Wow, I haven't actually logged in to Slashdot in a long time. A long long time.
So, I'm old. Like really old. I did Unix before Linux. I did Windows 1.0. I still, after all these years, miss the Turbo Pascal editor. I use Total Commander.
Far as I'm concerned, if I *have* to use the mouse for your stupid application, you've failed.
But actually, Windows 10 is a step in the right direction. I can't think of a thing in W10 that can't be done with the keyboard. Here's an example. Want to swap your displays? Type Windows key / type "display" / use the arrow keys to move the little pictures of your monitors.
It's actually kinda cool.
Windows 10 does get one thing wrong. The currently focused app is not sufficiently highlighted. The currently focused app has it's titlebar text in black whereas other apps get gray. Pisses me off.
And, actually, Office 2016 is also a step in the right direction. There are actually keyboard commands for pretty much everything.
Now, if you hate Micro$oft, I don't blame you. If you are going to hate Windoze forevah no matter what, I can understand that. But if you want to or have to use it, if you keep an open mind you might be pleasantly surprised with it. I know I've been.
These plans are littered all over the world. Every supplier of even a single part has lots of specifications and details of parts they have to interact with on their systems. If you hack just a few of those, you essentially get all the plans you need to build your own, or to find the weak spots in the design and adapt your own weapons on that. DOD may not have these plans on computers that are connected to the internet, but most suppliers do. It's a public secret these are the companies that get hacked and that is the way the plans get leaked or stolen.
Citation needed. Contractors to classified projects keep their materials classified. If ABC Corp. supplies, say, a classified navigation system to a classified weapons project, it is certainly a requirement that ABC Corp treats everything related to the nav system as classified.
Sure. Procedures are occasionally broken, within and without govt. But you make it sound like suppliers don't have, and are not required to have, safeguards.
Does it really matter so long as it does what it says on the tin? It works faster, surely that's all that matters?
Nope. Need to know how it works. Need to be able to examine every aspect of it. Need to be able to model it and predict its behavior in different situations.
On top of that why does your employer owe you health insurance in the first place? That also used to be something that was a fringe benefit that people then started to expect and demand like it was owed to them.
Your employer owes you nothing. And it will give you nothing unless you metaphorically put a gun to its head. It will take everything you've got, your time, yours skills, the best hours of your days, and the best days of your life, and give you *nothing* for it, if you let it. Oh, it's possible that an employer here or there has some notion of mutually assured advantage, that together all stakeholders can work together to everyone's mutual advantage, but even if such a philosophy isn't a smoke screen with which to take everything you've got, unless you have your finger on the big red button, it's just talk.
If your owners had their way, you'd be working 20 hours a day for a breadcrust, and be happy for it. The only reason they give you *anything* -- vacation, health care, a window, weekends, "free" soda, is because it is economically advantageous to them to do so.
So, is a "company" legally and ethically responsible to consider only the well-being ("maximize the return") of their owners at the cost of every other stakeholder?
What about legal and ethical responsibilities to employees, customers, community, and environment?
In maximizing the well-being of the owners, does that mean they should minimize the well being of everyone else?
If your statements are true, then a "company" has a legal and ethical obligation to do everything it can to decrease its legal obligation to anyone but the owners. Why stop at "legal"? The very idea of "legal" implies that there is some interest at play besides that of the owners. If the well-being of the owners is all that matters, then any action, whether legal or not, that benefits the owners is not only permissible, but ethically required.
The OP (and the author of TFA) need to think longer-term.
Whether GG succeeds or not in its first incarnation is a completely different issue than whether it will succeed in the end.
The future is here, boys and girls. Humans have been steadily integrating more and more technology into our bodies ever since . . . well, ever since we've had bodies and technology.
Glasses, hearing aids, artificial limbs, portable writing implements, carriable cameras, backpacks . . . the amount of wearable technology is staggering. So we know people will wear technology, and will integrate it into their bodies.
Do people want to take pictures? Yes. They want to take pictures. All the time. Everywhere. Every form factor that you can use to capture an image, people use. People carry around big DSLRs. Compact cameras. Cell phones. And when Google Glass gets to be easy-enough, and cheap-enough, and common-enough, they'll do that, too.
Face it. We are well on our way to recording every freaking minute of our lives, from every possible angle. And Google will store it and search it for us. The only real question left is, will we be the subject or the object of our future? Will the govt and the corps be the only ones who record and use the moments of our lives, or will we as well?
Take back the future. The ability for people to be able to invisibly record anything and everything will also let us watch the cops and the crooks. That's a good thing.
And earpieces and Segway? Actually, more people don't use earpieces because it doesn't work well enough. Yet. When I can stick something in my ear that's near invisible, picks up my whisper, blocks out the ambient noise, and doesn't need recharging all the time, why would I ever take it off?
And look how long it took for bikes to become ubiquitous. Give Segway a chance. Pretty soon you'll see SegShare along BikeShare.
It was built for the military and the universities. But at some point they let you on it. And at the same time they let you on it, they let all other civilians on it, including children.
Don't let your kids lose here unsupervised. It's not that hard
As I predicted, the old pass the buck to the parents nonsense. Yes, it is that hard. Technically, logistically, and time wise.
I would no more leave a kid on an unfiltered net connection
As I also pointed out, a net nanny on a PC isn't enough. Even if the kids can't find their way around it, they have consoles, smartphones, their friends houses, free wifi all over the place.
I would be curious as to what GP's policy is regarding his kids' usage of the internet from the ages of 2 and up. On multiple devices. Sure, easy enough to monitor a 2-year-old. 10-year-old, mebbe so. It gets much harder to monitor much older kids' internet usage, especially when there are multiple devices. There are lots of kids who can handle the unlimited games/videos/porn of the internet, and some who can't. The GP has one thing right, though, it's the parents' problem.
Back in the day there was some sort of limit to what kids had access to. Now it is unlimited and it is everywhere. It is definitely a challenge for the modern parent.
I say we start with the cast of the Jersey Shore and pretty much everyone that works on Captiol Hill.
Hey now. Okay, there're the elected officials, but for every representative or senator, there're a couple hundred other people who work on Capitol Hill.
That's pretty much true of any skill -- or, for that matter, any school subject. Some people will be better than others. Some won't get it at all. And some will truly excel.
But a worthwhile question is, *why* do some excel at one skill, some at another? To what extent is it nature vs. nurture? Lots of slashdotians are willing to come down on one side or the other, but, far as I know, we don't really understand everything about how people develop skills and interests.
Perhaps a reasonable hypothesis is that nature and nurture both play a role, with the assumption that at this point, we don't really understand the interrelationship between the two. Isn't it therefore worthwhile to do our best to give every child the opportunity to realize what unrealized skills and abilities they may have?
We all carry models of reality around in our heads.
Some of us like to share our models and call them science. Some of us like to share our models and call them religion.
Personally, I like the science type of model when it comes to figuring out how stuff works. I think the religion type of model has some interesting things to say about the world also, although for my 2c more about human nature and being a person than how stuff works.
Those folks on the Texas BOE, they are dangerous though. Someone ought to vote them out. I don't think their arguments have anything to do with religion. It's about power.
Everyone seems to agree that Google is definitely taking the text of email messages and analyzing it to collect summary data. Some people say that's "reading", others say it isn't. Whatever. Personally, I think it is reading, but let's just call it analyzing. Perhaps that's more accurate anyway.
Clearly, Google is analyzing everyone's email. Clearly, Google is very, very good at data collection and analysis. Personally, I think they are capable of analyzing a single person's email and learning a great deal about that individual person, and I think they are capable of analyzing groups of people and learning a great deal about those groups. So both breadth and depth correlation. So, they might, just making stuff up, be able to figure out that a great number of people lived in city A and moved to city B. They might be able to tell who is having an affair. Who is launching a business. Or all kinds of things. Note, when I say things like "figure out", I don't mean a person is doing it. I mean an automated program has been programmed to find the cheaters or the dissidents, or whatever. I person wouldn't read a million people's email. Now, a person might read a summary of a million people's email, but not the emails themselves. Or they might read a report that correlates data gathered by email with data gathered by a variety of other methods in order to build up a complete picture of their users.
Some people might think that's oogey, some might not. I think it is, but that's just me.
My view is that I'd love to live in a world where the greatest threat comes from business rather than government.
You already do, you just don't realize it yet
In the 20th Century governments killed some 100 million (at least) people, usually their own. However much damage even the largest corporations have done isn't even on the same planet with that scale. Also, let me know when corporations can declare war and draft people.
You ARE kidding, right? When they say a war "cost $500 billion dollars", that money is going somewhere. A substantial portion of it goes to the corporations that make the weapons systems that kill the people. A war is just another way of figuring out how to transfer wealth from the many to the few using the government as a middle man.
I'm not saying that all the ills of every kind of government don't have a lot to do with it, I'm just saying that among those people with a vested financial interest in seeing the bombs drop, are the shareholders, officers, managers, and employees of a large number of corporations.
A good wordprocessor is not a good target for an F/OSS project. It's a lot of boring, thankless work. Nobody has an itch that has to be scratched in such a masochistic way. That's why F/OSS wordprocessors are all not very good. Same goes for accounting systems, CAD systems, and many more. Often a F/OSS project just can't muster enough resources to complete the project. A for-profit company has no such problem; they just pay money, and developers show up for work.
You're right. It is hard to imagine a for-profit company having any interest in producing F/OSS software. Still, I bet there are exceptions. Maybe I'll do a search.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, I haven't actually logged in to Slashdot in a long time. A long long time.
So, I'm old. Like really old. I did Unix before Linux. I did Windows 1.0. I still, after all these years, miss the Turbo Pascal editor. I use Total Commander.
Far as I'm concerned, if I *have* to use the mouse for your stupid application, you've failed.
But actually, Windows 10 is a step in the right direction. I can't think of a thing in W10 that can't be done with the keyboard. Here's an example. Want to swap your displays? Type Windows key / type "display" / use the arrow keys to move the little pictures of your monitors.
It's actually kinda cool. Windows 10 does get one thing wrong. The currently focused app is not sufficiently highlighted. The currently focused app has it's titlebar text in black whereas other apps get gray. Pisses me off.
And, actually, Office 2016 is also a step in the right direction. There are actually keyboard commands for pretty much everything. Now, if you hate Micro$oft, I don't blame you. If you are going to hate Windoze forevah no matter what, I can understand that. But if you want to or have to use it, if you keep an open mind you might be pleasantly surprised with it. I know I've been.
Cheers.
You have stated two options:
1) Most people relax all day, the most intelligent get luxury in exchange for work
2) Technology is destroyed and we regress
I'll throw out some more:
3) The few enslave the many.
4) We blow ourselves back to the stone age
Of course, any of these could happen to societies rather than the whole species.
More than one fiction writer has envisioned a post-scarcity society. Here's one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture
Or maybe they'll off us because we might become a threat at some point in the future.
Or maybe they're a run-away machine culture that indiscriminately converts all matter it encounters into computronium.
Or maybe playing with sapient species is fun.
China can steal all the designs they want, but without successfully implementing the designs, I'm honestly not that concerned.
That's a viewpoint, sure. My guess is that you don't work in the defense industry. Just a guess.
These plans are littered all over the world. Every supplier of even a single part has lots of specifications and details of parts they have to interact with on their systems. If you hack just a few of those, you essentially get all the plans you need to build your own, or to find the weak spots in the design and adapt your own weapons on that. DOD may not have these plans on computers that are connected to the internet, but most suppliers do. It's a public secret these are the companies that get hacked and that is the way the plans get leaked or stolen.
Citation needed. Contractors to classified projects keep their materials classified. If ABC Corp. supplies, say, a classified navigation system to a classified weapons project, it is certainly a requirement that ABC Corp treats everything related to the nav system as classified.
Sure. Procedures are occasionally broken, within and without govt. But you make it sound like suppliers don't have, and are not required to have, safeguards.
Does it really matter so long as it does what it says on the tin? It works faster, surely that's all that matters?
Nope. Need to know how it works. Need to be able to examine every aspect of it. Need to be able to model it and predict its behavior in different situations.
On top of that why does your employer owe you health insurance in the first place? That also used to be something that was a fringe benefit that people then started to expect and demand like it was owed to them.
Your employer owes you nothing. And it will give you nothing unless you metaphorically put a gun to its head. It will take everything you've got, your time, yours skills, the best hours of your days, and the best days of your life, and give you *nothing* for it, if you let it. Oh, it's possible that an employer here or there has some notion of mutually assured advantage, that together all stakeholders can work together to everyone's mutual advantage, but even if such a philosophy isn't a smoke screen with which to take everything you've got, unless you have your finger on the big red button, it's just talk.
If your owners had their way, you'd be working 20 hours a day for a breadcrust, and be happy for it. The only reason they give you *anything* -- vacation, health care, a window, weekends, "free" soda, is because it is economically advantageous to them to do so.
What about legal and ethical responsibilities to employees, customers, community, and environment?
In maximizing the well-being of the owners, does that mean they should minimize the well being of everyone else?
If your statements are true, then a "company" has a legal and ethical obligation to do everything it can to decrease its legal obligation to anyone but the owners. Why stop at "legal"? The very idea of "legal" implies that there is some interest at play besides that of the owners. If the well-being of the owners is all that matters, then any action, whether legal or not, that benefits the owners is not only permissible, but ethically required.
The OP (and the author of TFA) need to think longer-term.
Whether GG succeeds or not in its first incarnation is a completely different issue than whether it will succeed in the end.
The future is here, boys and girls. Humans have been steadily integrating more and more technology into our bodies ever since . . . well, ever since we've had bodies and technology.
Glasses, hearing aids, artificial limbs, portable writing implements, carriable cameras, backpacks . . . the amount of wearable technology is staggering. So we know people will wear technology, and will integrate it into their bodies.
Do people want to take pictures? Yes. They want to take pictures. All the time. Everywhere. Every form factor that you can use to capture an image, people use. People carry around big DSLRs. Compact cameras. Cell phones. And when Google Glass gets to be easy-enough, and cheap-enough, and common-enough, they'll do that, too.
Face it. We are well on our way to recording every freaking minute of our lives, from every possible angle. And Google will store it and search it for us. The only real question left is, will we be the subject or the object of our future? Will the govt and the corps be the only ones who record and use the moments of our lives, or will we as well?
Take back the future. The ability for people to be able to invisibly record anything and everything will also let us watch the cops and the crooks. That's a good thing.
And earpieces and Segway? Actually, more people don't use earpieces because it doesn't work well enough. Yet. When I can stick something in my ear that's near invisible, picks up my whisper, blocks out the ambient noise, and doesn't need recharging all the time, why would I ever take it off?
And look how long it took for bikes to become ubiquitous. Give Segway a chance. Pretty soon you'll see SegShare along BikeShare.
we should not let our personal opinions interfere with our judgement or our civility
Yes, this.
Not sure why this is rated troll.
I have notices a growing number of US citizens that are trying to stay permanently in Europe after being here for a while.
Citation needed. Also, what's necessary for a US citizen to stay permanently in Europe? Hypothetically.
Okay, I've heard of a moped Jesus, but not a marzipan pope.
Nice Bowie reference.
The internet wasn't built for children.
It was built for the military and the universities. But at some point they let you on it. And at the same time they let you on it, they let all other civilians on it, including children.
Don't let your kids lose here unsupervised. It's not that hard
As I predicted, the old pass the buck to the parents nonsense. Yes, it is that hard. Technically, logistically, and time wise.
I would no more leave a kid on an unfiltered net connection
As I also pointed out, a net nanny on a PC isn't enough. Even if the kids can't find their way around it, they have consoles, smartphones, their friends houses, free wifi all over the place.
I would be curious as to what GP's policy is regarding his kids' usage of the internet from the ages of 2 and up. On multiple devices. Sure, easy enough to monitor a 2-year-old. 10-year-old, mebbe so. It gets much harder to monitor much older kids' internet usage, especially when there are multiple devices. There are lots of kids who can handle the unlimited games/videos/porn of the internet, and some who can't. The GP has one thing right, though, it's the parents' problem.
Back in the day there was some sort of limit to what kids had access to. Now it is unlimited and it is everywhere. It is definitely a challenge for the modern parent.
I say we start with the cast of the Jersey Shore and pretty much everyone that works on Captiol Hill.
Hey now. Okay, there're the elected officials, but for every representative or senator, there're a couple hundred other people who work on Capitol Hill.
That's pretty much true of any skill -- or, for that matter, any school subject. Some people will be better than others. Some won't get it at all. And some will truly excel.
But a worthwhile question is, *why* do some excel at one skill, some at another? To what extent is it nature vs. nurture? Lots of slashdotians are willing to come down on one side or the other, but, far as I know, we don't really understand everything about how people develop skills and interests.
Perhaps a reasonable hypothesis is that nature and nurture both play a role, with the assumption that at this point, we don't really understand the interrelationship between the two. Isn't it therefore worthwhile to do our best to give every child the opportunity to realize what unrealized skills and abilities they may have?
If you want a great spreadsheet: http://www.quantrix.com/
Whoa, pricey. They could probably rule the world if they released an ultra-simple free version and a somewhat more featured cheap version.
We all carry models of reality around in our heads.
Some of us like to share our models and call them science. Some of us like to share our models and call them religion.
Personally, I like the science type of model when it comes to figuring out how stuff works. I think the religion type of model has some interesting things to say about the world also, although for my 2c more about human nature and being a person than how stuff works.
Those folks on the Texas BOE, they are dangerous though. Someone ought to vote them out. I don't think their arguments have anything to do with religion. It's about power.
I was in Dallas once. It was a really nice town. There were only two problems -- it was ridiculously hot, and there were texans EVERYWHERE!
How do you know about the hot chick in 406? Have you been reading my email?
Everyone seems to agree that Google is definitely taking the text of email messages and analyzing it to collect summary data. Some people say that's "reading", others say it isn't. Whatever. Personally, I think it is reading, but let's just call it analyzing. Perhaps that's more accurate anyway.
Clearly, Google is analyzing everyone's email. Clearly, Google is very, very good at data collection and analysis. Personally, I think they are capable of analyzing a single person's email and learning a great deal about that individual person, and I think they are capable of analyzing groups of people and learning a great deal about those groups. So both breadth and depth correlation. So, they might, just making stuff up, be able to figure out that a great number of people lived in city A and moved to city B. They might be able to tell who is having an affair. Who is launching a business. Or all kinds of things. Note, when I say things like "figure out", I don't mean a person is doing it. I mean an automated program has been programmed to find the cheaters or the dissidents, or whatever. I person wouldn't read a million people's email. Now, a person might read a summary of a million people's email, but not the emails themselves. Or they might read a report that correlates data gathered by email with data gathered by a variety of other methods in order to build up a complete picture of their users.
Some people might think that's oogey, some might not. I think it is, but that's just me.
Oh . . . we're pretty clear on that . . . .
It's a Frenchy word. It's pronounced "fan-bwah". Some people pronounce it fan-BOY, like Illinois, but that's just colloquial.
My view is that I'd love to live in a world where the greatest threat comes from business rather than government.
You already do, you just don't realize it yet
In the 20th Century governments killed some 100 million (at least) people, usually their own. However much damage even the largest corporations have done isn't even on the same planet with that scale. Also, let me know when corporations can declare war and draft people.
You ARE kidding, right? When they say a war "cost $500 billion dollars", that money is going somewhere. A substantial portion of it goes to the corporations that make the weapons systems that kill the people. A war is just another way of figuring out how to transfer wealth from the many to the few using the government as a middle man.
I'm not saying that all the ills of every kind of government don't have a lot to do with it, I'm just saying that among those people with a vested financial interest in seeing the bombs drop, are the shareholders, officers, managers, and employees of a large number of corporations.
A good wordprocessor is not a good target for an F/OSS project. It's a lot of boring, thankless work. Nobody has an itch that has to be scratched in such a masochistic way. That's why F/OSS wordprocessors are all not very good. Same goes for accounting systems, CAD systems, and many more. Often a F/OSS project just can't muster enough resources to complete the project. A for-profit company has no such problem; they just pay money, and developers show up for work.
You're right. It is hard to imagine a for-profit company having any interest in producing F/OSS software. Still, I bet there are exceptions. Maybe I'll do a search.