Diaspora needed more than a bit of polish, and that may have contributed to its lack of uptake. If you want to convince people to switch from FB to your network, you better have an amazing user experience. For the inexperienced user who isn't interested in setting up a server themselves, it needs to have the same ease of use as a centralized social network. And with those users now at least somewhat aware of privacy-related issues, you had better be able to offer them some assurances as to the safety of their data; most of them would still entrust their data to FB sooner than to some random guy or weird group of hacktivists. And if you give those assurances, keep in mind that they will not understand anything about encryption schemes.
The GUI part is relatively easy to address with a lot of hard work. The trust part is a lot harder... until you do convince enough people to come over and invite their friends in turn.
There's plenty of reasons I can think of why I'd prefer image recognition on my phone rather than the cloud. Privacy, for one. If you let FB tag your photos with the names of the people in it (after teaching it those names), what do you think happens to that data? You might not even want to share the photo or video stream with anyone... Another reason is that we still do not live in a world with ubiquitous and cheap mobile data. Travel abroad, and you'll find out quickly why cloud-based services like Waze aren't always a viable option.
Looking at stuff and trying to apply it to the world isn't that obvious.
I remember a story my dad told about when he got to play with one of the first microprocessors: a (relatively) big, fragile and expensive piece of kit. The question most people would ask about this new technology is: "What can we use this for?". And most of them would try and answer that in terms of the situation they are presented with: i.e. they come up with applications for that processor that take its properties (big, fragile and expensive) into consideration. When my dad and his friend speculated about these processors being used in cars and washing machines, their professor famously told them "that'll never happen". It's one of those "I foresee a world market of perhaps 5 computers" remarks; the result of thinking in the context at hand.
A common trick of innovators is to try to think creatively, think outside the box by "moving the box", by thinking about what's in front of them in a new context. The best way of doing that is to ask the right questions, often ones that start with "why" or "what if". In case of the processor, good questions to ask would have been "Why can't we combine the processor and peripheral circuits into a single chip?", or simply "What if this could be had for $0.50?". Another common creative question "What if everybody had one of these?".
Back then, people generally wrote "his", "he" etc when writing about people, male and female, in general. They did not need to qualify every single reference to a person with (m/f), or write his/her instead of his, the way we do these days, verbally bending over backwards to avoid the dreaded accusation of misogyny.
Give it time. Materials and printers are improving as is the design of printed guns. In a few years I expect to see a practical, single use printed revolver (6 shots), firing.22 rounds. Practical meaning that the gun will be fairly reliable if handled carefully, that the gun is safe to use, that it can be printed on the kind of hardware accessible to hobbyists, and can be assembled and finished by pretty much anyone. The last part is the most significant: it's possible to make better zip guns from pipe, wood and common parts, but they still require some skills to assemble. 3d printing will give anyone easy access to a gun.
Of course to actually use it you'll still need to get your hands on some ammo, which is the tricky part in countries with strict gun control.
A guy has a few beers and hits a pedestrian, and the police call it the results of DUI, yet sober people hit pedestrians all the time. Low levels of alcohol do not increase your chances much of causing an accident; they do more to decrease your chances of avoiding one, i.e. reacting adequately to an unusual situation. Not that I'm advocating drinking and driving here, but saying that even 1 drink is bad is silly. Our bureau for traffic safety stated (against popular political opinion, surprisingly) that lowering the current limit of 0.05 BAC (2 drinks or so) would do very little to directly reduce the accident rates. A lower legal limit may help in an indirect way, by emphasizing the negative effects of alcohol on driving abilities, and the idea that it's easier to say no to the first drink than it is to the third. (Which is why the legal limit for young drivers was in fact lowered to 0.02).
Oddly, Magic Mushrooms are legal in Japan...but for "appreciation purposes" only. So you can buy them but you're only supposed to look at them, I suppose.
Similar laws exist in much of Europe. By the way, why do you call this case a false positive? The law exists explicitly to address cases like this one. So that politicians can appear to be tough on pedophiles as you pointed out. They'd turn it into a thoughtcrime if they could look inside our heads, too.
The phone may be powerful enough but you need an OS to match. In that sense, MS perhaps had the right idea to converge their mobile and desktop OS, even if they did it in a horrible way. At some point we'll see devices that work in 2 modes: a non-multitasking one (or with limited multitasking), geared towards small screens and touch input when running on the portable device, and a multitasking mode geared towards large screens and separate input devices, for when the phone is docked on the desktop. Merely adding a keyboard and mouse to an iPhone / iPad is going to be crap.
And thanks to better processors, a little proliferation doesn't matter that much to consumers either. Modern GPS chips already support both GPS and Glonass, and will support Galileo as well when that goes up.
That's what is being taught in business school. Actually, it's a few things. "It's bad to have your company depending on a single person", which is true. "Standardizing jobs / positions makes it easier to shift people around, making you less dependent on any one of them, and makes recruitment and organizing the work easier if you do this in line with the rest of your industry", which is also true to a degree. Never mind the many negative effects of standardizing jobs; the message to take away from this is not that people are drop in replaceable parts. If you did all this correctly, it'll be easier to replace a leaver, but it doesn't mean that replacing one person doesn't come at a high cost, and doesn't mean that adding or replacing many people at once is still extremely hard to do without messing up the works.
Sadly I see my share of managers who do get the idea that people can be swapped in and out at no cost. Needless to say their teams are not the high performers.
The declaration is issued to you, not directly to your employer. If they give a negative recommendation, there are procedures for appeal and they will have to give a valid reason there, i.e. an actual criminal record that is relevant to the job or permit you are after. So no, they cannot blacklist you for no reason.
I've wondered about that: to what extent should a criminal past continue to haunt you, or in other words: should prospective employers (or even the public) have the right to look into your background? If an employer happens to know that you did something wrong in the past, I think they ought to be free to not hire you, but that's not the same as making such information freely available to employers.
Here in the Netherlands, employers can't directly check your criminal records (they are not even allowed to ask in job interviews), but they can request that you submit a so-called "statement of conduct" (in some professions like child care, having such a statement is mandatory by law). Such statements are issued by the police on request, and the nice thing about them is that it doesn't detail your criminal past, but instead answers a specific question about the job or license you are applying for: "does anything in this person's record indicate that they shouldn't get a job in a day care center / get a gun license / hold a job with a lot of financial responsibilities?" So a child molester is not barred from a job as CFO, an embezzler can still get a gun license, and a burglar can work in day care, because the statement of conduct in each of these cases will come back as "no objection". To me this seems like a much more reasonable balance between the rights of employers wanting to know whom they are dealing with, and those of criminals who have served their time.
Even better of course would be for the US to drop the stupid "war on drugs". Interestingly, it looks like the USA is now leading on legalizing soft drugs, whereas the Netherlands (known for its liberal attitude towards drugs) is actually cracking down. (remember: soft drugs were never legal here, merely tolerated).
Piketty did little to advance the debate on income equality; that debate was already alive and well before he published his book. The only thing it did was to supply some intellectual ammunition to those in favour of greater equality, but there are very few (if any) new arguments brought forth. I read his book and I agree with some of the ideas within, but as a whole this book is vastly overrated.
I've mostly backed stuff that looked like it would not get created by regular companies. Most of this was in the area of Home Automation; a niche market, which means that even for great products the economics may simply not work out. Start-ups as well as existing companies can take some of the gamble out of that equation through crowdsourcing. I've backed 7 projects thus far:
3 delivered more or less on time
1 is on track for timely delivery
1 ran into technical and organisational issues, but they've turned those around and it looks like they will deliver the product after all, if a bit late. Their campaign was overfunded so they didn't run out of cash.
1 underestimated organisational difficulties (such as obtaining product certification in different regions) and ran out of money. A good many backers did receive their goods and they still think they can fulfil all pledges, but I'm not holding my breath.
1 I've given up on.
Not too bad a track record. Of course it's easy enough to let others fund these kickstarter projects and let them take the risk, but where's the fun in that? As long as you understand the risk, I don't see why one shouldn't fund these projects that might otherwise not see the light of day.
Those fundamentals are important, sure, and the ability to code in itself may not be that important later in life (unless you want to work with code for a living). But coding teaches and trains some important skills: troubleshooting, problem solving, analytical thinking. Those are very useful skills in jobs that require any amount of thought, and I can't think of many other activities that train these as well as coding does. One question: can we teach a meaningful percentage of all kids to code at a level where these skills actually come into play? I'm not enough to a pedagogue to answer that.
This is a good example of why an energy strategy needs to include a look at the economic model. I doubt Germany negotiated very hard: as it is, Norway (like the Netherlands) imports surplus wind and solar power from Germany for next to nothing, in some cases they can even use it to run pumps and top up their hydro reservoirs. They then sell back hydro power during peak hours at a premium. They have similar issues with private solar installations: utilities are forced to buy surplus private solar power at consumer prices, usually at a time when demand for power is very low. Scale up far enough, and it'll break them economically.
Well, as long as you stay unmarried your chances at getting a divorce are zero, so don't do it!
Seriously, this is just statistics, correlation without causation most likely. I am sure they can find similar correlations for unmarried couples: 10% more chance of a breakup if your first pet was a cat instead of a dog, that sort of thing.
The Russians had their Space Shuttle as well, the Buran. But they applied the same principles and approach to engineering to it; apparently it was a much simpler and better integrated design than the extremely complex Space Shuttle. The thing only flew once, sadly, so it's hard to say how they would have compared in reliability and performance.
They made the lead engineer who came up with that idea take the first flight
Guess someone learned their lesson about not opening their big mouth... On the other hand, being crammed upside down into a tiny capsule atop a pile of combustible fuel contained by experimental Soviet equipment might still be worth it for a once in a lifetime chance at going to space.
Perhaps the first Mars One flight could have bears and wolves on board. These would be released (in special space suits) just prior to the human settlers, who will then have to battle these animals for food and survival. Mars One is just a reality show after all, and this would make for some great* television.
I doubt that Mars One colonists will have to deal much with anything, by the way. My guess is that the people behind the venture have no plans to actually launch a single vehicle, but have a whole range of reality shows planned for "selecting" the "astronauts". They're probably just waiting for a network to pick them up, or for Endemol to buy the concept.
The iPhone was a game changer in the market. You are right in that it wasn't a radical new design and more the result of a series of small improvements coupled with a drive for quality. Even so, all those improvements added up to the first smart phone that was actually easy to use. Back then, if you saw someone take out a smart phone at the bus stop, fiddle with it for a minute and then put it back, you could be sure it was an iPhone. Doing small tasks quickly simply wasn't practical on the other smart phones out there at the time.
I'm not sure to what extent Tesla innovated to create the cars they have, but certainly they made the first EV that people actually wanted to have for reasons other than it being an EV or hybrid. It was also one of the first mass market EVs that doesn't look like utter crap (the Honda Civic hybrid being the other one). Interestingly, some analysts suggested that Tesla should stick to supplying batteries and drive trains for other car makers... after having stood the EV market on its head. I for one hope that they'll continue to make cars, but the real test (and the tipping point) will be the moment they create a family EV in a mid-range price class.
It's Top Gear doing the misdirections and deceptions. They fudged the tests in order to make fun of the Tesla, and when Musk called them out on it and sued them for libel and defamation, Top Gear's defence was that they are "an entertainment program, not to be taken seriously". And that's exactly what it is.
I'm sure the man has an ego the size of Jupiter and a temper to match, but at least he has some reason to have those. He's getting things done in several difficult industries. The comparison to Apple and Jobs is apt in more ways that one: like Apple's flagship product, the Tesla has caught the attention of many, and every little flaw is put under a magnifying glass and blown out of proportion.
Slashdot Mirror
Diaspora needed more than a bit of polish, and that may have contributed to its lack of uptake. If you want to convince people to switch from FB to your network, you better have an amazing user experience. For the inexperienced user who isn't interested in setting up a server themselves, it needs to have the same ease of use as a centralized social network. And with those users now at least somewhat aware of privacy-related issues, you had better be able to offer them some assurances as to the safety of their data; most of them would still entrust their data to FB sooner than to some random guy or weird group of hacktivists. And if you give those assurances, keep in mind that they will not understand anything about encryption schemes.
The GUI part is relatively easy to address with a lot of hard work. The trust part is a lot harder... until you do convince enough people to come over and invite their friends in turn.
There's plenty of reasons I can think of why I'd prefer image recognition on my phone rather than the cloud. Privacy, for one. If you let FB tag your photos with the names of the people in it (after teaching it those names), what do you think happens to that data? You might not even want to share the photo or video stream with anyone... Another reason is that we still do not live in a world with ubiquitous and cheap mobile data. Travel abroad, and you'll find out quickly why cloud-based services like Waze aren't always a viable option.
Looking at stuff and trying to apply it to the world isn't that obvious.
I remember a story my dad told about when he got to play with one of the first microprocessors: a (relatively) big, fragile and expensive piece of kit. The question most people would ask about this new technology is: "What can we use this for?". And most of them would try and answer that in terms of the situation they are presented with: i.e. they come up with applications for that processor that take its properties (big, fragile and expensive) into consideration. When my dad and his friend speculated about these processors being used in cars and washing machines, their professor famously told them "that'll never happen". It's one of those "I foresee a world market of perhaps 5 computers" remarks; the result of thinking in the context at hand.
A common trick of innovators is to try to think creatively, think outside the box by "moving the box", by thinking about what's in front of them in a new context. The best way of doing that is to ask the right questions, often ones that start with "why" or "what if". In case of the processor, good questions to ask would have been "Why can't we combine the processor and peripheral circuits into a single chip?", or simply "What if this could be had for $0.50?". Another common creative question "What if everybody had one of these?".
Back then, people generally wrote "his", "he" etc when writing about people, male and female, in general. They did not need to qualify every single reference to a person with (m/f), or write his/her instead of his, the way we do these days, verbally bending over backwards to avoid the dreaded accusation of misogyny.
Give it time. Materials and printers are improving as is the design of printed guns. In a few years I expect to see a practical, single use printed revolver (6 shots), firing .22 rounds. Practical meaning that the gun will be fairly reliable if handled carefully, that the gun is safe to use, that it can be printed on the kind of hardware accessible to hobbyists, and can be assembled and finished by pretty much anyone. The last part is the most significant: it's possible to make better zip guns from pipe, wood and common parts, but they still require some skills to assemble. 3d printing will give anyone easy access to a gun.
Of course to actually use it you'll still need to get your hands on some ammo, which is the tricky part in countries with strict gun control.
A guy has a few beers and hits a pedestrian, and the police call it the results of DUI, yet sober people hit pedestrians all the time. Low levels of alcohol do not increase your chances much of causing an accident; they do more to decrease your chances of avoiding one, i.e. reacting adequately to an unusual situation. Not that I'm advocating drinking and driving here, but saying that even 1 drink is bad is silly. Our bureau for traffic safety stated (against popular political opinion, surprisingly) that lowering the current limit of 0.05 BAC (2 drinks or so) would do very little to directly reduce the accident rates. A lower legal limit may help in an indirect way, by emphasizing the negative effects of alcohol on driving abilities, and the idea that it's easier to say no to the first drink than it is to the third. (Which is why the legal limit for young drivers was in fact lowered to 0.02).
Oddly, Magic Mushrooms are legal in Japan...but for "appreciation purposes" only. So you can buy them but you're only supposed to look at them, I suppose.
Similar laws exist in much of Europe. By the way, why do you call this case a false positive? The law exists explicitly to address cases like this one. So that politicians can appear to be tough on pedophiles as you pointed out. They'd turn it into a thoughtcrime if they could look inside our heads, too.
Indeed. When were online ads ever "fun and informative?"
The phone may be powerful enough but you need an OS to match. In that sense, MS perhaps had the right idea to converge their mobile and desktop OS, even if they did it in a horrible way. At some point we'll see devices that work in 2 modes: a non-multitasking one (or with limited multitasking), geared towards small screens and touch input when running on the portable device, and a multitasking mode geared towards large screens and separate input devices, for when the phone is docked on the desktop. Merely adding a keyboard and mouse to an iPhone / iPad is going to be crap.
And thanks to better processors, a little proliferation doesn't matter that much to consumers either. Modern GPS chips already support both GPS and Glonass, and will support Galileo as well when that goes up.
That's what is being taught in business school. Actually, it's a few things. "It's bad to have your company depending on a single person", which is true. "Standardizing jobs / positions makes it easier to shift people around, making you less dependent on any one of them, and makes recruitment and organizing the work easier if you do this in line with the rest of your industry", which is also true to a degree. Never mind the many negative effects of standardizing jobs; the message to take away from this is not that people are drop in replaceable parts. If you did all this correctly, it'll be easier to replace a leaver, but it doesn't mean that replacing one person doesn't come at a high cost, and doesn't mean that adding or replacing many people at once is still extremely hard to do without messing up the works.
Sadly I see my share of managers who do get the idea that people can be swapped in and out at no cost. Needless to say their teams are not the high performers.
The declaration is issued to you, not directly to your employer. If they give a negative recommendation, there are procedures for appeal and they will have to give a valid reason there, i.e. an actual criminal record that is relevant to the job or permit you are after. So no, they cannot blacklist you for no reason.
I've wondered about that: to what extent should a criminal past continue to haunt you, or in other words: should prospective employers (or even the public) have the right to look into your background? If an employer happens to know that you did something wrong in the past, I think they ought to be free to not hire you, but that's not the same as making such information freely available to employers.
Here in the Netherlands, employers can't directly check your criminal records (they are not even allowed to ask in job interviews), but they can request that you submit a so-called "statement of conduct" (in some professions like child care, having such a statement is mandatory by law). Such statements are issued by the police on request, and the nice thing about them is that it doesn't detail your criminal past, but instead answers a specific question about the job or license you are applying for: "does anything in this person's record indicate that they shouldn't get a job in a day care center / get a gun license / hold a job with a lot of financial responsibilities?" So a child molester is not barred from a job as CFO, an embezzler can still get a gun license, and a burglar can work in day care, because the statement of conduct in each of these cases will come back as "no objection". To me this seems like a much more reasonable balance between the rights of employers wanting to know whom they are dealing with, and those of criminals who have served their time.
Even better of course would be for the US to drop the stupid "war on drugs". Interestingly, it looks like the USA is now leading on legalizing soft drugs, whereas the Netherlands (known for its liberal attitude towards drugs) is actually cracking down. (remember: soft drugs were never legal here, merely tolerated).
Piketty did little to advance the debate on income equality; that debate was already alive and well before he published his book. The only thing it did was to supply some intellectual ammunition to those in favour of greater equality, but there are very few (if any) new arguments brought forth. I read his book and I agree with some of the ideas within, but as a whole this book is vastly overrated.
I've mostly backed stuff that looked like it would not get created by regular companies. Most of this was in the area of Home Automation; a niche market, which means that even for great products the economics may simply not work out. Start-ups as well as existing companies can take some of the gamble out of that equation through crowdsourcing. I've backed 7 projects thus far:
3 delivered more or less on time
1 is on track for timely delivery
1 ran into technical and organisational issues, but they've turned those around and it looks like they will deliver the product after all, if a bit late. Their campaign was overfunded so they didn't run out of cash.
1 underestimated organisational difficulties (such as obtaining product certification in different regions) and ran out of money. A good many backers did receive their goods and they still think they can fulfil all pledges, but I'm not holding my breath.
1 I've given up on.
Not too bad a track record. Of course it's easy enough to let others fund these kickstarter projects and let them take the risk, but where's the fun in that? As long as you understand the risk, I don't see why one shouldn't fund these projects that might otherwise not see the light of day.
Those fundamentals are important, sure, and the ability to code in itself may not be that important later in life (unless you want to work with code for a living). But coding teaches and trains some important skills: troubleshooting, problem solving, analytical thinking. Those are very useful skills in jobs that require any amount of thought, and I can't think of many other activities that train these as well as coding does. One question: can we teach a meaningful percentage of all kids to code at a level where these skills actually come into play? I'm not enough to a pedagogue to answer that.
Maybe Lockheed partnered with Rossi
I am rather saddened that "TLDR" is a thing, and a big one these days...
This is a good example of why an energy strategy needs to include a look at the economic model. I doubt Germany negotiated very hard: as it is, Norway (like the Netherlands) imports surplus wind and solar power from Germany for next to nothing, in some cases they can even use it to run pumps and top up their hydro reservoirs. They then sell back hydro power during peak hours at a premium. They have similar issues with private solar installations: utilities are forced to buy surplus private solar power at consumer prices, usually at a time when demand for power is very low. Scale up far enough, and it'll break them economically.
Well, as long as you stay unmarried your chances at getting a divorce are zero, so don't do it!
Seriously, this is just statistics, correlation without causation most likely. I am sure they can find similar correlations for unmarried couples: 10% more chance of a breakup if your first pet was a cat instead of a dog, that sort of thing.
The Russians had their Space Shuttle as well, the Buran. But they applied the same principles and approach to engineering to it; apparently it was a much simpler and better integrated design than the extremely complex Space Shuttle. The thing only flew once, sadly, so it's hard to say how they would have compared in reliability and performance.
They made the lead engineer who came up with that idea take the first flight
Guess someone learned their lesson about not opening their big mouth... On the other hand, being crammed upside down into a tiny capsule atop a pile of combustible fuel contained by experimental Soviet equipment might still be worth it for a once in a lifetime chance at going to space.
Perhaps the first Mars One flight could have bears and wolves on board. These would be released (in special space suits) just prior to the human settlers, who will then have to battle these animals for food and survival. Mars One is just a reality show after all, and this would make for some great* television.
I doubt that Mars One colonists will have to deal much with anything, by the way. My guess is that the people behind the venture have no plans to actually launch a single vehicle, but have a whole range of reality shows planned for "selecting" the "astronauts". They're probably just waiting for a network to pick them up, or for Endemol to buy the concept.
*) for some definitions of "great"
The iPhone was a game changer in the market. You are right in that it wasn't a radical new design and more the result of a series of small improvements coupled with a drive for quality. Even so, all those improvements added up to the first smart phone that was actually easy to use. Back then, if you saw someone take out a smart phone at the bus stop, fiddle with it for a minute and then put it back, you could be sure it was an iPhone. Doing small tasks quickly simply wasn't practical on the other smart phones out there at the time.
I'm not sure to what extent Tesla innovated to create the cars they have, but certainly they made the first EV that people actually wanted to have for reasons other than it being an EV or hybrid. It was also one of the first mass market EVs that doesn't look like utter crap (the Honda Civic hybrid being the other one). Interestingly, some analysts suggested that Tesla should stick to supplying batteries and drive trains for other car makers... after having stood the EV market on its head. I for one hope that they'll continue to make cars, but the real test (and the tipping point) will be the moment they create a family EV in a mid-range price class.
It's Top Gear doing the misdirections and deceptions. They fudged the tests in order to make fun of the Tesla, and when Musk called them out on it and sued them for libel and defamation, Top Gear's defence was that they are "an entertainment program, not to be taken seriously". And that's exactly what it is.
I'm sure the man has an ego the size of Jupiter and a temper to match, but at least he has some reason to have those. He's getting things done in several difficult industries. The comparison to Apple and Jobs is apt in more ways that one: like Apple's flagship product, the Tesla has caught the attention of many, and every little flaw is put under a magnifying glass and blown out of proportion.