Those are not measures of intelligence. Those are measures of education. You just detected the failure in the educational system, not shown those people are not intelligent. If you didn't hardcode or teach that information to an AI, it wouldn't have any knowledge of those either.
Robots will do all the restocking of the shelves and cashiers in stores, there will probably be McRobots instead of McDonalds....
See, this is why I don't think what they said will happen. We've had the technology to do the menial labor robot for at least ten or twenty years, if not longer.
Secondly, the whole exchange labor for money thing is overrated. The way it used to work, most people (well, those considered "people" by the law) just owned land and their own equipment and did the work themselves or with their children. Then the feudal lords came along and started the "golden parachute CEO" model, and normal people's lives have been hell ever since.
Okay, maybe I overstated it a bit, but I'm just trying to say there are other ways than just having a corporate overlord. If each person owned their own robot and land to use it, they would not need a "job."
"Job" was just a method a large organization (such as a corporation) which needed labor done by many people could function. If the robots do the job, and you are their "leader," then you just have a small business you run.
Essentially, the people who think the only way they can survive by having a "job" are living in a Manorialism. There are choices, they all just have different difficulties.
The problem is all the game consoles and most (all?) of the cellphones are DRM encumbered. Nobody can publish a program for these systems unless they get the personal approval of the manufacturer or use an "illegal circumvention device."
With both Microsoft and Apple both deep into DRM, one has to wonder if their ultimate goal may be to convert general purpose computers into the same censored kind of device. It is asinine when you buy hardware and are not allowed to install whatever software you legally own or create on it. It goes against the basic fundamentals of property law.
"Intellectual Property" companies tried to get the SSSCA passed to require by law all devices which even touched multimedia content have DRM. It is also interesting these companies have been trying to obscure the fact it is DRM by calling it a "security" technology.
Maybe the problem is the software. 10 years ago a 1GHz machine was fairly good. 20 years ago, a 1GHz machine was something experimental the miltary worked on.
There is no reason someone can't do a lot of tasks with a 1GHz (or even 500MHz) netbook except if they are using poorly designed, bloated software.
With just modest hardware acceleration, a 500 MHz computer can play videos
just fine. I had a 500MHz computer which would play dvds just fine. Maybe these "slow" computers couldn't play "high definition" (a moving target), but I think if there were more "slow" supercomputer netbooks on the market, more websites would offer lower resolution, faster codec non-Flash alternatives for "slow" supercomputers.
The problem is computers have been an economy of waste for the past decade or more. Companies try to make you waste more so you need to constantly upgrade. Even software companies benefit from this, because when people throw out their old computer and buy another, they often "upgrade" to the "latest and greatest" software as well.
Yes there are uses which need multigigahertz computers, but the vast majority of casual use? Not really.
What netbook has all its apps online? I have an Asus EEE, and even though the preinstalled software is crappy, it works fine without the internet. Open Office, the media player, file/photo browser, the games, even firefox for viewing html files work just fine without it. You can also access a shell prompt and do things there.
I know because my internet access isn't exactly reliable.
No, it's flora, idiot. Me, I prefer the Pleistocene megafauna. They may not convert Sun's energy into food or run a game server, but they make great steaks!
You may have a point about Linux not being perfect for all enterprise uses, but I don't see where it limits those values to a 32 bit int. It appears to limit it to the system int size. On 64 bit systems, wouldn't this be 64 bits and therefore much larger?
what else do they think we are doing with those 60+Gb data plans they offer?
Speaking with your grandma on a hi-def video stream? Playing fast-paced, bandwidth wasting games? Controlling a robot on the other side of the planet? Downloading astronomical charts? Telecommuting? Downloading software updates? Using facebook? Facebook probably hits your quota right there. Do they have to care?
I would also like to point out there are plenty of sources to indicate the majority of infringement notices are incorrect, if not outright fraudulent.
Yeah, plenty of people use the internet for copyright infringement, but it does not give media companies or anyone else the right to take it away from everyone. Telephones are used to plan murders and all sorts of illegal activities. Should we have them taken away as well?
I'm not sure how your version of mozilla works, but I have Firefox, and last time I checked, just hovering over the lock tells me which CA signed the ssl cert for the current website I'm visiting. I have to make the effort to go to the key dialog box to find out anything else. It would be fishy if I didn't see Thawte as the CA for google.
Then again, maybe your point was they could fool people in China. They could do that anyway. They are the government, they can do all sorts of things up to and including writing laws saying all ssl programs are required to use their CA. However, I doubt even then all Chinese citizens will be fooled, as at least some will know (or realize) the government controls it, so they won't be protected from whatever censorship crap the bureaucrats want to pull.
It is not much different from here in the US if our government tried the same thing. Then again, this is more obvious, since I'm sure some US based CAs are "friendly" with various three letter agencies, so your gmail account may still be vulnerable to government surveillance in "the land of freedom!" Really, who is Thawte anyway? Do you know?
I may be reasonably assured I can pass credit card info through SSL without a con artist sniffing the data, but I am not sure I would trust it to protect me against government agents.
While plenty of corporations (and the people who run them) don't care whether lots of people die, just as long as the company gets money, anytime you sell millions of any one product, most likely someone is going to get injured or die from it.
You can't have absolute safety all the time. Do you know how much labor would be required? It would probably take thousands (if not millions) of people to service just one person, and how are you going to feed and house those thousands (or millions) of slaves?
People are going to die. You can't stop that. It is a question of how careful should you be. There is a reasonable medium between being so reckless you don't care, and so careful you never deliver anything.
Though you do have a point about corporations being used to shield people from prosecution for their crimes...
Which is why Microsoft software should never be used in medical, transportation or financial computers. Their entire attitude is if they even bother to think about something which may go wrong, they don't give a single piece of fetid shit. Let it crash. Let it lock up. Let it burn. Let it make your money disappear. Let it turn that guy's heart monitor off. "Who cares."
Systems which need to be reliable must be designed while anticipating everything a programmer can possibly think could go wrong. Anything less is irresponsible.
Yes there will probably be bugs, but if you design every function so it doesn't crash and burn on unexpected input, maybe even put in some paranoid protections, then there is a better chance someone won't die.
Look at most open source programs. The icons suck. The fonts suck. The layout sucks. The usability sucks. Few people can get those things right. Open source doesn't have a Susan Kare.
It is ironic you say those things then point to a person's website which you imply would solve those problems, yet her site is unusable. I went to the about page to find out who she is, and the font is so small as to be unreadable. Look at the css: it has font: 1px and 2px all over the place. You do know what that means, don't you? She instructed the fonts to be one or two pixels big! How is that usable? I can't read the page like that. Can you? Your god of ui design is not perfect.
You know what tinkerers will do. "See, if you press here, it pops up a keyboard image and you can use VI commands."...
So tinkerers can do that, why should you stop them from doing it on their own computer? I am a touch typist, and I like to use emacs keybindings so I don't have to lift my hands from the keyboard. I know how to read, but my ablility to decode images (and what stupid "GUI" designers think should be in icons) is limited, probably because of brain damage due to the strokes I had, so words are better than icons for me.
This is usable for me, but it may not be for others. Why do we have to make rigid user interfaces for one group of people: the illiterate hunt and peckers? Microsoft ruined my ability to use emacs bindings by putting a big useless button where the rest of the control key should go. Even if you need a "Windows key", there is no reason to place it on the main part of the keyboard anyway.
... Name one open source program that's undergone usability testing.
Firefox? The program which allowed me to "tinker" and see why your "god of gui design" site was screwed up? Generally "usability testing" is done with people who have learned the broken system lusers call "the perfect gui" which we have today. They just say what they want is whatever they've seen Microsoft do, not what would work.
To design a ui which would be helpful to all people, you would need to test people who haven't been broken by the current regime of "gui wonderfulness." It needs those who have a wide variety of needs, skills and deficits. Contrary to wide belief, everybody is not the same identical clone. Some people can touch type, some people can't.
Some people like to be entertained by bleeps, bloops, and videos. Some people would rather their computer run fast and allow them to do work without distraction. Some people are computer programers, others doctors, others bankers, or factory workers, farmers, hotel clerks, etc. They don't necessarily do the same jobs in the same ways.
That is why open technology is a great thing. You can choose to make it work in a different way to your own needs. It is not as if a device has to be locked down to make it easy to use. In fact, locking it down ensures the device will only be easy to use for a small subset of people. Why can't we all just get along?
You are rich and spoiled, so you don't get the point of why someone would buy a $100 laptop. There are plenty of people who can't afford or aren't willing to pay for a more expensive one, so this would be their only choice.
It is a computer. It browses the web. It will do word processing and edit photos. It works. That is what they need. They may not even have anything resembling broadband to watch HD videos anyway.
Though, I agree they should use a mainstream distro. Xandros on the Asus EEE sucks! They don't even supply upgrades (last time I checked there were not any updates in their repository and the kernel, vulnerable samba, and etc were outdated), and anyone who wants to fix all the security flaws needs a lot of Linux knowledge.
The hardware they chose doesn't seem to be fully compatible with the generic kernel. (however, recent ones may work with the wireless --haven't been able to try it out easily because of their layered filesystem scheme.) I wonder how many of those netbooks are now part of a botnet? There is no way a lay person or their MCSE friend could fix the security problems with it, and no, installing a warez windows 98 on it isn't going to improve the security situation.
No, that is the goal of DRM, not netbooks. You can do all those things with a netbook. 10 or 20 years ago, even the fastest computers where no more powerful and had no more storage than todays netbooks, yet people still managed to do all those things without relying on a special "network service." Flash cards hold gigabytes of data, unless you are making high-def really long movies or something, you won't run out of space.
The problem is with commercial developers creating bloatware (how else are they going to get people to rebuy the same product? more features!), and their idiot wannabes.
If you would have bothered to read the entire summary, you'd know it was a limitation of KDE/Gnome, not Linux nor the X Window System nor all window managers.
Maybe Microsoft should add reading to their MCSE program, but then all the losers would cry: "This is too hard!" I hope you are having fun trying to pay off your $30k loan by working "tech support" for the Postal Service or Burger King.
You don't understand the guy's goal. He really hates cats, and he heard the saying: "Curiosity killed the cat." He is just bringing the plan to its natural evolution.
How about two users? That is what I do. I have one user for insecure internet access, and another for financial transactions. The home directory of the account for financial transactions is chmod 700.
Really, I use several user accounts --one for the X server, one for multimedia / video games, one for my real work / valuable files, etc. It isn't any hassle to use the insecure internet or video game accounts because I have them set up so I don't need a password when I su from the X server account. Makes it very easy to drop privs.
Yes, this doesn't protect from the insecure account running malware, or that malware breaking through a local root exploit, so an eye has to be kept on it still, but it is better to make life more difficult for malware writers, and if they stay trapped in the one account, cleanup is relatively easy.
The flicker on LCDs is apparently because they use pulse-width modulation to vary the output level of the backlight in a power efficient manner. Yet the frequency is hideously low, so you can see it flicker. I am not sure why they don't use frequencies in the kHz instead of Hz range. The electronics should be able to handle it easily.
So the antitrust efforts of Microsoft are the fault of OSS developers? If it wasn't for Microsoft, you'd have a choice of not only MSWin and Linux, but also OS/2, BeOS, and many others. Hardware manufacturers would have to create drivers for most operating systems if they wanted any decent market share, just like it was in the 1980s.
I suppose during the bank bailouts you were complaining to your local banks about how they are assholes because they didn't defraud the government into giving them shitloads of taxpayer's money and how they don't give their executives multi-million dollar "bonuses."
If a company manipulates the market to eliminate competition, how does this become the fault of those who try to compete?
Whatever you say shithead. You are just a childish asshole who shits on whomever is most convenient when you don't get what you want. Then again, your views are so absurd, I have to wonder if you are some sort of Microsoft "missionary" trying to preach "the word" of the "one true OS."
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Those are not measures of intelligence. Those are measures of education. You just detected the failure in the educational system, not shown those people are not intelligent. If you didn't hardcode or teach that information to an AI, it wouldn't have any knowledge of those either.
See, this is why I don't think what they said will happen. We've had the technology to do the menial labor robot for at least ten or twenty years, if not longer.
Secondly, the whole exchange labor for money thing is overrated. The way it used to work, most people (well, those considered "people" by the law) just owned land and their own equipment and did the work themselves or with their children. Then the feudal lords came along and started the "golden parachute CEO" model, and normal people's lives have been hell ever since.
Okay, maybe I overstated it a bit, but I'm just trying to say there are other ways than just having a corporate overlord. If each person owned their own robot and land to use it, they would not need a "job."
"Job" was just a method a large organization (such as a corporation) which needed labor done by many people could function. If the robots do the job, and you are their "leader," then you just have a small business you run.
Essentially, the people who think the only way they can survive by having a "job" are living in a Manorialism. There are choices, they all just have different difficulties.
The problem is all the game consoles and most (all?) of the cellphones are DRM encumbered. Nobody can publish a program for these systems unless they get the personal approval of the manufacturer or use an "illegal circumvention device."
With both Microsoft and Apple both deep into DRM, one has to wonder if their ultimate goal may be to convert general purpose computers into the same censored kind of device. It is asinine when you buy hardware and are not allowed to install whatever software you legally own or create on it. It goes against the basic fundamentals of property law.
"Intellectual Property" companies tried to get the SSSCA passed to require by law all devices which even touched multimedia content have DRM. It is also interesting these companies have been trying to obscure the fact it is DRM by calling it a "security" technology.
Maybe the problem is the software. 10 years ago a 1GHz machine was fairly good. 20 years ago, a 1GHz machine was something experimental the miltary worked on.
There is no reason someone can't do a lot of tasks with a 1GHz (or even 500MHz) netbook except if they are using poorly designed, bloated software.
With just modest hardware acceleration, a 500 MHz computer can play videos just fine. I had a 500MHz computer which would play dvds just fine. Maybe these "slow" computers couldn't play "high definition" (a moving target), but I think if there were more "slow" supercomputer netbooks on the market, more websites would offer lower resolution, faster codec non-Flash alternatives for "slow" supercomputers.
The problem is computers have been an economy of waste for the past decade or more. Companies try to make you waste more so you need to constantly upgrade. Even software companies benefit from this, because when people throw out their old computer and buy another, they often "upgrade" to the "latest and greatest" software as well.
Yes there are uses which need multigigahertz computers, but the vast majority of casual use? Not really.
What netbook has all its apps online? I have an Asus EEE, and even though the preinstalled software is crappy, it works fine without the internet. Open Office, the media player, file/photo browser, the games, even firefox for viewing html files work just fine without it. You can also access a shell prompt and do things there.
I know because my internet access isn't exactly reliable.
Good question. Anyone know the answer? I assumed they showed the ultimate root.
No, it's flora, idiot. Me, I prefer the Pleistocene megafauna. They may not convert Sun's energy into food or run a game server, but they make great steaks!
You may have a point about Linux not being perfect for all enterprise uses, but I don't see where it limits those values to a 32 bit int. It appears to limit it to the system int size. On 64 bit systems, wouldn't this be 64 bits and therefore much larger?
Speaking with your grandma on a hi-def video stream? Playing fast-paced, bandwidth wasting games? Controlling a robot on the other side of the planet? Downloading astronomical charts? Telecommuting? Downloading software updates? Using facebook? Facebook probably hits your quota right there. Do they have to care?
I would also like to point out there are plenty of sources to indicate the majority of infringement notices are incorrect, if not outright fraudulent.
Yeah, plenty of people use the internet for copyright infringement, but it does not give media companies or anyone else the right to take it away from everyone. Telephones are used to plan murders and all sorts of illegal activities. Should we have them taken away as well?
I'm not sure how your version of mozilla works, but I have Firefox, and last time I checked, just hovering over the lock tells me which CA signed the ssl cert for the current website I'm visiting. I have to make the effort to go to the key dialog box to find out anything else. It would be fishy if I didn't see Thawte as the CA for google.
Then again, maybe your point was they could fool people in China. They could do that anyway. They are the government, they can do all sorts of things up to and including writing laws saying all ssl programs are required to use their CA. However, I doubt even then all Chinese citizens will be fooled, as at least some will know (or realize) the government controls it, so they won't be protected from whatever censorship crap the bureaucrats want to pull.
It is not much different from here in the US if our government tried the same thing. Then again, this is more obvious, since I'm sure some US based CAs are "friendly" with various three letter agencies, so your gmail account may still be vulnerable to government surveillance in "the land of freedom!" Really, who is Thawte anyway? Do you know?
I may be reasonably assured I can pass credit card info through SSL without a con artist sniffing the data, but I am not sure I would trust it to protect me against government agents.
While plenty of corporations (and the people who run them) don't care whether lots of people die, just as long as the company gets money, anytime you sell millions of any one product, most likely someone is going to get injured or die from it.
You can't have absolute safety all the time. Do you know how much labor would be required? It would probably take thousands (if not millions) of people to service just one person, and how are you going to feed and house those thousands (or millions) of slaves?
People are going to die. You can't stop that. It is a question of how careful should you be. There is a reasonable medium between being so reckless you don't care, and so careful you never deliver anything.
Though you do have a point about corporations being used to shield people from prosecution for their crimes...
Which is why Microsoft software should never be used in medical, transportation or financial computers. Their entire attitude is if they even bother to think about something which may go wrong, they don't give a single piece of fetid shit. Let it crash. Let it lock up. Let it burn. Let it make your money disappear. Let it turn that guy's heart monitor off. "Who cares."
Systems which need to be reliable must be designed while anticipating everything a programmer can possibly think could go wrong. Anything less is irresponsible.
Yes there will probably be bugs, but if you design every function so it doesn't crash and burn on unexpected input, maybe even put in some paranoid protections, then there is a better chance someone won't die.
It is ironic you say those things then point to a person's website which you imply would solve those problems, yet her site is unusable. I went to the about page to find out who she is, and the font is so small as to be unreadable. Look at the css: it has font: 1px and 2px all over the place. You do know what that means, don't you? She instructed the fonts to be one or two pixels big! How is that usable? I can't read the page like that. Can you? Your god of ui design is not perfect.
So tinkerers can do that, why should you stop them from doing it on their own computer? I am a touch typist, and I like to use emacs keybindings so I don't have to lift my hands from the keyboard. I know how to read, but my ablility to decode images (and what stupid "GUI" designers think should be in icons) is limited, probably because of brain damage due to the strokes I had, so words are better than icons for me.
This is usable for me, but it may not be for others. Why do we have to make rigid user interfaces for one group of people: the illiterate hunt and peckers? Microsoft ruined my ability to use emacs bindings by putting a big useless button where the rest of the control key should go. Even if you need a "Windows key", there is no reason to place it on the main part of the keyboard anyway.
Firefox? The program which allowed me to "tinker" and see why your "god of gui design" site was screwed up? Generally "usability testing" is done with people who have learned the broken system lusers call "the perfect gui" which we have today. They just say what they want is whatever they've seen Microsoft do, not what would work.
To design a ui which would be helpful to all people, you would need to test people who haven't been broken by the current regime of "gui wonderfulness." It needs those who have a wide variety of needs, skills and deficits. Contrary to wide belief, everybody is not the same identical clone. Some people can touch type, some people can't.
Some people like to be entertained by bleeps, bloops, and videos. Some people would rather their computer run fast and allow them to do work without distraction. Some people are computer programers, others doctors, others bankers, or factory workers, farmers, hotel clerks, etc. They don't necessarily do the same jobs in the same ways.
That is why open technology is a great thing. You can choose to make it work in a different way to your own needs. It is not as if a device has to be locked down to make it easy to use. In fact, locking it down ensures the device will only be easy to use for a small subset of people. Why can't we all just get along?
You are rich and spoiled, so you don't get the point of why someone would buy a $100 laptop. There are plenty of people who can't afford or aren't willing to pay for a more expensive one, so this would be their only choice.
It is a computer. It browses the web. It will do word processing and edit photos. It works. That is what they need. They may not even have anything resembling broadband to watch HD videos anyway.
Though, I agree they should use a mainstream distro. Xandros on the Asus EEE sucks! They don't even supply upgrades (last time I checked there were not any updates in their repository and the kernel, vulnerable samba, and etc were outdated), and anyone who wants to fix all the security flaws needs a lot of Linux knowledge.
The hardware they chose doesn't seem to be fully compatible with the generic kernel. (however, recent ones may work with the wireless --haven't been able to try it out easily because of their layered filesystem scheme.) I wonder how many of those netbooks are now part of a botnet? There is no way a lay person or their MCSE friend could fix the security problems with it, and no, installing a warez windows 98 on it isn't going to improve the security situation.
No, that is the goal of DRM, not netbooks. You can do all those things with a netbook. 10 or 20 years ago, even the fastest computers where no more powerful and had no more storage than todays netbooks, yet people still managed to do all those things without relying on a special "network service." Flash cards hold gigabytes of data, unless you are making high-def really long movies or something, you won't run out of space.
The problem is with commercial developers creating bloatware (how else are they going to get people to rebuy the same product? more features!), and their idiot wannabes.
If you would have bothered to read the entire summary, you'd know it was a limitation of KDE/Gnome, not Linux nor the X Window System nor all window managers.
Maybe Microsoft should add reading to their MCSE program, but then all the losers would cry: "This is too hard!" I hope you are having fun trying to pay off your $30k loan by working "tech support" for the Postal Service or Burger King.
You don't understand the guy's goal. He really hates cats, and he heard the saying: "Curiosity killed the cat." He is just bringing the plan to its natural evolution.
Then support holographic memory. There appears to be at least one company doing work with it. There may be more. I didn't look very hard.
How about two users? That is what I do. I have one user for insecure internet access, and another for financial transactions. The home directory of the account for financial transactions is chmod 700.
Really, I use several user accounts --one for the X server, one for multimedia / video games, one for my real work / valuable files, etc. It isn't any hassle to use the insecure internet or video game accounts because I have them set up so I don't need a password when I su from the X server account. Makes it very easy to drop privs.
Yes, this doesn't protect from the insecure account running malware, or that malware breaking through a local root exploit, so an eye has to be kept on it still, but it is better to make life more difficult for malware writers, and if they stay trapped in the one account, cleanup is relatively easy.
The flicker on LCDs is apparently because they use pulse-width modulation to vary the output level of the backlight in a power efficient manner. Yet the frequency is hideously low, so you can see it flicker. I am not sure why they don't use frequencies in the kHz instead of Hz range. The electronics should be able to handle it easily.
How is a tablet pc not an e-reader??? If you install a pdf viewer on a computer, you have an "e-reader."
So the antitrust efforts of Microsoft are the fault of OSS developers? If it wasn't for Microsoft, you'd have a choice of not only MSWin and Linux, but also OS/2, BeOS, and many others. Hardware manufacturers would have to create drivers for most operating systems if they wanted any decent market share, just like it was in the 1980s.
I suppose during the bank bailouts you were complaining to your local banks about how they are assholes because they didn't defraud the government into giving them shitloads of taxpayer's money and how they don't give their executives multi-million dollar "bonuses."
If a company manipulates the market to eliminate competition, how does this become the fault of those who try to compete?
Whatever you say shithead. You are just a childish asshole who shits on whomever is most convenient when you don't get what you want. Then again, your views are so absurd, I have to wonder if you are some sort of Microsoft "missionary" trying to preach "the word" of the "one true OS."
This should not be surprising since Hollywood has taken over most of the video game industry.
Medical supply companies use Chinese manufacturers all the time. Take this instance where heparin was contaminated with melamine.
Thanks. I couldn't remember the spelling and searches were useless because I wasn't spelling it correctly.