It's not exactly the first time this type of thing has been done. It's a page out of the HR version of Sun Tzu's The Art of War.
PetroCanada, for instance, bounced its offices back and forth between Toronto and Calgary a few times (back in the 80s or 90s). Lots of people tried to hang on and lost their shirts on moving expenses because the housing markets happened to be going the opposite way of the moves.
Companies will sometimes hire an 'axe man' who gives them advice on the best way to get employees to leave for the least possible expense to the corporation. Forcing them to choose between moving and quitting is not uncommon.
Yeah... different types of communication, though. And note that I said 'kill voicemail' not 'kill phones'.
Most of what I get calls for are moderately simple requests that can't be serviced right away. What that means is that I have to listen to the voice mail, figure out who they are and what they want, and then take notes so I don't forget. If they just send me an email (hopefully with a clear subject), that's taken off me and the request is easier to queue.
For complex subjects, you need more than a moment of phone time, so a meeting - however brief - needs to be scheduled. Usually I get a voicemail asking for a meeting - and again, for that purpose an email is better.
For a moment there I thought you were going to suggest you'd be offering something more specific - date consulting.
Imagine the money you could squeeze out of guys by advanced cyber stalking, data mining, and analysis of potential dates. You could rate them on looks, personality, and, most importantly, likelihood of putting out for a particular client utilizing a particular approach.
I LOVE physical QWERTY. I loved my BlackBerry phones, and back in the day, even my Playbook. Nice concepts, uneven execution, lousy updates that frequently made things worse rather than better... and then the updates stopped and platforms were abandoned after promises they wouldn't be.
RIM/BlackBerry consistently turns whatever they touch into shit due to poor decisions from the top of the organization. If you buy anything with their brand on it, you're a glutton for punishment.
Ugh. I haven't personally had satellite Internet ever, and have only dealt with it second hand once, a long time ago.
I forgot about the standard of 'satellite direct for downlink, land line plus central transmitter for uplink'.
So much for global mobility if that's what Musk is talking about here. I need direct two-way communication between my base station and a satellite before I care about this system. Perhaps I'm asking too much for a consumer-grade ground transmitter to get a signal to a LEO satellite?
> I'm old enough to have actually studied computer programming in the 1980s
I'm a bit behind that. I was playing around with BASIC and LOGO on the C=64 around that time. And a bit of whatever SpenceBBS was coded in. I didn't study a programming language until the 1990s, and they put APL in front of me. (And that didn't stick, I remember nothing!)
I like the idea of more or less global Internet access. I mean, once I've paid Musk's fee... is he going to care if I talk to his satellites from Australia instead of Canada? No matter where I go, if I have power and a dish I should be able to get access.
On the other hand... if the NSA doesn't have a tap on this, I'll be very much surprised. And that bothers me on an ideological level even if it is unlikely to have an immediate and significant effect on me.
C++, but Fortran's pretty much the same for all but a few cases... where it's markedly better. Apparently it's also easier to learn and has a few other practical advantages.
So the answer is that there ISN'T a replacement yet. Fortran is the programming language of choice for large physics simulations at present.
But a bit of googling shows that there's still more than enough justification to call it the best programming language for physics simulations.
So... there will be Fortran programmers out there. I'd suspect, though, given that it's maintained a niche in high-end physics simulation, that anyone who would program in Fortran at the level required here currently has a job doing just that, and won't have time for a major side project with an unknown probability of paying off.
>And that would be the reason my father told me never to let one client dedicate more than 30% of my business.
I have worked for companies that died because they failed to do this. One logistics and one IT.
When one supplier dominates your business, they're not a supplier... they're your master. It's just a matter of how gentle they are. And as soon as they decide they can do better, they'll kill you off without a second thought.
> It's also why I told my father that reliable clients sometimes get heavy discounts, to offset the lack of sales/collection efforts
This should be standard. The profit margin should be set based on the difficulty of servicing the client, offset by long term projections (take a hit to land a new client, milk them a bit in the mid term, give them a break to keep them long term). An easy 5% 'forever' is better than a hard 10% that lasts a year.
Squeezing blood from a stone is the province of vendors dealing with government contracts, and even then they get caught up in efficiency purges once in a while.
Who cares? And you've eliminated the Chinese, Russians, Israelis, and basically every competent intelligence agency in the world in your quest for assigning partisan blame domestically.
1a) Hardware switches need to come back into fashion. CUT THE WIRES. Since physical switches have an irritating habit of failing, they need to be easily replaceable, so they need to plug in and touch contact points, not be soldered in.
1b) These switches should exist for power and every corruptible/interceptable I/O path. If a light sensor senses, an LED blinks, a mic listens, or tone is generated, there should be a physical, circuit-interrupting switch to kill the related hardware. If there isn't, your device isn't as secure as it could be.
2) The OS should fake permissions for apps, since so many refuse to run without access they don't actually require. Instead of 'yes/no' when access is requested, we need the options 'yes', 'no', and 'fake it'. Anybody who demands location, camera, mic, contact, and file access to run their app that needs none of that should not be respected enough that you have to go with 'just do not install'. They're immoral, you be immoral right back.
>Wanted: an app that broadcasts ALL these signals, making them think you've got every product already, so they won't waste their time trying to sell you anything.
Since to be useful the sound must be unique to the user (in order to be matched to you by the receiving device), you'd need to know their algorithm for generating the sounds. It's probably a hash of some unique device ID available to applications, and not terribly difficult to figure out, but it's not as simple as 'broadcast it all!'
>Or just pollute their data to the point it's useless
An ultrasonic static generator would be more practical. Drown out any signals you haven't noticed and silenced with noise. You might piss off your dog, though.
>When the ad plays on a TV or radio, or some ad code runs on a mobile or computer, it emits ultrasounds that are picked up by the microphone of nearby laptops, desktops, tablets or smartphones. SDKs embedded in apps installed on those devices relay the beacon back to the online advertiser, who then knows that the user of TV "x" is also the owner of smartphone "Y"
Imagine you're on your phone and browsing the web. You load one of those ads, and your phone now broadcasts your advertiser-assigned unique ID via ultrasound. OK. Who says it has to be another device YOU own that picks it up?
How difficult would it be to drop listening devices in high traffic areas that listen for those tones, sending location information back to whoever? And that's just to augment other devices that might be infected with a listen-and-report app.
This isn't an advertising tool, it's a ubiquitous surveillance tool for three-letter-agencies that advertisers have discovered. That is, of course, assuming it actually works outside a lab and isn't just an untested fantasy the ad types latched onto.
Anyway, IF phones can both transmit and detect ultrasonic tones (which I question), it's only a matter of time until someone produces a 'secure' phone that has physical filters in line with the speaker and mic wires to filter out anything outside the range of human hearing.
>If they didn't actively police it, Facebook would quickly turn into a cam site.
They're missing out on something, then. It'd be easy enough for them to 'wall off' a section of the site for adult services - charging to confirm identify, legal age, legality of the production in the location of origin, etc - and then allowing their confirmed over-18 members to access it while taking an ongoing cut of the cam fees.
They'd still have to monitor for people trying to run their cam site outside the prescribed areas, but they could be making bank on the cam girls who play ball.
>We should return to the moon first, build a base there, maybe a colony
You're still far enough away you're going to die in the event of a catastrophic failure.
You don't have any significant atmosphere. Mars has *something*, and it makes a big difference. Steadier temperatures, for one. Oxygen, for another. Surprisingly, nitrogen (though most of it is in the soil, not the air).
0.38g over 0.16g. For human physiology, one's a lot closer than the other to the environment we evolved in. While we have no data, I'm willing to bet the human body does better on Mars than the Moon.
Then there's radiation - Mars has less of it.
Problems with regolith? Mars probably has toxic perchlorates, but lunar dust is razor sharp and static-charged. On modest time scales it's a bigger hazard to humans and hardware, and more difficult to deal with.
Then there's the time lag. The Moon is about 1.3s away, plus some extra for however you're routing the signal around the Earth, and you have to account for the round trip for feedback. Mars is between 3 and 22 light *minutes* away.
Essentially, the Moon is a much better target for teleoperated robot exploration and development than human habitation. If we want humans to survive with minimal or no continual assistance from Earth, until we figure out how to live in a space ship off solar power and harvesting comets and asteroids.... Mars is it.
School boards... a place where politicians breed and local busybodies fuck up education with their local ignorance. School boards ban books and think their interpretation of God overrules evidence and the scientific method.
School boards should be obliterated, or at least exist only to handle a small portion of the schooling system set aside for 'items only locally relevant'. They can decide if the kids should attend a particular local festival or what local history should be given precedence in the curriculum. And they can certainly act as oversight for the school administration. But they shouldn't be setting standards for the education system.
Your argument - at least to me - makes the exact opposite point you obviously intended.
Gene editing, through every part of the organism reachable by the immune system, in a live mammal. HIV will ultimately be a mere footnote, because this technology is an early first step to editing your own genome as a consenting adult instead of fiddling around with the genes of a fertilized egg and hoping you haven't screwed over a future person's life in the process.
You won't be rebuilding large structures in the body with this, but there's still so much that can be done if you can alter genes in an adult. There are a lot of deleterious genetic conditions that can be corrected, and then you move on to upgrading.
The difference is that after a stay on the ISS, astronauts go to extended rehab in top notch medical facilities.
That won't be an option on Mars, so we're probably going to have to do the 'tether and counterweight' thing to give them artificial gravity for the trip.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not exactly the first time this type of thing has been done. It's a page out of the HR version of Sun Tzu's The Art of War.
PetroCanada, for instance, bounced its offices back and forth between Toronto and Calgary a few times (back in the 80s or 90s). Lots of people tried to hang on and lost their shirts on moving expenses because the housing markets happened to be going the opposite way of the moves.
Companies will sometimes hire an 'axe man' who gives them advice on the best way to get employees to leave for the least possible expense to the corporation. Forcing them to choose between moving and quitting is not uncommon.
Yeah... different types of communication, though. And note that I said 'kill voicemail' not 'kill phones'.
Most of what I get calls for are moderately simple requests that can't be serviced right away. What that means is that I have to listen to the voice mail, figure out who they are and what they want, and then take notes so I don't forget. If they just send me an email (hopefully with a clear subject), that's taken off me and the request is easier to queue.
For complex subjects, you need more than a moment of phone time, so a meeting - however brief - needs to be scheduled. Usually I get a voicemail asking for a meeting - and again, for that purpose an email is better.
Kill internal voicemail. Voicemail is evil. It puts all the processing load on the recipient.
IM is OK, but email is better.
Physical visits should be scheduled in most cases.
For a moment there I thought you were going to suggest you'd be offering something more specific - date consulting.
Imagine the money you could squeeze out of guys by advanced cyber stalking, data mining, and analysis of potential dates. You could rate them on looks, personality, and, most importantly, likelihood of putting out for a particular client utilizing a particular approach.
I LOVE physical QWERTY. I loved my BlackBerry phones, and back in the day, even my Playbook. Nice concepts, uneven execution, lousy updates that frequently made things worse rather than better... and then the updates stopped and platforms were abandoned after promises they wouldn't be.
RIM/BlackBerry consistently turns whatever they touch into shit due to poor decisions from the top of the organization. If you buy anything with their brand on it, you're a glutton for punishment.
Easy to tap, if you run your tap onboard the satellites...
Ugh. I haven't personally had satellite Internet ever, and have only dealt with it second hand once, a long time ago.
I forgot about the standard of 'satellite direct for downlink, land line plus central transmitter for uplink'.
So much for global mobility if that's what Musk is talking about here. I need direct two-way communication between my base station and a satellite before I care about this system. Perhaps I'm asking too much for a consumer-grade ground transmitter to get a signal to a LEO satellite?
> I'm old enough to have actually studied computer programming in the 1980s
I'm a bit behind that. I was playing around with BASIC and LOGO on the C=64 around that time. And a bit of whatever SpenceBBS was coded in. I didn't study a programming language until the 1990s, and they put APL in front of me. (And that didn't stick, I remember nothing!)
I like the idea of more or less global Internet access. I mean, once I've paid Musk's fee... is he going to care if I talk to his satellites from Australia instead of Canada? No matter where I go, if I have power and a dish I should be able to get access.
On the other hand... if the NSA doesn't have a tap on this, I'll be very much surprised. And that bothers me on an ideological level even if it is unlikely to have an immediate and significant effect on me.
>they will have to do what they should have done years ago... Convert to a more modern language
For this type of task, Fortran is still the best choice. A quick bit of google research reveals that C++ is competitive, but still a runner-up.
C++, but Fortran's pretty much the same for all but a few cases... where it's markedly better. Apparently it's also easier to learn and has a few other practical advantages.
So the answer is that there ISN'T a replacement yet. Fortran is the programming language of choice for large physics simulations at present.
But a bit of googling shows that there's still more than enough justification to call it the best programming language for physics simulations.
So... there will be Fortran programmers out there. I'd suspect, though, given that it's maintained a niche in high-end physics simulation, that anyone who would program in Fortran at the level required here currently has a job doing just that, and won't have time for a major side project with an unknown probability of paying off.
Nice. Sadly, my company uses iPhones and the iOS alternative only works on jailbroken devices.
>And that would be the reason my father told me never to let one client dedicate more than 30% of my business.
I have worked for companies that died because they failed to do this. One logistics and one IT.
When one supplier dominates your business, they're not a supplier... they're your master. It's just a matter of how gentle they are. And as soon as they decide they can do better, they'll kill you off without a second thought.
> It's also why I told my father that reliable clients sometimes get heavy discounts, to offset the lack of sales/collection efforts
This should be standard. The profit margin should be set based on the difficulty of servicing the client, offset by long term projections (take a hit to land a new client, milk them a bit in the mid term, give them a break to keep them long term). An easy 5% 'forever' is better than a hard 10% that lasts a year.
Squeezing blood from a stone is the province of vendors dealing with government contracts, and even then they get caught up in efficiency purges once in a while.
Who cares? And you've eliminated the Chinese, Russians, Israelis, and basically every competent intelligence agency in the world in your quest for assigning partisan blame domestically.
1a) Hardware switches need to come back into fashion. CUT THE WIRES. Since physical switches have an irritating habit of failing, they need to be easily replaceable, so they need to plug in and touch contact points, not be soldered in.
1b) These switches should exist for power and every corruptible/interceptable I/O path. If a light sensor senses, an LED blinks, a mic listens, or tone is generated, there should be a physical, circuit-interrupting switch to kill the related hardware. If there isn't, your device isn't as secure as it could be.
2) The OS should fake permissions for apps, since so many refuse to run without access they don't actually require. Instead of 'yes/no' when access is requested, we need the options 'yes', 'no', and 'fake it'. Anybody who demands location, camera, mic, contact, and file access to run their app that needs none of that should not be respected enough that you have to go with 'just do not install'. They're immoral, you be immoral right back.
>Wanted: an app that broadcasts ALL these signals, making them think you've got every product already, so they won't waste their time trying to sell you anything.
Since to be useful the sound must be unique to the user (in order to be matched to you by the receiving device), you'd need to know their algorithm for generating the sounds. It's probably a hash of some unique device ID available to applications, and not terribly difficult to figure out, but it's not as simple as 'broadcast it all!'
>Or just pollute their data to the point it's useless
An ultrasonic static generator would be more practical. Drown out any signals you haven't noticed and silenced with noise. You might piss off your dog, though.
>When the ad plays on a TV or radio, or some ad code runs on a mobile or computer, it emits ultrasounds that are picked up by the microphone of nearby laptops, desktops, tablets or smartphones. SDKs embedded in apps installed on those devices relay the beacon back to the online advertiser, who then knows that the user of TV "x" is also the owner of smartphone "Y"
Imagine you're on your phone and browsing the web. You load one of those ads, and your phone now broadcasts your advertiser-assigned unique ID via ultrasound. OK. Who says it has to be another device YOU own that picks it up?
How difficult would it be to drop listening devices in high traffic areas that listen for those tones, sending location information back to whoever? And that's just to augment other devices that might be infected with a listen-and-report app.
This isn't an advertising tool, it's a ubiquitous surveillance tool for three-letter-agencies that advertisers have discovered. That is, of course, assuming it actually works outside a lab and isn't just an untested fantasy the ad types latched onto.
Anyway, IF phones can both transmit and detect ultrasonic tones (which I question), it's only a matter of time until someone produces a 'secure' phone that has physical filters in line with the speaker and mic wires to filter out anything outside the range of human hearing.
>If they didn't actively police it, Facebook would quickly turn into a cam site.
They're missing out on something, then. It'd be easy enough for them to 'wall off' a section of the site for adult services - charging to confirm identify, legal age, legality of the production in the location of origin, etc - and then allowing their confirmed over-18 members to access it while taking an ongoing cut of the cam fees.
They'd still have to monitor for people trying to run their cam site outside the prescribed areas, but they could be making bank on the cam girls who play ball.
>We should return to the moon first, build a base there, maybe a colony
You're still far enough away you're going to die in the event of a catastrophic failure.
You don't have any significant atmosphere. Mars has *something*, and it makes a big difference. Steadier temperatures, for one. Oxygen, for another. Surprisingly, nitrogen (though most of it is in the soil, not the air).
0.38g over 0.16g. For human physiology, one's a lot closer than the other to the environment we evolved in. While we have no data, I'm willing to bet the human body does better on Mars than the Moon.
Then there's radiation - Mars has less of it.
Problems with regolith? Mars probably has toxic perchlorates, but lunar dust is razor sharp and static-charged. On modest time scales it's a bigger hazard to humans and hardware, and more difficult to deal with.
Then there's the time lag. The Moon is about 1.3s away, plus some extra for however you're routing the signal around the Earth, and you have to account for the round trip for feedback. Mars is between 3 and 22 light *minutes* away.
Essentially, the Moon is a much better target for teleoperated robot exploration and development than human habitation. If we want humans to survive with minimal or no continual assistance from Earth, until we figure out how to live in a space ship off solar power and harvesting comets and asteroids.... Mars is it.
School boards... a place where politicians breed and local busybodies fuck up education with their local ignorance. School boards ban books and think their interpretation of God overrules evidence and the scientific method.
School boards should be obliterated, or at least exist only to handle a small portion of the schooling system set aside for 'items only locally relevant'. They can decide if the kids should attend a particular local festival or what local history should be given precedence in the curriculum. And they can certainly act as oversight for the school administration. But they shouldn't be setting standards for the education system.
Your argument - at least to me - makes the exact opposite point you obviously intended.
Are the people in your state a different species?
I'm pretty sure we all have the same nutritional requirements, so why have 50 different standards set by 50 different committees?
That's just inefficient.
Gene editing, through every part of the organism reachable by the immune system, in a live mammal. HIV will ultimately be a mere footnote, because this technology is an early first step to editing your own genome as a consenting adult instead of fiddling around with the genes of a fertilized egg and hoping you haven't screwed over a future person's life in the process.
You won't be rebuilding large structures in the body with this, but there's still so much that can be done if you can alter genes in an adult. There are a lot of deleterious genetic conditions that can be corrected, and then you move on to upgrading.
The difference is that after a stay on the ISS, astronauts go to extended rehab in top notch medical facilities.
That won't be an option on Mars, so we're probably going to have to do the 'tether and counterweight' thing to give them artificial gravity for the trip.
While true, I'm actually glad the summary didn't suggest 5G was superluminal. On this planet, we obey the Law of Relativity!