Because of capitalism, if feel that I'm not being paid what I'm worth, I am free to market my services to competing employers. Try doing that in a command economy, where there are no competing employers because the State owns all means of production!
there's almost always someone willing to do it for less.
That works in our favor when it's time to, say, get a haircut. I'm better off when I go to the barber that charges $12, instead of the barber that charges $16. The one with the more competitive price gets rewarded with my business.
Maybe you're not like me: do you seek out the most expensive barber you can find, because you feel sorry for the way the other barbers are undercutting him? Hmm, I didn't think so.
It's a thorny question, but I do know that when I wrote a program that solves sudoku puzzles, it was a much greater accomplishment than solving one particular sudoku puzzle.
Similarly, if/when somebody writes a program that, in turn, writes an essay that actually entertains or informs people, it will be a much greater accomplishment than writing a particular essay that entertains or informs people. As such, the software will deserve first-amendment protection.
Wouldn't it be nice if pivoting displays had caught on more? Landscape orientation is perfect for watching videos, then rotate it 90 degrees and it's the perfect aspect ratio for word processing/coding.
I think the problem is that to the average consumer, technical specs like "1920x1200 resolution" are meaningless. Other products have been dumbed down too. Instead of being impressed that a pair of speakers has flat frequency response up to 22kHz, the dumbed-down consumer looks for "ooh, that thingie looks kewl and it has a dock so i think it'll play music from my ipod." And instead of being impressed by a politician who actually grasps the implications of our entitlement programs having $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities, they vote for... you get the idea.
I produce content on my desktop. I consume it on my iPad.
I both produce and consume on my desktop, mostly because I can't stand any screen smaller than 22". How can anyone tolerate watching movies on a tiny screen? It's a miserable user experience. The answer, I imagine, is that people are still impressed by the novelty of their new mobile devices. Are people going to come to their senses and allow that novelty to wear off in the next few years? Or is this a "new normal" that people will just mindlessly settle for?
(Rei, you're the man when it comes to knowledge of the EV industry. I wish Slashdot had a way of sending messages to other users, so I wouldn't have to post an off-topic question like this.)
I wish him success, but he should be aware that there was a Tesla museum in Colorado Springs that was unable to make a go of it. It entered Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 1998.
"In most civilised nations, healthcare is treated as an essential basic service just like policing, fire, and the military are."
Another poster said, "Imagine just NOT HAVING TO WORRY about healthcare or costs."
Both of these attitudes are problematic. No society has unlimited resources to devote to anything, including healthcare. Therefore, healthcare consumers should shop around, and financially reward the providers who give higher-quality care at lower cost. They should not be thrown into the largest government bureaucracy that ever existed (which is currently being spun up, now that John Roberts said the "Affordable Care Act" "is within Congress's power to tax," nevermind this). Such bureaucracies are notoriously insensitive to cost, and tend to rely on rationing mechanisms.
Am I saying that patients should be expected to shop around in emergency situations? Of course not. And most healthcare is not delivered in emergency situations.
A truly civilized nation would make healthcare a very free market, which would drive prices very low and make unsubsidized treatments affordable to many more people than they otherwise would be. And then, the burden of helping those people who are still unable to afford treatment would be quite light and manageable.
Great post, trout007. But you're wrong about one thing: "Land prices would plummet in most places."
No; when roads become irrelevant, land prices would increase in places not serviced by roads. Those increases might be partly offset by reduced demand in places currently serviced by roads. But overall, there would be a net increase in land prices. (And that should please all the people who've been complaining about falling real estate prices... but I know better, it won't please them.)
And since most places aren't serviced by roads, land prices would increase in most places.
As an aside, there will be lots of environmental benefits when millions of acres of land that are currently paved revert to their natural state. No more wild animals or pets being turned into roadkill. And we'll probably want to "undo" the creation of those raised roadbeds that disrupt water flow in the Everglades.
"why would anyone think a single-purpose, one-use-only app makes any sense?
From a practical point of view, it makes no sense whatsoever. But as a means of generating publicity and buzz, it's genius, and even I downloaded the app right away.
I've long thought that gamma-ray bursts -- those unexplained explosions that happen in distant galaxies, and are much more energetic than supernovae -- are the "oopses" of alien civilizations experimenting with really potent physics that they don't fully understand.
As I understand it, these bursts can sterilize the better part of a galaxy. I'm not a luddite, but let's apply a little caution and try not to end up like those poor sods.
The file system is horribly, horribly confusing to non-technical people
Moving away from the file system is horribly confusing to me. When folks build up a collection of hundreds of documents and want to keep them well-organized, they drag them into folders. What's so confusing about that, especially when done using a pretty GUI? It's a great metaphor for how non-technical people keep real-world paper documents organized. If anyone has implemented a superior organizational concept, I haven't noticed.
You go into an app, and see the list of documents that go with that app.
Terrible! I want to see my collection of folders and documents in the glory of its full entirety, not filtered by whatever app I may in at the time. At the very least, I need to know what volume the documents are stored on, so I know whether they've been backed up. (And so I know which cloud service to blame when they disappear, get corrupted, get compromised, etc.)
How about we educate the masses about the power of the file system, instead of dumbing down the interface and snatching that power away from techies and non-techies alike. That's a huge step backwards.
It costs a significant amount of fuel to deorbit a satellite at the end of its useful life, and pre-Elon, it was very expensive to launch that fuel to orbit.
Despite that cost, all low-earth-orbit satellites launched by the U.S. Government in recent years have the ability to deorbit themselves.
With reduced launch costs, the rest of the world will have no excuse to not follow suit.
A computer can perform those functions better than most humans, since it can track every single car nearby and their exact speed, trajectory, behavior patterns, etc
Especially if the other cars are designed to cooperate by broadcasting their speed, trajectory, etc. Then your car won't have to expend CPU cycles analyzing camera images to determine what the other cars are up to.
I disagree, and be very careful making assertions like this.
I hope you agree that sentient entities, like you and me, ought to have rights.
And it's entirely possible that next year someone will come out with an app that runs on my MacBook and very much appears to be sentient. And if appearing sentient might as well be sentient, then it could very well become a crime to power off my MacBook after I've launched said app.
So there should be a pretty high threshold for what is sentient. Every time a sentient entity is created -- which might be as easy as launching another instance of an app -- we taxpayers might find ourselves on the hook for maintaining the hardware and providing electrical power to keep these things alive.
Once you have a developed economy, it's hard to wring the same kind of growth out of it, because you're a lot closer to your potential.
No, it's easier for a developed economy to make productivity gains than it is for a subsistence economy, because by definition, the subsistence economy, after meeting the most basic needs of the population, has hardly anything left over to invest in R&D.
That is why human existence remained much the same for millennia -- a subsistence economy has little capacity to change itself -- but suddenly in the last 200 years there has been an explosion of technology and growth.
But the United States, we don't always make the best choices as to what to do with the fruits of our developed economy. Sometimes that's the fault of government (blowing money on lavish parties for GSA employees); sometimes it's the fault of individuals (blowing $150 on a ticket to watch grown men chase a ball around on a field).
According to http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/nyc_full_tidal_records.jpg, sea level today is rising at a rate of 280 mm per century. This rate has been unchanged since these records began to be kept in the 1850s. It seems wholly insensitive to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. How do you explain that? Strange attractors again?
You seem to be a little light on facts. Medicare's unfunded liability is $89 TRILLION. In other words, $89 trillion in future obligations, for which we currently have no idea where the money will come from. This figure was published in the 2009 Medicare Trustees Report. So it's not right-wing FUD, unless you consider the Medicare Trustees to be right-wing FUD slingers.
When Lyndon Johnson created Medicare, the projected costs of the program were orders of magnitude smaller than the actually turned out to be. (We are going down that same path with Obamacare. The projected costs are already far higher then they were when the program was sold to Congress.) If President Johnson had known the true extent of the monster that Medicare would eventually grow into, he wouldn't have touched it with a ten foot pole, because -- love him or hate him -- he didn't have a deathwish for America's economy.
I'm sick of having to download hundreds of needless apps whose functionality could have been performed in Safari.
It's getting ridiculous: "Honey, how many pages of apps do I have to scroll through until I get to the one that displays the tensile strength of Reebok shoelaces?"
I've always wondered, where does the increased mass manifest itself? Is it distributed amongst all the atoms in the object?
Say I have a lump of copper comprising 10^23 copper atoms. When I take it out of the freezer, does the mass of each one of those copper atoms increase? Taking the question down still one more level, do only the nucleons of those atoms gain mass, or do their electrons become more massive as well?
Slashdot Mirror
Because of capitalism.
Because of capitalism, if feel that I'm not being paid what I'm worth, I am free to market my services to competing employers. Try doing that in a command economy, where there are no competing employers because the State owns all means of production!
there's almost always someone willing to do it for less.
That works in our favor when it's time to, say, get a haircut. I'm better off when I go to the barber that charges $12, instead of the barber that charges $16. The one with the more competitive price gets rewarded with my business.
Maybe you're not like me: do you seek out the most expensive barber you can find, because you feel sorry for the way the other barbers are undercutting him? Hmm, I didn't think so.
The ice was found on Mercury.
It's a thorny question, but I do know that when I wrote a program that solves sudoku puzzles, it was a much greater accomplishment than solving one particular sudoku puzzle.
Similarly, if/when somebody writes a program that, in turn, writes an essay that actually entertains or informs people, it will be a much greater accomplishment than writing a particular essay that entertains or informs people. As such, the software will deserve first-amendment protection.
Wouldn't it be nice if pivoting displays had caught on more? Landscape orientation is perfect for watching videos, then rotate it 90 degrees and it's the perfect aspect ratio for word processing/coding.
I think the problem is that to the average consumer, technical specs like "1920x1200 resolution" are meaningless. Other products have been dumbed down too. Instead of being impressed that a pair of speakers has flat frequency response up to 22kHz, the dumbed-down consumer looks for "ooh, that thingie looks kewl and it has a dock so i think it'll play music from my ipod." And instead of being impressed by a politician who actually grasps the implications of our entitlement programs having $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities, they vote for... you get the idea.
I produce content on my desktop. I consume it on my iPad.
I both produce and consume on my desktop, mostly because I can't stand any screen smaller than 22". How can anyone tolerate watching movies on a tiny screen? It's a miserable user experience. The answer, I imagine, is that people are still impressed by the novelty of their new mobile devices. Are people going to come to their senses and allow that novelty to wear off in the next few years? Or is this a "new normal" that people will just mindlessly settle for?
(Rei, you're the man when it comes to knowledge of the EV industry. I wish Slashdot had a way of sending messages to other users, so I wouldn't have to post an off-topic question like this.)
According to this video.
http://cnettv.cnet.com/can-tesla-model-unkill-electric-car-cnet-cars/9742-1_53-50132179.html?ttag=cnet~tesla~ob
the Model S' performance is limited by the throughput of the inverter.
Inverters also add weight, volume, cost, and are not 100% efficient. Why not do away with the inverter altogether and use DC electric motors?
I wish him success, but he should be aware that there was a Tesla museum in Colorado Springs that was unable to make a go of it. It entered Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 1998.
"In most civilised nations, healthcare is treated as an essential basic service just like policing, fire, and the military are."
Another poster said, "Imagine just NOT HAVING TO WORRY about healthcare or costs."
Both of these attitudes are problematic. No society has unlimited resources to devote to anything, including healthcare. Therefore, healthcare consumers should shop around, and financially reward the providers who give higher-quality care at lower cost. They should not be thrown into the largest government bureaucracy that ever existed (which is currently being spun up, now that John Roberts said the "Affordable Care Act" "is within Congress's power to tax," nevermind this). Such bureaucracies are notoriously insensitive to cost, and tend to rely on rationing mechanisms.
Am I saying that patients should be expected to shop around in emergency situations? Of course not. And most healthcare is not delivered in emergency situations.
Free markets and competition rarely intersect with the world of healthcare, but this is what happens when they do: http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=3602626
A truly civilized nation would make healthcare a very free market, which would drive prices very low and make unsubsidized treatments affordable to many more people than they otherwise would be. And then, the burden of helping those people who are still unable to afford treatment would be quite light and manageable.
Great post, trout007. But you're wrong about one thing: "Land prices would plummet in most places."
No; when roads become irrelevant, land prices would increase in places not serviced by roads. Those increases might be partly offset by reduced demand in places currently serviced by roads. But overall, there would be a net increase in land prices. (And that should please all the people who've been complaining about falling real estate prices... but I know better, it won't please them.)
And since most places aren't serviced by roads, land prices would increase in most places.
As an aside, there will be lots of environmental benefits when millions of acres of land that are currently paved revert to their natural state. No more wild animals or pets being turned into roadkill. And we'll probably want to "undo" the creation of those raised roadbeds that disrupt water flow in the Everglades.
"why would anyone think a single-purpose, one-use-only app makes any sense?
From a practical point of view, it makes no sense whatsoever. But as a means of generating publicity and buzz, it's genius, and even I downloaded the app right away.
It doesn't have to consume the entire universe.
I've long thought that gamma-ray bursts -- those unexplained explosions that happen in distant galaxies, and are much more energetic than supernovae -- are the "oopses" of alien civilizations experimenting with really potent physics that they don't fully understand.
As I understand it, these bursts can sterilize the better part of a galaxy. I'm not a luddite, but let's apply a little caution and try not to end up like those poor sods.
The file system is horribly, horribly confusing to non-technical people
Moving away from the file system is horribly confusing to me. When folks build up a collection of hundreds of documents and want to keep them well-organized, they drag them into folders. What's so confusing about that, especially when done using a pretty GUI? It's a great metaphor for how non-technical people keep real-world paper documents organized. If anyone has implemented a superior organizational concept, I haven't noticed.
You go into an app, and see the list of documents that go with that app.
Terrible! I want to see my collection of folders and documents in the glory of its full entirety, not filtered by whatever app I may in at the time. At the very least, I need to know what volume the documents are stored on, so I know whether they've been backed up. (And so I know which cloud service to blame when they disappear, get corrupted, get compromised, etc.)
How about we educate the masses about the power of the file system, instead of dumbing down the interface and snatching that power away from techies and non-techies alike. That's a huge step backwards.
about 50% of them are actually below average
Actually, exactly 50% of them are below average.
...Mac OS 9.
It costs a significant amount of fuel to deorbit a satellite at the end of its useful life, and pre-Elon, it was very expensive to launch that fuel to orbit.
Despite that cost, all low-earth-orbit satellites launched by the U.S. Government in recent years have the ability to deorbit themselves.
With reduced launch costs, the rest of the world will have no excuse to not follow suit.
A computer can perform those functions better than most humans, since it can track every single car nearby and their exact speed, trajectory, behavior patterns, etc
Especially if the other cars are designed to cooperate by broadcasting their speed, trajectory, etc. Then your car won't have to expend CPU cycles analyzing camera images to determine what the other cars are up to.
appearing sentient might as well be sentient
I disagree, and be very careful making assertions like this.
I hope you agree that sentient entities, like you and me, ought to have rights.
And it's entirely possible that next year someone will come out with an app that runs on my MacBook and very much appears to be sentient. And if appearing sentient might as well be sentient, then it could very well become a crime to power off my MacBook after I've launched said app.
So there should be a pretty high threshold for what is sentient. Every time a sentient entity is created -- which might be as easy as launching another instance of an app -- we taxpayers might find ourselves on the hook for maintaining the hardware and providing electrical power to keep these things alive.
Once you have a developed economy, it's hard to wring the same kind of growth out of it, because you're a lot closer to your potential.
No, it's easier for a developed economy to make productivity gains than it is for a subsistence economy, because by definition, the subsistence economy, after meeting the most basic needs of the population, has hardly anything left over to invest in R&D.
That is why human existence remained much the same for millennia -- a subsistence economy has little capacity to change itself -- but suddenly in the last 200 years there has been an explosion of technology and growth.
But the United States, we don't always make the best choices as to what to do with the fruits of our developed economy. Sometimes that's the fault of government (blowing money on lavish parties for GSA employees); sometimes it's the fault of individuals (blowing $150 on a ticket to watch grown men chase a ball around on a field).
According to http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/nyc_full_tidal_records.jpg, sea level today is rising at a rate of 280 mm per century. This rate has been unchanged since these records began to be kept in the 1850s. It seems wholly insensitive to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
How do you explain that? Strange attractors again?
So you have created a universe with a better ratio of hospitable-to-inhospitable planets?
No?
Didn't think so.
You seem to be a little light on facts. Medicare's unfunded liability is $89 TRILLION. In other words, $89 trillion in future obligations, for which we currently have no idea where the money will come from. This figure was published in the 2009 Medicare Trustees Report. So it's not right-wing FUD, unless you consider the Medicare Trustees to be right-wing FUD slingers.
When Lyndon Johnson created Medicare, the projected costs of the program were orders of magnitude smaller than the actually turned out to be. (We are going down that same path with Obamacare. The projected costs are already far higher then they were when the program was sold to Congress.) If President Johnson had known the true extent of the monster that Medicare would eventually grow into, he wouldn't have touched it with a ten foot pole, because -- love him or hate him -- he didn't have a deathwish for America's economy.
I'm sick of having to download hundreds of needless apps whose functionality could have been performed in Safari.
It's getting ridiculous: "Honey, how many pages of apps do I have to scroll through until I get to the one that displays the tensile strength of Reebok shoelaces?"
I've always wondered, where does the increased mass manifest itself? Is it distributed amongst all the atoms in the object?
Say I have a lump of copper comprising 10^23 copper atoms. When I take it out of the freezer, does the mass of each one of those copper atoms increase? Taking the question down still one more level, do only the nucleons of those atoms gain mass, or do their electrons become more massive as well?
Hmm... you say there is no such thing as "Indian food," then you go on to use that exact phrase two more times.