Actually, if you don't like Slashdot Beta, just go to that "Ask Me Anything" reddit now, don't even open it in a new tab. It was all covered there yesterday with actual experts and stuff.
eh, I'm becoming kinda interested in energy policy, esp. since we're gradually transitioning from a production economy to a purely imaginary intellectual-property-based economy. Also timely now that we're poking/griefing at Russia's largely oil-based economy and their relationship with China.
If you have some reading on US foreign policy / military intervention strategy that's less naive than "spreading freedom and democracy" or even "cheap energy" (like the GI Joe and Transformers cartoons I grew up with), I'd gladly read it;-)
If 3 mediocre software engineers could match the capabilities of one good one, I'm sure we'd see more application of that principle outside of government contracting (cost-plus) work.
Bumblebees are clearly Communist Ecoterrorists out to destroy our fine, God-fearing Capitalist agricultural industry. We should immediately start executing those evil climatologists. God and the Invisible Hand would never permit massive CO2 emissions to effect humans, and anyone that says so should be taken out and beaten to death.
Well, get ready to start beating, because apparently the (interim) solution is asexual reproduction: https://xkcd.com/1259/
I don't think NASA does insurance because it's a business decision and NASA isn't a business.
The DSCVR launch was delayed because the Air Force (which is run more like a business) insisted on taking out an insurance policy on the SpaceX launch. They were involved because they were paying for it, since DSCVR was sort of an odd collaboration between NOAA, NASA, and the USAF.
Spacecraft insurance is expensive since the insurance actuaries actually want comprehensive statistical data on each launch vehicle, and that's simply not available on new launch vehicles with less than ~21 (remember the threshold for statistical significance?) launches.
I have a stock Nexus 5 with Lollipop (Android 5.something) and they put in a pretty excellent data meter under Settings | Data Usage
It shows a cumulative graph of data usage over time, and a linear projection up to the end of the month for your billing plan, along with a customizable warning threshold. Under that it lists a histogram of how many MB is used by each app. Click on those, and you can configure background data for each app to restrict them to only update on wifi (or not at all).
This is pretty much a solved problem if you can convince your phone manufacturer to update you to Android 5 (or just flash a CyanogenMOD build yourself like I used to do on every phone I had before my Nexus 5)
Yeah, that's why they just call it "unlimited data" with 2GB of "high speed data". I don't find it confusing, though I'm a bit confused why other people do.
Yeah, I was thinking that too! The stories from Metatropolis were sort of the polar opposite of the world of Snow Crash, where the only workers left worked on big government projects to unwittingly destroy humanity as we know it (or well, at least just the CS nerds)
I do kinda think this is the way of the future, though, whether we like it or not. Used to be that you got a job with one employer for life, and a 30-year mortgage to tie you down and help maintain "stability" in the economy.
But to some extent, that "stability" also prevents free market forces (snicker) from arranging things optimally... things change every 5 years or so, and your skillset could probably be put to use better elsewhere, hopefully for higher pay. So now that people have increased "freedom" to jump between jobs and employers, hopefully they're doing better work and supporting the economy better than if they had just stagnated at their first employer filling a seat.
Of course, people can and do bounce around too much... Personally I try to stick to each employer for a few years because it takes me at least 6 months to learn enough about their IT systems to reach what I'd consider full productivity enhancing and building new ones. Of course, unskilled labor needs less spinup time to reach full productivity.
But what I anticipate will happen (heck, most businesses are halfway there already) is that we'll just all become contractors, both skilled and semi-skilled workers. We'll all become full-time employees of a labor farm which will handle training and HR and benefits, and they'll subcontract us out to whatever corporation actually has money to do projects. The corporations working on projects just want to get shit done and don't care to maintain big HR departments and take care of their people. The contracting agencies just want to maintain their labor farms and negotiate the highest rates possible for the just barely competent enough employee in their pool. Yes, there will be a proliferation of middlemen, but on the plus side they'll be negotiating a higher salary for you since they get a cut.
- taxi (ride sharing) - plumber (flow sharing) - electrician (connection sharing) - fireman (Jerry, you really have to stop making those 'wee-ooh wee-ooh' sounds while you drive)
Oh, I'm not worried about WWIII, it just has a pretty good explanation of how much our foreign military intervention is driven by backing the USD with growth in oil/energy since the dollar went off the gold standard.
Never listen to any commentator on that topic if they seem unaware that most US oil consumption is supplied by the US and Canada.
Argh, I never listen to any commentator who obviously didn't bother reading the link, but I'll give you a pass since all I could find was the silly youtube video. Here's another post in text form: http://stormcloudsgathering.co...
The point isn't that the US buys foreign oil, the point is that oil is only traded in USD on the world market, and we primarily take military action against countries who dare to try to sell oil to others in their own currency.
Another good narrative is the "Covert Origins of ISIS", which explains how the media is used to convince democracies to go to war in other countries by vilifying, well, villains that are mostly of our own creation in the first place. So now whenever I hear news about how bad conflicts are in the middle east, instead of worrying about terrorists I'm can be pretty comfortable knowing that things are probably going exactly as planned.
Oh, I'm not worried about WWIII, it just has a pretty good explanation of how much our foreign military intervention is driven by backing the USD with growth in oil/energy since the dollar went off the gold standard.
For more irreverent/technical discussion threads, though, I'd guess there might be some corner of reddit that could match what we had here on Slashdot... but I haven't redditted much, so someone else will have to guide us.
OK, it's a borderline conspiracy theory site, but this guy does a good job analyzing events and media coverage.
My favorite post is on how he explains US military activity... everything makes much more sense now: The Geopolitics of World War III: https://youtu.be/TC3tINgWfQE
... and plenty of the crawling robots also ended up falling over.
But why no love for the videos of robots failing and falling? There are plenty of videos of legged robots not falling, and they are positively terrifying for the humans vs. robots crowd:
"Teaching" as we know it is going to be replaced. We will always have teachers and people that foster learning but it will not be done as it is done now.
Yep, teachers are just going to keep incorporating new technologies... like blackboards and whiteboards and textbooks and transparencies and TVs and computers and projectors and the internet and laboratory equipment. But kids that can learn on their own will continue to learn on their own, and teachers will be there to try to keep those students engaged and motivated and get the best that they can out of the rest.
Why does a tiny small school in the middle of nowhere need both a French AND Spanish teacher when you could have someone in Spain and France teaching them through Youtube and interacting through Skype. Look at how Duolingo[0] has taken off. That's something that can be introduced to a 3 year old and they will intuitively pick up without fighting 13 years of trying to 'unlearn' some things in English.
I'll check out duolingo, but usually it's relatively difficult for a native speaker to teach their "milk" language to a mature student learning it as a second language. My wife is a native Russian speaker, but she only professionally teaches her other languages (German, Spanish, ESoL) since her knowledge of those is more academic than guttural. Later on when you're ready to try to pick out the nuances of native speakers, then you're much better off doing a full immersion program abroad if you really want to work on fine-tuning your accent and tone and colloquialisms. It's actually pretty silly that many foreign language education programs really insist on hiring native speakers for beginner - intermediate language education.
Eh, we're not going to get rid of teachers. They're just going to have more tools and instructional models at their disposal.
This sounds like a good instructional model. After all, one of the best ways to truly learn a topic is to attempt to teach it to someone else.
I'm pretty sure they're going to find out they still need someone in a "teacher" role to monitor progress, resolve conflicts, keep students motivated, adapt the curriculum to individual students' abilities and learning styles, and so on.
You are absolutely right. And the reason for that is that I am a cheapskate.
Most museums have language saying how much of the membership fee is tax deductible, so you wouldn't be able to deduct a portion of your membership fee that represented the "fair market value" of any merchandise or "admission tickets" that your annual passes represent. But then the bulk of the fee actually goes on to support the operation and is tax deductible. And of course you can simply donate more than the minimum recommended membership amount. But money that goes to a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit is charity as far as the IRS is concerned, so why not include it in your calculation for your charitable giving? It's not like the girl-scout cookies you buy from your neighbors is tax deductible (well, apparently it is if you donate the cookies to someone else).
Anyway, we may all hate playing taxes, but why not take some joy in the tax incentive meta-game?
I've been pretty happy using python for prototyping, and it's actually fairly fast using a JIT wrapper like pypy. And the C++ bindings are there for when you have to rewrite one of your modules for performance. There's even an interface to Boost and maybe even ASIO if you want to tinker with those for some reason... I played with some Boost libs briefly years ago but found they added too much complexity and got by fine using much cleaner "pure" python modules instead.
Not a complete filesystem-level solution. But I'm pretty happy with KeePass for sensitive stuff.
Using the KeePassX client on Linux, with the.kdb file on Google Drive. KeePass2Android on our phones. We have a secret key not stored on Google Drive, and a passphrase to unlock that. Haven't had any trouble with the automatic sync of the.kdb back to Google Drive after making any changes.
If encfs works fairly well on Linux, what's stopping you from getting http://linuxonandroid.org/ working on Android and mounting your encfs file in a full Linux chroot environment? Then on Windows just run a Linux VM that exports a Samba share of the unencrypted files.
The other thing I've always done since forever is just use my phone / internet kiosk to VNC+SSH back to my home PC.
"Your mileage may vary"... just a disclaimer in the way of a bad car analogy that someone else may not necessarily get as much out of the experience as I did while politely implicating that it may have had more to do with their driving style.
Oh, I dunno, I haven't regretted making tax-deductible membership contributions to educational stuff run by our evil government, such as:
* National Parks Annual Pass - usually pays for itself within 4 visits, and always provides the best experiences our country has to offer.
* Science Museum Annual Pass - this is typically a state-funded thing, but the passes often have reciprocity at science centers across the country. Some are more amazing than others, but all are great places to take kids on rainy days.
* Smithsonian Institution - yeah, more useful if you live or visit near the nation's capitol, but these museums house or nation's treasures and make them free for all.
Can't really go wrong with any of these, all are staffed by amazing, capable, motivated, and certainly underpaid US gov't workers. But of course, YMMV.
That's pretty impressive, I always enjoy your posts and hope I'm half as awesome as you when I get to that certain age (though it's not actually that far off nowadays).
What percentage of income do other people spend on directing support to charity? I always feel woefully inadequate since we only do maybe a few hundred dollars per year, which comes out to fractions of a percent of our joint income. OTOH, we feel like we're pretty frugal with money and don't really waste anything... no entertainment budget for movies or Netflix, eat out cheap just a couple of times a week, maybe one vacation per year, and the rest goes to mortgage and utilities and education activities for the kids, as well as some minimal token amount for 401k and 529 savings plans.
I hear Muslims are more or less required to donate something like 5% of their income to charity, so I wonder what that says about my prospects towards society if I'm only puttering around at one tenth of that:P
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, mod parent up.
Actually, if you don't like Slashdot Beta, just go to that "Ask Me Anything" reddit now, don't even open it in a new tab. It was all covered there yesterday with actual experts and stuff.
eh, I'm becoming kinda interested in energy policy, esp. since we're gradually transitioning from a production economy to a purely imaginary intellectual-property-based economy. Also timely now that we're poking/griefing at Russia's largely oil-based economy and their relationship with China.
If you have some reading on US foreign policy / military intervention strategy that's less naive than "spreading freedom and democracy" or even "cheap energy" (like the GI Joe and Transformers cartoons I grew up with), I'd gladly read it ;-)
Well, apparently there's money to be made in products that people can use worldwide.
http://www.businessinsider.com...
If 3 mediocre software engineers could match the capabilities of one good one, I'm sure we'd see more application of that principle outside of government contracting (cost-plus) work.
Bumblebees are clearly Communist Ecoterrorists out to destroy our fine, God-fearing Capitalist agricultural industry. We should immediately start executing those evil climatologists. God and the Invisible Hand would never permit massive CO2 emissions to effect humans, and anyone that says so should be taken out and beaten to death.
Well, get ready to start beating, because apparently the (interim) solution is asexual reproduction:
https://xkcd.com/1259/
I don't think NASA does insurance because it's a business decision and NASA isn't a business.
The DSCVR launch was delayed because the Air Force (which is run more like a business) insisted on taking out an insurance policy on the SpaceX launch. They were involved because they were paying for it, since DSCVR was sort of an odd collaboration between NOAA, NASA, and the USAF.
Spacecraft insurance is expensive since the insurance actuaries actually want comprehensive statistical data on each launch vehicle, and that's simply not available on new launch vehicles with less than ~21 (remember the threshold for statistical significance?) launches.
I have a stock Nexus 5 with Lollipop (Android 5.something) and they put in a pretty excellent data meter under Settings | Data Usage
It shows a cumulative graph of data usage over time, and a linear projection up to the end of the month for your billing plan, along with a customizable warning threshold. Under that it lists a histogram of how many MB is used by each app. Click on those, and you can configure background data for each app to restrict them to only update on wifi (or not at all).
This is pretty much a solved problem if you can convince your phone manufacturer to update you to Android 5 (or just flash a CyanogenMOD build yourself like I used to do on every phone I had before my Nexus 5)
Yeah, that's why they just call it "unlimited data" with 2GB of "high speed data". I don't find it confusing, though I'm a bit confused why other people do.
Yeah, I was thinking that too! The stories from Metatropolis were sort of the polar opposite of the world of Snow Crash, where the only workers left worked on big government projects to unwittingly destroy humanity as we know it (or well, at least just the CS nerds)
I do kinda think this is the way of the future, though, whether we like it or not. Used to be that you got a job with one employer for life, and a 30-year mortgage to tie you down and help maintain "stability" in the economy.
But to some extent, that "stability" also prevents free market forces (snicker) from arranging things optimally... things change every 5 years or so, and your skillset could probably be put to use better elsewhere, hopefully for higher pay. So now that people have increased "freedom" to jump between jobs and employers, hopefully they're doing better work and supporting the economy better than if they had just stagnated at their first employer filling a seat.
Of course, people can and do bounce around too much... Personally I try to stick to each employer for a few years because it takes me at least 6 months to learn enough about their IT systems to reach what I'd consider full productivity enhancing and building new ones. Of course, unskilled labor needs less spinup time to reach full productivity.
But what I anticipate will happen (heck, most businesses are halfway there already) is that we'll just all become contractors, both skilled and semi-skilled workers. We'll all become full-time employees of a labor farm which will handle training and HR and benefits, and they'll subcontract us out to whatever corporation actually has money to do projects. The corporations working on projects just want to get shit done and don't care to maintain big HR departments and take care of their people. The contracting agencies just want to maintain their labor farms and negotiate the highest rates possible for the just barely competent enough employee in their pool. Yes, there will be a proliferation of middlemen, but on the plus side they'll be negotiating a higher salary for you since they get a cut.
"Unlicensed"
- taxi (ride sharing)
- plumber (flow sharing)
- electrician (connection sharing)
- fireman (Jerry, you really have to stop making those 'wee-ooh wee-ooh' sounds while you drive)
oh, we have (unlicensed) AC gold here!
Oh, I'm not worried about WWIII, it just has a pretty good explanation of how much our foreign military intervention is driven by backing the USD with growth in oil/energy since the dollar went off the gold standard.
Never listen to any commentator on that topic if they seem unaware that most US oil consumption is supplied by the US and Canada.
Argh, I never listen to any commentator who obviously didn't bother reading the link, but I'll give you a pass since all I could find was the silly youtube video. Here's another post in text form:
http://stormcloudsgathering.co...
The point isn't that the US buys foreign oil, the point is that oil is only traded in USD on the world market, and we primarily take military action against countries who dare to try to sell oil to others in their own currency.
Another good narrative is the "Covert Origins of ISIS", which explains how the media is used to convince democracies to go to war in other countries by vilifying, well, villains that are mostly of our own creation in the first place. So now whenever I hear news about how bad conflicts are in the middle east, instead of worrying about terrorists I'm can be pretty comfortable knowing that things are probably going exactly as planned.
Oh, here's where it went: http://stormcloudsgathering.co...
I was going to link the blog site http://scgnews.com/ , but that site appears to have been squatted upon.
https://xkcd.com/727/
slashies!
Oh, I'm not worried about WWIII, it just has a pretty good explanation of how much our foreign military intervention is driven by backing the USD with growth in oil/energy since the dollar went off the gold standard.
http://arstechnica.com/ is pretty good from a tech news coverage perspective. http://theregister.co.uk/ has the nice snarky British humor angle as well.
http://fark.com/ tends to have pretty great and balanced political discussion and humor.
For more irreverent/technical discussion threads, though, I'd guess there might be some corner of reddit that could match what we had here on Slashdot... but I haven't redditted much, so someone else will have to guide us.
OK, it's a borderline conspiracy theory site, but this guy does a good job analyzing events and media coverage.
My favorite post is on how he explains US military activity... everything makes much more sense now:
The Geopolitics of World War III: https://youtu.be/TC3tINgWfQE
... and plenty of the crawling robots also ended up falling over.
But why no love for the videos of robots failing and falling? There are plenty of videos of legged robots not falling, and they are positively terrifying for the humans vs. robots crowd:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Teaching" as we know it is going to be replaced. We will always have teachers and people that foster learning but it will not be done as it is done now.
Yep, teachers are just going to keep incorporating new technologies... like blackboards and whiteboards and textbooks and transparencies and TVs and computers and projectors and the internet and laboratory equipment. But kids that can learn on their own will continue to learn on their own, and teachers will be there to try to keep those students engaged and motivated and get the best that they can out of the rest.
Why does a tiny small school in the middle of nowhere need both a French AND Spanish teacher when you could have someone in Spain and France teaching them through Youtube and interacting through Skype. Look at how Duolingo[0] has taken off. That's something that can be introduced to a 3 year old and they will intuitively pick up without fighting 13 years of trying to 'unlearn' some things in English.
I'll check out duolingo, but usually it's relatively difficult for a native speaker to teach their "milk" language to a mature student learning it as a second language. My wife is a native Russian speaker, but she only professionally teaches her other languages (German, Spanish, ESoL) since her knowledge of those is more academic than guttural. Later on when you're ready to try to pick out the nuances of native speakers, then you're much better off doing a full immersion program abroad if you really want to work on fine-tuning your accent and tone and colloquialisms. It's actually pretty silly that many foreign language education programs really insist on hiring native speakers for beginner - intermediate language education.
Eh, we're not going to get rid of teachers. They're just going to have more tools and instructional models at their disposal.
This sounds like a good instructional model. After all, one of the best ways to truly learn a topic is to attempt to teach it to someone else.
I'm pretty sure they're going to find out they still need someone in a "teacher" role to monitor progress, resolve conflicts, keep students motivated, adapt the curriculum to individual students' abilities and learning styles, and so on.
You are absolutely right. And the reason for that is that I am a cheapskate.
Most museums have language saying how much of the membership fee is tax deductible, so you wouldn't be able to deduct a portion of your membership fee that represented the "fair market value" of any merchandise or "admission tickets" that your annual passes represent. But then the bulk of the fee actually goes on to support the operation and is tax deductible. And of course you can simply donate more than the minimum recommended membership amount. But money that goes to a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit is charity as far as the IRS is concerned, so why not include it in your calculation for your charitable giving? It's not like the girl-scout cookies you buy from your neighbors is tax deductible (well, apparently it is if you donate the cookies to someone else).
Anyway, we may all hate playing taxes, but why not take some joy in the tax incentive meta-game?
Word.
I've been pretty happy using python for prototyping, and it's actually fairly fast using a JIT wrapper like pypy. And the C++ bindings are there for when you have to rewrite one of your modules for performance. There's even an interface to Boost and maybe even ASIO if you want to tinker with those for some reason... I played with some Boost libs briefly years ago but found they added too much complexity and got by fine using much cleaner "pure" python modules instead.
Not a complete filesystem-level solution. But I'm pretty happy with KeePass for sensitive stuff.
Using the KeePassX client on Linux, with the .kdb file on Google Drive. .kdb back to Google Drive after making any changes.
KeePass2Android on our phones. We have a secret key not stored on Google Drive, and a passphrase to unlock that. Haven't had any trouble with the automatic sync of the
If encfs works fairly well on Linux, what's stopping you from getting http://linuxonandroid.org/ working on Android and mounting your encfs file in a full Linux chroot environment? Then on Windows just run a Linux VM that exports a Samba share of the unencrypted files.
The other thing I've always done since forever is just use my phone / internet kiosk to VNC+SSH back to my home PC.
What is YMMV?
"Your mileage may vary" ... just a disclaimer in the way of a bad car analogy that someone else may not necessarily get as much out of the experience as I did while politely implicating that it may have had more to do with their driving style.
Oh, I dunno, I haven't regretted making tax-deductible membership contributions to educational stuff run by our evil government, such as:
* National Parks Annual Pass - usually pays for itself within 4 visits, and always provides the best experiences our country has to offer.
* Science Museum Annual Pass - this is typically a state-funded thing, but the passes often have reciprocity at science centers across the country. Some are more amazing than others, but all are great places to take kids on rainy days.
* Smithsonian Institution - yeah, more useful if you live or visit near the nation's capitol, but these museums house or nation's treasures and make them free for all.
Can't really go wrong with any of these, all are staffed by amazing, capable, motivated, and certainly underpaid US gov't workers. But of course, YMMV.
That's pretty impressive, I always enjoy your posts and hope I'm half as awesome as you when I get to that certain age (though it's not actually that far off nowadays).
What percentage of income do other people spend on directing support to charity? I always feel woefully inadequate since we only do maybe a few hundred dollars per year, which comes out to fractions of a percent of our joint income. OTOH, we feel like we're pretty frugal with money and don't really waste anything... no entertainment budget for movies or Netflix, eat out cheap just a couple of times a week, maybe one vacation per year, and the rest goes to mortgage and utilities and education activities for the kids, as well as some minimal token amount for 401k and 529 savings plans.
I hear Muslims are more or less required to donate something like 5% of their income to charity, so I wonder what that says about my prospects towards society if I'm only puttering around at one tenth of that :P