Workers at foxconn have access to a diverse diet, which, by the way, is actually pretty tough to get on 2 dollars a day. They have generally clean water, again, not something they would have had as starving peasants. Oh, and they aren't starving. They, and their children will be able to read and write.
Sounds reasonable, but how do we know that they and their children will be able to read and write? Is Foxconn actually enrolling their employees in literacy classes?
And how exactly do you raise a child in a 10x12 dorm room that you're sharing with four other people? How do you even have a chance to have a married life? From what I've read, Foxconn employees are worked until they literally can't work any more -- what happens to them when they've outlived their usefulness to Foxconn?
This all still sounds like massive exploitation to me. Maybe the wages are reasonable for the economy, and eating is better than starving, but a humane employer still needs to enable their employees to have a life outside the company. If you're working 16 hours a day, living in a company dorm where you can be rousted from your bed to work a special shift for Apple, buying from the company store, and have no chance of a life outside of work, you're effectively a slave.
Alot of what was mentioned in the NY Times is new information. Describing worker dormitories
Why this obsession about worker dormitories?
Could it have anything to do with squeezing 15 beds into a 12' x 12' room (as mentioned in TFA)? The beds are stacked and so close together that you have to slide into them. If that's not worker abuse, I don't know what is.
The last thing content producers want is to have consumers creating their own content on mobile devices instead of passively viewing their ad-loaded streams.
I had a similar experience -- college was even worse than high school.
In my case, it was a private Ivy League university where I was supported by a scholarship. I was able to deal with the bullies and cliques in high school, but the level of crushing elitism, sexism, bigotry, and outright racism I encountered in college was something I had never experienced in my entire life. Those people were from a different world of privilege and entitlement.
College was the worst four years of my life, but fortunately my life and career post-graduation has made up for it in spades. It does get better, but not necessarily in college.
The mainstream Web will break off and become the equivalent of a U.S. cable TV network. Meanwhile the rest of us will find ways to tunnel through the wider Internet and World Wide Web through off-shore proxies and alternative DNS servers. It will be like using the Internet in China.
I hear you. It's damn frustrating with these two bills are coming up at the same time. Both bills are strikes through the heart of the U.S. Constitution, but the defense appropriations bill that enables the government to detain U.S. citizens without trial on the mere suspicion of terrorism is the more horrible. Yet it doesn't seem to be getting nearly the amount of attention as SOPA.
Thanks for the correction. I see that what I described is probably more properly referred to as file shadowing. And you're right, if I did "rm -rf/" just before rsync did its thing every night, I would lose up to a month of new data instead of just a day.
I thought it would be like one of those blank billboards with a "your ad here" kind of thing, but it looks like Google is trying to be the next Disney from the tone of that Sophie ad. I was stunned at the emotional outreach they use to gather more product for their customers.
Yeah, Facebook is just trying to protect its business model... but the prospect of two Zuckerbergs suing each other promises to be pretty entertaining! They definitely deserve each other...
It depends upon how well your employer is doing and how much they value their employees. At my previous gig we all had nice shiny new MacBook Pros that were purchased before the Great Recession started, but they sure weren't going to replace those 2007 MBPs with newer versions the way the business was going.
At my current gig I was outfitted with a brand new max-spec 2011 MacBook Pro along with a beautiful 27" Apple Cinema LED monitor, and they told me I could get a MacPro tower as well if it would make the builds go faster. I thought that was overkill so I opted for an SSD for the MacBook Pro instead.
The equipment I use at work has almost always been better than I could afford at home, going all the way back to when I was developing on VAXen.
That means that having a mirrored pair as a minimum -- even on a home machine -- is not an optional frill, it is a necessity.
Uh, RAID is a very bad idea, unless you need 100% uptime (like on a server with hot swap).... For home use, the much better option is to use the second drive for frequent backups, ideally automated (so you can't forget to do it).
That's exactly what mirroring means -- having a 2nd drive that is copied from the first at regular intervals through rsync or something similar.
I'll concur with this strategy. HDDs are cheap and have huge capacities now, but you have to assume that they will fail. If you have two drives on separate file systems hosting the same data, then you are substantially less likely to have both fail at the same time and lose all your data. I also keep a 3rd copy off-site at my office and rotate the drives every month or so.
SOPA is horrible, but the U.S. is not the entire WWW. Shouldn't we simply be able to use alternative DNS resolvers if the U.S. Govt. censors the ones it controls? Or does the U.S. Govt. really have the much control over the entire WWW?
Defenders of Carrier IQ insist that they're not collecting keystrokes, capturing SMS messages, or relaying personal information to the FBI, and that they're just collecting information to improve the quality of the network. The argument is irrelevant. Clearly the software has the capability of performing all these functions even if it isn't currently being used that way, and if the capability is there, it can be abused by third parties. Its existence on a personal device on anything other than an opt-in basis is unacceptable.
With horse drawn carriages there were two problems that automobiles solved. First, you had to fuel/feed your horse, even if you weren't going anywhere, an automobile you only have to fuel if you want to use it. Second, horse drawn carriages had a maximum sustainable speed that made travel of any significant distance (more than a few miles) a serious undertaking.
You forgot about the third problem, the vast amounts of horse poo clogging the city streets. I seem to recall some projection at the time that claimed a limit to the growth of urban environments based on the amount of horse manure a city could reasonably dispose of.
An AI can be recreated if erased by supplying identical inputs and initial conditions.
I'm not so sure. Surely an AI requires software and training to be intelligent, in addition to the hardware. And what constitutes that software and training?
I would claim that AI would have to trained pretty much the same way a human child is raised: embodied in the real world, learning how to avoid dangerous situations, navigate its way to desirable outcomes, maybe even fall in love with another sentient being.
At that point the AI cannot simply be recreated after being erased. It is the sum of both its experiences and its hardware.
Linus Torvalds - 4:24 PM - Public
So the google pages thing might actually work as a reasonable place to do kernel release announcements.
I always felt like I wouldn't want to do them on my personal page, but having a G+ page dedicated to Linux makes the announcements actually make sense.
So if you are following me because you expected to see kernel announcements, and you haven't figured out already that I'm very spotty with that, you might want to unfollow me, and follow the Linux page instead.
Of course, I might be spotty there too. It's not like I'm the most organized person in the world. But at least there is one release announcement there now.
And the actual announcement:
Linus Torvalds - 3:53 PM - Public
By popular demand...
Linus Torvalds shared a Google+ page with you.
Linux - you know you want it
https://www.google.com
End-to-end encryption keeps them from knowing squat about your browsing habits other than the fact that you prefer Google. Of course, Google knows all.
Exactly this. I had the same experience with the iPad. I just didn't get that it was supposed to be a personal device and it was very confusing at first. It never occurred to me that a device costing hundreds of dollars wasn't expected to be shared by everybody in the family; I kept looking for ways to allow both my wife and I to use it without exposing each others personal stuff, and if finally dawned on me that Apple expected everybody to have their own iPad. WTF?
Do you not visualize when thinking and imagining things? Mental imagery is more basic to abstract thought than language. Imagining empty space without words is easy; finding the words to describe it is more difficult. Even your syllogism example, in my mind, immediately appears as a set of concentric circles: A in the center, B surrounding A, and C circumscribing both. That mental image to me seems to convey the truth of the syllogism far more directly than expressing it in words.
I downgraded to Firefox 3.6 because it's the most stable supported version. None of the other major versions get any security fixes unless you upgrade to the next major version. Firefox 4 and above simply don't work in the corporate environment.
SeaMonkey maybe. I'm seriously thinking about going back. Maybe Opera, but that apparently isn't open source, and that would entail getting used to a new interface.
I'm on Firefox 4 at home and constantly have to dismiss the nag screen that says I need to update to 5. I had to downgrade to 3.6 at work in order to continue using Firefox there.
It's really sad to see Firefox dying like this, and all due to the arrogance of its developers.
Slashdot Mirror
Workers at foxconn have access to a diverse diet, which, by the way, is actually pretty tough to get on 2 dollars a day. They have generally clean water, again, not something they would have had as starving peasants. Oh, and they aren't starving. They, and their children will be able to read and write.
Sounds reasonable, but how do we know that they and their children will be able to read and write? Is Foxconn actually enrolling their employees in literacy classes?
And how exactly do you raise a child in a 10x12 dorm room that you're sharing with four other people? How do you even have a chance to have a married life? From what I've read, Foxconn employees are worked until they literally can't work any more -- what happens to them when they've outlived their usefulness to Foxconn?
This all still sounds like massive exploitation to me. Maybe the wages are reasonable for the economy, and eating is better than starving, but a humane employer still needs to enable their employees to have a life outside the company. If you're working 16 hours a day, living in a company dorm where you can be rousted from your bed to work a special shift for Apple, buying from the company store, and have no chance of a life outside of work, you're effectively a slave.
Why this obsession about worker dormitories?
Could it have anything to do with squeezing 15 beds into a 12' x 12' room (as mentioned in TFA)? The beds are stacked and so close together that you have to slide into them. If that's not worker abuse, I don't know what is.
The last thing content producers want is to have consumers creating their own content on mobile devices instead of passively viewing their ad-loaded streams.
I had a similar experience -- college was even worse than high school.
In my case, it was a private Ivy League university where I was supported by a scholarship. I was able to deal with the bullies and cliques in high school, but the level of crushing elitism, sexism, bigotry, and outright racism I encountered in college was something I had never experienced in my entire life. Those people were from a different world of privilege and entitlement.
College was the worst four years of my life, but fortunately my life and career post-graduation has made up for it in spades. It does get better, but not necessarily in college.
The mainstream Web will break off and become the equivalent of a U.S. cable TV network. Meanwhile the rest of us will find ways to tunnel through the wider Internet and World Wide Web through off-shore proxies and alternative DNS servers. It will be like using the Internet in China.
I hear you. It's damn frustrating with these two bills are coming up at the same time. Both bills are strikes through the heart of the U.S. Constitution, but the defense appropriations bill that enables the government to detain U.S. citizens without trial on the mere suspicion of terrorism is the more horrible. Yet it doesn't seem to be getting nearly the amount of attention as SOPA.
Thanks for the correction. I see that what I described is probably more properly referred to as file shadowing. And you're right, if I did "rm -rf /" just before rsync did its thing every night, I would lose up to a month of new data instead of just a day.
Who knew?
I thought it would be like one of those blank billboards with a "your ad here" kind of thing, but it looks like Google is trying to be the next Disney from the tone of that Sophie ad. I was stunned at the emotional outreach they use to gather more product for their customers.
Yeah, Facebook is just trying to protect its business model... but the prospect of two Zuckerbergs suing each other promises to be pretty entertaining! They definitely deserve each other...
It depends upon how well your employer is doing and how much they value their employees. At my previous gig we all had nice shiny new MacBook Pros that were purchased before the Great Recession started, but they sure weren't going to replace those 2007 MBPs with newer versions the way the business was going.
At my current gig I was outfitted with a brand new max-spec 2011 MacBook Pro along with a beautiful 27" Apple Cinema LED monitor, and they told me I could get a MacPro tower as well if it would make the builds go faster. I thought that was overkill so I opted for an SSD for the MacBook Pro instead.
The equipment I use at work has almost always been better than I could afford at home, going all the way back to when I was developing on VAXen.
That means that having a mirrored pair as a minimum -- even on a home machine -- is not an optional frill, it is a necessity.
Uh, RAID is a very bad idea, unless you need 100% uptime (like on a server with hot swap).... For home use, the much better option is to use the second drive for frequent backups, ideally automated (so you can't forget to do it).
That's exactly what mirroring means -- having a 2nd drive that is copied from the first at regular intervals through rsync or something similar.
I'll concur with this strategy. HDDs are cheap and have huge capacities now, but you have to assume that they will fail. If you have two drives on separate file systems hosting the same data, then you are substantially less likely to have both fail at the same time and lose all your data. I also keep a 3rd copy off-site at my office and rotate the drives every month or so.
SOPA is horrible, but the U.S. is not the entire WWW. Shouldn't we simply be able to use alternative DNS resolvers if the U.S. Govt. censors the ones it controls? Or does the U.S. Govt. really have the much control over the entire WWW?
Defenders of Carrier IQ insist that they're not collecting keystrokes, capturing SMS messages, or relaying personal information to the FBI, and that they're just collecting information to improve the quality of the network. The argument is irrelevant. Clearly the software has the capability of performing all these functions even if it isn't currently being used that way, and if the capability is there, it can be abused by third parties. Its existence on a personal device on anything other than an opt-in basis is unacceptable.
With horse drawn carriages there were two problems that automobiles solved. First, you had to fuel/feed your horse, even if you weren't going anywhere, an automobile you only have to fuel if you want to use it. Second, horse drawn carriages had a maximum sustainable speed that made travel of any significant distance (more than a few miles) a serious undertaking.
You forgot about the third problem, the vast amounts of horse poo clogging the city streets. I seem to recall some projection at the time that claimed a limit to the growth of urban environments based on the amount of horse manure a city could reasonably dispose of.
An AI can be recreated if erased by supplying identical inputs and initial conditions.
I'm not so sure. Surely an AI requires software and training to be intelligent, in addition to the hardware. And what constitutes that software and training?
I would claim that AI would have to trained pretty much the same way a human child is raised: embodied in the real world, learning how to avoid dangerous situations, navigate its way to desirable outcomes, maybe even fall in love with another sentient being.
At that point the AI cannot simply be recreated after being erased. It is the sum of both its experiences and its hardware.
Linus Torvalds - 4:24 PM - Public So the google pages thing might actually work as a reasonable place to do kernel release announcements. I always felt like I wouldn't want to do them on my personal page, but having a G+ page dedicated to Linux makes the announcements actually make sense. So if you are following me because you expected to see kernel announcements, and you haven't figured out already that I'm very spotty with that, you might want to unfollow me, and follow the Linux page instead. Of course, I might be spotty there too. It's not like I'm the most organized person in the world. But at least there is one release announcement there now.
And the actual announcement:
Linus Torvalds - 3:53 PM - Public By popular demand... Linus Torvalds shared a Google+ page with you. Linux - you know you want it
https://www.google.com End-to-end encryption keeps them from knowing squat about your browsing habits other than the fact that you prefer Google. Of course, Google knows all.
And if you prefer Google not to know all: http://www.googlesharing.net/
+1 on this one, another bug I forgot to mention in the survey.
Yes, this exactly. I wish I'd remembered to mention this when I filled out the survey. Please fix the "get more" button.
Exactly this. I had the same experience with the iPad. I just didn't get that it was supposed to be a personal device and it was very confusing at first. It never occurred to me that a device costing hundreds of dollars wasn't expected to be shared by everybody in the family; I kept looking for ways to allow both my wife and I to use it without exposing each others personal stuff, and if finally dawned on me that Apple expected everybody to have their own iPad. WTF?
Do you not visualize when thinking and imagining things? Mental imagery is more basic to abstract thought than language. Imagining empty space without words is easy; finding the words to describe it is more difficult. Even your syllogism example, in my mind, immediately appears as a set of concentric circles: A in the center, B surrounding A, and C circumscribing both. That mental image to me seems to convey the truth of the syllogism far more directly than expressing it in words.
Perhaps Jobs just prefers to donate anonymously, as many of us do.
3.6 is is the long-term release as far as I can tell. It still gets updates for security fixes. I just updated to 3.6.20 a few days ago.
I downgraded to Firefox 3.6 because it's the most stable supported version. None of the other major versions get any security fixes unless you upgrade to the next major version. Firefox 4 and above simply don't work in the corporate environment.
SeaMonkey maybe. I'm seriously thinking about going back. Maybe Opera, but that apparently isn't open source, and that would entail getting used to a new interface.
I'm on Firefox 4 at home and constantly have to dismiss the nag screen that says I need to update to 5. I had to downgrade to 3.6 at work in order to continue using Firefox there.
It's really sad to see Firefox dying like this, and all due to the arrogance of its developers.