This being the internet, and specifically Slashdot, I look forward to a well-mannered, reasonable discussion about the event and surrounding possibilities with absolutely no moderator bias intervention, political fervor, or anyone being referred to as a "fuckwad".
What's more, every nifty gadget we have these days began life as a product only affordable by "rich douchebags", as the GP puts it. GPS, cell phones, TVs, probably every single car feature that is now standard was once a high-priced optional.
Things, especially electronics, have never popped into existence as affordable by the middle class. It's only after economy of scale kicks in and R&D is somewhat recovered that the prices drop. So these "rich douchebags" are not only shifting money towards those various US things, but they are also beta-testing the product for a premium price before it reaches us proletariat.
My guess is that this is for the "Reopen closed tab" feature. FireFox makes it appear that the tab is gone, but retains it in memory for an indeterminate length prior to the browser itself closing in case the user selects that option.
Which can be handy... except that it seems to be the only way for it to work. If there was a "hell yes I want this tab gone" option that would close the tab and release all associated memory, that would be great. But unless such a thing would give Mozilla's UI team a reason to completely redo the layout again, I doubt it will happen short of an extension.
Haha, I hadn't thought about that. I was more concerned that the game will likely be stuffed to the gills with microtransactions, where you get X Pokeballs per day/week/lifetime. You can choose to buy more with real money, or to buy Pokeballs with a better capture rate (Great Ball, Ultra Ball, etc.).
Though, considering the age range the series targets, I wonder how they'll make that work. Probably make you buy cards in a store and scan them or something.
It's not limited to nerds, either, but force-of-habit. If the gal in question regularly put on those kind of augmented clothes, then it wouldn't occur to her to make sure to avoid things that would scare easily-terrified people.
Anecdote: I recently flew (for the first time in four years). For my day-to-day I carry a pocket knife on me; three inches long, fairly dull, but handy to have. Knowing that I would absentmindedly grab it from where I dump my pocket stuff, I purposefully put it in my suitcase. But, then, I knew I was going through security theater, rather than just picking someone up (in such a case I likely would have had it on my person.)
Nintendo has a long history of being staunchly anti-first-anything. I believe someone high up in Nintendo once compared the second-hand selling of their games to piracy. Sony and Microsoft have dropped region encoding with their latest consoles, while Nintendo keeps it up.
The only reason we haven't seen obscene DRM from Nintendo (like requiring the kind of things Microsoft tried to do with the Xbone) is because Nintendo is still trying to completely figure out how that internet thingy works.
I say all of this as a life-long fan of Nintendo. I love their core games and have supported them in the past when they languished, but boy did they fuck up a lot of decisions for this round. I am afraid that Mr. Iwata's untimely passing will only make it worse.
you can rest assured that it will probably come in both gendered versions.
Ooooooh no. If sexbots become a reality and moderately affordable, I doubt that the plain-male or plain-female will even break the top ten in number of sales. There are so many fetishes you can find on the internet that can't occur in nature right now, and sexbots can make many come to life instead of being relegated to drawings and stories.
Without going into the more, uh, odd ones, an example would be a hermaphrodite (the "both genitalia" you mention). But that's still quite pedestrian given other fetishes a sexbot can bring to life...
People like this should still be spoken against at the earliest possible moment (and in the most polite way possible, as releasing anger won't win anyone to your side). Even if she doesn't actually get sexbots outright banned--and I agree with you on this, that she won't--left unchecked she could still create a following or plant ideas that lead to problems in the future.
Me, too.:'( After the announcement that Dice was looking to sell Slashdot, I realized I hadn't seen a Hastletonoftext "article" in many weeks and thought we had finally purged ourselves of him.
If a trusted/. user did a Kickstarter to buy and maintain/. from Dice, and there was a $100 tier where the only perk was "no Bennett Hastleton", it would be funded in minutes.
They should make it like the voice in the LCARs system (I think that's part of the system). A nice voice with short, informative statements. And a million Star Trek fans would love it.
However, I don't think it qualifies as "Internet of Things". My understanding is that IoT is a bunch of small items that connect through the web to make up a large network of productivity. So if each pole had a device installed that can tell when something is wrong and send a signal to HQ, that would be "IoT".
It would also be a complete waste of funds because of implementation and upkeep costs vs your idea.
As someone who has little life and a large penchant for daydreaming, I've come up with a rough list of things, in order of priority:
1) Hire an accountant. I would do this before I even collected my new-found wealth 2) Pay off all of my debt 3) Gift large sums to my family, working with my accountant to see as little as possible be eaten by taxes (amount to gift depends on what I receive, but for $2.5B probably a million each sibling (4) and 10-20 million to my folks) 4) Set aside a good amount for long-term living, so that even if I undertake anything and bottom out I still won't need to work at all 5) Find a nice area, probably somewhere 30-60 miles outside a major city, and settle down there (at least, use it as my "home base") 6) Donate vast swaths to select charities. EFF is up there, as is the UCLA. I also have more specific charities that I have personal relationships with, such as a poverty assistance center outside of Detroit, a feline sanctuary outside of Denver, and a cancer research fund that partners through my fraternity.
Once all of that is done I'll probably undertake a large number of economic experiments. Maybe something like MINCOME, but attempt to make it self-sufficient. I've always had a idea of taking the run-down areas of Detroit and turning it into a city of sorts for veterans, offering both housing and employment. These might be separate, or they might be the same. Such a city would also try to implement various "newer" technologies and be used for studying them, such as heavy solar installation and a revamped electrical grid.
Another notion I've long had is a website where people (likely just Americans) can apply for a $1000 grant for anything. Ideally I would partner with various companies to supply whatever was being purchased to help spread money further via sponsorship (and maybe a reality TV series), like if they applied for a grant to use towards a washer/dryer I would just buy the washer/dryer for them.
tl;dr: Pay off my debt, set aside money, they give most of the rest away
What about a "clinic" that helps people become "accustomed" to their claimed sensitivity? Bring them to a facility, give some pseduospeech about how its protected from EM waves, and when they enter they get an "EM meter". Acts just like the Geiger counters they see on TV, but it only reacts to specific things so that, while inside the building, it appears to be reading at or near 0, but if they step outside it goes up.
Then they go through "therapy" which involves slowing increasing their apparent exposure to EM waves. Use actual EM waves for this, for added effect, but it's mostly about the whole "indicator light" and a separate counter. Help them build up a tolerance, which is actually mental instead of physical, and let them return every few years to "adjust".
This is similar to the Mirror Box treatment of phantom limbs. The brain thinks something is there, so make it appear that there actually is something there, and that the something is changing and can be handled by the brain.
Someone who will file for benefits over a heretofore scientifically invalid illness is likely also someone who will "find" problems in their work environment that no other person, be it employee or customer, was aware of or even cares about. So not only does the beneficiary's own mental state potentially qualify them for benefits, but giving them said benefits also means that s/he won't be a (regular) problem for a business.
Not only would you spend 20 years paying too much for oil, you would also add more pollutants to the air than you would with faster solar cell adoption. So there's a non-financial (at least, not easily calculated) incentive as well.
I think a large problem with primaries is that, in most states, you have to be registered with the party before you can take part in their primary. Sure, you can game this by switching registration before and after, but it's still very limiting. The POTUS would be more representative if the primaries were not allowed to do that. Sure, it means that one side can try to vote for a joke candidate to make it easier that their own candidate wins the office, but it also means that "honest" voters can pick a candidate from the other side that they would be most likely to support (or least likely to oppose, anyway.) If that person does get into the office, it's still involvement from more of the population in doing so, which might help fight the "us vs them" mentality in US politics.
Of course, the Democrats and Republicans both bank heavily on that very "us vs. them" mentality to rally their base, so I wouldn't expect change in the primaries, electorate college, or first-past-the-post voting short of a revolution (political or physical.)
Rich people can hire only so many servants and drivers and people to wash their cars and be nanny to their kids. There are only so many people needed to service the robots. Only so many people needed to do the dirty work. And those are just the low-paying jobs.
But there's one dystopian job that would employ most people: lab rat.
It appears to be the nature of the wealthy and powerful to want more wealth and power. Once the tiny minority controls the vast majority, what more is left? Life. They will want to live longer (immortality is a nice idea), be healthier, and put little time and effort into it. This requires medical advances, which requires research and human trials. Experimenting on monkeys and mice can only help so much; using live humans would be better.
So, with a giant population starving, they'll start hiring people to go through medical experiments, and doctors/researchers to plan and do them. Patient protection laws? Ha, they'll control the government so those will be abolished quickly. Doctors unwilling to perform such acts? Yes, that sure was a problem for Germany and Japan during WWII, or for any doctor or scientist that says things like "Smoking is relatively harmless" or "Global warming is a complete crock".
So the rich will pay just enough to keep people in decent health until they're old enough to be lab rats, and then they can either starve or work as one. If a subject is lucky, they'll get a neat-o benefit. But more likely they'll be horribly mutilated or, you know, die. The only problem will be keeping the number of subjects low enough to maintain a steady supply of future subjects. Looks like people are starting to revolt? Hire more subjects! Ideally those with the most individualistic tendencies.
Unlike giant, rusty conglomerates (such as members of the RIAA), small studios that rely on advertising will adapt--they'll have to, or they'll die. Many already have, using services like Kickstarter and Patreon to run campaigns for funding. Digital content sites have long had stores to purchase physical goods, using profit from that as (partial) funding.
Companies that offer subscriptions in addition to ad-supported revenue will likely lock down more of their content behind the subscription, offering scraps and glimpses to entice people to subscribe. I would also expect existing subscriptions to spread into tiers, so people can use cheaper subscriptions to get access, albeit at lower quality or content than the full subscription.
More directly to the web in general, I expect many competitors to pop up in "website funding". They could work like Patreon does, where you subscribe to a site for a small amount (likely $1 or less a month.) It could bring about the oft-spoken "micropayments", where a site using the service would charge the viewer a pittance per page or per day, depending on costs. (Users would ideally have full control on whitelisting/blacklisting.)
What will be killed off are the tons of blogs/sites that exist only to re-serve someone else's content (usually without attribution). It will be extremely refreshing, I think. There will be some unfortunate causalities during the transition, but in the end the web will be far better for it.
During all of this, giant publishers will just continue to stick their head in the sand and sue people, clutching to the "old ways" that they understood.
Hmm. I'm not sold, as that's an opinion piece that links to an opinion piece as the source, and it smells like someone trying to fight the $15/hr idea by linking it to racism.
Buuuut a lot of things around that time had links to racism (and not just black people), so it wouldn't surprise me if it's true. Even if it were, it's irrelevant to the push for a higher min wage being good or bad.
In my Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.
- Franklin Roosevelt's Statement on the National Industrial Recovery Act (16 June 1933)
Emphasis mine. The NIR Act established the first minimum wage in America (this was struck down in 1935, ruled unconstitutional by the SC, but a subsequent Act establishing a minimum wage was upheld by the SC in 1941, under that magical Commerce Clause.)
Granted, he doesn't say the family size that decent living would support, but lacking statements to the contrary I assume at least a three-person household. But a temp wage? No, that does not appear to be the intention of it. Big business and our government has twisted and contorted it over the decades to be just a minimum wage paid to people... but if it can't cover life's basics, then what is the point of it at all?
This is a good move that will definitely be controversial to the young, single techie set. If the demographics are to be believed, Millenials are having even fewer children...
As part of said set, and someone who hopes to never pass on his genes, I fully support [ma|pa]ternity leave. I know that my co-worker won't be even close to his or her normal when they're dealing with those nights of almost no sleep for the first few months, and I will feel more confident in my company if they have plans in place that make sure the work is spread equally or a temp replacement is hired while still caring for the new parent.
The only thing I ask is that us single/childless folks don't bear the load of the missing coworker. It's not a vacation, because you're having to take care of a brand new human, but it's still time off (at the very least, you get to avoid the commute). If the workload has to be split between remaining employees, let those employees earn an extra day or three of vacation--or some other compensation--to ease their own extra burden.
Slashdot Mirror
This being the internet, and specifically Slashdot, I look forward to a well-mannered, reasonable discussion about the event and surrounding possibilities with absolutely no moderator bias intervention, political fervor, or anyone being referred to as a "fuckwad".
What's more, every nifty gadget we have these days began life as a product only affordable by "rich douchebags", as the GP puts it. GPS, cell phones, TVs, probably every single car feature that is now standard was once a high-priced optional.
Things, especially electronics, have never popped into existence as affordable by the middle class. It's only after economy of scale kicks in and R&D is somewhat recovered that the prices drop. So these "rich douchebags" are not only shifting money towards those various US things, but they are also beta-testing the product for a premium price before it reaches us proletariat.
My guess is that this is for the "Reopen closed tab" feature. FireFox makes it appear that the tab is gone, but retains it in memory for an indeterminate length prior to the browser itself closing in case the user selects that option.
Which can be handy... except that it seems to be the only way for it to work. If there was a "hell yes I want this tab gone" option that would close the tab and release all associated memory, that would be great. But unless such a thing would give Mozilla's UI team a reason to completely redo the layout again, I doubt it will happen short of an extension.
Haha, I hadn't thought about that. I was more concerned that the game will likely be stuffed to the gills with microtransactions, where you get X Pokeballs per day/week/lifetime. You can choose to buy more with real money, or to buy Pokeballs with a better capture rate (Great Ball, Ultra Ball, etc.).
Though, considering the age range the series targets, I wonder how they'll make that work. Probably make you buy cards in a store and scan them or something.
It's not limited to nerds, either, but force-of-habit. If the gal in question regularly put on those kind of augmented clothes, then it wouldn't occur to her to make sure to avoid things that would scare easily-terrified people.
Anecdote: I recently flew (for the first time in four years). For my day-to-day I carry a pocket knife on me; three inches long, fairly dull, but handy to have. Knowing that I would absentmindedly grab it from where I dump my pocket stuff, I purposefully put it in my suitcase. But, then, I knew I was going through security theater, rather than just picking someone up (in such a case I likely would have had it on my person.)
Nintendo has a long history of being staunchly anti-first-anything. I believe someone high up in Nintendo once compared the second-hand selling of their games to piracy. Sony and Microsoft have dropped region encoding with their latest consoles, while Nintendo keeps it up.
The only reason we haven't seen obscene DRM from Nintendo (like requiring the kind of things Microsoft tried to do with the Xbone) is because Nintendo is still trying to completely figure out how that internet thingy works.
I say all of this as a life-long fan of Nintendo. I love their core games and have supported them in the past when they languished, but boy did they fuck up a lot of decisions for this round. I am afraid that Mr. Iwata's untimely passing will only make it worse.
Ooooooh no. If sexbots become a reality and moderately affordable, I doubt that the plain-male or plain-female will even break the top ten in number of sales. There are so many fetishes you can find on the internet that can't occur in nature right now, and sexbots can make many come to life instead of being relegated to drawings and stories.
Without going into the more, uh, odd ones, an example would be a hermaphrodite (the "both genitalia" you mention). But that's still quite pedestrian given other fetishes a sexbot can bring to life...
People like this should still be spoken against at the earliest possible moment (and in the most polite way possible, as releasing anger won't win anyone to your side). Even if she doesn't actually get sexbots outright banned--and I agree with you on this, that she won't--left unchecked she could still create a following or plant ideas that lead to problems in the future.
Ounce of prevention and all of that.
Me, too. :'( After the announcement that Dice was looking to sell Slashdot, I realized I hadn't seen a Hastletonoftext "article" in many weeks and thought we had finally purged ourselves of him.
If a trusted /. user did a Kickstarter to buy and maintain /. from Dice, and there was a $100 tier where the only perk was "no Bennett Hastleton", it would be funded in minutes.
They should make it like the voice in the LCARs system (I think that's part of the system). A nice voice with short, informative statements. And a million Star Trek fans would love it.
This is an excellent idea.
However, I don't think it qualifies as "Internet of Things". My understanding is that IoT is a bunch of small items that connect through the web to make up a large network of productivity. So if each pole had a device installed that can tell when something is wrong and send a signal to HQ, that would be "IoT".
It would also be a complete waste of funds because of implementation and upkeep costs vs your idea.
Only after they updated the summary.
Who else would shill Dice posts without mentioning conflict of interest?
As someone who has little life and a large penchant for daydreaming, I've come up with a rough list of things, in order of priority:
1) Hire an accountant. I would do this before I even collected my new-found wealth
2) Pay off all of my debt
3) Gift large sums to my family, working with my accountant to see as little as possible be eaten by taxes (amount to gift depends on what I receive, but for $2.5B probably a million each sibling (4) and 10-20 million to my folks)
4) Set aside a good amount for long-term living, so that even if I undertake anything and bottom out I still won't need to work at all
5) Find a nice area, probably somewhere 30-60 miles outside a major city, and settle down there (at least, use it as my "home base")
6) Donate vast swaths to select charities. EFF is up there, as is the UCLA. I also have more specific charities that I have personal relationships with, such as a poverty assistance center outside of Detroit, a feline sanctuary outside of Denver, and a cancer research fund that partners through my fraternity.
Once all of that is done I'll probably undertake a large number of economic experiments. Maybe something like MINCOME, but attempt to make it self-sufficient. I've always had a idea of taking the run-down areas of Detroit and turning it into a city of sorts for veterans, offering both housing and employment. These might be separate, or they might be the same. Such a city would also try to implement various "newer" technologies and be used for studying them, such as heavy solar installation and a revamped electrical grid.
Another notion I've long had is a website where people (likely just Americans) can apply for a $1000 grant for anything. Ideally I would partner with various companies to supply whatever was being purchased to help spread money further via sponsorship (and maybe a reality TV series), like if they applied for a grant to use towards a washer/dryer I would just buy the washer/dryer for them.
tl;dr: Pay off my debt, set aside money, they give most of the rest away
What about a "clinic" that helps people become "accustomed" to their claimed sensitivity? Bring them to a facility, give some pseduospeech about how its protected from EM waves, and when they enter they get an "EM meter". Acts just like the Geiger counters they see on TV, but it only reacts to specific things so that, while inside the building, it appears to be reading at or near 0, but if they step outside it goes up.
Then they go through "therapy" which involves slowing increasing their apparent exposure to EM waves. Use actual EM waves for this, for added effect, but it's mostly about the whole "indicator light" and a separate counter. Help them build up a tolerance, which is actually mental instead of physical, and let them return every few years to "adjust".
This is similar to the Mirror Box treatment of phantom limbs. The brain thinks something is there, so make it appear that there actually is something there, and that the something is changing and can be handled by the brain.
Someone who will file for benefits over a heretofore scientifically invalid illness is likely also someone who will "find" problems in their work environment that no other person, be it employee or customer, was aware of or even cares about. So not only does the beneficiary's own mental state potentially qualify them for benefits, but giving them said benefits also means that s/he won't be a (regular) problem for a business.
Not only would you spend 20 years paying too much for oil, you would also add more pollutants to the air than you would with faster solar cell adoption. So there's a non-financial (at least, not easily calculated) incentive as well.
I think a large problem with primaries is that, in most states, you have to be registered with the party before you can take part in their primary. Sure, you can game this by switching registration before and after, but it's still very limiting. The POTUS would be more representative if the primaries were not allowed to do that. Sure, it means that one side can try to vote for a joke candidate to make it easier that their own candidate wins the office, but it also means that "honest" voters can pick a candidate from the other side that they would be most likely to support (or least likely to oppose, anyway.) If that person does get into the office, it's still involvement from more of the population in doing so, which might help fight the "us vs them" mentality in US politics.
Of course, the Democrats and Republicans both bank heavily on that very "us vs. them" mentality to rally their base, so I wouldn't expect change in the primaries, electorate college, or first-past-the-post voting short of a revolution (political or physical.)
I'm personally hoping the Red Scare will finally end before we get to that point, but if we do continue that way it's the outcome I expect.
But there's one dystopian job that would employ most people: lab rat.
It appears to be the nature of the wealthy and powerful to want more wealth and power. Once the tiny minority controls the vast majority, what more is left? Life. They will want to live longer (immortality is a nice idea), be healthier, and put little time and effort into it. This requires medical advances, which requires research and human trials. Experimenting on monkeys and mice can only help so much; using live humans would be better.
So, with a giant population starving, they'll start hiring people to go through medical experiments, and doctors/researchers to plan and do them. Patient protection laws? Ha, they'll control the government so those will be abolished quickly. Doctors unwilling to perform such acts? Yes, that sure was a problem for Germany and Japan during WWII, or for any doctor or scientist that says things like "Smoking is relatively harmless" or "Global warming is a complete crock".
So the rich will pay just enough to keep people in decent health until they're old enough to be lab rats, and then they can either starve or work as one. If a subject is lucky, they'll get a neat-o benefit. But more likely they'll be horribly mutilated or, you know, die. The only problem will be keeping the number of subjects low enough to maintain a steady supply of future subjects. Looks like people are starting to revolt? Hire more subjects! Ideally those with the most individualistic tendencies.
Unlike giant, rusty conglomerates (such as members of the RIAA), small studios that rely on advertising will adapt--they'll have to, or they'll die. Many already have, using services like Kickstarter and Patreon to run campaigns for funding. Digital content sites have long had stores to purchase physical goods, using profit from that as (partial) funding.
Companies that offer subscriptions in addition to ad-supported revenue will likely lock down more of their content behind the subscription, offering scraps and glimpses to entice people to subscribe. I would also expect existing subscriptions to spread into tiers, so people can use cheaper subscriptions to get access, albeit at lower quality or content than the full subscription.
More directly to the web in general, I expect many competitors to pop up in "website funding". They could work like Patreon does, where you subscribe to a site for a small amount (likely $1 or less a month.) It could bring about the oft-spoken "micropayments", where a site using the service would charge the viewer a pittance per page or per day, depending on costs. (Users would ideally have full control on whitelisting/blacklisting.)
What will be killed off are the tons of blogs/sites that exist only to re-serve someone else's content (usually without attribution). It will be extremely refreshing, I think. There will be some unfortunate causalities during the transition, but in the end the web will be far better for it.
During all of this, giant publishers will just continue to stick their head in the sand and sue people, clutching to the "old ways" that they understood.
Hmm. I'm not sold, as that's an opinion piece that links to an opinion piece as the source, and it smells like someone trying to fight the $15/hr idea by linking it to racism.
Buuuut a lot of things around that time had links to racism (and not just black people), so it wouldn't surprise me if it's true. Even if it were, it's irrelevant to the push for a higher min wage being good or bad.
Emphasis mine. The NIR Act established the first minimum wage in America (this was struck down in 1935, ruled unconstitutional by the SC, but a subsequent Act establishing a minimum wage was upheld by the SC in 1941, under that magical Commerce Clause.)
Granted, he doesn't say the family size that decent living would support, but lacking statements to the contrary I assume at least a three-person household. But a temp wage? No, that does not appear to be the intention of it. Big business and our government has twisted and contorted it over the decades to be just a minimum wage paid to people... but if it can't cover life's basics, then what is the point of it at all?
As part of said set, and someone who hopes to never pass on his genes, I fully support [ma|pa]ternity leave. I know that my co-worker won't be even close to his or her normal when they're dealing with those nights of almost no sleep for the first few months, and I will feel more confident in my company if they have plans in place that make sure the work is spread equally or a temp replacement is hired while still caring for the new parent.
The only thing I ask is that us single/childless folks don't bear the load of the missing coworker. It's not a vacation, because you're having to take care of a brand new human, but it's still time off (at the very least, you get to avoid the commute). If the workload has to be split between remaining employees, let those employees earn an extra day or three of vacation--or some other compensation--to ease their own extra burden.
I was told there wouldn't be a math test today.