>Many on the left love protectionism...except when they don't.
Many on the right love protectionism...except when they don't.
As both sides wake up and realize that nobody thinks the idea is any good. Both ends of the spectrum have had the wool pulled over their eyes by corporate interests for the benefit of maybe a few thousand extremely wealthy individuals. Those same 100 families own 75% of everything, and have us so busy fighting each other we don't realize that they already snuck off with the loot...
Without personal gain, shit just doesn't get done.
People managed to make money (even obscene amounts) before patents and copyrights existed. They will be able to make money (even obscene amounts) after patents and copyright are given the boot.
Or put another way, if nobody is making something, someone will come along and make it. If there are too many people making copies of something, then some of those people will go out of business. The idea that without patent and copyright protection, nobody will build anything, is without merit and stands in contrast to 10,000 years of commerce.
Last note: copyrights and patents are artificial *monopolies*. They exist in direct contradiction to the concept of a free market. One cannot be in favor of unregulated free markets and be in favor of copyrights and patents: They stand at odds to one another. If you believe they can co-exist then you either do not understand what patents and copyrights are, or you do not understand what free markets are...
Best results will be obtained by using Monster (tm) brand USB cables.
I can vouch for that. I was running windows 8.1 about a year and a half ago when I bought a Monster USB cable for my PC. After plugging it in to let my iPhone sync overnight, I came back in the morning to find that the good folks at Monster have created an alternative to Windows called "Ubuntu", and their USB cable installed it for me! At first I was worried, but the tech support assured me that it was free, and I have never looked back!
If you're running versions with known vulnerabilities, that makes things really easy for the bad guys.
Windows itself has become an unpatchable vulnerability because Microsoft *are* the bad guys, and they have the keys to the kingdom. Enabling / Disabling Windows update is now a lose-lose proposition. If you are stuck with windows, your only choice is whose malware you want installed on your computer...
Why can't Microsoft just open source everything and play nice with the development community without making me cringe every time their update policy changes?
Because Microsoft is not in the business of giving anything away free (as in freedom or beer). The only reason it didn't cost you money to "upgrade" from win 7/8 to win10 is because win10 isn't the product, *you* are. Microsoft is in the business of wringing every spare dime out of every source they can get. Everything they do is with an eye towards that end. They gave up on selling an operating system to get money from you because as a target of advertising, you are worth far more to them than a measly hundred and fifty bucks every few years. The advertising revenue per person for targeted advertising like that provided by search and by those who control the OS, are worth several hundred dollars a year per computer in ad revenue.
No one is late to the IoT party yet. It's not clear there's even going to be one.
By the time these kinds of trends have a dopey name, the party has already started. If you didn't already have an IoT product well under development by now, its already too late because all the players that will be successful, in what people are calling the IoT, already have a product at or near market release.
These guys with the kickstarter want to start a business, otherwise they wouldn't be putting the energy into this. The problem they face is that they are trying to enter an already saturated market with a product that has no real differentiation from the market. In the low volumes they will likely be able to sell, and facing competition from the Raspberry Pi foundation who are a not for profit in a saturated market, They will be roadkill in 2 years. Even an established player like Intel is getting rogered good in this market. In two years they have gotten just a few thousand supporter. There is some reason to believe they are funding the production of promised units through future donations. Even if they are on the up and up so far, they do not have a clear path to profitability. Even if their unit cost is $0, they have so far sold just 10,000 units per year. That amounts to $50,000 per year in income. Thats barely enough to keep 1 person gainfully employed. In order to be remotely successful, with a profit margin of $1 per unit, they would need to sell hundreds of thousands of units. Even if by some miracle they do managed to sell 100k units per year for two years, in two years their product is completely obsolete, and if they haven't spent a huge percentage of that money developing the next generation, they sink like a rock.
The only way to avoid that fate is to manage to sell millions of units with at least a few dollar per unit of profit margin.
Depends on what you want to do. If you have an IoT product to develop, this could be exactly what you want at its heart.
If you have an IoT product in mind, this is the last thing you want. I do this for a living. The problem with this thing is that it takes too much development effort to shave a few bucks off the unit cost. That extra effort translates into longer time to market. While you are loosing precious months trying to get your OS running with everything you need in a tiny memory footprint, another up-and-coming startup built a product around one of the other SBCs out there that isn't vastly under-powered. They beat you to market by 6 months with a product that only costs $5 more than yours, and you suddenly find your brilliant IoT product just got flushed down the loo because you couldn't execute a viable business plan.
Time to market is huge in this day and age. Just ask Intel and Microsoft how their IoT plans are rolling out, and you'll find out real quick that even a superior product at a lower price point will have a hard time competing when you're late to the party.
Because you cant FIND Pi-Zeros and so they effectively don't exist for most of the interested market?
These are not available yet either. The difference is that I have some degree of confidence that the Pi foundation will eventually produce zeros in enough quantity to satisfy demand...
Absolutely not, the goal should be to write the simplest code. Simplest being defined as easiest to understand that gets the job done. Simple code has fewer bugs, is generally easier to write, even if it is longer sometimes, and is far and gone easier to maintain.
Many code abbreviation techniques actually make code harder to understand, like some of the sketchier if constructs in C, in-line class definitions in C++, etc... And before you start talking about in-line class definitions being faster, modern compilers have been able to handle whole program optimization including cross-source in-lining for many years now, there is no longer any benefit to having any code in headers, and for readability, lots of good reasons to never have code in headers. Keep each class in its own files (header and source pair), and nobody gets hurt.
And tbh it's not that efficient anyway, but the programmer who wrote it doesn't know because he didn't time it........
Yes it is, and yes we do. Our programs run against massive data sets (anywhere from a couple hundred MB to tens of TB) on a single machine. Our inner loops run billions of iterations per pass, and response time is absolutely critical. A single extra instruction in an inner loop can cost many seconds of real response time. Cloud solutions are not an option, and neither are large server farms. This thing has to run on somebodies desk.
Short of assembler, there are not many ways to improve on what we are doing, and even there GCC and MSVC++ both produce some damn fast and highly efficient code when fed the right diet of templated inline functions. In the few cases where the final assembled version has made me do a WTF, it turned out to be instruction re-ordering to take advantage of (or work around) quirks of the x86 machines in common use today. I have been very hard pressed to beat the compiler for most functions compiled from good TMP. Some of the things we do with it simply cant be done anywhere else but assembler. Even C has its limitations.
As an exercise, try to figure out how to get a C program to compile down to a dynamic set of functions, all in-lined into a single function. In TMP, I can do it. The templating spreads out the function into as many versions as it takes to cover all the possible variations, each of which is a fully in-lined version containing only the desired "calls". I have been programming in C a long time, and the best I have ever seen was someone try to implement the same thing by actually implementing all the different variations of the in-lined function by hand, and then creating a jump table to pick the right one. It was thousands of LOC and prone to typos, as opposed to the TMP version which was 50 LOC, and either worked or didn't, no place for small corner case errors to hide.
Yeah we should definitely be more like Venezuela or Greece, because it's progressive to die 4 years earlier on average due to shitty socialist healthcare.
Wait, expensive? You've already paid for it through taxes. Why would any ambulance service charge you twice?
Thats not how it works...
The ambulance company, like the hospital, expects to get paid, and will send your bill to a collections agency if you don't pay it. Like a hospital, they are not allowed to refuse treatment, and it is pretty bad karma to look for cash up front from someone in need of an ambulance ride. You might think that the ambulance service is paid for by taxes, but most of them are either private, or volunteer companies.
You might not have noticed the cost before, because it is typically included into your hospital bill which the insurance company picks up and pays. If you are feeling adventurous, you can even barter for the best rates before having an ambulance company called (there are typically multiples available to choose form in any given area).
If US companies can't operate under fair rules in China, should Chinese companies be permitted to operate in the US without restrictions?
We can still trade, but do we necessarily have to allow service oriented businesses operate on each other's soil?
The Chinese are right to fight all American tech companies tooth and nail. American diplomats have been trying to force IP laws on China: laws which are decidedly foreign to the communist concept, and entirely biased in favor of the US. The simple fact is that American technology can't compete without inventing imaginary property and forcing others to pay for the right to use that imaginary property. The very concept is all the worst kinds of rent-seeking, and I don't want that shit in my country either. I'm stuck with it unfortunately, but I think that anyone with sense enough to understand why income inequality is a problem should be firmly on Chinas side on this one.
Python ranked #4 on RedMonk's list, while the survey found a three-way tie for fifth place between Ruby, C#, and C++,
Their methodology according to the link is to scan github and sourceforge and determine what frequency those projects use what languages. This is absolutely asinine, as it completely precludes all closed source work. Most embedded systems, drivers, and other low level work is not going to be open source, as it is work for hire. This list can best be described as the ranking of the popularity of languages for peoples pet projects, and or what languages they use when not getting paid. I will also say that given the choice between a website with only a dozen years of existence vs IEEE with almost 100 years of existence with an interest in all things electronic and computing, I will go with IEEE every time. Sorry RedMonk, its just hard to take you seriously when you are clearly some guys blog, and you're competing with an international professional organization with membership measured in the millions and decades of exceptional science and technology reporting.
You might want to pay particular attention to aviation and the problem of lifting hundreds of tons into the air because only hydrocarbon energy is dense enough to provide that kind of power in a weight ratio suitable for flight with useful payload.
Horseshit. The solar impulse 2 just rounded the planet on nothing but solar power. Commercially viable electric powered air flight requires only evolutionary improvements to existing technology, not revolutionary changes. In fact, in the event that a shortage of fossil fuels comes to pass, the economics could make regular electric flight happen, even without the need for any governmental interference. GE and Rolls Royce already have experimental programs to that very effect, and those are just the two i know about.
Neither do photo-voltaic cells, and I notice that the article carefully avoided any mention of efficiency. I expect that is where this thing goes off the rails. If it can't muster at least 10% efficiency (comparable to an EV powered by solar cells), then whats the point? Photovoltaics would be better.
The whole idea of explosion powered vehicles is pretty stupid when faced with the infrastructure to transmit electrical power in vast quantities. 100 years ago, that infrastructure did not exist, and there was considerable doubt as to its ability to scale. Today, we have a successful, proven system that can scale to any amount needed for relatively cheap. Its time to move on from flammable materials as fuels.
All of the other crap in seawater makes a mess of the delicate chemistry involved. As with most of these things, it needs pure water, or it will quickly stop working.
It is also clear that it will *consume* fresh water, which adds yet another drain on our already overtaxed fresh water supply.
They care about the excitement of being a part of something.
That is exactly how scam artists operate. Its like they say: A fool and their money...
On the other side, even the most well intentioned people can fail miserably. Making VR / AR tech is a *very* expensive proposition. Its hard tech, and requires tons of expensive R+D. This is not the sort of thing that crowdfunding is likely to get right, since R+D work is heavily front loaded, it is a bad business plan to promise units before you are in the late stages of development because all the money you get from pre-orders gets spent on R+D, and when you do finally have a product working, there is not enough money to manufacture the units you have already promised to ship. In addition, a good rule of thumb is that the first 500 units will cost you 3 times as much to manufacture (not including R+D cost) as the final product, just because of teething problems with any new product assembly. If your product profit margins cant absorb that kind of hit (which most cant), then your business plan needs to account for having enough funding in place *before* taking those orders, to pay those expenses, Otherwise, you get into the viscous cycle of using new customers money to pay for previous customers product, and you can only afford small batches of product which drives your per unit cost way up, and makes it that much harder to dig out of the hole.
Congrats, you've just raised the bar of employment above the heads of the marginally skilled, and put them on your 'Basic Income',
Thats a Good Thing (tm). No one does those jobs because they want to. They do them because they have to. The sooner those jobs are fully automated, the happier everyone will be. I would argue that it is far far better to have a set of people on welfare than it is to have that same set of people working at crap jobs for the rest of their lives, if for no other reason than because the automation will always do a better job than a disgruntled person.
Automation is by far and gone the best thing to happen to our world, and yet conservatives claim its the coming of the end of days because it takes away jobs. Somebody somewhere managed to convince the entire population of the planet that it is their god given right to toil away their lives at jobs they hate in pursuit of one day making enough money so they can retire and stop doing those jobs they hate so damn much. The whole thing is a relic of a soon to be bygone era. A thousand years from now, the people will look back in horror at what they will consider to be the equivalent of slavery and say its small wonder we wanted to kill each other all the time.
I do a job which requires me to work 50-60 hours a week because it requires a relatively (within my field) unique combination of skills and knowledge, plus there needs to be one person making a consistent set of decisions for the people underneath me in the organization structure. Much like getting nine women pregnant won't produce a child in a month, having more people do my job won't decrease the amount of work I have to do, and having multiple managers giving out potentially contradictory instructions would potentially make it far far worse.
There are no jobs where that is a fundamental component of the job. It is rather a fundamental component of the particular business structure your employer has chosen for your company. I used to work as at UPS, and upper management there claimed that they needed to only use part time employees while insisting that management employees work 60+ hour weeks. They claimed that this was a fundamental result of the way in which the transportation industry worked. Then along came FedEx, and suddenly that business model got a lot less cut and dry. Then came the lawsuits from the part time employees, and suddenly the company figured out how to make the hours work for them.
Just because no one in your particular industry has the foresight to see a better way, doesn't mean there isn't a better way. In the end, most industry is simply unnecessary in the grand scheme of things, and if your little piece of things stopped getting done, would anyone really notice?
The job I mentioned above, had those same basic problems. It turns out the reason for the problem was not fundamental to the job, but fundamental to the crappy technology the company had chosen to implement the tools of the job. With better tools, the job could have easily been reduced to 30 hours per week. In fact, the job could have been done entirely without those tools. The result would have been a less profitable operation, but profit is only of concern to the stockholders. Society shouldn't and *normally* doesn't care about it. In the end, there isn't any job that can't be re-engineered to function with more people working in smaller time blocks. If you're lazy, you could even just do those 14 hour shifts, but do one of them a week. Your company could train more people to do the job, they just choose not to. If you can't find people capable enough, try doubling the salary and see if you get those more capable people you were looking for. Methinks you would.
I would still get food stamps and reducing income housing. Sounds like working is for suckers.
Working is for people who enjoy what they are doing. There is no fundamental reason why people should have to work more than a few hours a week, as this is all that is really required to maintain society. The trouble comes from the jobs out there that nobody wants to do. As a society, we are making a concerted effort to eradicate these jobs. The few that cannot be automated or otherwise eliminated should merit extra pay above UBI to compensate the people that do them, but as time goes on there will be dwindling need for these jobs. The rest of the jobs are things that people actually enjoy doing, and many of them would get done anyways because people like doing them: Engineering, Science (which is damn near the poverty level anyways), etc... The simple fact is that the work that society needs to have done is almost non-existent. Look at France, they have one of the most extensive PTO in the world, 25% unemployment (thanks to monumental youth unemployment), and yet their society still functions OK. everyone gets mostly what they want. You could also look at the Nordic model with essentially a UBI coupled with free education and nationalized health care. Their society hasn't collapsed. People there still get up and go to work even though there are huge numbers of people that are on welfare. Its time to admit that Capitalism was necessary in the old world, but in the post automation world, capitalism causes more problems than it solves. Communisim may or may not have many answers, but a mixed model will probably be the best solution, and if the Nordic countries are anything to go by, that model has been showing tremendous success already. Its very telling that Three of the top five countries on the HDI list use the Nordic model, and they have consistently remained high on those lists. The united states by contrast has now fallen to number 8, and shows every sign of continued slippage. When you look at the inequality adjusted HDI, the nordic states remain in the top 5, and the united states falls all the way to 28th position which indicates that in the United states, the standard of living is only high if you are wealthy. The poor and middle classes actually suffer living standards that are on par with Poland, the Check Republic and Malta.
How would an immediately available customer rating know if the carpets were fire retardant or not?
It wouldn't. The building inspector would know, and were talking about eliminating hotel taxes and hotel specific regulations, not building codes. Fire safety regulations are not specific to hotels, but are required by the building department in regards to buildings of a certain size and type.
To elaborate, hotels are not required to have sprinklers because they are hotels, they are required to have them if the building is of a large enough size and meets certain criteria. A building of that size and type would require sprinklers, even if it were an office building, or some other kind of building with a high density of persons at any given time. Conversely, a free standing motel where every room has individual exits to the outdoors are not typically required to have sprinklers because the building type does not present the same fire hazard. Again that would be the case if it were a motel or not, and would be the purview of the building department.
A simple example is hotels are held to a much higher standard for fire safety.
No, buildings of that size and occupancy levels are held to that higher standard. It could be an office building, and the building codes have the same requirements given the same envelope of building. A hotel that consists of hundreds of single room free standing structures are not required to have sprinklers, fire block stairway exits, etc... All of those kinds of requirements are specific to the size and layout of the building to ensure escape paths, and fire warning, etc. Small free standing structures simply do not present the same hazards in that regard, so those things are not required.
Slashdot Mirror
>Many on the left love protectionism...except when they don't. Many on the right love protectionism...except when they don't.
As both sides wake up and realize that nobody thinks the idea is any good. Both ends of the spectrum have had the wool pulled over their eyes by corporate interests for the benefit of maybe a few thousand extremely wealthy individuals. Those same 100 families own 75% of everything, and have us so busy fighting each other we don't realize that they already snuck off with the loot...
Without personal gain, shit just doesn't get done.
People managed to make money (even obscene amounts) before patents and copyrights existed. They will be able to make money (even obscene amounts) after patents and copyright are given the boot.
Or put another way, if nobody is making something, someone will come along and make it. If there are too many people making copies of something, then some of those people will go out of business. The idea that without patent and copyright protection, nobody will build anything, is without merit and stands in contrast to 10,000 years of commerce.
Last note: copyrights and patents are artificial *monopolies*. They exist in direct contradiction to the concept of a free market. One cannot be in favor of unregulated free markets and be in favor of copyrights and patents: They stand at odds to one another. If you believe they can co-exist then you either do not understand what patents and copyrights are, or you do not understand what free markets are...
Best results will be obtained by using Monster (tm) brand USB cables.
I can vouch for that. I was running windows 8.1 about a year and a half ago when I bought a Monster USB cable for my PC. After plugging it in to let my iPhone sync overnight, I came back in the morning to find that the good folks at Monster have created an alternative to Windows called "Ubuntu", and their USB cable installed it for me! At first I was worried, but the tech support assured me that it was free, and I have never looked back!
As a desktop environment? Probably Emacs.
I predict 2017 will the year of emacs on the desktop.
If you're running versions with known vulnerabilities, that makes things really easy for the bad guys.
Windows itself has become an unpatchable vulnerability because Microsoft *are* the bad guys, and they have the keys to the kingdom. Enabling / Disabling Windows update is now a lose-lose proposition. If you are stuck with windows, your only choice is whose malware you want installed on your computer...
Why can't Microsoft just open source everything and play nice with the development community without making me cringe every time their update policy changes?
Because Microsoft is not in the business of giving anything away free (as in freedom or beer). The only reason it didn't cost you money to "upgrade" from win 7/8 to win10 is because win10 isn't the product, *you* are. Microsoft is in the business of wringing every spare dime out of every source they can get. Everything they do is with an eye towards that end. They gave up on selling an operating system to get money from you because as a target of advertising, you are worth far more to them than a measly hundred and fifty bucks every few years. The advertising revenue per person for targeted advertising like that provided by search and by those who control the OS, are worth several hundred dollars a year per computer in ad revenue.
TANSTAAFL
No one is late to the IoT party yet. It's not clear there's even going to be one.
By the time these kinds of trends have a dopey name, the party has already started. If you didn't already have an IoT product well under development by now, its already too late because all the players that will be successful, in what people are calling the IoT, already have a product at or near market release.
These guys with the kickstarter want to start a business, otherwise they wouldn't be putting the energy into this. The problem they face is that they are trying to enter an already saturated market with a product that has no real differentiation from the market. In the low volumes they will likely be able to sell, and facing competition from the Raspberry Pi foundation who are a not for profit in a saturated market, They will be roadkill in 2 years. Even an established player like Intel is getting rogered good in this market. In two years they have gotten just a few thousand supporter. There is some reason to believe they are funding the production of promised units through future donations. Even if they are on the up and up so far, they do not have a clear path to profitability. Even if their unit cost is $0, they have so far sold just 10,000 units per year. That amounts to $50,000 per year in income. Thats barely enough to keep 1 person gainfully employed. In order to be remotely successful, with a profit margin of $1 per unit, they would need to sell hundreds of thousands of units. Even if by some miracle they do managed to sell 100k units per year for two years, in two years their product is completely obsolete, and if they haven't spent a huge percentage of that money developing the next generation, they sink like a rock.
The only way to avoid that fate is to manage to sell millions of units with at least a few dollar per unit of profit margin.
Depends on what you want to do. If you have an IoT product to develop, this could be exactly what you want at its heart.
If you have an IoT product in mind, this is the last thing you want. I do this for a living. The problem with this thing is that it takes too much development effort to shave a few bucks off the unit cost. That extra effort translates into longer time to market. While you are loosing precious months trying to get your OS running with everything you need in a tiny memory footprint, another up-and-coming startup built a product around one of the other SBCs out there that isn't vastly under-powered. They beat you to market by 6 months with a product that only costs $5 more than yours, and you suddenly find your brilliant IoT product just got flushed down the loo because you couldn't execute a viable business plan.
Time to market is huge in this day and age. Just ask Intel and Microsoft how their IoT plans are rolling out, and you'll find out real quick that even a superior product at a lower price point will have a hard time competing when you're late to the party.
Because you cant FIND Pi-Zeros and so they effectively don't exist for most of the interested market?
These are not available yet either. The difference is that I have some degree of confidence that the Pi foundation will eventually produce zeros in enough quantity to satisfy demand...
The goal should always be to produce less code
Absolutely not, the goal should be to write the simplest code. Simplest being defined as easiest to understand that gets the job done. Simple code has fewer bugs, is generally easier to write, even if it is longer sometimes, and is far and gone easier to maintain.
Many code abbreviation techniques actually make code harder to understand, like some of the sketchier if constructs in C, in-line class definitions in C++, etc... And before you start talking about in-line class definitions being faster, modern compilers have been able to handle whole program optimization including cross-source in-lining for many years now, there is no longer any benefit to having any code in headers, and for readability, lots of good reasons to never have code in headers. Keep each class in its own files (header and source pair), and nobody gets hurt.
And tbh it's not that efficient anyway, but the programmer who wrote it doesn't know because he didn't time it........
Yes it is, and yes we do. Our programs run against massive data sets (anywhere from a couple hundred MB to tens of TB) on a single machine. Our inner loops run billions of iterations per pass, and response time is absolutely critical. A single extra instruction in an inner loop can cost many seconds of real response time. Cloud solutions are not an option, and neither are large server farms. This thing has to run on somebodies desk.
Short of assembler, there are not many ways to improve on what we are doing, and even there GCC and MSVC++ both produce some damn fast and highly efficient code when fed the right diet of templated inline functions. In the few cases where the final assembled version has made me do a WTF, it turned out to be instruction re-ordering to take advantage of (or work around) quirks of the x86 machines in common use today. I have been very hard pressed to beat the compiler for most functions compiled from good TMP. Some of the things we do with it simply cant be done anywhere else but assembler. Even C has its limitations.
As an exercise, try to figure out how to get a C program to compile down to a dynamic set of functions, all in-lined into a single function. In TMP, I can do it. The templating spreads out the function into as many versions as it takes to cover all the possible variations, each of which is a fully in-lined version containing only the desired "calls". I have been programming in C a long time, and the best I have ever seen was someone try to implement the same thing by actually implementing all the different variations of the in-lined function by hand, and then creating a jump table to pick the right one. It was thousands of LOC and prone to typos, as opposed to the TMP version which was 50 LOC, and either worked or didn't, no place for small corner case errors to hide.
C++ Template Metaprogramming FTW.
For when it absolutely positively has to squeeze every last instruction cycle, and screw the next guy...
Yeah we should definitely be more like Venezuela or Greece, because it's progressive to die 4 years earlier on average due to shitty socialist healthcare.
Yeah, All those countries with socialized medicine like Sweden, Norway and Canada are trailing the list of national life expectancy.
You fucking dolt.
Wait, expensive? You've already paid for it through taxes. Why would any ambulance service charge you twice?
Thats not how it works...
The ambulance company, like the hospital, expects to get paid, and will send your bill to a collections agency if you don't pay it. Like a hospital, they are not allowed to refuse treatment, and it is pretty bad karma to look for cash up front from someone in need of an ambulance ride. You might think that the ambulance service is paid for by taxes, but most of them are either private, or volunteer companies.
You might not have noticed the cost before, because it is typically included into your hospital bill which the insurance company picks up and pays. If you are feeling adventurous, you can even barter for the best rates before having an ambulance company called (there are typically multiples available to choose form in any given area).
If US companies can't operate under fair rules in China, should Chinese companies be permitted to operate in the US without restrictions? We can still trade, but do we necessarily have to allow service oriented businesses operate on each other's soil?
The Chinese are right to fight all American tech companies tooth and nail. American diplomats have been trying to force IP laws on China: laws which are decidedly foreign to the communist concept, and entirely biased in favor of the US. The simple fact is that American technology can't compete without inventing imaginary property and forcing others to pay for the right to use that imaginary property. The very concept is all the worst kinds of rent-seeking, and I don't want that shit in my country either. I'm stuck with it unfortunately, but I think that anyone with sense enough to understand why income inequality is a problem should be firmly on Chinas side on this one.
Python ranked #4 on RedMonk's list, while the survey found a three-way tie for fifth place between Ruby, C#, and C++,
Their methodology according to the link is to scan github and sourceforge and determine what frequency those projects use what languages. This is absolutely asinine, as it completely precludes all closed source work. Most embedded systems, drivers, and other low level work is not going to be open source, as it is work for hire. This list can best be described as the ranking of the popularity of languages for peoples pet projects, and or what languages they use when not getting paid. I will also say that given the choice between a website with only a dozen years of existence vs IEEE with almost 100 years of existence with an interest in all things electronic and computing, I will go with IEEE every time. Sorry RedMonk, its just hard to take you seriously when you are clearly some guys blog, and you're competing with an international professional organization with membership measured in the millions and decades of exceptional science and technology reporting.
You might want to pay particular attention to aviation and the problem of lifting hundreds of tons into the air because only hydrocarbon energy is dense enough to provide that kind of power in a weight ratio suitable for flight with useful payload.
Horseshit. The solar impulse 2 just rounded the planet on nothing but solar power. Commercially viable electric powered air flight requires only evolutionary improvements to existing technology, not revolutionary changes. In fact, in the event that a shortage of fossil fuels comes to pass, the economics could make regular electric flight happen, even without the need for any governmental interference. GE and Rolls Royce already have experimental programs to that very effect, and those are just the two i know about.
It doesn't add to the problem
Neither do photo-voltaic cells, and I notice that the article carefully avoided any mention of efficiency. I expect that is where this thing goes off the rails. If it can't muster at least 10% efficiency (comparable to an EV powered by solar cells), then whats the point? Photovoltaics would be better.
The whole idea of explosion powered vehicles is pretty stupid when faced with the infrastructure to transmit electrical power in vast quantities. 100 years ago, that infrastructure did not exist, and there was considerable doubt as to its ability to scale. Today, we have a successful, proven system that can scale to any amount needed for relatively cheap. Its time to move on from flammable materials as fuels.
What about seawater?
All of the other crap in seawater makes a mess of the delicate chemistry involved. As with most of these things, it needs pure water, or it will quickly stop working.
It is also clear that it will *consume* fresh water, which adds yet another drain on our already overtaxed fresh water supply.
TANSTAAFL
They care about the excitement of being a part of something.
That is exactly how scam artists operate. Its like they say: A fool and their money...
On the other side, even the most well intentioned people can fail miserably. Making VR / AR tech is a *very* expensive proposition. Its hard tech, and requires tons of expensive R+D. This is not the sort of thing that crowdfunding is likely to get right, since R+D work is heavily front loaded, it is a bad business plan to promise units before you are in the late stages of development because all the money you get from pre-orders gets spent on R+D, and when you do finally have a product working, there is not enough money to manufacture the units you have already promised to ship. In addition, a good rule of thumb is that the first 500 units will cost you 3 times as much to manufacture (not including R+D cost) as the final product, just because of teething problems with any new product assembly. If your product profit margins cant absorb that kind of hit (which most cant), then your business plan needs to account for having enough funding in place *before* taking those orders, to pay those expenses, Otherwise, you get into the viscous cycle of using new customers money to pay for previous customers product, and you can only afford small batches of product which drives your per unit cost way up, and makes it that much harder to dig out of the hole.
Congrats, you've just raised the bar of employment above the heads of the marginally skilled, and put them on your 'Basic Income',
Thats a Good Thing (tm). No one does those jobs because they want to. They do them because they have to. The sooner those jobs are fully automated, the happier everyone will be. I would argue that it is far far better to have a set of people on welfare than it is to have that same set of people working at crap jobs for the rest of their lives, if for no other reason than because the automation will always do a better job than a disgruntled person.
Automation is by far and gone the best thing to happen to our world, and yet conservatives claim its the coming of the end of days because it takes away jobs. Somebody somewhere managed to convince the entire population of the planet that it is their god given right to toil away their lives at jobs they hate in pursuit of one day making enough money so they can retire and stop doing those jobs they hate so damn much. The whole thing is a relic of a soon to be bygone era. A thousand years from now, the people will look back in horror at what they will consider to be the equivalent of slavery and say its small wonder we wanted to kill each other all the time.
I do a job which requires me to work 50-60 hours a week because it requires a relatively (within my field) unique combination of skills and knowledge, plus there needs to be one person making a consistent set of decisions for the people underneath me in the organization structure. Much like getting nine women pregnant won't produce a child in a month, having more people do my job won't decrease the amount of work I have to do, and having multiple managers giving out potentially contradictory instructions would potentially make it far far worse.
There are no jobs where that is a fundamental component of the job. It is rather a fundamental component of the particular business structure your employer has chosen for your company. I used to work as at UPS, and upper management there claimed that they needed to only use part time employees while insisting that management employees work 60+ hour weeks. They claimed that this was a fundamental result of the way in which the transportation industry worked. Then along came FedEx, and suddenly that business model got a lot less cut and dry. Then came the lawsuits from the part time employees, and suddenly the company figured out how to make the hours work for them.
Just because no one in your particular industry has the foresight to see a better way, doesn't mean there isn't a better way. In the end, most industry is simply unnecessary in the grand scheme of things, and if your little piece of things stopped getting done, would anyone really notice?
The job I mentioned above, had those same basic problems. It turns out the reason for the problem was not fundamental to the job, but fundamental to the crappy technology the company had chosen to implement the tools of the job. With better tools, the job could have easily been reduced to 30 hours per week. In fact, the job could have been done entirely without those tools. The result would have been a less profitable operation, but profit is only of concern to the stockholders. Society shouldn't and *normally* doesn't care about it. In the end, there isn't any job that can't be re-engineered to function with more people working in smaller time blocks. If you're lazy, you could even just do those 14 hour shifts, but do one of them a week. Your company could train more people to do the job, they just choose not to. If you can't find people capable enough, try doubling the salary and see if you get those more capable people you were looking for. Methinks you would.
I would still get food stamps and reducing income housing. Sounds like working is for suckers.
Working is for people who enjoy what they are doing. There is no fundamental reason why people should have to work more than a few hours a week, as this is all that is really required to maintain society. The trouble comes from the jobs out there that nobody wants to do. As a society, we are making a concerted effort to eradicate these jobs. The few that cannot be automated or otherwise eliminated should merit extra pay above UBI to compensate the people that do them, but as time goes on there will be dwindling need for these jobs. The rest of the jobs are things that people actually enjoy doing, and many of them would get done anyways because people like doing them: Engineering, Science (which is damn near the poverty level anyways), etc... The simple fact is that the work that society needs to have done is almost non-existent. Look at France, they have one of the most extensive PTO in the world, 25% unemployment (thanks to monumental youth unemployment), and yet their society still functions OK. everyone gets mostly what they want. You could also look at the Nordic model with essentially a UBI coupled with free education and nationalized health care. Their society hasn't collapsed. People there still get up and go to work even though there are huge numbers of people that are on welfare. Its time to admit that Capitalism was necessary in the old world, but in the post automation world, capitalism causes more problems than it solves. Communisim may or may not have many answers, but a mixed model will probably be the best solution, and if the Nordic countries are anything to go by, that model has been showing tremendous success already. Its very telling that Three of the top five countries on the HDI list use the Nordic model, and they have consistently remained high on those lists. The united states by contrast has now fallen to number 8, and shows every sign of continued slippage. When you look at the inequality adjusted HDI, the nordic states remain in the top 5, and the united states falls all the way to 28th position which indicates that in the United states, the standard of living is only high if you are wealthy. The poor and middle classes actually suffer living standards that are on par with Poland, the Check Republic and Malta.
How would an immediately available customer rating know if the carpets were fire retardant or not?
It wouldn't. The building inspector would know, and were talking about eliminating hotel taxes and hotel specific regulations, not building codes. Fire safety regulations are not specific to hotels, but are required by the building department in regards to buildings of a certain size and type.
To elaborate, hotels are not required to have sprinklers because they are hotels, they are required to have them if the building is of a large enough size and meets certain criteria. A building of that size and type would require sprinklers, even if it were an office building, or some other kind of building with a high density of persons at any given time. Conversely, a free standing motel where every room has individual exits to the outdoors are not typically required to have sprinklers because the building type does not present the same fire hazard. Again that would be the case if it were a motel or not, and would be the purview of the building department.
A simple example is hotels are held to a much higher standard for fire safety.
No, buildings of that size and occupancy levels are held to that higher standard. It could be an office building, and the building codes have the same requirements given the same envelope of building. A hotel that consists of hundreds of single room free standing structures are not required to have sprinklers, fire block stairway exits, etc... All of those kinds of requirements are specific to the size and layout of the building to ensure escape paths, and fire warning, etc. Small free standing structures simply do not present the same hazards in that regard, so those things are not required.