixed budget as patents got used in products. In such a system, granting more patents or increasing the duration of them would mean everyone got smaller payments. Further, as there would be an actual visible budget it would compete with other priorities such as defense or health care, creating an incentive for politicians to keep a certain balance.
You'd still have the leeches, but there would be a built in systemic resistance, as for someone to get more it would be apparent that everyone else got less.
The board probably had decided on a MS strategy before hiring Elop so they're as complicit in the current strategy as he is. That means they have face invested in the strategy which makes it unlikely that they'll fire Elop and change directions before it's too late. Once the board gets replaced the company may stand a chance, but that'll take some time.
It's certainly possible, but considering that the rails are subjected to the same force the projectile is and the tolerances are probably fairly important to prevent arcing and maintaining accuracy you may end up with a fairly heavy fixture that needs replacing. Replaceable strips might be possible, but I'd wager that part of the problem in producing replacable parts in a railgun is that pretty much everything apart from the projectile will end up welded into one piece.
Despite the marketing speak of marketers, tracking users does not help with targetting ads as it misses the temporal aspect of targetting. It doesn't matter if they know I was interested in apple trees three months ago, or yesterday, because when I'm reading that Time article, at that exact point in time I don't give a fuck about apple trees. Unless it actually happens to be a Time article about apple trees, in which case tracking me is pointless, as they could, cheaper and more accurately, target the reader by using the contents of the article.
Any worthwhile targetting can use the contents of the presented material. The most worthwhile avenue is price comparison sites where you pretty much know everyone browsing them is a potential customer at the specific time they're browsing. Bar that you've got special interest sites and articles, where the reader may have an interest in the subject matter, with a fair chance at catching them in a research-for-purchase point in time. But tracking? Any historical data you have is worthless compared to knowing what they're browsing right now and that simply doesn't require tracking.
Show something relevant to the article I'm reading. Because even with an FMRI strapped to my head you're not going to get a better targetting. If you can't think of anything interesting, too bad, but there is nothing you can know about me that will make me care about something unrelated while I'm reading that article.
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By the time remote controlled robots would be usable enough to carry around and install office equipment it won't be long before we have robots that can do it without any remote control.
And I doubt there will be a significant time span where robot-maintainer is a useful job; we'll have robots for that too.
There needs to be a serious discussion on what kind of society we are going to have when human labour is obsolete. The current system will start seriously breaking down when capacity outstrips demand by a significant degree and any increase in demand will be met by further automation.
You cannot selectively enforce a law of nature or a mathematical law. Human laws are selectively enforced all the time. Intent and circumstances are often taken into account. Often history is considered. Sometimes even connections, wealth and race. All of those influence whether laws are enforced in any particular case.
Many judicial systems have significant discretionary powers, to the extent where, for better or worse, the letter of the law is often less important than the circumstances of the case.
IP is ultimately a form of taxation and redistribution and as such it contributes to the general cost level of the economy. Saying that IPR is needed because the jobs are the only ones that don't get outsourced to cheaper countries is equivalent to saying that we need higher taxes to pay for government jobs that are the only ones that don't get oursourced.
IPR simply makes an economy less competitive and is part of the reason why everything is too expensive to do in the west.
And frankly I can't see any reason why blockbuster couldn't trivially be outsourced. The script for most films could probably be written by, eh, a script. Effects can certianly be done anywhere and I really doubt actors will last beyond the decade before they start getting replaced by rendered versions.
The idea that more people are alive than have died is an urban myth; if you google it, estimates are that about 100 billion people have lived and died over the last 50k years. So we're outnumbered by dead people by quite a bit.
Exactly. As long as the patent system is built to be an adversarial system where one of the parties has to get screwed for it to function, well, somebody is and chances are it's the little guy.
If someone actually wanted to make inventing and patenting easier and more consistently worthwhile then the system would be reconstructed so, for example, the patent office pays the inventor when his patent gets used, while the funding would be gathered as VAT or something general. It would become just another tax/subsidise scheme (just like it is anyway) handled like every other such scheme, accounted for within state budgets and evaluated for efficiency.
Actually it's a quite interesting topic as it highlights the deficiencies of economic measures like GDP. Measures that could take into account all value created in society, ranging from pro-bono work to free software to the value of free time would be far more useful to maximize the wealth creation in an economy as a whole.
The reason why we would get a world without professional musicians would be that there was a vast surplus of musicians leading to supply massively outstripping demand. Which means we'd have a world with a lot of amateur musicians playing for fun, without pay, because they enjoy doing it. Much like we have today.
To answer the question of what the GP does for a living, one can assume he's doing something that nobody else would do for fun or as a hobby. Probably not trying to be a professional starcraft player or a pro angler. Much like most people who hold paying jobs, making the choice between fun or a paycheck. It's not a question of the value of the work, it's a question of wether the value is available anywhere and everywhere without remuneration or not.
The reaction from 'professional musicians' when Amanda Palmer invited amateurs to play with her on tour locations is an exceptional example of what must be the most spoiled and conceited group of people ever to grace the labour market.
As a general rule it's not 'one company', but many and varying forms of companies in many countries depending on the forms of incorporation that are available in each country. Most countries have variants that can be owned and controlled by outside entities, which is why the local ones don't go around doing their own thing.
This of course creates all sorts of ways to move money around to the place in which profits are best taken, as they can usually make internal sales for imaginary numbers to their subsidiaries which allows them to control exactly where the profit goes. For the specific corporate structure used by google and many others you can look up Double Irish on Wikipedia, which is a structure that allows any corporation to basically pay very close to no taxes at all.
For most of history there has been a large pent-up demand, and a demand whose fulfillment has almost always required labour. There are indications that both of these factors are changing; both the demand side where the demand pretty much only exist if it never has to be paid for (the pre-crash massive credit expansion, do people wan't macmansions, or do they want free macmansions?) and on the labour side where scaling demand simply doesn't create new jobs to any significant extent. In the economic end game we have all resources extracted and recycled by self-servicing automated machinery, that can be turned into anything you can get a semi-ai blueprint creator to create for you for an automated manufacturing unit to produce. When there's no manual labour involved in the whole process at all, in a functioning competitive free market the price would fall to zero. And if you can get most things that you can reasonably well describe or copy produced for you at zero cost, what exactly do you foresee will be something you want so bad that you're going to foresake a lot of free time to try to find something someone else wants that they can't get for free that you can help them with? There will be things, of course. But at the point where most things are free, a whole lot of people are going to say, meh, I'll go have a (no-human-labour-was-involved) beer with buddies or play an online (largely ai-generated) game or something.
Price scraping is always a bit iffy and with rarer items even more so, so I think I'd discount the Opteron. A few steps below the top the prices look realistic and have matched what was available locally in retail for me.
Looking at the performance charts at Passmark the top still looks dominated by AMD. Intel has ramped up performance, but it's ramped up price even more.
On the AMD side the sockets have stayed compatible for quite some time over the generations, and I can say that I've upgraded CPU's many, many times. Usually the server side has gotten to inherit CPU's from faster desktops, leading to multiple upgrades as servers then inherit eachother. Old socket AM2 boards that started out running cheap sempron CPU's end up running dualcore X2 chips.
You could, of course, move the whole MB instead or recommission a machine, but frankly there's a lot more specificity of purpose in the MB than in the CPU leading to bad fits and significant price differences to get something that will work well for any purpose. A whole lot of flexibility would be lost.
I've certainly done so a lot of times. Stick a newer more powerful CPU into a desktop or media PC and I get a chain upgrade of 2-4 other machines. 5 faster machines for the price of 1, hard to get a better deal.
Enterprise solution - solvent used for dissolving excessive piles of cash in corporate vaults.
Still, even Bujold is fairly recent. Personally I suspect that if men were the ones getting pregnant we'd have had da Vinci making designs for uterine replicators and the Germans would have perfected them in the 30's.
It will be interesting to see how the debate goes when they start being used, particularly as cosmetic and convenience reasons are likely to be significant drivers. I'm certain some groups will find (or make up) a lot of reasons to oppose them, despite the many and obvious advantages.
Why would his mail go to his ISP? Mine certainly doesn't, it routes from my local mail server through a VPN via a VPS and from there to destination and vice versa.
Not that I have anything I'm particularly concerned about, but the asshats in charge can take their retention directive and shove it.
Variance within the groups is far larger than the variance between the groups, which indicates that any selection from culture or race would be wildly inappropriate to use as the main factor that impacts learning performance.
If they for some reason want to grade ability by ability, then they should probably do a battery of learning tests and divide people into groups on that, until everyone gets average grade in their very own grade group, no matter what other groups they may or may not belong to. Which of course negates the entire point of grading at all, for better or worse.
If they actually want to help people who have reduced performance then they can just commit resources to assist anyone who performs badly, and neither race or culture need to enter in to it.
In the case of offensive speech there's certainly a case to be made that it works one way. As offense is a subjective experience and the threshold for offense can reasonably be argued to be related to what can be expected in normal discourse, removing any offensive material will lead to other material being the 'most offensive' and hence cause even stronger subjective feelings of offense in an ever more sensitized audience than it previously would, in turn leading to arguments for its removal from public discourse.
Perhaps it's kept in equilibrium by the tendency of oppressive systems to get violently overthrown and have their standards of offense recalibrated against a curtain of bloodshed and death. But maybe it's better to avoid walking down that road by having people grow up and not base their entire sense of selfworth on whatever verbal diarhea is coming out of some random ass.
If TFA is accurate, "Climate change is happening so fast that caffeine farms would have to move their plantations 50m every decade to survive, he added.", this would be another case of OMG the HORROR.
Of course, calling them caffeine farms may be an indication that 50m might mean something other than 50 meters and that someone hasn't had their morning coffee. In that case one would hope more care is taken with any units used in actual calculations underlying the cause for alarm.
I doubt any governments are going to fix this. They've been bitching about Ireland's corporate tax rate for years now which is utterly irrelevant as the companies in question arent even paying Irelands corporate taxes.
The details of the Double Irish/Dutch sandwich scheme is even on Wikipedia and has been for years. And it will come to no surprise to anyone here, but fantasy pricing of 'intellectual property' finds yet another use as a great way to transfer profits to a shell corporation set up in a place where you just happen to have zero corporate tax.
Just wait 'til the media corps figure they should be able to deduct pirate copies on taxes and demand tax rebates of several trillion dollars.
Indeed, as the ultimate goal of humans is to work as much as possible. Almost everyone on their death bed regrets not having worked more. Or maybe not.
We're rapidly leaving the age of scarcity. Within years whole swaths of current human fields of labour will be rendered obsolete, even now Chinese labour is getting replaced by robots, 3d printing will probably do a lot more in and we're on the cusp of losing vehicle piloting to automation which will wipe out large parts of the transportation industry. Increased demand is simply fulfilled by more automated processes, it doesn't create more need for labour to anywhere near the extent it used to.
Ultimately we will have a choice. Either keep the few employed in productive necessary labour, while directly and indirectly taxing them like hell to support the rest of the population in meaningless make-work or outright welfare. Or we can cut working hours/days until equilibrium is restored and more equitable distribution of labour is achieved.
Personally I prefer the latter. I can live with having more free time, but both working my ass off to keep everyone else fed or, to paraphrase Keynes, doing make-work by burying money and digging it up again just to keep 'money' flowing aren't among the more palatable ways of living life.
While it may be difficult to create a system without leeches attempting to exploit it, it's possible to create systems where the various forces balance eachother.
The fundamental problem with all IPR systems is that all the parties involved in the system gain from having it extended. The government offices managing them, lawyers, holders, they all gain. The paying party, consumers and the aggregate economy, has no representation. The total cost to the economy isn't even calculated and certainly not accounted for.
Imagine a different system, for example if patents didn't grant monopoly rights but instead a renumeration right where the patent office paid out a certain amount out of a fixed budget as patents got used in products. In such a system, granting more patents or increasing the duration of them would mean everyone got smaller payments. Further, as there would be an actual visible budget it would compete with other priorities such as defense or health care, creating an incentive for politicians to keep a certain balance.
You'd still have the leeches, but there would be a built in systemic resistance, as for someone to get more it would be apparent that everyone else got less.
The board probably had decided on a MS strategy before hiring Elop so they're as complicit in the current strategy as he is. That means they have face invested in the strategy which makes it unlikely that they'll fire Elop and change directions before it's too late. Once the board gets replaced the company may stand a chance, but that'll take some time.
It's certainly possible, but considering that the rails are subjected to the same force the projectile is and the tolerances are probably fairly important to prevent arcing and maintaining accuracy you may end up with a fairly heavy fixture that needs replacing. Replaceable strips might be possible, but I'd wager that part of the problem in producing replacable parts in a railgun is that pretty much everything apart from the projectile will end up welded into one piece.
Despite the marketing speak of marketers, tracking users does not help with targetting ads as it misses the temporal aspect of targetting. It doesn't matter if they know I was interested in apple trees three months ago, or yesterday, because when I'm reading that Time article, at that exact point in time I don't give a fuck about apple trees. Unless it actually happens to be a Time article about apple trees, in which case tracking me is pointless, as they could, cheaper and more accurately, target the reader by using the contents of the article.
Any worthwhile targetting can use the contents of the presented material. The most worthwhile avenue is price comparison sites where you pretty much know everyone browsing them is a potential customer at the specific time they're browsing. Bar that you've got special interest sites and articles, where the reader may have an interest in the subject matter, with a fair chance at catching them in a research-for-purchase point in time. But tracking? Any historical data you have is worthless compared to knowing what they're browsing right now and that simply doesn't require tracking.
Show something relevant to the article I'm reading. Because even with an FMRI strapped to my head you're not going to get a better targetting. If you can't think of anything interesting, too bad, but there is nothing you can know about me that will make me care about something unrelated while I'm reading that article.
It really is that simple.