Japan's birth rate is actually the same as Italy and Spain and a lot of other European countries, which don't really have the whole salaryman culture of Japan. It's also not that much lower than lower than the EU average.
I don't think any developed nation knows how to solve this problem yet. They all seem to have a birth rate of less than 2 children per woman, which is obviously not enough keep a stable population. But most countries are willing to accept a certain amount of immigration, which will make up for a low birth rate. Japan is not willing to do this, and that's why their population is declining.
Anyone who has the capability to break this would-be law (reimplementing an API) also has the technical capability to understand it, and therefore consent to it. Those who don't, don't need to worry about it. I don't think this is a problem, and there are many branches of the law where this is the case, especially in specialized areas.
For example there are laws around the minimum legal tread depth on car tires. Someone who does not have any experience of driving might not understand that there's a relationship between tread depth and water dispersion, but any driver who intentionally lets his or her tires go bald is being irresponsible. When someone takes on a technical activity, it's their responsibility to also educate themselves on the risks involved, and the branch of law that applies to that activity.
The entire software industry would grind to a halt if a copyright on APIs were enforced. Do you think someone should be able to sue Oracle for using SQL as the interface to their DBMS? Or using the Unix API in Solaris? Solaris ships with a C/C++ compiler and I'm pretty sure Sun/Oracle "stole" the APIs from AT&T and UCB. I don't see how this is any different from Android.
Very rarely do democracies require citizens to actually make detailed decisions about how a country is run(*). We usually get people to vote on something much more general - which politicians get into office - and then we let them handle things without micromanaging them. If they fuck up, we get pissed off and vote for someone else in the next cycle.
This jury on the other hand is being asked to decide the outcome of a single case. The case is fairly technical, or at least more technical than the general public is able to understand.
There are better ways to do it. We could be more selective in the jury selection process, and ensure that the jury consists of technical people. Or we could have expert witnesses instruct the jury on how to make findings of facts.
But we shouldn't just throw our hands up and say that it's "the worst of all systems except every other system". It's easy enough to identify problems with the system in general, and this case in particular, and then propose solutions.
* Yes, I'm aware that there are some places (e.g. California) that have people vote directly on little things, but this tends to lead to bad results (the state is almost broke and a lot of the cities have dysfunctional politics).
Even if they don't observe a correlation between brain cancer and mobile phone use, it could be the case that mobile phones cause cancer, and some other cause of cancer was removed from society that caused an equal drop in cancer rates. So it's technically true; the absence of correlation in this study does not rule out causation.
Amazon is the last in a long line of middlemen that make up a supply chain. Anyone who is silly enough to measure companies by revenue is naturally going to have a bias that makes them think that retailers are "bigger" than manufacturing and engineering companies. What matters isn't the revenue that passes through a company, but the profit that they get to keep.
I'm not trying to put down Amazon - they're a very successful company and probably one day they'll be bigger than Microsoft. But not today.
Simulation is not duplication, and intelligence is not consciousness.
Even if those aliens somehow managed to simulate an entire universe, and even if that program was able to simulate intelligence, there's no reason to believe that any of those simulated beings are conscious. Just because someone can compute the results of what would have happened in some simulated scenario, doesn't mean that that a conscious experience of that scenario magically gets created.
If anyone is going to argue that we're "very likely" living in a simulation, then they're going to have to show that simulating a brain creates the same consciousness that a real brain does (i.e., that simulating a brain is the same as duplicating a brain). We don't know a lot about consciousness, but I find it incredibly hard to believe that executing instructions on a CPU would do this.
The broad definition of the word isn't "the poorest part of a city" - it actually means the area of a city that is set aside for a minority, and carries some connotations of that place being poor. People aren't just attaching a racist tag to it; the very definition of the word is inseparable from race. The fact that you think "ghetto" simply means a "poor area" suggests that you've been exposed to a lot of casual racism in your life, and you haven't noticed.
For example, during the Nazi era, the Jews were gathered into ghettoes. They weren't called ghettoes because they were poor, they were called that because they were areas that were set aside for Jews.
When I was in high school, a lot of kids would say "that's gay" to refer to anything they didn't like in general - imagine if the woman in the ad had called T-Mobile "gay"! It's similarly offensive to people who actually live in ghettoes, or are part of races that have historically been forced into ghettoes.
First of all, Market St takes you right between the Tenderloin and the 6th & Market area, which locals knows to avoid. Clueless tourists however, don't.
Second, everyone in SF knows it looks like shit there, no one's pretending it doesn't. But about a third or maybe even half of the homeless people there are mentally ill. It's fucked up that as a society, we'd leave sick people out there to die, and demand that they "beg coyly, stay quiet, and generally stay out of your way". We don't do that with people with cancer, or physical disabilities, and we shouldn't for the mentally ill either. You can look down on "SJW"s all you want, but the guy was acting like a cunt, and he got treated the way he deserved.
+1. It's virtually impossible for a "distracted" pedestrian to injure a driver, but very easy for a driver to kill a pedestrian. Responsibility should fall on those who are creating the most risk for others.
...except maybe when you're actually exercising. A 24 oz bottle of Gatorade has 160 calories in it, which would only take 10-15 minutes to burn off while running or cycling.
Overconsumption of sugar is a big problem, but there's also lack of exercise. We've structured our lives (and cities) in such a way that we don't have to lift a finger to do anything. The only way to exercise is to actively go out of your way to do it; people just can't burn off all that sugar in their day-to-day suburban lives.
You're right that no one was a "right" to live wherever they want, but it still sucks to get kicked out of a city you've grown to like, and there's no reason why governments can't enact policies that would avoid putting so many people in such a shitty situation.
The obvious one is increasing the housing supply to meet the demand, so that everyone who wants to live there can do so. There's plenty of space - San Francisco is only half as dense as Brooklyn, for example. Unfortunately right now, the number of approved units for construction in San Francisco exactly matches projected growth, which means that prices are likely to remain high for a long time.
Another problem is the lack of a good public transit system, which would let people live just a bit farther out. Then, those people who are priced out could move somewhere cheaper but still have access to the city. New York is a good example; those who were priced out of Manhattan were able to move out to other boroughs like Brooklyn and catch the subway in (or enjoy the neighborhoods in Brooklyn).
Too bad that the City of San Francisco, and its neighbors in the Bay Area, have shown no interest in pursuing either of these solutions. The tech scapegoating doesn't really help either.
Since it's always going to be about who can spend the most either way, I don't see why an engineering competition is any less interesting than an athletic competition.
Motorsports (Formula One, Le Mans) are already like this, and I find it interesting because you get to see engineers push the boundaries of technology. It would be fantastic if we could push the boundaries of prosthetic technologies for disabled people.
At the cost of the next election? That happened in 1996 and John Howard went on to be the second longest serving prime minister in Australian history. Needless to say, there is no serious opposition to gun control in Australia.
In the Android world, manufacturers release low spec phones to serve the budget end of the market. Apple does the same thing by using newly manufactured iPhones from an old design. Saying that these old iPhone models shouldn't get updates is exactly the same as saying that low spec Android phones shouldn't get updates, which is crazy.
It doesn't matter when the phone was designed - if a phone was purchased recently, customers should be able to expect updates for a reasonable period. It's completely unreasonable to stop providing updates during the warranty period!
It should be illegal for manufacturers to stop providing security updates during the 2-year contract period, if it isn't already.
The denser parts of San Francisco tend to have pretty low speed limits, such that cars can immediately come to a stop if they need to. For example Market St around Powell is 10 mph.
If you've ever been around that area, it should be obvious that there are vastly more people on foot than in cars. It just doesn't make any sense to slow down the majority (who are on foot) and have them wait for the minority (in their cars) to go past.
I'm not sure what you're referring to here. Can you give any examples of how recent versions of OS X suffer from mobilization?
Expose didn't get taken away, it just got renamed to "Mission Control" and got merged with Spaces (which was a good idea) in OS X Lion. They also made it work with multitouch trackpad gestures (i.e. you can activate it by swiping up with 3 fingers). That was probably iPhone-inspired, but it was done in a way that was very suitable for a desktop/laptop environment.
The only thing I can think of that got a bit of a negative reaction was the flat design that was introduced in Yosemite. But this has nothing to do with mobilization, it's just a coincidence that both the mobile and desktop OSes moved towards a flat design at the same time.
I used to think so too, but then I got one as a gift and started wearing it. There were a few things that I then found out were nice:
- Android Wear devices can unlock your Android phone for you, so you don't have to enter your password/pin/pattern every time. This by itself is so compelling that I'd wear a smart bracelet with just this feature if it was available.
- You can use your watch to ring your phone, if you lose it under the couch or something.
- It's actually very convenient to be able to glance at messages/emails when they arrive without having to pull out a phone. You can archive them then and there if it's not important (very useful if you're trying to do Inbox Zero) or respond using voice recognition if it's something short (very useful when driving).
It's not a life-altering step forward like the original iPhone was, but not every new device needs to change the world and disrupt everything. As long as it provides value to some niche, then it's a good thing to have on the market.
I think most people here will agree that Canonical has lost the plot with regards to usability, but Ubuntu's release cadence is something that it still has going for it. As a developer, one thing I hated about developing for RHEL is that it ships with ancient versions of libraries. You either have to bring in your own newer versions (and all transitive dependencies) or make do with missing features and incompatibilities.
Ubuntu LTS ships often enough to stay fresh, but not too often to be a maintenance burden. RHEL's model might appeal to highly change-averse sysadmins who value stability above all else, but Ubuntu is stable (enough) for cloud uses and makes better tradeoffs for developers IMO.
That's nice of you do that, but it's not quite the same situation that Uber is in. They don't own the cars that their drivers drive, and they can't just tell their drivers to drive into Martin Place during the a hostage situation. I mean, they could try, but I doubt many drivers would follow those instructions. The next best thing that they can do is provide an incentive for their drivers to take risks and respond to emergencies, and surge pricing can help pay for this. Whether they're being dicks or not depends on how much of a cut they take:
- If they ate the cost themselves, it'd be a really nice thing to do, similar to what you did with your helicopters - If they simply charge more but maintain the same profit, then what they're doing is neither generous nor opportunistic, it's just neutral - If they profit more from the misfortune of others, then they're dicks
If I had to guess, I'd say that they're probably making more profits during emergencies, except when there's a public backlash (like there was in Sydney). This is just based on the fact that they do seem like a dick-ish company.
But there's nothing wrong in principle with surge pricing, even during emergencies. It serves a useful purpose: it encourages more drivers to get out and get people out of a dangerous place.
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Japan's birth rate is actually the same as Italy and Spain and a lot of other European countries, which don't really have the whole salaryman culture of Japan. It's also not that much lower than lower than the EU average.
I don't think any developed nation knows how to solve this problem yet. They all seem to have a birth rate of less than 2 children per woman, which is obviously not enough keep a stable population. But most countries are willing to accept a certain amount of immigration, which will make up for a low birth rate. Japan is not willing to do this, and that's why their population is declining.
Anyone who has the capability to break this would-be law (reimplementing an API) also has the technical capability to understand it, and therefore consent to it. Those who don't, don't need to worry about it. I don't think this is a problem, and there are many branches of the law where this is the case, especially in specialized areas.
For example there are laws around the minimum legal tread depth on car tires. Someone who does not have any experience of driving might not understand that there's a relationship between tread depth and water dispersion, but any driver who intentionally lets his or her tires go bald is being irresponsible. When someone takes on a technical activity, it's their responsibility to also educate themselves on the risks involved, and the branch of law that applies to that activity.
The entire software industry would grind to a halt if a copyright on APIs were enforced. Do you think someone should be able to sue Oracle for using SQL as the interface to their DBMS? Or using the Unix API in Solaris? Solaris ships with a C/C++ compiler and I'm pretty sure Sun/Oracle "stole" the APIs from AT&T and UCB. I don't see how this is any different from Android.
Very rarely do democracies require citizens to actually make detailed decisions about how a country is run(*). We usually get people to vote on something much more general - which politicians get into office - and then we let them handle things without micromanaging them. If they fuck up, we get pissed off and vote for someone else in the next cycle.
This jury on the other hand is being asked to decide the outcome of a single case. The case is fairly technical, or at least more technical than the general public is able to understand.
There are better ways to do it. We could be more selective in the jury selection process, and ensure that the jury consists of technical people. Or we could have expert witnesses instruct the jury on how to make findings of facts.
But we shouldn't just throw our hands up and say that it's "the worst of all systems except every other system". It's easy enough to identify problems with the system in general, and this case in particular, and then propose solutions.
* Yes, I'm aware that there are some places (e.g. California) that have people vote directly on little things, but this tends to lead to bad results (the state is almost broke and a lot of the cities have dysfunctional politics).
Even if they don't observe a correlation between brain cancer and mobile phone use, it could be the case that mobile phones cause cancer, and some other cause of cancer was removed from society that caused an equal drop in cancer rates. So it's technically true; the absence of correlation in this study does not rule out causation.
Amazon is the last in a long line of middlemen that make up a supply chain. Anyone who is silly enough to measure companies by revenue is naturally going to have a bias that makes them think that retailers are "bigger" than manufacturing and engineering companies. What matters isn't the revenue that passes through a company, but the profit that they get to keep.
I'm not trying to put down Amazon - they're a very successful company and probably one day they'll be bigger than Microsoft. But not today.
Simulation is not duplication, and intelligence is not consciousness.
Even if those aliens somehow managed to simulate an entire universe, and even if that program was able to simulate intelligence, there's no reason to believe that any of those simulated beings are conscious. Just because someone can compute the results of what would have happened in some simulated scenario, doesn't mean that that a conscious experience of that scenario magically gets created.
If anyone is going to argue that we're "very likely" living in a simulation, then they're going to have to show that simulating a brain creates the same consciousness that a real brain does (i.e., that simulating a brain is the same as duplicating a brain). We don't know a lot about consciousness, but I find it incredibly hard to believe that executing instructions on a CPU would do this.
The broad definition of the word isn't "the poorest part of a city" - it actually means the area of a city that is set aside for a minority, and carries some connotations of that place being poor. People aren't just attaching a racist tag to it; the very definition of the word is inseparable from race. The fact that you think "ghetto" simply means a "poor area" suggests that you've been exposed to a lot of casual racism in your life, and you haven't noticed.
For example, during the Nazi era, the Jews were gathered into ghettoes. They weren't called ghettoes because they were poor, they were called that because they were areas that were set aside for Jews.
When I was in high school, a lot of kids would say "that's gay" to refer to anything they didn't like in general - imagine if the woman in the ad had called T-Mobile "gay"! It's similarly offensive to people who actually live in ghettoes, or are part of races that have historically been forced into ghettoes.
First of all, Market St takes you right between the Tenderloin and the 6th & Market area, which locals knows to avoid. Clueless tourists however, don't.
Second, everyone in SF knows it looks like shit there, no one's pretending it doesn't. But about a third or maybe even half of the homeless people there are mentally ill. It's fucked up that as a society, we'd leave sick people out there to die, and demand that they "beg coyly, stay quiet, and generally stay out of your way". We don't do that with people with cancer, or physical disabilities, and we shouldn't for the mentally ill either. You can look down on "SJW"s all you want, but the guy was acting like a cunt, and he got treated the way he deserved.
You're lost deep inside a social bubble if you truly think that "the overwhelming majority of the tech community" is behind Trump.
+1. It's virtually impossible for a "distracted" pedestrian to injure a driver, but very easy for a driver to kill a pedestrian. Responsibility should fall on those who are creating the most risk for others.
It's never a great idea to drink your calories.
...except maybe when you're actually exercising. A 24 oz bottle of Gatorade has 160 calories in it, which would only take 10-15 minutes to burn off while running or cycling.
Overconsumption of sugar is a big problem, but there's also lack of exercise. We've structured our lives (and cities) in such a way that we don't have to lift a finger to do anything. The only way to exercise is to actively go out of your way to do it; people just can't burn off all that sugar in their day-to-day suburban lives.
Microsoft were forced to disclose these parents in a Chinese court. You can read about them here:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
You're right that no one was a "right" to live wherever they want, but it still sucks to get kicked out of a city you've grown to like, and there's no reason why governments can't enact policies that would avoid putting so many people in such a shitty situation.
The obvious one is increasing the housing supply to meet the demand, so that everyone who wants to live there can do so. There's plenty of space - San Francisco is only half as dense as Brooklyn, for example. Unfortunately right now, the number of approved units for construction in San Francisco exactly matches projected growth, which means that prices are likely to remain high for a long time.
Another problem is the lack of a good public transit system, which would let people live just a bit farther out. Then, those people who are priced out could move somewhere cheaper but still have access to the city. New York is a good example; those who were priced out of Manhattan were able to move out to other boroughs like Brooklyn and catch the subway in (or enjoy the neighborhoods in Brooklyn).
Too bad that the City of San Francisco, and its neighbors in the Bay Area, have shown no interest in pursuing either of these solutions. The tech scapegoating doesn't really help either.
Heck, one feature of Google Glass was to have it upload the photos and Google recognizes everyone on the street.
No it wasn't. Google removed facial recognition from their Glass SDK and explicitly banned app developers from using it in their apps.
http://arstechnica.com/informa...
Just wondering if you think baseball is a sport?
I was under the impression that the Olympics is already a competition of which country can spend the most on training facilities for its athletes:
http://www.bbc.com/news/busine...
http://www.yellowfinbi.com/YFC...
Since it's always going to be about who can spend the most either way, I don't see why an engineering competition is any less interesting than an athletic competition.
Motorsports (Formula One, Le Mans) are already like this, and I find it interesting because you get to see engineers push the boundaries of technology. It would be fantastic if we could push the boundaries of prosthetic technologies for disabled people.
At the cost of the next election? That happened in 1996 and John Howard went on to be the second longest serving prime minister in Australian history. Needless to say, there is no serious opposition to gun control in Australia.
No. Processing raw files involves more than just compression, it includes things like demosaicing and setting white balance.
In the Android world, manufacturers release low spec phones to serve the budget end of the market. Apple does the same thing by using newly manufactured iPhones from an old design. Saying that these old iPhone models shouldn't get updates is exactly the same as saying that low spec Android phones shouldn't get updates, which is crazy.
It doesn't matter when the phone was designed - if a phone was purchased recently, customers should be able to expect updates for a reasonable period. It's completely unreasonable to stop providing updates during the warranty period!
It should be illegal for manufacturers to stop providing security updates during the 2-year contract period, if it isn't already.
The denser parts of San Francisco tend to have pretty low speed limits, such that cars can immediately come to a stop if they need to. For example Market St around Powell is 10 mph.
If you've ever been around that area, it should be obvious that there are vastly more people on foot than in cars. It just doesn't make any sense to slow down the majority (who are on foot) and have them wait for the minority (in their cars) to go past.
I'm not sure what you're referring to here. Can you give any examples of how recent versions of OS X suffer from mobilization?
Expose didn't get taken away, it just got renamed to "Mission Control" and got merged with Spaces (which was a good idea) in OS X Lion. They also made it work with multitouch trackpad gestures (i.e. you can activate it by swiping up with 3 fingers). That was probably iPhone-inspired, but it was done in a way that was very suitable for a desktop/laptop environment.
The only thing I can think of that got a bit of a negative reaction was the flat design that was introduced in Yosemite. But this has nothing to do with mobilization, it's just a coincidence that both the mobile and desktop OSes moved towards a flat design at the same time.
I used to think so too, but then I got one as a gift and started wearing it. There were a few things that I then found out were nice:
- Android Wear devices can unlock your Android phone for you, so you don't have to enter your password/pin/pattern every time. This by itself is so compelling that I'd wear a smart bracelet with just this feature if it was available.
- You can use your watch to ring your phone, if you lose it under the couch or something.
- It's actually very convenient to be able to glance at messages/emails when they arrive without having to pull out a phone. You can archive them then and there if it's not important (very useful if you're trying to do Inbox Zero) or respond using voice recognition if it's something short (very useful when driving).
It's not a life-altering step forward like the original iPhone was, but not every new device needs to change the world and disrupt everything. As long as it provides value to some niche, then it's a good thing to have on the market.
I think most people here will agree that Canonical has lost the plot with regards to usability, but Ubuntu's release cadence is something that it still has going for it. As a developer, one thing I hated about developing for RHEL is that it ships with ancient versions of libraries. You either have to bring in your own newer versions (and all transitive dependencies) or make do with missing features and incompatibilities.
Ubuntu LTS ships often enough to stay fresh, but not too often to be a maintenance burden. RHEL's model might appeal to highly change-averse sysadmins who value stability above all else, but Ubuntu is stable (enough) for cloud uses and makes better tradeoffs for developers IMO.
That's nice of you do that, but it's not quite the same situation that Uber is in. They don't own the cars that their drivers drive, and they can't just tell their drivers to drive into Martin Place during the a hostage situation. I mean, they could try, but I doubt many drivers would follow those instructions. The next best thing that they can do is provide an incentive for their drivers to take risks and respond to emergencies, and surge pricing can help pay for this. Whether they're being dicks or not depends on how much of a cut they take:
- If they ate the cost themselves, it'd be a really nice thing to do, similar to what you did with your helicopters
- If they simply charge more but maintain the same profit, then what they're doing is neither generous nor opportunistic, it's just neutral
- If they profit more from the misfortune of others, then they're dicks
If I had to guess, I'd say that they're probably making more profits during emergencies, except when there's a public backlash (like there was in Sydney). This is just based on the fact that they do seem like a dick-ish company.
But there's nothing wrong in principle with surge pricing, even during emergencies. It serves a useful purpose: it encourages more drivers to get out and get people out of a dangerous place.