People living in a country with strict gun control laws will also benefit, if they desire a gun for home defense. Not legal (in those countries), but morally that hardly counts as mischief.
That was never true in countries with strict gun control laws. Of course, in those countries those first graders can print guns but will still have a hard time obtaining the ammo for them.
Speaking of gun control: in my country there's a ban on anything that looks like a real gun (and a ban on actual guns as well). So you can have things like Airsoft guns as long as they are made to look like toys, having bright colors etc. But now we'll have actual guns that look like toys...
Logic would say you're right. Religion however... given the fact that it is invented and produced in the West, it will probably be declared "haram" by Muslims (like a Syrian rebel Sharia court outlawed croissants, as they supposedly celebrate victory over invading Muslims). But I'm rather curious about the Jewish verdict.
Ask your family member if they would like their neighbours to see every single thing they read and write on the Internet. If they don't like that, then why would they allow their government to see everything, knowing that a government (and its individual civil servants) can do far more damage, intentionally or by accident, than any neighbour could with that information.
Technical solutions can to some degree mitigate social and political problems. Using encryption isn't going to solve the issue of governmental and commercial parties snooping and sharing stuff that we the people do not want them to access, nor will it solve the deeper issue of these organisations thinking that they have a right to access that data to begin with, but encryption can reduce the amount of useful data they can actually access.
In this case, the solution fails for technical / practical reasons. Corporations do not use "the cloud" just for storage, but for processing of data as well, which means it'll have to exist in plaintext on the cloud server at some point. If you want your data to be secure, you should certainly encrypt it, but you aso should stop using the cloud for anything but storage of already encrypted data.
Remember: "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety". You're giving up liberty, not even for security, but for a one-off win against a bunch of pedofilic perverts. One-off, because don't think for a second that this will significantly hinder the distribution of kiddie porn, or more importantly, the pornographers (who I agree deserve everything they get). And whenever a government rep mentions "for the children", it's your liberty you should worry about, not your kids.
Seriously, you think this is about pedophiles? Whenever some politician or law enforcement officer tells you he's after kiddie porn, he is really saying "I can and will do whatever the hell I want to you, your family and your dog, because I have a great excuse to do so". It's also a great way to attack and discredit political opponents or undesirables, as has happened a few times here in Europe: "Well, we couldn't find any offence to pin on him after we arrested him, except for the kiddie porn we found on his computer".
Our rights and freedoms are getting reamed so badly in the name of fighting child pornography, that I sometimes think that legalizing transmission and posession of kiddie porn would be the lesser evil. Think about that for a moment.
Good point, but the problem is that very few people see the width of that spectrum. Sucks if you're a head chef but your boss can't really see how you're different from the burger flipper, except that you seem to flip more or bigger burgers.
That's why I call bollocks on TFA. VCs favour developer-founders now? It might be a good move but then again, it might not, and next month they'll favour people with neatly trimmed hair, just like last month they were favouring people with business experience. As for programmers, their power has declined. A long time ago (in tech-land terms), programming was a respected profession, not just amongst peers but also by the general public, and by those programmers' employers. That had already ended when I got into the game, but even back then, programmers did have a significant amount of influence on the design and parameters of the program. As a programmer I got to join meetings on product and service design with the CTO and marketing manager of a large mobile telco. Small projects were generally left to be managed by team leads who were also programmers. And project managers of larger projects often deferred to his developers.
Today, most larger corporations keep their programmers in the basement. The aspect of the job that involved contact with clients, management and business representatives is now handled by sales reps, project managers and business analysts. Most of whom have a very weak grasp of technology, I might add. The chasm between tech and business hasn't widened, but the bridges have gone and we're reduced to flinging memos across the gap. On top of that, now we're seeing heavy compartimentalisation of the work, by defining standards and procedures that attempt to turn creativity and flexibility into predictable monkey work. Now, standards and procedures aren't necessarily bad, and the field of software development can do with some professionalisation, but what's being introduced now moves us in the wrong direction. Even the master coders' jobs are being reduced to burger flipping, or at least managers are trying to.
Unfortunately I could not find the list of items they bought / printed so I've no idea how they came up with that figure.
One thing that 3d printers offer is a much wider variety of designs for printed household items; I suspect that "designer" items will be much cheaper to print than to order, as the margin on those things is rather high. Hard to put a price on that, though.
I see a lot of potential value in replacement parts. I lost a little plastic retaining thingy inside my dishwasher, my option was to replace the entire soap tray unit (around $40), or print a replacement retainer (<$1). For a lot of household items replacement parts are not even available, so the savings go up to the replacement value of the entire item. Then again, I do not have that much breakage in my home over the course of a year, so it's still more attractive to order parts from the manufacturer or from a fablab than to buy my own 3d printer.
Cute, but wrong. The world is full of persistent, determined failures. If you lack skills and talent, you will not succeed by persisting. If you lack the skills of a carpenter and the talent of an architect, you can "press" on all you want but it's unlikely that you'll build a house that stays up. You might come up with some sort of servicable shelter, but that's hardly contributing towards "solving the problems of the human race".
Persistence is important of course; without persistence you are unlikely to develop your skills and talents. Solving hard problems takes persistence. But there is a difference between persisting in attacking a hard problem and not giving up after a failure or three, and persisting in trying and trying again when you simply lack the skills for the job. As GP points out, persistence can make up for some lack of skill, but it will not bring you on the same level as a highly skilled person.
Open source is not trustworthy by default. If you download and use a somewhat obscure bit of FOSS, do you really check the code yourself for bad behaviour, or do you assume that others have? That's a dangerous assumption. In contrast, Apple and Google add a layer of trust to closed software. They're saying "If you trust us, then you can trust that the apps you download do not mess around with private APIs and therefore cannot steal your contact list or other private data without your consent.". They take care of checking code for you (on a basic level). I don't trust Apple in every matter, but I do trust that they perform decent checks on the software in the App store, and I trust their OS enough to not worry about apps bypassing privacy controls using trivial exploits.
That works for developers as well: by passing Apple's QA, I gain a modicum of trust with potential customers while keeping the source code to myself. The App store model allows honest small time developers to make some money off their work.
I'd be interested to see how much Spotify gets out of all this on average. Are they greedy or are they not charging us enough? If a popular artist's work gets, say, half its plays through Spotify, how much would Spotify have to charge us to provide a decent income to the artist?
By the way, that graph seems to be comparing CDs against single songs, if I'm reading it right. Also, the retail royalty figure is deceptive, as this is rarely an $x per CD deal. Usually your get a certain % in gross revenue after which the label deducts your share of the costs (production / promotion). For starting bands the scummier labels will charge a lot, so even after a debut album that sells nicely the band will not do all that well, or even end up owing the label. Hollywood accounting at its finest.
Capturing everything observable in orderly lists (based on the mechanics of the underlying model) is science. Calling planets and moons "objects" is akin to discovering more and more kinds of atoms and particles and deciding to call everything just "stuff" because it doesn't fit your model anymore. The right answer is to rethink the definitions and perhaps alter the model. The distinction between planets and moons is still a useful one even if we found a few cases where we're not sure how we should classify them.
Solution: "diamond" lanes for robo-drivers only. If robots have a separate lane, you could have them go 170km/h and drive bumper to bumper: enough of a benefit to convince notorious speeders to go robo.
The real benefit of robo drivers however is for people who don't need a car every day, but really have no viable alternatives on days that they do need one. In the near future, rentals might be a viable option even for people living in the sticks. Dial up the rental company and place your order, and 1 hour later the rental vehicle pulls up in front of your house. Done with the car? Send it off to return to the lot by itself.
Politicians using a high profile incident to further their own agenda? Well well... color me thoroughly unsurprised. And that's all this is. The USA may have been caught snooping on our stuff, but clearly the solution is not to give control from one peeping Tom nation to other nations that will not only snoop but lock down and censor as well. And I firmly include the proposed UN body in that category; the danger is that every nation with a burr up its arse about something (IP infringement, religious sensitivities, cultural encroachment) will not only find a willing ear at the UN as they always do, but will also have the means to enforce their own petty rules in other countries. The Internet under UN control will become a politically correct, culturally sanitized My Little Pony land.
Being polite = not being a dick
Demanding politeness from others = being a politically correct dick
Sharp uses words like "not acceptable" and "keep it professional"; these are not requests but demands addressed at an established community with a long history. Very unprofessional of her.
Arafat got the peace prize jointly with Peres and Rabin, specifically for entering into negotiations for peace (at Oslo IIRC) despite severe opposition from their own constituents. For each of them, maintaining a warlike stance would have been the easier political choice. In that light, the Prize was actually awarded to someone worthy for a change, even if very little came of it in the end.
I suppose you've also heard about plague, AIDS and the measles, but if you've never been affected by them, then it must be a lot of made up rubbish, right?
1) Smaller solar flares have affected the grid before. It's not unthinkable that a big one as mentioned in TFA can break a lot more stuff. Stuff that isn't exactly off the shelf in quantity. Might be a rare event, but if we can plan against it, maybe we should? Beats sitting in the dark for weeks.
2) Speaking of Y2K... the reason nothing happened is because companies took action. I've been involved in Y2K work at the time, and while a lot of it was bullshit ("Make sure the coffee machines are Y2K-ready or we're doooooomed"), the power plant and telco I worked for would have been severly affected by Y2K if nothing had been done. Some of that was simply being prepared for any disaster; their systems had never been offline completely (only parts of it), and there was no procedure for a cold restart.
In other words, when doom is called, consultants scramble to grab a piece of the hyped pie, companies take rational stock of their own situation and apply fixes as needed, and the general public scoffs as the event passes as another non-event, because of preparation and planning
Where's my mod points when I need them? You're right: Bose is a good compromise for people who do not want big speakers but still get decent sound. And yes, it's a decent system for people who are not too discerning about sound quality, i.e. most of us. These days you can do better for your money, but for a good while Bose was the only name in town for those looking for small speakers with decent sound.
Personally, I'm still looking for speakers that excel at reproducing music (modern as well as classical) but also do a good job in a home theater setup. I settled on a pair of Acoustic Research Status S-50 floor standers, good but still a bit of a compromise. Hearing good things about the LinkWitz Orion but I still have to find a pair I can listen to, to decide whether all that extra cabling and equipment is worth the effort.
Slashdot Mirror
People living in a country with strict gun control laws will also benefit, if they desire a gun for home defense. Not legal (in those countries), but morally that hardly counts as mischief.
That was never true in countries with strict gun control laws. Of course, in those countries those first graders can print guns but will still have a hard time obtaining the ammo for them.
Speaking of gun control: in my country there's a ban on anything that looks like a real gun (and a ban on actual guns as well). So you can have things like Airsoft guns as long as they are made to look like toys, having bright colors etc. But now we'll have actual guns that look like toys...
Like this?
Logic would say you're right. Religion however... given the fact that it is invented and produced in the West, it will probably be declared "haram" by Muslims (like a Syrian rebel Sharia court outlawed croissants, as they supposedly celebrate victory over invading Muslims). But I'm rather curious about the Jewish verdict.
Ask your family member if they would like their neighbours to see every single thing they read and write on the Internet. If they don't like that, then why would they allow their government to see everything, knowing that a government (and its individual civil servants) can do far more damage, intentionally or by accident, than any neighbour could with that information.
Technical solutions can to some degree mitigate social and political problems. Using encryption isn't going to solve the issue of governmental and commercial parties snooping and sharing stuff that we the people do not want them to access, nor will it solve the deeper issue of these organisations thinking that they have a right to access that data to begin with, but encryption can reduce the amount of useful data they can actually access.
In this case, the solution fails for technical / practical reasons. Corporations do not use "the cloud" just for storage, but for processing of data as well, which means it'll have to exist in plaintext on the cloud server at some point. If you want your data to be secure, you should certainly encrypt it, but you aso should stop using the cloud for anything but storage of already encrypted data.
Remember: "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety". You're giving up liberty, not even for security, but for a one-off win against a bunch of pedofilic perverts. One-off, because don't think for a second that this will significantly hinder the distribution of kiddie porn, or more importantly, the pornographers (who I agree deserve everything they get). And whenever a government rep mentions "for the children", it's your liberty you should worry about, not your kids.
Seriously, you think this is about pedophiles? Whenever some politician or law enforcement officer tells you he's after kiddie porn, he is really saying "I can and will do whatever the hell I want to you, your family and your dog, because I have a great excuse to do so". It's also a great way to attack and discredit political opponents or undesirables, as has happened a few times here in Europe: "Well, we couldn't find any offence to pin on him after we arrested him, except for the kiddie porn we found on his computer".
Our rights and freedoms are getting reamed so badly in the name of fighting child pornography, that I sometimes think that legalizing transmission and posession of kiddie porn would be the lesser evil. Think about that for a moment.
Good point, but the problem is that very few people see the width of that spectrum. Sucks if you're a head chef but your boss can't really see how you're different from the burger flipper, except that you seem to flip more or bigger burgers.
That's why I call bollocks on TFA. VCs favour developer-founders now? It might be a good move but then again, it might not, and next month they'll favour people with neatly trimmed hair, just like last month they were favouring people with business experience. As for programmers, their power has declined. A long time ago (in tech-land terms), programming was a respected profession, not just amongst peers but also by the general public, and by those programmers' employers. That had already ended when I got into the game, but even back then, programmers did have a significant amount of influence on the design and parameters of the program. As a programmer I got to join meetings on product and service design with the CTO and marketing manager of a large mobile telco. Small projects were generally left to be managed by team leads who were also programmers. And project managers of larger projects often deferred to his developers.
Today, most larger corporations keep their programmers in the basement. The aspect of the job that involved contact with clients, management and business representatives is now handled by sales reps, project managers and business analysts. Most of whom have a very weak grasp of technology, I might add. The chasm between tech and business hasn't widened, but the bridges have gone and we're reduced to flinging memos across the gap. On top of that, now we're seeing heavy compartimentalisation of the work, by defining standards and procedures that attempt to turn creativity and flexibility into predictable monkey work. Now, standards and procedures aren't necessarily bad, and the field of software development can do with some professionalisation, but what's being introduced now moves us in the wrong direction. Even the master coders' jobs are being reduced to burger flipping, or at least managers are trying to.
political enemies that use an iPhone.
On Slashdot these often seem to be synonymous. (iPhone user here)
Wasn't the quote about invention rather than genius?
Unfortunately I could not find the list of items they bought / printed so I've no idea how they came up with that figure.
One thing that 3d printers offer is a much wider variety of designs for printed household items; I suspect that "designer" items will be much cheaper to print than to order, as the margin on those things is rather high. Hard to put a price on that, though.
I see a lot of potential value in replacement parts. I lost a little plastic retaining thingy inside my dishwasher, my option was to replace the entire soap tray unit (around $40), or print a replacement retainer (<$1). For a lot of household items replacement parts are not even available, so the savings go up to the replacement value of the entire item. Then again, I do not have that much breakage in my home over the course of a year, so it's still more attractive to order parts from the manufacturer or from a fablab than to buy my own 3d printer.
1) Print gun
2) Rob bank
3) Profit!
Cute, but wrong. The world is full of persistent, determined failures. If you lack skills and talent, you will not succeed by persisting. If you lack the skills of a carpenter and the talent of an architect, you can "press" on all you want but it's unlikely that you'll build a house that stays up. You might come up with some sort of servicable shelter, but that's hardly contributing towards "solving the problems of the human race".
Persistence is important of course; without persistence you are unlikely to develop your skills and talents. Solving hard problems takes persistence. But there is a difference between persisting in attacking a hard problem and not giving up after a failure or three, and persisting in trying and trying again when you simply lack the skills for the job. As GP points out, persistence can make up for some lack of skill, but it will not bring you on the same level as a highly skilled person.
Just being curious here: does Websense still block sites like the ACLU under all categories? They used to, about a decade ago.
Open source is not trustworthy by default. If you download and use a somewhat obscure bit of FOSS, do you really check the code yourself for bad behaviour, or do you assume that others have? That's a dangerous assumption. In contrast, Apple and Google add a layer of trust to closed software. They're saying "If you trust us, then you can trust that the apps you download do not mess around with private APIs and therefore cannot steal your contact list or other private data without your consent.". They take care of checking code for you (on a basic level). I don't trust Apple in every matter, but I do trust that they perform decent checks on the software in the App store, and I trust their OS enough to not worry about apps bypassing privacy controls using trivial exploits.
That works for developers as well: by passing Apple's QA, I gain a modicum of trust with potential customers while keeping the source code to myself. The App store model allows honest small time developers to make some money off their work.
That's not impressive but outrageous.
I'd be interested to see how much Spotify gets out of all this on average. Are they greedy or are they not charging us enough? If a popular artist's work gets, say, half its plays through Spotify, how much would Spotify have to charge us to provide a decent income to the artist?
By the way, that graph seems to be comparing CDs against single songs, if I'm reading it right. Also, the retail royalty figure is deceptive, as this is rarely an $x per CD deal. Usually your get a certain % in gross revenue after which the label deducts your share of the costs (production / promotion). For starting bands the scummier labels will charge a lot, so even after a debut album that sells nicely the band will not do all that well, or even end up owing the label. Hollywood accounting at its finest.
Capturing everything observable in orderly lists (based on the mechanics of the underlying model) is science. Calling planets and moons "objects" is akin to discovering more and more kinds of atoms and particles and deciding to call everything just "stuff" because it doesn't fit your model anymore. The right answer is to rethink the definitions and perhaps alter the model. The distinction between planets and moons is still a useful one even if we found a few cases where we're not sure how we should classify them.
A space station?
Solution: "diamond" lanes for robo-drivers only. If robots have a separate lane, you could have them go 170km/h and drive bumper to bumper: enough of a benefit to convince notorious speeders to go robo.
The real benefit of robo drivers however is for people who don't need a car every day, but really have no viable alternatives on days that they do need one. In the near future, rentals might be a viable option even for people living in the sticks. Dial up the rental company and place your order, and 1 hour later the rental vehicle pulls up in front of your house. Done with the car? Send it off to return to the lot by itself.
Politicians using a high profile incident to further their own agenda? Well well... color me thoroughly unsurprised. And that's all this is. The USA may have been caught snooping on our stuff, but clearly the solution is not to give control from one peeping Tom nation to other nations that will not only snoop but lock down and censor as well. And I firmly include the proposed UN body in that category; the danger is that every nation with a burr up its arse about something (IP infringement, religious sensitivities, cultural encroachment) will not only find a willing ear at the UN as they always do, but will also have the means to enforce their own petty rules in other countries. The Internet under UN control will become a politically correct, culturally sanitized My Little Pony land.
Being polite = not being a dick
Demanding politeness from others = being a politically correct dick
Sharp uses words like "not acceptable" and "keep it professional"; these are not requests but demands addressed at an established community with a long history. Very unprofessional of her.
Arafat got the peace prize jointly with Peres and Rabin, specifically for entering into negotiations for peace (at Oslo IIRC) despite severe opposition from their own constituents. For each of them, maintaining a warlike stance would have been the easier political choice. In that light, the Prize was actually awarded to someone worthy for a change, even if very little came of it in the end.
I suppose you've also heard about plague, AIDS and the measles, but if you've never been affected by them, then it must be a lot of made up rubbish, right?
1) Smaller solar flares have affected the grid before. It's not unthinkable that a big one as mentioned in TFA can break a lot more stuff. Stuff that isn't exactly off the shelf in quantity. Might be a rare event, but if we can plan against it, maybe we should? Beats sitting in the dark for weeks.
2) Speaking of Y2K... the reason nothing happened is because companies took action. I've been involved in Y2K work at the time, and while a lot of it was bullshit ("Make sure the coffee machines are Y2K-ready or we're doooooomed"), the power plant and telco I worked for would have been severly affected by Y2K if nothing had been done. Some of that was simply being prepared for any disaster; their systems had never been offline completely (only parts of it), and there was no procedure for a cold restart.
In other words, when doom is called, consultants scramble to grab a piece of the hyped pie, companies take rational stock of their own situation and apply fixes as needed, and the general public scoffs as the event passes as another non-event, because of preparation and planning
Where's my mod points when I need them? You're right: Bose is a good compromise for people who do not want big speakers but still get decent sound. And yes, it's a decent system for people who are not too discerning about sound quality, i.e. most of us. These days you can do better for your money, but for a good while Bose was the only name in town for those looking for small speakers with decent sound.
Personally, I'm still looking for speakers that excel at reproducing music (modern as well as classical) but also do a good job in a home theater setup. I settled on a pair of Acoustic Research Status S-50 floor standers, good but still a bit of a compromise. Hearing good things about the LinkWitz Orion but I still have to find a pair I can listen to, to decide whether all that extra cabling and equipment is worth the effort.