I could make a political point about how kickstarter and its kin are a response to laws that limit risky investments by all except the wealthy and the effect of "the closure" in Venice in the 14th centuary.
You could, but then you'd be ignoring history. The US "informed investor" legislation is to protect people from otherwise-legal fraud. Did you never hear about the movie scam? A production team would roll up in a small town, and offer to put the place on the map by shooting a move there. Everyone knows movies make millions. No brainer. Invest, invest, invest! And so the townsfolk would hand over many thousands of pounds to the production company, who would shoot a movie -- a crap one that no-one would ever pay money to see. Contract complete, the production crew would take their salaries and send the film off to distributors, who would refuse it. The townsfolk would never see any of their investment returned, and the production crew would be better off. Done right, they'd also get catering and accommodation on credit to the production company, but make sure that they emptied the account through executive salaries and equipment hire (from themselves) so that they could fold the company with massive debts.
By sticking everything in limited liability companies, this type of scam remains on the legal side of the law. In fact, even major productions companies often start a new LLC for each production, and if they cancel the project, extras, cleaners etc go unpaid.
So yes, before you assume everything your government does is designed to screw you over, take a look at your own history.
This should be the approach taken for any risky venture on kickstarter as well.
Assume that you might lose all your money.
Unfortunately the approach for venture capital is "high stakes on good odds" -- you might lose a million, but you might make a hundred million. With Kickstarter, you might get 10% off the projected retail price, or you might even pay full price. Or you might even pay $10 and only get 5 bloody stickers. You can't Kickstart like a capital investor, because the gains aren't there for the funders.
The programmatic implementation itself of course you have to do yourself, but that's generally the straightforward part
I'm working in natural language processing for generating parallel equivalent text in multiple languages.
(after you properly defined the problem, and the solution you want to work towards).
That's a bit circular though, because my difficulty is properly defining the problem, or rather the set of all subproblems, and the solution(s). It's easy to implement once you know what you're doing, but if we all knew what we were doing, there'd be much less buggy software out there....
If you can't express the idea in text and text alone, then you haven't broken it down properly.
...and at the planning stage, you are still trying to break down the problem. The core concept behind team thinking is that individually, we often fail to analyse the situation completely, and input from others can show holes in our reasoning and things we've failed to properly consider. The whole, hopefully, is greater than the sum of its parts.
I'm coding alone at the moment, and because I have no-one to bounce ideas off, I frequently find myself heading into dead-ends because the problem domain I'm dealing with is very large, and as there's no-one to discuss things with, I need to prototype to find my mistakes. Then I have to go back and rewrite.
Well, its... a lot more complicated than that, but yes, except no one has made the large touch screen that you plugin to the LAN and it just does that... yet.
A business can't close early if the owner so chooses?
Where do you live? I do not want to live there
You realise that most pubs could make just as much profit if they only opened for a few hours at the weekend, right? Midweek drinkers barely cover staff costs.
That's the key phrase -- don't reinvent the wheel. But is coding "inventing" or "building"? Because sometimes it's quicker to build your own wheel or whittle your own peg than go out and hunt down one the right size for your needs.
If his dad was a multi-millionaire, he could have got himself a nice little trophy 3rd/4th wife and had some kids when he was about 80. Then at 90, he could have told his young son, preparing to go to high school, about the dark days of his early career...
Paying for downtime is the elephant in the room in terms of "minimum wage". Cleaners, for instance, typically get minimum wage. But they work for two hours in the morning, then another two hours in the early evening. They're working part-time in a job that is as invasive as a full-time job.
Imagine your company was making cutbacks, and they asked you to cut your hours in half, at the same pro-rata salary. But your day was cut in two, with half your hours before 9:30 and half your hours from 4:30 pm onwards. Your days would be ruined by commuting etc, and you would be unhappy... and yet we force that on people whose hourly rate is already pitiful in comparison to ours.
It boggles my mind that in the richest country in the world, there is even debate over this. The rest of the world has already realized that of course someone shouldn't lose their house or their job because they got the flu.
Given the recent flap about it, I think the way to convince the USA to have paid sick leave is to scream "BUT WHAT IF HE HAS EBOLA?!?!?"
Try to get a taxi at 6th and 44th in Manhattan at 5PM. Taxis are pretty damn expensive in NYC, and pretty much impossible to find when demand is high. Know what is available at 5PM? Uber cars.
If everyone could get a taxi at peak time, would they get home quicker? No, because you'd have gridlock. This is one of the things that city planners take into account when managing taxi licensing.
Public transport is an efficient solution at peak time. It may not seem like it -- what with waiting times, multiple stops, the need to walk a bit and connect -- but mass transit is the only way to keep that many people moving. 25 years ago New York was famous worldwide for its traffic jams -- you don't want that again.
Taxis are useful at times of lower demand, when public transport becomes inefficient.
Unlimited cars leads to a tragedy-of-the-commons scenario. I'd tell you to stop being so selfish, but even enlightened self-interested says you should just get a damn bus.
Professional drivers need to get peak-time business to account for slack time at off-peak hours.
If Uber drivers can cherry pick the fares at peak time, undercutting the full-time drivers, there's no incentive for drivers to make themselves available off-peak.
Licensing incorporates a social contract -- it's much like pubs. Where I live, a pub has to apply for certain hours. They can't shut up early whenever business is slack -- they've been given the license to make sure supply matches demand. The number of licenses is restricted so that the business can survive. Quid pro quo.
Keeping prices high keeps taxis available. Uber lets drivers pick up passengers when the driver wants -- taxis pick up passengers when the passenger wants.
Not to mention the issue of robbery, assualt and rape. In Scottish cities, there are two types of cars: taxis (black cabs) and private hire cars. A taxi can pick you up off the street, a private hire car can only collect you from a pre-booked address. Outside of cities, there is only generally one category, which is called a taxi, but can only pick up from taxi ranks or pre-booked addresses. Both currently need to have clear markings, but in the old days there was only mandatory marking on black cabs (the ones you can hail from the street).
It wasn't unheard of for unlicensed (or just unscrupulous) operators to use a radio scanner to intercept dispatch messages and steal fares from the licensed companies. It also wasn't unheard of for these firms to be part of crime gangs, so it wasn't unheard of for people to be robbed by the driver. Things took a turn for the sinister when a lone nutter got hold of a radio scanner and started targetting dispatches for women, and when he liked the woman he picked up... well, it doesn't take much to imagine what he did.
That's why we put in laws mandating clear marking for all cars-for-hire. Even if you got picked up by the wrong person, it would still have to be a licensed driver, making the pool of suspects much smaller. Taxi drivers still occassionally go off the rails, but they're easy to track down, as they're all on file.
Differential pricing is a consequence of income disparity. Our lifestyles are only possible because people in poorer countries are can produce our bananas and electronics at stupidly low prices. If the USA attempted to ban differential pricing, they would be shutting a hell of a lot of people out of the drugs market -- cheap drugs in Africa are profitable in a tokenistic sense -- they are profitable precisely because the costs are already offset in rich countries. If they had a choice between selling only at African prices or only at American ones, they'd stick to American ones, as that's where the profit lies.
Because it costs at least $1 billion to develop a new drug
The problem with those numbers is that it costs a billion to even get your drug to the point where it might be accepted by the FDA. This means that you're asking companies to pony up a billion dollars and hope that their drug works and hope it's first to market. How many people would buy a 1 dollar lottery ticket if they knew their was less than a 10% chance that they might win the grand prize of 2 dollars.
Exactly. These prizes only work where there's low material costs (eg design and programming) or where the costs can be justified by ego anyway (billionaires and their space rockets). And there's another problem -- the goal should be "the best antibiotics possible", but now we're aiming for "the quickest antibiotic you can come up with" in order to be first. Not to mention that FDA approval is not a neutral, unbiased, pure scientific step -- with all the favours and bri--"consultancies" going on in pharmaceutical circles, the little guys would find their approvals delayed and delayed until the big guys had been approved and got the cash.
You did a lot more research into phages, though. I still don't understand why phages aren't being used as a part of standard surgical disinfection worldwide yet -- micro-organisms that literally eat life-threatening bacteria but that are too large to enter the human bloodstream... isn't that better than swabbing us all down with toxic chemicals?
Slashdot Mirror
I could make a political point about how kickstarter and its kin are a response to laws that limit risky investments by all except the wealthy and the effect of "the closure" in Venice in the 14th centuary.
You could, but then you'd be ignoring history. The US "informed investor" legislation is to protect people from otherwise-legal fraud. Did you never hear about the movie scam? A production team would roll up in a small town, and offer to put the place on the map by shooting a move there. Everyone knows movies make millions. No brainer. Invest, invest, invest! And so the townsfolk would hand over many thousands of pounds to the production company, who would shoot a movie -- a crap one that no-one would ever pay money to see. Contract complete, the production crew would take their salaries and send the film off to distributors, who would refuse it. The townsfolk would never see any of their investment returned, and the production crew would be better off. Done right, they'd also get catering and accommodation on credit to the production company, but make sure that they emptied the account through executive salaries and equipment hire (from themselves) so that they could fold the company with massive debts.
By sticking everything in limited liability companies, this type of scam remains on the legal side of the law. In fact, even major productions companies often start a new LLC for each production, and if they cancel the project, extras, cleaners etc go unpaid.
So yes, before you assume everything your government does is designed to screw you over, take a look at your own history.
This should be the approach taken for any risky venture on kickstarter as well. Assume that you might lose all your money.
Unfortunately the approach for venture capital is "high stakes on good odds" -- you might lose a million, but you might make a hundred million. With Kickstarter, you might get 10% off the projected retail price, or you might even pay full price. Or you might even pay $10 and only get 5 bloody stickers. You can't Kickstart like a capital investor, because the gains aren't there for the funders.
The programmatic implementation itself of course you have to do yourself, but that's generally the straightforward part
I'm working in natural language processing for generating parallel equivalent text in multiple languages.
(after you properly defined the problem, and the solution you want to work towards).
That's a bit circular though, because my difficulty is properly defining the problem, or rather the set of all subproblems, and the solution(s). It's easy to implement once you know what you're doing, but if we all knew what we were doing, there'd be much less buggy software out there....
If you can't express the idea in text and text alone, then you haven't broken it down properly.
...and at the planning stage, you are still trying to break down the problem. The core concept behind team thinking is that individually, we often fail to analyse the situation completely, and input from others can show holes in our reasoning and things we've failed to properly consider. The whole, hopefully, is greater than the sum of its parts.
I'm coding alone at the moment, and because I have no-one to bounce ideas off, I frequently find myself heading into dead-ends because the problem domain I'm dealing with is very large, and as there's no-one to discuss things with, I need to prototype to find my mistakes. Then I have to go back and rewrite.
Really, asking Slashdot? All you're going to get is a bunch of snarky comments and a holy war or two.
I, for one, welcome our blue and black SystemD overlords.
Well, its ... a lot more complicated than that, but yes, except no one has made the large touch screen that you plugin to the LAN and it just does that ... yet.
Isn't that what Smart Podium does?
A business can't close early if the owner so chooses? Where do you live? I do not want to live there
You realise that most pubs could make just as much profit if they only opened for a few hours at the weekend, right? Midweek drinkers barely cover staff costs.
people don't re-invent the wheel
That's the key phrase -- don't reinvent the wheel. But is coding "inventing" or "building"? Because sometimes it's quicker to build your own wheel or whittle your own peg than go out and hunt down one the right size for your needs.
I can't -- my doctor requires notice of at least two weeks for non-urgent appointments.
If his dad was a multi-millionaire, he could have got himself a nice little trophy 3rd/4th wife and had some kids when he was about 80. Then at 90, he could have told his young son, preparing to go to high school, about the dark days of his early career...
When the odds are stacked against you, you have to play hardball (and mix your metaphors like the plague).
Paying for downtime is the elephant in the room in terms of "minimum wage". Cleaners, for instance, typically get minimum wage. But they work for two hours in the morning, then another two hours in the early evening. They're working part-time in a job that is as invasive as a full-time job.
Imagine your company was making cutbacks, and they asked you to cut your hours in half, at the same pro-rata salary. But your day was cut in two, with half your hours before 9:30 and half your hours from 4:30 pm onwards. Your days would be ruined by commuting etc, and you would be unhappy... and yet we force that on people whose hourly rate is already pitiful in comparison to ours.
It boggles my mind that in the richest country in the world, there is even debate over this. The rest of the world has already realized that of course someone shouldn't lose their house or their job because they got the flu.
Given the recent flap about it, I think the way to convince the USA to have paid sick leave is to scream "BUT WHAT IF HE HAS EBOLA?!?!?"
What's that damn printer doing making roads in my kitchen?!?
Try to get a taxi at 6th and 44th in Manhattan at 5PM. Taxis are pretty damn expensive in NYC, and pretty much impossible to find when demand is high. Know what is available at 5PM? Uber cars.
If everyone could get a taxi at peak time, would they get home quicker? No, because you'd have gridlock. This is one of the things that city planners take into account when managing taxi licensing.
Public transport is an efficient solution at peak time. It may not seem like it -- what with waiting times, multiple stops, the need to walk a bit and connect -- but mass transit is the only way to keep that many people moving. 25 years ago New York was famous worldwide for its traffic jams -- you don't want that again.
Taxis are useful at times of lower demand, when public transport becomes inefficient.
Unlimited cars leads to a tragedy-of-the-commons scenario. I'd tell you to stop being so selfish, but even enlightened self-interested says you should just get a damn bus.
If you don't understand something, feel free to ask for clarification. Calling someone stupid to mask your own ignorance is very immature.
Professional drivers need to get peak-time business to account for slack time at off-peak hours. If Uber drivers can cherry pick the fares at peak time, undercutting the full-time drivers, there's no incentive for drivers to make themselves available off-peak.
Licensing incorporates a social contract -- it's much like pubs. Where I live, a pub has to apply for certain hours. They can't shut up early whenever business is slack -- they've been given the license to make sure supply matches demand. The number of licenses is restricted so that the business can survive. Quid pro quo.
Keeping prices high keeps taxis available. Uber lets drivers pick up passengers when the driver wants -- taxis pick up passengers when the passenger wants.
Either. Both. Take your pick.
Not to mention the issue of robbery, assualt and rape. In Scottish cities, there are two types of cars: taxis (black cabs) and private hire cars. A taxi can pick you up off the street, a private hire car can only collect you from a pre-booked address. Outside of cities, there is only generally one category, which is called a taxi, but can only pick up from taxi ranks or pre-booked addresses. Both currently need to have clear markings, but in the old days there was only mandatory marking on black cabs (the ones you can hail from the street).
It wasn't unheard of for unlicensed (or just unscrupulous) operators to use a radio scanner to intercept dispatch messages and steal fares from the licensed companies. It also wasn't unheard of for these firms to be part of crime gangs, so it wasn't unheard of for people to be robbed by the driver. Things took a turn for the sinister when a lone nutter got hold of a radio scanner and started targetting dispatches for women, and when he liked the woman he picked up... well, it doesn't take much to imagine what he did.
That's why we put in laws mandating clear marking for all cars-for-hire. Even if you got picked up by the wrong person, it would still have to be a licensed driver, making the pool of suspects much smaller. Taxi drivers still occassionally go off the rails, but they're easy to track down, as they're all on file.
They're no different from normal taxi companies really.
Exactly -- which is why they should comply with the same registration laws as other taxi companies./p.
Differential pricing is a consequence of income disparity. Our lifestyles are only possible because people in poorer countries are can produce our bananas and electronics at stupidly low prices. If the USA attempted to ban differential pricing, they would be shutting a hell of a lot of people out of the drugs market -- cheap drugs in Africa are profitable in a tokenistic sense -- they are profitable precisely because the costs are already offset in rich countries. If they had a choice between selling only at African prices or only at American ones, they'd stick to American ones, as that's where the profit lies.
Because it costs at least $1 billion to develop a new drug The problem with those numbers is that it costs a billion to even get your drug to the point where it might be accepted by the FDA. This means that you're asking companies to pony up a billion dollars and hope that their drug works and hope it's first to market. How many people would buy a 1 dollar lottery ticket if they knew their was less than a 10% chance that they might win the grand prize of 2 dollars.
Exactly. These prizes only work where there's low material costs (eg design and programming) or where the costs can be justified by ego anyway (billionaires and their space rockets). And there's another problem -- the goal should be "the best antibiotics possible", but now we're aiming for "the quickest antibiotic you can come up with" in order to be first. Not to mention that FDA approval is not a neutral, unbiased, pure scientific step -- with all the favours and bri--"consultancies" going on in pharmaceutical circles, the little guys would find their approvals delayed and delayed until the big guys had been approved and got the cash.
You did a lot more research into phages, though. I still don't understand why phages aren't being used as a part of standard surgical disinfection worldwide yet -- micro-organisms that literally eat life-threatening bacteria but that are too large to enter the human bloodstream... isn't that better than swabbing us all down with toxic chemicals?
Diode. I meant diode.