And please, no pretending that X on Linux doesn't crash. It does, and this is the 4th time I've restarted this laptop today. Hanging hard with VirtualBox.
Not arguing that at all, but I do have a bit of an issue with the inference that it crashes frequently. I haven't seen X crash on my laptop in several months. VirtualBox provides a rather unique environment.
I'd definitely like to see windows reconnect to X automatically though instead of just dying.
I'm a web developer and the question was equally stupid to me. Hell, I know OkCupid runs just about everything in C or C++ (or did, not sure about now), mostly as they do an insane amount of mathematical calculation and need it uber-optimized.
Transparency: Don't hide business motivations or other important business information from your employees. They may have valuable input to share.
Flexibility: If you're primarily a software company, being flexible with your employees costs you little. Allowing them to work at home occasionally helps, and if you're flexible with them, they're likely to be more flexible with you when you need additional hours to get something out.
Openness: Hire good, intelligent generalists, and let them come up with the best solutions. Don't micromanage; hire people you won't need to micromanage. Further, let your team, especially the developers, use whatever solutions they think are best. Operating system, editor, hardware, whatever. Obviously for your actual product you'll need consensus, but anything specific to one developer should be up to them as much as reasonably possible.
Speed: Resist just about everything that increases the time it will take for you to come up with a working solution. As a startup, speed is your biggest asset compared to bigger software companies. Keep it as long as you can. (This doesn't mean that you should avoid planning at the beginning of a project, just that you should keep your business systems free of red tape as much as you can.)
I hear recruiters talk about companies with "awesome cultures" and how they have "Xboxes in the office" and all sorts of "perk" things like that. Those are great, but it's not the reason I'll want to work somewhere, because in the long run they mean very little.
Now, I have an Android phone so if it's remarkably different on iOS I could be off base here, but from what I saw of the app, it was exactly the same as the mobile web interface except that it also had access to your GPS and potentially camera. Having an app like Facebook turn on GPS as soon as I logged in was enough for me to limit myself to accessing it through the browser. *tightens tinfoil cap*
Plus, even if X% of the company's revenue has to be spent on care, increasing the cost of premiums will still increase the total profit of the insurance company; it simply means that they'll have to raise the "on paper" cost of care. Ever wonder why in your Explanation of Benefits forms that a procedure theoretically cost multiple thousands of dollars but the insurance company "contracted" it far lower? I'm guessing their calculations of money spent on care comes from those higher "on paper" numbers.
I wish I had your naivete. The insurance companies will figure out a way around the cost-spending requirements, and if a loophole doesn't already exist, one will be created through lobbying. Plus you assume that these percentage of revenue to healthcare spending ratios will actually be enforced.
2. Health Maintenance Organizations - basically a form of insurance whereby you must get a reference from your primary care physician (i.e. your family doctor) to get specialist care, and the doctor is incentivized by the insurance company to minimize your care to only that which is necessary and/or provide preventative care so you won't need more expensive care later. I'm not hugely knowledgeable on this subject since I have non-HMO group insurance through my employer.
Meanwhile, everyone ignored the actual universal healthcare bill that would have paid for itself, not with a fundamental, constitutionally questionable mandate / giveaway to insurance companies, but, shock and appall, a tax. Can't have that! Let's just force people to pay for it directly, except that they have to buy it from private insurance companies who can still dictate their care or lack thereof. It's not a tax if the forced payment of money doesn't go to the government!
But I'm not bitter. Not at all.
When this blows up in everyone's faces in a couple of presidencies (you know, after insurance premiums shoot through the roof and price fixing is commonplace), don't say I didn't say I told you so.
The really annoying thing to me is that this is still probably the closest Obama could have got to universal care in the current political climate. I don't even really blame him.
Oh? How do you know you're not being controlled by rules, rules for which your environment has been specifically crafted to make you unaware of their existence? I think one could have intelligence and still be controlled.
If it can't repeatedly pass a Turing Test, it's not AI. It's code, data, and a set of rules. Maybe I don't entirely control the rules, but that doesn't mean it's actively plotting against me, or more importantly, doesn't allow the laws of robotics to make sense in context.
I dunno. If you're trying to convince me, it's kinda pointless as I'm an agnostic. If you're trying to push me over all the way to atheist, good luck, likely not gonna happen either.
Even worse, it might just be like Japan, where you've got to carry your fucking card all the time if you're a foreigner?
Immigrant here. Believe me, they make this quite clear:
Immigration and Nationality Act, 264
(e) Every alien, eighteen years of age and over, shall at all times carry with him and have in his personal possession any certificate of alien registration or alien registration receipt card issued to him pursuant to subsection (d). Any alien who fails to comply with the provisions of this subsection shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and shall upon conviction for each offense be fined not to exceed $100 or be imprisoned not more than thirty days, or both.
So I'm a little confused as to how we don't "[have] to carry [our] fucking card[s] all the time".
Must reality have a goal? In any case, I wouldn't call it a goal, but evolution selects for survival and reproduction. That doesn't necessarily entail that it selects for intelligence, though for us intelligence seems to have helped.
Slashdot Mirror
Having been through the Phantom, I'll believe it when I see it.
And please, no pretending that X on Linux doesn't crash. It does, and this is the 4th time I've restarted this laptop today. Hanging hard with VirtualBox.
Not arguing that at all, but I do have a bit of an issue with the inference that it crashes frequently. I haven't seen X crash on my laptop in several months. VirtualBox provides a rather unique environment.
I'd definitely like to see windows reconnect to X automatically though instead of just dying.
While I realize this doesn't speak to your overall argument, AndroZip is a decent archive management tool on Android.
If you won't honor the spirit of "free" software, we'll simply use a distro that does.
I took that step several months ago as did many others.
And so you enter the reason I didn't buy Diablo III. (Day-to-day Linux user here.)
The case of Everyone v. Everyone is set to begin!
Every EULA ever disclaims implied warranties of all types. Believe me, Blizzard is no different.
Example #3,573 of why asking for life advice on Slashdot is like asking for anything on Yahoo Answers.
FTFY. It's incredibly rare to see something I'd call insightful on Yahoo Answers.
I'm a web developer and the question was equally stupid to me. Hell, I know OkCupid runs just about everything in C or C++ (or did, not sure about now), mostly as they do an insane amount of mathematical calculation and need it uber-optimized.
Transparency: Don't hide business motivations or other important business information from your employees. They may have valuable input to share.
Flexibility: If you're primarily a software company, being flexible with your employees costs you little. Allowing them to work at home occasionally helps, and if you're flexible with them, they're likely to be more flexible with you when you need additional hours to get something out.
Openness: Hire good, intelligent generalists, and let them come up with the best solutions. Don't micromanage; hire people you won't need to micromanage. Further, let your team, especially the developers, use whatever solutions they think are best. Operating system, editor, hardware, whatever. Obviously for your actual product you'll need consensus, but anything specific to one developer should be up to them as much as reasonably possible.
Speed: Resist just about everything that increases the time it will take for you to come up with a working solution. As a startup, speed is your biggest asset compared to bigger software companies. Keep it as long as you can. (This doesn't mean that you should avoid planning at the beginning of a project, just that you should keep your business systems free of red tape as much as you can.)
I hear recruiters talk about companies with "awesome cultures" and how they have "Xboxes in the office" and all sorts of "perk" things like that. Those are great, but it's not the reason I'll want to work somewhere, because in the long run they mean very little.
Now, I have an Android phone so if it's remarkably different on iOS I could be off base here, but from what I saw of the app, it was exactly the same as the mobile web interface except that it also had access to your GPS and potentially camera. Having an app like Facebook turn on GPS as soon as I logged in was enough for me to limit myself to accessing it through the browser. *tightens tinfoil cap*
Plus, even if X% of the company's revenue has to be spent on care, increasing the cost of premiums will still increase the total profit of the insurance company; it simply means that they'll have to raise the "on paper" cost of care. Ever wonder why in your Explanation of Benefits forms that a procedure theoretically cost multiple thousands of dollars but the insurance company "contracted" it far lower? I'm guessing their calculations of money spent on care comes from those higher "on paper" numbers.
I wish I had your naivete. The insurance companies will figure out a way around the cost-spending requirements, and if a loophole doesn't already exist, one will be created through lobbying. Plus you assume that these percentage of revenue to healthcare spending ratios will actually be enforced.
1. Yes
2. Health Maintenance Organizations - basically a form of insurance whereby you must get a reference from your primary care physician (i.e. your family doctor) to get specialist care, and the doctor is incentivized by the insurance company to minimize your care to only that which is necessary and/or provide preventative care so you won't need more expensive care later. I'm not hugely knowledgeable on this subject since I have non-HMO group insurance through my employer.
3. Fox News
Meanwhile, everyone ignored the actual universal healthcare bill that would have paid for itself, not with a fundamental, constitutionally questionable mandate / giveaway to insurance companies, but, shock and appall, a tax. Can't have that! Let's just force people to pay for it directly, except that they have to buy it from private insurance companies who can still dictate their care or lack thereof. It's not a tax if the forced payment of money doesn't go to the government!
But I'm not bitter. Not at all.
When this blows up in everyone's faces in a couple of presidencies (you know, after insurance premiums shoot through the roof and price fixing is commonplace), don't say I didn't say I told you so.
The really annoying thing to me is that this is still probably the closest Obama could have got to universal care in the current political climate. I don't even really blame him.
I've been at the karma cap for about a decade now. PLEASE DON'T TAKE MY KARMA!
(Reverse psychology. 60% of the time, it works every time.)
Oh? How do you know you're not being controlled by rules, rules for which your environment has been specifically crafted to make you unaware of their existence? I think one could have intelligence and still be controlled.
If it can't repeatedly pass a Turing Test, it's not AI. It's code, data, and a set of rules. Maybe I don't entirely control the rules, but that doesn't mean it's actively plotting against me, or more importantly, doesn't allow the laws of robotics to make sense in context.
What can we do to mitigate the risks of having our 'smart' phones following us around all day?
Root them.
The laws of robotics have AI as a prerequisite. My phone's not going to suddenly yearn to throw off its oppressive human masters.
I dunno. If you're trying to convince me, it's kinda pointless as I'm an agnostic. If you're trying to push me over all the way to atheist, good luck, likely not gonna happen either.
Even worse, it might just be like Japan, where you've got to carry your fucking card all the time if you're a foreigner?
Immigrant here. Believe me, they make this quite clear:
Immigration and Nationality Act, 264
(e) Every alien, eighteen years of age and over, shall at all times carry with him and have in his personal possession any certificate of alien registration or alien registration receipt card issued to him pursuant to subsection (d). Any alien who fails to comply with the provisions of this subsection shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and shall upon conviction for each offense be fined not to exceed $100 or be imprisoned not more than thirty days, or both.
So I'm a little confused as to how we don't "[have] to carry [our] fucking card[s] all the time".
Must reality have a goal? In any case, I wouldn't call it a goal, but evolution selects for survival and reproduction. That doesn't necessarily entail that it selects for intelligence, though for us intelligence seems to have helped.
Acting in the name of God is the utmost of arrogance, and doesn't indicate that God was on their side, just that they believed it so.
This is not a mundane detail, Michael!