The computer I am typing on is more powerful than a supercomputer from a few decades ago.
No, it isn't. That computer handled the needs of an entire multinational corporation and resulted in numerous scientific discoveries and papers. Your table is so amazingly un-powerful all you can do is play angry birds on it and post to/.
"Economic power" comes from what it DOES not how fast a flipflop toggles in the innards.
If you want a cruddy analogy, the brain of a Nobel prize winner might be "better" in whatever measure than the average coffee barista. That doesn't mean that coffee made by a Nobel Prize winner is any more "powerful" than coffee made by the average tattooed pierced B.S. degree holding barista.
In my extensive observation, most humans only work 30 hours a week anyway at anything beyond a plantation level job. You can make them sit in an office for 80 hours for appearances, but that just means 30 hours of work, and 50 hours of make-work, pretend, talking about sports tv real estate politics... Simply making people only sit at a desk when they actually work, will probably not improve hiring like you think. Now, 10 to 16 hours per week might actually work...
So you'll make a new hierarchy of style and tactile dexterity. Trust me, no one wants to buy my homemade knitted scarf, along with 99% of the human population. My grandma did in fact knit kick ass handmade sweaters that looked pretty awesome, but an entire family clan cannot live off one granny.
So you'll make a new hierarchy of hotness. Again, you don't want to see a fat middle-aged-ish dude like me in a hooters waitress uniform. Well maybe some of you weirdos would, and I'm sure there's the blackmail photo opportunity. Again you've made another system were 99% of the population will be utterly unemployed.
Frankly I think the only hope for humanity is probably some kind of post-religious Amish culture. Fine I'll live in a little farming village with nothing post 2000. Actually if I could live anywhere in any culture I'd like a cross between ancient greece and modern usa with all the good parts of each. Steampunk might be fun for a vacation. We already have Renn Faires for that era, thats mildly entertaining to visit.
why not focus on the question of what we are going to do with all unskilled labor that is currently being replaced?
"Let them eat cake" as long as possible, followed, of course, by revolution. In this case, the revolution will, in fact, be televised. Probably won't fix anything, but not avoidable either.
same error on four different fragments for it to fail
swap usenet article for dna fragment and right there, they've done a crappy job of reinventing the PAR2 file. There's probably some analogies from the tape sort/merge era although that's slightly before my time.
SSSS shamirs (aka the S in RSA) secret sharing system just tell it how many slices you want, and how many slices you need present and error free to decrypt, and you're done. Using it for redundancy in this case rather than security.
ECC is a pretty well worn path in CS.
A real hack would be writing DNA that expresses a protein which folds itself into a really little QR code. Those (can) have quite a bit of ECC Now that would be completely useless, yet impressive.
Very interesting I was finally motivated to google around and it turns out there's just 6 keys on a Perkins brailer, one key per bit/dot and you have to smash them and the "clock" signal to store is simultaneously releasing them all keys at once. I donno the encoding structure for braille but its entirely possible its a 5-of-6 encoding much like FDDI is a 8-of-10 etc etc, or I guess if its all 6 you just smash your fist on all the keys at once. And there also exists a spacebar, so I guess its technically 7 keys. Frankly I could use a traditional 10-key and type decimal UTF-8 values probably just as fast, with some practice. two decades ago working retail in the cash security room while a student I could quite easily ten-key much faster than one cash value per second after a couple weeks practice. So if a standard word is 5 letters and I squirted out two utf-8/ascii numbers per second, that would be about 24 WPM which is pretty fast compared to the average noob, although I'm typing this on a normal keyboard about 3 to 4 times as fast.
I can see why this hasn't been implemented on the back panel of cell phones etc because you'd have to remove all your fingers from the back of the phone to "key" thus there would be nothing holding the phone to your hand but residual finger grease on the display, also the wiggliness of the keying would vary with each glyph probably making it nearly impossible to read the display, and you know the average noob isn't going to start out as a touch typer. Finally the wiggliness of releasing keys would make the phone actually shift position for the next glyph making "typos" nearly inevitable.
Unfortunately my experience with "alternative" user interfaces such as my phone's shitty voice recognition, xbox shitty voice recognition, my cell phone's little postage stamp size touch keyboard vs my ring bologna finger tips means a bit error rate close to 10e-1 and everything takes 10 times as long as a keyboard. This post would probably take about an hour to input vs about a minute at 75 wpm or whatever typing.
So "what is the distance to the moon" is far more likely to start playing pink floyds dark side of the moon, or find me the wikipedia article about people mooning the camera (assuming the deletionist a-holes haven't removed it), or think "moon" is a cow moo-ing and google image search me pictures of cows or just pick some random german name in my contact list and call them or some shit like that.
Hopefully a Braille keyboard actually works and doesn't just output random stuff like modern input devices.
Other way around. Plasmas are unstable. Pretty much any time you dump energy into them, they get all whacked out on a small scale. This specific mode of instability on the sun wasn't expected, and it might even be a totally new instability mode, but speaking generally "plasmas behaving badly when you pump energy into them" has been a bug for fusion research for a very long time. You want the energy to be smoothly stable in the plasma not some whacked out thing because whacked out things tend to locally adsorb the energy from a big region, concentrate it in a little area getting hotter and hotter, which exceeds and breaks containment in its local area, end result is the plasma energy gets dumped into the diverter (or worst case, wall).
Crappy cooking analogy is when you're melting chocolate and the chocolate instead of being smooth thru the entire bowl suddenly phase transitions (more or less) and siezes into... whatever the hell siezed chocolate is. Crystallized chocolate I guess.. Whoops. Or you're trying to make a nice mayonnaise emulsion but something keeps breaking the F-ing emulsion so you just get icky oil and water instead of a bucket of mayo. Now I'm getting hungry...
Crappy/. car analogy is something like car engines produce the most energy when they burn real smoothly. Crazy ass detonations aka pinging ruins the smooth burning and although you get the same CO2 out the tailpipe, you get much less power at the crankshaft. You can fix that with water injection, or modify the compression ratio, cool the intake air, or clean the cylinder/head walls if they're coated with soot... all stuff you can't do in a reactor. More or less.
Maybe we're just jaded. Or maybe we've known a lot of blind people who used one-handed Braille chording keyboards to type as fast with one hand as a sighted person using a QWERTY keyboard and two hands.
OK I'll bite how does that work? I know the braille system is 2x3 grid aka 6 bits... and you claim there is a one handed keyboard, so I'm optimistically giving you 4 fingers and a thumb. In between I wonder how the protocol encoding works. It would be a heck of a lot simple if we had 7 or so fingers on each hand, or braille was just merely morse code. If I were inventing my own system I'd totally use two hands and one bit for pointer, middle, and ring fingers on each finger and probably either thumb as "clock signal". Or maybe rather than momentary keys the keys are little J/K toggle flipflops or S/R flipflops. Maybe two fingers pointer/middle in a three cycle mode where hitting the thumb advances?
There is a pretty hard core attitude shift in ipv6 that thou shalt not static assign addresses. Dynamic / multicast DNS to the rescue, etc. Also a VERY hard core attitude shift away from 1:1 mapping of address to interface. I have an ethernet at home with something like 4 ipv6 addrs on it, long story. If you do that, a renumbering is simple. Wait a moment for the router to start advertising its new prefix and you're all done. No need to reboot or any of that. We can trust mfgrs and poor programmers to totally F this up. Really ipv6 stacks should never have been made widely available with statically assignable addresses, that would fix a whole lot of issues with people who none the less demand the ability to shoot themselves in their foot.
Problem #1 is pretty much a firewall config issue. You want stateful firewalling or not? You decide.
To put that price in perspective, its the revenue from a third of a million iphone contracts $100 per contract per month * 24 month contract * 325000 = 780e6 Obviously you're not allowed to put 100% of your revenue toward any specific task, but it provides a bit of perspective. Also I'm not sure if $100/month would be considered cheap or expensive for an iphone monthly bill. I stopped paying $6 for a virgin mobile dumbfone and upgraded to $19 for a republic wireless android phone some years ago when it was in beta. I'm so far out of the budgetary range for an iphone that I don't bother following the prices.
Re:The reason a "cyber Pearl Harbor" isn't imminen
on
The One Sided Cyber War
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
That's all made up scaremongering to gather $$ and enforce central authority. I work on the "other side" no, not the black hat side, I mean the infrastructure provider side. Seriously claiming that our main site backup generator which doesn't have a networked SCADA interface will magically fail? And all our POPs which have gens that barely have electronic engine computers on the diesels will be magically reprogrammed? My cousin maintains large fixed diesel gens for hospitals, you're going to reprogram his ratchet set so he can't turn bolts? Without the internet no planes fly? LOL
A grid hit would look EXACTLY like the great NYC power outage about a decade ago. In fact, seeing as no newsies really looked into it to the depth necessary, it could very well have been an external hit to send a message.
A REAL hit wouldn't look like Jericho or a survivalist fanfic, it would look like an economic hit. If every centrifugal pump VFD at the local plant instantly reversed so they get to buy new ones, that doesn't mean we're going back to worldwide feudalism, it merely means bankruptcy for one plant. Actually it would look a heck of a lot like a major aerospace jetliner manufacturer having to ground an entire worldwide fleet leading to all kinds of economic effects.
ISPs are not the ones who designed ipv6 or the concepts behind it.
Usually when you see a "demand" for NAT on ipv6 its people who don't understand the relationship between a statefull firewall and NAT, and they really are "demanding" their existing firewall minus the NAT part.
I would imagine various privilege escalation attacks are microscopically more complicated, at least for skript kiddies and automated systems, on a mixed system. Security via obscurity should never be your only line of defense, but it is "a" line of defense.
In turn, we also need to back off the expectation that all experience adds value - part of the source of all the age-discrimination complaints is that older workers are generally not willing to take a new-hire level compensation despite their experience not being overly applicable.
We've long since done that. Pay raises are usually at or below the real world inflation rate, sometimes even at or below the made up govt numbers, so both standard of living and cost of production (assuming you aren't in the small fraction that get promoted) always falls over a long enough period of time.
At some point, any job that most people can reasonably train for will be accomplished more economically by automation. These people will then be either destitute or on the dole.
Short term solution is pointless "services". You can't automate "life coach" or "massage therapist" or "exotic dancer" or any number of "pay for human contact" jobs. Eventually the economy will bifurcate into the "real world" economy of material production and the "service" economy where no one really does anything but trade among themselves for pointless services.
Its a very important point that long before its impossible for a mere human to be trained for those jobs, it'll be uneconomic because of credentialism and the educational-industrial complex. So the goal is to graduate with a sheet of paper and a mortgage sized debt that will take 30 years to pay off, assuming you actually get a job in your field instead of being the 50% or so not employed in their field after graduation or free intern work. Oh and you'll only be employable for a couple years due to ageism because a cheaper unemployed new grad can do the same job for less pay... Anyway the problem is if you need a new career every decade due to technological change, and a new career takes 4 years training and $150K, and you have 50% odds of no pay off at all because of unemployment or 50% odds of a typical $40K/yr starting salary for six years until that tech is eliminated and you have to start over again, then society wide (no anecdotes please) the average cost of training per decade is $150K and the average gross pre-tax income over the same decade is 6 years x 40 grand x 0.5 of people employed in field = $120K. $120K $150K. Whoops.
Ah the story from late 1800s to now is there were always "Better quality, higher-paying jobs" available. The difference is now those are shrinking too, just as population and demand are exploding.
Frankly, you can't have a stable society where the only jobs available are for the cognitive elite, like the typical/.er. You need to give the lowest 95% or so of society "something" to do, because they're too dumb to lead themselves and they'll probably find something exciting to pass the time, like revolution. Even if you pay them off by taxing the heck out of the remaining 5% with a job, they're gonna get greedy / angry. And the "american dream" WRT education and having a job hasn't been beaten out of them yet, although the opportunities are all gone.
Oh sure it will, there is almost certainly some percentage of fatties that are partially kept in check by the shame of ordering multiple day's worth of food from a skinny teenager. Once you're ordering from an nonjudging robot it will be much socially easier to ask for 3 burgers and 2 orders of fries.
Ask a parent about food hyperinflation. Suddenly, in just a couple years, although nothing has changed on the menu, "a burger for lunch" has changed price from $5 when I was single to $20 because everything I buy is multiplied by family size, and there's no way in hell sibling X is going to eat a PB+J if sibling Y is eating a cheeseburger. Not just drive-thru but ditto chinese takeout, pizza delivery place, the sub sandwich place, the deli, etc.
Whats that quote about unix being friendly, its just really picky about who its friends are? I donno the comparison shows some eerie similarities between MB and/.: 1) Only about 0.1% of the population cares, if that 2) Roughly the same smart / technical / nerdy / geeky / maker-y audience 3) All the hard science and serious engineering discussion is worse than half baked 4) Endless discussion and retesting of internet memes. In fact about 50% is just endless rehashing / retesting of the same old thing 5) Tons of hearsay and bizarre technical assumptions. 6) Strange hats . Berets, red hats, fedoras...
On the other hand no one blows stuff up on/. and we're totally missing the Kari factor (and no, tubgirl, goatse, lemonparty and 2G1C don't count, nor does rickrolling). To the best of my knowledge mythbusters has no astroturfers, although I'm sure they could test that myth, inevitably ending up with an exploding crash test dummy.
I think of the hack itself as being sophisticated, not the individual teabilly drone being sophisticated. "Vote for X or you'll end up in Hell with the commie socialists" is a pretty good hack on taking advantage of human fears of the afterlife to control them to vote for someone. Not bad.
Its kind of like "hacking" ants into walking in a circle by playing games with their pheremone chemicals using sheets of paper. The hack design is elegant, the small minded animals being taken advantage of are not the component of the hack thats elegant. Ditto with the ants in a circle thing.
Slashdot Mirror
AKA the alaska permanent fund payments. Although they're not nearly enough to live off.
Pay for them with what?
Alternate currencies, alternate economies. As far as sci fi day dreams go, I'm guessing something more like Rishathra than Bitcoin.
The computer I am typing on is more powerful than a supercomputer from a few decades ago.
No, it isn't. That computer handled the needs of an entire multinational corporation and resulted in numerous scientific discoveries and papers. Your table is so amazingly un-powerful all you can do is play angry birds on it and post to /.
"Economic power" comes from what it DOES not how fast a flipflop toggles in the innards.
If you want a cruddy analogy, the brain of a Nobel prize winner might be "better" in whatever measure than the average coffee barista. That doesn't mean that coffee made by a Nobel Prize winner is any more "powerful" than coffee made by the average tattooed pierced B.S. degree holding barista.
In my extensive observation, most humans only work 30 hours a week anyway at anything beyond a plantation level job. You can make them sit in an office for 80 hours for appearances, but that just means 30 hours of work, and 50 hours of make-work, pretend, talking about sports tv real estate politics... Simply making people only sit at a desk when they actually work, will probably not improve hiring like you think. Now, 10 to 16 hours per week might actually work...
You're changing the subject but not the topic.
So you'll make a new hierarchy of style and tactile dexterity. Trust me, no one wants to buy my homemade knitted scarf, along with 99% of the human population. My grandma did in fact knit kick ass handmade sweaters that looked pretty awesome, but an entire family clan cannot live off one granny.
So you'll make a new hierarchy of hotness. Again, you don't want to see a fat middle-aged-ish dude like me in a hooters waitress uniform. Well maybe some of you weirdos would, and I'm sure there's the blackmail photo opportunity. Again you've made another system were 99% of the population will be utterly unemployed.
Frankly I think the only hope for humanity is probably some kind of post-religious Amish culture. Fine I'll live in a little farming village with nothing post 2000. Actually if I could live anywhere in any culture I'd like a cross between ancient greece and modern usa with all the good parts of each. Steampunk might be fun for a vacation. We already have Renn Faires for that era, thats mildly entertaining to visit.
why not focus on the question of what we are going to do with all unskilled labor that is currently being replaced?
"Let them eat cake" as long as possible, followed, of course, by revolution. In this case, the revolution will, in fact, be televised. Probably won't fix anything, but not avoidable either.
same error on four different fragments for it to fail
swap usenet article for dna fragment and right there, they've done a crappy job of reinventing the PAR2 file.
There's probably some analogies from the tape sort/merge era although that's slightly before my time.
SSSS shamirs (aka the S in RSA) secret sharing system just tell it how many slices you want, and how many slices you need present and error free to decrypt, and you're done. Using it for redundancy in this case rather than security.
ECC is a pretty well worn path in CS.
A real hack would be writing DNA that expresses a protein which folds itself into a really little QR code. Those (can) have quite a bit of ECC Now that would be completely useless, yet impressive.
Very interesting I was finally motivated to google around and it turns out there's just 6 keys on a Perkins brailer, one key per bit/dot and you have to smash them and the "clock" signal to store is simultaneously releasing them all keys at once. I donno the encoding structure for braille but its entirely possible its a 5-of-6 encoding much like FDDI is a 8-of-10 etc etc, or I guess if its all 6 you just smash your fist on all the keys at once. And there also exists a spacebar, so I guess its technically 7 keys. Frankly I could use a traditional 10-key and type decimal UTF-8 values probably just as fast, with some practice. two decades ago working retail in the cash security room while a student I could quite easily ten-key much faster than one cash value per second after a couple weeks practice. So if a standard word is 5 letters and I squirted out two utf-8/ascii numbers per second, that would be about 24 WPM which is pretty fast compared to the average noob, although I'm typing this on a normal keyboard about 3 to 4 times as fast.
I can see why this hasn't been implemented on the back panel of cell phones etc because you'd have to remove all your fingers from the back of the phone to "key" thus there would be nothing holding the phone to your hand but residual finger grease on the display, also the wiggliness of the keying would vary with each glyph probably making it nearly impossible to read the display, and you know the average noob isn't going to start out as a touch typer. Finally the wiggliness of releasing keys would make the phone actually shift position for the next glyph making "typos" nearly inevitable.
Unfortunately my experience with "alternative" user interfaces such as my phone's shitty voice recognition, xbox shitty voice recognition, my cell phone's little postage stamp size touch keyboard vs my ring bologna finger tips means a bit error rate close to 10e-1 and everything takes 10 times as long as a keyboard. This post would probably take about an hour to input vs about a minute at 75 wpm or whatever typing.
So "what is the distance to the moon" is far more likely to start playing pink floyds dark side of the moon, or find me the wikipedia article about people mooning the camera (assuming the deletionist a-holes haven't removed it), or think "moon" is a cow moo-ing and google image search me pictures of cows or just pick some random german name in my contact list and call them or some shit like that.
Hopefully a Braille keyboard actually works and doesn't just output random stuff like modern input devices.
Other way around. Plasmas are unstable. Pretty much any time you dump energy into them, they get all whacked out on a small scale. This specific mode of instability on the sun wasn't expected, and it might even be a totally new instability mode, but speaking generally "plasmas behaving badly when you pump energy into them" has been a bug for fusion research for a very long time. You want the energy to be smoothly stable in the plasma not some whacked out thing because whacked out things tend to locally adsorb the energy from a big region, concentrate it in a little area getting hotter and hotter, which exceeds and breaks containment in its local area, end result is the plasma energy gets dumped into the diverter (or worst case, wall).
Crappy cooking analogy is when you're melting chocolate and the chocolate instead of being smooth thru the entire bowl suddenly phase transitions (more or less) and siezes into ... whatever the hell siezed chocolate is. Crystallized chocolate I guess.. Whoops. Or you're trying to make a nice mayonnaise emulsion but something keeps breaking the F-ing emulsion so you just get icky oil and water instead of a bucket of mayo. Now I'm getting hungry...
Crappy /. car analogy is something like car engines produce the most energy when they burn real smoothly. Crazy ass detonations aka pinging ruins the smooth burning and although you get the same CO2 out the tailpipe, you get much less power at the crankshaft. You can fix that with water injection, or modify the compression ratio, cool the intake air, or clean the cylinder/head walls if they're coated with soot... all stuff you can't do in a reactor. More or less.
You're supposed to run your hand over the mousepad when you visit that site not look at the monitor.
(Yup looks like I'm going to hell now)
Maybe we're just jaded. Or maybe we've known a lot of blind people who used one-handed Braille chording keyboards to type as fast with one hand as a sighted person using a QWERTY keyboard and two hands.
OK I'll bite how does that work? I know the braille system is 2x3 grid aka 6 bits ... and you claim there is a one handed keyboard, so I'm optimistically giving you 4 fingers and a thumb. In between I wonder how the protocol encoding works. It would be a heck of a lot simple if we had 7 or so fingers on each hand, or braille was just merely morse code. If I were inventing my own system I'd totally use two hands and one bit for pointer, middle, and ring fingers on each finger and probably either thumb as "clock signal". Or maybe rather than momentary keys the keys are little J/K toggle flipflops or S/R flipflops. Maybe two fingers pointer/middle in a three cycle mode where hitting the thumb advances?
good one-handed data entry. Nothing has stuck.
What? Classic 10key. Only works for numbers and arithmetic. I suppose if you switch to octal input...
but does it run Crysis?
Yes but with only two PWM outputs all you get is two pixels.
In a way I'm glad this stuff isn't too popular... womens sweatpants flashing out morse code "juicy" isn't all that appealing.
One unfortunate thing is its an inch around. A hair smaller (24 mm?) and it would fit in a "one inch" model rocket tube.
There is a pretty hard core attitude shift in ipv6 that thou shalt not static assign addresses. Dynamic / multicast DNS to the rescue, etc.
Also a VERY hard core attitude shift away from 1:1 mapping of address to interface. I have an ethernet at home with something like 4 ipv6 addrs on it, long story.
If you do that, a renumbering is simple. Wait a moment for the router to start advertising its new prefix and you're all done. No need to reboot or any of that.
We can trust mfgrs and poor programmers to totally F this up. Really ipv6 stacks should never have been made widely available with statically assignable addresses, that would fix a whole lot of issues with people who none the less demand the ability to shoot themselves in their foot.
Problem #1 is pretty much a firewall config issue. You want stateful firewalling or not? You decide.
To put that price in perspective, its the revenue from a third of a million iphone contracts
$100 per contract per month * 24 month contract * 325000 = 780e6
Obviously you're not allowed to put 100% of your revenue toward any specific task, but it provides a bit of perspective.
Also I'm not sure if $100/month would be considered cheap or expensive for an iphone monthly bill.
I stopped paying $6 for a virgin mobile dumbfone and upgraded to $19 for a republic wireless android phone some years ago when it was in beta. I'm so far out of the budgetary range for an iphone that I don't bother following the prices.
That's all made up scaremongering to gather $$ and enforce central authority. I work on the "other side" no, not the black hat side, I mean the infrastructure provider side. Seriously claiming that our main site backup generator which doesn't have a networked SCADA interface will magically fail? And all our POPs which have gens that barely have electronic engine computers on the diesels will be magically reprogrammed? My cousin maintains large fixed diesel gens for hospitals, you're going to reprogram his ratchet set so he can't turn bolts? Without the internet no planes fly? LOL
A grid hit would look EXACTLY like the great NYC power outage about a decade ago. In fact, seeing as no newsies really looked into it to the depth necessary, it could very well have been an external hit to send a message.
A REAL hit wouldn't look like Jericho or a survivalist fanfic, it would look like an economic hit. If every centrifugal pump VFD at the local plant instantly reversed so they get to buy new ones, that doesn't mean we're going back to worldwide feudalism, it merely means bankruptcy for one plant. Actually it would look a heck of a lot like a major aerospace jetliner manufacturer having to ground an entire worldwide fleet leading to all kinds of economic effects.
ISPs are not the ones who designed ipv6 or the concepts behind it.
Usually when you see a "demand" for NAT on ipv6 its people who don't understand the relationship between a statefull firewall and NAT, and they really are "demanding" their existing firewall minus the NAT part.
I would imagine various privilege escalation attacks are microscopically more complicated, at least for skript kiddies and automated systems, on a mixed system. Security via obscurity should never be your only line of defense, but it is "a" line of defense.
In turn, we also need to back off the expectation that all experience adds value - part of the source of all the age-discrimination complaints is that older workers are generally not willing to take a new-hire level compensation despite their experience not being overly applicable.
We've long since done that. Pay raises are usually at or below the real world inflation rate, sometimes even at or below the made up govt numbers, so both standard of living and cost of production (assuming you aren't in the small fraction that get promoted) always falls over a long enough period of time.
At some point, any job that most people can reasonably train for will be accomplished more economically by automation. These people will then be either destitute or on the dole.
Short term solution is pointless "services". You can't automate "life coach" or "massage therapist" or "exotic dancer" or any number of "pay for human contact" jobs. Eventually the economy will bifurcate into the "real world" economy of material production and the "service" economy where no one really does anything but trade among themselves for pointless services.
Its a very important point that long before its impossible for a mere human to be trained for those jobs, it'll be uneconomic because of credentialism and the educational-industrial complex. So the goal is to graduate with a sheet of paper and a mortgage sized debt that will take 30 years to pay off, assuming you actually get a job in your field instead of being the 50% or so not employed in their field after graduation or free intern work. Oh and you'll only be employable for a couple years due to ageism because a cheaper unemployed new grad can do the same job for less pay... Anyway the problem is if you need a new career every decade due to technological change, and a new career takes 4 years training and $150K, and you have 50% odds of no pay off at all because of unemployment or 50% odds of a typical $40K/yr starting salary for six years until that tech is eliminated and you have to start over again, then society wide (no anecdotes please) the average cost of training per decade is $150K and the average gross pre-tax income over the same decade is 6 years x 40 grand x 0.5 of people employed in field = $120K. $120K $150K. Whoops.
Ah the story from late 1800s to now is there were always "Better quality, higher-paying jobs" available. The difference is now those are shrinking too, just as population and demand are exploding.
Frankly, you can't have a stable society where the only jobs available are for the cognitive elite, like the typical /.er. You need to give the lowest 95% or so of society "something" to do, because they're too dumb to lead themselves and they'll probably find something exciting to pass the time, like revolution. Even if you pay them off by taxing the heck out of the remaining 5% with a job, they're gonna get greedy / angry. And the "american dream" WRT education and having a job hasn't been beaten out of them yet, although the opportunities are all gone.
Oh sure it will, there is almost certainly some percentage of fatties that are partially kept in check by the shame of ordering multiple day's worth of food from a skinny teenager. Once you're ordering from an nonjudging robot it will be much socially easier to ask for 3 burgers and 2 orders of fries.
Ask a parent about food hyperinflation. Suddenly, in just a couple years, although nothing has changed on the menu, "a burger for lunch" has changed price from $5 when I was single to $20 because everything I buy is multiplied by family size, and there's no way in hell sibling X is going to eat a PB+J if sibling Y is eating a cheeseburger. Not just drive-thru but ditto chinese takeout, pizza delivery place, the sub sandwich place, the deli, etc.
Also there's a shortage of skinny teenagers now.
Whats that quote about unix being friendly, its just really picky about who its friends are? /.: ...
I donno the comparison shows some eerie similarities between MB and
1) Only about 0.1% of the population cares, if that
2) Roughly the same smart / technical / nerdy / geeky / maker-y audience
3) All the hard science and serious engineering discussion is worse than half baked
4) Endless discussion and retesting of internet memes. In fact about 50% is just endless rehashing / retesting of the same old thing
5) Tons of hearsay and bizarre technical assumptions.
6) Strange hats . Berets, red hats, fedoras
On the other hand no one blows stuff up on /. and we're totally missing the Kari factor (and no, tubgirl, goatse, lemonparty and 2G1C don't count, nor does rickrolling). To the best of my knowledge mythbusters has no astroturfers, although I'm sure they could test that myth, inevitably ending up with an exploding crash test dummy.
I think of the hack itself as being sophisticated, not the individual teabilly drone being sophisticated.
"Vote for X or you'll end up in Hell with the commie socialists" is a pretty good hack on taking advantage of human fears of the afterlife to control them to vote for someone. Not bad.
Its kind of like "hacking" ants into walking in a circle by playing games with their pheremone chemicals using sheets of paper. The hack design is elegant, the small minded animals being taken advantage of are not the component of the hack thats elegant. Ditto with the ants in a circle thing.