Actually i forgot to make my main point. Is selling stuff on Etsy a viable primary job at the moment? No, unless you're amazingly talented (at business as well as art) there's no way you can make enough to house and feed yourself. Now what if you've already gotten those needs taken care of and you just need some cash for luxuries? And what if those luxuries are a fraction of the cost they used to be due to automation? Selling enough on Etsy to get $25 to buy a new smartphone is certainly possible. Or you could work a couple hours a day at the local fast food place. (They're not _all_ going to go out of business just because military style food is available for free.) Or any other number of jobs.
There well be fewer jobs available, or rather fewer person-hours of such jobs available, but if all people need to work for is luxuries then just working a couple hours a week is entirely feasible. Employers would no longer be able to force an ever-shrinking employee base to work harder and longer under threat of unemployment because being unemployed just wouldn't be that bad.
First of all a minor nitpick, "substandard food"? The government is perfectly capable of providing decent nutrition. Military food certainly isn't popular, but i'm pretty sure it's quite a bit healthier than the "tasty" fast food that a lot of the poor currently subsist on.
Second of all i'm not saying that this solution will fix everything, but it will provide a foundation from which to work on. If everyone is housed and everyone is fed and everyone is informed (at least as much as they want to be) then we'll have have time to muddle through the blowback of increased automation. (If all the plutocrats stop paying workers then who's going to be buying their products? Other plutocrats?)
Eventually there will be advanced enough automation that we can all sit back and live in a utopia (presuming the energy/resource demands don't destroy our planet) but there's going to be a lot of stumbling blocks between here and there. One of the first of which is going to be if you try to start redistributing the wealth before there is enough for everyone.
"I'm an advocate of instituting a basic income, so that everyone can can have a decent life even if there is no work available. The arguments against has always been that people won't want to work, but really those very few who don't want to work at all in a world were very little work is available shouldn't, leave it to those who do, they will be much more motivated."
I agree, but with one fundamental change. The government should not be providing an income, it should be providing things. The classic problem with a welfare state is that people always want more and will spend what they have on the "wrong" things. The dystopic version which frequently shows up in SF involves 90% or more of the population "on the dole" with whichever politician is willing to increase the dole getting elected, until the entire system undergoes complete economic collapse.
So instead of providing everyone with a basic living allowance, instead provide basic housing, basic food and basic information connectivity. And by basic i mean an 100 sq ft or less dorm style room and three meals a day of school/military quality food. Said apartments ought to have a basic computer that can connect to the net and do word processing and such and that's about it, and have a basic cable hookup.
Obviously that would have a drastic impact on a couple areas of the economy, but it's quite possible that just handing out welfare checks to everyone would have worse effects in the long run. Under the system above no one would be at risk of death if they couldn't find a job, but there would still be plenty of incentive to find some kind of work so you could afford better food or be able to buy the luxuries being advertised on your free cable shows.
Automated taxis would be a huge improvement, at least once the technology is fully developed. If every car on the road is controlled by AI then they can all drive in the most fuel-efficient manner. When you ask for a car you'll state how many passengers there are and you will be sent the smallest (and therefore most fuel efficient) car possible for that number of people. And finally all the cars in fleet would be of a more modern (and thus more fuel efficient) type.
"They added choice ingredients to brew a little brew,
But they didn't know the wires were crossed in Chamber Number Two.
A tiny bit of space got folded, things were looking queer --
They turned the spout and then came out the world's first Hyper-Beer."
Uh, i got the Gingerbread OTA update on my Nexus One last night. They announced it sometime last week. Everyone with an N1 should have the update within another week or two.
I've heard all this before. You can make cute little memory associations that will let you easily remember a really long number, or a sequence of cards, or whatever.
That's great if you want to amaze your friends or count cards in Vegas, but i don't think that's going to be of much practical use in my day to day life. Certainly not compared to the effort required. What i really need is a way to remember how i solved a particular programming problem six months ago. Or what the best algorithm is for a particular task. Things that can't be summed up as a simple number. Some people get asked "do you know how to do X" and they say "Why yes! I dealt with that six months ago, and this is how you solve the problem!" When posed with the same question i usually say "Uh, i dealt with something like that six months ago, let me see if i wrote it down in my notes." If that fails (which it often does, since i can never be sure what i'll need to remember later at the time that it happens) i'll spend fifteen minutes (or more) searching through old code trying to remind myself how exactly i dealt with it.
So some people (namely me) have far worse than average memory (which definitely implies there are others with far better than average memory, despite what he says) but his method certainly isn't going to help me, and i can't think of any kind of simple training that would.
And this would be reason number 7329 to _not_ use alternative app markets, especially if they're hosted in China. The ability to install unauthorized apps is great, but that ability should only be used if you can download the apk file directly from someone you have reason to trust. I've done that a couple times and not had any problem.
This may change slightly once Amazon and others start putting up their own app stores with their own authorization process, but that's entirely different from installing some random market run by nobody you've ever heard of before.
"Most amusingly, however, nearly a quarter of the 1,000 patient respondents said they don't even trust themselves with access to their own electronic health records."
It seems we can't have a week go by without some article showing up on Slashdot about how the average person don't have "sufficient" security on their various electronic devices and programs. In which case if those same average people are concerned about a particular set of records being compromised couldn't it be considered wise that they'd rather have someone else who should (theoretically) have better safeguards in place handle those records?
He would have been okay if he'd just stuck with "the world's oldest printed book", instead of "first and oldest," since it is arguably the oldest book currently being printed. Sometimes being overly specific can really be problematic.
Speaking of which, note the "arguably" part above. There are a few other works which _might_ be older, but it depends a lot on your definition of "book", whether you want to date the origin of the bits of text or the codification of the whole book, and a lot of archaeological debate.
"It seems to me that the music was written before it was licensed or contracted to be made."
From Christopher Tin's wikipedia page: "By far his biggest break came in 2005, when Soren Johnson, his roommate at Stanford and now working as a game designer at Firaxis Games, asked him to compose the theme song for Civilization IV. Tin responded with 'Baba Yetu,' a choral piece performed by Stanford Talisman."
It's really not that hard to check these things before spewing off the first criticism that comes to mind.
You think the song is good, so clearly the problem is that it's got drums and chanting? I'm confused, do you think the Grammys should have a rule that only over-produced and auto-tuned pop/rock/hip-hop should win awards? It won the award for "Best instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalists", which i agree is a rather nebulous category, but what song do you think should have won instead?
I'm mostly reiterating what was said in the article i linked in my earlier post in the thread, but there are two problems with the switch from the Stack of Doom system (SoD) to the one unit per tile system (1UPT), at least in regards to it being more tactical that way.
First, to the extent that it is more tactical, is that really a good thing? Civilization has always been first and foremost a strategy game. Adding more tactical elements isn't a bad thing per se, but it is a problem when those tactical elements detract from the strategic side. In earlier Civs the goal (at least if you were warmongering) was to create cities with high production so you could produce a large number of units and overpower the other players units. Civ5 has intentionally been designed to reduce the number of units you're able to produce so the tactical map isn't overflowing with units. So now instead of outproducing the enemy you have to out think the enemy with a limited supply of units. The problem is that the AI is so limited that that's not really a challenge. Given relative parity of troop types good players are able to maintain kill ratios of 12:1 or better against the AI, making conquest by far the easiest way to win the game. Under most circumstances (medium sized maps and reasonable difficulty) you can produce an army of a dozen units or less at the beginning and just keep upgrading the same units for the entire game, kicking the ass of any AI you come across.
So in short they reduced the strategic element (High production cities have been made more difficult to create and less valuable to have) in order to promote the tactical element, except the tactical element is a joke for anyone who's learned how to handle the AI.
Second, Civ4's SoDs are frequently pointed at by critics as one of the problems with the game, but they're not actually as overwhelming as they're made out to be. It's still important to use good tactics when going to war in Civ4. Stacking a large number of units does concentrate a lot of power, but it also makes the units in that stack vulnerable to collateral damage, and it also reduces the tactical options available to you. If i put all my units in one stack and try to invade you can sent multiple raiding parties into my territory to threaten multiple cities at once, and if all my units are in my SoD then i have nothing to defend with. (And if i'm able to produce so many units that i can defend my cities against anything you can throw at me and still have a SoD left over to invade that's larger than all your defenses then wouldn't you be just as screwed under the 1UPT system as well?)
If you look online for recaps of Civ4 games (both multiplayer and against the AI) you can find a lot of cases of players taking on large SoDs with inferior forces and triumphing due to good tactics. This usually happens when the player with less forces is defending and able to take advantage of internal mobility due to roads to make sure the combat happens on their own terms, but that's the way things often work in real life too.
"Civ 5 seems to again be a step back. Beautiful graphics and a solid engine behind everything, but a rather crappy AI and some questionable design decisions (like non-stacking units which lead to massive sprawl late game). Not a horrible game, but in more than a few ways one that doesn't measure up to Civ 4."
After watching the debate in the online communities (mainly CivFanatics, the general tenor of which is summed up in Sulla's article about the subject) and playing almost 200 hours of the game myself, it seems that most of the problems in the game are related to depth. Which isn't to say that the game doesn't have depth, but that they did a great job on the basics while the underlying elements have flaws that aren't apparent at first.
I think that almost everyone who enjoys such games will love Civ 5 at first, all the changes they've made to the series will certainly provide a fresh experience. It's only as you spend more time with the game that you'll come to understand (consciously or unconsciously) the problems those changes have introduced. The amount of time it takes for that realization to happen will depend on how "hardcore" of a player you are. If you're a casual Civ player (though describing it that way is perhaps somewhat of an oxymoron) you can get a lot of fun out of Civ 5 before the problems drive you away in frustration or boredom.
"at nintendo took one look at their DS, then promptly shat a brick."
Nintendo is coming out with the 3DS in about two months, which will have a 3D display (which some people care about and some don't) and real game controls, of which this phone has neither. If the people Nintendo were going to give a shit about any upcoming phone it would probably be the Sony Xperia Play, aka PSP Phone.
Okay, if that's true that answers the question of why the other companies aren't able to match Apple on the price, they are, they're just not matching Apple at all the different price points. That does raise the question though, why don't they have cheaper models that match the cheaper versions of the iPad?
And furthermore, given that Apple is know for charging premium prices, why is it that no one can manage to beat their price while still providing decent hardware?
That seems rather unlikely. I remember reading a story around ten years ago about an experiment in evolutionary program design where the researchers managed to grow a program that performed some task or other that was just a fraction of the size that humans were able to code. However it would only run on a specific kind of chip because the code had evolved to take advantage of a certain kind of self-generated interference in the case of that specific chip.
If natural evolution wasn't able to perform a similar trick with the nervous system given around half a billion years to play with i'd be rather surprised.
For all that the day to day transaction on the stock market have very little relation to what's happening in the real world, when the stock market crashes it does have an effect on the real economy.
So i guess it's a really good thing that we don't have to worry about a cyberwar or we might be it real trouble! After all, the countries that don't like America would never want to hurt us economically unless they were also willing to invade!
I don't know about iBooks, but Amazon/Kindle has made a big deal about how books you buy from them are tied to your account, so it doesn't matter what device you're using or what device you originally bought the books on, you'll have access to all your stuff. I'm pretty sure Barnes & Noble/Nook works the same way. Apple's move is just an attempt to extort more money out of the booksellers, it shouldn't have any affect on the portability of your ebooks.
I assure you that with hundreds of thousands of apps, Apple has just as many crap apps as Google. In fact they most likely have far _more_ crap apps than Google. The problem is that Apple does a better job of letting you find the good ones and avoid the bad ones. Perhaps that's what you meant, but if so you should have said that you _see_ a lot of shit in Google's App Store, unlike Apple's App Store.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually i forgot to make my main point. Is selling stuff on Etsy a viable primary job at the moment? No, unless you're amazingly talented (at business as well as art) there's no way you can make enough to house and feed yourself. Now what if you've already gotten those needs taken care of and you just need some cash for luxuries? And what if those luxuries are a fraction of the cost they used to be due to automation? Selling enough on Etsy to get $25 to buy a new smartphone is certainly possible. Or you could work a couple hours a day at the local fast food place. (They're not _all_ going to go out of business just because military style food is available for free.) Or any other number of jobs.
There well be fewer jobs available, or rather fewer person-hours of such jobs available, but if all people need to work for is luxuries then just working a couple hours a week is entirely feasible. Employers would no longer be able to force an ever-shrinking employee base to work harder and longer under threat of unemployment because being unemployed just wouldn't be that bad.
First of all a minor nitpick, "substandard food"? The government is perfectly capable of providing decent nutrition. Military food certainly isn't popular, but i'm pretty sure it's quite a bit healthier than the "tasty" fast food that a lot of the poor currently subsist on.
Second of all i'm not saying that this solution will fix everything, but it will provide a foundation from which to work on. If everyone is housed and everyone is fed and everyone is informed (at least as much as they want to be) then we'll have have time to muddle through the blowback of increased automation. (If all the plutocrats stop paying workers then who's going to be buying their products? Other plutocrats?)
Eventually there will be advanced enough automation that we can all sit back and live in a utopia (presuming the energy/resource demands don't destroy our planet) but there's going to be a lot of stumbling blocks between here and there. One of the first of which is going to be if you try to start redistributing the wealth before there is enough for everyone.
"I'm an advocate of instituting a basic income, so that everyone can can have a decent life even if there is no work available. The arguments against has always been that people won't want to work, but really those very few who don't want to work at all in a world were very little work is available shouldn't, leave it to those who do, they will be much more motivated."
I agree, but with one fundamental change. The government should not be providing an income, it should be providing things. The classic problem with a welfare state is that people always want more and will spend what they have on the "wrong" things. The dystopic version which frequently shows up in SF involves 90% or more of the population "on the dole" with whichever politician is willing to increase the dole getting elected, until the entire system undergoes complete economic collapse.
So instead of providing everyone with a basic living allowance, instead provide basic housing, basic food and basic information connectivity. And by basic i mean an 100 sq ft or less dorm style room and three meals a day of school/military quality food. Said apartments ought to have a basic computer that can connect to the net and do word processing and such and that's about it, and have a basic cable hookup.
Obviously that would have a drastic impact on a couple areas of the economy, but it's quite possible that just handing out welfare checks to everyone would have worse effects in the long run. Under the system above no one would be at risk of death if they couldn't find a job, but there would still be plenty of incentive to find some kind of work so you could afford better food or be able to buy the luxuries being advertised on your free cable shows.
Automated taxis would be a huge improvement, at least once the technology is fully developed. If every car on the road is controlled by AI then they can all drive in the most fuel-efficient manner. When you ask for a car you'll state how many passengers there are and you will be sent the smallest (and therefore most fuel efficient) car possible for that number of people. And finally all the cars in fleet would be of a more modern (and thus more fuel efficient) type.
"They added choice ingredients to brew a little brew,
But they didn't know the wires were crossed in Chamber Number Two.
A tiny bit of space got folded, things were looking queer --
They turned the spout and then came out the world's first Hyper-Beer."
What's in the (Win) box?
PAIN!
Uh, i got the Gingerbread OTA update on my Nexus One last night. They announced it sometime last week. Everyone with an N1 should have the update within another week or two.
"and forget about original programming."
You could not be further from the truth! I'm very much looking forward to Mega BearLion vs Giant Robo-Piranha 2: The Revenge!
I've heard all this before. You can make cute little memory associations that will let you easily remember a really long number, or a sequence of cards, or whatever.
That's great if you want to amaze your friends or count cards in Vegas, but i don't think that's going to be of much practical use in my day to day life. Certainly not compared to the effort required. What i really need is a way to remember how i solved a particular programming problem six months ago. Or what the best algorithm is for a particular task. Things that can't be summed up as a simple number. Some people get asked "do you know how to do X" and they say "Why yes! I dealt with that six months ago, and this is how you solve the problem!" When posed with the same question i usually say "Uh, i dealt with something like that six months ago, let me see if i wrote it down in my notes." If that fails (which it often does, since i can never be sure what i'll need to remember later at the time that it happens) i'll spend fifteen minutes (or more) searching through old code trying to remind myself how exactly i dealt with it.
So some people (namely me) have far worse than average memory (which definitely implies there are others with far better than average memory, despite what he says) but his method certainly isn't going to help me, and i can't think of any kind of simple training that would.
And this would be reason number 7329 to _not_ use alternative app markets, especially if they're hosted in China. The ability to install unauthorized apps is great, but that ability should only be used if you can download the apk file directly from someone you have reason to trust. I've done that a couple times and not had any problem.
This may change slightly once Amazon and others start putting up their own app stores with their own authorization process, but that's entirely different from installing some random market run by nobody you've ever heard of before.
You're totally right! Showing a commercial during the Superbowl that treats the users of competing devices/OSes as being trapped in an oppressive 1984 type world they need to be rescued from ALWAYS results in anger and ultimately leads to the total failure and bankruptcy of the company that sponsored the ad.
Damn it! You're not an Anonymous Coward! Now you've ruined it for everyone!
"Most amusingly, however, nearly a quarter of the 1,000 patient respondents said they don't even trust themselves with access to their own electronic health records."
It seems we can't have a week go by without some article showing up on Slashdot about how the average person don't have "sufficient" security on their various electronic devices and programs. In which case if those same average people are concerned about a particular set of records being compromised couldn't it be considered wise that they'd rather have someone else who should (theoretically) have better safeguards in place handle those records?
He would have been okay if he'd just stuck with "the world's oldest printed book", instead of "first and oldest," since it is arguably the oldest book currently being printed. Sometimes being overly specific can really be problematic.
Speaking of which, note the "arguably" part above. There are a few other works which _might_ be older, but it depends a lot on your definition of "book", whether you want to date the origin of the bits of text or the codification of the whole book, and a lot of archaeological debate.
"It seems to me that the music was written before it was licensed or contracted to be made."
From Christopher Tin's wikipedia page: "By far his biggest break came in 2005, when Soren Johnson, his roommate at Stanford and now working as a game designer at Firaxis Games, asked him to compose the theme song for Civilization IV. Tin responded with 'Baba Yetu,' a choral piece performed by Stanford Talisman."
It's really not that hard to check these things before spewing off the first criticism that comes to mind.
You think the song is good, so clearly the problem is that it's got drums and chanting? I'm confused, do you think the Grammys should have a rule that only over-produced and auto-tuned pop/rock/hip-hop should win awards? It won the award for "Best instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalists", which i agree is a rather nebulous category, but what song do you think should have won instead?
I'm mostly reiterating what was said in the article i linked in my earlier post in the thread, but there are two problems with the switch from the Stack of Doom system (SoD) to the one unit per tile system (1UPT), at least in regards to it being more tactical that way.
First, to the extent that it is more tactical, is that really a good thing? Civilization has always been first and foremost a strategy game. Adding more tactical elements isn't a bad thing per se, but it is a problem when those tactical elements detract from the strategic side. In earlier Civs the goal (at least if you were warmongering) was to create cities with high production so you could produce a large number of units and overpower the other players units. Civ5 has intentionally been designed to reduce the number of units you're able to produce so the tactical map isn't overflowing with units. So now instead of outproducing the enemy you have to out think the enemy with a limited supply of units. The problem is that the AI is so limited that that's not really a challenge. Given relative parity of troop types good players are able to maintain kill ratios of 12:1 or better against the AI, making conquest by far the easiest way to win the game. Under most circumstances (medium sized maps and reasonable difficulty) you can produce an army of a dozen units or less at the beginning and just keep upgrading the same units for the entire game, kicking the ass of any AI you come across.
So in short they reduced the strategic element (High production cities have been made more difficult to create and less valuable to have) in order to promote the tactical element, except the tactical element is a joke for anyone who's learned how to handle the AI.
Second, Civ4's SoDs are frequently pointed at by critics as one of the problems with the game, but they're not actually as overwhelming as they're made out to be. It's still important to use good tactics when going to war in Civ4. Stacking a large number of units does concentrate a lot of power, but it also makes the units in that stack vulnerable to collateral damage, and it also reduces the tactical options available to you. If i put all my units in one stack and try to invade you can sent multiple raiding parties into my territory to threaten multiple cities at once, and if all my units are in my SoD then i have nothing to defend with. (And if i'm able to produce so many units that i can defend my cities against anything you can throw at me and still have a SoD left over to invade that's larger than all your defenses then wouldn't you be just as screwed under the 1UPT system as well?)
If you look online for recaps of Civ4 games (both multiplayer and against the AI) you can find a lot of cases of players taking on large SoDs with inferior forces and triumphing due to good tactics. This usually happens when the player with less forces is defending and able to take advantage of internal mobility due to roads to make sure the combat happens on their own terms, but that's the way things often work in real life too.
"Civ 5 seems to again be a step back. Beautiful graphics and a solid engine behind everything, but a rather crappy AI and some questionable design decisions (like non-stacking units which lead to massive sprawl late game). Not a horrible game, but in more than a few ways one that doesn't measure up to Civ 4."
After watching the debate in the online communities (mainly CivFanatics, the general tenor of which is summed up in Sulla's article about the subject) and playing almost 200 hours of the game myself, it seems that most of the problems in the game are related to depth. Which isn't to say that the game doesn't have depth, but that they did a great job on the basics while the underlying elements have flaws that aren't apparent at first.
I think that almost everyone who enjoys such games will love Civ 5 at first, all the changes they've made to the series will certainly provide a fresh experience. It's only as you spend more time with the game that you'll come to understand (consciously or unconsciously) the problems those changes have introduced. The amount of time it takes for that realization to happen will depend on how "hardcore" of a player you are. If you're a casual Civ player (though describing it that way is perhaps somewhat of an oxymoron) you can get a lot of fun out of Civ 5 before the problems drive you away in frustration or boredom.
You are entirely correct, that is the not the real Kevin Butler's real twitter account.
(It is however the "real" Kevin Butler's "real" twitter account.)
"at nintendo took one look at their DS, then promptly shat a brick."
Nintendo is coming out with the 3DS in about two months, which will have a 3D display (which some people care about and some don't) and real game controls, of which this phone has neither. If the people Nintendo were going to give a shit about any upcoming phone it would probably be the Sony Xperia Play, aka PSP Phone.
Okay, if that's true that answers the question of why the other companies aren't able to match Apple on the price, they are, they're just not matching Apple at all the different price points. That does raise the question though, why don't they have cheaper models that match the cheaper versions of the iPad?
And furthermore, given that Apple is know for charging premium prices, why is it that no one can manage to beat their price while still providing decent hardware?
That seems rather unlikely. I remember reading a story around ten years ago about an experiment in evolutionary program design where the researchers managed to grow a program that performed some task or other that was just a fraction of the size that humans were able to code. However it would only run on a specific kind of chip because the code had evolved to take advantage of a certain kind of self-generated interference in the case of that specific chip.
If natural evolution wasn't able to perform a similar trick with the nervous system given around half a billion years to play with i'd be rather surprised.
For all that the day to day transaction on the stock market have very little relation to what's happening in the real world, when the stock market crashes it does have an effect on the real economy.
So i guess it's a really good thing that we don't have to worry about a cyberwar or we might be it real trouble! After all, the countries that don't like America would never want to hurt us economically unless they were also willing to invade!
I don't know about iBooks, but Amazon/Kindle has made a big deal about how books you buy from them are tied to your account, so it doesn't matter what device you're using or what device you originally bought the books on, you'll have access to all your stuff. I'm pretty sure Barnes & Noble/Nook works the same way. Apple's move is just an attempt to extort more money out of the booksellers, it shouldn't have any affect on the portability of your ebooks.
I assure you that with hundreds of thousands of apps, Apple has just as many crap apps as Google. In fact they most likely have far _more_ crap apps than Google. The problem is that Apple does a better job of letting you find the good ones and avoid the bad ones. Perhaps that's what you meant, but if so you should have said that you _see_ a lot of shit in Google's App Store, unlike Apple's App Store.