First of all, let me make it clear. I believe in AGW and I advocate policies to limit it that are considered liberal.
But lets get to the meat. Millions will die because we failed to persuade a strong majority of North Americans that AGW is real. We failed, and excuses *why* we failed even worse than being utterly meaningless because they prevent us from focusing on tactics that might work in future.
I am not saying what *should* happen - I am saying what *has* happened. And clearly, we've failed. There has been no meaningful progress in combatting AGW from North America. And it doesn't matter what the excuse is or how justified our tactics. We failed. Moreover, we've failed so profoundly, that a huge number of North Americans don't even believe that AGW is real. It doesn't get much worse than that.
Look, I understand that you think you can simply throw science at a problem and it should be solved. But we tried that and we failed. We did not use the appropriate tactics to persuade a strong majority of the population that we were correct. This isn't a case of science - the science is pretty much proven.
Assuming that the science should overrule human beliefs is as naive as believing that facts determine the outcome of court cases. Facts are just *one* factor in the verdict, and how and who presents them is more important than the actual fact itself. Narrative beats fact 9 times out of 10. And by having scientists act as policy advocates, we gave the people exactly the narrative they needed to disbelieve them.
Er? The results have been publicized and in the case of lead in gasoline, there was a ban. Or do you prefer to have lead contaminating everywhere you live?
In a highly politicized situation, it is far better to have a ban advocated by people who are not actually doing the science, based on the science by "disinterested" parties.
That's like saying doctors shouldn't tell you not to smoke.
Actually that's a good analogy. It was the doctors, *not* the scientists that led that policy discussion, and the argument was stronger for it. Why? Because doctors weren't going to benefit ideologically or financially from advocating the banning/discouraging of smoking. Nor would they gain academic reputation by being proved "correct". They were seen as impartial.
And even with all that, it took decades to chip away at smoking.
The government wants to ensure that businesses report all the income they receive. If everyone gets a receipt, then an agent need only make a few purchases, see that those receipts do indeed show up in the books, and has some level of confidence that the merchant is reporting all their receipts.
If receipts were only issued occasionally, then it would be very easy to conceal only the income for which no receipt was issued. If the government can create a culture where people expect to get a receipt, then for many fraud-prone businesses, this line of fraud becomes too much work.
The fact that you don't retain your receipt is immaterial. It's that you must be issued the receipt and the merchant *might* be asked to account for that receipt in his books.
You were part of the enforcement mechanism the moment you received your receipt.
And yes, perhaps you could get in trouble for not asking for a receipt. But since most citizens are compliant and don't feel that tax fraud is in their favour, it's highly likely that there's a high enough rate of compliance that no prosecutions for failure to ask for a receipt are necessary.
Yes, I've been to a few countries with stores having signs indicating the law that they *must* give you a receipt and if they fail to do so, you *must* ask for one. It's requiring the citizens to do their part in fighting tax evasion.
So if you have scientific information that the humans are slowly poisoning itself with lead coming from gasoline, for example, you wouldn't try to raise the alarm to have lead removed as an additive in gasoline?
Indeed, publicizing the results would be called for. Suggesting legislation (including a ban) would not.
Look, human beings are human beings. Motivated reasoning (reasoning held because you like the outcome, not because the reasoning is any good) is real.
So it is completely natural for people opposed to a policy to look very closely at those who provided the scientific data. Think how many of us cast doubts on industry paid research conducted by real scientists. We think we know the motivation of the scientist, and thus we doubt their science.
The only way to avoid this is for scientists to recuse themselves from policy discussions. Of course this is difficult, as they are among the best informed. But to do otherwise is to compromise their ability to provide data that is perceived as unbiased.
For example, look at the American CBO, which provides estimates about policy costs to the American government. They are prevented from making any policy comments at all (including having to have their estimates take into account elements that everyone knows will never be present but the politicians put in their to make proposals look credible). Why aren't they allowed to inject common-sense into the discussion, given it would make estimates more informative? Because doing so would jeopardize their ability to be seen as unbiased and in the end would render this very valuable data source completely useless.
We have to live with second best.
One of the largest objections to current climate science is the claim that it has a liberal bias. We need to be very careful not to let that be true. Unfortunately science isn't immune to political pressure - I see it even in the non-controversial things that I work on. It takes extreme vigilance to protect science from political pressure (from either side) on the politically sensitive issues.
Where do you think that claim came from? Conservatives, namely those who stand to lose should people use less oil.
But let's look at the scientists who are arguing for climate change. This includes the vast majority of scientists. They represent virtually every country on the planet. They represent males and females of different age groups. They represent different ethnic populations and speak dozens of languages. Yet you've branded them as "liberal". Have you actually thought about that? Statistically that seems highly unlikely.
Much of the reason that they've been branded as liberal is some scientists have (for understandable reason) been loudly advocating for policy that is in line with many standard liberal held policies. And by advocating for policy, they've caused their actual research to be cast into doubt.
Or let me put it another way. If you believe that literally the fate of mankind is at stake, what sort of monster would you have to be to not twist your research to fit whatever is necessary to push mankind into making a decision that it must make. Now, I don't believe that scientists are fudging data, but by advocating policy along with apocalyptic messaging, they've made it easier for people to believe that they might.
If scientists had held off advocating policy, I think we'd have less proposed action (those scientists pushed AGW into the public consciousness), but less dispute about the actual science itself. I'd far rather have had an active policy fight between "mitigate global warming" vs. "every man/country for them self" (i.e. every country just tries to handle the warming that's coming) instead of what we have now, which is an inability to even agree upon the basic facts.
Should we we reduce CO2 emissions? That isn't a "science" question
Wrong, and now you've lost all credibility in this discussion.
It's statements like this that worry me only slightly less than the deniers.
Science is a description of the universe. It's about facts determined by the scientific method. It might tell us that every single human will die if you don't do something - it says nothing about whether you *should* do it or not. That's policy.
The people who pretend that science tells humans *how* to act are using science as a tool to promulgate their agenda and are scarcely less dangerous than those who pretend that science has no place in decision making.
At best, science should lay out the priors upon which all policy discussion might rely. Someone who believes that if we all believe the same facts, we must all come to the same decisions is either blind to human experience or has deep authoritarian instincts.
It's very likely I believe in the same policy decisions as the poster I am criticizing. But the ends do NOT justify the means, especially if the means is corrupting the definition of science (even for a good cause).
In the 80's, several of my best Physics and CS professors were ex-Americans who had fled the draft for the Vietname war in the 60's.
Canada was all the better for it.
However, in the interest of fairness, it should be noted that there's a constant brain drain (rather slower of late) from Canada to the US of talented individuals seeking the greater opportunities that a country as large as the US can offer. This is more of a small flow of academics in the other direction rather than a huge reversal in the regular brain drain to the US.
If the work conditions are terrible, and the success rate (presumably landing a tenure-track position) is so low, it would seem to me that the only ethical course of action is to make PhD programs *much* harder to get into, and to discourage students who are considering that career path.
Unfortunately, this may be directly opposed to the interests of the university.
Should we assume that 22 year-olds are not capable of getting the information they need to make rational decisions and intervene with legislation?
Personally, I'd be fine with requiring universities to find out and disclose the percentage of post-graduates who attain a faculty position (and perhaps their salary) within 10 years of their PhD. The cost of acquiring this information would be minuscule compared to years lost by people pursuing an ultimately futile career (who we would hope would be dissuaded once they understand reality).
It might be devastating for science (lots of work by high quality, low paid post-grads lost), but the ethics are clear.
> and then come back to self driving when the technology is fully baked.
Unfortunately, on-road testing is how the technology becomes fully baked. I expect at least 1,000 deaths in the next several years as the technology gets put into real use and it gets billions of miles of experience.
Whether Uber's tech is baked enough that they should be allowed to test on the road will only become apparent once this accident is investigated.
My response was to the author's assertion that a walled garden is a bad thing.
It is *a* thing.
Whether it's bad or good depends upon the needs of the user. And frankly, for me, the walled garden is, overall, an advantage. For my use case, disadvantages of Apple's walled garden (which you listed some - there are of course many more) cost me very little, and the advantages of a walled garden (mostly I don't have to care about updates, security, malware (mostly), etc.) are significant to me. My time is precious - I don't want to waste it on my phone.
Obviously the opposite applies to you. Very good.
But if you cannot imagine a set of needs that vary sufficiently from your own that a walled garden is actually an advantage, I fear for your paucity of imagination.
If you don't understand that flexibility has a cost, then you have failed to learn one of the most basic principles of user interfaces.
If you *do* understand that flexibility has a cost, but cannot conceive of their beings more than two settings - yours and the far end of the spectrum, then you have failed to understand human beings.
I understand the urge to evangelize - whether it be your God or your phone's OS. But realize when you are doing so.
I want my phone to be a phone, and my computer to be my computer. I've no more interest in paying the flexibility tax on my phone than I do on my toaster. I am willing to pay that tax for my computer.
Obviously personal needs vary completely. Trying to recommend one phone/OS/toaster over another without fully understanding the needs of the user is proselytizing, not advising.
Programmers in India are billed at 25-30 dollars per hour so around 50-60K.
Really? I've been on the outsourced side of this, and we were told that if the off-shore team had to repeat the work three times to get it right (which is not all that unusual), the company was still saving money.
And this was in Canada, where the health insurance cost was pretty negligible.
Also, no H1B's, as the company ran it's own shop in India.
At $25-30, it hardly seems worth it, given my observed failure rate of off-shoring projects to be about 50%.
Junior developers generally need good specs, narrow goals, well specified tools, well-defined tests, etc.
And those are *exactly* the sorts of tasks that are very amenable to out-sourcing.
It's pretty hard for companies to justify spending $60K on a junior developer, when they can purchase the services of someone with roughly the same skill set for $10K and get fairly similar results.
Of course, foolish companies feel they can also replace the $100K developers with a $10K developers, but that generally ends in tears fairly quickly.
One point that should be obvious to anyone who has worked in a business is that getting someone's services like this "for free" is anything but.
First, there's the straight up cost: Lawyers vetting contracts, employees gathering and then vetting information, etc.
Then there's the small possibility that somehow, somewhere, this turns out to cost Razer big time - they accidentally expose a competitive secret, the person puts out malware in the Linux Razer driver, the person uses the information to build targeted malware for the Windows side, the service provider turns out to be a Russian spy and it's linked with Razer.... It doesn't matter how ridiculous the scenario, there is some chance of a very bad thing happening.
And then think of the benefit. Zero. (Okay, maybe they sell another 2-3.)
So, in which world can this be justified as a rational business decision?
In most situations like this (unusual disclosures, not business as usual, no going forward as a line of business), a medium-sized company might want perhaps $50K up front, a larger company might demand 3-4 times that. Anything less than that is simply too little return for the risk.
You are far more likely to get the kind of support you want from a small company for which the gain of supporting Linux has *real* marketing value to them and thus the company they're putting at (small) risk isn't *that* valuable compared to the benefit.
I'm pretty certain that if the Internet Archive had a mechanism so that an e-book could only be "checked-out" by 1 user at a time, there'd be no issue here because instead of losing (potentially) thousands of sales, you're losing maybe a dozen.
So in impact, a very big difference. And impact is what matters, not "are these mechanisms topologically identical".
I'm assuming that your morality is not "if I twist a mechanism to get away with it, then it must be ethical" strain.
> I imagine that local libraries that have gone down this route buy ONE e-copy which they make available to their borrowers.
Rather more importantly, the libraries only loan one copy of the e-book out at a time, mimicking the constraints of physical copy books. They do, in fact, buy multiple copies of e-books if they feel there are going to be multiple users requesting copies simultaneously.
Libraries are indeed a balance between the needs of society (which benefits from the availability) and the individuals who produce the material that society needs. Like taxes, most authors are happy to to lose some of their potential revenue to benefit society at large. However, as might be expected, most bridle at total expropriation of their earnings done at the behest not of society as a whole, but individuals who choose to break the previous existing social and legal contract.
To the contrary - my wife receives an annual payment from the government to compensate her for the possible loss of royalties that libraries might bring. Given that libraries also *buy* the book they lend, I've yet to meet an author who wasn't enthusiastically pro-library.
This is like saying that because I don't like the idea of being robbed by you, I should hate the idea of paying taxes. Ludicrous on every level.
Time to switch to AMD. Not only don't they have such clauses, they are actively putting themselves into a situation where a future management cannot easily pull a Nvidia anymore.
The only danger is that if AMD is depriving themselves of a significant revenue stream, then that makes Nvidia the richer company, possibly allowing it to hire the best programmers, built better facilities, do more R&D, and eventually kill AMD, in which case we're all poorer for AMD's customer-centric move.
Now, I don't think the revenues in this situation are are actually significant enough to matter, but if I'm wrong, AMD may have attached an anvil to its future success. The ability to price discriminate by market segment is critical to the survival of a *lot* of businesses.
And based on UK law they will probably win, because they actually have a standard of fitness for purpose. If you bought it on the premise that you would have a certain level of performance and now you won't, you should be able to return it.
Care to lay odds on Intel actually being ruled against? 2:1? 3:1?
If it weren't for the fact that guilt is immaterial compared to PR so this will never get ruled upon, and Intel will settle for something that enriches a few lawyers and gives owners a $0.50 discount on their next Intel CPU, this would be a case worth wagering on.
Aggregation is pretty much their core value proposition. How could they "underestimate" this?
Because it turns out that aggregation isn't much of a business. If Patreon decides to maintain their current business model (and that is their main value to me), I don't know whether they'll actually go bust, or just be economically moribund, but either way, it turns out that there's not money in being the sort of business I need.
It's much like KickStarter started out as an Arts funding model, but eventually realized that their real value to people was as a pre-order house. Allowing people like me to support artistic creators might sound wonderful, but it's pretty much a loser's game. The customers of any real worth have enough money for real subscription services.
(It's sort of like when I finally realized that my small donations to charities were financially worthless to the charity - they literally spent more raising than I was willing to give. The worth of my donation was solely its help in providing the appearance of widespread support, which was necessary for the charity to get the real donations they were looking needed to do anything useful - those in the $100K+ range. My job was simply to help them establish credibility to the real donors.)
So, yes, we helped Patreon establish the credibility it needs to become a subscription business. But we have to face the fact that most of us are financially worthless to the businesses we'd like to serve us.
> I'm genuinely wondering, what makes Starcraft stand out?
Nothing. It's the other way around.
Traditional games like Chess and Go stand out by having massively fewer degrees of freedom than almost any video or even board game.
Not too diminish the advancements in AI, but games with relatively few choices each round are perfect for computers. In StarCraft (and in most video games), there are probably thousands of possible choices each frame.
Even if they got a Alpha Go like research budget, don't expect the Civilization 7 AI to start playing a game that's challenging to higher-level human play.
because they themselves forced me to torrent their movies and music
By the time my son was five, he already understood that the "he forced me to do it" defense is, unless someone literally has a gun to your head, a cowardly lie.
Time to take responsibility for your own actions. It's what adults do.
Agreed. But if Tesla can't do it either, he's afraid that Tesla will "poisons the pool" by raising expectations about what can be done and at what price point to impossible levels.
There's been more than one industry that simply doesn't exist at all because people have been trained to believe that anything less than the impossible is either no good or unfairly expensive.
As the head of GM team, he's petrified of Tesla failing but in doing so, sowing the whole field of autonomous vehicles with salt.
On the other hand, expecting Tesla to put the good of the field before it's own welfare is pretty much dreaming and taking shots at Tesla is simply counter-productive. His job is to just grin and bear it.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you point to an example or are you parroting talking points?
I'm talking about the psychology of credibility. What "talking point" are you referring to?
First of all, let me make it clear. I believe in AGW and I advocate policies to limit it that are considered liberal.
But lets get to the meat. Millions will die because we failed to persuade a strong majority of North Americans that AGW is real. We failed, and excuses *why* we failed even worse than being utterly meaningless because they prevent us from focusing on tactics that might work in future.
I am not saying what *should* happen - I am saying what *has* happened. And clearly, we've failed. There has been no meaningful progress in combatting AGW from North America. And it doesn't matter what the excuse is or how justified our tactics. We failed. Moreover, we've failed so profoundly, that a huge number of North Americans don't even believe that AGW is real. It doesn't get much worse than that.
Look, I understand that you think you can simply throw science at a problem and it should be solved. But we tried that and we failed. We did not use the appropriate tactics to persuade a strong majority of the population that we were correct. This isn't a case of science - the science is pretty much proven.
Assuming that the science should overrule human beliefs is as naive as believing that facts determine the outcome of court cases. Facts are just *one* factor in the verdict, and how and who presents them is more important than the actual fact itself. Narrative beats fact 9 times out of 10. And by having scientists act as policy advocates, we gave the people exactly the narrative they needed to disbelieve them.
Er? The results have been publicized and in the case of lead in gasoline, there was a ban. Or do you prefer to have lead contaminating everywhere you live?
In a highly politicized situation, it is far better to have a ban advocated by people who are not actually doing the science, based on the science by "disinterested" parties.
That's like saying doctors shouldn't tell you not to smoke.
Actually that's a good analogy. It was the doctors, *not* the scientists that led that policy discussion, and the argument was stronger for it. Why? Because doctors weren't going to benefit ideologically or financially from advocating the banning/discouraging of smoking. Nor would they gain academic reputation by being proved "correct". They were seen as impartial.
And even with all that, it took decades to chip away at smoking.
Perhaps you don't understand.
The government wants to ensure that businesses report all the income they receive. If everyone gets a receipt, then an agent need only make a few purchases, see that those receipts do indeed show up in the books, and has some level of confidence that the merchant is reporting all their receipts.
If receipts were only issued occasionally, then it would be very easy to conceal only the income for which no receipt was issued. If the government can create a culture where people expect to get a receipt, then for many fraud-prone businesses, this line of fraud becomes too much work.
The fact that you don't retain your receipt is immaterial. It's that you must be issued the receipt and the merchant *might* be asked to account for that receipt in his books.
You were part of the enforcement mechanism the moment you received your receipt.
And yes, perhaps you could get in trouble for not asking for a receipt. But since most citizens are compliant and don't feel that tax fraud is in their favour, it's highly likely that there's a high enough rate of compliance that no prosecutions for failure to ask for a receipt are necessary.
Yes, I've been to a few countries with stores having signs indicating the law that they *must* give you a receipt and if they fail to do so, you *must* ask for one. It's requiring the citizens to do their part in fighting tax evasion.
So if you have scientific information that the humans are slowly poisoning itself with lead coming from gasoline, for example, you wouldn't try to raise the alarm to have lead removed as an additive in gasoline?
Indeed, publicizing the results would be called for. Suggesting legislation (including a ban) would not.
Look, human beings are human beings. Motivated reasoning (reasoning held because you like the outcome, not because the reasoning is any good) is real.
So it is completely natural for people opposed to a policy to look very closely at those who provided the scientific data. Think how many of us cast doubts on industry paid research conducted by real scientists. We think we know the motivation of the scientist, and thus we doubt their science.
The only way to avoid this is for scientists to recuse themselves from policy discussions. Of course this is difficult, as they are among the best informed. But to do otherwise is to compromise their ability to provide data that is perceived as unbiased.
For example, look at the American CBO, which provides estimates about policy costs to the American government. They are prevented from making any policy comments at all (including having to have their estimates take into account elements that everyone knows will never be present but the politicians put in their to make proposals look credible). Why aren't they allowed to inject common-sense into the discussion, given it would make estimates more informative? Because doing so would jeopardize their ability to be seen as unbiased and in the end would render this very valuable data source completely useless.
We have to live with second best.
One of the largest objections to current climate science is the claim that it has a liberal bias. We need to be very careful not to let that be true. Unfortunately science isn't immune to political pressure - I see it even in the non-controversial things that I work on. It takes extreme vigilance to protect science from political pressure (from either side) on the politically sensitive issues.
Where do you think that claim came from? Conservatives, namely those who stand to lose should people use less oil.
But let's look at the scientists who are arguing for climate change. This includes the vast majority of scientists. They represent virtually every country on the planet. They represent males and females of different age groups. They represent different ethnic populations and speak dozens of languages. Yet you've branded them as "liberal". Have you actually thought about that? Statistically that seems highly unlikely.
Much of the reason that they've been branded as liberal is some scientists have (for understandable reason) been loudly advocating for policy that is in line with many standard liberal held policies. And by advocating for policy, they've caused their actual research to be cast into doubt.
Or let me put it another way. If you believe that literally the fate of mankind is at stake, what sort of monster would you have to be to not twist your research to fit whatever is necessary to push mankind into making a decision that it must make. Now, I don't believe that scientists are fudging data, but by advocating policy along with apocalyptic messaging, they've made it easier for people to believe that they might.
If scientists had held off advocating policy, I think we'd have less proposed action (those scientists pushed AGW into the public consciousness), but less dispute about the actual science itself. I'd far rather have had an active policy fight between "mitigate global warming" vs. "every man/country for them self" (i.e. every country just tries to handle the warming that's coming) instead of what we have now, which is an inability to even agree upon the basic facts.
Should we we reduce CO2 emissions? That isn't a "science" question
Wrong, and now you've lost all credibility in this discussion.
It's statements like this that worry me only slightly less than the deniers.
Science is a description of the universe. It's about facts determined by the scientific method. It might tell us that every single human will die if you don't do something - it says nothing about whether you *should* do it or not. That's policy.
The people who pretend that science tells humans *how* to act are using science as a tool to promulgate their agenda and are scarcely less dangerous than those who pretend that science has no place in decision making.
At best, science should lay out the priors upon which all policy discussion might rely. Someone who believes that if we all believe the same facts, we must all come to the same decisions is either blind to human experience or has deep authoritarian instincts.
It's very likely I believe in the same policy decisions as the poster I am criticizing. But the ends do NOT justify the means, especially if the means is corrupting the definition of science (even for a good cause).
In the 80's, several of my best Physics and CS professors were ex-Americans who had fled the draft for the Vietname war in the 60's.
Canada was all the better for it.
However, in the interest of fairness, it should be noted that there's a constant brain drain (rather slower of late) from Canada to the US of talented individuals seeking the greater opportunities that a country as large as the US can offer. This is more of a small flow of academics in the other direction rather than a huge reversal in the regular brain drain to the US.
If the work conditions are terrible, and the success rate (presumably landing a tenure-track position) is so low, it would seem to me that the only ethical course of action is to make PhD programs *much* harder to get into, and to discourage students who are considering that career path.
Unfortunately, this may be directly opposed to the interests of the university.
Should we assume that 22 year-olds are not capable of getting the information they need to make rational decisions and intervene with legislation?
Personally, I'd be fine with requiring universities to find out and disclose the percentage of post-graduates who attain a faculty position (and perhaps their salary) within 10 years of their PhD. The cost of acquiring this information would be minuscule compared to years lost by people pursuing an ultimately futile career (who we would hope would be dissuaded once they understand reality).
It might be devastating for science (lots of work by high quality, low paid post-grads lost), but the ethics are clear.
> and then come back to self driving when the technology is fully baked.
Unfortunately, on-road testing is how the technology becomes fully baked. I expect at least 1,000 deaths in the next several years as the technology gets put into real use and it gets billions of miles of experience.
Whether Uber's tech is baked enough that they should be allowed to test on the road will only become apparent once this accident is investigated.
My response was to the author's assertion that a walled garden is a bad thing.
It is *a* thing.
Whether it's bad or good depends upon the needs of the user. And frankly, for me, the walled garden is, overall, an advantage. For my use case, disadvantages of Apple's walled garden (which you listed some - there are of course many more) cost me very little, and the advantages of a walled garden (mostly I don't have to care about updates, security, malware (mostly), etc.) are significant to me. My time is precious - I don't want to waste it on my phone.
Obviously the opposite applies to you. Very good.
But if you cannot imagine a set of needs that vary sufficiently from your own that a walled garden is actually an advantage, I fear for your paucity of imagination.
Don't be snide.
If you don't understand that flexibility has a cost, then you have failed to learn one of the most basic principles of user interfaces.
If you *do* understand that flexibility has a cost, but cannot conceive of their beings more than two settings - yours and the far end of the spectrum, then you have failed to understand human beings.
I understand the urge to evangelize - whether it be your God or your phone's OS. But realize when you are doing so.
> It's called a "walled garden".
Which is exactly why I *go* with Apple.
I want my phone to be a phone, and my computer to be my computer. I've no more interest in paying the flexibility tax on my phone than I do on my toaster. I am willing to pay that tax for my computer.
Obviously personal needs vary completely. Trying to recommend one phone/OS/toaster over another without fully understanding the needs of the user is proselytizing, not advising.
(Not that you were doing so.)
Programmers in India are billed at 25-30 dollars per hour so around 50-60K.
Really? I've been on the outsourced side of this, and we were told that if the off-shore team had to repeat the work three times to get it right (which is not all that unusual), the company was still saving money.
And this was in Canada, where the health insurance cost was pretty negligible.
Also, no H1B's, as the company ran it's own shop in India.
At $25-30, it hardly seems worth it, given my observed failure rate of off-shoring projects to be about 50%.
Junior developers generally need good specs, narrow goals, well specified tools, well-defined tests, etc.
And those are *exactly* the sorts of tasks that are very amenable to out-sourcing.
It's pretty hard for companies to justify spending $60K on a junior developer, when they can purchase the services of someone with roughly the same skill set for $10K and get fairly similar results.
Of course, foolish companies feel they can also replace the $100K developers with a $10K developers, but that generally ends in tears fairly quickly.
One point that should be obvious to anyone who has worked in a business is that getting someone's services like this "for free" is anything but.
First, there's the straight up cost: Lawyers vetting contracts, employees gathering and then vetting information, etc.
Then there's the small possibility that somehow, somewhere, this turns out to cost Razer big time - they accidentally expose a competitive secret, the person puts out malware in the Linux Razer driver, the person uses the information to build targeted malware for the Windows side, the service provider turns out to be a Russian spy and it's linked with Razer.... It doesn't matter how ridiculous the scenario, there is some chance of a very bad thing happening.
And then think of the benefit. Zero. (Okay, maybe they sell another 2-3.)
So, in which world can this be justified as a rational business decision?
In most situations like this (unusual disclosures, not business as usual, no going forward as a line of business), a medium-sized company might want perhaps $50K up front, a larger company might demand 3-4 times that. Anything less than that is simply too little return for the risk.
You are far more likely to get the kind of support you want from a small company for which the gain of supporting Linux has *real* marketing value to them and thus the company they're putting at (small) risk isn't *that* valuable compared to the benefit.
I'm pretty certain that if the Internet Archive had a mechanism so that an e-book could only be "checked-out" by 1 user at a time, there'd be no issue here because instead of losing (potentially) thousands of sales, you're losing maybe a dozen.
So in impact, a very big difference. And impact is what matters, not "are these mechanisms topologically identical".
I'm assuming that your morality is not "if I twist a mechanism to get away with it, then it must be ethical" strain.
Canada, but I believe there's a similar program in the US.
It won't make you rich (at least here you max out at a few thousand), but it's a nice bump, especially for a mid-list author.
> I imagine that local libraries that have gone down this route buy ONE e-copy which they make available to their borrowers.
Rather more importantly, the libraries only loan one copy of the e-book out at a time, mimicking the constraints of physical copy books. They do, in fact, buy multiple copies of e-books if they feel there are going to be multiple users requesting copies simultaneously.
Libraries are indeed a balance between the needs of society (which benefits from the availability) and the individuals who produce the material that society needs. Like taxes, most authors are happy to to lose some of their potential revenue to benefit society at large. However, as might be expected, most bridle at total expropriation of their earnings done at the behest not of society as a whole, but individuals who choose to break the previous existing social and legal contract.
To the contrary - my wife receives an annual payment from the government to compensate her for the possible loss of royalties that libraries might bring. Given that libraries also *buy* the book they lend, I've yet to meet an author who wasn't enthusiastically pro-library.
This is like saying that because I don't like the idea of being robbed by you, I should hate the idea of paying taxes. Ludicrous on every level.
Time to switch to AMD. Not only don't they have such clauses, they are actively putting themselves into a situation where a future management cannot easily pull a Nvidia anymore.
The only danger is that if AMD is depriving themselves of a significant revenue stream, then that makes Nvidia the richer company, possibly allowing it to hire the best programmers, built better facilities, do more R&D, and eventually kill AMD, in which case we're all poorer for AMD's customer-centric move.
Now, I don't think the revenues in this situation are are actually significant enough to matter, but if I'm wrong, AMD may have attached an anvil to its future success. The ability to price discriminate by market segment is critical to the survival of a *lot* of businesses.
And based on UK law they will probably win, because they actually have a standard of fitness for purpose. If you bought it on the premise that you would have a certain level of performance and now you won't, you should be able to return it.
Care to lay odds on Intel actually being ruled against? 2:1? 3:1?
If it weren't for the fact that guilt is immaterial compared to PR so this will never get ruled upon, and Intel will settle for something that enriches a few lawyers and gives owners a $0.50 discount on their next Intel CPU, this would be a case worth wagering on.
Because it turns out that aggregation isn't much of a business. If Patreon decides to maintain their current business model (and that is their main value to me), I don't know whether they'll actually go bust, or just be economically moribund, but either way, it turns out that there's not money in being the sort of business I need.
It's much like KickStarter started out as an Arts funding model, but eventually realized that their real value to people was as a pre-order house. Allowing people like me to support artistic creators might sound wonderful, but it's pretty much a loser's game. The customers of any real worth have enough money for real subscription services.
(It's sort of like when I finally realized that my small donations to charities were financially worthless to the charity - they literally spent more raising than I was willing to give. The worth of my donation was solely its help in providing the appearance of widespread support, which was necessary for the charity to get the real donations they were looking needed to do anything useful - those in the $100K+ range. My job was simply to help them establish credibility to the real donors.)
So, yes, we helped Patreon establish the credibility it needs to become a subscription business. But we have to face the fact that most of us are financially worthless to the businesses we'd like to serve us.
> I'm genuinely wondering, what makes Starcraft stand out?
Nothing. It's the other way around.
Traditional games like Chess and Go stand out by having massively fewer degrees of freedom than almost any video or even board game.
Not too diminish the advancements in AI, but games with relatively few choices each round are perfect for computers. In StarCraft (and in most video games), there are probably thousands of possible choices each frame.
Even if they got a Alpha Go like research budget, don't expect the Civilization 7 AI to start playing a game that's challenging to higher-level human play.
By the time my son was five, he already understood that the "he forced me to do it" defense is, unless someone literally has a gun to your head, a cowardly lie.
Time to take responsibility for your own actions. It's what adults do.
> GM can't do it.
Agreed. But if Tesla can't do it either, he's afraid that Tesla will "poisons the pool" by raising expectations about what can be done and at what price point to impossible levels.
There's been more than one industry that simply doesn't exist at all because people have been trained to believe that anything less than the impossible is either no good or unfairly expensive.
As the head of GM team, he's petrified of Tesla failing but in doing so, sowing the whole field of autonomous vehicles with salt.
On the other hand, expecting Tesla to put the good of the field before it's own welfare is pretty much dreaming and taking shots at Tesla is simply counter-productive. His job is to just grin and bear it.