Re:Saw this one coming when..
on
42-Volt Autos
·
· Score: 1
They said 42-volts was chosen to avoid amperages that would harm humans while providing enough capacity for all the stuff being piled onto the latest models.
I don't know much about electricity but it seems strange to choose 42 volts as the upper-bound of "human-friendly" when our household stuff is 110. It seems to me that there must be another reason to stay as low as 42.
hey don't lower taxes because of it..they just shove the savings into another pork barrel.
Dude. What do you think a "pork barrel" is? It's a wasteful scam to reduce (apparent) unemployment! "A government project or appropriation that yields jobs or other benefits to a specific locale and patronage opportunities to its political representative."
It's just like paying an American to do something far above the market rate. They are both wastes of taxpayer money.
That companies keep outsourcing things to foreign countries. Of course, it saves them money, but at what cost? As they do that, unemployment in the US will only rise. I guess the prospect of higher profit margins outshines the prospect of giving a hard-working American a job.
So unemployment in America goes up and unemployment in India goes down and that is a problem because...Americans are just entitled to a better standard of living? Or because American businesses are supposed to be nationalistic rather than internationalistic? That doesn't make much sense to me. Westerners are pampered and I don't see anything wrong with spreading some of the juice around to the developing world. We'll all be better off in the long term if we move towards a world where people's opportunities depend upon what they can do and not where they were born.
I've been using exclusively OO.o for a number of months. I recently installed MS Office 2003 b2 and took it for a run, and while tight and very modern, it's full of many crazy features and the XML is writes is hopelessly unreadable.
The interesting thing is that SCO is now punishing people for buying Unix/AIX (TM) not Linux. The media spin has been that Linux is under a haze of doubt but for now at least Red Hat customers seem to be in a better position than AIX customers even though IBM has paid for a Unix license and Red Hat has not. Weird.
A torrent is a static file from an actual, present file, you can't make a torrent from tomorrow's daily picture. You have to download a new.torrent dose for your daily dose.
What's wrong with sending torrents by email or Usenet?
That is factually incorrect and without that "fact" your entire argument falls part. Do a Google search for "Open Source Definition" and tell me how Windows complies. The definition is quite precise, at least as precise as that of "Free Software". I have never heard Microsoft or anyone else claim that Windows is under an Open Source license. Furthermore, if you do a search for "Free Software Definition" you'll find 4 freedoms defined. Those four freedoms are all supported by every one of the open source licenses. Furthermore, your idea that FSF's "interpretation" of FREE SOFTWARE is simple and universal is incorrect. There are many different types of free software.
Free software has become much more popular and successful since people started to sell it as "Open Source Software."
I've heard of poker machines (as they are called in Australia) working like this before from people who worked in the industry. And if you think about it, they are not really 'cheating' people - just because the machine has made a random win/loss decision before you pull the handle makes no difference to the probabilities of winning or losing. It is just as likely that the machine could have decided that you were going to win and then generates that outcome no matter what choice you make.
If the machine knows 100% that you are going to lose then it must inform you of that fact. It cannot pretend that you might win if you select the right button. It is fraud plain and simple.
I always laugh when I hear people say they feel safer with a corporate product because there is a company behind it with the incentive to keep improving it. They've got it exactly backwards. The minute there is no more profit in a product, or the minute it becomes strategic to tie it or bundle it with something else a company will do that. An open source product can continue to advance as long as a single person cares about it.
The machine implies that a player, by deciding whether a number is on the high or the low end of a linear scale, can gain a better chance of winning. But that's what gambling is about, isn't it?
No. Gambling is where you make choices and win or lose based upon the choices you make. If you are offered a choice but the machine has decided to take your money regardless of what you choose, that isn't gambling, it is stealing. If the button has no effect on the outcome then it can only exist to trick the gambler.
Maybe the "I was misled into thinking I could win" argument might work, but if so, it could pretty much apply to all forms of gambling anywhere.
That makes no sense. You really can win at the lottery. If you pick the right numbers you win. You really can win at the horse races. You pick the right horse and you win. But in this case the user is offered a choice and they pick but they cannot win no matter what they do. It is not gambling.
Apparently the 'proof' that sliot machines, fruit machines as those wacky brits choose to call them, is that, if you 'freeze' the state of a fruit machine at some point and then repeat the next step, the machine will generate the same outcome.
No, you completely misunderstand. You must have skimmed the article very quickly. He says that if you freeze the state and then make a DIFFERENT CHOICE than you did before, you get the same result. In other words, the machine pretends that you can effect the outcome but you cannot. This has no impact on the statistics of the situation but it does mean that machine pretends that it behaves in a manner it does not which is arguably a form of fraud. Imagine it like this: your friend asks you to pick a number between one and ten and if you pick th number he's thinking of, he'll give you $10.00. But in his head he's already decided whether he'll give you the money or not and the game. That's the situation here and it is a form of deception and arguably outright fraud. If the "high"/"low" button is totally meaningless, why put the button there at all?
Oracle is the second biggest software company after you know who. They make a ton on those "related services." Yes, they also sell apps as someone else pointed out but it is my impression that they've never made a ton of money on the apps compared to the database and services. In fact they give away some apps like their portal.
Corporations are owned by shareholders. They are run day to day by managers supervised by a board of directors. A hostile takeover is one where the managers and the board of directors do not want to be bought but the purchaser buys them anyways, simply by buying shares from the shareholders.
Did you read the article? "DoCoMo's 3G service, which offers video conferencing and speedy access to the Web, had until recently met a cool reception due mainly to the poor battery life of its handsets."
How is mirroring a site that is not slashdotted "informative"? You're really fucking lazy if you can be bothered to scroll down and read the article but not to click on the article link.
Not quite true. Automation leads to higher productivity, meaning one worker can produce more.
Of course.
As long as there's enough demand, people can get new jobs. This happened,e.g, when new technologies killed off many jobs in the agriculture sector: People went to the cities to work in factories.
Factories are not consumers. Factories make products. People wanted more and more products and therefore they built the factories to build them. People always want more products. There has never been a time in history where people said: "I don't want a newer, better car. I don't want a faster internet connection. I don't want a more sleek celluar phone. I don't want a bigger television. It isn't that the factories magically came along just in time to suck up the farmboys. It's that the farmboys became an available resource when they were no longer needed on the farm so the factories had access to them at a price they could afford.
At the moment, however, I don't see the Next Big Thing that'll generate the jobs lost to automation. I don't the killer product that'll create a huge demand and'll lead to millions of jobs. Many thought, the internet would bring that on, but, as we all know now, that wasn't the case.
There is no need for the next big thing. The process of automation has been ongoing for centuries and only seldom has their been a next big thing. For instance, today there is a trend towards "personal chefs" who cook a week's meals for you in advance. Was there a technological shift recently that made this trend possible? Not really. Not much has changed in the kitchen since the microwave. But automation has freed up some people from other jobs and they looked around, said: "what niche isn't being filled" and they filled it. I could list a hundred similar jobs. In the 50s, when you went on vacation you sent your dogs to the neighbours. Today we pay for "doggy hotels." Oh yeah, and paid dog walkers. That isn't the result of technology. It's just people pushed out of other jobs, using their brains and creating a new market. People buy $5.00 fancy coffees. How the hell did that happen? Was it the Internet? No. It was just an unfilled niche. There are an infinite number of unfilled niches.
If the divide between rich and poor keeps getting bigger (which is a bad thing...don't get me wrong) then we will return to the days where middle class people had maids and butlers. It is the very nature of a moderately healthy capitalist economy to find jobs for most people most of the time. It has nothing to do with technological spikes.
That's about $3000 each. And most of that money goes to just a few people. Most of the jobs are held by foreigners (few Saudis deign to lower themselves to perform manual labor).
I have a hard time reconciling those two statements. The Saudis are poor but not so poor that they are willing to accept a job for pay? Sounds unlikely.
- Automatization leads to fewer and fewer workers being needed to do the same amount of work, meaning higher profits for the producer.
Or lower prices for the consumer. Or research and development into new products. Or all of the above.
- Outsourcing leads to those workers being paid less and less , meaning again higher profits.
Or lower prices. Or R&D
- This, in turn leads to higher unemployment rates and a higher number of workers with low wages.
You missed some logical step there. How does outsourcing lead to unemployment? By definition, outsourcing leads to a shift in employment.
Automation also does not, in general, lead to higher unemployment. If it did, nobody would have jobs today because we've been progressively automating the Western economy since... I don't know... the invention of the printing press? The loom? The cotton gin? The axe? Think about it. Automation creates new jobs just as it destroys old ones.
I don't really understand what you're getting at. Are you trying to say that Saudi Arabians are becoming terrorists because they feel "exploited"? Native Saudi Arabians are on average much richer than Americans.
Did you read the ret of my post? I pointed out that the next president could fix things if he was so inclined. On the other hand, we don't know who the next president will be nor how long they will be in power.
I followed one of your links and found this:
Our space assets now are probably more important to warfighters and more important to our ability to win this global war on terrorism than they ever have been historically.
Here's what amazes me. America learned one lesson with 9/11: there are people who want to destroy it. But America seems to be oblivious to another lesson: they do not need high-tech weapons, weapons of mass destruction, ballistic missiles etc. They can use commercial airlines. They can use fertilizer. They can use off-the-shelf explosives. They can use box cutters.
The Military/Industrial complex wants to fight Al Queada as if it were the Soviet Union: "we'll have bigger guns than them and then we'll win." "Iraq is developing big guns so we better invade them." But that shows a complete misunderstanding of the tactics of the real enemy. They shocked the world by using innovation rather than big guns.
Slashdot Mirror
... in Soviet Russia.
They said 42-volts was chosen to avoid amperages that would harm humans while providing enough capacity for all the stuff being piled onto the latest models.
I don't know much about electricity but it seems strange to choose 42 volts as the upper-bound of "human-friendly" when our household stuff is 110. It seems to me that there must be another reason to stay as low as 42.
hey don't lower taxes because of it..they just shove the savings into another pork barrel.
Dude. What do you think a "pork barrel" is? It's a wasteful scam to reduce (apparent) unemployment! "A government project or appropriation that yields jobs or other benefits to a specific locale and patronage opportunities to its political representative." It's just like paying an American to do something far above the market rate. They are both wastes of taxpayer money.
That companies keep outsourcing things to foreign countries. Of course, it saves them money, but at what cost? As they do that, unemployment in the US will only rise. I guess the prospect of higher profit margins outshines the prospect of giving a hard-working American a job.
So unemployment in America goes up and unemployment in India goes down and that is a problem because...Americans are just entitled to a better standard of living? Or because American businesses are supposed to be nationalistic rather than internationalistic? That doesn't make much sense to me. Westerners are pampered and I don't see anything wrong with spreading some of the juice around to the developing world. We'll all be better off in the long term if we move towards a world where people's opportunities depend upon what they can do and not where they were born.
.com, org, .net. Whatever.
I've been using exclusively OO.o for a number of months. I recently installed MS Office 2003 b2 and took it for a run, and while tight and very modern, it's full of many crazy features and the XML is writes is hopelessly unreadable.
It isn't that bad .The interesting thing is that SCO is now punishing people for buying Unix/AIX (TM) not Linux. The media spin has been that Linux is under a haze of doubt but for now at least Red Hat customers seem to be in a better position than AIX customers even though IBM has paid for a Unix license and Red Hat has not. Weird.
A torrent is a static file from an actual, present file, you can't make a torrent from tomorrow's daily picture. You have to download a new .torrent dose for your daily dose.
What's wrong with sending torrents by email or Usenet?
Even Windows is "Open Source".
That is factually incorrect and without that "fact" your entire argument falls part. Do a Google search for "Open Source Definition" and tell me how Windows complies. The definition is quite precise, at least as precise as that of "Free Software". I have never heard Microsoft or anyone else claim that Windows is under an Open Source license. Furthermore, if you do a search for "Free Software Definition" you'll find 4 freedoms defined. Those four freedoms are all supported by every one of the open source licenses. Furthermore, your idea that FSF's "interpretation" of FREE SOFTWARE is simple and universal is incorrect. There are many different types of free software.
Free software has become much more popular and successful since people started to sell it as "Open Source Software."
I've heard of poker machines (as they are called in Australia) working like this before from people who worked in the industry. And if you think about it, they are not really 'cheating' people - just because the machine has made a random win/loss decision before you pull the handle makes no difference to the probabilities of winning or losing. It is just as likely that the machine could have decided that you were going to win and then generates that outcome no matter what choice you make.
If the machine knows 100% that you are going to lose then it must inform you of that fact. It cannot pretend that you might win if you select the right button. It is fraud plain and simple.
The article is referring back to a vulnerability from 2000. Do a Google search for "Brown Orifice."
I always laugh when I hear people say they feel safer with a corporate product because there is a company behind it with the incentive to keep improving it. They've got it exactly backwards. The minute there is no more profit in a product, or the minute it becomes strategic to tie it or bundle it with something else a company will do that. An open source product can continue to advance as long as a single person cares about it.
The machine implies that a player, by deciding whether a number is on the high or the low end of a linear scale, can gain a better chance of winning. But that's what gambling is about, isn't it?
No. Gambling is where you make choices and win or lose based upon the choices you make. If you are offered a choice but the machine has decided to take your money regardless of what you choose, that isn't gambling, it is stealing. If the button has no effect on the outcome then it can only exist to trick the gambler.
Maybe the "I was misled into thinking I could win" argument might work, but if so, it could pretty much apply to all forms of gambling anywhere.
That makes no sense. You really can win at the lottery. If you pick the right numbers you win. You really can win at the horse races. You pick the right horse and you win. But in this case the user is offered a choice and they pick but they cannot win no matter what they do. It is not gambling.
Apparently the 'proof' that sliot machines, fruit machines as those wacky brits choose to call them, is that, if you 'freeze' the state of a fruit machine at some point and then repeat the next step, the machine will generate the same outcome.
No, you completely misunderstand. You must have skimmed the article very quickly. He says that if you freeze the state and then make a DIFFERENT CHOICE than you did before, you get the same result. In other words, the machine pretends that you can effect the outcome but you cannot. This has no impact on the statistics of the situation but it does mean that machine pretends that it behaves in a manner it does not which is arguably a form of fraud. Imagine it like this: your friend asks you to pick a number between one and ten and if you pick th number he's thinking of, he'll give you $10.00. But in his head he's already decided whether he'll give you the money or not and the game. That's the situation here and it is a form of deception and arguably outright fraud. If the "high"/"low" button is totally meaningless, why put the button there at all?
Oracle is the second biggest software company after you know who. They make a ton on those "related services." Yes, they also sell apps as someone else pointed out but it is my impression that they've never made a ton of money on the apps compared to the database and services. In fact they give away some apps like their portal.
Corporations are owned by shareholders. They are run day to day by managers supervised by a board of directors. A hostile takeover is one where the managers and the board of directors do not want to be bought but the purchaser buys them anyways, simply by buying shares from the shareholders.
But for phones, which last for days anyway, why?
Did you read the article? "DoCoMo's 3G service, which offers video conferencing and speedy access to the Web, had until recently met a cool reception due mainly to the poor battery life of its handsets."
How is mirroring a site that is not slashdotted "informative"? You're really fucking lazy if you can be bothered to scroll down and read the article but not to click on the article link.
Not quite true. Automation leads to higher productivity, meaning one worker can produce more.
Of course.
As long as there's enough demand, people can get new jobs. This happened ,e.g, when new technologies killed off many jobs in the agriculture sector: People went to the cities to work in factories.
Factories are not consumers. Factories make products. People wanted more and more products and therefore they built the factories to build them. People always want more products. There has never been a time in history where people said: "I don't want a newer, better car. I don't want a faster internet connection. I don't want a more sleek celluar phone. I don't want a bigger television. It isn't that the factories magically came along just in time to suck up the farmboys. It's that the farmboys became an available resource when they were no longer needed on the farm so the factories had access to them at a price they could afford.
At the moment, however, I don't see the Next Big Thing that'll generate the jobs lost to automation. I don't the killer product that'll create a huge demand and'll lead to millions of jobs. Many thought, the internet would bring that on, but, as we all know now, that wasn't the case.
There is no need for the next big thing. The process of automation has been ongoing for centuries and only seldom has their been a next big thing. For instance, today there is a trend towards "personal chefs" who cook a week's meals for you in advance. Was there a technological shift recently that made this trend possible? Not really. Not much has changed in the kitchen since the microwave. But automation has freed up some people from other jobs and they looked around, said: "what niche isn't being filled" and they filled it. I could list a hundred similar jobs. In the 50s, when you went on vacation you sent your dogs to the neighbours. Today we pay for "doggy hotels." Oh yeah, and paid dog walkers. That isn't the result of technology. It's just people pushed out of other jobs, using their brains and creating a new market. People buy $5.00 fancy coffees. How the hell did that happen? Was it the Internet? No. It was just an unfilled niche. There are an infinite number of unfilled niches.
If the divide between rich and poor keeps getting bigger (which is a bad thing...don't get me wrong) then we will return to the days where middle class people had maids and butlers. It is the very nature of a moderately healthy capitalist economy to find jobs for most people most of the time. It has nothing to do with technological spikes.
That's about $3000 each. And most of that money goes to just a few people. Most of the jobs are held by foreigners (few Saudis deign to lower themselves to perform manual labor).
I have a hard time reconciling those two statements. The Saudis are poor but not so poor that they are willing to accept a job for pay? Sounds unlikely.
- Automatization leads to fewer and fewer workers being needed to do the same amount of work, meaning higher profits for the producer.
Or lower prices for the consumer. Or research and development into new products. Or all of the above.
- Outsourcing leads to those workers being paid less and less , meaning again higher profits.
Or lower prices. Or R&D
- This, in turn leads to higher unemployment rates and a higher number of workers with low wages.
You missed some logical step there. How does outsourcing lead to unemployment? By definition, outsourcing leads to a shift in employment. Automation also does not, in general, lead to higher unemployment. If it did, nobody would have jobs today because we've been progressively automating the Western economy since ... I don't know ... the invention of the printing press? The loom? The cotton gin? The axe? Think about it. Automation creates new jobs just as it destroys old ones.
I don't really understand what you're getting at. Are you trying to say that Saudi Arabians are becoming terrorists because they feel "exploited"? Native Saudi Arabians are on average much richer than Americans.
I think you are describing the invisible hand of the market at work!
Did you read the ret of my post? I pointed out that the next president could fix things if he was so inclined. On the other hand, we don't know who the next president will be nor how long they will be in power.
I followed one of your links and found this: Our space assets now are probably more important to warfighters and more important to our ability to win this global war on terrorism than they ever have been historically.
Here's what amazes me. America learned one lesson with 9/11: there are people who want to destroy it. But America seems to be oblivious to another lesson: they do not need high-tech weapons, weapons of mass destruction, ballistic missiles etc. They can use commercial airlines. They can use fertilizer. They can use off-the-shelf explosives. They can use box cutters. The Military/Industrial complex wants to fight Al Queada as if it were the Soviet Union: "we'll have bigger guns than them and then we'll win." "Iraq is developing big guns so we better invade them." But that shows a complete misunderstanding of the tactics of the real enemy. They shocked the world by using innovation rather than big guns.