The limitations of the technology have historically been terrible.
Ever been to Disney World? They have an arcade building with a bunch of old games and new in there.
One of the rides is an Aladdin Magic Carpet VR ride. Possibly the cause of the most horrible motion sickness of my life.
I'm not prone to motion sickness. I was born in a coastal town. Ships pitching in the ocean are part of my natural environment. I play FPS and sim games without problems. I love most rollercoasters. This thing left me pale and sweating and nauseous.
Oculus made the first big pubic thrust at solving the problems that cause this - latency between the viewpoint input and the display being primary amongst them.
It's likely to be something which they can read easily, so not OTR.
SIGINT dudes are not just keen on encryption. They are keen on reading communications too. To this end they usually advocate systems with key escrow at the very least, because they want to be able to keep tabs on their agents and analysts.
I saw a brief prepared for the UK National Health Service by GCHQ on data security, it heavily emphasised key escrow, which reveals the bias of the agency that produced it. A crypto brief prepared by doctors would most emphatically not include the capability to forge signatures - no doctor is going to sign up for a system where his word might be brought into doubt.
My mother was employed as a legal secretary most of her life. When they graduated from electronic typewriters to computers, they issued her at some point with the standard squishy membrane keyboard. Her finger joint arthritis flared right up, because the feedback cues she had got used to from a lifetime of typing on proper keyboards had gone.
As her loving son, it was my duty to mail her a Cherry MX keyboard (A G80-3000). Her IT support griped and bitched about having to replace her keyboard, but she told them I was both an IT guy *and* a doctor, which shut them up.
Her finger arthritis was markedly better in a couple of weeks. She took the keyboard home with her when she retired and it's still in use on her workstation at home.
IMHO, giving professional typists a membrane keyboard should be considered a health and safety violation. It staggers me that so-called ergonomic layouts are usually membrane boards.
> Who's going to employ poor people once you destroy the businesses who employ poor people?
These businesses function on razor thin margins, and that's part of the problem. Part of the vast economies of scale that they command is keeping labour costs down.
If they go out of business, the huge volumes they deal in would presumably be missed. Other suppliers would step in to fill the void, only not being so large, not commanding such economy of scale. In short, having to employ more people to get the same amount of stuff done.
> They can achieve that by automation or by paying people what they're worth.
And that's the cornerstone of your argument - that some people are not worth paying enough to survive, in short, that they have so little value that they should die. This must be the case, because their income needs supplementing with government aid. If their labour was actually worth enough to let them live, they wouldn't need that support.
Oh, wait, if they died, they wouldn't be around to be a component of those "very useful services" that Wal-Mart and McDonalds provide.
Looks like the market is failing to me - if their employer didn't pay enough to maintain the fork lifts, or the fry cooker, they'd be unable to do business. But they don't pay enough to maintain the shelf stacker or the burger flipper. They only way they continue to work is because the government steps in. You wouldn't expect the government to step in to fix your milkshake machine, so why should they support your underpaid labour?
Because the governement has a moral obligation to help the needy, the only way around this is to legislate that labour is paid enough for them not to have to.
The stupid ones are generally the richest ones.. or at least, home to the richest.
The countries where people have a better standard of living are the ones leveraging their natural resources for the good of their people, rather than just selling them at pennies on the dollar to a few oligarchs.
A low minimum wage means the government is subsidising corporate profits - if the wages are insufficient to live on, those people end up on government benefits of some kind. Their subsistence becomes dependant on our taxes, rather than the ability of the corporation to pay them.
Which is fine by the corporations, because they worked so hard to transfer the burden of taxes away from themselves. Yup, it's really ironic - everyone in America is working for Wal-Mart, they just don't know it.
The vast majority of benefits in the UK are paid to people with jobs. Because their jobs are underpaid. Huge swathes of taxpayers money go into the pockets of landlords and shareholders, in order to keep a roof barely over the heads of those who do all the shit jobs. It's basically slavery.
You're right though. Raising the minimum wage won't help for the exact reason you point out. If you want people to work for you, you should have to be able to attract labour, which means you should be able to offer something better.
At the moment, you just have to be able to offer something better than scraping by in poverty while the government does it's level best to pull the rug out from under you.
Give the people a Universal Basic Income, and you'd have to offer something better than a mere three squares a day and a basic but acceptable accomodation. Then you'd actually see the market come into play - people making a choice about who they work for, and how much.
Right now, they work for less than a wage and a handful of food stamps, because there is literally no choice. No choice - no market.
Which is basically impossible unless all the participants are an AI.
Take healthcare. The government of my country has an obsession with offering the public a "choice" in their healthcare. Which is dumb.
What people want from their healthcare is the best treatment. But they're not equipped to make decisions like that. It takes a decade of experience and training to make decisions like that. The remaining differentiators, for certain things, are almost totally meaningless. "Oh, you can go to THIS hospital, which is crap, but has a really good menu in the canteen...."
The whole point of capitalism is to leverage the efficiencies of specialisation. Which by definition, means that you're not an expert in all the goods and services you'll want to consume, because you let other people be an expert so they can make widgets more efficiently and provide them to you at a lower price than you could make them for.
Top that off with sectors of the economy that *deliberately* make it virtually impossible to make an objective choice (mobile phone service, financial instruments, etc), and you cannot have a free market economy, because you cannot have perfect knowledge by all participants.
The natural outcome is that wealth will concentrate. It doesn't matter where it concentrates first. It's like the formation of a solar system. You start with a big cloud of dust, and minor movements cause concentration of mass. Those tiny increases in mass cause more mass to be drawn in, until you have a small number of vast bodies with maybe a few moons orbitting them, and it's incredibly difficult for anything to change.
Money becomes synonymous with power, and power arranges things such that it begets more.
It's a shame that Sharpdevelop is so tied to Windows ; if it lived up to the promise of the platform, it would just run on Linux. Monodevelop is a *terrible* port and really lags behind SharpDevelop on features.
Even MS gets that UI is hard - the Windows.Forms namespace was being specifically excluded from the open-sourcing AFAICR.
I found the el-cheapo cardboard sleeves with a foil lining to be entirely adequate. 5 in a pack for a few dollars. I've not replaced the first one yet (I only have one NFC capable credit card).
And for that convenience you sell your control over your coffee maker.
I mean, seriously. It's a hot water machine with DRM on it. If the bottled water guys get hold of this idea, they'll make a kettle that only boils when you put the cap from the bottle into a slot. See what a ludicrous idea that is?
I have an Aeropress. You put a paper filter, and coffee in it. When you're done, you're left with a puck of coffee grounds which you eject into your (compost) bin.
You then rinse it under the tap and enjoy your coffee. Maintenance done.
This is why I used a cafetiere for the longest time.
I made all the coffee I wanted to drink at once, and the only waste was the grounds (and yes, it seems I'm wasting them, thanks for the tips about using them as soil improvement, sibling poster.
Now I use an Aeropress.
It makes better coffee, at the cost of a small circle of filter paper as waste. The grounds are much easier to deal with because it compresses them into a puck. I may even start saving them for my herb garden....
It's not the city of London. It's a small, privately owned borough in the middle. It has it's own private police force (who are staunch advocates of strong copyright policing, surprise). It's the scene of many of the financial crimes of this and previous centuries, but curiously, these don't get too much attention from their own private police.
But the whole point of automation is to reduce costs or increase productivity or quality.
If you robotize McDonalds, you're not going to increase the number of people who eat there ; that's pretty much determined by the size of the restaurant and the capacity of the kitchen. Quality is pretty much set by the quality of the ingredients, and is not the reason people eat in McDonalds.
The kitchen labour is flexible - McDonalds go to great pains to have people on contracts that mean they can have them work as little or as much as they need. So the thing they are making flex is labour, not production. Add robots, and you have less human labour. If you don't, there is no economic reason to do so - you don't need more production (or they would be having problems recruiting, not trying to keep their workforce lean).
If robots cost more to make and maintain than your human labour, you don't use them. Therefore robots mean fewer dollars in the pockets of human labour. It creates SOME jobs higher up the supply chain, sure, but not the kind of jobs that McDonalds kitchen labour can do - these guys are by and large, on the lower half of the bell curve for ability, as you point out. But if you need to spend more dollars on robots and engineers to handle them, you're doing it wrong. Therefore more money departs from the labour end of the economy (the customers of McDonalds) and into the pockets of the owners (the customers of 5 star restaurants).
Extend this to every low-skill employer and you have a vast underclass of unemployed people who i) need supporting ii) can no longer afford to buy goods and services that they previously would have afforded.
Lower demand means less economic activity which means more push to increase productivity and decrease labour.
Before long, robots are making the robots. The only guy with a job in robotics is the guy who maintains the robot maintaining robot. Sooner or later they realise that if they make another robot maintaining robot, they can make him redundant too.
At this point you can go one of two ways :
i) The 0.1% own all the robots and don't see why they should share their wealth. The remaining human population compete for an increasingly small pool of non-automatable jobs, the unemployed are herded into basic subsistence camps (by robot "peacekeepers"). ii) Everyone realises that the robots are made of materials from the Earth, and powered by energy from the Sun, that the Earth should be owned by all of us equally and that we should be striving for universal human happiness, and that if we cooperate we can all have a living standard that exceeds the definition of "comfortable" by some large margin, since all these robots made everything so gosh-darned productive
Would Walmart be as successful if they had to pay a living wage to keep employees?
Bingo.
Wages that are so low that the government is forced to step in and subsidise them? That's basically slavery. It is in fact, worse than slavery. If I kept slaves, I would have to feed, clothe, and accomodate them. Wal-Mart doesn't even bother to pay them enough for that, because it knows that their cost of living will be kept up by the government, aka, the people.
When all those right-wingers are screaming about minimum wage being too high, they're really advocating more socialism, because you can't have wages that low without social welfare programs. Without welfare, no-one would take a job for so little because they would be unable to survive.
Slashdot Mirror
And to a system not directly mounted as user accessible files, or they'll encrypt your backups too.
So you want a network storage server specifically configured to only permit create and append, but not delete.
Backup to Dropbox would probably be acceptable.
It keeps the prior versions of files for the last 30 days, and AFAIK the API does not expose the ability to delete them.
Mum's computer (well, aside from running Ubuntu) is set to make a weekly incremental backup to a cloud folder.
The limitations of the technology have historically been terrible.
Ever been to Disney World? They have an arcade building with a bunch of old games and new in there.
One of the rides is an Aladdin Magic Carpet VR ride. Possibly the cause of the most horrible motion sickness of my life.
I'm not prone to motion sickness. I was born in a coastal town. Ships pitching in the ocean are part of my natural environment. I play FPS and sim games without problems. I love most rollercoasters. This thing left me pale and sweating and nauseous.
Oculus made the first big pubic thrust at solving the problems that cause this - latency between the viewpoint input and the display being primary amongst them.
Shaft them with a Rod from God
We used to refer to this phenomenon as "needing a cardboard developer" ; I've both experienced and witnessed it many times.
It's likely to be something which they can read easily, so not OTR.
SIGINT dudes are not just keen on encryption. They are keen on reading communications too. To this end they usually advocate systems with key escrow at the very least, because they want to be able to keep tabs on their agents and analysts.
I saw a brief prepared for the UK National Health Service by GCHQ on data security, it heavily emphasised key escrow, which reveals the bias of the agency that produced it. A crypto brief prepared by doctors would most emphatically not include the capability to forge signatures - no doctor is going to sign up for a system where his word might be brought into doubt.
This.
My mother was employed as a legal secretary most of her life. When they graduated from electronic typewriters to computers, they issued her at some point with the standard squishy membrane keyboard. Her finger joint arthritis flared right up, because the feedback cues she had got used to from a lifetime of typing on proper keyboards had gone.
As her loving son, it was my duty to mail her a Cherry MX keyboard (A G80-3000). Her IT support griped and bitched about having to replace her keyboard, but she told them I was both an IT guy *and* a doctor, which shut them up.
Her finger arthritis was markedly better in a couple of weeks. She took the keyboard home with her when she retired and it's still in use on her workstation at home.
IMHO, giving professional typists a membrane keyboard should be considered a health and safety violation. It staggers me that so-called ergonomic layouts are usually membrane boards.
> Who's going to employ poor people once you destroy the businesses who employ poor people?
These businesses function on razor thin margins, and that's part of the problem. Part of the vast economies of scale that they command is keeping labour costs down.
If they go out of business, the huge volumes they deal in would presumably be missed. Other suppliers would step in to fill the void, only not being so large, not commanding such economy of scale. In short, having to employ more people to get the same amount of stuff done.
> They can achieve that by automation or by paying people what they're worth.
And that's the cornerstone of your argument - that some people are not worth paying enough to survive, in short, that they have so little value that they should die. This must be the case, because their income needs supplementing with government aid. If their labour was actually worth enough to let them live, they wouldn't need that support.
Oh, wait, if they died, they wouldn't be around to be a component of those "very useful services" that Wal-Mart and McDonalds provide.
Looks like the market is failing to me - if their employer didn't pay enough to maintain the fork lifts, or the fry cooker, they'd be unable to do business. But they don't pay enough to maintain the shelf stacker or the burger flipper. They only way they continue to work is because the government steps in. You wouldn't expect the government to step in to fix your milkshake machine, so why should they support your underpaid labour?
Because the governement has a moral obligation to help the needy, the only way around this is to legislate that labour is paid enough for them not to have to.
Should already be a thing.
Productivity has rocketed since the 50s. Doubled since around 1970, which is when wages went flat.
You should be working 20 hour weeks for a decent standard of living.
Instead, you're working 60 hour weeks and getting shafted.
The stupid ones are generally the richest ones.. or at least, home to the richest.
The countries where people have a better standard of living are the ones leveraging their natural resources for the good of their people, rather than just selling them at pennies on the dollar to a few oligarchs.
A low minimum wage means the government is subsidising corporate profits - if the wages are insufficient to live on, those people end up on government benefits of some kind. Their subsistence becomes dependant on our taxes, rather than the ability of the corporation to pay them.
Which is fine by the corporations, because they worked so hard to transfer the burden of taxes away from themselves. Yup, it's really ironic - everyone in America is working for Wal-Mart, they just don't know it.
The vast majority of benefits in the UK are paid to people with jobs. Because their jobs are underpaid. Huge swathes of taxpayers money go into the pockets of landlords and shareholders, in order to keep a roof barely over the heads of those who do all the shit jobs. It's basically slavery.
You're right though. Raising the minimum wage won't help for the exact reason you point out. If you want people to work for you, you should have to be able to attract labour, which means you should be able to offer something better.
At the moment, you just have to be able to offer something better than scraping by in poverty while the government does it's level best to pull the rug out from under you.
Give the people a Universal Basic Income, and you'd have to offer something better than a mere three squares a day and a basic but acceptable accomodation. Then you'd actually see the market come into play - people making a choice about who they work for, and how much.
Right now, they work for less than a wage and a handful of food stamps, because there is literally no choice. No choice - no market.
Your phrasing implies that they would work, if they were actually possible.
That's a bit like saying that Marilyn Monroe would totally be into me, if she wasn't dead.
Which is basically impossible unless all the participants are an AI.
Take healthcare. The government of my country has an obsession with offering the public a "choice" in their healthcare. Which is dumb.
What people want from their healthcare is the best treatment. But they're not equipped to make decisions like that. It takes a decade of experience and training to make decisions like that. The remaining differentiators, for certain things, are almost totally meaningless. "Oh, you can go to THIS hospital, which is crap, but has a really good menu in the canteen...."
The whole point of capitalism is to leverage the efficiencies of specialisation. Which by definition, means that you're not an expert in all the goods and services you'll want to consume, because you let other people be an expert so they can make widgets more efficiently and provide them to you at a lower price than you could make them for.
Top that off with sectors of the economy that *deliberately* make it virtually impossible to make an objective choice (mobile phone service, financial instruments, etc), and you cannot have a free market economy, because you cannot have perfect knowledge by all participants.
The natural outcome is that wealth will concentrate. It doesn't matter where it concentrates first. It's like the formation of a solar system. You start with a big cloud of dust, and minor movements cause concentration of mass. Those tiny increases in mass cause more mass to be drawn in, until you have a small number of vast bodies with maybe a few moons orbitting them, and it's incredibly difficult for anything to change.
Money becomes synonymous with power, and power arranges things such that it begets more.
It's a shame that Sharpdevelop is so tied to Windows ; if it lived up to the promise of the platform, it would just run on Linux. Monodevelop is a *terrible* port and really lags behind SharpDevelop on features.
Even MS gets that UI is hard - the Windows.Forms namespace was being specifically excluded from the open-sourcing AFAICR.
I found the el-cheapo cardboard sleeves with a foil lining to be entirely adequate. 5 in a pack for a few dollars. I've not replaced the first one yet (I only have one NFC capable credit card).
In the UK that could get you an infinite prison sentence.
You can be locked up for 2 years for not revealing an encrption key.
Then another 2 years if you don't reveal it after that.
Ad infinitum.
It's IR-reflecting ink. There's no identification. They are just being assholes.
Yeah, the only thing that got me off Win2k was DRM.
The games I wanted to play had DRM that the crypto API in Win2k didn't support.
"Upgraded" to Vista. Was I ever bitten.
And for that convenience you sell your control over your coffee maker.
I mean, seriously. It's a hot water machine with DRM on it. If the bottled water guys get hold of this idea, they'll make a kettle that only boils when you put the cap from the bottle into a slot. See what a ludicrous idea that is?
I have an Aeropress. You put a paper filter, and coffee in it. When you're done, you're left with a puck of coffee grounds which you eject into your (compost) bin.
You then rinse it under the tap and enjoy your coffee. Maintenance done.
This is why I used a cafetiere for the longest time.
I made all the coffee I wanted to drink at once, and the only waste was the grounds (and yes, it seems I'm wasting them, thanks for the tips about using them as soil improvement, sibling poster.
Now I use an Aeropress.
It makes better coffee, at the cost of a small circle of filter paper as waste. The grounds are much easier to deal with because it compresses them into a puck. I may even start saving them for my herb garden....
It's a holdover from the VERY old days of computing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
That's the "City of London".
It's not the city of London. It's a small, privately owned borough in the middle. It has it's own private police force (who are staunch advocates of strong copyright policing, surprise). It's the scene of many of the financial crimes of this and previous centuries, but curiously, these don't get too much attention from their own private police.
.. or at least, it should be. It obviously has some nods to the methodology, like deferring actions for later.
What it needs is better context support, a proper 'tickler', and a full-featured API.
Yes, you need robot makers.
But the whole point of automation is to reduce costs or increase productivity or quality.
If you robotize McDonalds, you're not going to increase the number of people who eat there ; that's pretty much determined by the size of the restaurant and the capacity of the kitchen. Quality is pretty much set by the quality of the ingredients, and is not the reason people eat in McDonalds.
The kitchen labour is flexible - McDonalds go to great pains to have people on contracts that mean they can have them work as little or as much as they need. So the thing they are making flex is labour, not production. Add robots, and you have less human labour. If you don't, there is no economic reason to do so - you don't need more production (or they would be having problems recruiting, not trying to keep their workforce lean).
If robots cost more to make and maintain than your human labour, you don't use them. Therefore robots mean fewer dollars in the pockets of human labour. It creates SOME jobs higher up the supply chain, sure, but not the kind of jobs that McDonalds kitchen labour can do - these guys are by and large, on the lower half of the bell curve for ability, as you point out. But if you need to spend more dollars on robots and engineers to handle them, you're doing it wrong. Therefore more money departs from the labour end of the economy (the customers of McDonalds) and into the pockets of the owners (the customers of 5 star restaurants).
Extend this to every low-skill employer and you have a vast underclass of unemployed people who i) need supporting ii) can no longer afford to buy goods and services that they previously would have afforded.
Lower demand means less economic activity which means more push to increase productivity and decrease labour.
Before long, robots are making the robots. The only guy with a job in robotics is the guy who maintains the robot maintaining robot. Sooner or later they realise that if they make another robot maintaining robot, they can make him redundant too.
At this point you can go one of two ways :
i) The 0.1% own all the robots and don't see why they should share their wealth. The remaining human population compete for an increasingly small pool of non-automatable jobs, the unemployed are herded into basic subsistence camps (by robot "peacekeepers").
ii) Everyone realises that the robots are made of materials from the Earth, and powered by energy from the Sun, that the Earth should be owned by all of us equally and that we should be striving for universal human happiness, and that if we cooperate we can all have a living standard that exceeds the definition of "comfortable" by some large margin, since all these robots made everything so gosh-darned productive
Would Walmart be as successful if they had to pay a living wage to keep employees?
Bingo.
Wages that are so low that the government is forced to step in and subsidise them? That's basically slavery. It is in fact, worse than slavery. If I kept slaves, I would have to feed, clothe, and accomodate them. Wal-Mart doesn't even bother to pay them enough for that, because it knows that their cost of living will be kept up by the government, aka, the people.
When all those right-wingers are screaming about minimum wage being too high, they're really advocating more socialism, because you can't have wages that low without social welfare programs. Without welfare, no-one would take a job for so little because they would be unable to survive.