Actually that's already happening, too. Granted, sportswriting is more formulaic than most, but it falls squarely in the category of previously exclusively human activity.
I think RMS is just expressing his priorities, not being out of touch with reality. Here are three groups to consider:
1) Money-oriented: Larry Ellison, Bill Gates
2) Technology-oriented: Linus Torvalds, James Gosling
3) Socially-oriented: Richard Stallman, and... not many others in this arena
If you judge people in one group by the values of the other, they seem deficient. Torvalds failed to capitalize on his success. Ellison is a bastard. Stallman's head is in the clouds. But they are at or near the top of their own games.
I think they are leaping headlong into an unworkable business strategy - they are waving the white flag to the content owners. What choice do they have? But 30 million per movie? Nope, if they're paying that much, they'll never be able to rent movies to me at a price I'm willing to pay. They are no longer a force for lowering prices.
All prediction is based on nothing more than the assumption that the universe has fixed laws of cause and effect that will not change in the future. More complex predictions require more inputs and more cause/effect rules, but they're still the same thing.
Not just college; jobs nowadays often require working with people who have accents as well. I grew up in Idaho and never had to deal with accents. (Actually quite a few Hispanic farm workers lived in the area, but they might as well have been on another planet; I never got to know even one of them). Now I can't understand accents at all. It can be embarrassing, giving a seminar and not understanding a question, or not understanding a stewardess on an international flight. Oh look, a hick!
Yes, I can imagine a case where a teacher's English is so bad it is a real impediment to learning. But I would only agree to taking action in pretty extreme cases.
Predictive software, in itself, hasn't been an "idea" for a long time. The very first "real" computer application was churning out ballistics trajectory tables, which is itself prediction (albeit based on laws that are well-understood, or at least repeatable). Weather forecasting is obviously predictive. All automated stock-market trading software is predictive.
Having the idea is trivial. Actually making it work is the ENTIRE matter.
3) And yet, wealth inequality grew during the 2000's; the rich continued to get richer while everybody else got poorer.
How is that possible? Why hasn't the weakness of the stock market and real estate leveled the distribution of wealth? If high-frequency trading, or insider trading, or anything "unfair" has happened on a large scale, it should be detectable because the distribution of returns should be more skewed - that is, the best should be beating the market by a wider margin than before. Are they?
RAM cache is not persistent. That means when a user writes to a file, the system cannot (usually) return immediately after it's copied into cache; it must wait until the data is persistently stored. Thus slow persistent storage (HDD) is still a bottleneck even with lots of cache. (If you are doing non-blocking writes to a 64 GB non-persistent cache you could lose the whole system in a crash! Simply flushing that cache to disk could take an hour - does your UPS last that long?)
Also, the amount of disk reads necessary to fill a 32-64GB cache in the first place is huge. It would take hours for the system to fully warm up after being booted, because the first time you did anything it would still be HDD slow.
The problem I see with this is I would rather just choose what to put on HDD vs SSD manually. Most of my huge files are TV recordings that are written once sequentially, then read once sequentially, then deleted. That sort of activity tends to ruin cache by filling it with bulk data that will never be needed again. So having an SSD system drive and a HDD media drive is a pretty simple and effective separation.
It's actually rather presumptuous for taxpayers to claim ownership of "state" universities these days. A professor from the University of Iowa told me the school only gets a little more than 10% of its funding from the state. "Public" education has been shrunk down to little more than a scholarship and student loan program, with the schools scrapping for full-tuition foreign students and research programs to stay alive.
PS, the vast majority of lottery winners and NBA players are first-generation wealthy, too. The essence of the lottery mentality is thinking, "they were once just like me!" instead of, "what are the chances I will make it?"
I couldn't follow the link without a subscription. But anyways, we are talking about different classes of income.
It's meaningless to say "80% of millionares are first-generation" because $1M in 1980 is equivalent to $2.6M now. If you start retirement with $1M in the bank right now and a 3.5% withdrawl rate (which is reasonable), you'll only be taking out $35K/year to live on!
Runaway wealth accrual is not caused by people who have accumulated $1M during a career; we're talking about people who get ten times that much every year even when the business fails. The lowest of the top 5 hedge fund managers in 2010 made $1.4 billion, which is obviously 1,400 times as much, in a single year, as the entrepreneurs and professional to which you refer accumulated over the course of a career. Doing the math, that's the same as equating somebody who makes $100,000 per year with somebody else who has a net worth of $71. Are the people I'm talking about reallythousands of times more productive than the people you're talking about?
That's the lottery ticket mentality. For some reason people have no problem spotting it among inner-city youths neglecting their schooling in the hopes of becoming an NBA star - yet they're blind to the same syndrome among wanna-be plumbers who are just sure they'll be running a big prosperous business one day and want to slash taxes right now, just in case.
Instead of anecdotes, let's look at statistics: "Study: CEO pay negatively linked to profitability."
That doesn't mean we shouldn't "allow" people to be Steve Jobs, it means we shouldn't let a bunch of overpaid pretenders ride his coat tails.
Check out the wikipedia page on EROI - Ratio of Energy Returned on Energy Invested. Solar isn't too high on the list, although it beats shale oil. Actually the scary thing here is how fast oil is going downhill as the good stuff is used up and we start scraping the bottom of the barrel, so to speak. Note Oil Imports in 1990, 2005, and 2007.
There's nothing in the article that says they are supporting themselves. I used to do some moonlighting supporting a guy's website. I worked at home and probably only averaged an hour per day. It doesn't mean I was lazy, it doesn't mean I was misleading him on the number of hours worked, and it doesn't mean I was making a living at it.
If the Register surveyed freelance writers and found out they were only averaging an hour per day of work, nobody would assume they were fully employed or making much money. I think this is the same.
Well, no, complex IT projects of the sort prone to failure do not simply consist of selecting a provider for a relatively simple service and overseeing it. Complex projects normally consist of integrating many different systems that are initially incompatible, which is what makes them so complex and prone to failure. (Government is by no means unique in struggling with them, either).
Open source video card drivers have never been any good, and I say that as somebody who ran linux with a first-gen Voodoo card and many other cards since.
Even the closed-source linux drivers tend to be substandard. I've never seen a totally stable multi-seat setup, and believe me, I've tried.
I think you raised a good but solvable point, which is there needs to be a trusted notary who can digitally sign and date any given document. There are commercial solutions for this, but the govt. would need to select one and oversee it.
Even replacing a fraction of the cards in your wallet would be a big improvement. I have loads of gift cards with unknown balances that I don't use because I don't like to carry a thick wallet.
The article doesn't address this, but a huge benefit for me would be if the point-of-sale terminal sends an itemized receipt to your smartphone in return. This would give people a whole new level of convenience and control in tracking their purchases. (Insert possible big-brother issues...)
There are sports like running where the rules are simple and determining the winner is simple, perhaps even automated. Then there are judged sports like gymnastics and ice skating where winning boils down to subjectivity.
The world economy is increasingly based on intellectual property, which is not governed by the physical laws of production capacity and unit cost. Instead intellectual property is government by subjective judgements about who deserves how much of the credit. These judgements are formalized in patent and copyright law, but they still come down to interpretation and value judgement. There is no firm ground to stand on.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, Iridium.
Every subscriber doesn't watch every movie.
And, RedBox is $1 per movie.
Actually that's already happening, too. Granted, sportswriting is more formulaic than most, but it falls squarely in the category of previously exclusively human activity.
1) Money-oriented: Larry Ellison, Bill Gates
2) Technology-oriented: Linus Torvalds, James Gosling
3) Socially-oriented: Richard Stallman, and... not many others in this arena
If you judge people in one group by the values of the other, they seem deficient. Torvalds failed to capitalize on his success. Ellison is a bastard. Stallman's head is in the clouds. But they are at or near the top of their own games.
Ahh, an optimist.
I think they are leaping headlong into an unworkable business strategy - they are waving the white flag to the content owners. What choice do they have? But 30 million per movie? Nope, if they're paying that much, they'll never be able to rent movies to me at a price I'm willing to pay. They are no longer a force for lowering prices.
All prediction is based on nothing more than the assumption that the universe has fixed laws of cause and effect that will not change in the future. More complex predictions require more inputs and more cause/effect rules, but they're still the same thing.
Yes, I can imagine a case where a teacher's English is so bad it is a real impediment to learning. But I would only agree to taking action in pretty extreme cases.
Having the idea is trivial. Actually making it work is the ENTIRE matter.
New high-end products reduce prices by devaluing older products, not by being cheap in themselves.
I have a question that may or may not be related. I keep asking but haven't heard a good answer.
How is that possible? Why hasn't the weakness of the stock market and real estate leveled the distribution of wealth? If high-frequency trading, or insider trading, or anything "unfair" has happened on a large scale, it should be detectable because the distribution of returns should be more skewed - that is, the best should be beating the market by a wider margin than before. Are they?
Also, the amount of disk reads necessary to fill a 32-64GB cache in the first place is huge. It would take hours for the system to fully warm up after being booted, because the first time you did anything it would still be HDD slow.
The problem I see with this is I would rather just choose what to put on HDD vs SSD manually. Most of my huge files are TV recordings that are written once sequentially, then read once sequentially, then deleted. That sort of activity tends to ruin cache by filling it with bulk data that will never be needed again. So having an SSD system drive and a HDD media drive is a pretty simple and effective separation.
It's actually rather presumptuous for taxpayers to claim ownership of "state" universities these days. A professor from the University of Iowa told me the school only gets a little more than 10% of its funding from the state. "Public" education has been shrunk down to little more than a scholarship and student loan program, with the schools scrapping for full-tuition foreign students and research programs to stay alive.
PS, the vast majority of lottery winners and NBA players are first-generation wealthy, too. The essence of the lottery mentality is thinking, "they were once just like me!" instead of, "what are the chances I will make it?"
It's meaningless to say "80% of millionares are first-generation" because $1M in 1980 is equivalent to $2.6M now. If you start retirement with $1M in the bank right now and a 3.5% withdrawl rate (which is reasonable), you'll only be taking out $35K/year to live on!
Runaway wealth accrual is not caused by people who have accumulated $1M during a career; we're talking about people who get ten times that much every year even when the business fails. The lowest of the top 5 hedge fund managers in 2010 made $1.4 billion, which is obviously 1,400 times as much, in a single year, as the entrepreneurs and professional to which you refer accumulated over the course of a career. Doing the math, that's the same as equating somebody who makes $100,000 per year with somebody else who has a net worth of $71. Are the people I'm talking about really thousands of times more productive than the people you're talking about?
Riding a natural monopoly to the top is awesome. Can she find something like that for HP to focus on?
Instead of anecdotes, let's look at statistics: "Study: CEO pay negatively linked to profitability."
That doesn't mean we shouldn't "allow" people to be Steve Jobs, it means we shouldn't let a bunch of overpaid pretenders ride his coat tails.
Check out the wikipedia page on EROI - Ratio of Energy Returned on Energy Invested. Solar isn't too high on the list, although it beats shale oil. Actually the scary thing here is how fast oil is going downhill as the good stuff is used up and we start scraping the bottom of the barrel, so to speak. Note Oil Imports in 1990, 2005, and 2007.
If the Register surveyed freelance writers and found out they were only averaging an hour per day of work, nobody would assume they were fully employed or making much money. I think this is the same.
Well, no, complex IT projects of the sort prone to failure do not simply consist of selecting a provider for a relatively simple service and overseeing it. Complex projects normally consist of integrating many different systems that are initially incompatible, which is what makes them so complex and prone to failure. (Government is by no means unique in struggling with them, either).
Even the closed-source linux drivers tend to be substandard. I've never seen a totally stable multi-seat setup, and believe me, I've tried.
I think you raised a good but solvable point, which is there needs to be a trusted notary who can digitally sign and date any given document. There are commercial solutions for this, but the govt. would need to select one and oversee it.
The article doesn't address this, but a huge benefit for me would be if the point-of-sale terminal sends an itemized receipt to your smartphone in return. This would give people a whole new level of convenience and control in tracking their purchases. (Insert possible big-brother issues...)
I'll best most of the Post Office closings will be in those same areas.
Qwikster may end up distributing its Blu-Rays via pony express.
Thanks for brightening my day, fungus dude.
The world economy is increasingly based on intellectual property, which is not governed by the physical laws of production capacity and unit cost. Instead intellectual property is government by subjective judgements about who deserves how much of the credit. These judgements are formalized in patent and copyright law, but they still come down to interpretation and value judgement. There is no firm ground to stand on.