Umm, so what your saying is that the robots are not taking all the CNC operator jobs, they're only taking 90% (nine out of ten) of them, since 1 machinist + robots can do the job of 10?
It looks like the OS doesn't suck, but the hardware does...
http://www.digitaltrends.com/c... "The Marshall London looks fantastic, and its musical ability lives up to expectations, but it's a terribly mediocre, overpriced smartphone."
http://www.androidauthority.co... "What the Marshall London does have going for it is its near-stock Android experience. Marshall didn't try too hard to make Google's OS different, something that might have helped keep the phone snappier. Just keep in mind you would be getting a mid-to-low tier performance out of this phone. That's really the important part.... With that said, we also have to mention casual smartphone users will have to cut too many corners to live with superior sound. That's the main issue here, Marshall took a generic phone and put its name on it. Cool apps and a good design won't be enough to put this phone in the hands of people outside the target niche. Especially when considering that price."
Because this is that nasty renewable energy, and we have make sure everybody understands how dangerous it is, in comparison to nice, safe, clean, reliable coal and oil...
A random private citizen who is know for pointing a video camera at the relevant section of street every day. Like, say, some business that operates a surveillance security camera where the field of view includes the crime scene. Evidence like that is routinely gathered and used in court.
Archive.org operates a similar video camera pointing at many web servers.
I was under the impression thst it stops saving new pages, and stops *displaying* old pages, but does not nuke the old pages from storage. If your robots.txt goes away in the future, the old pages come back.... Ay least, that was my understanding from long ago...
Yeah, I'm assuming employees handling cash - if you're any larger than a micro business, then you'll have employees doing a significant portion of that (even if the owner is the one who runs to the bank). And, yeah, there's time value even if it is the owner.
I agree, if you're a business where a non-trivial portion of your sales are small (below $20, say), then the per transaction fees are a much bigger concern. So yes, I agree that for small tickets, the costs are more onerous. (Interestingly, especially in that scenario, the costs of handling large amounts of small-denomination cash go up significantly. Counting $10k in $5 and $10 bills takes longer than counting $10k in $50s.)
Agreed - the price of the service is completely out of line with its costs, but that is true of many service industries. I'm not arguing that the Visa/Mastercard oligopoly is fair, just that the cash alternative costs too.
Unfortunately the cash costs scale closer to linear with the transaction size and transaction volume, which is why Visa gets away with having a percentage cost structure.
When I run the calculations for a couple of small businesses that I frequent (where I know the business well enough to estimate the numbers involved), they come out between 0.8%-1.5%. So yes, you are paying more for cards, but not enormously more.
Which ties in with a lot of the larger businesses (my phone and electricty providers) where they do charge a CC surcharge, it's often around 0.65%, which would approximate the difference in cost between handling CC and other forms of payment.
And there we have it. An online business that processes $10,000 a month with an average ticket of $50 will pay about 2.80% of volume or $280 a month in credit card processing charges.
If you're paying your cash-handling staff $10/hour, that's about 28 hours of work in the month, or about 1 hour per day (1.5 hours if you don't open on weekends) for additional cash handling beyond the individual transactions.
That's not especially far-fetched - in practice for a business carrying about $300 in float, and taking between $300-$500/day, the cash handling time is probably somewhere between 30-45 minutes per day, depending on whether you bank daily or you have a safe on site and bank weekly. Cards are more expensive, but not significantly more so, unless you're running your business on the slimmest of margins.
You believe that paying with a credit card does not cost more than cash? You may not see the cost as it may be charged to the store instead of you, but you pay in higher prices for all goods and services.
For a long time, I used to think like you did - that the merchant was getting ripped off to the tune of 1-2% when I paid by credit card.
However, that was before taking into account the costs of handling cash - paying staff to count the cash twice a day, infrastructure/security to store cash safely overnight, paying staff to transfer cash safely to the bank regularly, potential costs of staff theft, arranging/maintaining sufficient float to give change to customers, sufficient security for float cash during the work day, etc.
These are real costs on a business, which are not relevant for card transactions, and also get factored into the costs of goods and services.
Therefore when the rare occasion occurs when the computer does something stupid I want manual controls so I can take over. I do not want to be sitting their helpless cursing some nameless programmer with my last breath because the car has suddenly switched to British locale and now thinks it has to drive on the left hand side of the road!
But you're okay with sitting there helplessly cursing when your friend in the driver's seat has a delusion, grabs the manual controls and swerves into traffic to avoid a non-existent obstacle?
It sounds like what you really want is an off switch. In an emergency, bring the car to a stop, regardless of what the computer thinks. No need for manual controls, just a safe stopping mechanism.
What's the magic Slashdot formula that keeps attracting more people?
I think that the site's slogan pretty much sums it up: "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." It's a very simple motto, and I think that appeals to a lot of people. You can go to CNN and see very straight-laced, spell-checked, fact-checked summary of the day's events. Or you can go somewhere like Slashdot and you can see maybe a little bit more raw discussion of the events, a summary of a different type of news - tech news, but with a different slant than you might get on CNN.
... the human brain is less prone to a spontaneous crash from an errant cosmic ray flipping a bit when doing 110 km/h down the motorway.
Cosmic rays, sure.
Things that do crash human attention and judgement include:
That bright flashy advertisement on the shoulder
That chick in the next car with a nice rack
The screaming kid in the back seat who just dropped his icecream
A sneeze
A yawn
Shit, what's that noise?
Oh, look, a pony!
Eww, what's that smell?
Why is that car pulled over? / Oh, look, an accident!
AAAAARRRHHH, THERE'S A SPIDER ON THE DASHBOARD!
What did the passenger just say?
What's the speed limit in on this road?
What is that car doing?
And those are just things which have taken *my* attention off the road. Fortunately, in most of those situations, I've had good road placement beforehand, and so have generally avoided collisions due to those issues, but I don't think I've seen any situation where I think I'd be less likely to crash than a computer...
And I don't think random cosmic bit errors occur as often as any of those situations, and on top of all that we already have autonomous systems which can deal with unreliable computers - m-out-of-n control systems have been around since forever.
... a MITM attack and screen scraper app are possible on your phone and not on a credit/atm card. You are trading risks, and not in favor of the phone. Safer? Not a chance.
There's no more exposure than simply having online banking in the first place. If you have online access to your account, then MITM and screen scrapers are already a risk. Adding cardless cash support does not increase that risk appreciably.
Stolen card attacks via ATM are already a risk. Online banking is already a risk.
Most people who use cardless cash in Australia also have an ATM card, however they have the option of using the app if they are without their card for some reason. This does not increase their exposure over someone who already has online banking and an ATM card.
Cement is also a hard product produced by mixing powdered cement with water, and allowing it to dry. This is frequently used for applying to things which need to be permanently affixed, but do not require the compressive strength of concrete. Wet cement is essentially a glue.
It's not that hard. Have the pull-request page randomly display one of three selected usernames - a male one, a female one, or an agnostic one.
Or have the people writing the code not be the one selecting which persona they're submitting as, and have the decision only be made after the code is written.
Rod Quantock:... Just to give you a bit of my background, I probably am the only comedian in Australia and I think I'm quite rare in the world who actually devotes all of his comedy shows to issues around climate change, but particularly things like peak oil. But to get to that point takes an awful lot of work. And I spent a lot of time being a political comic, and I have the advantage that most of you don't have; I've got nothing to do during the day. I work for an hour or two hours at night, and the rest of the time is my own. And I spend that time reading what you don't have time to read. And I've had people come to me at the end of a show about politics and people say to me, 'I love coming to your shows every year because it means I don't have to read the newspapers for a year.'
So when I got involved in climate change I applied for what used to be called a Keating Fellowship and Howard changed that very quickly to an Australia Council Fellowship. And I applied for it because I was broke, a condition which is with me constantly. And I thought, well, I've been around a while, I deserve some money. So I was about to turn 60 and I thought, well, what I'll do is I'll apply to them to do a project about the world from the day I was born. I was born in [mumbles], and I just look at the world, where it came from and how it got to where it was, contemporaneous with this application.
So I did that, and I began in 1948, the declaration of human rights, the division of Israel and Palestine, North and South Korea, Velcro was invented in 1948, the first Holden rolled offâ¦you know, the roots of our contemporary world are there and a lot of it is still festering today. I'm not what you'd call a bright person but I'm methodical, and I did it chronologically. And as I went through I started to see things like the impact of chemicals in our environment. I'd been aware of that, but as you march back through time and then push your way forward, these become more and more apparent.
And then I hit the 1973 oil shock when the world economy collapsed through lack of oil. So I got interested in peak oil. But as I got closer and closer to the day, I saw climate change looming and looming and looming larger in discussions. So I took that and I really knuckled down and I read everything there is to read about it, and I came to the conclusion that we are all going to die. That's it.
Now, I have a preconditioned attitude to apocalypse. By the time I was 10, I'd seen black-and-white footage of the Hiroshima bomb, I'd seen black-and-white footage of the Holocaust, I'd seen black-and-white footage of Japanese prisoners of war, I've seen the worst that humanity could do to one another. And so it was very clear to me that climate change is something we weren't going to stop because it's not in our nature to be intelligent and clever about these things.
And then you throw in peak oil and you suddenly realise that the brick wall is approaching very, very quickly. So I thought, what do you do? And I thought, well, you tell people about it, that's what you do. So I did a show called Bugger the Polar Bears, This Is Serious, because people were always thinking it's about polar bears. And I did shows called The People We Should Eat First. I actually have a list of people we should eat first. And when climate change really hits, I want you to remember that the person sitting in front of you is made of protein. Just keep that in mind. And as a general warning to you all, try not to look delicious. I actually used to be 18 stone but I'm trying to get less and less a source of food.
But it's a lot of work to understand it. The basics are simple. CO2 is a greenhouse gas and there's lots of it, more in the atmosphere, so we are heating up. But the consequences, the flow-ons, the shift changes in the state of our environment that can happen very, very suddenly, those sorts of things you've really got to study. And I got to a point where I thought it's all over.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, so what your saying is that the robots are not taking all the CNC operator jobs, they're only taking 90% (nine out of ten) of them, since 1 machinist + robots can do the job of 10?
Hell, compare it to the adoption of XP or 7 after they were released....
It looks like the OS doesn't suck, but the hardware does...
http://www.digitaltrends.com/c...
"The Marshall London looks fantastic, and its musical ability lives up to expectations, but it's a terribly mediocre, overpriced smartphone."
http://www.androidauthority.co...
"What the Marshall London does have going for it is its near-stock Android experience. Marshall didn't try too hard to make Google's OS different, something that might have helped keep the phone snappier. Just keep in mind you would be getting a mid-to-low tier performance out of this phone. That's really the important part....
With that said, we also have to mention casual smartphone users will have to cut too many corners to live with superior sound. That's the main issue here, Marshall took a generic phone and put its name on it. Cool apps and a good design won't be enough to put this phone in the hands of people outside the target niche. Especially when considering that price."
http://www.alphr.com/mobile-ph...
"A distinct lack of imagination continues throughout the handset."
HTML gets sent to the browser. Javascript gets sent to WScript.exe...
Isn't that what they say everytime before they do the thing?
* MP3 players are junk and just get left in drawers... http://www.bit-tech.net/news/h...
* Macs will never run on Intel http://www.theinquirer.net/inq...
* Ipods will never do video. http://www.macobserver.com/tmo...
* We are not working on a phone. http://www.macobserver.com/tmo...
* People want keyboards, tablets are going to fail http://www.wired.com/2010/02/s...
* Information about a tablet is incorrect http://www.googl8.com/85998192...
Notably, 5 days is a work week, and there are ~52 weeks in a year. :-P
Agreed. So we use EVs for those use cases, and develop another technology (like FCVs) for the other 20%, right?
Because this is that nasty renewable energy, and we have make sure everybody understands how dangerous it is, in comparison to nice, safe, clean, reliable coal and oil...
A random private citizen who is know for pointing a video camera at the relevant section of street every day. Like, say, some business that operates a surveillance security camera where the field of view includes the crime scene. Evidence like that is routinely gathered and used in court.
Archive.org operates a similar video camera pointing at many web servers.
I was under the impression thst it stops saving new pages, and stops *displaying* old pages, but does not nuke the old pages from storage. If your robots.txt goes away in the future, the old pages come back.... Ay least, that was my understanding from long ago...
Alternate hypothesis: users respond better to female digital voices. Most GPS units and previous IVR systems feature female voices.
Yeah, I'm assuming employees handling cash - if you're any larger than a micro business, then you'll have employees doing a significant portion of that (even if the owner is the one who runs to the bank). And, yeah, there's time value even if it is the owner.
I agree, if you're a business where a non-trivial portion of your sales are small (below $20, say), then the per transaction fees are a much bigger concern. So yes, I agree that for small tickets, the costs are more onerous. (Interestingly, especially in that scenario, the costs of handling large amounts of small-denomination cash go up significantly. Counting $10k in $5 and $10 bills takes longer than counting $10k in $50s.)
Agreed - the price of the service is completely out of line with its costs, but that is true of many service industries. I'm not arguing that the Visa/Mastercard oligopoly is fair, just that the cash alternative costs too.
Unfortunately the cash costs scale closer to linear with the transaction size and transaction volume, which is why Visa gets away with having a percentage cost structure.
When I run the calculations for a couple of small businesses that I frequent (where I know the business well enough to estimate the numbers involved), they come out between 0.8%-1.5%. So yes, you are paying more for cards, but not enormously more.
Which ties in with a lot of the larger businesses (my phone and electricty providers) where they do charge a CC surcharge, it's often around 0.65%, which would approximate the difference in cost between handling CC and other forms of payment.
from your link:
If you're paying your cash-handling staff $10/hour, that's about 28 hours of work in the month, or about 1 hour per day (1.5 hours if you don't open on weekends) for additional cash handling beyond the individual transactions.
That's not especially far-fetched - in practice for a business carrying about $300 in float, and taking between $300-$500/day, the cash handling time is probably somewhere between 30-45 minutes per day, depending on whether you bank daily or you have a safe on site and bank weekly. Cards are more expensive, but not significantly more so, unless you're running your business on the slimmest of margins.
For a long time, I used to think like you did - that the merchant was getting ripped off to the tune of 1-2% when I paid by credit card.
However, that was before taking into account the costs of handling cash - paying staff to count the cash twice a day, infrastructure/security to store cash safely overnight, paying staff to transfer cash safely to the bank regularly, potential costs of staff theft, arranging/maintaining sufficient float to give change to customers, sufficient security for float cash during the work day, etc.
These are real costs on a business, which are not relevant for card transactions, and also get factored into the costs of goods and services.
according to google:
which is about 2/3rd the distance across America.
But you're okay with sitting there helplessly cursing when your friend in the driver's seat has a delusion, grabs the manual controls and swerves into traffic to avoid a non-existent obstacle?
It sounds like what you really want is an off switch. In an emergency, bring the car to a stop, regardless of what the computer thinks. No need for manual controls, just a safe stopping mechanism.
As our former glorious leader once said: http://www.g4tv.com/articles/49932/Ten_Minutes_with_CmdrTaco/:
What's the magic Slashdot formula that keeps attracting more people?
I think that the site's slogan pretty much sums it up: "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." It's a very simple motto, and I think that appeals to a lot of people. You can go to CNN and see very straight-laced, spell-checked, fact-checked summary of the day's events. Or you can go somewhere like Slashdot and you can see maybe a little bit more raw discussion of the events, a summary of a different type of news - tech news, but with a different slant than you might get on CNN.
Cosmic rays, sure.
Things that do crash human attention and judgement include:
And those are just things which have taken *my* attention off the road. Fortunately, in most of those situations, I've had good road placement beforehand, and so have generally avoided collisions due to those issues, but I don't think I've seen any situation where I think I'd be less likely to crash than a computer...
And I don't think random cosmic bit errors occur as often as any of those situations, and on top of all that we already have autonomous systems which can deal with unreliable computers - m-out-of-n control systems have been around since forever.
There's no more exposure than simply having online banking in the first place. If you have online access to your account, then MITM and screen scrapers are already a risk. Adding cardless cash support does not increase that risk appreciably.
Stolen card attacks via ATM are already a risk. Online banking is already a risk.
Most people who use cardless cash in Australia also have an ATM card, however they have the option of using the app if they are without their card for some reason. This does not increase their exposure over someone who already has online banking and an ATM card.
Maybe I'm missing something, but they say 1.5kg tank, not 1.5kg of fuel.
4.347L * 0.0708kg/l = 0.308kg
Which leaves approximately 1.2kg for the metal to enclose the tank...
Cement is also a hard product produced by mixing powdered cement with water, and allowing it to dry. This is frequently used for applying to things which need to be permanently affixed, but do not require the compressive strength of concrete. Wet cement is essentially a glue.
It's not that hard. Have the pull-request page randomly display one of three selected usernames - a male one, a female one, or an agnostic one.
Or have the people writing the code not be the one selecting which persona they're submitting as, and have the decision only be made after the code is written.
Rod Quantock: ... Just to give you a bit of my background, I probably am the only comedian in Australia and I think I'm quite rare in the world who actually devotes all of his comedy shows to issues around climate change, but particularly things like peak oil. But to get to that point takes an awful lot of work. And I spent a lot of time being a political comic, and I have the advantage that most of you don't have; I've got nothing to do during the day. I work for an hour or two hours at night, and the rest of the time is my own. And I spend that time reading what you don't have time to read. And I've had people come to me at the end of a show about politics and people say to me, 'I love coming to your shows every year because it means I don't have to read the newspapers for a year.'
So when I got involved in climate change I applied for what used to be called a Keating Fellowship and Howard changed that very quickly to an Australia Council Fellowship. And I applied for it because I was broke, a condition which is with me constantly. And I thought, well, I've been around a while, I deserve some money. So I was about to turn 60 and I thought, well, what I'll do is I'll apply to them to do a project about the world from the day I was born. I was born in [mumbles], and I just look at the world, where it came from and how it got to where it was, contemporaneous with this application.
So I did that, and I began in 1948, the declaration of human rights, the division of Israel and Palestine, North and South Korea, Velcro was invented in 1948, the first Holden rolled offâ¦you know, the roots of our contemporary world are there and a lot of it is still festering today. I'm not what you'd call a bright person but I'm methodical, and I did it chronologically. And as I went through I started to see things like the impact of chemicals in our environment. I'd been aware of that, but as you march back through time and then push your way forward, these become more and more apparent.
And then I hit the 1973 oil shock when the world economy collapsed through lack of oil. So I got interested in peak oil. But as I got closer and closer to the day, I saw climate change looming and looming and looming larger in discussions. So I took that and I really knuckled down and I read everything there is to read about it, and I came to the conclusion that we are all going to die. That's it.
Now, I have a preconditioned attitude to apocalypse. By the time I was 10, I'd seen black-and-white footage of the Hiroshima bomb, I'd seen black-and-white footage of the Holocaust, I'd seen black-and-white footage of Japanese prisoners of war, I've seen the worst that humanity could do to one another. And so it was very clear to me that climate change is something we weren't going to stop because it's not in our nature to be intelligent and clever about these things.
And then you throw in peak oil and you suddenly realise that the brick wall is approaching very, very quickly. So I thought, what do you do? And I thought, well, you tell people about it, that's what you do. So I did a show called Bugger the Polar Bears, This Is Serious, because people were always thinking it's about polar bears. And I did shows called The People We Should Eat First. I actually have a list of people we should eat first. And when climate change really hits, I want you to remember that the person sitting in front of you is made of protein. Just keep that in mind. And as a general warning to you all, try not to look delicious. I actually used to be 18 stone but I'm trying to get less and less a source of food.
But it's a lot of work to understand it. The basics are simple. CO2 is a greenhouse gas and there's lots of it, more in the atmosphere, so we are heating up. But the consequences, the flow-ons, the shift changes in the state of our environment that can happen very, very suddenly, those sorts of things you've really got to study. And I got to a point where I thought it's all over.