I concur. If Slashdot could do well simply to institute some editorial rules about ad content: by insisting on no blinking, flashing, animating, moving stuff, they could go a long, long way to making the larger, more intrusive ads more palettable to the readers. I don't object to advertising per se, but I do object to movement in my peripheral vision while I'm trying to read.
What's to prevent someone from producing CD-ROM drivers that just emulate whatever it is that the audio error correction hardware does? I would expect such software to emerge from the bazaar pretty quickly. Is there some deeper hardware issue here?
I for one would really like to see this come out in traditional (i.e., paper) book form. I'd like to have something tangible to drop on the desks of the principals and counselors at my kids' schools. Those people are the ones who need to see this material but they are never going to read something online -- it's hard enough just getting them to read their email.
It looks to me like the people objecting to your publishing this material and the people whose material it was were different people. Ignore the silly screeching of the folks who feel a need to object to everything. Just publish the book.
Yup, there's lots of stupid companies out there
on
Too Old To Code?
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· Score: 1
Companies have figured out that you can hire kids right out of school, pay them sub-standard salaries, and get 80 hours per week of work out of them. What they haven't figured out is that most of what that 80 hours per week produces is crap. I don't think it's entirely unreasonable, for example, to place a non-trivial portion of the blame for the execrable state of Windows at the doorstep of Microsoft's HR practices.
All the best coders I know - the ones who consistently produce high quality, relatively bug free code in short amounts of (calendar) time - are over 40. 80 hours per week versus 40 hours per week is just a factor of 2; maturity and breadth of experience can buy you a factor of 10 to 100.
Re:An irrelevant non-sequitur.
on
Nanomedicine
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· Score: 1
One target endpoint of the research program Freitas lays out in Nanomedicine is to make the body self-repairing. That's where we're headed, so it's not irrelevant at all.
Re:This is a major win.
on
Nanomedicine
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· Score: 1
A classic mistake people make when thinking about the future is failure to think about things systemically. If I have sufficiently developed medical nanotechnology, then my body is self-repairing. In that case, what do I need medical insurance for? Smoking and using many other drugs will be relatively safe habits (still socially obnoxious perhaps, but that's a different issue).
It's not an inane question at all. It's a bit of obscure jargon that threw me the first time I heard it, too. I'm sure one of the EROS or KeyKOS folks can explain this better than I can, but since I don't see any of them wandering around here at the moment...
The idea is that the mechanisms that make a program persistent are orthogonal to the mechanisms that let the program do whatever it actually does. No file writes (no files, yeah!), no "save to disk", none of that. The program runs under the illusion that it is running on a 100% non-stop machine, regardless of actual stoppages of the underlying hardware.
Some installations of EROS' predecessor, KeyKOS, have had processes running literally for years, in the face not only of hardware failures but in some cases complete replacements of the underlying hardware with newer generation machines. The only reason EROS can't make this claim is that it hasn't been around long enough to accumulate the track record!
This isn't a new problem. "Overproduction", or "underdemand", has been on the horizon for years now as a trend of the Industrial Revolution.
Well, this isn't a new *idea*, but I wouldn't use the word "problem". It's probably not wise to get your economics from such noted authorities in the field as Vonnegut and Pohl. However much we may enjoy their writing (and I enjoy both of them immensely), this is a subject about which they haven't a clue. Underconsumption theories have approximately the same currency in economics as perpetual motion machines have in physics.
People always seem to find ways to make use of increased production capacity. Just because you don't agree with the things some people choose to do with their relative wealth doesn't mean the world is going to pay you any heed. People will do what they do.
In any case, I'm always struck by how pathetically small our productive capacity is. Consider how much GWP needs to increase before we can afford to do things like build starships.
This will be the biggest problem with more automation. If 90% of all work become automated should 90% of all people be out of work and poor? Or should everybody only have to work 10% as hard? My fear is that it will turn out to be more of the first than the second.
No, 100% of the people can be employed while being 10x more productive.
I had to implement a system to handle sales tax on network transactions as part of the late, lamented American Information Exchange system years ago (pre-web, a long story, not relevent here, ask me about it in some other context). As a result I learned more about this subject than anyone should ever care to.
Basically, how it works in the US is this: sales taxes are charged to the buyer in the state where the buyer is located at the time of the transaction. The seller is expected to act as an agent for the state to collect the tax from the buyer in those cases where the seller has a "business nexus" (I'll get to that shortly) in the buyer's state. In cases where the seller does not have a business nexus in the buyer's state, the buyer is expected to submit the tax to the state directly, though, as a practical matter, this almost never happens.
The key factor in determining if the seller is expected to collect the tax is, as I said, is this idea of "business nexus". What this means is that the seller has some presence in the state which makes it subject to that state's jurisdiction. Obviously, if you are physically doing business in a state, you have nexus there, but other things can suck you in as well. For example, if I run a mail order business from New York that rents office space in California (say my catalog designer works from there), the State of California can claim I have nexus in California. Similarly with having warehouse facilities in a state, or employees who reside there, or any number of vastly more subtle things. Other than the most straightforward cases (e.g., you live there), the determination of business nexus is litigated on a case by case basis. Some states are more aggressive than others in pursuing this, and some are more creative. Some of them are extremely creative and are constantly trying to push the outside of the envelope. There was a case where a state (I believe it was Wisconsin, but don't quote me on that) attempted to claim that they were owed sales tax on sales of in-flight liquor sold by out-of-state airlines on the basis that the airplanes were overflying their state and thus the airlines had nexus there (they lost, but it illustrates the lengths some states will go to). Some states have tried to claim that use of the mails or the telephone system caused nexus (i.e., "you used phone lines that physically run through our state to communicate with the buyer, thus you were doing business here"), but this has been dispensed with too, though I believe by an act of Congress rather than by litigation. The hit-or-miss nature of this process is the reason why mail-order businesses (and web retailers) will typically have a list of sales tax states that seems entirely random. Basically, those are the states that came after those particular businesses and won.
The web does not introduce any substantive new principles in all this, but it does create a situation in which large numbers of individuals and very small businesses are now potentially doing business in a zillion different tax jurisdictions, and this is bound to get messy as the tax authorities' greed asserts itself, as it inevitably will.
I was the project leader for Habitat at Lucasfilm and it was me that adopted (I won't say "coined" as the word itself is of course older than anybody here) the term "avatar" to denote the embodiment of a persona in a virtual world. My collaborator in this, Randy Farmer, and I wrote a fairly lengthy post-mortem which you can find at http://www.communities.com/paper/lesson s.html and which has had a lot of influence on people in the field.
Slashdot Mirror
It's simple. They spin them more slowly than that and then lie about the specs.
I concur. If Slashdot could do well simply to institute some editorial rules about ad content: by insisting on no blinking, flashing, animating, moving stuff, they could go a long, long way to making the larger, more intrusive ads more palettable to the readers. I don't object to advertising per se, but I do object to movement in my peripheral vision while I'm trying to read.
What's to prevent someone from producing CD-ROM drivers that just emulate whatever it is that the audio error correction hardware does? I would expect such software to emerge from the bazaar pretty quickly. Is there some deeper hardware issue here?
I for one would really like to see this come out in traditional (i.e., paper) book form. I'd like to have something tangible to drop on the desks of the principals and counselors at my kids' schools. Those people are the ones who need to see this material but they are never going to read something online -- it's hard enough just getting them to read their email.
It looks to me like the people objecting to your publishing this material and the people whose material it was were different people. Ignore the silly screeching of the folks who feel a need to object to everything. Just publish the book.
All the best coders I know - the ones who consistently produce high quality, relatively bug free code in short amounts of (calendar) time - are over 40. 80 hours per week versus 40 hours per week is just a factor of 2; maturity and breadth of experience can buy you a factor of 10 to 100.
An interesting book. However, anybody who goes looking for it should note that the author's name is Gary Klein, not Alan.
And the officially sanctioned distro will be ... LinuxOne! Suddenly many other things become clear.
The idea is that the mechanisms that make a program persistent are orthogonal to the mechanisms that let the program do whatever it actually does. No file writes (no files, yeah!), no "save to disk", none of that. The program runs under the illusion that it is running on a 100% non-stop machine, regardless of actual stoppages of the underlying hardware.
Some installations of EROS' predecessor, KeyKOS, have had processes running literally for years, in the face not only of hardware failures but in some cases complete replacements of the underlying hardware with newer generation machines. The only reason EROS can't make this claim is that it hasn't been around long enough to accumulate the track record!
Well, this isn't a new *idea*, but I wouldn't use the word "problem". It's probably not wise to get your economics from such noted authorities in the field as Vonnegut and Pohl. However much we may enjoy their writing (and I enjoy both of them immensely), this is a subject about which they haven't a clue. Underconsumption theories have approximately the same currency in economics as perpetual motion machines have in physics.
People always seem to find ways to make use of increased production capacity. Just because you don't agree with the things some people choose to do with their relative wealth doesn't mean the world is going to pay you any heed. People will do what they do.
In any case, I'm always struck by how pathetically small our productive capacity is. Consider how much GWP needs to increase before we can afford to do things like build starships.
No, 100% of the people can be employed while being 10x more productive.
My understanding is that the NRO is responsible for the photorecon sats, but NSA runs the signals intelligence sats.
I had to implement a system to handle sales tax on network transactions as part of the late, lamented American Information Exchange system years ago (pre-web, a long story, not relevent here, ask me about it in some other context). As a result I learned more about this subject than anyone should ever care to.
Basically, how it works in the US is this: sales taxes are charged to the buyer in the state where the buyer is located at the time of the transaction. The seller is expected to act as an agent for the state to collect the tax from the buyer in those cases where the seller has a "business nexus" (I'll get to that shortly) in the buyer's state. In cases where the seller does not have a business nexus in the buyer's state, the buyer is expected to submit the tax to the state directly, though, as a practical matter, this almost never happens.
The key factor in determining if the seller is expected to collect the tax is, as I said, is this idea of "business nexus". What this means is that the seller has some presence in the state which makes it subject to that state's jurisdiction. Obviously, if you are physically doing business in a state, you have nexus there, but other things can suck you in as well. For example, if I run a mail order business from New York that rents office space in California (say my catalog designer works from there), the State of California can claim I have nexus in California. Similarly with having warehouse facilities in a state, or employees who reside there, or any number of vastly more subtle things. Other than the most straightforward cases (e.g., you live there), the determination of business nexus is litigated on a case by case basis. Some states are more aggressive than others in pursuing this, and some are more creative. Some of them are extremely creative and are constantly trying to push the outside of the envelope. There was a case where a state (I believe it was Wisconsin, but don't quote me on that) attempted to claim that they were owed sales tax on sales of in-flight liquor sold by out-of-state airlines on the basis that the airplanes were overflying their state and thus the airlines had nexus there (they lost, but it illustrates the lengths some states will go to). Some states have tried to claim that use of the mails or the telephone system caused nexus (i.e., "you used phone lines that physically run through our state to communicate with the buyer, thus you were doing business here"), but this has been dispensed with too, though I believe by an act of Congress rather than by litigation. The hit-or-miss nature of this process is the reason why mail-order businesses (and web retailers) will typically have a list of sales tax states that seems entirely random. Basically, those are the states that came after those particular businesses and won.
The web does not introduce any substantive new principles in all this, but it does create a situation in which large numbers of individuals and very small businesses are now potentially doing business in a zillion different tax jurisdictions, and this is bound to get messy as the tax authorities' greed asserts itself, as it inevitably will.
--
I was the project leader for Habitat at Lucasfilm and it was me that adopted (I won't say "coined" as the word itself is of course older than anybody here) the term "avatar" to denote the embodiment of a persona in a virtual world. My collaborator in this, Randy Farmer, and I wrote a fairly lengthy post-mortem which you can find at http://www.communities.com/paper/lesson s.html and which has had a lot of influence on people in the field.
-- Chip Morningstar