I think if we flip the question, the answer is obvious. What are theaters doing to keep themselves alive? The reasons you cite have mostly been around for awhile (though you could argue some have gotten worse).
The quality of the home theater has vastly outpaced the marginal increases in quality at movie theaters. Cheap, huge TV's at very high resolutions with a huge catalog of instantly-available streaming services. At some point, many people decided it made more sense to stay home.
Once you have been conditioned to watch movies at home, the movie theater loses the habit forming inertia it once had and people just assume to stay home. The thought of going out to see a movie doesn't even enter their mind.
If theaters never existed and launched from scratch today, they'd be an instant flop.
How long will it actually take to write a full 40 terabytes of data? How long will it take to sequentially read all 40 terabytes? One of the reasons MapReduce is so popular is because traditional hard drives have not kept pace with memory and cpu speed increases. A 15K SAS hard drive can sequentially read less than 200 MB/sec. It would take days.
This might be useful for certain backup purposes. However, Samsung has already released a 128 terabyte SSD prototype. Obviously there is a huge price difference, but how useful is a hard drive that large if it takes forever to read all of its data? I think traditional hard drives are quickly on their way to becoming a backup/archival medium to complement tape. Live data will probably start to live on SSDs more frequently.
I remember a similar story a few months ago. A thief stole someone's phone and the perpetrator was suggested to the victim as "someone you may know." I think the consensus was, just visiting someone's facebook page pulls you into their potential network. I'm guessing she's visited her alter-ego's page at some point (and maybe some of her clients).
The only winning move is to not play. Just get rid of facebook and install uBlock and filters that keep social media at bay.
So a quick google search shows there are about 250 million adults in the U.S.
Subtract those that are older and haven't applied for credit in a very long time.
Subtract the college students that have never applied for credit using a credit bureau.
Subtract the tinfoil hat crowd.
Subtract those in prison.
It seems to me that every American actively participating in this nations credit system has been hacked. The way the number is reported, it seems like it was a partial database breach. But subtracting out those not currently participating in the credit system seems awfully close to the number reported.
Government agencies relying on fines for operation has always bothered me. If you need $x to run your department properly, then justify it in a budget and let's raise the taxes appropriately. Funds collected from fines should be diverted in a way the original issuer sees no benefit.
My first thinkpad was the last generation with IBM branding. Then I read on slashdot that Lenovo had been producing them long before the sale, and thus my longtime streak of Lenovo laptops. I've never had a hardware failure on any of them (original IBM or Lenovo). Software is another story *cough* superfish *cough*
I've noticed over the years the quality of content on netflix streaming has declined. There was a netflix employee that made the comment to the effect "they'll take what we give 'em" a couple of years ago. There's generally a good selection of DVDs so I understand the appeal.
I just watched The Founder a few weeks back. FWIW, Ray Kroc didn't have a fondness for MBAs and for awhile refused to hire them. I suppose this all depends on your opinion of Ray Kroc, but it's hard to deny his business successes he was able to obtain without them. Jeff Bezos himself graduated with EE and CS degrees.
First of all, Jeopardy Watson has almost nothing to do with the Watson product IBM is selling. That system was largely NLP based and the team disbanded afterwards. From what I can tell, the only thing still alive from that project is Apache UIMA. Watson isn't even a single product. It's a collection of about a dozen disjoint products with the word "Watson" in front of their name.
The current iteration of "Watson" is not interesting at all. Their machine learning portion is just SPSS. Their next-gen machine learning is just Apache Spark. Their UI to setup hardware and submit spark jobs is very unreliable. When you get an error, it's generally a "An error has occurred" or something just as useless.
Jeopardy Watson was interesting, but the big players are doing much more interesting things these days. Google and Microsoft have very good public machine learning and AI platforms. Amazon's is OK, nothing special. If you want to work at a lower level, Stanford maintains a set of libraries with implementations of their cutting edge algorithms. Especially their NLP group. Theirs are actually user-friendly compared to many other research level projects.
The threat of AI should be categorized and handled accordingly.
AI built into mechanical systems (i.e. self-driving cars) should have a fuse that a human can pull easily. The Silicon Valley episode scenario can be handled in this manner. Things that are remote that use RF could have an AI-less out-of-band system to kill power. I think the skynet scenario is actually easiest to subvert.
The scarier scenario is that we put AI in charge of delicate financial systems. I don't have a lot of confidence that we have enough "kill switches" globally to subvert a mass catastrophic financial event. A single system could do something bad that causes a cascading effect. Imagine a financial system so complex that only computers understand how it works. It may get to the point that tons of assets have to be sorted out in courts, halting the economy, forcing us into a global depression.
I heard a story on NPR categorizing misleading and untrue news into four categories (which I agree with). Each of these four are often called "fake news" these days but it's obvious only one is.
(1) True fake news. News that has no basis at all and is created to be spread on social media to make ad dollars. These are things like pizza-gate and "pope endorsing trump."
(2) Click bait. The story may be true or somewhat true but headline extremely misleading.
(3) Satire. The onion.
(4) News that contains facts but they are out of context and many other important facts are omitted to promote a narrative.
There was an OTM episode a few months ago that talked honestly about bias in reporting on gun issues. Most reporters for the main stream media live in large metropolitan areas where guns aren't common (for non-criminals anyway) and their knowledge is extremely lacking. They interviewed a journalist from the midwest that took the MSM to task for getting so many basic things about gun control reporting incorrect. Basic facts like the difference between semi-automatic and automatic weapons and how it amplifies the mistrust of MSM for gun owners.
For those that don't know, OTM is produced by WNYC, a pretty liberal NPR affiliate.
Speaking of this, I will never buy a non-Google Android device again. None of the big players provide reasonable updates and most load your device with crap you can't uninstall. My last phone was a Samsung and I never once used their Samsung apps. They also quickly gave up on providing updates and it was difficult to tell if I was even getting security updates after awhile. Google has been very reliable about providing updates to their Nexus devices and I don't have to worry about Skype permanently installed on my phone.
Unfortunately I fall into this category. I bought a Nexus 7 in 2013 and I used it for a couple of weeks before I realized it wasn't very useful. I'm around computers all day so there's really no use for it. The rare case when I'm not around a computer, I just use my phone. I've seen office workers that have both a tablet and laptop and it's amazingly awkward watching them try to force the tablet into their life. It's almost like some people like being seen in meetings with their tablet.
Tablets aren't useless. They make amazing replacements for bulky POS. They work really well for outside workers (think utility workers) that previously would receive work orders on bulky Panasonic toughbooks. They are often simpler than PC's for kiosks. However, for many consumers tablets were a one-time mistake they won't make again.
The problem with something like this is that genes don't always express and gene expression isn't binary (on/off). So someone might test as a good leader and then when stressed by the job their gene expression changes and they aren't a good leader anymore. Someone with a biology background can correct me (and probably will) but this sounds like it won't actually work very well in practice.
Doing right by your customers is an important part of retaining them.
I am amazed how Samsung has responded to this. Think about all the recalls (and should-have-been recalls) of the past 30 years. They could have responded
It has come to our attention that a small minority of Note 7 phones (less than 0.001%) have resulted in smoking and short durations of flames when improperly charged. We would like to remind you to always use Samsung brand phone chargers plugged into an electrical socket that meets state and local building codes.
I can't think of a single company whose first response wouldn't have been a denial, followed by months of denials, federal investigations, and then a small fine. Most auto manufacturers have faced deadly design choices and it's not until the government twists their arm do they act.
My favorite Nathan for you running joke is Windows 95. "You're still running Windows 95? My parents got rid of their Windows 95 computer because minesweeper stopped working."
I heard an anecdotal story about the owner of several Wendy's franchises had issues with people stealing ketchup packets. So they decided to keep the packets behind the counter and patrons had to ask for them. Abuse went down by some huge number.
I think officers have to radio into dispatch all the time (any time they pull someone over, see something suspicious, etc). Database access should be a 2-person deal. Dispatch gets a popup of searches the officer is doing when the officer radios in and dispatch has the opportunity to flag any suspicious access. I think just knowing someone is readily watching would greatly reduce abuse.
I'm glad you brought this up. The discussion seems to be around facebook and censorship, but instead let's talk about the Vietnam war, the use of napalm and how terrible and horrific it is, and what led to this poor girl being burned by it.
I'm a millennial and I think very few of us appreciate how senseless the Vietnam war was. There was a draft. A friggin' DRAFT. This doesn't happen anymore. I can't imagine getting a draft card and being sent off to die for a war I do not believe in. America dumped toxic chemicals all over this country and caused cancer in many people. When the veterans got home, they weren't exactly welcomed back on a red carpet.
Maybe someone can correct me or expand since I wasn't alive during the war, but as far as I can tell it was a pretty senseless war and this picture should remind us to be a little more careful with how we step foot on foreign soil.
I own a kindle and it's collecting dust. I've purchased like 5 or so technical kindle books (math and programming). Equations typically can't be scaled or don't display properly. Code examples are formatted so badly they are impossible to read. I originally bought my kindle thinking I could read research papers. Hah! Good luck. Try to read an IEEE two column format research paper on the kindle. Most ebook formats are just as bad. O'Reilly books had the right idea to use pdf's.
There is a very good episode of NPR's Planet Money that talks about Kansas City taxes. Basically, businesses hop back and forth to whomever gives them the lowest taxes. It's a race to the bottom. The only winning move is not to play.
Episode here
I think the knee jerk reaction is that Rick Scott has spent most of his time as governor trying to weaken environmental protections to appease his donors so he can run for senate in 2018. This is the same governor that sent out a memo that basically says the state isn't allowed to acknowledge global warming.
Rick Scott wants to be a senator so he's basically abandoned any governing of the state and is falling in line with typical party politics. EPA bad, business good. He needs those piles of donor dollars to run for senate in 2018.
Slashdot Mirror
I think if we flip the question, the answer is obvious. What are theaters doing to keep themselves alive? The reasons you cite have mostly been around for awhile (though you could argue some have gotten worse).
The quality of the home theater has vastly outpaced the marginal increases in quality at movie theaters. Cheap, huge TV's at very high resolutions with a huge catalog of instantly-available streaming services. At some point, many people decided it made more sense to stay home.
Once you have been conditioned to watch movies at home, the movie theater loses the habit forming inertia it once had and people just assume to stay home. The thought of going out to see a movie doesn't even enter their mind.
If theaters never existed and launched from scratch today, they'd be an instant flop.
How long will it actually take to write a full 40 terabytes of data? How long will it take to sequentially read all 40 terabytes? One of the reasons MapReduce is so popular is because traditional hard drives have not kept pace with memory and cpu speed increases. A 15K SAS hard drive can sequentially read less than 200 MB/sec. It would take days.
This might be useful for certain backup purposes. However, Samsung has already released a 128 terabyte SSD prototype. Obviously there is a huge price difference, but how useful is a hard drive that large if it takes forever to read all of its data? I think traditional hard drives are quickly on their way to becoming a backup/archival medium to complement tape. Live data will probably start to live on SSDs more frequently.
I remember a similar story a few months ago. A thief stole someone's phone and the perpetrator was suggested to the victim as "someone you may know." I think the consensus was, just visiting someone's facebook page pulls you into their potential network. I'm guessing she's visited her alter-ego's page at some point (and maybe some of her clients).
The only winning move is to not play. Just get rid of facebook and install uBlock and filters that keep social media at bay.
So a quick google search shows there are about 250 million adults in the U.S.
Subtract those that are older and haven't applied for credit in a very long time.
Subtract the college students that have never applied for credit using a credit bureau.
Subtract the tinfoil hat crowd.
Subtract those in prison.
It seems to me that every American actively participating in this nations credit system has been hacked. The way the number is reported, it seems like it was a partial database breach. But subtracting out those not currently participating in the credit system seems awfully close to the number reported.
Government agencies relying on fines for operation has always bothered me. If you need $x to run your department properly, then justify it in a budget and let's raise the taxes appropriately. Funds collected from fines should be diverted in a way the original issuer sees no benefit.
My first thinkpad was the last generation with IBM branding. Then I read on slashdot that Lenovo had been producing them long before the sale, and thus my longtime streak of Lenovo laptops. I've never had a hardware failure on any of them (original IBM or Lenovo). Software is another story *cough* superfish *cough*
I've noticed over the years the quality of content on netflix streaming has declined. There was a netflix employee that made the comment to the effect "they'll take what we give 'em" a couple of years ago. There's generally a good selection of DVDs so I understand the appeal.
I just watched The Founder a few weeks back. FWIW, Ray Kroc didn't have a fondness for MBAs and for awhile refused to hire them. I suppose this all depends on your opinion of Ray Kroc, but it's hard to deny his business successes he was able to obtain without them. Jeff Bezos himself graduated with EE and CS degrees.
First of all, Jeopardy Watson has almost nothing to do with the Watson product IBM is selling. That system was largely NLP based and the team disbanded afterwards. From what I can tell, the only thing still alive from that project is Apache UIMA. Watson isn't even a single product. It's a collection of about a dozen disjoint products with the word "Watson" in front of their name.
The current iteration of "Watson" is not interesting at all. Their machine learning portion is just SPSS. Their next-gen machine learning is just Apache Spark. Their UI to setup hardware and submit spark jobs is very unreliable. When you get an error, it's generally a "An error has occurred" or something just as useless.
Jeopardy Watson was interesting, but the big players are doing much more interesting things these days. Google and Microsoft have very good public machine learning and AI platforms. Amazon's is OK, nothing special. If you want to work at a lower level, Stanford maintains a set of libraries with implementations of their cutting edge algorithms. Especially their NLP group. Theirs are actually user-friendly compared to many other research level projects.
The threat of AI should be categorized and handled accordingly.
AI built into mechanical systems (i.e. self-driving cars) should have a fuse that a human can pull easily. The Silicon Valley episode scenario can be handled in this manner. Things that are remote that use RF could have an AI-less out-of-band system to kill power. I think the skynet scenario is actually easiest to subvert.
The scarier scenario is that we put AI in charge of delicate financial systems. I don't have a lot of confidence that we have enough "kill switches" globally to subvert a mass catastrophic financial event. A single system could do something bad that causes a cascading effect. Imagine a financial system so complex that only computers understand how it works. It may get to the point that tons of assets have to be sorted out in courts, halting the economy, forcing us into a global depression.
I heard a story on NPR categorizing misleading and untrue news into four categories (which I agree with). Each of these four are often called "fake news" these days but it's obvious only one is.
(1) True fake news. News that has no basis at all and is created to be spread on social media to make ad dollars. These are things like pizza-gate and "pope endorsing trump."
(2) Click bait. The story may be true or somewhat true but headline extremely misleading.
(3) Satire. The onion.
(4) News that contains facts but they are out of context and many other important facts are omitted to promote a narrative.
There was an OTM episode a few months ago that talked honestly about bias in reporting on gun issues. Most reporters for the main stream media live in large metropolitan areas where guns aren't common (for non-criminals anyway) and their knowledge is extremely lacking. They interviewed a journalist from the midwest that took the MSM to task for getting so many basic things about gun control reporting incorrect. Basic facts like the difference between semi-automatic and automatic weapons and how it amplifies the mistrust of MSM for gun owners.
For those that don't know, OTM is produced by WNYC, a pretty liberal NPR affiliate.
Speaking of this, I will never buy a non-Google Android device again. None of the big players provide reasonable updates and most load your device with crap you can't uninstall. My last phone was a Samsung and I never once used their Samsung apps. They also quickly gave up on providing updates and it was difficult to tell if I was even getting security updates after awhile. Google has been very reliable about providing updates to their Nexus devices and I don't have to worry about Skype permanently installed on my phone.
Unfortunately I fall into this category. I bought a Nexus 7 in 2013 and I used it for a couple of weeks before I realized it wasn't very useful. I'm around computers all day so there's really no use for it. The rare case when I'm not around a computer, I just use my phone. I've seen office workers that have both a tablet and laptop and it's amazingly awkward watching them try to force the tablet into their life. It's almost like some people like being seen in meetings with their tablet.
Tablets aren't useless. They make amazing replacements for bulky POS. They work really well for outside workers (think utility workers) that previously would receive work orders on bulky Panasonic toughbooks. They are often simpler than PC's for kiosks. However, for many consumers tablets were a one-time mistake they won't make again.
The problem with something like this is that genes don't always express and gene expression isn't binary (on/off). So someone might test as a good leader and then when stressed by the job their gene expression changes and they aren't a good leader anymore. Someone with a biology background can correct me (and probably will) but this sounds like it won't actually work very well in practice.
Doing right by your customers is an important part of retaining them.
I am amazed how Samsung has responded to this. Think about all the recalls (and should-have-been recalls) of the past 30 years. They could have responded
It has come to our attention that a small minority of Note 7 phones (less than 0.001%) have resulted in smoking and short durations of flames when improperly charged. We would like to remind you to always use Samsung brand phone chargers plugged into an electrical socket that meets state and local building codes.
I can't think of a single company whose first response wouldn't have been a denial, followed by months of denials, federal investigations, and then a small fine. Most auto manufacturers have faced deadly design choices and it's not until the government twists their arm do they act.
My favorite Nathan for you running joke is Windows 95. "You're still running Windows 95? My parents got rid of their Windows 95 computer because minesweeper stopped working."
I heard an anecdotal story about the owner of several Wendy's franchises had issues with people stealing ketchup packets. So they decided to keep the packets behind the counter and patrons had to ask for them. Abuse went down by some huge number.
I think officers have to radio into dispatch all the time (any time they pull someone over, see something suspicious, etc). Database access should be a 2-person deal. Dispatch gets a popup of searches the officer is doing when the officer radios in and dispatch has the opportunity to flag any suspicious access. I think just knowing someone is readily watching would greatly reduce abuse.
I'm glad you brought this up. The discussion seems to be around facebook and censorship, but instead let's talk about the Vietnam war, the use of napalm and how terrible and horrific it is, and what led to this poor girl being burned by it.
I'm a millennial and I think very few of us appreciate how senseless the Vietnam war was. There was a draft. A friggin' DRAFT. This doesn't happen anymore. I can't imagine getting a draft card and being sent off to die for a war I do not believe in. America dumped toxic chemicals all over this country and caused cancer in many people. When the veterans got home, they weren't exactly welcomed back on a red carpet.
Maybe someone can correct me or expand since I wasn't alive during the war, but as far as I can tell it was a pretty senseless war and this picture should remind us to be a little more careful with how we step foot on foreign soil.
The issues are not specific to the kindle device (though definitely worse). Cloud reader on a computer has the same issues.
I own a kindle and it's collecting dust. I've purchased like 5 or so technical kindle books (math and programming). Equations typically can't be scaled or don't display properly. Code examples are formatted so badly they are impossible to read. I originally bought my kindle thinking I could read research papers. Hah! Good luck. Try to read an IEEE two column format research paper on the kindle. Most ebook formats are just as bad. O'Reilly books had the right idea to use pdf's.
There is a very good episode of NPR's Planet Money that talks about Kansas City taxes. Basically, businesses hop back and forth to whomever gives them the lowest taxes. It's a race to the bottom. The only winning move is not to play. Episode here
Sanders spent most of his campaign reiterating that the system is rigged. The DNC and Clinton proved him right.
I think the knee jerk reaction is that Rick Scott has spent most of his time as governor trying to weaken environmental protections to appease his donors so he can run for senate in 2018. This is the same governor that sent out a memo that basically says the state isn't allowed to acknowledge global warming.
Rick Scott wants to be a senator so he's basically abandoned any governing of the state and is falling in line with typical party politics. EPA bad, business good. He needs those piles of donor dollars to run for senate in 2018.