Why bother taking risks with proprietary readers and formats when I know my trusty hardcover -- short of disaster -- will be readable 75 years from now?
C'mon, is there really an e-book format that hasn't yet been cracked? I know it's cool to claim you'd have no problem paying for an e-book if the format was open, but that's really not a practical reason.
No one has been allowed to buy anyone. There was a published rumor that Microsoft might be taking an equity stake in AOL.
Then again, even if Microsoft did buy AOL entirely, I don't see the harm. AOL, while a large player, is nowhere near a monopoly, and won't give Microsoft any additional monopoly power.
Bloomberg speculates that this deal would profit both companies.
Gee, you don't say. Two companies are voluntarily entering into a deal. If the deal didn't "profit both companies" at least one of them would say no to the deal.
Sometimes, however, consumer demand changes in ways the entrepreneur either could not, or failed to, predict. This is especially true in a world where our central banks create huge business cycles.
And the ability to lay off workers just makes matters worse, as it turns a problem in one industry into a downward spiral which affects all industries.
During the boom phase of the cycle, way too much purchasing power is invested in the capital goods sector, and it must be slowly transferred back to the consumer goods sector.
Don't you think maybe the boom phase of the cycle would be evened out if a company was forced to look at the long run rather than just hire and fire for a quick profit?
What happens when government interferes with this adjustment process?
Let's start with what happens when the government doesn't interfere with the "adjustment process": a long, sustained depression.
Efficient service of consumer demand can not be obtained, because funds are tied up in a suboptimal structure of production.
You're assuming employers and employees can't come to an agreement on things, but I never meant to imply that. If an employee can find a new job and the employer wants to let go of her anyway, then everyone is happy and there isn't a problem.
Profits decrease, so it takes longer for businesses to acquire the capital they need to build an efficient structure of production. During this lengthened capital build-up process, entrepreneurs are less likely to replace businesses that go bankrupt with new businesses.
I would think new businesses would have an advantage over old ones, as they can hire the number of new workers that they need, rather than have to worry about paying for the current ones.
So long as society has enough savings, they will be fine. That is, if everyone has enough berries saved up to sustain their old level of consumption while they swith production methods, there are no problems.
Society today is so efficient that there would be plenty of food, shelter, etc. even if everyone in the world only worked 4 or 5 hours a week. We, as a society, do have enough savings, far far beyond what we need to keep everyone living at a quite comfortable level. There shouldn't be any unemployment. If there is, then our economic system has failed us.
In that case, reorganization is needed; some people must be moved back to the old method of production. What if this reorganization is not allowed to happen?
I'm not saying reorganization is not allowed to happen. But "you're fired, go reorganize" isn't the way it should happen.
Well, that is the inefficiency I am talking about. A certain level of consumption is desired, but there will not be enough berries to fulfill it. The only thing that can fix this is to allow the market to form itself into a structure of production that efficiently meets consumer demands.
I'm not saying we should abandon capitalism. The market is still there, and it'll still be able to reorganize. But instead of firing people first and then having them figure out the reorganization themselves, this would force companies to assist in the reorganization process.
Anyway, you act like it's a grossly foreign concept, but it's really not that different from what we have now, with unemployment compensation. If someone gets laid off, for no fault of his/her own, then the company has to pay the person (usually around 50%) while looking for a new job. In France they take what is arguably a more reasonable approach, and instead of applying a formula based on previous compensation they allow negotiation and ultimately adjudication by a judge if it comes to that, to determine what amount of severance pay is fair.
Heh, my girlfriend's parents just had DSL made available to them; they get it this week. And it's coming to my apartment on September 30th. About a mile south of here they've got Fios.
The 768K/128K Verizon DSL plan is only $15/month. Sure, it's not anywhere near as fast as it could be, but it's a lot faster than dialup (down, anyway), and it's always on.
Also, if you can find someone within line of sight who has DSL or Cable modem, you can roll your own point to point wireless network pretty easilly, even with plain old 802.11a/b/g.
Line of sight is pretty difficult if you don't live in the desert, and even then "pretty easily" is somewhat of an overstatment, especially if you want to do it legally.
Jobs are not resources that are "taken" or "sent" to other countries. Rather, jobs are created (and destroyed) by entrepreneurs--people who have acquired capital--capitalists, if you [will]. There is an infinite amount of work to be done, and thus an infinite number of potential jobs that could be created. One does not need to fear the loss of a job, because another one can easily be created...so long as entrepreneurs have the freedom to acquire capital and to use it.
I fully agree here.
How can business restructure itself when it can't even fire or lay off its employees?
How does the ability to lay off employees lead to less unemployment? I can't say I understand that one.
How can new businesses be started when people are so heavily taxed that they have trouble building up a pool of capital?
Charge more? Make less of a profit?
Socialists must learn that employers and employees have a common goal: to make the most productive use out of the scarce resources.
If you're truly a socialist, then this statement doesn't even make sense, because it presumes that employers and employees exist in the first place. Of course, you're probably referring to liberal capitalists here, not socialists. In that case, there's agreement that common goals exist. Then again, making *the most* productive use out of scarce resources isn't necessarily one of those goals. Most people don't care in 100% efficiency, if that means not having the safety of a stable income.
Stealing the employer's capital and taking away his freedoms will never help anyone.
When we were small and insignificant and had to hire the best people we could find, we had to train them and then hope they would work out. We wanted our people to share our goals of making a profit and a contribution. We in turn felt a responsibility to provide them with opportunity and job security to the best of our ability. Thus, we made an early and important decision: We did not want to be a "hire and fire"--a company that would seek large, short-term contracts, employ a great many people for the duration of the contract, and at its completion let those people go. This type of operation is often the quickest and most efficient way to get a big job accomplished. But Bill and I didn't want to operate that way. We wanted to be in business for the long haul, to have a company built around a stable and dedicated workforce.
That's a quote from The HP Way by David Packard, a book given to every single employee of Hewlett-Packard, at least it was when I joined in '98. I wonder if the current CEO even read it.
Since the merger it's like HP sucked all the Suck out of Compaq's sucky products and injected it into HP products.
And it's not like it wasn't foreseeable. It's the reason that the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the William R. Hewlett Revocable Trust voted against the merger. It's the reason I voted against the merger.
I doubt the workers would suffer, undoubtedly the French govt would end up holding the bag -- as they should, since it's their regs that are so onerous.
I think it's pretty twisted that we consider these regulations onerous. Why should workers be subject to the ups and downs of the company they work for? It wasn't that long ago even here in the US that lifetime employment was standard. In fact, even at HP this was pretty much the standard until the late 90s.
What is gained by shifting the risks of the business from the employers to the employees? Once this risk has been shifted, what's left to justify the profits being made by the shareholders?
I don't think it's onerous. It's different, sure, but it's arguably even more fair.
I don't think that was ever true at HP. It certainly wasn't true when I worked there in the late 90s. But then again, in the late 90s HP still hadn't ever laid an employee off. Contractors were hired to take care of the ebb and flow in the need for workers. When things turned down, the contractors were let go, and the employees were kept.
Then Carly came in, I quit for another job, and a few months later everyone in my NJ office were told they could move to Texas or take a severance package.
As a person who was a contractor at HP, I am glad to see these HP employee's get laid off. Never in my life have I dealt with such a group of arrogant and hostile to contractors group of people in my whole life.
As a former HP employee, I have no idea what you're talking about. Have you ever thought that maybe these employees weren't being hostile because you were a contractor, but because you were an ass?
It was a company of "we're better than you, you God Damn contractors". We ran just about every support division, but those fuckers never said thank you or even acted nice toward us.
Ah. I see. You worked in support. I was never particularly pleased with our support team. Most of us were better than most of you, and yeah, when you responded to my request days after you should have and bitched the whole time, sometimes I didn't say "thank you". After all, you were just doing your job (and usually poorly at that).
It was a company of Us vs Those Contractors.
That said, we had a contractor on our R&D team, and we treated him just like everyone else. Actually HP was just sued recently precisely because they treated their contractors so similarly to their employees. Basically the only difference was whether or not you got benefits, and who was the first to get laid off. Of course, that was pre-Carly, when HP still had the track record of having never laid off a single employee. Nowadays you might as well be a contractor, the contractors got paid a lot better and it more than made up for the lack of benefits, especially if they made some creative tax deductions. I suppose at least the employees get unemployment if they get canned, but the days of never laying anyone off are long gone.
I never had a vacation because we did not have the same benefits as them but did the same work.
And got paid more for that same work. If you wanted to be an employee, why didn't you just apply for a company that would hire you as an employee?
Go to the menu. Hit 6 (display). Hit *. System Prog password is 000000. Your ESN will show up. I strongly suggest you now hit end and then exit unless you really know what you're doing. And don't tell anyone your ESN. That can be used to clone your phone.
There are other hidden screens that are easy to get to too. The one thing I haven't figured out is how to brew test enable the phone, this way I can run self-signed brew apps. Supposedly you have to turn it in to the manufacturer to do that, but there must be another way...
I also haven't gotten the GPS screen to work, but I believe the problem there is that verizon hasn't yet turned on the service for non-911 calls. It'd be nice to at least get the raw data, but this doesn't seem to be accessible either.
I probably have this to some extent. In school I usually made up for it by learning the information ahead of time (through reading), and basically when I was listening to the teacher I'd know what they were going to say before they said it.
I found it very interesting to read the second coping skill there: "Do not take notes yourself when information comes from others orally, as this may interfere with your processing strategies..." I deal with this problem all the time at work, when the people who answer the phone are out of the office and I have to answer it. Just today I had to take someone's name and number and it took 3 or 4 tries before I got it down. I'm not really sure what can be done about this, other than just ask people to repeat themselves. I've tried typing in the information as they tell me but that doesn't work either. Maybe I can ask for less information at once. Get the name down first, then the number, and so on. It's also ironic that the fact that I essentially refused to take notes in High School was one of the things that I used to get in trouble for.
"Use closed captioning while watching television." Interesting. I do that sometimes when watching a movie.
The one thing that doesn't really fit though is the article says "APD's have an Auditory (Verbal) Processing Disorder, and text is only verbal code, and so the Auditory Processing Disorder is extended into reading and writing as this auditory code." But I'm *usually* pretty good at reading, much moreso than listening to someone speaking. I do occassionally find myself reading the same sentence 10 or 20 times, but I think that's really more a lack of concentration.
I don't think so either. It just changes the game. Unfortunately, it also increases the cost of being a good player, because the tools you're talking about aren't available for free (you can make 'em yourself, of course, but if you've got a day job this is going to take a while).
Is it different from B&M play? Most certainly. That however doesn't mean it is any better or worse than live poker. I think it is no more unfair than it is for the common tourist walking into a casino and playing the local sharks.
I think it's slightly worse because it makes the game more expensive. But I wouldn't call it unfair. Like I said, I think the poker places should just go ahead and allow bots. I guess the fear is that'd increase collusion, but collusion is really a separate issue.
I read about something like this once, and there was a specific term for it, but I forget what it is. It seems to me more like a mental issue than a hearing issue, though. I doubt a hearing aid of any sort would solve things. I experience it sometimes and it's basically like my hearing isn't adequetely connected to my comprehension. And yeah, I find myself often asking someone to repeat themselves and then figuring out what they said before they even do repeat it. I basically reloop what they said back through my subvocalisation, and then I understand it.
They are looking to mimic humans, but I doubt human form is the most efficient and adaptable.
I doubt we're going to come up with a better design than millions of years of natural selection. Besides, so many of the objects we use every day were designed to work well with human hands. Sure, you can usually custom design something to work better than hands for a particular task, but building new hardware for every new task is time consuming and wasteful. With a generic human-like hand you don't need to deploy new hardware for every new task, you can instead deploy new software (with delivery at the speed of light, something UPS and FedEx can't quite handle).
For all the advances in technology we have, humans still do an awful lot of manual labor. By the very definition of the word, this is stuff that is best done with hands.
A blob-like form consisting of millions of nanobots working together, sometimes loosely, sometimes in a tight lattice, would make much more sense
OK, OK, when the enemy in Terminator 2 gets created, that'll be better than an artificial hand. But that's a long ways off.
I was just thinking about this a couple days ago. I think every office is going to need one of these in the future. There's just too much mindless manual labor that occurs from day to day. Sure, the hardware is only part of the story, but once you've got the hardware you can download the software updates.
For instance, I work as an accountant, and maybe half my time is spent opening envelopes, making photocopies, typing in data, etc. With a computer doing all that easy stuff, it'd leave me to the stuff that computers aren't (yet) good at - classifying, reconciling, identifying red flags, etc.
It's kind of amazing that we've got people progressing in artificial intellegence and yet the average home/office computer can't even do the simplest of tasks that any 5 year old can do. I tease one of my coworkers all the time about the fact that the computer tells him to change the backup tape. Computers should be working for us, not the other way around.
And best of all, the field operatives won't have to carry the load themselves. They can strap these backpacks to be backs of dolphins, or camels, or something.
This same scenario happens over and over. And though it can happen at live games, the frequency is much less.
If this were true, surely someone would have published overwhelming evidence of it by now. It's really easy to log every single hand you play, and lots of people do it. In fact, the hand histories are available for quite a while even for hands you didn't play in. So if the frequency of any particular scenario were different, in a statistically significant way, then you could easily publish evidence of this beyond just claiming it's true.
Also, straights and flushes are much more common online
That is probably true, because more people chase straights and flushes online.
I agree with you that bots aren't a worry, though. I'm mostly concerned with good players using computer assistance, though.
You're never going to stop either online, so the online poker places should just allow it (bots and computer assistance, but not collusion of course), and then at least everyone is on the same playing field.
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Why bother taking risks with proprietary readers and formats when I know my trusty hardcover -- short of disaster -- will be readable 75 years from now?
C'mon, is there really an e-book format that hasn't yet been cracked? I know it's cool to claim you'd have no problem paying for an e-book if the format was open, but that's really not a practical reason.
and that's an e-book, right? I suppose other e-books will catch on when they too are free. People don't want to pay money for bits.
No one has been allowed to buy anyone. There was a published rumor that Microsoft might be taking an equity stake in AOL.
Then again, even if Microsoft did buy AOL entirely, I don't see the harm. AOL, while a large player, is nowhere near a monopoly, and won't give Microsoft any additional monopoly power.
AOL gave everything to the Mozilla Foundation.
I thought Mozilla was a rewrite from scratch.
Bloomberg speculates that this deal would profit both companies.
Gee, you don't say. Two companies are voluntarily entering into a deal. If the deal didn't "profit both companies" at least one of them would say no to the deal.
Sometimes, however, consumer demand changes in ways the entrepreneur either could not, or failed to, predict. This is especially true in a world where our central banks create huge business cycles.
And the ability to lay off workers just makes matters worse, as it turns a problem in one industry into a downward spiral which affects all industries.
During the boom phase of the cycle, way too much purchasing power is invested in the capital goods sector, and it must be slowly transferred back to the consumer goods sector.
Don't you think maybe the boom phase of the cycle would be evened out if a company was forced to look at the long run rather than just hire and fire for a quick profit?
What happens when government interferes with this adjustment process?
Let's start with what happens when the government doesn't interfere with the "adjustment process": a long, sustained depression.
Efficient service of consumer demand can not be obtained, because funds are tied up in a suboptimal structure of production.
You're assuming employers and employees can't come to an agreement on things, but I never meant to imply that. If an employee can find a new job and the employer wants to let go of her anyway, then everyone is happy and there isn't a problem.
Profits decrease, so it takes longer for businesses to acquire the capital they need to build an efficient structure of production. During this lengthened capital build-up process, entrepreneurs are less likely to replace businesses that go bankrupt with new businesses.
I would think new businesses would have an advantage over old ones, as they can hire the number of new workers that they need, rather than have to worry about paying for the current ones.
So long as society has enough savings, they will be fine. That is, if everyone has enough berries saved up to sustain their old level of consumption while they swith production methods, there are no problems.
Society today is so efficient that there would be plenty of food, shelter, etc. even if everyone in the world only worked 4 or 5 hours a week. We, as a society, do have enough savings, far far beyond what we need to keep everyone living at a quite comfortable level. There shouldn't be any unemployment. If there is, then our economic system has failed us.
In that case, reorganization is needed; some people must be moved back to the old method of production. What if this reorganization is not allowed to happen?
I'm not saying reorganization is not allowed to happen. But "you're fired, go reorganize" isn't the way it should happen.
Well, that is the inefficiency I am talking about. A certain level of consumption is desired, but there will not be enough berries to fulfill it. The only thing that can fix this is to allow the market to form itself into a structure of production that efficiently meets consumer demands.
I'm not saying we should abandon capitalism. The market is still there, and it'll still be able to reorganize. But instead of firing people first and then having them figure out the reorganization themselves, this would force companies to assist in the reorganization process.
Anyway, you act like it's a grossly foreign concept, but it's really not that different from what we have now, with unemployment compensation. If someone gets laid off, for no fault of his/her own, then the company has to pay the person (usually around 50%) while looking for a new job. In France they take what is arguably a more reasonable approach, and instead of applying a formula based on previous compensation they allow negotiation and ultimately adjudication by a judge if it comes to that, to determine what amount of severance pay is fair.
Heh, my girlfriend's parents just had DSL made available to them; they get it this week. And it's coming to my apartment on September 30th. About a mile south of here they've got Fios.
Oh yeah, this is Verizon.
The 768K/128K Verizon DSL plan is only $15/month. Sure, it's not anywhere near as fast as it could be, but it's a lot faster than dialup (down, anyway), and it's always on.
Just out of curiosity, what is the latency like on EV-DO and EV-DO Rev A?
Pinging www.slashdot.org [66.35.250.151] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 66.35.250.151: bytes=32 time=342ms TTL=46 Reply from 66.35.250.151: bytes=32 time=283ms TTL=46 Reply from 66.35.250.151: bytes=32 time=298ms TTL=46 Reply from 66.35.250.151: bytes=32 time=278ms TTL=46Verizon Wireless Broadband Access, Tampa, Florida.
Also, if you can find someone within line of sight who has DSL or Cable modem, you can roll your own point to point wireless network pretty easilly, even with plain old 802.11a/b/g.
Line of sight is pretty difficult if you don't live in the desert, and even then "pretty easily" is somewhat of an overstatment, especially if you want to do it legally.
Jobs are not resources that are "taken" or "sent" to other countries. Rather, jobs are created (and destroyed) by entrepreneurs--people who have acquired capital--capitalists, if you [will]. There is an infinite amount of work to be done, and thus an infinite number of potential jobs that could be created. One does not need to fear the loss of a job, because another one can easily be created...so long as entrepreneurs have the freedom to acquire capital and to use it.
I fully agree here.
How can business restructure itself when it can't even fire or lay off its employees?
How does the ability to lay off employees lead to less unemployment? I can't say I understand that one.
How can new businesses be started when people are so heavily taxed that they have trouble building up a pool of capital?
Charge more? Make less of a profit?
Socialists must learn that employers and employees have a common goal: to make the most productive use out of the scarce resources.
If you're truly a socialist, then this statement doesn't even make sense, because it presumes that employers and employees exist in the first place. Of course, you're probably referring to liberal capitalists here, not socialists. In that case, there's agreement that common goals exist. Then again, making *the most* productive use out of scarce resources isn't necessarily one of those goals. Most people don't care in 100% efficiency, if that means not having the safety of a stable income.
Stealing the employer's capital and taking away his freedoms will never help anyone.
Depends what you do with that "stolen" capital.
That's a quote from The HP Way by David Packard, a book given to every single employee of Hewlett-Packard, at least it was when I joined in '98. I wonder if the current CEO even read it.
Since the merger it's like HP sucked all the Suck out of Compaq's sucky products and injected it into HP products.
And it's not like it wasn't foreseeable. It's the reason that the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the William R. Hewlett Revocable Trust voted against the merger. It's the reason I voted against the merger.
I doubt the workers would suffer, undoubtedly the French govt would end up holding the bag -- as they should, since it's their regs that are so onerous.
I think it's pretty twisted that we consider these regulations onerous. Why should workers be subject to the ups and downs of the company they work for? It wasn't that long ago even here in the US that lifetime employment was standard. In fact, even at HP this was pretty much the standard until the late 90s.
What is gained by shifting the risks of the business from the employers to the employees? Once this risk has been shifted, what's left to justify the profits being made by the shareholders?
I don't think it's onerous. It's different, sure, but it's arguably even more fair.
I don't think that was ever true at HP. It certainly wasn't true when I worked there in the late 90s. But then again, in the late 90s HP still hadn't ever laid an employee off. Contractors were hired to take care of the ebb and flow in the need for workers. When things turned down, the contractors were let go, and the employees were kept.
Then Carly came in, I quit for another job, and a few months later everyone in my NJ office were told they could move to Texas or take a severance package.
As a person who was a contractor at HP, I am glad to see these HP employee's get laid off. Never in my life have I dealt with such a group of arrogant and hostile to contractors group of people in my whole life.
As a former HP employee, I have no idea what you're talking about. Have you ever thought that maybe these employees weren't being hostile because you were a contractor, but because you were an ass?
It was a company of "we're better than you, you God Damn contractors". We ran just about every support division, but those fuckers never said thank you or even acted nice toward us.
Ah. I see. You worked in support. I was never particularly pleased with our support team. Most of us were better than most of you, and yeah, when you responded to my request days after you should have and bitched the whole time, sometimes I didn't say "thank you". After all, you were just doing your job (and usually poorly at that).
It was a company of Us vs Those Contractors.
That said, we had a contractor on our R&D team, and we treated him just like everyone else. Actually HP was just sued recently precisely because they treated their contractors so similarly to their employees. Basically the only difference was whether or not you got benefits, and who was the first to get laid off. Of course, that was pre-Carly, when HP still had the track record of having never laid off a single employee. Nowadays you might as well be a contractor, the contractors got paid a lot better and it more than made up for the lack of benefits, especially if they made some creative tax deductions. I suppose at least the employees get unemployment if they get canned, but the days of never laying anyone off are long gone.
I never had a vacation because we did not have the same benefits as them but did the same work.
And got paid more for that same work. If you wanted to be an employee, why didn't you just apply for a company that would hire you as an employee?
Go to the menu. Hit 6 (display). Hit *. System Prog password is 000000. Your ESN will show up. I strongly suggest you now hit end and then exit unless you really know what you're doing. And don't tell anyone your ESN. That can be used to clone your phone.
There are other hidden screens that are easy to get to too. The one thing I haven't figured out is how to brew test enable the phone, this way I can run self-signed brew apps. Supposedly you have to turn it in to the manufacturer to do that, but there must be another way...
I also haven't gotten the GPS screen to work, but I believe the problem there is that verizon hasn't yet turned on the service for non-911 calls. It'd be nice to at least get the raw data, but this doesn't seem to be accessible either.
Oh yeah, I especially liked this one: "A child with APD may be accused of 'not listening'." Heh, or a boyfriend...
I probably have this to some extent. In school I usually made up for it by learning the information ahead of time (through reading), and basically when I was listening to the teacher I'd know what they were going to say before they said it.
I found it very interesting to read the second coping skill there: "Do not take notes yourself when information comes from others orally, as this may interfere with your processing strategies..." I deal with this problem all the time at work, when the people who answer the phone are out of the office and I have to answer it. Just today I had to take someone's name and number and it took 3 or 4 tries before I got it down. I'm not really sure what can be done about this, other than just ask people to repeat themselves. I've tried typing in the information as they tell me but that doesn't work either. Maybe I can ask for less information at once. Get the name down first, then the number, and so on. It's also ironic that the fact that I essentially refused to take notes in High School was one of the things that I used to get in trouble for.
"Use closed captioning while watching television." Interesting. I do that sometimes when watching a movie.
The one thing that doesn't really fit though is the article says "APD's have an Auditory (Verbal) Processing Disorder, and text is only verbal code, and so the Auditory Processing Disorder is extended into reading and writing as this auditory code." But I'm *usually* pretty good at reading, much moreso than listening to someone speaking. I do occassionally find myself reading the same sentence 10 or 20 times, but I think that's really more a lack of concentration.
Is this cheating? I don't think so.
I don't think so either. It just changes the game. Unfortunately, it also increases the cost of being a good player, because the tools you're talking about aren't available for free (you can make 'em yourself, of course, but if you've got a day job this is going to take a while).
Is it different from B&M play? Most certainly. That however doesn't mean it is any better or worse than live poker. I think it is no more unfair than it is for the common tourist walking into a casino and playing the local sharks.
I think it's slightly worse because it makes the game more expensive. But I wouldn't call it unfair. Like I said, I think the poker places should just go ahead and allow bots. I guess the fear is that'd increase collusion, but collusion is really a separate issue.
I read about something like this once, and there was a specific term for it, but I forget what it is. It seems to me more like a mental issue than a hearing issue, though. I doubt a hearing aid of any sort would solve things. I experience it sometimes and it's basically like my hearing isn't adequetely connected to my comprehension. And yeah, I find myself often asking someone to repeat themselves and then figuring out what they said before they even do repeat it. I basically reloop what they said back through my subvocalisation, and then I understand it.
They are looking to mimic humans, but I doubt human form is the most efficient and adaptable.
I doubt we're going to come up with a better design than millions of years of natural selection. Besides, so many of the objects we use every day were designed to work well with human hands. Sure, you can usually custom design something to work better than hands for a particular task, but building new hardware for every new task is time consuming and wasteful. With a generic human-like hand you don't need to deploy new hardware for every new task, you can instead deploy new software (with delivery at the speed of light, something UPS and FedEx can't quite handle).
For all the advances in technology we have, humans still do an awful lot of manual labor. By the very definition of the word, this is stuff that is best done with hands.
A blob-like form consisting of millions of nanobots working together, sometimes loosely, sometimes in a tight lattice, would make much more sense
OK, OK, when the enemy in Terminator 2 gets created, that'll be better than an artificial hand. But that's a long ways off.
I was just thinking about this a couple days ago. I think every office is going to need one of these in the future. There's just too much mindless manual labor that occurs from day to day. Sure, the hardware is only part of the story, but once you've got the hardware you can download the software updates.
For instance, I work as an accountant, and maybe half my time is spent opening envelopes, making photocopies, typing in data, etc. With a computer doing all that easy stuff, it'd leave me to the stuff that computers aren't (yet) good at - classifying, reconciling, identifying red flags, etc.
It's kind of amazing that we've got people progressing in artificial intellegence and yet the average home/office computer can't even do the simplest of tasks that any 5 year old can do. I tease one of my coworkers all the time about the fact that the computer tells him to change the backup tape. Computers should be working for us, not the other way around.
And best of all, the field operatives won't have to carry the load themselves. They can strap these backpacks to be backs of dolphins, or camels, or something.
This same scenario happens over and over. And though it can happen at live games, the frequency is much less.
If this were true, surely someone would have published overwhelming evidence of it by now. It's really easy to log every single hand you play, and lots of people do it. In fact, the hand histories are available for quite a while even for hands you didn't play in. So if the frequency of any particular scenario were different, in a statistically significant way, then you could easily publish evidence of this beyond just claiming it's true.
Also, straights and flushes are much more common online
That is probably true, because more people chase straights and flushes online.
I agree with you that bots aren't a worry, though. I'm mostly concerned with good players using computer assistance, though.
You're never going to stop either online, so the online poker places should just allow it (bots and computer assistance, but not collusion of course), and then at least everyone is on the same playing field.
I'd not hard to understand or believe.
Me neither.