If you're talking about the back room of a walmart store, then maaaaaaybe. But installing static cameras and/or rails that capture EVERY location's contents accurately doesn't scale well with the 1 million sqft standalone warehouses they're talking about. The costs would far exceed any benefit. And gods forbid if you want to reconfigure your racks! Meanwhile, if you can make a $500 drone that can do inventory counts automatically, even if you have to manually program its flight path each time you change your rack layout, you've just saved a crapload of money.
I can think of a few reasons why robots may be more efficient.
- The Biggie(tm): the time the human spends traveling in racks is wasted time that's paid by the hour. Robots aren't paid by the hour, so even if the robots are half the speed of a human, you can simply deploy five times as many robots, and now you aren't paying people for travel time between pick faces AND you're moving more product with fewer man-hours.
- Racks don't need to be human-length, allowing more storage in less space.
- Product is lighter than a person, so moving it consumes less fuel. Fuel costs are a very serious expense in a warehouse.
- Robots can zip around gathering well-organized product faster than a human can think of where to move next. And even if the robot knows exactly where to take the human, it wouldn't be able to accelerate very fast without additional harnesses/restraints for the human.
- Easier to segregate high-value product. If the robots are bringing you just the SKU you need then nobody except the facility manager has a reason to be wandering around the iPad locker, which means fewer iPads growing legs. Missing product will be noticed very quickly if there's any kind of auditing.
- Lower inventory error rate, because a robot will never accidentally pick from the wrong location. Your cycle counts and physical inventories are suddenly looking much cleaner, especially on high-volume products.
With all of that said, "no human jobs are being taken" is complete, utter BS. Where do you think those up-to-40% savings are coming from? Yes, storage space, fuel, rent/property taxes, and shrinkage (depending on your security) are all major expenses, but by far the biggest cost in any warehouse operation is labor. The travel time between locations is time that's no longer going into the pockets of workers.
adjust the gasoline tax as needed to pay for highway repair
I'm guessing you're not from California, because they tried that. It was called Proposition 42, and voters passed it. They get billions from extra gas taxes, and it is consistently diverted to the general fund by congress because of wording that allows them to use do so in a deficit.
Somehow, voters didn't seem to understand that a vote for a tax increase was a vote to send the money directly to the general fund, one way or another. You'd think they'd get wise to it.
The only point a student could argue is that the Turnitin is using their papers for profit. At least, that's my big issue. Not that I'm arguing for Turnitin, but if you read their site, it says this:
Use of a work for non-profit educational purposes is presumptively fair, under most circumstances. 17 U.S.C. 107. However, although the overall purpose of creating a database of student works is to increase the efficacy of the TURNITIN plagiarism detection system, the system is provided to institutions on a for-profit basis, and is therefore commercial in nature.
Commercial use of a work may still be "fair use" under U.S. Copyright Law (17 U.S.C. 107), especially when less than the entire work is being used, and/or the use does not "materially impair the marketability of the work which is copied." Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enters., 471 U.S. 539, 566-67 (1985). Here, the actual work is used by the TURNITIN system only as a reference, for purposes of creating a separate work, the digital "fingerprint". If there is a match between a submitted work and fingerprinted portions of an archived student work, only that matching text is highlighted in the originality report.
The identification of a textual match between documents relays a fact, which is not protected from disclosure by the Copyright laws. 17 U.S.C. 102(b). Where there is no way to express the fact in question except by copying of the underlying material, the fact and the portion of the material representing it are said to have "merged", excluding the material itself from the ambit of copyright protection. Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Tel. Serv. Co., 499 U.S. 340, 349 (1991); Harper & Row Publishers, supra at 556; Veeck v. Southern Building Code Congress Int'l, Inc., 293 F.3d 791 (9th Cir., June 7, 2002). Because one cannot identify a passage as having been copied without matching it to the material that was putatively copied from, display of the matching material is not prohibited by copyright.
No other portions of the archived work are displayed, used, published, distributed or further copied without prior author consent. Compare, A&M Records, et al. v. Napster, at 1015 and 1019 (distribution of a copied work to the public without the copyright holder's consent implies that the copyright in the copied material may have been infringed). As such, the archival does not publish the work as a whole, or otherwise impinge on the author's ability to exploit the work commercially. Because the "primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors but '[to] promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts" (Veeck, supra as reported at 2002 U.S. App.LEXIS 10963, *25), the minimal use of a student's work to ferret out plagiarism in others works, without making the work itself available to the public, is a fair use that does not infringe any copyright which may be present in the archived work.
So, they're arguing that their use of your paper isn't removing your ability to commercially exploit the use of your paper. Unless it was a paper on how to detect plagiarism, and you were planning to sell it to people or use it as a basis for a service of your own.;)
I wouldn't be so angry if it was, say, a non-profit service from a university. Still, I'd imagine that it's hard to argue before a court that, unless you were planning to use your paper in the same way they are, or they're distributing it, any damage has been done to you.
I may be completely off base, so don't kill me if I'm dead wrong, please. In fact, I'd like to know what laws would specifically refute their statement, since IANAL...
I'll buy all my songs from iTMS when I can play the downloaded files directly, without having to waste a CD and have either a huge FLAC file or another lossy version, in foobar2000, without needing so much as Quicktime installed. Or whichever music store does it first.
I realize that being able to buy music in such novel ways as an online music store should be applauded, but until I can listen to it the way I want, I'm not going for it. And since that's, to say the least, very unlikely to happen, as there's IP to protect, I guess I'm out a new fad.
Does there need to be a point? Someone made an operating system just for fun, and all you can do is piss on it.
It's interesting. It doesn't have to be suitable for any purpose for that to happen. It's neat to look at. And if you have no use for it, then don't use it.
Better yet, make a post on the Internet about how useless it is. That'll show them.
As soon as they have Souther, Hillman Furay band for downloading. And maybe some more Weird Al. And definitely some Queen. And a few other things. And I miss some of the Shawn Phillips songs that aren't there, too.
Sorry, iTunes does not have nearly all the songs I would like.
Although they DID have the Eliminator album, so that's something right.
Only he's able to do that. In one episode, as I recall, when the nephews tried to swim with him, they just smacked right into it.
And for the record, my money bin WOULD be on top of a hill with a gigantic dollar sign on it. And it would have all of his traps, too. Except it would have more SSMs to keep the Beagle Boys and other such burglers out....yeah, okay, so my childhood was largely constructed of Disney Afternoon...
Gee, that's odd, for the past, well, forever, US corporations, and their lackey government, have been the leaders in citizen oppression. Looks like we need to step it up a notch. Hilary, Jack, you guys listening? If Swedish parliament has a shot at passing such a sweeping law, you should be ashamed of yourselves for falling behind. What we need in the U.S. right now is $10 taxes on CDs. That'll teach those legitimate users who's in charge of the pictures they burn onto CDs and send to their relatives!
Anyway, in other news...
The sky is falling! The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
P.S. I'm trying to be funny, if you didn't notice. And yes, I DO know better than what I just said. Thanks.
Pokemon Snap was fun. Red/Blue was primitive, but I played that game a LOT. I followed up on everything about the games, and even tried some of the fifty rumored ways to catch Mew or non-existant Pokemon. But yeah, endless sequels kills pretty much anything. Or maybe I just grew up. Oh, well, I still keep my eye on it if it ever comes up (it's popular on GameFAQs at the moment), just because I was such a huge closet fan.
So anyway, I've even been looking back at all the new stuff that's come out since I stopped buying it (last game or anything Pokemon related that I bought was Silver). When I recently discovered that there WAS a semi-legitimate way to catch Mew (i.e. no Gameshark or external devices, but it uses a buffer overflow exploit in the game, like the infinite items thing), my heart jumped. All that time, I could have had a Mew.
Mew, by the way, kicks serious ass.
- Dane
P.S. I didn't see The Wizard, and my parents made a good effort to make sure I never did. I got the power glove, but that was a horrendous piece of crap. I couldn't even get Punch-Out to work with it 90% of the time. Much better was the Advantage -- until the joystick broke off, that was by far my favorite peripheral that Nintendo had made. Oh, and does anyone remember the Oreo/SMB3 contest? $5 off any game. Wee.
I was thinking the same thing. I didn't have much time to get into amateur radio, but I still had some fun with it. Just hope they don't decide to knock out everything but 2 meters or something... we can pray, at least, that this act is passed.
Most of those I could at least see some iota of merit in if I was a baboon mashing a big, green "approved" button that is apparently being currently applied at the patent office (I call dibs on that patent LOLLERZ), but this one scares me:
Quicksort implemented using a linked list of pointers to the objects to be sorted.
So, they... patented an implementation of a second year CS sorting algorith? If I knew it was as simple as LINKED LIST + QUICKSORT = TEH PATENT I could have had made several by now. I mean, that somehow seems obvious to me...
Oh, that's before I read the one below it:
Generation of random numbers by feeding the output of one random number generator into the input of another random number generator.
Uhhhhh, I did this in Visual Basic in my eleventh grade "intro to programming" course, which was basically a BS course where they gave us the source code to all the programs they wanted us to implement. Just to make sure, I checked the patent office, and sure enough... huh, looks like I need to be hauled off! At least it's expired now... I hope.
Anyway, those are all pretty much stupid, so I'll stop right here and just say that anybody involved in approving those patents are at best a waste of tax dollars.
Error: Illegal operation. That's 'as', not your stupid Hello, World program you're trying to assemble. Get with the times. At least use C#, dude. You embarrass us both. Try it again and I'll forward your keystrokes for the past five months to the FBI. Just remember how easy it is to forget to delete history that may or may not connect you to some certain ildche 0npre.
Sorry. That's what I thought when I saw that. I mean, I'm really sorry. That was a pretty stupid joke...
What I don't get is why the parent rarely ever gets modded up, but "MICROSOFT SUX THEY COPY EVERYTHING HURR HURR" gets a five every single time. It boggles the mind...
Two cases were the Internet retailer screwed up and got hit with CA's sales and use tax are Borders.com and Bn.com. Essentially, these two "click-through" retailers had no direct physical presence within CA. But, the two retailers had "brick-and-mortar" affiliates, Border's Bookstores, and Barnes & Nobles, Booksellers, respectively. The two legally and supposedly financially separated "click-through" and "bricks-and-mortar" companies were so closely affiliated that the CA taxing authority (and the administrative appeal Board) felt that the "click-through" company fulfilled the Quill "substantial nexus" test. These guys so intertwined their businesses that they shared marketing functions, and allowed customers to returns books purchased at "click-through" store to the "bricks-and-mortar" store.
So, the rule, if you don't want to be forced to collect state sales/use taxes, is don't put a physical presence in the state and don't so intertwine your "click-through" business with a local "bricks-and-mortar" business that the "bricks-and-mortar's" physical presence gets imputed to you via agency.
So, if more states start doing this, then I'll have to pay dozens of states' worth of tax on one item. Yay.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're talking about the back room of a walmart store, then maaaaaaybe. But installing static cameras and/or rails that capture EVERY location's contents accurately doesn't scale well with the 1 million sqft standalone warehouses they're talking about. The costs would far exceed any benefit. And gods forbid if you want to reconfigure your racks! Meanwhile, if you can make a $500 drone that can do inventory counts automatically, even if you have to manually program its flight path each time you change your rack layout, you've just saved a crapload of money.
I can think of a few reasons why robots may be more efficient.
- The Biggie(tm): the time the human spends traveling in racks is wasted time that's paid by the hour. Robots aren't paid by the hour, so even if the robots are half the speed of a human, you can simply deploy five times as many robots, and now you aren't paying people for travel time between pick faces AND you're moving more product with fewer man-hours.
- Racks don't need to be human-length, allowing more storage in less space.
- Product is lighter than a person, so moving it consumes less fuel. Fuel costs are a very serious expense in a warehouse.
- Robots can zip around gathering well-organized product faster than a human can think of where to move next. And even if the robot knows exactly where to take the human, it wouldn't be able to accelerate very fast without additional harnesses/restraints for the human.
- Easier to segregate high-value product. If the robots are bringing you just the SKU you need then nobody except the facility manager has a reason to be wandering around the iPad locker, which means fewer iPads growing legs. Missing product will be noticed very quickly if there's any kind of auditing.
- Lower inventory error rate, because a robot will never accidentally pick from the wrong location. Your cycle counts and physical inventories are suddenly looking much cleaner, especially on high-volume products.
With all of that said, "no human jobs are being taken" is complete, utter BS. Where do you think those up-to-40% savings are coming from? Yes, storage space, fuel, rent/property taxes, and shrinkage (depending on your security) are all major expenses, but by far the biggest cost in any warehouse operation is labor. The travel time between locations is time that's no longer going into the pockets of workers.
That was an amazing post. I wish I had mod points to give you.
adjust the gasoline tax as needed to pay for highway repair
I'm guessing you're not from California, because they tried that. It was called Proposition 42, and voters passed it. They get billions from extra gas taxes, and it is consistently diverted to the general fund by congress because of wording that allows them to use do so in a deficit.
Somehow, voters didn't seem to understand that a vote for a tax increase was a vote to send the money directly to the general fund, one way or another. You'd think they'd get wise to it.
Just use "for" for expanding wildcards.
Mini-howto:
Make directory "here" and batch file "foo.bat"
Put single line into batch file:
for %%f in (*.m4p) do DeDRMS "%%f"
Run the batch file.
No, but that's your fault for dealing with people who won't cooperate with you and having them send e-mail to such an "untrusted" place.
just desserts
just deserts
Yes, but hydroxilic acid sounds so much more menacing.
So, they're arguing that their use of your paper isn't removing your ability to commercially exploit the use of your paper. Unless it was a paper on how to detect plagiarism, and you were planning to sell it to people or use it as a basis for a service of your own.
I wouldn't be so angry if it was, say, a non-profit service from a university. Still, I'd imagine that it's hard to argue before a court that, unless you were planning to use your paper in the same way they are, or they're distributing it, any damage has been done to you.
I may be completely off base, so don't kill me if I'm dead wrong, please. In fact, I'd like to know what laws would specifically refute their statement, since IANAL...
I'll buy all my songs from iTMS when I can play the downloaded files directly, without having to waste a CD and have either a huge FLAC file or another lossy version, in foobar2000, without needing so much as Quicktime installed. Or whichever music store does it first.
I realize that being able to buy music in such novel ways as an online music store should be applauded, but until I can listen to it the way I want, I'm not going for it. And since that's, to say the least, very unlikely to happen, as there's IP to protect, I guess I'm out a new fad.
Does there need to be a point? Someone made an operating system just for fun, and all you can do is piss on it.
It's interesting. It doesn't have to be suitable for any purpose for that to happen. It's neat to look at. And if you have no use for it, then don't use it.
Better yet, make a post on the Internet about how useless it is. That'll show them.
As soon as they have Souther, Hillman Furay band for downloading. And maybe some more Weird Al. And definitely some Queen. And a few other things. And I miss some of the Shawn Phillips songs that aren't there, too. Sorry, iTunes does not have nearly all the songs I would like. Although they DID have the Eliminator album, so that's something right.
Seriously.
http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=315
Which is also depricated, IIRC. I wonder what they're going to do for a mail client now?
Well, then, um, don't use them? This isn't exactly being forced upon you.
Only he's able to do that. In one episode, as I recall, when the nephews tried to swim with him, they just smacked right into it. And for the record, my money bin WOULD be on top of a hill with a gigantic dollar sign on it. And it would have all of his traps, too. Except it would have more SSMs to keep the Beagle Boys and other such burglers out. ...yeah, okay, so my childhood was largely constructed of Disney Afternoon...
Gee, that's odd, for the past, well, forever, US corporations, and their lackey government, have been the leaders in citizen oppression. Looks like we need to step it up a notch. Hilary, Jack, you guys listening? If Swedish parliament has a shot at passing such a sweeping law, you should be ashamed of yourselves for falling behind. What we need in the U.S. right now is $10 taxes on CDs. That'll teach those legitimate users who's in charge of the pictures they burn onto CDs and send to their relatives!
Anyway, in other news...
The sky is falling!
The sky is falling!
The sky is falling!
P.S. I'm trying to be funny, if you didn't notice. And yes, I DO know better than what I just said. Thanks.
Pokemon Snap was fun. Red/Blue was primitive, but I played that game a LOT. I followed up on everything about the games, and even tried some of the fifty rumored ways to catch Mew or non-existant Pokemon. But yeah, endless sequels kills pretty much anything. Or maybe I just grew up. Oh, well, I still keep my eye on it if it ever comes up (it's popular on GameFAQs at the moment), just because I was such a huge closet fan.
So anyway, I've even been looking back at all the new stuff that's come out since I stopped buying it (last game or anything Pokemon related that I bought was Silver). When I recently discovered that there WAS a semi-legitimate way to catch Mew (i.e. no Gameshark or external devices, but it uses a buffer overflow exploit in the game, like the infinite items thing), my heart jumped. All that time, I could have had a Mew.
Mew, by the way, kicks serious ass.
- Dane
P.S. I didn't see The Wizard, and my parents made a good effort to make sure I never did. I got the power glove, but that was a horrendous piece of crap. I couldn't even get Punch-Out to work with it 90% of the time. Much better was the Advantage -- until the joystick broke off, that was by far my favorite peripheral that Nintendo had made. Oh, and does anyone remember the Oreo/SMB3 contest? $5 off any game. Wee.
I was thinking the same thing. I didn't have much time to get into amateur radio, but I still had some fun with it. Just hope they don't decide to knock out everything but 2 meters or something... we can pray, at least, that this act is passed.
- KF6KBP
Most of those I could at least see some iota of merit in if I was a baboon mashing a big, green "approved" button that is apparently being currently applied at the patent office (I call dibs on that patent LOLLERZ), but this one scares me:
Quicksort implemented using a linked list of pointers to the objects to be sorted.
So, they... patented an implementation of a second year CS sorting algorith? If I knew it was as simple as LINKED LIST + QUICKSORT = TEH PATENT I could have had made several by now. I mean, that somehow seems obvious to me...
Oh, that's before I read the one below it:
Generation of random numbers by feeding the output of one random number generator into the input of another random number generator.
Uhhhhh, I did this in Visual Basic in my eleventh grade "intro to programming" course, which was basically a BS course where they gave us the source code to all the programs they wanted us to implement. Just to make sure, I checked the patent office, and sure enough... huh, looks like I need to be hauled off! At least it's expired now... I hope.
Anyway, those are all pretty much stupid, so I'll stop right here and just say that anybody involved in approving those patents are at best a waste of tax dollars.
What I don't get is why the parent rarely ever gets modded up, but "MICROSOFT SUX THEY COPY EVERYTHING HURR HURR" gets a five every single time. It boggles the mind...
Or just pay whatever the lowest price is, like a good capitalist.
Two cases were the Internet retailer screwed up and got hit with CA's sales and use tax are Borders.com and Bn.com. Essentially, these two "click-through" retailers had no direct physical presence within CA. But, the two retailers had "brick-and-mortar" affiliates, Border's Bookstores, and Barnes & Nobles, Booksellers, respectively. The two legally and supposedly financially separated "click-through" and "bricks-and-mortar" companies were so closely affiliated that the CA taxing authority (and the administrative appeal Board) felt that the "click-through" company fulfilled the Quill "substantial nexus" test. These guys so intertwined their businesses that they shared marketing functions, and allowed customers to returns books purchased at "click-through" store to the "bricks-and-mortar" store.
So, the rule, if you don't want to be forced to collect state sales/use taxes, is don't put a physical presence in the state and don't so intertwine your "click-through" business with a local "bricks-and-mortar" business that the "bricks-and-mortar's" physical presence gets imputed to you via agency.
So, if more states start doing this, then I'll have to pay dozens of states' worth of tax on one item. Yay.
It's sad- RMS must have some big feelings of inadequacy to press the issue so hard and so often.
<voice="Shrek">Ya think he's overcompensating for something?</voice>