Well, I guess it depends on what you consider the purpose of business. If you consider the purpose of a business to gather money, then sure. If you consider gathering money just one of many purposes of a business, and that other ends are valid for their own sake, then not so much.
Ultimately what people try to do is to maximize the perceived value of their lives. Money has value, but other things have value as well. Just as no businessman would turn away somebody who wanted to trade a diamond ring for a hamburger even if the menu is denominated in dollars and not carats, people aren't going to turn away leisure time for money unless the money is pretty valuable.
They are not identical as long as your capability for work is not diminished by being paid more for it. If you manage to finish your work in less time, a business like approach would be investing your remaining time to get paid for something else too.
Sure, if you value yourself as just another machine on the assembly line then the most cost effective way to exploit your body is to get as many hours as are cost-effective, but investing enough in maintenance and downtime so that on the whole you're as productive as possible.
A lot of executives treat their staff that way (though they don't mind burning them out more as they're easier to replace), so I guess I shouldn't be surprised if some treat themselves that way as well.
If you view work as a means to an end and not an end in itself, then it makes more sense to maximize the value of time not spent working. That could include working to bring in money to spend during that time, or it might include having more time to spend not working in the first place.
But, whatever floats your boat. If you're happier working 50 hours a week more power to you. Most people simply aren't - and it isn't because they're lazy - they're just working for themselves.
Nothing. It all comes down to who builds the robots first, and what their personal motivations are.
Sadly, that is how most revolutions seem to turn out. The only thing that kept the US from being another 3rd world dictatorship was the right people just happened to end up in charge.
Well, in an ideal world we'd build warplanes with the intent to NOT use them. In the US we seem to like dropping bombs by the bushel so economy in that role has become important.
The original purpose of aircraft like the F14 and F22 was against an air-capable enemy. Fortunately that is a war we haven't had to fight in a long time. Building F22s and not using them is a lot cheaper than fighting wars all over the place like we are now, so I wouldn't really call the F22 the best example of military waste.
I suspect (but do not know for sure) that the F22 isn't using interferometry so much as passive radar and/or data sharing.
Interferometry would require a LOT of data sharing (you need to compare the raw receiver signals). Passive radar just requires each aircraft to know what the others are transmitting (a pre-shared algorithm and a shared key (maybe pre-shared, but easily shared dynamically)). Data sharing just requires aircraft to transmit coordinates.
The bit you mentioned where radio dishes are linked to simulate one the size of the earth requires interferometry. It gives somewhat more sensitivity, but more importantly higher resolution. You need to record all the radio signals (I believe they have to be sampled at full frequency - not demodulated first), and a time reference. For radio astronomy that means sampling rates of a few hundred MHz, but I suspect that is WAY too low for radar. Radar would require sampling at multiple GHz frequencies - assuming anything can actually sample at that rate the data volumes would be huge. An aircraft would have to receive multiple sources at this rate and process it in realtime - not a trivial undertaking. I'm not sure it would even buy you much for an aircraft - their radar are very high resolution already, and if you want to defeat stealth you're probably better off processing the singals individually.
But, I have no special knowledge here - certainly would be interested in feedback from anybody who has applied interferometry to radar. It is far easier when you're combining signals from physically linked receivers - then you don't need to digitize anything until it has already been mixed and don't need to store anything.
All true, but the AIM-120 does have its own radar for terminal guidance (which I think is something like 10-12 miles). So, if you fire at close to that range the aircraft fire control radar does not need to be on for long. If the AIM-120 were updated with a "low probability of intercept" radar receiver like the F22 then it might not even need that (assuming that mode could support fire control).
If the missile is really fired with 99% PK (assuming it can even get that high), then it probably will be at that kind of range anyway. If you fire an AIM 120 at max range then the easiest defense for the enemy aircraft is to just turn around and run - the max range assumes that the enemy aircraft will continue to close. The only way to be sure an AIM-120 will hit is to fire at much closer range, and at that kind of range it will probably be active almost from the start.
Oh, and if the enemy aircraft is jamming then I believe an AIM 120 doesn't need fire control radar at all - it can just home-on-jam until it gets to active seeker range. I'm not sure if it can home on radar in a similar way.
Well, ramping up industrial production is always an option (not a fast one), but I wouldn't assume military supply chains are free from foreign dependency.
Maybe the parts on the F22 are made in the US, but what about the robots that make the parts? What about the lubricating oil for the robots? What about the parts that go into the robots? What about the ball bearings in the conveyor belt that carries the parts down the line? What about the parts for the Honda Civic that gets the engineers to work so that they can build the F22 parts?
An all-out embargo would result in impact to the entire US economy. You'll have everything from shortages of consumer goods to shortages of latex gloves in hospitals. The effects would be widely felt.
Knowing where the enemy is even without having fire control is a considerable advantage. If you know where the enemy is you can position all your aircraft for a shot at a range where the missiles are unevadable, and then light up all your radars at once. Once the missiles are on their own guidance the aircraft can shut down their radar again.
You could also attack with IR without ever turning you your radar. I don't know if you can fire an AAMRAM at medium range without turning on your radar at all (though if the missiles are still on the plane I doubt it makes much difference which radar is emitting).
I'd think that a big limitation here would be the ability to predict the incoming signals before they arise. For just an unmodulated carrier that is easy, but for signals that are heavily modulated that would not be the case.
When radio waves hit your stealth aircraft they WILL reflect off in various directions. It isn't until they hit the aircraft that you're able to detect and measure them, and any signal you generate to confuse the location of your aircraft must be transmitted after the real reflections have already been created (radio waves travel at the speed of light, and your signal processing gear can operate no more quickly than that).
For a naive receiver that is only looking at carrier signals and which doesn't pick up on double-reflections it might work. However, I'd think this could be defeated with a design that took this attack into account, or especially if the signal sources were non-civilian in nature (think spread spectrum transmitters whose signals might be hard to even detect in the first place, except for a receiver which knows exactly where to expect them and when).
Why the fuck should they? You're the one unhappy with your job. Go get trained your own damned self and don't cry that someone else won't pay for it.
That sounds nice until the whole population is unhappy with their job (or unemployed) and starts burning down everything in sight.
Does the US economic system work out badly for everybody? Hardly! If you are born into wealth, or born with a lot of talent it works just fine. However, if you're a part of the other 95% of the population things have been steadily declining.
Do these people lack the ambition/talent/etc to go out and fix their situation? Absolutely! Does that make their situation their own fault? No! You can't write somebody off because they were either born with or raised into a situation that puts them at an economic disadvantage.
Thankfully I had family to fall back on, until I got another job.
That's wonderful and all, but for many out there the family is already falling back on them. If you're the sole breadwinner in a family with a few kids then losing your job will quickly put everybody out on the streets. If your parents happen to be wealthy then you can get by, but that just demonstrates how lopsided the whole system is - chances are they didn't get wealthy by punching a timecard for 40 hours a week.
If your only source of income comes from working, rather than from owning, then you really are over the barrel, unless you've decided to be single and stash a lot of money.
Well said. The idea that you can't get ahead in the US is crazy. I left home with a 15 year old pickup and and an empty wallet. I am now a millionaire and I did it with 30 years of working hard and always trying to help others succeed. It can be done.
You're obviously not a mentally retarded quadriplegic. The only difference between one of those and you is a matter of degree. One one end of a scale is some guy who is confined to an iron lung for life and who is brain dead. On the other end of the scale is a cross between Albert Einstein and the Man of Steel. Everybody falls somewhere in-between.
I could just as easily say that the idea that you can't score in the 99th percentile at math without studying is crazy, because I did just that. However, that only works because I actually AM in the 99th percentile when it comes to math (and I know there are vast numbers of people who do better than I do). For everybody else I went to high school with that really wasn't a viable option, and for me to ridicule them for being born with a different set of talents would be incredibly dumb.
Oh, and "everybody is good at something" isn't true either. There are plenty of people who simply are mediocre, or below-average at everything. No, hard work doesn't make up for this either. You could study as hard as you like and most likely you'll never outperform me on an advanced math test, and you can exercise as hard as you like and you'll never out-dig a backhoe. Sure, you can outperform somebody slightly better than you by working harder, but most people who are successful are born with greater than average talents.
Oh, and luck really does factor in as well. Zuckerburg probably wouldn't have been successful if he was't smart, but there are lots of people as smart as he is and most won't ever be that successful no matter how hard they work. You only read in the paper about the ones who succeed.
What's wrong with socialism? It seems to be working fine for the Nordic countries.
He didn't say there was anything wrong with socialism. He simply asked whether any alternative to it existed.
I think it is inevitable. Oh, we can debate how long it will be until that day comes, but it is inevitable.
Those who oppose socialized medicine sometimes just make me chuckle - it is inevitable as well. Eventually somebody will come up with a way to predict whether somebody will develop expensive health problems later in life. Individuals will always have access to this information (no way to prevent it). So, if the law will prevents insurance companies from taking this information into account those most likely to be sick will sign up for insurance and those most likely to be healthy will not, and the insurance companies will go bankrupt or have only a few customers who can pay astronomical premiums. On the other hand if the insurance companies are allowed to discriminate based on predicted health information then anybody who will be sick won't be able to get insurance and the rest will have cheap premiums but really not need insurance anyway. Bottom line is that insurance only works when you're dealing with statistical risks, and not actual knowledge of individual likely outcomes.
So, unless the wealthy people just turn the robots loose on everybody else and split the world amongst themselves, we'll be forced to switch to an economic model which reconigizes that nobody really has anything to contribute so we might as well just all have as decent a life as we can and stop trying to compete.
Who becomes a robotic industry analyst for Goldman Sachs to advise private sector retirement planners?
Another robot.
Who monitors the quality of the product that robot is building?
Another robot.
There is nothing qualitatively different between a robot and a human - it is all a matter of degree. Right now humans are a lot weaker, a bit more nimble in certain edge cases and less so in most others, and a lot smarter. However, robots used to be weaker than they are today, they used to be less nimble than they are today, and they used to be dumber than they are today. Sooner or later a robot will be built which is capable of doing ANYTHING a human can do, and at that point in time there will never be economic incentive to hire a human to do work again.
That's like saying that there will ALWAYS be ditches to be dug. Sure, there always will, but that's what we have backhoes for.
There will be plenty of work to do - there just won't be much for human beings to do. At some point in time I doubt there will be a single job that a human will be able to do better than a machine. I certainly can't conceive of anything a person can do which a machine could never do. People are basically machines to begin with - we just don't quite understand how all the parts go together yet.
You left out artificial intelligence. Your brain is an organ - a bunch of cells wired together - a purely physical object. As such it is finite in its ability and complexity, and therefore both able to be understood and surpassed.
You'd never hire people to dig ditches the way you would have 100 years ago - today you'd just use a backhoe. It really doesn't matter how strong you are - you can't compete with a backhoe.
Well, imagine applying that to mental activity. Robot designers won't just be out of work because we have enough robots to do the job. Robot designers will be out of work because the robots will be able to design the new robots. They'll create original works of art as well.
There will be the owners of the robots, any people they keep around just to have somebody to talk to or as pets, and then everybody else. Most likely the everybody else bit will just be allowed to starve - there is no need for those who control the robot to cater to them.
That is, unless the people as a whole own the means of production, and that's communism. The main failing of communism tends to be that nobody has incentive to work, but in such a society nobody really needs to work in the first place.
I have to seriously disagree - I'm a part owner (largest minority share) in the startup I work at.
Most owners tend to work FAR less than employees. I happen to be a part owner in a few hundred companies, and I couldn't even tell you what those companies are let alone what is going on inside them.
Sure, the average small business owner does tend to work a lot harder, especially when starting up. However, at some point they either retire or sell the business and at that point they get a ton of return for no additional labor.
I've got nothing against people who own small businesses, but in general they're well-compensated for their time.
Hate to self-reply, but a second issue concerning laziness.
Laziness itself is a virtue. For whatever reason culture in the US is to work for the sake of work, but if you consider work no more than a means to an end then minimizing the work involved to achieve that end is nothing more than efficiency.
In business, you don't maximize profits by having less of them. Getting paid as much as you can for a particular work is a proper business goal, getting it for as little work as possible is just plain laziness.
What you praised and what you criticized are the same thing.
I do 3 hours of work. I want to be paid as much as I can be paid for those 3 hours of work. That works for a business, and it works for an employee.
If I make $40 for every hour worked I'm going to try to make $50 instead if I can. If I have to work 90 seconds to make a dollar I'm going to try to only have to work 72 seconds to make a dollar. The first is the attitude you praised, the second is the one you called laziness. Mathematically they are identical.
For some reason in the US it is a virtue to work 48 hours/wk and make $100k/yr, and it is an even bigger virtue to work 48 hours/wk and make $200k/yr or work 60 hours/wk and make $150k/yr. However, for whatever reason the idea of working 10 hours/wk and making $40k/yr is considered laziness. I call it contentment - if your labor is valuable enough that you can live comfortably on a short work week more power to you.
Re:It's not all about power....differentiators are
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Sony Announces the PS4
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So far we are at about $600. Add a keyboard & mouse, and we approach $650. Of course that PC is way more versatile than the PS4, so I would prefer it over the console (I might also get a different CPU, the FX-4100 was mainly for comparison).
First, half the stuff on your list you only need to buy if you don't already own a PC. If you already have a decent motherboard/HD/etc you're just buying a motherboard/CPU/GPU. That isn't an option if you're buying a console (they don't make a PS3 to PS4 upgrade kit).
However, the big thing is how all that stuff depreciates over time. Wait 6 months and the price of the same PC hardware will be cut in half, while the PS4 might be $50 cheaper if you're lucky. Wait a year and the PC will be way cheaper.
Consoles are made using equipment bought on huge scales and sold at a loss initially (usually), so it only makes sense that they're going to be a bit cheaper to start out. However, their retail price tends to stay pretty flat, compared to PCs that drop in price $50/month until you hit the budget range (then the price stays constant but the specs ramp up every month).
Since many PC games are console games as well the GPU investment tends to last a fairly long time (the graphics requirements don't keep inflating like they used to). If you just buy it a year after the console comes out you save a lot of money and get a more useful system overall. During that first year just play the games on your somewhat-underpowered system, and then when you upgrade both those games and all previous ones benefit from the upgrade (unlike when you upgrade a PS4 it isn't like your PS2 games get faster).
Re:It's not all about power....differentiators are
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Sony Announces the PS4
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· Score: 1
the console gains a performance benefit over similarly specced general purpose PCs.
The key words here are "similarly specced." The console will have the same hardware over its lifetime. The price is likely to not drop that much over its lifetime (it will drop, but not nearly as fast as the hardware - the vendor loses money per console at the very start, and makes back a fortune later).
The suggested strategy was to just wait a year after the console comes out and buy a decent PC. The depreciation on computer hardware over a year's time is something amazing to behold. For the same cost as a console you can get a much more powerful PC a year later. Sure, the games won't be quite as micro-optimized, but having an extra 50% CPU and GPU power to burn is very forgiving of things like that. If you wait a little longer you benefit even more. Sure, the consoles are $50 cheaper or whatever after a year, but comparable PCs will be dropping $50/month in price for months after the consoles come out, until they're discontinued and the low-end budget PCs are vastly superior.
Plus a PC is a more practical investment overall. You get a lot more use out of a gaming PC than a console, and you can always buy controllers/etc for it.
Oh there is feedback all right - it's called student opinion surveys. For those of us on the tenure track, getting bad enough feedback can cost you tenure - and your job.
The kind of feedback likely has to do with the kinds of students in the class. Many of my best professors did not get the best feedback. Often it was more a measure of how many A's the professor handed out.
A big part of the problem is that most students are kids just out of high school, and many aren't really there to learn the material in the first place. It doesn't surprise me that they're more likely to stick with traditional classes than online ones. You have to stick with traditional classes to not fail out and lose your chance to have your parents to pay for you to live in a building full of people your own age and go to parties 3 nights a week. If you're taking online classes your only incentive to stick with the class is to actually learn the material.
Bullshit, if you own it you can distribute copies freely under your own terms because it's yours, the fact that you can't do such a thing is proof that you in fact do not own it and only license it.
Ownership of an item has nothing to do with ownership of the copyright associated with that item. You can own something without having the right to distribute copies of it.
17 USC 109 (a): Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106 (3), the owner of a particular copy or phonorecord lawfully made under this title, or any person authorized by such owner, is entitled, without the authority of the copyright owner, to sell or otherwise dispose of the possession of that copy or phonorecord.
Note the use of the phrases "owner of a particular copy" vs "copyright owner" - these are both ownership rights which differ in the rights conferred.
You can't copy something just because you own it, just as you can't shoot your neighbor just because you bought and paid for the gun.
I think that if that were going to happen, it would have by now. Debian would have taken over, or Ubuntu, or Red Hat. But, instead, the success of each has had a ripple effect, as each works to imitate and/or provide alternatives to whatever bells and whistles are working for one of them this week.
Yup. My concern was more with the whole "don't abandon Ubuntu - at least they're popularizing linux" bit. I'm not sure I want to see any one distro get a huge majority of the install base. In my mind a distro being popular is the best reason not to use it - it keeps the ecosystem healthy.
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Well, I guess it depends on what you consider the purpose of business. If you consider the purpose of a business to gather money, then sure. If you consider gathering money just one of many purposes of a business, and that other ends are valid for their own sake, then not so much.
Ultimately what people try to do is to maximize the perceived value of their lives. Money has value, but other things have value as well. Just as no businessman would turn away somebody who wanted to trade a diamond ring for a hamburger even if the menu is denominated in dollars and not carats, people aren't going to turn away leisure time for money unless the money is pretty valuable.
They are not identical as long as your capability for work is not diminished by being paid more for it. If you manage to finish your work in less time, a business like approach would be investing your remaining time to get paid for something else too.
Sure, if you value yourself as just another machine on the assembly line then the most cost effective way to exploit your body is to get as many hours as are cost-effective, but investing enough in maintenance and downtime so that on the whole you're as productive as possible.
A lot of executives treat their staff that way (though they don't mind burning them out more as they're easier to replace), so I guess I shouldn't be surprised if some treat themselves that way as well.
If you view work as a means to an end and not an end in itself, then it makes more sense to maximize the value of time not spent working. That could include working to bring in money to spend during that time, or it might include having more time to spend not working in the first place.
But, whatever floats your boat. If you're happier working 50 hours a week more power to you. Most people simply aren't - and it isn't because they're lazy - they're just working for themselves.
Nothing. It all comes down to who builds the robots first, and what their personal motivations are.
Sadly, that is how most revolutions seem to turn out. The only thing that kept the US from being another 3rd world dictatorship was the right people just happened to end up in charge.
Well, in an ideal world we'd build warplanes with the intent to NOT use them. In the US we seem to like dropping bombs by the bushel so economy in that role has become important.
The original purpose of aircraft like the F14 and F22 was against an air-capable enemy. Fortunately that is a war we haven't had to fight in a long time. Building F22s and not using them is a lot cheaper than fighting wars all over the place like we are now, so I wouldn't really call the F22 the best example of military waste.
I suspect (but do not know for sure) that the F22 isn't using interferometry so much as passive radar and/or data sharing.
Interferometry would require a LOT of data sharing (you need to compare the raw receiver signals). Passive radar just requires each aircraft to know what the others are transmitting (a pre-shared algorithm and a shared key (maybe pre-shared, but easily shared dynamically)). Data sharing just requires aircraft to transmit coordinates.
The bit you mentioned where radio dishes are linked to simulate one the size of the earth requires interferometry. It gives somewhat more sensitivity, but more importantly higher resolution. You need to record all the radio signals (I believe they have to be sampled at full frequency - not demodulated first), and a time reference. For radio astronomy that means sampling rates of a few hundred MHz, but I suspect that is WAY too low for radar. Radar would require sampling at multiple GHz frequencies - assuming anything can actually sample at that rate the data volumes would be huge. An aircraft would have to receive multiple sources at this rate and process it in realtime - not a trivial undertaking. I'm not sure it would even buy you much for an aircraft - their radar are very high resolution already, and if you want to defeat stealth you're probably better off processing the singals individually.
But, I have no special knowledge here - certainly would be interested in feedback from anybody who has applied interferometry to radar. It is far easier when you're combining signals from physically linked receivers - then you don't need to digitize anything until it has already been mixed and don't need to store anything.
All true, but the AIM-120 does have its own radar for terminal guidance (which I think is something like 10-12 miles). So, if you fire at close to that range the aircraft fire control radar does not need to be on for long. If the AIM-120 were updated with a "low probability of intercept" radar receiver like the F22 then it might not even need that (assuming that mode could support fire control).
If the missile is really fired with 99% PK (assuming it can even get that high), then it probably will be at that kind of range anyway. If you fire an AIM 120 at max range then the easiest defense for the enemy aircraft is to just turn around and run - the max range assumes that the enemy aircraft will continue to close. The only way to be sure an AIM-120 will hit is to fire at much closer range, and at that kind of range it will probably be active almost from the start.
Oh, and if the enemy aircraft is jamming then I believe an AIM 120 doesn't need fire control radar at all - it can just home-on-jam until it gets to active seeker range. I'm not sure if it can home on radar in a similar way.
Well, ramping up industrial production is always an option (not a fast one), but I wouldn't assume military supply chains are free from foreign dependency.
Maybe the parts on the F22 are made in the US, but what about the robots that make the parts? What about the lubricating oil for the robots? What about the parts that go into the robots? What about the ball bearings in the conveyor belt that carries the parts down the line? What about the parts for the Honda Civic that gets the engineers to work so that they can build the F22 parts?
An all-out embargo would result in impact to the entire US economy. You'll have everything from shortages of consumer goods to shortages of latex gloves in hospitals. The effects would be widely felt.
Knowing where the enemy is even without having fire control is a considerable advantage. If you know where the enemy is you can position all your aircraft for a shot at a range where the missiles are unevadable, and then light up all your radars at once. Once the missiles are on their own guidance the aircraft can shut down their radar again.
You could also attack with IR without ever turning you your radar. I don't know if you can fire an AAMRAM at medium range without turning on your radar at all (though if the missiles are still on the plane I doubt it makes much difference which radar is emitting).
I'd think that a big limitation here would be the ability to predict the incoming signals before they arise. For just an unmodulated carrier that is easy, but for signals that are heavily modulated that would not be the case.
When radio waves hit your stealth aircraft they WILL reflect off in various directions. It isn't until they hit the aircraft that you're able to detect and measure them, and any signal you generate to confuse the location of your aircraft must be transmitted after the real reflections have already been created (radio waves travel at the speed of light, and your signal processing gear can operate no more quickly than that).
For a naive receiver that is only looking at carrier signals and which doesn't pick up on double-reflections it might work. However, I'd think this could be defeated with a design that took this attack into account, or especially if the signal sources were non-civilian in nature (think spread spectrum transmitters whose signals might be hard to even detect in the first place, except for a receiver which knows exactly where to expect them and when).
Why the fuck should they? You're the one unhappy with your job. Go get trained your own damned self and don't cry that someone else won't pay for it.
That sounds nice until the whole population is unhappy with their job (or unemployed) and starts burning down everything in sight.
Does the US economic system work out badly for everybody? Hardly! If you are born into wealth, or born with a lot of talent it works just fine. However, if you're a part of the other 95% of the population things have been steadily declining.
Do these people lack the ambition/talent/etc to go out and fix their situation? Absolutely! Does that make their situation their own fault? No! You can't write somebody off because they were either born with or raised into a situation that puts them at an economic disadvantage.
Thankfully I had family to fall back on, until I got another job.
That's wonderful and all, but for many out there the family is already falling back on them. If you're the sole breadwinner in a family with a few kids then losing your job will quickly put everybody out on the streets. If your parents happen to be wealthy then you can get by, but that just demonstrates how lopsided the whole system is - chances are they didn't get wealthy by punching a timecard for 40 hours a week.
If your only source of income comes from working, rather than from owning, then you really are over the barrel, unless you've decided to be single and stash a lot of money.
Well said. The idea that you can't get ahead in the US is crazy. I left home with a 15 year old pickup and and an empty wallet. I am now a millionaire and I did it with 30 years of working hard and always trying to help others succeed. It can be done.
You're obviously not a mentally retarded quadriplegic. The only difference between one of those and you is a matter of degree. One one end of a scale is some guy who is confined to an iron lung for life and who is brain dead. On the other end of the scale is a cross between Albert Einstein and the Man of Steel. Everybody falls somewhere in-between.
I could just as easily say that the idea that you can't score in the 99th percentile at math without studying is crazy, because I did just that. However, that only works because I actually AM in the 99th percentile when it comes to math (and I know there are vast numbers of people who do better than I do). For everybody else I went to high school with that really wasn't a viable option, and for me to ridicule them for being born with a different set of talents would be incredibly dumb.
Oh, and "everybody is good at something" isn't true either. There are plenty of people who simply are mediocre, or below-average at everything. No, hard work doesn't make up for this either. You could study as hard as you like and most likely you'll never outperform me on an advanced math test, and you can exercise as hard as you like and you'll never out-dig a backhoe. Sure, you can outperform somebody slightly better than you by working harder, but most people who are successful are born with greater than average talents.
Oh, and luck really does factor in as well. Zuckerburg probably wouldn't have been successful if he was't smart, but there are lots of people as smart as he is and most won't ever be that successful no matter how hard they work. You only read in the paper about the ones who succeed.
What's wrong with socialism? It seems to be working fine for the Nordic countries.
He didn't say there was anything wrong with socialism. He simply asked whether any alternative to it existed.
I think it is inevitable. Oh, we can debate how long it will be until that day comes, but it is inevitable.
Those who oppose socialized medicine sometimes just make me chuckle - it is inevitable as well. Eventually somebody will come up with a way to predict whether somebody will develop expensive health problems later in life. Individuals will always have access to this information (no way to prevent it). So, if the law will prevents insurance companies from taking this information into account those most likely to be sick will sign up for insurance and those most likely to be healthy will not, and the insurance companies will go bankrupt or have only a few customers who can pay astronomical premiums. On the other hand if the insurance companies are allowed to discriminate based on predicted health information then anybody who will be sick won't be able to get insurance and the rest will have cheap premiums but really not need insurance anyway. Bottom line is that insurance only works when you're dealing with statistical risks, and not actual knowledge of individual likely outcomes.
So, unless the wealthy people just turn the robots loose on everybody else and split the world amongst themselves, we'll be forced to switch to an economic model which reconigizes that nobody really has anything to contribute so we might as well just all have as decent a life as we can and stop trying to compete.
Who takes care of the robots?
Another robot.
Who programs them?
Another robot.
Who builds them?
Another robot.
Who designs them?
Another robot.
Who installs them?
Another robot.
Who recycles them when they are worn out?
Another robot.
Who becomes a robotic industry analyst for Goldman Sachs to advise private sector retirement planners?
Another robot.
Who monitors the quality of the product that robot is building?
Another robot.
There is nothing qualitatively different between a robot and a human - it is all a matter of degree. Right now humans are a lot weaker, a bit more nimble in certain edge cases and less so in most others, and a lot smarter. However, robots used to be weaker than they are today, they used to be less nimble than they are today, and they used to be dumber than they are today. Sooner or later a robot will be built which is capable of doing ANYTHING a human can do, and at that point in time there will never be economic incentive to hire a human to do work again.
There will ALWAYS be work to be found.
That's like saying that there will ALWAYS be ditches to be dug. Sure, there always will, but that's what we have backhoes for.
There will be plenty of work to do - there just won't be much for human beings to do. At some point in time I doubt there will be a single job that a human will be able to do better than a machine. I certainly can't conceive of anything a person can do which a machine could never do. People are basically machines to begin with - we just don't quite understand how all the parts go together yet.
You left out artificial intelligence. Your brain is an organ - a bunch of cells wired together - a purely physical object. As such it is finite in its ability and complexity, and therefore both able to be understood and surpassed.
You'd never hire people to dig ditches the way you would have 100 years ago - today you'd just use a backhoe. It really doesn't matter how strong you are - you can't compete with a backhoe.
Well, imagine applying that to mental activity. Robot designers won't just be out of work because we have enough robots to do the job. Robot designers will be out of work because the robots will be able to design the new robots. They'll create original works of art as well.
There will be the owners of the robots, any people they keep around just to have somebody to talk to or as pets, and then everybody else. Most likely the everybody else bit will just be allowed to starve - there is no need for those who control the robot to cater to them.
That is, unless the people as a whole own the means of production, and that's communism. The main failing of communism tends to be that nobody has incentive to work, but in such a society nobody really needs to work in the first place.
I have to seriously disagree - I'm a part owner (largest minority share) in the startup I work at.
Most owners tend to work FAR less than employees. I happen to be a part owner in a few hundred companies, and I couldn't even tell you what those companies are let alone what is going on inside them.
Sure, the average small business owner does tend to work a lot harder, especially when starting up. However, at some point they either retire or sell the business and at that point they get a ton of return for no additional labor.
I've got nothing against people who own small businesses, but in general they're well-compensated for their time.
Hate to self-reply, but a second issue concerning laziness.
Laziness itself is a virtue. For whatever reason culture in the US is to work for the sake of work, but if you consider work no more than a means to an end then minimizing the work involved to achieve that end is nothing more than efficiency.
In business, you don't maximize profits by having less of them. Getting paid as much as you can for a particular work is a proper business goal, getting it for as little work as possible is just plain laziness.
What you praised and what you criticized are the same thing.
I do 3 hours of work. I want to be paid as much as I can be paid for those 3 hours of work. That works for a business, and it works for an employee.
If I make $40 for every hour worked I'm going to try to make $50 instead if I can. If I have to work 90 seconds to make a dollar I'm going to try to only have to work 72 seconds to make a dollar. The first is the attitude you praised, the second is the one you called laziness. Mathematically they are identical.
For some reason in the US it is a virtue to work 48 hours/wk and make $100k/yr, and it is an even bigger virtue to work 48 hours/wk and make $200k/yr or work 60 hours/wk and make $150k/yr. However, for whatever reason the idea of working 10 hours/wk and making $40k/yr is considered laziness. I call it contentment - if your labor is valuable enough that you can live comfortably on a short work week more power to you.
So far we are at about $600. Add a keyboard & mouse, and we approach $650. Of course that PC is way more versatile than the PS4, so I would prefer it over the console (I might also get a different CPU, the FX-4100 was mainly for comparison).
First, half the stuff on your list you only need to buy if you don't already own a PC. If you already have a decent motherboard/HD/etc you're just buying a motherboard/CPU/GPU. That isn't an option if you're buying a console (they don't make a PS3 to PS4 upgrade kit).
However, the big thing is how all that stuff depreciates over time. Wait 6 months and the price of the same PC hardware will be cut in half, while the PS4 might be $50 cheaper if you're lucky. Wait a year and the PC will be way cheaper.
Consoles are made using equipment bought on huge scales and sold at a loss initially (usually), so it only makes sense that they're going to be a bit cheaper to start out. However, their retail price tends to stay pretty flat, compared to PCs that drop in price $50/month until you hit the budget range (then the price stays constant but the specs ramp up every month).
Since many PC games are console games as well the GPU investment tends to last a fairly long time (the graphics requirements don't keep inflating like they used to). If you just buy it a year after the console comes out you save a lot of money and get a more useful system overall. During that first year just play the games on your somewhat-underpowered system, and then when you upgrade both those games and all previous ones benefit from the upgrade (unlike when you upgrade a PS4 it isn't like your PS2 games get faster).
the console gains a performance benefit over similarly specced general purpose PCs.
The key words here are "similarly specced." The console will have the same hardware over its lifetime. The price is likely to not drop that much over its lifetime (it will drop, but not nearly as fast as the hardware - the vendor loses money per console at the very start, and makes back a fortune later).
The suggested strategy was to just wait a year after the console comes out and buy a decent PC. The depreciation on computer hardware over a year's time is something amazing to behold. For the same cost as a console you can get a much more powerful PC a year later. Sure, the games won't be quite as micro-optimized, but having an extra 50% CPU and GPU power to burn is very forgiving of things like that. If you wait a little longer you benefit even more. Sure, the consoles are $50 cheaper or whatever after a year, but comparable PCs will be dropping $50/month in price for months after the consoles come out, until they're discontinued and the low-end budget PCs are vastly superior.
Plus a PC is a more practical investment overall. You get a lot more use out of a gaming PC than a console, and you can always buy controllers/etc for it.
Oh there is feedback all right - it's called student opinion surveys. For those of us on the tenure track, getting bad enough feedback can cost you tenure - and your job.
The kind of feedback likely has to do with the kinds of students in the class. Many of my best professors did not get the best feedback. Often it was more a measure of how many A's the professor handed out.
A big part of the problem is that most students are kids just out of high school, and many aren't really there to learn the material in the first place. It doesn't surprise me that they're more likely to stick with traditional classes than online ones. You have to stick with traditional classes to not fail out and lose your chance to have your parents to pay for you to live in a building full of people your own age and go to parties 3 nights a week. If you're taking online classes your only incentive to stick with the class is to actually learn the material.
The law certainly applies to software as it is written. The court in this case was wrong.
Bullshit, if you own it you can distribute copies freely under your own terms because it's yours, the fact that you can't do such a thing is proof that you in fact do not own it and only license it.
Ownership of an item has nothing to do with ownership of the copyright associated with that item. You can own something without having the right to distribute copies of it.
Note the use of the phrases "owner of a particular copy" vs "copyright owner" - these are both ownership rights which differ in the rights conferred.
You can't copy something just because you own it, just as you can't shoot your neighbor just because you bought and paid for the gun.
I think that if that were going to happen, it would have by now. Debian would have taken over, or Ubuntu, or Red Hat. But, instead, the success of each has had a ripple effect, as each works to imitate and/or provide alternatives to whatever bells and whistles are working for one of them this week.
Yup. My concern was more with the whole "don't abandon Ubuntu - at least they're popularizing linux" bit. I'm not sure I want to see any one distro get a huge majority of the install base. In my mind a distro being popular is the best reason not to use it - it keeps the ecosystem healthy.