You have a problem with Nerval's lobster don't read it's postings
I didn't; I just saw "Nerval's Lobster" and made my post. While you know about Nerval's Lobster, and I know about Nerval's Lobster, there are many who don't, especially newer users. Therefore, I do what Slashdot editors will not.
Incidentally, you seem to be rather pissed about my comment. Why did you not take your own advice and simply not read it?:)
I'm talking about when it was owned by Geeknet. Any time they posted a link to, say, SourceForge, they would mention that SourceForge and Slashdot are both owned by the same company.
I think Beta was actually their attempt to monetize Slashdot, but the community reaction was so horrendous (and rightfully so, IMO) that they had to cancel it, which is why they're looking to sell off Slashdot. These Dicevertisements are just a little side action for them, for whatever ads I'm sure they have plastered over their own page.
Not when the source holds a status of privilege above other sources and the connection is not disclosed.
My personal problem isn't Slashdot having articles linking to Dice, or even using a shill account; it's the refusal to post a disclaimer about sharing a parent company./.ers cry foul over any article where the author has a potential conflict of interest and does not disclose it; why should we do any different when Slashdot editors post a Dice story?
Just a friendly reminder that Nerval's Lobster is a Dice shill account, and posts articles for Dice.com. Oh, and that editors either refuse to, or are banned from, putting a disclaimer that Dice.com is owned by Dice Holdings, Inc., the parent company of Slashdot, as they once would when posting a link to "sister" sites prior to being purchased by Dice.
"Interactive ads" aren't new to Hulu, though, and don't completely halt playback.
The way it works is that you're first presented with a screen giving you the option to use the interactive ad or to watch the show normally with commercials. If there's no interaction after so many seconds (15?) then the show would automatically continue with normal commercials. They've also done similar campaigns where you are shown a very long commercial (either a movie/game trailer or one some medication commercial) in lieu of commercial breaks; these would default to the long commercial if there's no selection made (IIRC).
I hadn't seen these for a while before I signed up for their Commercial Free* plan. No surprise that Fox is using them again. Last campaign I can recall was for some car brand where you'd answer four multiple-choice questions. It was easy to just sit there and click-spam where an answer would appear, because it didn't matter if you were right or wrong, so you'd fly through the interactive ad in 5 seconds and avoid 300 seconds of commercials.
* Except for a handful of shows that require an advertisement to be shown at the beginning and end of an episode for some damn licensing reason, though
I disagree. I believe > is easier to parse while reading code since it separates it from identifiers, control statements, constants, numbers, and other keywords. It's the same reason && is better than "AND" in C syntax derivatives.
Oh, how I wish I hadn't run out of mod points, as this is 100% my view.
When I am trying to read code (whether familiarizing myself with another's code, reviewing code I wrote long ago, or trying to pin down a bug) the use of punctuation like > and < makes it far easier for me to split out statements and work the logic in my head. With "friendlier" syntax I have to first identify what is an operator (especially if someone uses a variable name like "g" or "lot") then mentally parse outward from there.
I also prefer it for brevity. Consider C#.NET: Boolean statements can be short-circuited using &&, or you can make sure both sides evaluate with &. In VB.NET, the equivalent keywords are ANDALSO and AND. In either case the C#.NET operator is far more concise, and also feeds back into head parsing.
And, responding to the GP, if someone wants to make an "English" friendly language, fine... but what if someone from Germany, knowing no English, wants to use the language? The OR is no more familiar to them than the |, so I would expect them to prefer the punctuation for brevity.
Perhaps computer science should create an "indistinguishable from magic" term for programs/processes that are not truly intelligent (in that they learn and adapt with no further human tampering of the programming) but give the appearance of being intelligent in a narrow field and, as far as the common person is concerned, is "smart" (like Siri).
If customer B gets caught up at some point then its time to increase their limit (if you haven't already speculatively done so)
I wonder if this is what Discover did to me. Beginning of the year I had $5500 in credit with a $6500 limit. Starting with a nice bonus I received in January, I've been aggressively "pay-using" the card[1] when I hadn't touched it the prior year. Since then I've gotten three credit line increases: $8000 (soon after I deposited the bonus), $11,000, and two months ago it went to $13,500.
Of course, the joke's on them: I only have $111 on the account now, which will be paid off with my next paycheck, and then the card will be set aside and used only for a few small monthly bills (paying off the balance each month) or when their cash back promotion lines up with a purchase.
[1] By "pay-using", I mean I dump as much of each paycheck as possible to pay down the balance, then use the card for my normal purchases. Thanks to a lower interest rate applied to newer purchases, and any payment over minimum being applied to older purchases, I was able to avoid probably $200 in interest charges this year and the effective monthly payment was only 50% more than usual.
Some people would be happy to sit at home and do nothing except watch TV all day. So? Some would keep working because they were not happy sitting at home watching TV all day.
I think that a middle-ground is an in-between: 40 hour work weeks would go out the window, and many people would spend most of their time doing basic recreation, working only 10-20 hours regularly to have a higher standard of living. You will have many, especially "professional" white collar workers, who will keep at the 40, but they will quickly become the exception rather than the norm.
One of the biggest secondary benefits of a "guaranteed income" (beyond covering the basic life necessities) is that it would tremendously tip the scales of power between employer and employee. Right now employees are often at the mercy of the employer, lest they find themselves out of a job and without income. Unions balance this to some extent But if everyone knew that they could quit at any moment and still survive, employees would put up with a far lesser amount of bullshit. Employers would become far more interested in the psychological needs of their employees, especially as what they pay would be greatly reduced. It would remove much of the need of unions, who would remain primarily for workplace safety and standards. (Ideally OSHA sees to that, but they're too removed from the day-to-day at any particular company to be as effective.) In the end, what tedious work still needs to be done by humans will still be done, but the money offered will be much different relative to other jobs and employers would make an effort to keep it from being soul-destroying. Most likely it would involve a job done by one person for 40 hours/week to instead be done by 4 people for 10 hours/week each.
It would also create a much better "free market", as much as such a thing can exist. Minimum wage would be completely done away with, so the demand between someone who mops floor and someone who serves burgers becomes far more apparent. There would be a boon in entrepreneurship, as people that can get seed money can begin new companies. If the companies fail, oh well, the owner and whatever employees there are still have their minimum income.
So far as I'm aware, the only people who would "lose" (if you want to call it that) are those who would see far higher taxes on the tip-top most brackets.
Contrast this with Hulu which has 20-30 seconds of ads in each break.
Eh wut? Before I subscribed to Hulu Commercial Free when it started a few months back, Hulu was pushing 2 minutes of commercials for most shows, especially the more "mainstream" ones that air on regular TV channels. Some of the lesser known/older series might only have one or two 20-30 second commercials per break, but prior to switching I found that the exception rather than the rule.
It was quickly approaching the amount of ads for regular cable, to the point that I could use the commercial breaks as bathroom/food breaks and still get back before they were over.
could put 1 million irritating people in jobs that bother us even more.
Offtopic, but I think this is an argument in favor of a guaranteed income. How many co-workers or employees of other companies have you dealt with that were, at best, irritating? (Often downright unhelpful.) I bet a lot of those people only work because they have to do so, and a guaranteed income means they could go about a basic living without bringing productivity down anywhere.
I am betting the automated car wins. Sure the automated car may have some accidents that the human might avoid but I'm betting the total goes down.
A number of accidents, sure. But what will halt automated car adoption is a single serious accident that is grappled by whatever group opposes automated driving in general (if not an automaker trying to avoid innovating, then an auto insurance group fearing lost profits or a group of overbearing parents) and paints automotive driving as something just short of letting the Devil himself drive.
The American public, always the fearful type willing to give up any and everything for the sake of safety (regardless if actual safety improves), will immediately stop buying automatic cars and all progress will stall for two decades.
When first hearing about this rumor, I thought of something different: The Dreamcast VMU.
For those who don't remember or never saw one, the Dreamcast "Virtual Memory Unit" was like other memory cards of the day, with one notable addition: a low-resolution (48x32 dots) LCD screen. When plugged into the controller, the VMU screen could offer some basic info for select games (most games would just show a logo or something, though). When removed, the VMU could play some basic things on the go, as it also had simple controls on the unit itself. (It could even connect to other VMUs for file transfer or multi-player games.)
So a "hybrid" console is one where a handheld can be plugged into controller, or act as the controller itself. On the go it can store and play mini-games or dumbed-down versions of full console games, and while connected to the core unit it can play handheld games on the big screen, act as a secondary monitor for the console game (like the Wii U has now), or work as a streaming receiver for the Console (like the Wii U or PS4+Vita does.)
Considering their push towards mobile, I can envision the "handheld" half of this is actually whatever smartphone you have on hand, which uses NFC, BT, or just a direct physical connection. Nintendo would probably release a more specific handheld (that is also more restricted, and they would release their core titles for) that takes better advantage of the connection, but to draw in users they would want to have some sort of connection with existing lines of phones. It would be a support nightmare, though, so I can't see it being very plausible even if this rumor is true.
Suddenly, the car runs into a problem that it can't deal with so it hands over control to the driver.
A situation where A) there is not enough time for the car to stop completely or give adequete warning before releasing control, or B) a "reasonably capable" system--one that most people feel comfortable giving full control to as they sleep--could not handle itself is not going to be a situation a human driver can properly handle, even one who is above average and has been paying close attention and constantly prepared to take control. These are bleeding edge cases, like a falling boulder or earthquake.
Even if you don't know the exact destination, there's a general idea of direction/area. Give the command of "head towards [street name]" so the car moves in that direction at a somewhat slower pace as you look up the exact address (and then remember to mark it as a Favorite, so next time you don't have to look it up.)
Let's say you are in a crowded parking lot and you want the car to park in the 3rd spot, 4 rows over.
Non-problem. The car drops you off directly in front of the location, let's say a store (perhaps even a designated loading/unloading area), then parks itself wherever a spot is available, even if that is two blocks away. In fact, it probably will be two blocks away, as spots closest to the location will probably be reserved for manual and semi-manual vehicles. When you are ready to go, or you just forgot something in the vehicle, you press a button on your remote/phone and the car makes its way back to the store.
For convoluted areas requiring minute redirection, such as the airport you mention, the car could interface with a system at the airport that will direct it as needed. But I would not be surprised if the car can manage on its own
A lot of the things we have to concern ourselves with in regards to human needs and limitations will disappear once 99% autonomous cars are standard. Heck, once that happens I would expect a sharp decline in direct auto sales, and people instead do a "time share" kind of thing with automated cars.
There's also time: Even if the automated system in a truck can only be relied on for the straight-and-narrow highway, requiring the driver for everything else, stuff can get transported a lot faster. The driver can sleep in the cab while the truck drives itself, stopping only for fuel (which is when the driver can take care of their own needs.)
When fully automated, the driver (there for the 1% of cases where s/he might be necessary, until those are solved and people become comfortable with driverless trucks) can spend time doing other things, like any testing/training/studying necessary, paperwork, etc.
I imagine that there will be "freight semi trains", where trucks in network will actually link up (probably not literally) on the highway in order to be more efficient. The ones in the back have reduced drag (a trailer that can have walls extending to the cab behind can reduce this further) and can follow each other towards common destinations.
that they raised the deductible and raised the premium.
If they raised it as little as possible, and solely because of Obamacare, then it means you had crap insurance and they were raising prices to cover extra costs of being in compliance. If either (or neither) of those things apply, they raised rates so they could screw you over, claim "Obamacare", and you wouldn't bother asking questions about why, exactly, the rates were raised tremendously.
Meanwhile, I went from a $320 "Economy" plan with my employer to a $160 "Catastrophic" (Economy for under-30s) plan through my state's Market. Same deductible, slightly higher co-pay/out-of-pocket.
It's great that your son is doing better, and I mean no offense towards you or him, but classifying him and his smarter-than-average classmates as "weirdos" doesn't help with bullying. When you say someone is "weird", many people will associate "weird" with "outcast", and makes that someone a much easier target because the assumption is that society will not punish as harshly--if at all--for abusing/bullying someone society considers lowly.
I know you don't mean that association, but as someone else who was bullied I know (and assume you know) just how destructive words can be, even when said innocently.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I was just making sure the relationship was clear (that /. is owned by DHI, not by Dice.com)
I didn't; I just saw "Nerval's Lobster" and made my post. While you know about Nerval's Lobster, and I know about Nerval's Lobster, there are many who don't, especially newer users. Therefore, I do what Slashdot editors will not.
Incidentally, you seem to be rather pissed about my comment. Why did you not take your own advice and simply not read it? :)
I'm talking about when it was owned by Geeknet. Any time they posted a link to, say, SourceForge, they would mention that SourceForge and Slashdot are both owned by the same company.
I think Beta was actually their attempt to monetize Slashdot, but the community reaction was so horrendous (and rightfully so, IMO) that they had to cancel it, which is why they're looking to sell off Slashdot. These Dicevertisements are just a little side action for them, for whatever ads I'm sure they have plastered over their own page.
Not when the source holds a status of privilege above other sources and the connection is not disclosed.
My personal problem isn't Slashdot having articles linking to Dice, or even using a shill account; it's the refusal to post a disclaimer about sharing a parent company. /.ers cry foul over any article where the author has a potential conflict of interest and does not disclose it; why should we do any different when Slashdot editors post a Dice story?
Just a friendly reminder that Nerval's Lobster is a Dice shill account, and posts articles for Dice.com. Oh, and that editors either refuse to, or are banned from, putting a disclaimer that Dice.com is owned by Dice Holdings, Inc., the parent company of Slashdot, as they once would when posting a link to "sister" sites prior to being purchased by Dice.
"Interactive ads" aren't new to Hulu, though, and don't completely halt playback.
The way it works is that you're first presented with a screen giving you the option to use the interactive ad or to watch the show normally with commercials. If there's no interaction after so many seconds (15?) then the show would automatically continue with normal commercials. They've also done similar campaigns where you are shown a very long commercial (either a movie/game trailer or one some medication commercial) in lieu of commercial breaks; these would default to the long commercial if there's no selection made (IIRC).
I hadn't seen these for a while before I signed up for their Commercial Free* plan. No surprise that Fox is using them again. Last campaign I can recall was for some car brand where you'd answer four multiple-choice questions. It was easy to just sit there and click-spam where an answer would appear, because it didn't matter if you were right or wrong, so you'd fly through the interactive ad in 5 seconds and avoid 300 seconds of commercials.
* Except for a handful of shows that require an advertisement to be shown at the beginning and end of an episode for some damn licensing reason, though
Oh, how I wish I hadn't run out of mod points, as this is 100% my view.
When I am trying to read code (whether familiarizing myself with another's code, reviewing code I wrote long ago, or trying to pin down a bug) the use of punctuation like > and < makes it far easier for me to split out statements and work the logic in my head. With "friendlier" syntax I have to first identify what is an operator (especially if someone uses a variable name like "g" or "lot") then mentally parse outward from there.
I also prefer it for brevity. Consider C#.NET: Boolean statements can be short-circuited using &&, or you can make sure both sides evaluate with &. In VB.NET, the equivalent keywords are ANDALSO and AND. In either case the C#.NET operator is far more concise, and also feeds back into head parsing.
And, responding to the GP, if someone wants to make an "English" friendly language, fine... but what if someone from Germany, knowing no English, wants to use the language? The OR is no more familiar to them than the |, so I would expect them to prefer the punctuation for brevity.
Perhaps computer science should create an "indistinguishable from magic" term for programs/processes that are not truly intelligent (in that they learn and adapt with no further human tampering of the programming) but give the appearance of being intelligent in a narrow field and, as far as the common person is concerned, is "smart" (like Siri).
Simulated Intelligence?
I wonder if this is what Discover did to me. Beginning of the year I had $5500 in credit with a $6500 limit. Starting with a nice bonus I received in January, I've been aggressively "pay-using" the card[1] when I hadn't touched it the prior year. Since then I've gotten three credit line increases: $8000 (soon after I deposited the bonus), $11,000, and two months ago it went to $13,500.
Of course, the joke's on them: I only have $111 on the account now, which will be paid off with my next paycheck, and then the card will be set aside and used only for a few small monthly bills (paying off the balance each month) or when their cash back promotion lines up with a purchase.
[1] By "pay-using", I mean I dump as much of each paycheck as possible to pay down the balance, then use the card for my normal purchases. Thanks to a lower interest rate applied to newer purchases, and any payment over minimum being applied to older purchases, I was able to avoid probably $200 in interest charges this year and the effective monthly payment was only 50% more than usual.
I think that a middle-ground is an in-between: 40 hour work weeks would go out the window, and many people would spend most of their time doing basic recreation, working only 10-20 hours regularly to have a higher standard of living. You will have many, especially "professional" white collar workers, who will keep at the 40, but they will quickly become the exception rather than the norm.
One of the biggest secondary benefits of a "guaranteed income" (beyond covering the basic life necessities) is that it would tremendously tip the scales of power between employer and employee. Right now employees are often at the mercy of the employer, lest they find themselves out of a job and without income. Unions balance this to some extent But if everyone knew that they could quit at any moment and still survive, employees would put up with a far lesser amount of bullshit. Employers would become far more interested in the psychological needs of their employees, especially as what they pay would be greatly reduced. It would remove much of the need of unions, who would remain primarily for workplace safety and standards. (Ideally OSHA sees to that, but they're too removed from the day-to-day at any particular company to be as effective.) In the end, what tedious work still needs to be done by humans will still be done, but the money offered will be much different relative to other jobs and employers would make an effort to keep it from being soul-destroying. Most likely it would involve a job done by one person for 40 hours/week to instead be done by 4 people for 10 hours/week each.
It would also create a much better "free market", as much as such a thing can exist. Minimum wage would be completely done away with, so the demand between someone who mops floor and someone who serves burgers becomes far more apparent. There would be a boon in entrepreneurship, as people that can get seed money can begin new companies. If the companies fail, oh well, the owner and whatever employees there are still have their minimum income.
So far as I'm aware, the only people who would "lose" (if you want to call it that) are those who would see far higher taxes on the tip-top most brackets.
Eh wut? Before I subscribed to Hulu Commercial Free when it started a few months back, Hulu was pushing 2 minutes of commercials for most shows, especially the more "mainstream" ones that air on regular TV channels. Some of the lesser known/older series might only have one or two 20-30 second commercials per break, but prior to switching I found that the exception rather than the rule.
It was quickly approaching the amount of ads for regular cable, to the point that I could use the commercial breaks as bathroom/food breaks and still get back before they were over.
Offtopic, but I think this is an argument in favor of a guaranteed income. How many co-workers or employees of other companies have you dealt with that were, at best, irritating? (Often downright unhelpful.) I bet a lot of those people only work because they have to do so, and a guaranteed income means they could go about a basic living without bringing productivity down anywhere.
A number of accidents, sure. But what will halt automated car adoption is a single serious accident that is grappled by whatever group opposes automated driving in general (if not an automaker trying to avoid innovating, then an auto insurance group fearing lost profits or a group of overbearing parents) and paints automotive driving as something just short of letting the Devil himself drive.
The American public, always the fearful type willing to give up any and everything for the sake of safety (regardless if actual safety improves), will immediately stop buying automatic cars and all progress will stall for two decades.
When first hearing about this rumor, I thought of something different: The Dreamcast VMU.
For those who don't remember or never saw one, the Dreamcast "Virtual Memory Unit" was like other memory cards of the day, with one notable addition: a low-resolution (48x32 dots) LCD screen. When plugged into the controller, the VMU screen could offer some basic info for select games (most games would just show a logo or something, though). When removed, the VMU could play some basic things on the go, as it also had simple controls on the unit itself. (It could even connect to other VMUs for file transfer or multi-player games.)
So a "hybrid" console is one where a handheld can be plugged into controller, or act as the controller itself. On the go it can store and play mini-games or dumbed-down versions of full console games, and while connected to the core unit it can play handheld games on the big screen, act as a secondary monitor for the console game (like the Wii U has now), or work as a streaming receiver for the Console (like the Wii U or PS4+Vita does.)
Considering their push towards mobile, I can envision the "handheld" half of this is actually whatever smartphone you have on hand, which uses NFC, BT, or just a direct physical connection. Nintendo would probably release a more specific handheld (that is also more restricted, and they would release their core titles for) that takes better advantage of the connection, but to draw in users they would want to have some sort of connection with existing lines of phones. It would be a support nightmare, though, so I can't see it being very plausible even if this rumor is true.
Annnnd I think I'm actually agreeing with you, but I stopped reading too soon. So my reply is moot.
A situation where
A) there is not enough time for the car to stop completely or give adequete warning before releasing control, or
B) a "reasonably capable" system--one that most people feel comfortable giving full control to as they sleep--could not handle itself
is not going to be a situation a human driver can properly handle, even one who is above average and has been paying close attention and constantly prepared to take control. These are bleeding edge cases, like a falling boulder or earthquake.
Even if you don't know the exact destination, there's a general idea of direction/area. Give the command of "head towards [street name]" so the car moves in that direction at a somewhat slower pace as you look up the exact address (and then remember to mark it as a Favorite, so next time you don't have to look it up.)
Non-problem. The car drops you off directly in front of the location, let's say a store (perhaps even a designated loading/unloading area), then parks itself wherever a spot is available, even if that is two blocks away. In fact, it probably will be two blocks away, as spots closest to the location will probably be reserved for manual and semi-manual vehicles. When you are ready to go, or you just forgot something in the vehicle, you press a button on your remote/phone and the car makes its way back to the store.
For convoluted areas requiring minute redirection, such as the airport you mention, the car could interface with a system at the airport that will direct it as needed. But I would not be surprised if the car can manage on its own
A lot of the things we have to concern ourselves with in regards to human needs and limitations will disappear once 99% autonomous cars are standard. Heck, once that happens I would expect a sharp decline in direct auto sales, and people instead do a "time share" kind of thing with automated cars.
There's also time: Even if the automated system in a truck can only be relied on for the straight-and-narrow highway, requiring the driver for everything else, stuff can get transported a lot faster. The driver can sleep in the cab while the truck drives itself, stopping only for fuel (which is when the driver can take care of their own needs.)
When fully automated, the driver (there for the 1% of cases where s/he might be necessary, until those are solved and people become comfortable with driverless trucks) can spend time doing other things, like any testing/training/studying necessary, paperwork, etc.
I imagine that there will be "freight semi trains", where trucks in network will actually link up (probably not literally) on the highway in order to be more efficient. The ones in the back have reduced drag (a trailer that can have walls extending to the cab behind can reduce this further) and can follow each other towards common destinations.
Even the Kochs believe it starts at the grassroots level, so they've set up a number of "grassroots" organizations.
Buh. I meant "If either one of those didn't apply, or neither applied," That's what I get for skimming the preview...
If they raised it as little as possible, and solely because of Obamacare, then it means you had crap insurance and they were raising prices to cover extra costs of being in compliance. If either (or neither) of those things apply, they raised rates so they could screw you over, claim "Obamacare", and you wouldn't bother asking questions about why, exactly, the rates were raised tremendously.
Meanwhile, I went from a $320 "Economy" plan with my employer to a $160 "Catastrophic" (Economy for under-30s) plan through my state's Market. Same deductible, slightly higher co-pay/out-of-pocket.
It's great that your son is doing better, and I mean no offense towards you or him, but classifying him and his smarter-than-average classmates as "weirdos" doesn't help with bullying. When you say someone is "weird", many people will associate "weird" with "outcast", and makes that someone a much easier target because the assumption is that society will not punish as harshly--if at all--for abusing/bullying someone society considers lowly.
I know you don't mean that association, but as someone else who was bullied I know (and assume you know) just how destructive words can be, even when said innocently.