I do wonder whether people who can't read have any problem paying bills that they presumably can't read or if there is any value in advertising to people making $8 a day though
Or selling any kind of goods or services. What's his disposable income on $8/day? How long did he have to save up to afford even a $40 Android phone? If you want to make money selling things to him, then someone needs to invest in increasing his skills and the surrounding infrastructure to the point where he can be earning a lot more, and that's probably going to involve teaching him to read.
Captioning is just as inefficient as video in the fist place.
It's also a good demonstration of how inefficient video is. Watch a 10-minute with subtitles. Count the number of times that you finish reading the text before the speaker finishes talking. Count how many times the reverse happens. If you get bored, use a stopwatch and start it when you finish reading and stop it again when the speaker catches up. You'll probably find that you've wasted at least 3 out of those 10 minutes and that's with text that isn't in any way optimised for reading speed or retention.
signs vary from state to state, and even city to city in many cases
What kind of moronic system is that? The Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals was signed in 1968 and standardised road signs and is implemented by 68 countries (actually, a few more, as some implement it as a de-facto standard without ratifying the treaty).
Not sure about the US, but in the UK there are standard speed limits for different types of roads. Most of the time, the speed limit signs are simply a reminder that you're on a road of a particular kind. Occasionally, they override the default, but typically only by moving it up or down one standard increment on the scale (e.g. 30 to 20 or 50). I'm not surprised that it's easy to fool the computer vision algorithm that determines what the sign said (have a look some time at how bad computer vision is at detecting bicycles), but I would be very surprised if this isn't cross-referenced with a road-type database (Google Maps is pretty hit and miss here, but OpenStreetMap has correct classifications for all of the roads that I've seen in its database) for sanity checking. If the sign is significantly different from the road classification, disregard it entirely. If it's one step away, it's probably correct, but if you see another sign with a lower limit, choose that in preference).
As others have said, it's a start. I recall growing up one of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures showing that an area of the Sahara that looked about one square centimetre on a global could provide enough solar power for the entire world and I wondered if that was still true. The current world power consumption is around 110PWh/year. Assuming 1KW for 12 hours per square metre (100% efficiency - infeasible), that works out at 4.38MWh/year, that works out at around 2.5e10 square metres, or around 0.3% of the area of the Sahara. Cheap panels are closer to 18% efficient, so 1.5% of the total area. Assume that maintenance and other factors mean that you're only averaging peak output 50% of the time, that brings us up to 3% of the area of the Sahara. That's a huge engineering project, but having a large-scale proof-of-concept helps.
I remember when the.Net framework was brand new (like a year or two old, tops) seeing jobs advertised that had requirements of 10 years of experience working with "C#.Net".
Back then, C# was so similar to Java that this wasn't even that unreasonable...
I think the AirPods already support streaming compressed audio and decoding on the device (it's part of the Bluetooth spec), so the only thing that's actually missing is the ability to buffer music. You could stick 1GB of flash in them without changing much in terms of cost and form factor and it would only take about 5 minutes to fill that from a phone with Bluetooth 5. The phone could then go to sleep for a long time and the ear pods could keep playing.
The twins are always (due to their age) in the same play environment, wether it be the play room, living room, their bed room, or in the back yard. She gravitates towards dolls, picture books of people, and wants to be held/cuddled a lot. He gravitates towards cars, dump trucks/loaders, blocks, picture books of trucks and construction sites, and only wants to be held if it involves tumbling, tossing, and spinning
And in the picture books that they read, are there the same number of male and female protagonists? If you look at the packaging for the trucks that he likes to play with, are they showing pictures of boys or girls or both playing with them, (or driving real ones)? In the TV that he watches, how many show girls in physically active roles? Very young children are particularly sensitive to picking up biases from their surroundings. Being in the same environment means nothing if that same environment is full of subconscious visual clues about gender roles.
Has anyone in the history of computing decided to leave the tech industry because there were no woman pages?
Nope, although my partner did recently observe that man pages are sensibly named, because they're used for mansplaining: they tell the reader the things that he or she already knows and omit the important details.
After all, there are actual legitimate physical differences that are partially responsible for fewer women going into construction
I was at a conference in San Diego a few years ago, where the hotel was also hosting a Women in Construction conference. It was quite entertaining to see elevators full of scrawny men and heavily muscled women. So, two things about your observation:
First, the physical strength requirements of construction are nowhere near as great as they were 50 years ago. Health and safety rules to prevent permanent injuries mean that most people of either gender can attain the required strength if they exercise enough (and working on a construction site is a really good way of getting that exercise).
Second, your observation is the absolute core of racist or sexist attitudes: judging individuals based on (perceived or real) averages. Most men and women are a lot weaker than someone who works in construction. Most have less natural inclination towards logical reasoning than someone who works in the sciences. Both professions rely on the statistical outliers.
I used to have a Psion Series 3 handheld computer that lasted between 1 and 4 weeks, depending on use, on a pair of AA alkaline batteries. A battery that lasted 400 charge cycles would have lasted longer than the device.
The lithium-ion battery in my 2008 MacBook Pro was advertised at 300 charge cycles (it actually lasted about 130 before dying, but Apple replaced it out of warranty). There are a lot of places where this kind of life is perfectly adequate.
In the UK, you also need a TV license if you use one and the companies that sell them are required by law to notify the TV licensing agency of your address when you do. You'll then be harassed by the company that the government outsources license fee collection to until you either pay, let them inspect your house to verify that you're not receiving broadcast TV, or take them to court.
Why were the NSA spying on someone who was possibly involved in copyright infringement?
That's the key issue. Why is copyright infringement in the remit of the National Security Agency? What is the national security threat from pirating movies?
If your iphone camera is so great let's see it zoom without losing resolution
Not sure about the iPhones, but my partner had a Nokia 1020, which had a 40 megapixel sensor. You do lose resolution when you zoom (although it also had an optical zoom), but the resolution was sufficiently high that you typically didn't care. She's just replaced it with a newer Android phone because Windows Phone 8 is no longer getting security updates and a lot of TLS sites require newer cypher suites than it supports and the new camera is a lot worse.
This keeps being repeated by Americans and it annoys me slightly more each time. Some definitions:
A republic is any system of government in which the titular head of state is not a hereditary monarch. This includes Athenian-style direct democracy where everyone votes on every issue up to military dictatorships. Being a republic is not anything to be particularly proud of: republics have killed far more of their own citizens in the twentieth century than monarchies. Most industrial nations are either constitutional monarchies or republics (and there isn't much difference in practice between being a monarchy in which the monarch has almost no power and being a republic).
A democracy is any system of government in which final authority rests with the people (literally with the city, because the term originally referred to ancient Greek city states). This includes direct democracy, where all issues are decided by plebiscite, systems such as democratic anarchy (not central government, rule by immediate consensus), and a great many forms of representative democracy where the government is run by representatives selected from the people (by election, by lottery, and so on).
The USA aims to be a representative democratic republic. In practice it is closer to an oligarchy (with political dynasties, it arguable how long it will remain a republic), but claiming that it's a republic and therefore not a democracy makes as much sense as claiming that 2 is a positive number and therefore not even: the two concepts are entirely orthogonal.
I suspect that your country would be less of an oligarchy if more of your voters actually understood some basic political theory and didn't keep loudly shouting opinions about words that they clearly don't understand.
Mate, being a professional manager I can (and do) make those decisions on a daily basis. Not only will I choose the most qualified applicant, I will be able to document and justify that decision quite easily.
Lots of people can justify things that are not actually true, that's not an achievement.
Don't believe something to be impossible just because you don't know how to do it!
I don't believe it's impossible because I don't know how to do it, I believe it's impossible because multiple peer-reviewed studies have shown that it's impossible. For example, one published last year showed that the same hiring managers would rate a male applicant stronger than a female one and would be able to justify it, but would use the inverse justification when the candidates profiles were inverted ('this candidate is stronger because he has more on-the-job experience' or 'this candidate is stronger because he has more relevant qualifications', you'd get either justification and it would be honestly believed to be objective - oh, and it wasn't just men who had this bias, women were slightly more likely to prefer the male candidate than men when hiring).
Speaking as someone who teaches at a UK university: that's pretty rare in the sciences. Most of my students will do an internship in between their first and second or second and third (or both) years, but most internship programmes are only open to people who are returning to study the following year (which is unfortunate for masters students). At the end of the degree, they are typically offered jobs (for our students, typically multiple offers per student, but we're atypical in that regard).
Integer division is pretty common in C programs, where you want to use it for indexing and want the rounding behaviour, or where you're running in embedded systems without an FPU (or in kernel mode without an FPU context).
That is, if you force businesses to pay interns, say, $15/h, they only hire people who they know are worth $15/h.
No, they only hire interns if the cost of paying them $15/h and having them be useless is more than the cost of recruiting via other mechanisms. Most of the companies that I work with consider (paid) interns their cheapest recruiting tool. They pay them a few thousand pounds for a three-month period and in that time they get to evaluate how well the person works with a team, what their skills are, whether they are a good fit for the company, and to persuade them that the company is a great place to work. Even better, at the end of the three months, there's no obligation to offer them a job and you can get rid of them with no repercussions if they're not competent. In contrast, pretty much any other mechanism for hiring is very expensive, particularly when you factor in the costs of hiring a bad employee.
Which works well for repeated tasks, such as a production line. It's much harder for the one-off repairs that you often need the highest skill for. That said, tele-operation can reduce the motor skills requirements quite significantly by simply making the virtual target a lot bigger. If one cm of movement by the operator corresponds to 1mm of movement by the robot, you can be pretty clumsy and still do very precise work.
You just have to have paperwork that proves you did it because they were the most qualified applicants.
Who is the most qualified applicant? Do you interview? If not, then how do you rank degrees from different universities, how do you evaluate education versus not-quite-relevant work experience? How do you moderate for age (you're not just giving the job to the oldest person, because they've got the most experience, are you)? If you do interview, what does your company do to compensate for implicit bias? Are your interviewers going to be subconsciously biased to the upper middle class white male who looks and sounds just like them? Or towards the black woman who they think will tick diversity checkboxes and make them look better? Or towards the hot blond of their preferred gender that they think might sleep with them? Do you have documentation to ensure that you're entirely objective in all of these ways? Of course not, because no company does.
Slashdot Mirror
I do wonder whether people who can't read have any problem paying bills that they presumably can't read or if there is any value in advertising to people making $8 a day though
Or selling any kind of goods or services. What's his disposable income on $8/day? How long did he have to save up to afford even a $40 Android phone? If you want to make money selling things to him, then someone needs to invest in increasing his skills and the surrounding infrastructure to the point where he can be earning a lot more, and that's probably going to involve teaching him to read.
Captioning is just as inefficient as video in the fist place.
It's also a good demonstration of how inefficient video is. Watch a 10-minute with subtitles. Count the number of times that you finish reading the text before the speaker finishes talking. Count how many times the reverse happens. If you get bored, use a stopwatch and start it when you finish reading and stop it again when the speaker catches up. You'll probably find that you've wasted at least 3 out of those 10 minutes and that's with text that isn't in any way optimised for reading speed or retention.
signs vary from state to state, and even city to city in many cases
What kind of moronic system is that? The Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals was signed in 1968 and standardised road signs and is implemented by 68 countries (actually, a few more, as some implement it as a de-facto standard without ratifying the treaty).
Not sure about the US, but in the UK there are standard speed limits for different types of roads. Most of the time, the speed limit signs are simply a reminder that you're on a road of a particular kind. Occasionally, they override the default, but typically only by moving it up or down one standard increment on the scale (e.g. 30 to 20 or 50). I'm not surprised that it's easy to fool the computer vision algorithm that determines what the sign said (have a look some time at how bad computer vision is at detecting bicycles), but I would be very surprised if this isn't cross-referenced with a road-type database (Google Maps is pretty hit and miss here, but OpenStreetMap has correct classifications for all of the roads that I've seen in its database) for sanity checking. If the sign is significantly different from the road classification, disregard it entirely. If it's one step away, it's probably correct, but if you see another sign with a lower limit, choose that in preference).
He didn't presume himself Djikstra: Djikstra only needed one page.
As others have said, it's a start. I recall growing up one of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures showing that an area of the Sahara that looked about one square centimetre on a global could provide enough solar power for the entire world and I wondered if that was still true. The current world power consumption is around 110PWh/year. Assuming 1KW for 12 hours per square metre (100% efficiency - infeasible), that works out at 4.38MWh/year, that works out at around 2.5e10 square metres, or around 0.3% of the area of the Sahara. Cheap panels are closer to 18% efficient, so 1.5% of the total area. Assume that maintenance and other factors mean that you're only averaging peak output 50% of the time, that brings us up to 3% of the area of the Sahara. That's a huge engineering project, but having a large-scale proof-of-concept helps.
I remember when the .Net framework was brand new (like a year or two old, tops) seeing jobs advertised that had requirements of 10 years of experience working with "C#.Net".
Back then, C# was so similar to Java that this wasn't even that unreasonable...
You military types call windmills all sorts of strange names!
FYI, here in Europa
I thought I told you to attempt no landings there?
I think the AirPods already support streaming compressed audio and decoding on the device (it's part of the Bluetooth spec), so the only thing that's actually missing is the ability to buffer music. You could stick 1GB of flash in them without changing much in terms of cost and form factor and it would only take about 5 minutes to fill that from a phone with Bluetooth 5. The phone could then go to sleep for a long time and the ear pods could keep playing.
The twins are always (due to their age) in the same play environment, wether it be the play room, living room, their bed room, or in the back yard. She gravitates towards dolls, picture books of people, and wants to be held/cuddled a lot. He gravitates towards cars, dump trucks/loaders, blocks, picture books of trucks and construction sites, and only wants to be held if it involves tumbling, tossing, and spinning
And in the picture books that they read, are there the same number of male and female protagonists? If you look at the packaging for the trucks that he likes to play with, are they showing pictures of boys or girls or both playing with them, (or driving real ones)? In the TV that he watches, how many show girls in physically active roles? Very young children are particularly sensitive to picking up biases from their surroundings. Being in the same environment means nothing if that same environment is full of subconscious visual clues about gender roles.
Has anyone in the history of computing decided to leave the tech industry because there were no woman pages?
Nope, although my partner did recently observe that man pages are sensibly named, because they're used for mansplaining: they tell the reader the things that he or she already knows and omit the important details.
After all, there are actual legitimate physical differences that are partially responsible for fewer women going into construction
I was at a conference in San Diego a few years ago, where the hotel was also hosting a Women in Construction conference. It was quite entertaining to see elevators full of scrawny men and heavily muscled women. So, two things about your observation:
First, the physical strength requirements of construction are nowhere near as great as they were 50 years ago. Health and safety rules to prevent permanent injuries mean that most people of either gender can attain the required strength if they exercise enough (and working on a construction site is a really good way of getting that exercise).
Second, your observation is the absolute core of racist or sexist attitudes: judging individuals based on (perceived or real) averages. Most men and women are a lot weaker than someone who works in construction. Most have less natural inclination towards logical reasoning than someone who works in the sciences. Both professions rely on the statistical outliers.
I used to have a Psion Series 3 handheld computer that lasted between 1 and 4 weeks, depending on use, on a pair of AA alkaline batteries. A battery that lasted 400 charge cycles would have lasted longer than the device.
The lithium-ion battery in my 2008 MacBook Pro was advertised at 300 charge cycles (it actually lasted about 130 before dying, but Apple replaced it out of warranty). There are a lot of places where this kind of life is perfectly adequate.
In the UK, you also need a TV license if you use one and the companies that sell them are required by law to notify the TV licensing agency of your address when you do. You'll then be harassed by the company that the government outsources license fee collection to until you either pay, let them inspect your house to verify that you're not receiving broadcast TV, or take them to court.
True. Your app is going to run on ARM devices, other ARM devices, and possibly even a third kind of ARM device.
Why were the NSA spying on someone who was possibly involved in copyright infringement?
That's the key issue. Why is copyright infringement in the remit of the National Security Agency? What is the national security threat from pirating movies?
If your iphone camera is so great let's see it zoom without losing resolution
Not sure about the iPhones, but my partner had a Nokia 1020, which had a 40 megapixel sensor. You do lose resolution when you zoom (although it also had an optical zoom), but the resolution was sufficiently high that you typically didn't care. She's just replaced it with a newer Android phone because Windows Phone 8 is no longer getting security updates and a lot of TLS sites require newer cypher suites than it supports and the new camera is a lot worse.
A republic is any system of government in which the titular head of state is not a hereditary monarch. This includes Athenian-style direct democracy where everyone votes on every issue up to military dictatorships. Being a republic is not anything to be particularly proud of: republics have killed far more of their own citizens in the twentieth century than monarchies. Most industrial nations are either constitutional monarchies or republics (and there isn't much difference in practice between being a monarchy in which the monarch has almost no power and being a republic).
A democracy is any system of government in which final authority rests with the people (literally with the city, because the term originally referred to ancient Greek city states). This includes direct democracy, where all issues are decided by plebiscite, systems such as democratic anarchy (not central government, rule by immediate consensus), and a great many forms of representative democracy where the government is run by representatives selected from the people (by election, by lottery, and so on).
The USA aims to be a representative democratic republic. In practice it is closer to an oligarchy (with political dynasties, it arguable how long it will remain a republic), but claiming that it's a republic and therefore not a democracy makes as much sense as claiming that 2 is a positive number and therefore not even: the two concepts are entirely orthogonal.
I suspect that your country would be less of an oligarchy if more of your voters actually understood some basic political theory and didn't keep loudly shouting opinions about words that they clearly don't understand.
Mate, being a professional manager I can (and do) make those decisions on a daily basis. Not only will I choose the most qualified applicant, I will be able to document and justify that decision quite easily.
Lots of people can justify things that are not actually true, that's not an achievement.
Don't believe something to be impossible just because you don't know how to do it!
I don't believe it's impossible because I don't know how to do it, I believe it's impossible because multiple peer-reviewed studies have shown that it's impossible. For example, one published last year showed that the same hiring managers would rate a male applicant stronger than a female one and would be able to justify it, but would use the inverse justification when the candidates profiles were inverted ('this candidate is stronger because he has more on-the-job experience' or 'this candidate is stronger because he has more relevant qualifications', you'd get either justification and it would be honestly believed to be objective - oh, and it wasn't just men who had this bias, women were slightly more likely to prefer the male candidate than men when hiring).
Speaking as someone who teaches at a UK university: that's pretty rare in the sciences. Most of my students will do an internship in between their first and second or second and third (or both) years, but most internship programmes are only open to people who are returning to study the following year (which is unfortunate for masters students). At the end of the degree, they are typically offered jobs (for our students, typically multiple offers per student, but we're atypical in that regard).
Integer division is pretty common in C programs, where you want to use it for indexing and want the rounding behaviour, or where you're running in embedded systems without an FPU (or in kernel mode without an FPU context).
That is, if you force businesses to pay interns, say, $15/h, they only hire people who they know are worth $15/h.
No, they only hire interns if the cost of paying them $15/h and having them be useless is more than the cost of recruiting via other mechanisms. Most of the companies that I work with consider (paid) interns their cheapest recruiting tool. They pay them a few thousand pounds for a three-month period and in that time they get to evaluate how well the person works with a team, what their skills are, whether they are a good fit for the company, and to persuade them that the company is a great place to work. Even better, at the end of the three months, there's no obligation to offer them a job and you can get rid of them with no repercussions if they're not competent. In contrast, pretty much any other mechanism for hiring is very expensive, particularly when you factor in the costs of hiring a bad employee.
Which works well for repeated tasks, such as a production line. It's much harder for the one-off repairs that you often need the highest skill for. That said, tele-operation can reduce the motor skills requirements quite significantly by simply making the virtual target a lot bigger. If one cm of movement by the operator corresponds to 1mm of movement by the robot, you can be pretty clumsy and still do very precise work.
You just have to have paperwork that proves you did it because they were the most qualified applicants.
Who is the most qualified applicant? Do you interview? If not, then how do you rank degrees from different universities, how do you evaluate education versus not-quite-relevant work experience? How do you moderate for age (you're not just giving the job to the oldest person, because they've got the most experience, are you)? If you do interview, what does your company do to compensate for implicit bias? Are your interviewers going to be subconsciously biased to the upper middle class white male who looks and sounds just like them? Or towards the black woman who they think will tick diversity checkboxes and make them look better? Or towards the hot blond of their preferred gender that they think might sleep with them? Do you have documentation to ensure that you're entirely objective in all of these ways? Of course not, because no company does.