Everyone said the same thing when ATMs came around, "Oh no, they're going to replace actual tellers!" But it didn't, banks still hire quite frequently for bank tellers.
Yes, they do. However, the total number of bank tellers has dropped substantially since 1970 (along with the number of bank branches). That's thanks to the ATM, credit cards, and EFTPOS.
I'm not saying these kiosks aren't going to become more prevalent, but they won't replace actual human contact. Having previously worked in many service related jobs I know that people (especially older adults) will not allow this to occur.
I like your term: "older adults". Did you check out the time line here? It's fifty years in the future. The vast majority of those "older adults" (and a large proportion of younger adults) will be dead.
In fifty years time, people who will be born this year will be in the older half of the population. The percentage of people who aren't comfortable with today's level of automation or higher will be miniscule.
The robotic future will happen, it's just a question of time. The economies of the world will have to adapt to handle massive unemployment (a significant percentage of people are not suitable for anything but labour intensive work).
One thing that the article left out, though: when will the first robot riot occur (that is, a riot of people attacking robots for "stealing our jobs!")
You'll need Longhorn to access web services (banking, bill payment, etc.) that Microsoft plans to make "essential" and exclusive to windows users.
Personally, whenever I see a service that requires Windows (and only Windows) to access it, I avoid it.
I changed banks because the internet banking client was Windows only (they've now gone web-based). The only thing I still have to do via Windows when it comes to interacting with outside groups is tax lodgement. If the Australian government ever releases a Mac or Linux version of e-tax, I'll use it instead.
I can dig competing for my labor costs on the strength of my skills, but I can't compete with developers who make $5,850 a year, because I can't even rent a hole in the wall in my city for that yearly income, let alone feed myself.
Then you live in an area that's too expensive. Maybe you should move to India?
The open-source viewer is a requirement to show that the data format is in fact implementable and adhered to. It helps avoid ambiguities if you like.
Furthermore, it provides a reference implementation for other vendors.
Such a viewer would not necessarily be usuable. Features I would not expect to see would include:
* printing
* editing (duh!)
* search capabilities
* clipboard support
* easy navigation
Essentially, if all it was was a window with a scroll bar to let you scroll through the rendered document, it will have met the criteria.
I think the average Aussie would sooner eat their Akubra than become the 52nd state of the US. Why on earth would we want to drop our standard of living to match yours?
However, you're welcome to become our 9th state (New Zealand will be the 8th).
(Of course, we'd have to have Akubra's to eat... stupid stereotypes)
I mean, "government wasting money on Microsoft products" wouldn't have such a ring to it in the US now, would it?
It should, but for different reasons. In the case of the rest of the world, they would like to keep money in the country.
For the US, they should care about having a diversified IT sector. The US government is a large enough client that it could choose three or four software suites, and insist that they play nicely together. I mean, do the government only buy cars from one manufacturer?
Alternatively, we could consider the statistics. A vastly disproportionate number of whites get into top universities compared to other races. Either you contend: - (a) there is some natural genetic reason whites do better (i.e. eugenics ownz) - (b) there is some sort of bias at the universities - (c) there is some socio-economic reason other races struggle to get to university and to do as well as whites on their SATs or equivalent
I would hope (a) is unacceptable to you. I think you will find (b) and (c) are more likely explanations - so what do we do about it? Leave things be?
A may or may not be right, but it's largely irrelevant(*). I'm going to ignore B for now.
Let's look at C. The logic becomes: more whites get into uni. White people tend to belong to better socio-economic groups. Therefore, we'll legislate a certain number of places for minority groups.
Excuse me, I missed something. First, we're talking about white people getting into uni largely because they've got more money. Then, we ignore that and say that we have to let minorities in.
You are better off instead making it possible for people from those lower socio-economic groups, regardless of race, to go to uni.
Eminem made a quote recently along the lines of race not mattering much anymore. It was something like "a poor white kid has more in common with the poor black kid than he does with a rich white kid." Sums it up beautifully.
The whole problem with affirmative action is that it aims to correct an imbalance by discriminating along racial/gender/etc lines.
(*) How many elite sprinters are white? How many boxers? There are physical differences between the various sub-species that may contribute towards things like whites doing better at SATs. Anyone who says anything different is a politically correct nutter. But I'd bet you anything you like that the differences are not significant enough to explain the discrepencies, within at least an order of magnitude.
I'm of the firm opinion that open-source software should not be legislated for. Instead, it should compete on its own merits.
However, I'm also of the firm opinion that, at least for government documents, the format of the data should be, by law, an open format. That is, a format that is completely and openly described, and with an open-source viewer (as a reference implementation).
Furthermore, the software products that government workers use should, by default, save in the open format, without loss of functionality. In other words, "Save As..." doesn't cut the mustard.
Once that is in place, applications will be able to play on a more level playing ground. Furthermore, there won't be the risk of documents being lost because there is no longer any software available that can read them.
Of course, but the question is whether the government should be in the business of controlling and regulating the use of that language, as the French government does. If the French language cannot survive in its current form without artificial government intervention, then its current form is not a "living" language at all - but a nostalgic fiction.
Of course they can. A government has the perfect right to say what words go into official government reports. They're not going to stomp out the word 'email' in non-government reports, after all.
Furthermore, the government has the duty to define the official language; the education department sets the curriculum by which language skills are taught in school. Most such curriculum tend to avoid the use of slang and jargon, after all.
Unless they are in a work of Orwellian fiction - governments have no business telling their populations what words they can and cannot use.
RTFA: the French government is only preventing the use of 'email' in official government documents.
So, while e-commerce patents are indeed questionable by nature the Austrilian goverment is lead by very different reasons to void them: They want to give their own Aussie based companies a commercial advantage over US competitors. Australian companies won't have to invest money into the development of innovative, high-tech business model and are protect from paying any patent fees by Australian law. Thus they gain a huge advantage by cutting their e-commerce cost by 20 percent.
Well, as it's only one patent that's being blocked, your response seem overly general. The one patent in question doesn't seem to have had much of a "innovative, high-tech business model" behind it.
Furthermore, there are several Australian companies that hold e-commerce patents. I used to work for one that had patents on a method of processing online credit-card payments (and it actually appeared to me to be genuinely innovative).
And before you get on your high horse about Australia's violations of the WIPO, I suggest you look into the US's own violations.
I fully agree with your last statement, however. It's the duty of a government to act for the benefit of all citizens, and that's just what the Australian government is doing (for a change).:)
As I understand it, if I used a DLL distributed under the LGPL, I wouldn't have to worry about section 6. I'd just link it in and I wouldn't care.
With Java, however, you have to meet a bunch of restrictions. But we want people to be able to use our open-source JARs as easily as if they were using a DLL, license wise.
If I'm wrong, and using a DLL fits under Section 6 the same way, feel free to correct me.
The GPL is viral. But then, so are most licenses that permit re-use (including all commercial ones, by their very nature).
A viral license is one that propogates itself into your own licensing scheme, should you chose to relicense your code. For example, if I wrote some software, using GPL code for part of it, I couldn't release the software as a whole under the BSD license because I would have to include the GPL license. That's viral; the GPL has propogated into your license. Heck, that's the whole bloody point of it.
Any license that constrains what you can do with your own license would be viral. Even if all it was is a one-line acknowledgement somewhere in the guts of the doco, it would still be viral. Of course, the better viral licenses require that the infected license also becomes viral.:)
The BSD license, by contrast, isn't viral: you can do what you want with the code. Including stealing it, branding it as your own, and packaging it up within your closed-source product. RMS and the FSF didn't like that, which is why they wrote the GPL and the LGPL; to prevent "freed" software from being "captured" again.
To paraphrase your last line: If you find some really neat library under [insert any license here] that you want to use, and you don't want to follow the terms, well: tough luck. I fully agree with this sentiment.
I disagree. Let's imagine for a minute that everyone provides an accurate profile, targeted marketing works, sales increase, and the advertiser gets rich.
You really think that the money they spend on advertising will level off?
Yes. If your product is selling like hotcakes, you don't need to spend money advertising it.
Advertising is an overhead for a business, and businesses like to cut back on overheads when they can.
There is a significant difference to logging in to a site in order to participate in conversation and logging in to simply read news. At/., posting requires an identity, since anonymous postings are mostly ignored. However, there is absolutely no requirement that one log in to/. in order to read the stories. Your anology is broken. Privacy should be a choice. At/. one has that choice, with the NYT one does not.
Anyone can read the New York Times anonymously. It involves dropping some cash at your local news agent.
The web site is a bonus, and one you don't even have to pay cash for. If you don't like it, don't use it; support your local newsagency instead.
It's a station wagon full of backup tapes. 20GB Travan tapes are about the size of a cigarette pack.
While I'm not personally familar with how many cigaratte packs you can fit into a station wagon, I would imagine it's several hundered, if not a few thousand.
Or mod the parent of this one was incomplete... care to explain what I got wrong?
Sure, it's a little simple, but it presents, at a high-school physics level, the explanation. If you've got a better one (at the same level, not the college post-grad one), feel free.
Most models of the Big Bang have energy pretty randomly distributed over the entire universe. Admittedly, the universe was a lot smaller in those days.
According to the theory, matter coalesced out of the primidal (and extremely high entropy) soup as the universe expanded and cooled off, at the ripe old age of about 10^-43 seconds. This was obviously a decrease of entropy; matter represents a greater concentration of energy than plasma does.
About 3 minutes in, the matter started forming into matter; still greater concentration. A few hundred thousand years later, there were stars and galaxies forming. In fact, arguably, at the cosmic scale, the universe has done nothing but become more and more organised, in direct violation of the Laws of Thermodynamics. Sure, that may change one day, but 15 billion-odd years of violating the Law means it's not much of a Law, is it? I mean, by comparision, P2P filesharers are upstanding citizens and great respecters of copyright.
The Laws of Thermodynamics apply to the motion of particles in a fluid, and the transfer of heat in said fluid. You take it out of that context, and you're no longer playing in the right arena.
Actually, most scientific theories called Laws are relics of the 19th century or earlier. Hence, for example, Newton's Laws of Motion and Gravity, all of which were found to be approximations. We don't call them Laws these days, we call them theories (such as the theory of relativity... it was special relativity that superseded the Laws of Motion and Gravity).
Heck, under some of those theories, some of the Laws refer to things that don't exist. For example, gravity isn't a force, but a curvature in space-time, according to special relativity.
Oh, and I never said that the Laws of Thermodynamics were invalid; I said that they were a description of what we have seen experimentally to occur. That doesn't mean you can't violate them, just that we haven't worked out how to do it (while the Universe may have...)
The "Laws of Thermodynamics" are a description of what is observed to happen to gases under experimental conditions. There's no real evidence that they scale out, you know, and a fair bit to hint that they don't. And even if they do apply, we know that they talk about what happens in the long term. They don't apply short-term.
Hmmm... energy can't be created. What did the Big Bang do, then?
Hmmm... systems tend towards maximum entropy, but over the medium term (like several billion years), it appears that there's a bias towards increasing complexity, actually.
I mean, the universe, not long after the Big Bang, was a pretty high-entropy environment. Then things like stars and galaxies started coming out of the mix. And then you can get self-replicating systems that tend towards complexity as well.
Heck, in any case, even if you can't get perpetual motion, there's nothing say you can't get "several million years" motion, is there? I'd settle for that.
Besides, you have to realise it's kooks who come up with whacky ideas and find ways to achieve them. The first step to achieving the impossible is to think that "hey, maybe it is possible after all".
IBM have lots of patents because they've got good engineers who come up with a lot of ideas.
However, IBM management have looked at the situation and basically come up with the following:
If I've got good engineers who understand my technology really well, they could probably understand other technology really well also. Therefore, I gain if technology isn't patented; sure, people can try to steal my technology, but I can try to steal theirs, and I'm better at it.
However, if I can't steal their technology, I'd better make sure they can't steal mine.
This makes it easy to understand why one of the most patent-laden companies in the world wants to limit patents.:) More power to them, I say.
(Oh, and the countries that ignore IP laws, like China, will command more and more of the market share; it costs a lot of money to come up with something new, but relatively little to rip it off. Spend your "R&D" budget on industrial espionage instead)
Erm, so are they saying that current now flows from a positively charged source to negative one?
If there is a positively charged object and a negatively charged object, they exert an equal attractive force on each other, right?
F = ma, or: a = F/m. The heavier the object, the slower it will accelerate due to the force.
Now, in a wire, the negatively charged electrons are significantly lighter than the positively charged nuclei they've detactched from. So it's the electrons that move in an electrical circuit.
However, we're not talking about an eletrical circuit here. We're talking about charged ions. Ions are atoms or molecules, not sub-atomic particles. It can be quite easy for positively charged ions to be lighter than the negatively charged ions, and thus the positive ions move instead. Even when the positive ions are heavier, they won't be so disproportionately heavy, so they'll still move.
A) Mercury does rotate. However, your "proper answer" got it wrong; while Mercury rotates on its axis every 58.6 days, it's moved a long way around the sun in that same time. As a result, it's day (period between one sunrise and the next) takes longer than its rotation period. In fact, it takes about 3 rotations to get one 'day'. Also, because of the elliptical orbit and long rotation period, you can get a funky double-sunset effect, when the sun sets, then rises again in reverse before setting again.
B) Mercury does so have an atmosphere. The atmosphere is, on average, about 440K; quite hot enough. The night side is cold, not because there is no atmosphere, but because the atmosphere is so thin it radiates the heat away into space very fast. Mercury actually has a very turbulent convenction system, especially around the terminator line.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, they do. However, the total number of bank tellers has dropped substantially since 1970 (along with the number of bank branches). That's thanks to the ATM, credit cards, and EFTPOS.
I'm not saying these kiosks aren't going to become more prevalent, but they won't replace actual human contact. Having previously worked in many service related jobs I know that people (especially older adults) will not allow this to occur.
I like your term: "older adults". Did you check out the time line here? It's fifty years in the future. The vast majority of those "older adults" (and a large proportion of younger adults) will be dead.
In fifty years time, people who will be born this year will be in the older half of the population. The percentage of people who aren't comfortable with today's level of automation or higher will be miniscule.
The robotic future will happen, it's just a question of time. The economies of the world will have to adapt to handle massive unemployment (a significant percentage of people are not suitable for anything but labour intensive work).
One thing that the article left out, though: when will the first robot riot occur (that is, a riot of people attacking robots for "stealing our jobs!")
Mind you, that won't make RMS say nice things about Macs.
WordPad is an app. You can't easily embed it into your own.
The stuff in Panther is built into the OS, not the TextEdit app. Big difference.
(MS could change WordPad easily enough; creating new COM interfaces would do the trick)
Personally, whenever I see a service that requires Windows (and only Windows) to access it, I avoid it.
I changed banks because the internet banking client was Windows only (they've now gone web-based). The only thing I still have to do via Windows when it comes to interacting with outside groups is tax lodgement. If the Australian government ever releases a Mac or Linux version of e-tax, I'll use it instead.
Then you live in an area that's too expensive. Maybe you should move to India?
The open-source viewer is a requirement to show that the data format is in fact implementable and adhered to. It helps avoid ambiguities if you like.
Furthermore, it provides a reference implementation for other vendors.
Such a viewer would not necessarily be usuable. Features I would not expect to see would include:
* printing
* editing (duh!)
* search capabilities
* clipboard support
* easy navigation
Essentially, if all it was was a window with a scroll bar to let you scroll through the rendered document, it will have met the criteria.
I think the average Aussie would sooner eat their Akubra than become the 52nd state of the US. Why on earth would we want to drop our standard of living to match yours?
However, you're welcome to become our 9th state (New Zealand will be the 8th).
(Of course, we'd have to have Akubra's to eat... stupid stereotypes)
It should, but for different reasons. In the case of the rest of the world, they would like to keep money in the country.
For the US, they should care about having a diversified IT sector. The US government is a large enough client that it could choose three or four software suites, and insist that they play nicely together. I mean, do the government only buy cars from one manufacturer?
A may or may not be right, but it's largely irrelevant(*). I'm going to ignore B for now.
Let's look at C. The logic becomes: more whites get into uni. White people tend to belong to better socio-economic groups. Therefore, we'll legislate a certain number of places for minority groups.
Excuse me, I missed something. First, we're talking about white people getting into uni largely because they've got more money. Then, we ignore that and say that we have to let minorities in.
You are better off instead making it possible for people from those lower socio-economic groups, regardless of race, to go to uni.
Eminem made a quote recently along the lines of race not mattering much anymore. It was something like "a poor white kid has more in common with the poor black kid than he does with a rich white kid." Sums it up beautifully.
The whole problem with affirmative action is that it aims to correct an imbalance by discriminating along racial/gender/etc lines.
(*) How many elite sprinters are white? How many boxers? There are physical differences between the various sub-species that may contribute towards things like whites doing better at SATs. Anyone who says anything different is a politically correct nutter. But I'd bet you anything you like that the differences are not significant enough to explain the discrepencies, within at least an order of magnitude.
I'm of the firm opinion that open-source software should not be legislated for. Instead, it should compete on its own merits.
However, I'm also of the firm opinion that, at least for government documents, the format of the data should be, by law, an open format. That is, a format that is completely and openly described, and with an open-source viewer (as a reference implementation).
Furthermore, the software products that government workers use should, by default, save in the open format, without loss of functionality. In other words, "Save As..." doesn't cut the mustard.
Once that is in place, applications will be able to play on a more level playing ground. Furthermore, there won't be the risk of documents being lost because there is no longer any software available that can read them.
Of course they can. A government has the perfect right to say what words go into official government reports. They're not going to stomp out the word 'email' in non-government reports, after all.
Furthermore, the government has the duty to define the official language; the education department sets the curriculum by which language skills are taught in school. Most such curriculum tend to avoid the use of slang and jargon, after all.
RTFA: the French government is only preventing the use of 'email' in official government documents.
Well, as it's only one patent that's being blocked, your response seem overly general. The one patent in question doesn't seem to have had much of a "innovative, high-tech business model" behind it.
Furthermore, there are several Australian companies that hold e-commerce patents. I used to work for one that had patents on a method of processing online credit-card payments (and it actually appeared to me to be genuinely innovative).
And before you get on your high horse about Australia's violations of the WIPO, I suggest you look into the US's own violations.
I fully agree with your last statement, however. It's the duty of a government to act for the benefit of all citizens, and that's just what the Australian government is doing (for a change).
But that's what we don't want.
As I understand it, if I used a DLL distributed under the LGPL, I wouldn't have to worry about section 6. I'd just link it in and I wouldn't care.
With Java, however, you have to meet a bunch of restrictions. But we want people to be able to use our open-source JARs as easily as if they were using a DLL, license wise.
If I'm wrong, and using a DLL fits under Section 6 the same way, feel free to correct me.
The GPL is viral. But then, so are most licenses that permit re-use (including all commercial ones, by their very nature).
:)
A viral license is one that propogates itself into your own licensing scheme, should you chose to relicense your code. For example, if I wrote some software, using GPL code for part of it, I couldn't release the software as a whole under the BSD license because I would have to include the GPL license. That's viral; the GPL has propogated into your license. Heck, that's the whole bloody point of it.
Any license that constrains what you can do with your own license would be viral. Even if all it was is a one-line acknowledgement somewhere in the guts of the doco, it would still be viral. Of course, the better viral licenses require that the infected license also becomes viral.
The BSD license, by contrast, isn't viral: you can do what you want with the code. Including stealing it, branding it as your own, and packaging it up within your closed-source product. RMS and the FSF didn't like that, which is why they wrote the GPL and the LGPL; to prevent "freed" software from being "captured" again.
To paraphrase your last line: If you find some really neat library under [insert any license here] that you want to use, and you don't want to follow the terms, well: tough luck. I fully agree with this sentiment.
Yes. If your product is selling like hotcakes, you don't need to spend money advertising it.
Advertising is an overhead for a business, and businesses like to cut back on overheads when they can.
Anyone can read the New York Times anonymously. It involves dropping some cash at your local news agent.
The web site is a bonus, and one you don't even have to pay cash for. If you don't like it, don't use it; support your local newsagency instead.
Ahem.
It's a station wagon full of backup tapes. 20GB Travan tapes are about the size of a cigarette pack.
While I'm not personally familar with how many cigaratte packs you can fit into a station wagon, I would imagine it's several hundered, if not a few thousand.
What's your cutoff point?
I take it you're volunteering to be a candidate for herd-thinning?
Or mod the parent of this one was incomplete... care to explain what I got wrong?
Sure, it's a little simple, but it presents, at a high-school physics level, the explanation. If you've got a better one (at the same level, not the college post-grad one), feel free.
Most models of the Big Bang have energy pretty randomly distributed over the entire universe. Admittedly, the universe was a lot smaller in those days.
According to the theory, matter coalesced out of the primidal (and extremely high entropy) soup as the universe expanded and cooled off, at the ripe old age of about 10^-43 seconds. This was obviously a decrease of entropy; matter represents a greater concentration of energy than plasma does.
About 3 minutes in, the matter started forming into matter; still greater concentration. A few hundred thousand years later, there were stars and galaxies forming. In fact, arguably, at the cosmic scale, the universe has done nothing but become more and more organised, in direct violation of the Laws of Thermodynamics. Sure, that may change one day, but 15 billion-odd years of violating the Law means it's not much of a Law, is it? I mean, by comparision, P2P filesharers are upstanding citizens and great respecters of copyright.
The Laws of Thermodynamics apply to the motion of particles in a fluid, and the transfer of heat in said fluid. You take it out of that context, and you're no longer playing in the right arena.
Actually, most scientific theories called Laws are relics of the 19th century or earlier. Hence, for example, Newton's Laws of Motion and Gravity, all of which were found to be approximations. We don't call them Laws these days, we call them theories (such as the theory of relativity... it was special relativity that superseded the Laws of Motion and Gravity).
Heck, under some of those theories, some of the Laws refer to things that don't exist. For example, gravity isn't a force, but a curvature in space-time, according to special relativity.
Oh, and I never said that the Laws of Thermodynamics were invalid; I said that they were a description of what we have seen experimentally to occur. That doesn't mean you can't violate them, just that we haven't worked out how to do it (while the Universe may have...)
The "Laws of Thermodynamics" are a description of what is observed to happen to gases under experimental conditions. There's no real evidence that they scale out, you know, and a fair bit to hint that they don't. And even if they do apply, we know that they talk about what happens in the long term. They don't apply short-term.
Hmmm... energy can't be created. What did the Big Bang do, then?
Hmmm... systems tend towards maximum entropy, but over the medium term (like several billion years), it appears that there's a bias towards increasing complexity, actually.
I mean, the universe, not long after the Big Bang, was a pretty high-entropy environment. Then things like stars and galaxies started coming out of the mix. And then you can get self-replicating systems that tend towards complexity as well.
Heck, in any case, even if you can't get perpetual motion, there's nothing say you can't get "several million years" motion, is there? I'd settle for that.
Besides, you have to realise it's kooks who come up with whacky ideas and find ways to achieve them. The first step to achieving the impossible is to think that "hey, maybe it is possible after all".
(All that said, I think Tilley was a scam artist)
However, IBM management have looked at the situation and basically come up with the following:
This makes it easy to understand why one of the most patent-laden companies in the world wants to limit patents.
(Oh, and the countries that ignore IP laws, like China, will command more and more of the market share; it costs a lot of money to come up with something new, but relatively little to rip it off. Spend your "R&D" budget on industrial espionage instead)
If there is a positively charged object and a negatively charged object, they exert an equal attractive force on each other, right?
F = ma, or: a = F/m. The heavier the object, the slower it will accelerate due to the force.
Now, in a wire, the negatively charged electrons are significantly lighter than the positively charged nuclei they've detactched from. So it's the electrons that move in an electrical circuit.
However, we're not talking about an eletrical circuit here. We're talking about charged ions. Ions are atoms or molecules, not sub-atomic particles. It can be quite easy for positively charged ions to be lighter than the negatively charged ions, and thus the positive ions move instead. Even when the positive ions are heavier, they won't be so disproportionately heavy, so they'll still move.
Keeping up now?
Seesh, did you read the proper answer?
A) Mercury does rotate. However, your "proper answer" got it wrong; while Mercury rotates on its axis every 58.6 days, it's moved a long way around the sun in that same time. As a result, it's day (period between one sunrise and the next) takes longer than its rotation period. In fact, it takes about 3 rotations to get one 'day'. Also, because of the elliptical orbit and long rotation period, you can get a funky double-sunset effect, when the sun sets, then rises again in reverse before setting again.
B) Mercury does so have an atmosphere. The atmosphere is, on average, about 440K; quite hot enough. The night side is cold, not because there is no atmosphere, but because the atmosphere is so thin it radiates the heat away into space very fast. Mercury actually has a very turbulent convenction system, especially around the terminator line.