Sorry, nothing is free. Someone has to pay for that.
This is true. The economic output of a country is fixed over time and no amount of spending can ever increase it. Building textile factories in the industrial revolution made no difference to the amount of cloth produced, cheap electric lighting made no different to the number of productive hours for which businesses could operate, building canals and roads had no impact on industry and so on.
Lets be real: If people want transportation, they can move into a city and be able to walk to their destination
Also true. The supply of city centre housing is elastic.
Oh, wait. Nothing you've said is even slightly bounded in economics.
Yes, giving everyone their own Cadillac might improve things and make society more efficient
I doubt it. In most of the world, the roads wouldn't cope with that level of traffic and the lungs of the people would definitely not be happy with the increase in pollution.
Transportation is not the government's job.
Who degreed this? Effective transportation is the single thing that economists agree benefits the overall health of an economy, yet is difficult to monetise because the people that benefit do so at one remove or more (e.g. businesses benefit from a larger pool of accessible employees and customers). This sounds exactly like the kind of thing that should be run by the government. It is something that, if done well, will make an operating loss but increase the overall health of the economy.
I suspect that if you made national rail services free, then you'd see some unpleasant secondary effects. There are a lot of commuter towns around London already where no one who works there can afford to live there because salaries in London are higher and this pushes up the property prices. You might eventually reach an equilibrium where salaries everywhere reach London rates, but that would take a long time.
There are few e-mail clients even capable of sending plain text e-mail, let alone clients that do so by default.
Really? Apple Mail (macOS and iOS), Thunderbird, and K9 Mail are all happy to have plain text set as their composing format. I've not seen a mail client that can't send plain text.
Back in the day, Google Ads were plain text, usually advertising content directly related to the page that I was viewing. I clicked on a few, and I actually liked them because they introduced me to products that solved problems that I had identified that I had. People liked them because they were a lot less intrusive than the animated banner ads that they were competing against, and also far more likely to be relevant. Now, they are based on a crappy model of me, which is either creepy if it's accurate, or annoying if it isn't (yes, I did want one of those last week. Then I bought one. Now I am looking for something else), and they're as likely to contain video as anyone else's.
Is there really a law that prevents me from writing my own web browser that blocks all ads except my own?
I don't know. Are you in a dominant position in the online advertising market? Are you using income from online advertising to subsidise the development of the web browser and sell it below cost? If the answer to both of these is 'yes', then there are laws in a lot of jurisdictions, yes.
Maybe my school (in the UK) was unusual, but in my class under 20% walked, the remainder took a bus or were driven - and most of those were driven. The few buses that went near the school didn't go to all of the places pupils came from and most lived outside of comfortable walking distance. The same was true of most of the schools where my mother taught (in various bits of Devon, mostly rural).
20 years ago, I attended a talk by a Sinologist who talked about Cocoa Cola's entry into China. The Chinese government had required that they partner with a Chinese company and produce their product locally, in 1984. The Chinese company then spent 10 years studying Cocoa Cola's products, workflow, supply chain, and so on until they understood it better than Cocoa Cola. Then they started producing their own versions, and used this as leverage to increase their ownership share of the joint venture. Anyone who engaged in this kind of 'partnership' after this point had no excuse for claiming that they were doing anything other than selling their company to the Chinese
if you have store opening hours from 09:00 to 18:00, this means that problems with the POS will be during those times. That means that the IT people who deal with those issues must be available. No, this will not be all of them.
This is another of my pet peeves: Having store opening hours the majority of which fall in the time when most people with jobs can't visit the store. Unless you're something like a coffee shop with a large customer base that grabs a cup on the way to work, your most important business hours are likely to be the couple of hours in the middle of the day over which everyone else's lunch breaks are spread and the time after 17:00 when other people leave work. Changing your opening times to 11:00-20:00 would likely increase the amount of time when you're open and your potential customers are able to attend and would mean that most of your staff wouldn't be travelling to and from work at rush hour.
I've heard of it. Now tell me what percentage of people, particularly of people in low-paid occupations, who constitute the majority of the workforce, work at places that offer it.
Supporting multiple time zones isn't that hard, though it seems that most people who develop calendar software have never travelled more than a couple of hundred miles and can't conceive of an event that would start in one time zone and end in another. It's much more difficult to support multiple calendars (e.g. Gregorian, Buddhist, Chinese, Coptic, Hebrew, and so on) and most software that deals with dates fails spectacularly there.
I have two objections to the EU Parliament - firstly, STV is not mandatory. Secondly, it has no ability to initiate legislation. The only elected body of a nominally democratic institution only has the power to rubber stamp, or reject legislation.
The last time that a proposal came up to move power to the EU Parliament and away from the Commission, it was vetoed by the French and the English. If the UK leaves and Macron remains staunchly pro-EU, I wouldn't be surprised if that changed.
The sad thing about the Brexit referendum wasn't that people wanted to take power from the EU, it was that they thought that giving it to the people most responsible for the least-democratic aspects of the EU was a good plan.
One of the proposals that I've seen is for direct democracy but with arbitrary layers of delegation. I don't have time to vote on every issue, but there's someone I know who's well-versed in issues relating to heathcare and someone else who knows a lot about education, so I delegate my votes to them in these policy areas. They may not have time to vote for everything, but they know enough to be able to judge other people that have sensible opinions, so can delegate my vote and theirs. You'd need some safeguards to prevent sudden swings in public opinion from causing things that have been worked on for months to collapse, but even something like preventing you from changing your delegation more than once a month would help there.
This also addresses problems of gerrymandering. Constituencies are entirely fluid entities, with individuals able to add and remove themselves at will.
But the reality is that most people aren't interested enough to educate themselves about important topics, but want to participate anyway.
Most? I doubt that there are any people who have well-informed opinions on the vast majority of issues that come up in Parliament. The issues are sufficiently complex that it would take full-time study to understand just a few of them.
The problem with representative democracy is that, in my experience, the representatives that we elect are only marginally less ignorant than the average voter. They have to rely on opinions from the civil service and self-proclaimed experts, who are often pushing an agenda and not giving impartial advice.
I suspect that the problem is that we pick people to be general representatives. I wonder how different it would be if we had to vote independently for people to represent us in different policy areas and require that they collaborate in issues that overlap multiple areas.
Then you have a new problem, that anyone who works a 9-5 job has to figure out how to get their children to school an hour after they're supposed to be at work. Not a problem if one parent doesn't work, or in places where children can walk / cycle to school, but still a big issue in a lot of the country (particularly rural areas).
That said, there's a lot of research that shows that children don't lean efficiently until about 10-11am (depending on age, for many teenagers it's not until the afternoon), so there are other arguments for making the school day later.
Portugal is east of Greenwich, like the rest of Europe. "east is where the thumb points left"
I've no idea what 'east is where the thumb points left' means, but Greenwich is exactly on the Meridian (by definition), Lisbon is 9 degrees, 9 minutes West of the Meridian. Even Madrid (which is in the country to the East of Portugal) is West of Greenwich (3 degrees, 43 minutes), though Barcelona (right on the Eastern edge of Spain) is 2 degrees 11 minutes East of Greenwich.
And the evidence that you have to support circadian rhythms benefitting more from sunlight while people are in offices than from sunlight when people are outside is...?
You know the best way to get good power usage? Finish what ever compute needs doing quickly and put the device to sleep. A faster CPU in the same power envelope means that it can have the network and RAM out of their low-power states for less time, which translates to better battery life.
Are you really telling me that apple who has gone from no chip to having a cpu in the last couple years has all the top CPU talent and companies like Intel and AMD who have been at this game forever are really loosing out to them?
Note that Apple bought PWRFicient 10 years ago. This gave them a bunch of people with 10-20 years of CPU design experience, so it's not as if they had a standing start. Their first (recent) in-house-designed CPUs were in pre-Touch iPods, so iPhone CPUs weren't even their first ones.
That said, I'm still skeptical of the Geekbench numbers. The Apple cores are pretty impressive, but I don't believe that you can get higher IPC in a passively cooled CPU in a phone than Intel gets from a 95W core.
Three reasons. The first is that Intel has control over their process, which currently gives them a big advantage in the analogue electronics side of chip design. ARM cores have to be synthesisable on any process and even Qualcomm likes to have a couple of options for fabs so that they can negotiate a good rate. This means that Intel can do clock and power gating at a much finer granularity than anyone else.
The second is that the workloads where big.LITTLE makes sense are fairly limited. If you're buying machines for a datacentre, they're consuming so much power just by existing that if you're not using them at close to capacity then you're wasting money. Even on laptops, the CPU in its lowest power state is often using less power than keeping the RAM refreshed. It's only on very mobile devices that it makes sense to have a simple in-order core or two that can do background processing while the main core sleeps and the user isn't actively doing anything. Apple is apparently considering adding a small ARM core for this purpose to laptops (for things like checking email while the machine is in suspend mode, for which it currently wakes up the main CPU for a few seconds). It's likely to add a little bit of time to the suspend life of a laptop, but most laptop users care about the time that the machine can be on and in use a lot more than they care about standby time. In contrast, mobile phone users care a lot about standby time.
Finally, there's a much higher lower-limit on the complexity of an x86 chip. A low-end ARM core has no microcode. It can have a trivial branch predictor, because the pipeline is so short that the mispredict penalty is small. The decoder is trivial. The cache controller is simple, because there's no implicit synchronisation between instruction and data cache. In contrast, an x86 chip needs to have a bunch of microcode, an instruction parser (x86 instructions are so complex that it's a stretch to call it a decoder) which has little area impact on a high-end superscalar core but adds a significant fraction to a trivial core, and must ensure that it has enough store forwarding that writes are instantly observable in the decode stage.
The article that I read this morning was predicting a slow decline with a linear drop-off over many years. I think this completely misses the value of Facebook: it is not useful because of anything it does, it's useful because other people use it. Every person who quits makes it slightly less useful for 20 or so other people (and less valuable for a few hundred advertisers). I still run a Jabber server, but I haven't used it regularly for years - when I logged on before Christmas because I was consulting for someone who wanted to use it for pair debugging, I found that of the 100+ people in my roster, zero were online. Every person who quits a communication system increases the probability that someone else will leave. If only half of your friends are using Facebook then Facebook becomes the least convenient way of communicating, so you leave. Now there's a new group of people for whom Facebook isn't useful.
Tox and GNU Ring are both promising projects that are building entirely decentralised chat (text, voice, video) systems with group chats and end-to-end encryption. Tox is pretty usable but with one major limitation (which they are working on, though I haven't seen much progress): accounts are tied to a device, you can't move between devices in a chat.
I've never seen a Linux distribution where LD_LIBRARY_PATH was set by default to include locations in the user's home directory. You need to explicitly do that. I suppose that a malicious update script could set it in.profile, but if you use su or sudo then they sanitise your environment so you can't accidentally elevate privilege doing it. I believe that on most *NIX systems the run-time linker also checks that libraries linked by setuid root binaries are owned by root, so you can't exploit it by having the user run a setuid binary.
If you can persuade all employers to let their employees come into work an hour early and leave an hour early, that would fix the problem as well. Good luck with that.
So while I really don't care that much about the time zone changing, if people are going to want 'more sun at night', that's really the wrong reason to do it today. If we keep it, it should be so that the sun appears in the morning. That way, when the majority of people are in transit to work?
Why? In the mornings, people get up and go to work and sit inside. In the evenings, they go out and can, if there is any, enjoy the daylight. When GWB extended summer time in the US, it had no measurable impact on any sector of the economy, except sports clubs, which saw an increase in custom, because people had more sunlight in the evenings when they could go and enjoy themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, nothing is free. Someone has to pay for that.
This is true. The economic output of a country is fixed over time and no amount of spending can ever increase it. Building textile factories in the industrial revolution made no difference to the amount of cloth produced, cheap electric lighting made no different to the number of productive hours for which businesses could operate, building canals and roads had no impact on industry and so on.
Lets be real: If people want transportation, they can move into a city and be able to walk to their destination
Also true. The supply of city centre housing is elastic.
Oh, wait. Nothing you've said is even slightly bounded in economics.
Yes, giving everyone their own Cadillac might improve things and make society more efficient
I doubt it. In most of the world, the roads wouldn't cope with that level of traffic and the lungs of the people would definitely not be happy with the increase in pollution.
Transportation is not the government's job.
Who degreed this? Effective transportation is the single thing that economists agree benefits the overall health of an economy, yet is difficult to monetise because the people that benefit do so at one remove or more (e.g. businesses benefit from a larger pool of accessible employees and customers). This sounds exactly like the kind of thing that should be run by the government. It is something that, if done well, will make an operating loss but increase the overall health of the economy.
I suspect that if you made national rail services free, then you'd see some unpleasant secondary effects. There are a lot of commuter towns around London already where no one who works there can afford to live there because salaries in London are higher and this pushes up the property prices. You might eventually reach an equilibrium where salaries everywhere reach London rates, but that would take a long time.
There are few e-mail clients even capable of sending plain text e-mail, let alone clients that do so by default.
Really? Apple Mail (macOS and iOS), Thunderbird, and K9 Mail are all happy to have plain text set as their composing format. I've not seen a mail client that can't send plain text.
Back in the day, Google Ads were plain text, usually advertising content directly related to the page that I was viewing. I clicked on a few, and I actually liked them because they introduced me to products that solved problems that I had identified that I had. People liked them because they were a lot less intrusive than the animated banner ads that they were competing against, and also far more likely to be relevant. Now, they are based on a crappy model of me, which is either creepy if it's accurate, or annoying if it isn't (yes, I did want one of those last week. Then I bought one. Now I am looking for something else), and they're as likely to contain video as anyone else's.
Is there really a law that prevents me from writing my own web browser that blocks all ads except my own?
I don't know. Are you in a dominant position in the online advertising market? Are you using income from online advertising to subsidise the development of the web browser and sell it below cost? If the answer to both of these is 'yes', then there are laws in a lot of jurisdictions, yes.
Maybe my school (in the UK) was unusual, but in my class under 20% walked, the remainder took a bus or were driven - and most of those were driven. The few buses that went near the school didn't go to all of the places pupils came from and most lived outside of comfortable walking distance. The same was true of most of the schools where my mother taught (in various bits of Devon, mostly rural).
20 years ago, I attended a talk by a Sinologist who talked about Cocoa Cola's entry into China. The Chinese government had required that they partner with a Chinese company and produce their product locally, in 1984. The Chinese company then spent 10 years studying Cocoa Cola's products, workflow, supply chain, and so on until they understood it better than Cocoa Cola. Then they started producing their own versions, and used this as leverage to increase their ownership share of the joint venture. Anyone who engaged in this kind of 'partnership' after this point had no excuse for claiming that they were doing anything other than selling their company to the Chinese
if you have store opening hours from 09:00 to 18:00, this means that problems with the POS will be during those times. That means that the IT people who deal with those issues must be available. No, this will not be all of them.
This is another of my pet peeves: Having store opening hours the majority of which fall in the time when most people with jobs can't visit the store. Unless you're something like a coffee shop with a large customer base that grabs a cup on the way to work, your most important business hours are likely to be the couple of hours in the middle of the day over which everyone else's lunch breaks are spread and the time after 17:00 when other people leave work. Changing your opening times to 11:00-20:00 would likely increase the amount of time when you're open and your potential customers are able to attend and would mean that most of your staff wouldn't be travelling to and from work at rush hour.
I've heard of it. Now tell me what percentage of people, particularly of people in low-paid occupations, who constitute the majority of the workforce, work at places that offer it.
Supporting multiple time zones isn't that hard, though it seems that most people who develop calendar software have never travelled more than a couple of hundred miles and can't conceive of an event that would start in one time zone and end in another. It's much more difficult to support multiple calendars (e.g. Gregorian, Buddhist, Chinese, Coptic, Hebrew, and so on) and most software that deals with dates fails spectacularly there.
I have two objections to the EU Parliament - firstly, STV is not mandatory. Secondly, it has no ability to initiate legislation. The only elected body of a nominally democratic institution only has the power to rubber stamp, or reject legislation.
The last time that a proposal came up to move power to the EU Parliament and away from the Commission, it was vetoed by the French and the English. If the UK leaves and Macron remains staunchly pro-EU, I wouldn't be surprised if that changed.
The sad thing about the Brexit referendum wasn't that people wanted to take power from the EU, it was that they thought that giving it to the people most responsible for the least-democratic aspects of the EU was a good plan.
One of the proposals that I've seen is for direct democracy but with arbitrary layers of delegation. I don't have time to vote on every issue, but there's someone I know who's well-versed in issues relating to heathcare and someone else who knows a lot about education, so I delegate my votes to them in these policy areas. They may not have time to vote for everything, but they know enough to be able to judge other people that have sensible opinions, so can delegate my vote and theirs. You'd need some safeguards to prevent sudden swings in public opinion from causing things that have been worked on for months to collapse, but even something like preventing you from changing your delegation more than once a month would help there.
This also addresses problems of gerrymandering. Constituencies are entirely fluid entities, with individuals able to add and remove themselves at will.
But the reality is that most people aren't interested enough to educate themselves about important topics, but want to participate anyway.
Most? I doubt that there are any people who have well-informed opinions on the vast majority of issues that come up in Parliament. The issues are sufficiently complex that it would take full-time study to understand just a few of them.
The problem with representative democracy is that, in my experience, the representatives that we elect are only marginally less ignorant than the average voter. They have to rely on opinions from the civil service and self-proclaimed experts, who are often pushing an agenda and not giving impartial advice.
I suspect that the problem is that we pick people to be general representatives. I wonder how different it would be if we had to vote independently for people to represent us in different policy areas and require that they collaborate in issues that overlap multiple areas.
Then you have a new problem, that anyone who works a 9-5 job has to figure out how to get their children to school an hour after they're supposed to be at work. Not a problem if one parent doesn't work, or in places where children can walk / cycle to school, but still a big issue in a lot of the country (particularly rural areas).
That said, there's a lot of research that shows that children don't lean efficiently until about 10-11am (depending on age, for many teenagers it's not until the afternoon), so there are other arguments for making the school day later.
Portugal is east of Greenwich, like the rest of Europe. "east is where the thumb points left"
I've no idea what 'east is where the thumb points left' means, but Greenwich is exactly on the Meridian (by definition), Lisbon is 9 degrees, 9 minutes West of the Meridian. Even Madrid (which is in the country to the East of Portugal) is West of Greenwich (3 degrees, 43 minutes), though Barcelona (right on the Eastern edge of Spain) is 2 degrees 11 minutes East of Greenwich.
And the evidence that you have to support circadian rhythms benefitting more from sunlight while people are in offices than from sunlight when people are outside is...?
You know the best way to get good power usage? Finish what ever compute needs doing quickly and put the device to sleep. A faster CPU in the same power envelope means that it can have the network and RAM out of their low-power states for less time, which translates to better battery life.
Are you really telling me that apple who has gone from no chip to having a cpu in the last couple years has all the top CPU talent and companies like Intel and AMD who have been at this game forever are really loosing out to them?
Note that Apple bought PWRFicient 10 years ago. This gave them a bunch of people with 10-20 years of CPU design experience, so it's not as if they had a standing start. Their first (recent) in-house-designed CPUs were in pre-Touch iPods, so iPhone CPUs weren't even their first ones.
That said, I'm still skeptical of the Geekbench numbers. The Apple cores are pretty impressive, but I don't believe that you can get higher IPC in a passively cooled CPU in a phone than Intel gets from a 95W core.
Three reasons. The first is that Intel has control over their process, which currently gives them a big advantage in the analogue electronics side of chip design. ARM cores have to be synthesisable on any process and even Qualcomm likes to have a couple of options for fabs so that they can negotiate a good rate. This means that Intel can do clock and power gating at a much finer granularity than anyone else.
The second is that the workloads where big.LITTLE makes sense are fairly limited. If you're buying machines for a datacentre, they're consuming so much power just by existing that if you're not using them at close to capacity then you're wasting money. Even on laptops, the CPU in its lowest power state is often using less power than keeping the RAM refreshed. It's only on very mobile devices that it makes sense to have a simple in-order core or two that can do background processing while the main core sleeps and the user isn't actively doing anything. Apple is apparently considering adding a small ARM core for this purpose to laptops (for things like checking email while the machine is in suspend mode, for which it currently wakes up the main CPU for a few seconds). It's likely to add a little bit of time to the suspend life of a laptop, but most laptop users care about the time that the machine can be on and in use a lot more than they care about standby time. In contrast, mobile phone users care a lot about standby time.
Finally, there's a much higher lower-limit on the complexity of an x86 chip. A low-end ARM core has no microcode. It can have a trivial branch predictor, because the pipeline is so short that the mispredict penalty is small. The decoder is trivial. The cache controller is simple, because there's no implicit synchronisation between instruction and data cache. In contrast, an x86 chip needs to have a bunch of microcode, an instruction parser (x86 instructions are so complex that it's a stretch to call it a decoder) which has little area impact on a high-end superscalar core but adds a significant fraction to a trivial core, and must ensure that it has enough store forwarding that writes are instantly observable in the decode stage.
The article that I read this morning was predicting a slow decline with a linear drop-off over many years. I think this completely misses the value of Facebook: it is not useful because of anything it does, it's useful because other people use it. Every person who quits makes it slightly less useful for 20 or so other people (and less valuable for a few hundred advertisers). I still run a Jabber server, but I haven't used it regularly for years - when I logged on before Christmas because I was consulting for someone who wanted to use it for pair debugging, I found that of the 100+ people in my roster, zero were online. Every person who quits a communication system increases the probability that someone else will leave. If only half of your friends are using Facebook then Facebook becomes the least convenient way of communicating, so you leave. Now there's a new group of people for whom Facebook isn't useful.
Tox and GNU Ring are both promising projects that are building entirely decentralised chat (text, voice, video) systems with group chats and end-to-end encryption. Tox is pretty usable but with one major limitation (which they are working on, though I haven't seen much progress): accounts are tied to a device, you can't move between devices in a chat.
I've never seen a Linux distribution where LD_LIBRARY_PATH was set by default to include locations in the user's home directory. You need to explicitly do that. I suppose that a malicious update script could set it in .profile, but if you use su or sudo then they sanitise your environment so you can't accidentally elevate privilege doing it. I believe that on most *NIX systems the run-time linker also checks that libraries linked by setuid root binaries are owned by root, so you can't exploit it by having the user run a setuid binary.
If you can persuade all employers to let their employees come into work an hour early and leave an hour early, that would fix the problem as well. Good luck with that.
So while I really don't care that much about the time zone changing, if people are going to want 'more sun at night', that's really the wrong reason to do it today. If we keep it, it should be so that the sun appears in the morning. That way, when the majority of people are in transit to work?
Why? In the mornings, people get up and go to work and sit inside. In the evenings, they go out and can, if there is any, enjoy the daylight. When GWB extended summer time in the US, it had no measurable impact on any sector of the economy, except sports clubs, which saw an increase in custom, because people had more sunlight in the evenings when they could go and enjoy themselves.