You're crosswatching too much. Crosswatching is not some psuedo-christian thing, its the TV watching equivalent of cross dressing.
They already target advertising extremely aggressively. We have DVRs so I only see flashes of commercials, but it seems my wifes soap operas don't advertise many video games and I don't see many feminine products advertised on the embarrassingly named syfy channel.
There are entire genres of TV shows I don't see ads for, don't know that exist (at least from my TV viewing), such as dancing with famous people, or musical high school children.
If you like... those kind of shows... hey, thats OK, but you can't demand they change their whole product lineup just for one guy on slashdot.
I was never able to solve the problem of "turn the TV on and off" "adjust the surround sound amplifier" etc so I'm stuck with the programmable shitty IR remotes on my mythtv boxes... Is there any wiimote solution to that general class of problem? (beyond the obvious, epoxy the wiimote to the back of a IR control, etc)
we can't push image processing hundreds of years into the future
exaggerate much? really, you think it'll take hundreds of years to solve the vision problem?
We will always be able to move the endpoints.
Can your new camera interpret a scene like an artist or a professional photographer so as to give correct advise? Not just bring the camera lens into focus but now provide framing, make up, clothing, and posing advise?
Oh you did that in 2030, well, I've decided its freaking useless unless you can select a specific artist or pro photographer, perhaps Salvador Dali or Ansel Adams.
Oh, you did that in 2040, well, I've decided its freaking useless unless it has virtual community mode. "Camera, I command thee to take a picture worthy of 4chan".
Oh, you did that in 2050, well, I've decided its freaking useless unless it intelligently creates and trolls the virtual community for you based on its view of the scene in front of its lens, next to the "upload to facebook" button I want a "troll 4chan" button on my camera.
Is there a law in the US that requires employers to pay wages in dollars? Or can they pay in any form that they want: bales of hay, pork bellies, or teenage virgins?
aka "Barter"
The IRS requires reporting of the dollar equivalent, and requires payment in dollars. Cannot avoid the almighty dollar.
Generally the IRS frowns upon giving people "stuff" because of the fraud possibilities, so they give companies an extremely hard time unless they pay in dollars.
Assuming you have a state income tax, they get in on the lawyer feeding frenzy. Even state sales taxes can have issues, if they "give" you some product do they earn a sales tax exemption, or not?
There are interesting EPA implications, if I am paid, say, a 5 gallon bucket of drain cleaner, whom is liable for any problems, whom is supposed to provide a MSDS. Some highly regulated industries (uranium refineries, pharmaceuticals, armament plants) already have issues with employees taking home souvenirs.
Finally there are plenty of minimum wage violations... In your example above, the company could declare some teenager as "worth $100K" but I wouldn't personally value at minimum wage equivalent. Some currencies, thankfully, are pretty thinly traded.
Its an excellent example of something that is technically theoretically possible, yet utterly uneconomic to actually implement.
Funny that you mention Cray, as the Cray-1 was the first supercomputer with vector processors, what GPGPUs actually are.
Cray-1 date of birth 1976
CDC Star-100 date of birth 1974 (not a stellar business/economic/PR success, but it technically worked)
ILLIAC IV design was completed in 1966. Implementation, however, had some problems. Debatable, but sort of true to say it was first booted up in 1972 but wasn't completely debugged for a couple years. As if there has ever been a completely debugged system.
Thats the problem with "first", theres so many of them.
The big problem with 3 megs of memory isn't that you can't boot windoze on it, but that you could have up to 3 million simple bugs in it. So as ECU memory sizes increase, the bugginess must increase.
think for a moment about driving your family car down a mountain road. Would you trust your family's life to a device that was manufactured to be sold for ~$150?
Humorously, that's almost exactly the cost of my latest set of brake rotors. I believe it was $143 with shipping. I install them myself because 1) its actually easier than changing the oil for my car design 2) If I do it, I know the installer is not on meth 3) I know the boss isn't trying to cheap out on brake cleaner or rush the job
That's also about the price of one decent tire for my car.
Full stop. Very old concept. This is not a new proposal. This is more like "five hundredth time we've been promised flying cars and perpetual motion"
Historically this always fails for two reasons:
Nothing corrodes stuff like the sea. Its barely economically feasible to build giant movable profit generating machines that slowly corrode away. Making "dirt" to build huts on or whatever is not going to generate enough economic activity to pay for maintenance. Or at least it never has in the past. You'd think if its feasible, we'd have had cultures like Bedouin nomads of the sea...
The other fail is dirt isn't as useful as buildings. And stuff floating on the sea is too flexible to build much bigger than cruise ships. And the weight per square foot is too high to do heavy industrial work.
So the best bet is always piling fill on shallow reefs to make new islands. But even that is usually economic doom (see Dubai, etc)
At the same time, I've always been someone who's been hard to shop for, because of my particular tastes, and because I disdain gift cards. I can understand people's desires to make gift giving easier, but let's get serious. A gift should be a well thought out and researched thing.
I've solved this, and my advice is you need to pick up a vice. Maybe pr0n, fine booze, sex (er, gift certificates for it from your S.O.), exotic chocolates, etc.
In my case it's tea. The rotgut crud in the teabags at the grocery store is too icky to drink, but there is good stuff out there. Tell them to buy you about two ounces of good stuff. Two ounces of good stuff, at least for tea, will last at most a couple weeks (depending on how much you drink and how many people you share with), and set them back the cost of a typical gift. My kids get me stuff scarcely better than the grocery store rotgut because thats all the money they have, and thats OK, yet my richer relations get me the exotic stuff that costs about as much as silver by weight (or much more). It works out pretty well, between the pagan capitalist xmas holiday, my birthday, some other seasonal holidays, and a couple "just because" to tide me over, I always have tea to drink. Make sure to tell you friends and family that for gods sake buy a little of the good stuff not a lot of the rotgut and no "related" capital goods like mugs or whatever, or else I'd have about fifty tea/coffee mugs by now.
A bigger mystery item is converting gifts into... other gifts.
Say I'm 17, in the US, and I ask Amazon to convert my incoming gifts into Everclear. Who is to blame?
1) Being a minor I can't enter into contracts and there's no proof (he he) that I was the person whom logged in and selected "convert to Everclear"
2) Regardless of the drinking age where Auntie Mildred lives, she has no way of knowing what I've done.
3) Amazon has no idea whats legal and not where I live, for me... or do they?
Booze is pretty well known, but there are other curious things you could theoretically purchase that might have legal issues for kids depending on the local nanny state, pr0n, R rated movies, violent games, rolling papers, etc.
Also, kids too poor to have a phone or computer, probably are not getting as much as their rich friends (whom probably have a car, allowance to spend on dates and trendy BS, etc)
Alcohol and drug use also correlate with frequent texting and heavy Facebook use
I knew no one in their right mind would use facebook.
The mystifying thing is you'd think it would correlate much stronger with 420chan than facebook. I mean, Mom and Grannie use facebook, you know what I mean?
I guess the reverse is true, too, given the number of slashdotters who make it clear that they never use Facebook.
Assuming the cause and effect is sex with high school kids leads to facebook use, its no great surprise that a married guy like me has no use what so ever for facebook. Assuming the cause and effect is facebook use leads to sex with high school kids, its no great surprise that a married guy like me has no use what so ever for facebook. Either way I'm not interested.
The weird part is before I deleted my facebook account, all my single guy friends were convinced the best way to get girls was to post constantly, so thats exactly what they did. They never seemed to get any, not girls their own age nor the previously mentioned as statistically inevitable high school girls. But they insist that facebook is the only way to get dates so they keep wasting time there? Hmm... the market is dead, and I'm not even in the market to begin with, so my motivation to participate is... uh... am I supposed to be their wingman or something?
- Is an employee considered property, or an 'asset'?
An asset. They cannot sell me to a different company without my consent.
You are mostly correct, with this exception that I LOLed at. With very few exceptions, no employee consent is ever required as part of a merger/sale/takeover/bankruptcy.
No holiday time, no sick leave, no maternity leave, no restrictions on hours worked, no mandated breaks, few health and safety regulations, can be fired without notice or reason, can legally discriminate, etc. It is like working in the third world. Between this and health care the US is low on my list of places I wish to work.
Spoken like someone who's never worked in the US.
You missed the most important part of his post:
Between this and health care the US is low on my list of places I wish to work.
This IS how illegals are treated in the US. Second hand knowledge, relatives in the fast food industry and electronic assembly industry (some is still done in the US not China, just not done by US citizens). Citizens get much better treatment, assuming their job hasn't been replaced with illegals. I'm told H1Bs "unofficially" get the same treatment, but I only have hearsay on that.
I laughed, but a more "instructables" style comment would be:
I can't believe you posted this to slashdot, don't you know that flaming makes people sad, I am an expert on this topic and it stuns me that slashdot would allow this post to appear without editorial filtering to prevent horrific emotional scarring. Oh, did I mention already that I'm an expert on this topic? Well just to make sure, yes, yes I am. This very important safety notice should be added to the article, Think Of The Children. You can quote me, vlm on that. Yup, quote vlm the expert.
One minor correction is those sites are mostly about talking vs doing with respect to DIY.
Much like listening to Leo Laporte on This Week in Tech gives you a pretty good insight into the culture of tech journalism, but make no mistake those guys are not reflective of tech culture itself.
Actual do-ers don't sound nearly as good on the radio nor read nearly as well on a website.
The culture of the local newspaper's business section newsroom, is not necessarily an accurate reflection of the actual business culture they are discussing.
Those of us whom use adblock on FF probably don't even realize they have ads, which is why they they have pro-members etc. By view all steps, they mean view all steps on one page instead of the classic online magazine click for a new page of ads for each sentence.
I found the results odd w/ respect to instructables and comments. I like instructables articles, but I actively avoid reading the comments because they are stuffed with morons.
Generally a couple kids asking for homework help, a bunch of negative trollers whining about safety or how the author is ignorant (worship me for I am fire marshal bill and someone with a room temperature IQ could be hurt, and also you are completely wrong in all your conclusions because I say so! Look at me! Look at me!), or utterly illiterate "mee 2 I agre w u" text talk that is still meaningless when converted to English.
Another thing I've noticed about instructables is I've gotten all kinds of ideas from making what amounts to homemade water park sprayers for the kids out of PVC pipe to a tasty sandwich made out of apples, cheddar, bacon, and sourdough bread. But real hard core stuff, things that takes more than a day and real work and skill, is never discussed. The guys whom make their own legal limit ham radio linear amps. Theres like two articles on electric car/bike conversions, but there should be more. It tends to be a site of talkers rather than doers.
Surprisingly community interaction did better than I'd have expected and no one mentioned the comment trolling team at instructables being a good reason not to upload and share.
During the declining years of cobol, I/we watched the participants fighting to increase their portion of the pie, regardless of how much it shrunk the pie.
If you're so afraid of civilisation and see every threat in terms of OH GOD SOMEONE'S ABOUT TO RAPE ME AND KILL MY FAMILY then perhaps you ought to move to Texas rather than dragging Canada down with you.
Actually more a fear of lack of civilization that fear of civilization. The odds of raped and killed in a state bordering Mexico is probably, what, a hundred, maybe a thousand times higher than in a more civilized area like Canada or some place in Europe.
Also our mass media "news" is primarily focused on keeping us scared to keep us under control. Works great w/ respect to starting wars and stuff, but there are side effects like this.
Slashdot Mirror
You're crosswatching too much. Crosswatching is not some psuedo-christian thing, its the TV watching equivalent of cross dressing.
They already target advertising extremely aggressively. We have DVRs so I only see flashes of commercials, but it seems my wifes soap operas don't advertise many video games and I don't see many feminine products advertised on the embarrassingly named syfy channel.
There are entire genres of TV shows I don't see ads for, don't know that exist (at least from my TV viewing), such as dancing with famous people, or musical high school children.
If you like... those kind of shows... hey, thats OK, but you can't demand they change their whole product lineup just for one guy on slashdot.
Take that shitty IR remote!
I was never able to solve the problem of "turn the TV on and off" "adjust the surround sound amplifier" etc so I'm stuck with the programmable shitty IR remotes on my mythtv boxes... Is there any wiimote solution to that general class of problem? (beyond the obvious, epoxy the wiimote to the back of a IR control, etc)
we can't push image processing hundreds of years into the future
exaggerate much? really, you think it'll take hundreds of years to solve the vision problem?
We will always be able to move the endpoints.
Can your new camera interpret a scene like an artist or a professional photographer so as to give correct advise? Not just bring the camera lens into focus but now provide framing, make up, clothing, and posing advise?
Oh you did that in 2030, well, I've decided its freaking useless unless you can select a specific artist or pro photographer, perhaps Salvador Dali or Ansel Adams.
Oh, you did that in 2040, well, I've decided its freaking useless unless it has virtual community mode. "Camera, I command thee to take a picture worthy of 4chan".
Oh, you did that in 2050, well, I've decided its freaking useless unless it intelligently creates and trolls the virtual community for you based on its view of the scene in front of its lens, next to the "upload to facebook" button I want a "troll 4chan" button on my camera.
etc
Is there a law in the US that requires employers to pay wages in dollars? Or can they pay in any form that they want: bales of hay, pork bellies, or teenage virgins?
aka "Barter"
The IRS requires reporting of the dollar equivalent, and requires payment in dollars. Cannot avoid the almighty dollar.
Generally the IRS frowns upon giving people "stuff" because of the fraud possibilities, so they give companies an extremely hard time unless they pay in dollars.
Assuming you have a state income tax, they get in on the lawyer feeding frenzy. Even state sales taxes can have issues, if they "give" you some product do they earn a sales tax exemption, or not?
There are interesting EPA implications, if I am paid, say, a 5 gallon bucket of drain cleaner, whom is liable for any problems, whom is supposed to provide a MSDS. Some highly regulated industries (uranium refineries, pharmaceuticals, armament plants) already have issues with employees taking home souvenirs.
Finally there are plenty of minimum wage violations... In your example above, the company could declare some teenager as "worth $100K" but I wouldn't personally value at minimum wage equivalent. Some currencies, thankfully, are pretty thinly traded.
Its an excellent example of something that is technically theoretically possible, yet utterly uneconomic to actually implement.
Don't forget employer provided cell phones and other technogadgets, employer subsidized exercise facilities, tuition reimbursement...
Funny that you mention Cray, as the Cray-1 was the first supercomputer with vector processors, what GPGPUs actually are.
Cray-1 date of birth 1976
CDC Star-100 date of birth 1974 (not a stellar business/economic/PR success, but it technically worked)
ILLIAC IV design was completed in 1966. Implementation, however, had some problems. Debatable, but sort of true to say it was first booted up in 1972 but wasn't completely debugged for a couple years. As if there has ever been a completely debugged system.
Thats the problem with "first", theres so many of them.
The big problem with 3 megs of memory isn't that you can't boot windoze on it, but that you could have up to 3 million simple bugs in it. So as ECU memory sizes increase, the bugginess must increase.
think for a moment about driving your family car down a mountain road. Would you trust your family's life to a device that was manufactured to be sold for ~$150?
Humorously, that's almost exactly the cost of my latest set of brake rotors. I believe it was $143 with shipping. I install them myself because 1) its actually easier than changing the oil for my car design 2) If I do it, I know the installer is not on meth 3) I know the boss isn't trying to cheap out on brake cleaner or rush the job
That's also about the price of one decent tire for my car.
Engineers Propose
Full stop. Very old concept. This is not a new proposal. This is more like "five hundredth time we've been promised flying cars and perpetual motion"
Historically this always fails for two reasons:
Nothing corrodes stuff like the sea. Its barely economically feasible to build giant movable profit generating machines that slowly corrode away. Making "dirt" to build huts on or whatever is not going to generate enough economic activity to pay for maintenance. Or at least it never has in the past. You'd think if its feasible, we'd have had cultures like Bedouin nomads of the sea...
The other fail is dirt isn't as useful as buildings. And stuff floating on the sea is too flexible to build much bigger than cruise ships. And the weight per square foot is too high to do heavy industrial work.
So the best bet is always piling fill on shallow reefs to make new islands. But even that is usually economic doom (see Dubai, etc)
There's also social problems. Mormon Auntie might not like it if you turn her pack of socks into whiskey...
So in addition to the kids "DO NOT WANT" list, and the US Govt "DO NOT WANT" list, Auntie also needs a "DO NOT WANT" list.
This is getting complicated.
At the same time, I've always been someone who's been hard to shop for, because of my particular tastes, and because I disdain gift cards. I can understand people's desires to make gift giving easier, but let's get serious. A gift should be a well thought out and researched thing.
I've solved this, and my advice is you need to pick up a vice. Maybe pr0n, fine booze, sex (er, gift certificates for it from your S.O.), exotic chocolates, etc.
In my case it's tea. The rotgut crud in the teabags at the grocery store is too icky to drink, but there is good stuff out there. Tell them to buy you about two ounces of good stuff. Two ounces of good stuff, at least for tea, will last at most a couple weeks (depending on how much you drink and how many people you share with), and set them back the cost of a typical gift. My kids get me stuff scarcely better than the grocery store rotgut because thats all the money they have, and thats OK, yet my richer relations get me the exotic stuff that costs about as much as silver by weight (or much more). It works out pretty well, between the pagan capitalist xmas holiday, my birthday, some other seasonal holidays, and a couple "just because" to tide me over, I always have tea to drink. Make sure to tell you friends and family that for gods sake buy a little of the good stuff not a lot of the rotgut and no "related" capital goods like mugs or whatever, or else I'd have about fifty tea/coffee mugs by now.
A bigger mystery item is converting gifts into ... other gifts.
Say I'm 17, in the US, and I ask Amazon to convert my incoming gifts into Everclear. Who is to blame?
1) Being a minor I can't enter into contracts and there's no proof (he he) that I was the person whom logged in and selected "convert to Everclear"
2) Regardless of the drinking age where Auntie Mildred lives, she has no way of knowing what I've done.
3) Amazon has no idea whats legal and not where I live, for me ... or do they?
Booze is pretty well known, but there are other curious things you could theoretically purchase that might have legal issues for kids depending on the local nanny state, pr0n, R rated movies, violent games, rolling papers, etc.
Also, kids too poor to have a phone or computer, probably are not getting as much as their rich friends (whom probably have a car, allowance to spend on dates and trendy BS, etc)
The story says Hyper-Texting, yet the title is Texting. I'm confused..
They're not texting to get dates, they're using hypertext transfer protocol to access that great dating site at http://127.0.0.1/
I've heard you can get warez and mp3s there too.
Alcohol and drug use also correlate with frequent texting and heavy Facebook use
I knew no one in their right mind would use facebook.
The mystifying thing is you'd think it would correlate much stronger with 420chan than facebook. I mean, Mom and Grannie use facebook, you know what I mean?
I guess the reverse is true, too, given the number of slashdotters who make it clear that they never use Facebook.
Assuming the cause and effect is sex with high school kids leads to facebook use, its no great surprise that a married guy like me has no use what so ever for facebook.
Assuming the cause and effect is facebook use leads to sex with high school kids, its no great surprise that a married guy like me has no use what so ever for facebook.
Either way I'm not interested.
The weird part is before I deleted my facebook account, all my single guy friends were convinced the best way to get girls was to post constantly, so thats exactly what they did. ... the market is dead, and I'm not even in the market to begin with, so my motivation to participate is ... uh ... am I supposed to be their wingman or something?
They never seemed to get any, not girls their own age nor the previously mentioned as statistically inevitable high school girls.
But they insist that facebook is the only way to get dates so they keep wasting time there?
Hmm
- Is an employee considered property, or an 'asset'?
An asset. They cannot sell me to a different company without my consent.
You are mostly correct, with this exception that I LOLed at. With very few exceptions, no employee consent is ever required as part of a merger/sale/takeover/bankruptcy.
No holiday time, no sick leave, no maternity leave, no restrictions on hours worked, no mandated breaks, few health and safety regulations, can be fired without notice or reason, can legally discriminate, etc. It is like working in the third world. Between this and health care the US is low on my list of places I wish to work.
Spoken like someone who's never worked in the US.
You missed the most important part of his post:
Between this and health care the US is low on my list of places I wish to work.
This IS how illegals are treated in the US. Second hand knowledge, relatives in the fast food industry and electronic assembly industry (some is still done in the US not China, just not done by US citizens). Citizens get much better treatment, assuming their job hasn't been replaced with illegals. I'm told H1Bs "unofficially" get the same treatment, but I only have hearsay on that.
I laughed, but a more "instructables" style comment would be:
I can't believe you posted this to slashdot, don't you know that flaming makes people sad, I am an expert on this topic and it stuns me that slashdot would allow this post to appear without editorial filtering to prevent horrific emotional scarring. Oh, did I mention already that I'm an expert on this topic? Well just to make sure, yes, yes I am. This very important safety notice should be added to the article, Think Of The Children. You can quote me, vlm on that. Yup, quote vlm the expert.
embedded in modern DIY culture.
One minor correction is those sites are mostly about talking vs doing with respect to DIY.
Much like listening to Leo Laporte on This Week in Tech gives you a pretty good insight into the culture of tech journalism, but make no mistake those guys are not reflective of tech culture itself.
Actual do-ers don't sound nearly as good on the radio nor read nearly as well on a website.
The culture of the local newspaper's business section newsroom, is not necessarily an accurate reflection of the actual business culture they are discussing.
Those of us whom use adblock on FF probably don't even realize they have ads, which is why they they have pro-members etc.
By view all steps, they mean view all steps on one page instead of the classic online magazine click for a new page of ads for each sentence.
I found the results odd w/ respect to instructables and comments. I like instructables articles, but I actively avoid reading the comments because they are stuffed with morons.
Generally a couple kids asking for homework help, a bunch of negative trollers whining about safety or how the author is ignorant (worship me for I am fire marshal bill and someone with a room temperature IQ could be hurt, and also you are completely wrong in all your conclusions because I say so! Look at me! Look at me!), or utterly illiterate "mee 2 I agre w u" text talk that is still meaningless when converted to English.
Another thing I've noticed about instructables is I've gotten all kinds of ideas from making what amounts to homemade water park sprayers for the kids out of PVC pipe to a tasty sandwich made out of apples, cheddar, bacon, and sourdough bread. But real hard core stuff, things that takes more than a day and real work and skill, is never discussed. The guys whom make their own legal limit ham radio linear amps. Theres like two articles on electric car/bike conversions, but there should be more. It tends to be a site of talkers rather than doers.
Surprisingly community interaction did better than I'd have expected and no one mentioned the comment trolling team at instructables being a good reason not to upload and share.
Java is the new COBOL.
During the declining years of cobol, I/we watched the participants fighting to increase their portion of the pie, regardless of how much it shrunk the pie.
If you're so afraid of civilisation and see every threat in terms of OH GOD SOMEONE'S ABOUT TO RAPE ME AND KILL MY FAMILY then perhaps you ought to move to Texas rather than dragging Canada down with you.
Actually more a fear of lack of civilization that fear of civilization. The odds of raped and killed in a state bordering Mexico is probably, what, a hundred, maybe a thousand times higher than in a more civilized area like Canada or some place in Europe.
Also our mass media "news" is primarily focused on keeping us scared to keep us under control. Works great w/ respect to starting wars and stuff, but there are side effects like this.
The State Department getting a diplomatic communication from China or Russia that just says, "Don't fuck with us."
More like China telling us QE2 is canceled.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing#QE2