Normally the company paying your salary is benefiting more from your work than you are
I'm not sure that's true. If a company is paying you, 40 currency units and, after overheads, making more than 40 currency units of profit from your work then it's doing really, really well. Now, it is quite likely that it's charging out your time at an equivalent of something like 200 currency units, but it's also paying for the time when you're not doing anything chargeable in this time, and for other expenses. It's also taking a lot of the risk - if there's no work for you to do for a month or two then you still get paid, and won't be fired without being given notice. If you are working for a company that really has this kind of margin, then you'd be better offering your services for 60 units to its customers directly...
It doesn't say how they encode the state. With a few internal states, their instruction set would probably qualify as a universal turing machine (no, I'm not going to prove it, hence the qualifier), because you can implement loops, addition, subtraction, and everything else that you'd need to implement some other universal model of computation. Well, except that the tape is only 32 bits long, so you couldn't implement anything trivial. Even a 16-bit adder might not be possible. You can, however, implement an infinite loop...
That said, they cheat a lot. All of the real logic is implemented in the CPU, so they're actually implementing a Turing Machine in another Turing Machine and just using the mechanical bits for storage. It's a pretty neat demo, and probably quite a nice teaching tool, but it doesn't really count as implementing a Turing Machine in Lego. I'd expect a mechanical mechanism for translating the {tape value, state} pair into an {action, tape value, state} tuple for it to really count.
True Socialism is people standing around with their hands out demanding products and services made possible by the minority of people who actually contribute to society
Yup, that's certainly the message I took away from 'the workers should control the means of production'. Wait, what?
What do you define as rich? 150k? what about the guy that makes 149k?
If you're talking about how much someone earns, they're almost certainly not rich. The problem with capitalism is in the name: it's all about the amount of capital that you control. In a capitalist society, you can gain income from two sources: from performing valuable work and from simply controlling capital. Worse, the income that you can gain from performing work is largely capped (there's only a finite amount of work you can do), whereas the income from controlling capital can grow as fast as you accumulate capital and after a certain point becomes self-sustaining (i.e. your income from capital exceeds your expenditure, so you continue to accumulate wealth without doing any work).
I have no problem with rewarding people for doing useful things, or even not-so-useful popular things. The problem is rewarding people simply because they are already wealthy.
Seriously, if I pay an extra 20 bucks for my iPhone, I can eliminate slavery in China? Good grief. Bill me. If I kick in $40, can I free the North Koreans too?
There was an article a few months back where an Apple spokesdroid said it would cost, I believe, an extra $35 if the iPhone were made in the USA, with US employment and environmental laws applying to the factory. We're talking under a 10% increase in price on a piece of consumer electronics, but that's ignoring the fact that a great many of the components would still be made in China. I wouldn't be surprised if the cost were closer to 25% more at the end. That's fine for luxury goods like the iPhone, but what happens when the same increase applies to essentials? A lot of people in the USA could not afford a 25% increase in the cost of, for example, clothing. The typical fix for this is to put up the minimum wage by 25%, but that then means that the cost of any goods or services produced primarily by people making minimum wage goes up.
It would be nice if there were some quick fix that could solve this, but unfortunately it's something that has to happen gradually. The problem is that our elected representatives are not doing the things that would start the process, and China won't because the ruling class is terrified of a large middle class.
The main issue is flexibility. A largely human-operated factory has a higher operating cost than a mostly automated one, but it's much faster to make changes to the product. This is really important in markets like mobile phones, where a product is often produced for under a year, often under six months. By the time you've set up an automated factory, the product is almost EOL, and it won't be produced for long enough to recoup your initial investment. This is starting to change, as companies like Foxconn are investing a lot in more flexible robots that will let them 'retool' the factors almost entirely in software.
What's wrong there? 80 hours a month is about 20 hours a week. With a 40 hour normal working week, that means 60 hours including his overtime. Six days of 10 hours a day is 60 hours a week.
And it takes a surprisingly small number of minority votes to change a candidate's opinion. The difference between the two front runners in a lot of elections is well under 10%, often under 1%. If 2% of the population vote for a single issue candidate, then next time around one or both candidates will realise that they can get an extra 2% of the vote by adopting those policies and that would be enough to swing the election. Unfortunately, in the USA, these issues tend to be things like abortion and gay marriage, not things that actually affect most people.
There have been no JavaScript security holes. There have, however, been a number of security holes in V8, in SpiderMonkey, etc. Just look up the numbers yourself if you're interested. The exact number depends on whether you are limited just to the JavaScript JIT, or if you include the DOM and related components.
NoScript assumes that all scripting is evil and that you should never allow it unless you absolutely have to — after multiple warning from NoScript as to how dangerous it is.
Given the number of security holes in JavaScript implementations and the lack of adequate sandboxing in modern browsers, that's not too much of a stretch. Even if you trust the site, do you trust the guy who paid $10 to put an advert on it?
HTTP2.0 / SPDY will solve this, but it will take many years till they are widely adopted.
Not entirely. You still need to completely fetch and parse the main web page before you start fetching the images from it. If you use data URLs, then you implicitly fetch them before you even know that you need them. This is one advantage that Flash and Java applets have over JavaScript + HTML + image + sound files. There was some plan for allowing browsers to grab a page plus all of its resources in some kind of container file, but I don't recall it going anywhere.
The people pushing for this kind of law argue that virtual goods are equivalent to physical ones in terms of being counted as property. How about we extend this to another metaphor: vigilante action. If I put a spiked trap in front of my door to deter burglars and the postman falls in, then I am liable for prosecution. These private law enforcement squads should have the same level of liability.
He didn't correctly quote Neil Armstrong, he correctly quoted Neil Armstrong's script. He fluffed his lines when he actually stepped onto the moon. Which, come to think of it, is pretty convincing evidence that it wasn't faked: on a sound stage you'd just go back for a second take...
If you look at the nominations, three of the five were for Doctor Who episodes. Given the piss-poor writing of the last series (I feel sorry for Matt Smith; you can tell he's a competent actor, but the writers seem to be religiously opposed to giving him anything to work with), The Doctor's Wife was probably the best they could have come up with. Night Terrors was the closest to a traditional Doctor Who episode, but didn't really stand out. Closing Time was just embarrassing. The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People would probably get my vote, but none of them were really worthy of an award. We haven't had anything like The Empty Child, The Girl in the Fireplace, or Blink since Steven Moffat took over, which is quite odd given that he wrote them. It makes me think that Russell T Davis must be a very good script editor...
It's the Hugo, not the Nebula. The Nebula award is intended to judge the artistic merit (whatever that means) of a work and is based on the opinions of a selected group of (mostly?) science fiction writers. The Hugo is based on nominations and votes from fans. It just means that a lot of people liked Captain America. Or that it didn't have much competition this year. Given that two of the other three options were 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2' (not as bad as Part 1, but still pretty dire, well into the Hollywood 'but my swimming pool is already filled with money' stage) and Source Code (if it's twice as good as I've heard, I'm still glad I haven't seen it), then there wasn't a great deal of choice. I thought Hugo was superb, but it also didn't get anything like the publicity of the other two, so I wouldn't be surprised if most of the voters hadn't seen it.
Net Neutrality means nothing anymore. The term was hijacked by strawman proposals that had nothing to do with the original concept. It used to mean that you can't prioritise data based on either the source or origin. The idea was that you couldn't prioritise your VoIP or movie streaming service unless you also prioritised everyone else's. The problem with this was that you could use some custom protocol for your service and then you could prioritise traffic for everyone who used that protocol (i.e. you), and degrade everyone else. So the definition evolved slightly to the requirement that you give equal QoS to all data in the same category. That, unfortunately, is very difficult to implement. With the current trend of trying to stuff everything over HTTP, it's often quite difficult to categorise traffic.
There was also an intentional attempt by ISPs to conflate Network Neutrality and lack of QoS in the minds of users. Network Neutrality did not mean that you had to treat latency-sensitive and jitter-sensitive traffic (e.g. VoIP) the same way you had to treat bulk transfers (e.g. software update downloads). The networks tried to pretend that it did, and so you get the nonexistent problem in an earlier post of porn downloads meaning you can't make telephone calls. In reality, it's fine to reserve, say, 10% of the total throughput for latency-sensitive communications and use that for voice traffic. The people doing the downloading have buffering and so don't notice the slight increase in latency or the extra jitter when people start and stop using the high priority channel. The voice users don't know that their traffic is higher priority, and it abruptly ceases to be if they cross some throughput threshold.
My biggest complaint is that ISPs are not required to publicly disclose their traffic management policy. If they were, then customers could make an informed decision (e.g. this ISP will cost you more because you can't use that VoIP provider with it and get adequate quality).
And that works for the license payers who just want to watch content how? By limiting what they can access?
That is the kind of short-term thinking that the BBC is supposed to be able to avoid by not having to be dependent on shareholders. The BBC is a big customer, and also a company that sets trends for a number of other national broadcasters. If they make a stand on an issue like this, then the content producers are going to have to change. If they roll over, then they create long-term problems for themselves.
If so, it's a less useful result. If someone pours you a glass without you knowing the size of the glass, it's pretty hard to estimate anyway. If you buy a pint of beer, then you know that you have a pint of beer. Unless you buy it in the USA, in which case you have 83% of a pint of... something.
How about a corporate version that only passes data to servers owned and controlled by your in-house IT staff? I'd have thought that there would be a market for this, but it's one that device makers, not Google, would have an incentive to fill.
Their charter would be better served by publishing the stuff that they do have the rights to (i.e. in-house productions) and refusing to sign distribution contracts in the future that didn't meet their requirements.
Yes, because when iPlayer launched back in 2007 everybody had a HTML5-compliant browser that supported a common video format... Oh wait, they didn't... and they still don't... Perhaps they should have tried RealPlayer instead...?
Or they could have just made.mp4 files available for playback. Then, it would have been trivial for someone else to write an iPlayer app for Android, for iOS, for WebOS, for OpenBSD-on-VAX, or whatever. The BBC does not make televisions, they just make information available in a well-documented format over the air that other manufacturers can easily transform back into television programs. They should be doing the same thing online: providing the shows and the metadata in a well-documented format and encouraging people to provide ways of accessing it.
They should have used open formats in open container files and made playback the client's problem. They should have remembered that their charter is to provide entertainment and information to the people of the UK, not to the subset that some third-party company decides are important. If the BBC had decided to broadcast TV in a format that required you to buy your TV from, for example, Samsung, then they'd have had the regulator slap them into oblivion, but somehow they get a free pass for doing the same thing on the Internet.
Instead of taxing the customers, the FCC should be taxing the companies by passing a simple mandate that they Must provide 3 Mbit/s wired service to any customer who asks for it. These billion-dollar corporations can afford to fund this subsidy for a mere 4% of the population.
Who? It's easy when you have a national monopoly for a telephone company - they are required to provide the service to everyone. When you have a set of geographical monopolies as telephone or Internet companies, which one do you force to provide coverage to anyone outside a certain area? How do small companies start up in such an environment? And what happens when Verizon (for example) becomes an umbrella corporation that just puts customers in contact with wholly owned subsidiaries that actually own the network infrastructure, but only in a small area each.
And, longer term, how do you stop this from just being city dwellers subsidising rural house prices? In the UK, it's very common for house prices a few miles outside of town to cost half to three quarters of what an equivalent house would cost in the town. In a really rural area, it can cost under half as much. This difference is because most people are unwilling to pay as much to be so far from infrastructure. If you're spending public money on adding that infrastructure, then you're effectively moving money to the pockets of rural home and land owners.
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Normally the company paying your salary is benefiting more from your work than you are
I'm not sure that's true. If a company is paying you, 40 currency units and, after overheads, making more than 40 currency units of profit from your work then it's doing really, really well. Now, it is quite likely that it's charging out your time at an equivalent of something like 200 currency units, but it's also paying for the time when you're not doing anything chargeable in this time, and for other expenses. It's also taking a lot of the risk - if there's no work for you to do for a month or two then you still get paid, and won't be fired without being given notice. If you are working for a company that really has this kind of margin, then you'd be better offering your services for 60 units to its customers directly...
It doesn't say how they encode the state. With a few internal states, their instruction set would probably qualify as a universal turing machine (no, I'm not going to prove it, hence the qualifier), because you can implement loops, addition, subtraction, and everything else that you'd need to implement some other universal model of computation. Well, except that the tape is only 32 bits long, so you couldn't implement anything trivial. Even a 16-bit adder might not be possible. You can, however, implement an infinite loop...
That said, they cheat a lot. All of the real logic is implemented in the CPU, so they're actually implementing a Turing Machine in another Turing Machine and just using the mechanical bits for storage. It's a pretty neat demo, and probably quite a nice teaching tool, but it doesn't really count as implementing a Turing Machine in Lego. I'd expect a mechanical mechanism for translating the {tape value, state} pair into an {action, tape value, state} tuple for it to really count.
True Socialism is people standing around with their hands out demanding products and services made possible by the minority of people who actually contribute to society
Yup, that's certainly the message I took away from 'the workers should control the means of production'. Wait, what?
What do you define as rich? 150k? what about the guy that makes 149k?
If you're talking about how much someone earns, they're almost certainly not rich. The problem with capitalism is in the name: it's all about the amount of capital that you control. In a capitalist society, you can gain income from two sources: from performing valuable work and from simply controlling capital. Worse, the income that you can gain from performing work is largely capped (there's only a finite amount of work you can do), whereas the income from controlling capital can grow as fast as you accumulate capital and after a certain point becomes self-sustaining (i.e. your income from capital exceeds your expenditure, so you continue to accumulate wealth without doing any work).
I have no problem with rewarding people for doing useful things, or even not-so-useful popular things. The problem is rewarding people simply because they are already wealthy.
They don't need to be identified, they need to be disambiguated. Identification is one way of disambiguation, but not the only one.
Seriously, if I pay an extra 20 bucks for my iPhone, I can eliminate slavery in China? Good grief. Bill me. If I kick in $40, can I free the North Koreans too?
There was an article a few months back where an Apple spokesdroid said it would cost, I believe, an extra $35 if the iPhone were made in the USA, with US employment and environmental laws applying to the factory. We're talking under a 10% increase in price on a piece of consumer electronics, but that's ignoring the fact that a great many of the components would still be made in China. I wouldn't be surprised if the cost were closer to 25% more at the end. That's fine for luxury goods like the iPhone, but what happens when the same increase applies to essentials? A lot of people in the USA could not afford a 25% increase in the cost of, for example, clothing. The typical fix for this is to put up the minimum wage by 25%, but that then means that the cost of any goods or services produced primarily by people making minimum wage goes up.
It would be nice if there were some quick fix that could solve this, but unfortunately it's something that has to happen gradually. The problem is that our elected representatives are not doing the things that would start the process, and China won't because the ruling class is terrified of a large middle class.
The main issue is flexibility. A largely human-operated factory has a higher operating cost than a mostly automated one, but it's much faster to make changes to the product. This is really important in markets like mobile phones, where a product is often produced for under a year, often under six months. By the time you've set up an automated factory, the product is almost EOL, and it won't be produced for long enough to recoup your initial investment. This is starting to change, as companies like Foxconn are investing a lot in more flexible robots that will let them 'retool' the factors almost entirely in software.
I wonder what happens to the Marxist ideal of workers controlling the means of production when all of the work is done by robots...
What's wrong there? 80 hours a month is about 20 hours a week. With a 40 hour normal working week, that means 60 hours including his overtime. Six days of 10 hours a day is 60 hours a week.
And it takes a surprisingly small number of minority votes to change a candidate's opinion. The difference between the two front runners in a lot of elections is well under 10%, often under 1%. If 2% of the population vote for a single issue candidate, then next time around one or both candidates will realise that they can get an extra 2% of the vote by adopting those policies and that would be enough to swing the election. Unfortunately, in the USA, these issues tend to be things like abortion and gay marriage, not things that actually affect most people.
There have been no JavaScript security holes. There have, however, been a number of security holes in V8, in SpiderMonkey, etc. Just look up the numbers yourself if you're interested. The exact number depends on whether you are limited just to the JavaScript JIT, or if you include the DOM and related components.
NoScript assumes that all scripting is evil and that you should never allow it unless you absolutely have to — after multiple warning from NoScript as to how dangerous it is.
Given the number of security holes in JavaScript implementations and the lack of adequate sandboxing in modern browsers, that's not too much of a stretch. Even if you trust the site, do you trust the guy who paid $10 to put an advert on it?
HTTP2.0 / SPDY will solve this, but it will take many years till they are widely adopted.
Not entirely. You still need to completely fetch and parse the main web page before you start fetching the images from it. If you use data URLs, then you implicitly fetch them before you even know that you need them. This is one advantage that Flash and Java applets have over JavaScript + HTML + image + sound files. There was some plan for allowing browsers to grab a page plus all of its resources in some kind of container file, but I don't recall it going anywhere.
The people pushing for this kind of law argue that virtual goods are equivalent to physical ones in terms of being counted as property. How about we extend this to another metaphor: vigilante action. If I put a spiked trap in front of my door to deter burglars and the postman falls in, then I am liable for prosecution. These private law enforcement squads should have the same level of liability.
He didn't correctly quote Neil Armstrong, he correctly quoted Neil Armstrong's script. He fluffed his lines when he actually stepped onto the moon. Which, come to think of it, is pretty convincing evidence that it wasn't faked: on a sound stage you'd just go back for a second take...
If you look at the nominations, three of the five were for Doctor Who episodes. Given the piss-poor writing of the last series (I feel sorry for Matt Smith; you can tell he's a competent actor, but the writers seem to be religiously opposed to giving him anything to work with), The Doctor's Wife was probably the best they could have come up with. Night Terrors was the closest to a traditional Doctor Who episode, but didn't really stand out. Closing Time was just embarrassing. The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People would probably get my vote, but none of them were really worthy of an award. We haven't had anything like The Empty Child, The Girl in the Fireplace, or Blink since Steven Moffat took over, which is quite odd given that he wrote them. It makes me think that Russell T Davis must be a very good script editor...
It's the Hugo, not the Nebula. The Nebula award is intended to judge the artistic merit (whatever that means) of a work and is based on the opinions of a selected group of (mostly?) science fiction writers. The Hugo is based on nominations and votes from fans. It just means that a lot of people liked Captain America. Or that it didn't have much competition this year. Given that two of the other three options were 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2' (not as bad as Part 1, but still pretty dire, well into the Hollywood 'but my swimming pool is already filled with money' stage) and Source Code (if it's twice as good as I've heard, I'm still glad I haven't seen it), then there wasn't a great deal of choice. I thought Hugo was superb, but it also didn't get anything like the publicity of the other two, so I wouldn't be surprised if most of the voters hadn't seen it.
Net Neutrality means nothing anymore. The term was hijacked by strawman proposals that had nothing to do with the original concept. It used to mean that you can't prioritise data based on either the source or origin. The idea was that you couldn't prioritise your VoIP or movie streaming service unless you also prioritised everyone else's. The problem with this was that you could use some custom protocol for your service and then you could prioritise traffic for everyone who used that protocol (i.e. you), and degrade everyone else. So the definition evolved slightly to the requirement that you give equal QoS to all data in the same category. That, unfortunately, is very difficult to implement. With the current trend of trying to stuff everything over HTTP, it's often quite difficult to categorise traffic.
There was also an intentional attempt by ISPs to conflate Network Neutrality and lack of QoS in the minds of users. Network Neutrality did not mean that you had to treat latency-sensitive and jitter-sensitive traffic (e.g. VoIP) the same way you had to treat bulk transfers (e.g. software update downloads). The networks tried to pretend that it did, and so you get the nonexistent problem in an earlier post of porn downloads meaning you can't make telephone calls. In reality, it's fine to reserve, say, 10% of the total throughput for latency-sensitive communications and use that for voice traffic. The people doing the downloading have buffering and so don't notice the slight increase in latency or the extra jitter when people start and stop using the high priority channel. The voice users don't know that their traffic is higher priority, and it abruptly ceases to be if they cross some throughput threshold.
My biggest complaint is that ISPs are not required to publicly disclose their traffic management policy. If they were, then customers could make an informed decision (e.g. this ISP will cost you more because you can't use that VoIP provider with it and get adequate quality).
And that works for the license payers who just want to watch content how? By limiting what they can access?
That is the kind of short-term thinking that the BBC is supposed to be able to avoid by not having to be dependent on shareholders. The BBC is a big customer, and also a company that sets trends for a number of other national broadcasters. If they make a stand on an issue like this, then the content producers are going to have to change. If they roll over, then they create long-term problems for themselves.
If so, it's a less useful result. If someone pours you a glass without you knowing the size of the glass, it's pretty hard to estimate anyway. If you buy a pint of beer, then you know that you have a pint of beer. Unless you buy it in the USA, in which case you have 83% of a pint of... something.
How about a corporate version that only passes data to servers owned and controlled by your in-house IT staff? I'd have thought that there would be a market for this, but it's one that device makers, not Google, would have an incentive to fill.
Their charter would be better served by publishing the stuff that they do have the rights to (i.e. in-house productions) and refusing to sign distribution contracts in the future that didn't meet their requirements.
Yes, because when iPlayer launched back in 2007 everybody had a HTML5-compliant browser that supported a common video format... Oh wait, they didn't... and they still don't... Perhaps they should have tried RealPlayer instead...?
Or they could have just made .mp4 files available for playback. Then, it would have been trivial for someone else to write an iPlayer app for Android, for iOS, for WebOS, for OpenBSD-on-VAX, or whatever. The BBC does not make televisions, they just make information available in a well-documented format over the air that other manufacturers can easily transform back into television programs. They should be doing the same thing online: providing the shows and the metadata in a well-documented format and encouraging people to provide ways of accessing it.
They should have used open formats in open container files and made playback the client's problem. They should have remembered that their charter is to provide entertainment and information to the people of the UK, not to the subset that some third-party company decides are important. If the BBC had decided to broadcast TV in a format that required you to buy your TV from, for example, Samsung, then they'd have had the regulator slap them into oblivion, but somehow they get a free pass for doing the same thing on the Internet.
Instead of taxing the customers, the FCC should be taxing the companies by passing a simple mandate that they Must provide 3 Mbit/s wired service to any customer who asks for it. These billion-dollar corporations can afford to fund this subsidy for a mere 4% of the population.
Who? It's easy when you have a national monopoly for a telephone company - they are required to provide the service to everyone. When you have a set of geographical monopolies as telephone or Internet companies, which one do you force to provide coverage to anyone outside a certain area? How do small companies start up in such an environment? And what happens when Verizon (for example) becomes an umbrella corporation that just puts customers in contact with wholly owned subsidiaries that actually own the network infrastructure, but only in a small area each.
And, longer term, how do you stop this from just being city dwellers subsidising rural house prices? In the UK, it's very common for house prices a few miles outside of town to cost half to three quarters of what an equivalent house would cost in the town. In a really rural area, it can cost under half as much. This difference is because most people are unwilling to pay as much to be so far from infrastructure. If you're spending public money on adding that infrastructure, then you're effectively moving money to the pockets of rural home and land owners.