An honest answer that is at least a good deal of the cause is that tech people are, broadly speaking, considerably smarter than garbage collectors, cops, and (sadly) most teachers. Consequently we see the problem more clearly, and feel the inequity more deeply when it is, in fact, an inequity and not just a result of "no qualified female (or any female) applied for the job." Exceptions exist, particularly where the people who do the hiring are mostly not tech types, and frankly, even leaving the issue of sex aside, they do a freaking terrible job of it.
"Ruby Programmer" Ok, fine.
"Must have 4 yr degree" arbitrarily prejudicial, counter productive. Also, fuck you.
"Offshore" seriously, just fuck you in the ass with a pineapple.
"Must be local" why, are your tech people/managers incompetent? Must the hire attend the company picnic? Offshore ok but Wyoming isn't? Add poison ivy wreath to pineapple
"Male" fuck you with a BIG pineapple that's on FIRE
1) Push your technical recruiters to hit 20% thresholds for female candidates 2) Challenge and question your personal assumptions about the leadership skills of women in technology 3) Transparently and openly take a stand to improve your company's diversity figures.
(1) is a terrible idea, and should be only "Push your technical recruiters to ignore sex completely and hire the most qualified person for the job, while pushing those who create the requirements for the jobs to stop requiring the ridiculous"
(2) meh. Just stop thinking about sex as an employment qualification. Stop it. Right now.
(3) No, definitely not, and also, fuck no. See (1) -- just behave reasonably and "diversity figures" will settle wherever they should be.
The earth has been much warmer in the past, and the most notable consequence of those conditions was rampant plant growth. At most, bands of climate that support particular crops will move northward. We are capable of surviving just fine in a very wide range of climate. Slowly increasing warmth of a few degrees is not a serious threat in and of itself.
Sea level: The seas have been much higher, and the consequences of a sea level rise of such tiny amounts as are predicted over such a long period are going to be irrelevant in the big picture. Human society is already extremely mobile over such time periods, and we are almost trivially capable of being even more so. Such moves can potentially benefit us in the sense that we can start over, smarter, for those of our older coastal cities that are so low that a few centimeters sea rise will result in their inundation. Better public transport, better street layout, better zoning, better utility transport and balance, more parks, opportunity to be more efficient in many ways (for example, monorails instead of trains; pumped canals instead of or in addition to streets; raised domiciles that allow 100% utilization of the ground underneath for vegetation... all kinds of opportunities arise when you don't have a gnarly old city infrastructure in the way.)
Long term continuation of CO2 increase: Unlikely. We're already transitioning to solar and so forth. There's no sane reason that wouldn't continue (and we should be pushing government hard to get it done sooner rather than later -- perhaps moving the ~40 billion dollars/year utterly wasted on the drug war (that's just the US costs -- leaves out tax gains and ignores world costs and gains) to solar panel and control electronics and energy storage production might be one way to do so. There is every reason to reduce emissions, even without the potential threat of emissions-related climate change.
The issue that seems to carry the most actual weight in the immediate sense is the possibility of the chemical changes that some scientists have predicted for the oceans. If the oceans undergo major changes in chemistry, the consequences are likely to be both sudden and very serious (as in, we may be royally fucked no matter what we try to do.) All that is, is a yet stronger argument for an even faster transition to stored solar.
The sensible path is to reduce emissions ASAP and as much as possible, while transitioning to stored solar power. In the case of the USA, this also reduces our country's vulnerability to the middle east's whims, something that continuously comes back to bite us on just about every level there is.
Buying only american goods is good for the american worker and the foreign consumer
I'm not following. Please explain how buying only American goods is good for the foreign consumer.
Buying only american goods [...is...] bad for the american consumer
This isn't correct. Keeping the money within the country accelerates the economy without leaking funds externally, and so funds American salaries, resource recovery, care and so forth. In a closed economy, especially one as large as ours, there is a lot of room for competition, and so costs should settle out to reasonable values in most cases without having to depend upon the workers living in despicable conditions, as is the case now.
Further, since within our own economy we can regulate activity at all levels (as we cannot in foreign economies), we can avoid monopolistic behavior, price gouging, unacceptably low wages, unacceptably long hours and so forth if we simply choose to do so.
Finally, for American tech workers who now have jobs, where those jobs were previously offshored, their roles as consumers are hugely improved, as well as their contribution to our economy (as compared to money going offshore and then into a foreign economy/)
so it doesn't really benefit any person of any nationality that produces and consumes the same amount.
The presumption here is invalid. The Chinese workers that make iPads live in dormitories, eat poorly, and earn very little income. They don't consume on an equal level with a US worker/consumer; they cannot do so. Likewise, the children that manufacture some of our clothing, etc. The equality you posit simply doesn't exist. And that, of course, is the basis for the lower cost of an offshored job.
My point being that if we force higher wages we will also be increasing costs by roughly the same amount.
The degree to which wages affect the continuing cost of manufacture of any one thing varies enormously. Some services are 100% wage based, such as programming of one-shot, one-customer solutions. Some are nearly 100% resource based, such as anything coming off of a fully automated production sequence. And there are cases everywhere in between. In addition, for the workers who now have jobs that were previously lost to shallower economies, their earning power (and power to support the economy) goes from near-zero to very significant. In any case where precursors (parts, for instance) were already being created here or the materials mined here, no cost increase is implied. Finally, as competition arises, manufacturing efficiency is a commonly adjusted factor. It's not just about costs or wages; that's far too simplistic a take on the issue.
No, but they are the most important factor if you actually count the labor costs that get lumped into things like mining, refining materials, and building the infrastructure that facilitates the manufacturing in the first place.
The most important factor out of [6,4,5,5,5, 5,5,5,5,5, 5,5,5,5,5, 5,5,5,5,5] is the 6. However, doubling the 6 to 12 changes the total from 100 to 106, or a 6% increase. What this tells us is that your words do not describe a general situation that backs up your assertion.
Furthermore, if we assume wages double, the only case where the cost doubles with it is the case where the job is entirely wage-based. You would first have to demonstrate that wages would double, though, and you have not done that.
I am saying that if we doubled everyone's wages that everything would roughly cost twice as much.
(a) No one is proposing doubling everyone's wages, the only wages that would need to change are the ones that were off shored, and (b) your assertion of doubled costs in response to doubled wages is fundamentally incorr
And there's the problem. Oil is still king of the economy.
You put your finger right on it. And re TFS, no one's going to be "kissing off big carbon" until they get smart enough to "kiss on big nuclear" or a local energy storage technology comes along that doesn't present the critical downsides of batteries.
I wouldn't advise holding your breath. The number of people who have asserted informed positions about nuclear power is miniscule, big-picture-wise, and ultracaps, the one hope we seemed to have for a while, appear to have hit a technical wall.
I think a lot of people forget that, milk, bread, fruit, etc... should all be a little cheaper at the moment. It won't be.
Radio Shack's customer base is shrinking to just those people that really want their widget NOW
And, at least as near as I can tell, at the same time as they stopped carrying widgets in favor of plastic toys, cellphones, and bottom-feeder car stereo equipment.
When I could get resistors, caps, ICs, transistors, even tubes, wire, connectors and adaptors, I used to go in there all the time -- because yes, I wanted it now, my time counts for a lot in my estimation of where to go and why.
I can't say who they were trying to target with this shift in emphasis, but I can tell you who they weren't trying to target, and that would be me and people like me. Who I suspect were the ones that made their original business model work in the first place.
I have this theory about publicly owned companies. They are forced to grow by the obligations to their stockholders. Without growth, even when the profits are decent, they are considered low performance -- so the emphasis is always, always, always on growth. No matter the consequences for the presently profitable sector.
But I don't think Radio Shack had anywhere to grow to. There are only so many electronics enthusiasts in any one town, so once they had addressed that, legit growth was over. In the computer realm, they had a pretty good day with the 6809-based color computer, but really couldn't keep the z80-based stuff going, and never got the PC compatible stuff into a workable price performance region. The plastic toys and cellphone sales? There never was a significant enough market for that stuff to make a difference. And so here we are.
You need to factor something else into your reasoning: If Apple changes the price of a product, just as with anything else, they will affect the market for that product. In particular, if they add too much to the end user's cost, competition will see to it that they regret it. The only way they can avoid this is to provide more functionality -- and in all products other than OS X itself, they're pretty far behind the curve already due to a series of extremely bad decisions.
A very good example of this is the predominance of Android-based phones over iOS based phones. My phone cost less than my SO's; she has a late model iPhone, I have a Galaxy Note 3. My phone is a far better phone and general applications platform than hers is -- and it cost less. She (my SO) has been shown, in detail, why this is so, and her next phone will almost certainly not be an Apple product, because (a) she knows that the functionality is lower and (b) she knows that the price is higher. Apple has two options here to bring her back into the fold, as it were. They can either drop the price (a lot) or they can up the functionality (doubtful they can... too invested in iTunes tethering, mommying the developers and consequently neutering the applications, closed developer ecosystem.)
[The ER is] legally obligated to treat you regardless of your ability to pay the bill.
No. They are legally obligated to stabilize you, which is a standard far below any attempt to actually resolve your problem. For instance, you walk into an ER with the first symptoms of lung cancer, perhaps bloody sputum, they'll give you a spray of Chloraseptic and a referral to a doctor -- which you will have to pay for. You might receive a prescription, which you will also have pay for. You will not be in receipt of a treatment program designed to remediate your cancer; you will simply have your present symptoms stabilized and be turned right back out the door. And then you will be billed for the ER visit itself (and the Chloraseptic) at a very high rate, and as soon as you can pay, they will insist, via the legal system, that you do so.
ER's without actual medical care follow up of the same kind as usual isn't worth squat for much more than short-term, easily remedied issues. And even at that, the only time it resolves to "free" is when the recipient is so far down on the economic ladder, not to rise again for years, as to be at the very ragged edge of the Gaussian.
Should we all be forced to pay the higher prices for products produced in America due to the higher price of labor?
Should we all be forced to pay the costs of a destroyed economy because you want cheaper widgets and don't give a hoot about the working and living conditions of those who perform the labor of creating these widgets for you? What you're arguing for here is great advantage for you, while the producers of the very things that give you your advantage have no access to the very benefits you so obviously covet.
What's the point of making $80,000 instead of $40,000, if everything costs twice as much?
The point of making twice as much, regardless of what things cost, is that you can purchase twice as much as you could otherwise.
However, as others have pointed out, for manufactured goods, labor costs are not the only factor that sets prices, nor is the amount of labor required to create widget A necessarily equal to the labor required to create widget B, nor, in fact, are these costs certain to be constants inherently not amenable to reduction. The premise you're implying here -- inherent double costs -- isn't supportable at all.
If you condemn free trade without condemning capitalism in general, all you are doing is redrawing the lines so they suit you.
Well, it's an interesting assertion, but you've not actually demonstrated this. Consequently I can't see taking it any more seriously than any other baseless remark. More to the point, I don't condemn free trade, I actually think it's a lovely idea, but as it turns out, when implemented without regard for human nature, it doesn't actually work. There are many ideas like this. For instance, it would be absolutely lovely if we could open our homes to anyone who needs shelter from a storm. Unfortunately, this tends to lead to us being raped and murdered in our beds. And so on.
So in light of free trade's actual failure to function as hoped for, my position is that we need to examine it to see why it failed, and then fix the problems so identified. In my opinion, this is not rocket science: Free trade fails because there is no level playing field, specifically because our offerings of economic parity are incorporated, while our offerings of social parity are not. This establishes massively unequal costs we cannot control, and so the playing field tilts in direct response and proportion.
To say that free trade is a fundamental requirement of human equality and/or decency is just hand-waving. Yes, all other things being equal, free trade could be a foundational element of a uniformly consistent world economic structure. But that's not the world we actually live in. Here, in reality, if we wish to develop a system system as good as it can be, then we must do it in a significant degree of isolation from systems that are fundamentally incompatible with the mechanisms that drive such a system. This is the only way it can be done. You may, if you're a raging optimist, imagine that were we to achieve such a thing, or even go a long way towards it, that it might serve as a model for other societies to emulate, but I think we already know where that leads: no one in power wants to abandon, or even significantly alter, the conditions that got them there and are keeping them there. That's just as evident inside our borders as out -- it is why it is so difficult to even begin to address the corruption that pervades our legislatures and our judiciary.
Capitalism, in the long term, seems fundamentally incompatible with basic human decency
Possibly pure capitalism is. However, since we've not been operating as anything even remotely close to pure capitalism in the last 60 years or so (that's the limit of my observations, not a pointer to any functional boundary I know of), what is relevant is what we are, rather than a pure ism. And what we are is very close to being compatible with human decency. We're getting along towards a universal medical system, we have social safety nets and so forth. Further, at the social level, we reward those who do charity with status. It all needs considerable work, but it certainly is many steps above the cold calculations of profit and loss already.
(and most religious morality)
The vast majority of religious morality is canned nonsense produced by the disingenuous in order to facilitate control over the deluded. The sooner it is excised from our economic and legal systems and is replaced by economic- and legal-sanity, the better off our country will be. I cannot, and do not, speak about other countries here, but I know very well the extensive damage the poison of religion has done to ours.
and will eventually produce gross inequalities
What you fail to recognize is that gross inequalities exist from the very start. They are the irreducible axioms of the human condition. Most of the implications of the statement "all men are created equal" are not just wrong, but nonsensical. The only sane rest
Trying to use protectionism to artificially keep American tech wages inflated while there are hundreds of thousands of perfectly qualified workers elsewhere who would gladly do the work cheaper
There's more than one way for us to create situations that are "not what this country is about." The question at hand here is, is the value of the ideal of the free market for everyone, everywhere, regardless of consequences, more important than the idea that we here in the USA should be able to afford homes, transport, healthcare, safe neighborhoods and so forth. Your assertion of inflated wages is also questionable: how appropriate wages are has to be measured against cost of living, maintainance of a healthy lifestyle, home ownership, and so forth. The costs and social limits here are demonstrably different than in, for instance, China.
Protectionism has its place, and isolating the economies of strong countries from those of weak countries is one of them.
At this point, having seen the actual long term effects of our free trade policy, I am entirely for putting protectionism in place hard. If you want access to the US market, you live here, you mine it here, build it here, bank here, design it here -- period. We are resource rich in every way: we have raw materials, we have manpower, we have land, we have a potentially useful educational system and we have an ethos that matches job ethic with reward. Most importantly, with high trade barriers, we have the required market.
If we did this, we'd have our own semiconductor industries, our own electronics manufacturing industries, and so forth, for every category you can think of.
"Free trade" was put in place last century with good intentions and yes, a very American outlook, trying to extend the way we thought outside our own and operated borders. But that's not what happened. Only some of the economic mechanisms made it out. So now we have countries mostly unlike us in the sense that they have an ethos that matches job ethic only with the most basic day to day survival -- and they use that to severely undercut us. It's cheaper to buy prescription eyeglasses from China, ship them across the ocean by air and then across our own country, than it is to buy them here. Same for batteries, radios, displays, computers, iPods and tablets, jewelry, tech jobs, pretty much you name it.
It's not just price as a per-hour thing; I don't require a high per-hour wage, and I know some others of comparable skill who don't either. None of us are employable, though, based on various combinations of basically economic factors like age, health, family size and the like. None of this makes a significant difference when the hire doesn't have to be insured; that's another economic advantage which going outside the country for labor provides.
Look at Bethlehem, PA. At Detroit, MI. At Butte, Montana. Once you really see the wreckage caused by free trade, its very hard to have any confidence it's actually the right thing to do. Nice idea, yes -- but like many ideals, when put into practice, human nature alters the deal, Darth Vader style.
I say put the walls up, give it 20-30 years, or whatever it takes for our economy to recover from the miss-step, then slowly begin to let other countries in with a carefully crafted tariff system that normalizes their prices with the prices here. That way, competition is based upon quality. Not the wages of Chinese or Indian peasants living in hovels.
To indulge in a little metaphor, we offered our hand, and they burned it instead of shaking it. Time to pull it back. That's just the sane response. Right now, all we're doing is standing there, arm out, fingers burned off, waiting until the figurative fire burns our arms off to the shoulders. It doesn't help one bit to stand around saying "but our intentions were good!" Sure they were. But the intentions of corporations are not. The only way they are actually like people is that they act like sociopaths and
Step 1: Export tech jobs overseas to increase corporate profit Step 2: Throw all low-skill immigrants back across the border Step 3: Now US tech workers can get jobs doing lawn work, picking crops, and nannying.
The JOED removed these because they needed the space for "surveillance", "camera", and "goodthink." They're lagging behind the USA, though, as we've shortcut the entire process by no longer requiring students to be able to read. (Or write. Or do math.)
Between that and our fabulous jobs policy*, the USA leads the world. Now, if only lead weren't toxic, we'd be ok.
* US Jobs Policy:
Step 1: Export tech jobs overseas to increase corporate profit Step 2: Throw all low-skill immigrants back across the border Step 3: Now US tech workers can get jobs doing lawn work, picking crops, and nannying.
It doesn't follow that because things like anthrax are restricted that there is a chilling effect on debate about anthrax
If possession of anything to do with the events was prohibited, yes, in fact it would provide a chilling effect.
But if you were to buy the lab coat, or a box of unused envelopes that said "from the desk of..." of some idiot who mixed up some anthrax and put such a thing on display with a plaque explaining what it was, that would be both interesting and provocative of conversation where reason could be brought into play. Nazi uniform, medal, helmet, sigil, patch, letterhead, enigma machine? Same thing. I'll get to firearms below.
surely you must advocate anyone being able to possess things like nuclear weapons [...] but you do accept that there is a line and it's somewhere between "Nazi memorabilia" and "WMD".
As to your first point, no -- but the real question here is, does this have anything to do with the line you posit? Does that line even exist? Let's look closely and see.
With memorabilia, we are talking about, at best, things like daggers, officer's swords and Lugers. Usually we're not even talking about those, but instead, flags, patches, uniforms, medals, a whole range of non-weapon artifacts and records.
These things add no notable destructive power to the individual that making them illegal eliminates. None at all. Take the Luger, for instance. Can't own a Nazi Luger? No, but you can own other pistols, rifles, and etc. Many of them far more destructive, longer range, etc. Hunting is legal (yes, even in Germany) and of course knives and rolling pins and pitchforks and poisons and so forth are in every home. So clearly, we're not talking about anything to do with adding destructive power not already easily available. I have a Luger, you have a Desert Eagle, You're going to make the bigger hole, believe me. You have a quality.222 scoped rifle, I have a Luger, you can shoot me dead before I can even see you in the distance.
So memorabilia and WMD do not exist on a continuum from one to the other. Which was my whole point. WMD are dangerous force-multipliers, hence deserve some special treatment. Memorabilia is not, and does not. But wait!
In the (rare, enormously expensive) case where a historical object actually might be a force multiplier -- say we were talking about a Messerschmidt fighter or a Tiger tank -- then there are other laws that reasonably control ownership, arming, firing and operation of such a thing -- Nazi or otherwise. That would exist on a continuum with WMD. Because it's pretty much that. The amount of damage you could do with a working Tiger (or fighter aircraft) before you could be stopped would be amazing (we've actually seen this happen in the US with older US tanks.) But note that the reason the working Tiger or fighter would be prohibited has nothing at all to do with the fact that is an historical object; it's because they can crush things, blow huge holes in things, drop bombs, all the while being basically unstoppable until very scarce resources are brought to bear upon the machine in question. And in turn, those remedies may create more of a mess. So no tanks or fighters without oversight (and usually, permanent neutering. Concrete down the tank barrel, removal of machine guns and bomb racks, etc.)
Now, WMD. Does that change what an individual can do, multiply their force as does the Tiger tank? Of course it does. More so. So you see, memorabilia do not exist along a continuum with Tiger tanks and WMD. Therefore, the rules applied to WMD should not be applied to memorabilia. Your posited "line" does not exist. It's apples and strudel. No comparison. Memorabilia does not provide force multiplication.
It's only banned in Germany, where it continues to have a very real and measurable effect. While a single flag may not re-start the mainstream Nazi movement, there ar
The Kinect 2 and Realsense devices use time-of-flight cameras to produce a depth image (albeit low-res) along with the RGB image.
The image is not 3D. Were it rendered back using all the data captured, and given that the data was of adequate resolution to be useful in image reproduction, you would not see a 3D result. You would see a result strictly silhouetted from the shooting POV. All information is acquired from a single perspective.
If you're at all familiar with graphics programming, think of it as a Z-buffer camera for your phone, drone or living room.
Even that is going too far. The information that is used to prepare a z-buffer is a full set of 3D data. The z-buffer is generated relative to the user's POV, and can change at any time along with the user's POV, thus being able to reconstruct a scene from every/any angle. That is not true of data from a TOF camera, which cannot be used to reconstruct the scene at all beyond a fixed POV.
The difference comes about because with a classic z-buffer in the output path of a 3D rendering system, the data is 3D on input and the z-buffer serves to filter for any desired POV, taking any arbitrary and variable viewing angle into account. It is a mechanism that is used to produce either mono or stereo data in order to convert any portion of the scene to a human-eye compatible view, either mono or stereo, and when coded for stereo, produces image pairs complete with parallax information as well. When data is supplied from one POV that includes z-depth, that information cannot be used to reproduce the scene in 3D because it contains very little information about it -- it's not actually 3D. It might be more accurately described as stereovision+LIDAR. Basically what it boils down to is, if you have 3D data, a z-buffer can be (and is) used to get you a view from any angle. If you capture the data through a virtual z-buffer (only Z data from one POV), then the scene cannot be used to get you a view from any angle. They do not provide the same functionality, and it is misleading to imply they do.
Acquisition of real-world 3D scene data requires capture from all angles simultaneously. Just as generation of a z-buffer requires full 3D data on every object in the scene in order to produce a result. You could not, for instance, produce a 3D hologram from what you have acquired as a result of stereo+LIDAR. You could from the data that is going into a Z-buffer, though.
I didn't say it did. TFA (and TFS) title is: "3D cameras are about to go mainstream."
3D (X, Y and Z; or width, height, and depth) data is not acquired by these cameras. Therefore, these are not 3D cameras. Therefore 3D cameras are not "about to go mainstream."
It mentions Realsense and Kinect sensors, but it fails to mention how they work.
They work by acquiring stereo 2D data from a fixed viewing angle. That's two acquisitions from almost the same vantage point, which provides a static illusion of depth via capture of parallax. It does not actually contain depth information on a per-frame basis. They are not 3D cameras.
So naturally those depth cameras can't sense the depth of surfaces that are visually obscured, and no, they can't see the back of your cube
Yes, that's exactly what I said.:)
but couple them with accelerometers (for dead reckoning of position & orientation), colour[sic] cameras and machine vision algorithms (for refining that reckoning), and walk around the cube
You can do this with one 2D camera. However, in order to do this, the reconstructed frame rate goes from acceptable to pitiful -- No one is going to be interested in a playback of the Bar Mitzvah that proceeds at one frame per walk-around. A "3D camera" would capture 3D information. Just as an infrared camera captures infrared, a 2D camera captures 2D information, and an ultraviolet camera captures ultraviolet information. It is absurd to characterize a stereo camera pair as a "3D camera", even without considering the bewilderment that will ensue when they actually arrive due to the dimwitted hijacking of the term "3D" by marketing buffoons.
"3D" is short for "three dimensions." That's what it means; that's what it's always meant; that's what it should mean. Suppose I sold you a "3D rendering system" that turned out to only let you specify X and Y co-ordinates for your objects. And when you complained, as you surely would, I tried to feed you a line about how "look, if you simply build, and then render, 2D models of the same object as it would appear from every possible viewing angle, and then display them one at a time, it's almost the same!" your next phone call would probably be to the better business bureau.
chances are you'll actually own (and find a few uses for) such a device yourself in the next few years.
I have owned a Kinect since just about day one. And I am well aware of its nature -- which is not 3D.
The degree of disingenuous wool-pulling over the eyes here is on a level with someone selling you an RGB camera that only captures red and green channels. There's no possible justification for it. None. The resistance to the facts brought about by personal investment in the marketing claptrap is an amazing thing to see -- something that is essentially a particularly rabid form of confirmation bias, where victims of misinformation deny reality because they are unable to admit they've been hoodwinked -- it is one of the things to look for any time propaganda has been drilled into gullible consumers:
o "Hey, bought a new car audio amp, I see!" x "Yes, it's a Pyle. It's 4000 watts!" o "No. Dude. It isn't 4000 watts. Someone at Pyle is laughing their head off at you right now." x "bitch, it says RIGHT HERE that it's 4000 watts!" o "Sigh."
Essentially the same conversation:
o "Hey, bought a new game motion controller accessory, I see!" x "Yes, it's a Kinect. It's a 3D motion controller!"
In a consumer video context, when actual 3D imaging becomes available, there is going to be considerable confusion due to this arbitrary and fundamentally inaccurate usage of the term "3D."
I thought any geek would understand this by now. Stereo is not 3D. It isn't even "2 and 1/2 D" as some like to call it. It's stereo. No more, no less.
Slashdot Mirror
No. Because they're not made of wood. Also, one turned me into a newt.
Hmm. Perhaps a check of the x-ray archives at your local ER will get you your answer.
Truly smart people enjoy the company of those smarter than themselves. It's a great way to learn. Bro.
An honest answer that is at least a good deal of the cause is that tech people are, broadly speaking, considerably smarter than garbage collectors, cops, and (sadly) most teachers. Consequently we see the problem more clearly, and feel the inequity more deeply when it is, in fact, an inequity and not just a result of "no qualified female (or any female) applied for the job." Exceptions exist, particularly where the people who do the hiring are mostly not tech types, and frankly, even leaving the issue of sex aside, they do a freaking terrible job of it.
"Ruby Programmer" Ok, fine.
"Must have 4 yr degree" arbitrarily prejudicial, counter productive. Also, fuck you.
"Offshore" seriously, just fuck you in the ass with a pineapple.
"Must be local" why, are your tech people/managers incompetent? Must the hire attend the company picnic? Offshore ok but Wyoming isn't? Add poison ivy wreath to pineapple
"Male" fuck you with a BIG pineapple that's on FIRE
(1) is a terrible idea, and should be only "Push your technical recruiters to ignore sex completely and hire the most qualified person for the job, while pushing those who create the requirements for the jobs to stop requiring the ridiculous"
(2) meh. Just stop thinking about sex as an employment qualification. Stop it. Right now.
(3) No, definitely not, and also, fuck no. See (1) -- just behave reasonably and "diversity figures" will settle wherever they should be.
The earth has been much warmer in the past, and the most notable consequence of those conditions was rampant plant growth. At most, bands of climate that support particular crops will move northward. We are capable of surviving just fine in a very wide range of climate. Slowly increasing warmth of a few degrees is not a serious threat in and of itself.
Sea level: The seas have been much higher, and the consequences of a sea level rise of such tiny amounts as are predicted over such a long period are going to be irrelevant in the big picture. Human society is already extremely mobile over such time periods, and we are almost trivially capable of being even more so. Such moves can potentially benefit us in the sense that we can start over, smarter, for those of our older coastal cities that are so low that a few centimeters sea rise will result in their inundation. Better public transport, better street layout, better zoning, better utility transport and balance, more parks, opportunity to be more efficient in many ways (for example, monorails instead of trains; pumped canals instead of or in addition to streets; raised domiciles that allow 100% utilization of the ground underneath for vegetation... all kinds of opportunities arise when you don't have a gnarly old city infrastructure in the way.)
Long term continuation of CO2 increase: Unlikely. We're already transitioning to solar and so forth. There's no sane reason that wouldn't continue (and we should be pushing government hard to get it done sooner rather than later -- perhaps moving the ~40 billion dollars/year utterly wasted on the drug war (that's just the US costs -- leaves out tax gains and ignores world costs and gains) to solar panel and control electronics and energy storage production might be one way to do so. There is every reason to reduce emissions, even without the potential threat of emissions-related climate change.
The issue that seems to carry the most actual weight in the immediate sense is the possibility of the chemical changes that some scientists have predicted for the oceans. If the oceans undergo major changes in chemistry, the consequences are likely to be both sudden and very serious (as in, we may be royally fucked no matter what we try to do.) All that is, is a yet stronger argument for an even faster transition to stored solar.
The sensible path is to reduce emissions ASAP and as much as possible, while transitioning to stored solar power. In the case of the USA, this also reduces our country's vulnerability to the middle east's whims, something that continuously comes back to bite us on just about every level there is.
I'm not following. Please explain how buying only American goods is good for the foreign consumer.
This isn't correct. Keeping the money within the country accelerates the economy without leaking funds externally, and so funds American salaries, resource recovery, care and so forth. In a closed economy, especially one as large as ours, there is a lot of room for competition, and so costs should settle out to reasonable values in most cases without having to depend upon the workers living in despicable conditions, as is the case now.
Further, since within our own economy we can regulate activity at all levels (as we cannot in foreign economies), we can avoid monopolistic behavior, price gouging, unacceptably low wages, unacceptably long hours and so forth if we simply choose to do so.
Finally, for American tech workers who now have jobs, where those jobs were previously offshored, their roles as consumers are hugely improved, as well as their contribution to our economy (as compared to money going offshore and then into a foreign economy/)
The presumption here is invalid. The Chinese workers that make iPads live in dormitories, eat poorly, and earn very little income. They don't consume on an equal level with a US worker/consumer; they cannot do so. Likewise, the children that manufacture some of our clothing, etc. The equality you posit simply doesn't exist. And that, of course, is the basis for the lower cost of an offshored job.
The degree to which wages affect the continuing cost of manufacture of any one thing varies enormously. Some services are 100% wage based, such as programming of one-shot, one-customer solutions. Some are nearly 100% resource based, such as anything coming off of a fully automated production sequence. And there are cases everywhere in between. In addition, for the workers who now have jobs that were previously lost to shallower economies, their earning power (and power to support the economy) goes from near-zero to very significant. In any case where precursors (parts, for instance) were already being created here or the materials mined here, no cost increase is implied. Finally, as competition arises, manufacturing efficiency is a commonly adjusted factor. It's not just about costs or wages; that's far too simplistic a take on the issue.
The most important factor out of [6,4,5,5,5, 5,5,5,5,5, 5,5,5,5,5, 5,5,5,5,5] is the 6. However, doubling the 6 to 12 changes the total from 100 to 106, or a 6% increase. What this tells us is that your words do not describe a general situation that backs up your assertion.
Furthermore, if we assume wages double, the only case where the cost doubles with it is the case where the job is entirely wage-based. You would first have to demonstrate that wages would double, though, and you have not done that.
(a) No one is proposing doubling everyone's wages, the only wages that would need to change are the ones that were off shored, and (b) your assertion of doubled costs in response to doubled wages is fundamentally incorr
You put your finger right on it. And re TFS, no one's going to be "kissing off big carbon" until they get smart enough to "kiss on big nuclear" or a local energy storage technology comes along that doesn't present the critical downsides of batteries.
I wouldn't advise holding your breath. The number of people who have asserted informed positions about nuclear power is miniscule, big-picture-wise, and ultracaps, the one hope we seemed to have for a while, appear to have hit a technical wall.
Again, spot-on. Depressingly so.
And, at least as near as I can tell, at the same time as they stopped carrying widgets in favor of plastic toys, cellphones, and bottom-feeder car stereo equipment.
When I could get resistors, caps, ICs, transistors, even tubes, wire, connectors and adaptors, I used to go in there all the time -- because yes, I wanted it now, my time counts for a lot in my estimation of where to go and why.
I can't say who they were trying to target with this shift in emphasis, but I can tell you who they weren't trying to target, and that would be me and people like me. Who I suspect were the ones that made their original business model work in the first place.
I have this theory about publicly owned companies. They are forced to grow by the obligations to their stockholders. Without growth, even when the profits are decent, they are considered low performance -- so the emphasis is always, always, always on growth. No matter the consequences for the presently profitable sector.
But I don't think Radio Shack had anywhere to grow to. There are only so many electronics enthusiasts in any one town, so once they had addressed that, legit growth was over. In the computer realm, they had a pretty good day with the 6809-based color computer, but really couldn't keep the z80-based stuff going, and never got the PC compatible stuff into a workable price performance region. The plastic toys and cellphone sales? There never was a significant enough market for that stuff to make a difference. And so here we are.
You need to factor something else into your reasoning: If Apple changes the price of a product, just as with anything else, they will affect the market for that product. In particular, if they add too much to the end user's cost, competition will see to it that they regret it. The only way they can avoid this is to provide more functionality -- and in all products other than OS X itself, they're pretty far behind the curve already due to a series of extremely bad decisions.
A very good example of this is the predominance of Android-based phones over iOS based phones. My phone cost less than my SO's; she has a late model iPhone, I have a Galaxy Note 3. My phone is a far better phone and general applications platform than hers is -- and it cost less. She (my SO) has been shown, in detail, why this is so, and her next phone will almost certainly not be an Apple product, because (a) she knows that the functionality is lower and (b) she knows that the price is higher. Apple has two options here to bring her back into the fold, as it were. They can either drop the price (a lot) or they can up the functionality (doubtful they can... too invested in iTunes tethering, mommying the developers and consequently neutering the applications, closed developer ecosystem.)
They can. They just can't hire them within our borders. But since "within our borders" is not an actual constraint... they can.
No. They are legally obligated to stabilize you, which is a standard far below any attempt to actually resolve your problem. For instance, you walk into an ER with the first symptoms of lung cancer, perhaps bloody sputum, they'll give you a spray of Chloraseptic and a referral to a doctor -- which you will have to pay for. You might receive a prescription, which you will also have pay for. You will not be in receipt of a treatment program designed to remediate your cancer; you will simply have your present symptoms stabilized and be turned right back out the door. And then you will be billed for the ER visit itself (and the Chloraseptic) at a very high rate, and as soon as you can pay, they will insist, via the legal system, that you do so.
ER's without actual medical care follow up of the same kind as usual isn't worth squat for much more than short-term, easily remedied issues. And even at that, the only time it resolves to "free" is when the recipient is so far down on the economic ladder, not to rise again for years, as to be at the very ragged edge of the Gaussian.
Should we all be forced to pay the costs of a destroyed economy because you want cheaper widgets and don't give a hoot about the working and living conditions of those who perform the labor of creating these widgets for you? What you're arguing for here is great advantage for you, while the producers of the very things that give you your advantage have no access to the very benefits you so obviously covet.
The point of making twice as much, regardless of what things cost, is that you can purchase twice as much as you could otherwise.
However, as others have pointed out, for manufactured goods, labor costs are not the only factor that sets prices, nor is the amount of labor required to create widget A necessarily equal to the labor required to create widget B, nor, in fact, are these costs certain to be constants inherently not amenable to reduction. The premise you're implying here -- inherent double costs -- isn't supportable at all.
Well, it's an interesting assertion, but you've not actually demonstrated this. Consequently I can't see taking it any more seriously than any other baseless remark. More to the point, I don't condemn free trade, I actually think it's a lovely idea, but as it turns out, when implemented without regard for human nature, it doesn't actually work. There are many ideas like this. For instance, it would be absolutely lovely if we could open our homes to anyone who needs shelter from a storm. Unfortunately, this tends to lead to us being raped and murdered in our beds. And so on.
So in light of free trade's actual failure to function as hoped for, my position is that we need to examine it to see why it failed, and then fix the problems so identified. In my opinion, this is not rocket science: Free trade fails because there is no level playing field, specifically because our offerings of economic parity are incorporated, while our offerings of social parity are not. This establishes massively unequal costs we cannot control, and so the playing field tilts in direct response and proportion.
To say that free trade is a fundamental requirement of human equality and/or decency is just hand-waving. Yes, all other things being equal, free trade could be a foundational element of a uniformly consistent world economic structure. But that's not the world we actually live in. Here, in reality, if we wish to develop a system system as good as it can be, then we must do it in a significant degree of isolation from systems that are fundamentally incompatible with the mechanisms that drive such a system. This is the only way it can be done. You may, if you're a raging optimist, imagine that were we to achieve such a thing, or even go a long way towards it, that it might serve as a model for other societies to emulate, but I think we already know where that leads: no one in power wants to abandon, or even significantly alter, the conditions that got them there and are keeping them there. That's just as evident inside our borders as out -- it is why it is so difficult to even begin to address the corruption that pervades our legislatures and our judiciary.
Possibly pure capitalism is. However, since we've not been operating as anything even remotely close to pure capitalism in the last 60 years or so (that's the limit of my observations, not a pointer to any functional boundary I know of), what is relevant is what we are, rather than a pure ism. And what we are is very close to being compatible with human decency. We're getting along towards a universal medical system, we have social safety nets and so forth. Further, at the social level, we reward those who do charity with status. It all needs considerable work, but it certainly is many steps above the cold calculations of profit and loss already.
The vast majority of religious morality is canned nonsense produced by the disingenuous in order to facilitate control over the deluded. The sooner it is excised from our economic and legal systems and is replaced by economic- and legal-sanity, the better off our country will be. I cannot, and do not, speak about other countries here, but I know very well the extensive damage the poison of religion has done to ours.
What you fail to recognize is that gross inequalities exist from the very start. They are the irreducible axioms of the human condition. Most of the implications of the statement "all men are created equal" are not just wrong, but nonsensical. The only sane rest
I would be open to any solution that seems to have a chance of working.
There's more than one way for us to create situations that are "not what this country is about." The question at hand here is, is the value of the ideal of the free market for everyone, everywhere, regardless of consequences, more important than the idea that we here in the USA should be able to afford homes, transport, healthcare, safe neighborhoods and so forth. Your assertion of inflated wages is also questionable: how appropriate wages are has to be measured against cost of living, maintainance of a healthy lifestyle, home ownership, and so forth. The costs and social limits here are demonstrably different than in, for instance, China.
Protectionism has its place, and isolating the economies of strong countries from those of weak countries is one of them.
At this point, having seen the actual long term effects of our free trade policy, I am entirely for putting protectionism in place hard. If you want access to the US market, you live here, you mine it here, build it here, bank here, design it here -- period. We are resource rich in every way: we have raw materials, we have manpower, we have land, we have a potentially useful educational system and we have an ethos that matches job ethic with reward. Most importantly, with high trade barriers, we have the required market.
If we did this, we'd have our own semiconductor industries, our own electronics manufacturing industries, and so forth, for every category you can think of.
"Free trade" was put in place last century with good intentions and yes, a very American outlook, trying to extend the way we thought outside our own and operated borders. But that's not what happened. Only some of the economic mechanisms made it out. So now we have countries mostly unlike us in the sense that they have an ethos that matches job ethic only with the most basic day to day survival -- and they use that to severely undercut us. It's cheaper to buy prescription eyeglasses from China, ship them across the ocean by air and then across our own country, than it is to buy them here. Same for batteries, radios, displays, computers, iPods and tablets, jewelry, tech jobs, pretty much you name it.
It's not just price as a per-hour thing; I don't require a high per-hour wage, and I know some others of comparable skill who don't either. None of us are employable, though, based on various combinations of basically economic factors like age, health, family size and the like. None of this makes a significant difference when the hire doesn't have to be insured; that's another economic advantage which going outside the country for labor provides.
Look at Bethlehem, PA. At Detroit, MI. At Butte, Montana. Once you really see the wreckage caused by free trade, its very hard to have any confidence it's actually the right thing to do. Nice idea, yes -- but like many ideals, when put into practice, human nature alters the deal, Darth Vader style.
I say put the walls up, give it 20-30 years, or whatever it takes for our economy to recover from the miss-step, then slowly begin to let other countries in with a carefully crafted tariff system that normalizes their prices with the prices here. That way, competition is based upon quality. Not the wages of Chinese or Indian peasants living in hovels.
To indulge in a little metaphor, we offered our hand, and they burned it instead of shaking it. Time to pull it back. That's just the sane response. Right now, all we're doing is standing there, arm out, fingers burned off, waiting until the figurative fire burns our arms off to the shoulders. It doesn't help one bit to stand around saying "but our intentions were good!" Sure they were. But the intentions of corporations are not. The only way they are actually like people is that they act like sociopaths and
Yes. Just like here. Except less expensive. So actually not just like here. See how that works?
US Jobs Policy:
Step 1: Export tech jobs overseas to increase corporate profit
Step 2: Throw all low-skill immigrants back across the border
Step 3: Now US tech workers can get jobs doing lawn work, picking crops, and nannying.
The JOED removed these because they needed the space for "surveillance", "camera", and "goodthink." They're lagging behind the USA, though, as we've shortcut the entire process by no longer requiring students to be able to read. (Or write. Or do math.)
Between that and our fabulous jobs policy*, the USA leads the world. Now, if only lead weren't toxic, we'd be ok.
* US Jobs Policy:
Step 1: Export tech jobs overseas to increase corporate profit
Step 2: Throw all low-skill immigrants back across the border
Step 3: Now US tech workers can get jobs doing lawn work, picking crops, and nannying.
It's genius!
If the current wait is one to four months... considering it's January 2015 right now... and if I ordered one now I wouldn't get it until 2016...
Time travel?
If possession of anything to do with the events was prohibited, yes, in fact it would provide a chilling effect.
But if you were to buy the lab coat, or a box of unused envelopes that said "from the desk of..." of some idiot who mixed up some anthrax and put such a thing on display with a plaque explaining what it was, that would be both interesting and provocative of conversation where reason could be brought into play. Nazi uniform, medal, helmet, sigil, patch, letterhead, enigma machine? Same thing. I'll get to firearms below.
As to your first point, no -- but the real question here is, does this have anything to do with the line you posit? Does that line even exist? Let's look closely and see.
With memorabilia, we are talking about, at best, things like daggers, officer's swords and Lugers. Usually we're not even talking about those, but instead, flags, patches, uniforms, medals, a whole range of non-weapon artifacts and records.
These things add no notable destructive power to the individual that making them illegal eliminates. None at all. Take the Luger, for instance. Can't own a Nazi Luger? No, but you can own other pistols, rifles, and etc. Many of them far more destructive, longer range, etc. Hunting is legal (yes, even in Germany) and of course knives and rolling pins and pitchforks and poisons and so forth are in every home. So clearly, we're not talking about anything to do with adding destructive power not already easily available. I have a Luger, you have a Desert Eagle, You're going to make the bigger hole, believe me. You have a quality .222 scoped rifle, I have a Luger, you can shoot me dead before I can even see you in the distance.
So memorabilia and WMD do not exist on a continuum from one to the other. Which was my whole point. WMD are dangerous force-multipliers, hence deserve some special treatment. Memorabilia is not, and does not. But wait!
In the (rare, enormously expensive) case where a historical object actually might be a force multiplier -- say we were talking about a Messerschmidt fighter or a Tiger tank -- then there are other laws that reasonably control ownership, arming, firing and operation of such a thing -- Nazi or otherwise. That would exist on a continuum with WMD. Because it's pretty much that. The amount of damage you could do with a working Tiger (or fighter aircraft) before you could be stopped would be amazing (we've actually seen this happen in the US with older US tanks.) But note that the reason the working Tiger or fighter would be prohibited has nothing at all to do with the fact that is an historical object; it's because they can crush things, blow huge holes in things, drop bombs, all the while being basically unstoppable until very scarce resources are brought to bear upon the machine in question. And in turn, those remedies may create more of a mess. So no tanks or fighters without oversight (and usually, permanent neutering. Concrete down the tank barrel, removal of machine guns and bomb racks, etc.)
Now, WMD. Does that change what an individual can do, multiply their force as does the Tiger tank? Of course it does. More so. So you see, memorabilia do not exist along a continuum with Tiger tanks and WMD. Therefore, the rules applied to WMD should not be applied to memorabilia. Your posited "line" does not exist. It's apples and strudel. No comparison. Memorabilia does not provide force multiplication.
The image is not 3D. Were it rendered back using all the data captured, and given that the data was of adequate resolution to be useful in image reproduction, you would not see a 3D result. You would see a result strictly silhouetted from the shooting POV. All information is acquired from a single perspective.
Even that is going too far. The information that is used to prepare a z-buffer is a full set of 3D data. The z-buffer is generated relative to the user's POV, and can change at any time along with the user's POV, thus being able to reconstruct a scene from every/any angle. That is not true of data from a TOF camera, which cannot be used to reconstruct the scene at all beyond a fixed POV.
The difference comes about because with a classic z-buffer in the output path of a 3D rendering system, the data is 3D on input and the z-buffer serves to filter for any desired POV, taking any arbitrary and variable viewing angle into account. It is a mechanism that is used to produce either mono or stereo data in order to convert any portion of the scene to a human-eye compatible view, either mono or stereo, and when coded for stereo, produces image pairs complete with parallax information as well. When data is supplied from one POV that includes z-depth, that information cannot be used to reproduce the scene in 3D because it contains very little information about it -- it's not actually 3D. It might be more accurately described as stereovision+LIDAR. Basically what it boils down to is, if you have 3D data, a z-buffer can be (and is) used to get you a view from any angle. If you capture the data through a virtual z-buffer (only Z data from one POV), then the scene cannot be used to get you a view from any angle. They do not provide the same functionality, and it is misleading to imply they do.
Acquisition of real-world 3D scene data requires capture from all angles simultaneously. Just as generation of a z-buffer requires full 3D data on every object in the scene in order to produce a result. You could not, for instance, produce a 3D hologram from what you have acquired as a result of stereo+LIDAR. You could from the data that is going into a Z-buffer, though.
Still, selfies of boobs. I think you made a couple of good points. Roundly.
I didn't say it did. TFA (and TFS) title is: " 3D cameras are about to go mainstream. "
3D (X, Y and Z; or width, height, and depth) data is not acquired by these cameras. Therefore, these are not 3D cameras. Therefore 3D cameras are not "about to go mainstream."
They work by acquiring stereo 2D data from a fixed viewing angle. That's two acquisitions from almost the same vantage point, which provides a static illusion of depth via capture of parallax. It does not actually contain depth information on a per-frame basis. They are not 3D cameras.
Yes, that's exactly what I said. :)
You can do this with one 2D camera. However, in order to do this, the reconstructed frame rate goes from acceptable to pitiful -- No one is going to be interested in a playback of the Bar Mitzvah that proceeds at one frame per walk-around. A "3D camera" would capture 3D information. Just as an infrared camera captures infrared, a 2D camera captures 2D information, and an ultraviolet camera captures ultraviolet information. It is absurd to characterize a stereo camera pair as a "3D camera", even without considering the bewilderment that will ensue when they actually arrive due to the dimwitted hijacking of the term "3D" by marketing buffoons.
"3D" is short for "three dimensions." That's what it means; that's what it's always meant; that's what it should mean. Suppose I sold you a "3D rendering system" that turned out to only let you specify X and Y co-ordinates for your objects. And when you complained, as you surely would, I tried to feed you a line about how "look, if you simply build, and then render, 2D models of the same object as it would appear from every possible viewing angle, and then display them one at a time, it's almost the same!" your next phone call would probably be to the better business bureau.
I have owned a Kinect since just about day one. And I am well aware of its nature -- which is not 3D.
The degree of disingenuous wool-pulling over the eyes here is on a level with someone selling you an RGB camera that only captures red and green channels. There's no possible justification for it. None. The resistance to the facts brought about by personal investment in the marketing claptrap is an amazing thing to see -- something that is essentially a particularly rabid form of confirmation bias, where victims of misinformation deny reality because they are unable to admit they've been hoodwinked -- it is one of the things to look for any time propaganda has been drilled into gullible consumers:
o "Hey, bought a new car audio amp, I see!"
x "Yes, it's a Pyle. It's 4000 watts!"
o "No. Dude. It isn't 4000 watts. Someone at Pyle is laughing their head off at you right now."
x "bitch, it says RIGHT HERE that it's 4000 watts!"
o "Sigh."
Essentially the same conversation:
o "Hey, bought a new game motion controller accessory, I see!"
x "Yes, it's a Kinect. It's a 3D motion controller!"
In a consumer video context, when actual 3D imaging becomes available, there is going to be considerable confusion due to this arbitrary and fundamentally inaccurate usage of the term "3D."
I thought any geek would understand this by now. Stereo is not 3D. It isn't even "2 and 1/2 D" as some like to call it. It's stereo. No more, no less.