The value of currency is not just it's face value. The value of a currency is that it allows people to exchange goods and services.
Ideally, the coins ought to cost more to make than their face value (to discourage counterfeiting), but the value of the metal ought to be less than their face value (to discourage people melting them down for the metal).
Obviously, for notes, it is unlikely that the cost of printing will exceed the face value, but it is a lot harder to forge notes, and we can rely more on counterfeit detection technology. If, on the other hand, someone makes counterfeit coins, those would be much harder to detect (unless we start making some sort of smart coins with built-in counterfeiting technology).
How exactly are FAX machines making your costs higher?
Probably because electronic form filling allows you to skip the steps of printing, handwriting, and then scanning each document, in addition to the dial and handshake, and the transmit time, and remember, time is money. Furthermore it reduces material waste and reduces the need for data entry and/or transcription.
And then of course, since fax machines involve moving parts and in most cases ink/toner, there's added time and cost involved in routine maintenance tasks.
Or maybe it discourages them from sending pointless and avoidable communications, such as emails!
The problem isn't that he will stop making money _now_. The problem will surface when he starts losing his most senior staff, or when he wants some of his current staff to do more, take more responsibilities. At that point they might refuse and ask what is in it for them. If you are currently paid 80k and you are asked to do more, or take a more demanding role, you will ask for a raise. if you are a janitor, you can't demand a raise unless he asks you to do more hours.
He will also have trouble recruiting proven talent who will want to out-earn his janitors.
I think this sentiment can be utterly counterproductive.
By virtue of being rich, the rich can sow the seeds for their societies future wealth in many ways. One of the big ways they do this is by spending on things that seem frivolous to most, but slowly become things that everyone takes for granted. This is what progress is.
I could give endless example, but here are a few:
- Passenger air travel used to be the preserve of the wealthy - now this is something that is so cheap that air travel is now completely de-glamourised. i
- ABS brakes were once only in expensive and powerful cars that only the rich could afford. Now they are not only standard fare, they are mandatory in many jurisdictions.
- The first plasma TVs cost in the region of $10,000 and were definitely out of reach for the average person. Now you can get much better TVs for a 50th of that.
While that top end Mercedes is the definition of a true luxury, you should consider that the reason that the car you likely drive today contains features that were first bought by the rich, and their frivolity actually led to useful innovation that are now available in pretty much any car you can think of today.
A more appropriate example for Slashdot is the amount of money many here would be prepared to spend on high end computer gear, particularly back in the day when high end PC gear was incredibly expensive. This wealth effectively "trickled down" to most people who can now afford computers that once were the preserve of the frivolously rich (or of geeks).
So don't knock the spending habits of the wealthy. We need them to continue to spend on the things that we cannot yet afford because one day, all of us will be able to afford them once whoever makes them is all tooled up and wants to recoup their investment (and make a bit of money for themselves while they are at it).
The point wasn't about whether or not the AF447 pilots could have saved the plane (I am sure they could have), the point was that they at least had some time to figure out why the autopilot had failed, and therefore to try and come up with a solution.
I am very aware that the plane still crashed, so ultimately, them having 3 minutes and 30 seconds didn't save them.
In contrast, on a busy highway, this is unlikely to be the case. And even if the highway were not busy, to give an example, if a tyre blows out, the effects are likely to be immediate and require an instant response from the driver if that is the failure mode for the "auto-driver". The driver will not have seconds to respond, and therefore the computer ought to assume that he would not be able to respond in time, and take the appropriate course of action such as stopping safely.
Unlike a plane, a car should ordinarily have the option of stopping and a computer can figure out how to do that. A plane will need to keep going in the event of trouble, and that is why the challenge is very different.
The airliner scenario is only superficially similar.
At cruising altitude, a plane typically has minutes before it crashes to the ground. For example, from the time its problem began, to the point in hit the ocean, Air France flight AF447's pilots had 3 minutes and 30 seconds to try and save the plane. There are typically few, if any other planes in its airspace to worry about, so pilots can do things like take our their operating manuals and run through operating prodecures to attempt to rescue the situation without worrying about hitting the kerb, another plane, etc. If my self driving car is going to give me 3 minutes before the actual crash, then fine. Otherwise, it is less than useless to give the control to a driver who likely doesn't have the correct situational awareness (who might even have fallen asleep).
Even if the driver had not been sleeping, a driver's awareness is reduced because he doesn't have to process what is happening around him all the time like one does when they are driving. So, for example, if the problem is that he is about to crash, unless he was hyper vigilant, he is the worst person in the world to drop into the driving seat so to speak.
Expecting a driver to take control in a failure scenario is not a solution.
I would never trust a car that could require me to take control in an emergency. At the very least, the autonomus driver should get the car to a safe stop before requiring a human to take over.
Netflix are also producing Clarkson, May and Hamond's new show. It won't be called Top Gear of course, the BBC still own the name, but it's being made by the original production crew and the same cast of course.
Personally I'm looking forward to the three way super-hybrid showdown (McLaren P1, Porsche 918 Spyder, and Ferrari La Ferrari) which I've been informed will be filmed next month...
Disclosure: I don't work for Netflix but am friends with one of the ex Top Gear staff.
The Clarkson, Hammond and May show is actually on Amazon!
So are you saying that Netflix should pay real money to have titles that people don't actually watch but like to see that they are available in the library?
At the end of the day, people will renew their subscriptions if they always have something to watch when they fire up Netflix, and they will cancel their subscriptions if they can't find anything to watch on Netflix.
I certainly don't look for Citizen Kane in the library to let me know if the library is any good or not. I look for the stuff I want to watch, watch that stuff, then lok for more stuff.
Some shows are not funded for a whole season. Producers will only commit so much money while they wait for ratings to provide them with an indication of whether or not the show will make them a profit. So the fact that the producers were willing to fund half a season rather than just a pilot indicates that they were willing to risk a lot financially. The fact that it got cancelled means there wasn't enough interest. It is the way TV works unfortunately (unless you are a BBC type organisation which can fund a whole series without really caring about whether or not it is "profitable").
Given that Apple shipped this on 22 October, less than 2 months after the feature was first mainlined in the kernel, I think it is safe to say (on that basis alone) that the Mac had it first.
It is now 8 years, in fact, a few days past 8 years (if Wikipedia is to be believed) since the final version of the GPL v3 license was published. It feels an appropriate length of time to gauge how successful the new license has been.
How do you think we should measure the success of GPL v3? And by this/these measure/(s), do you believe that GPL v3 has been more, less or just as successful as you hoped when you launched it?
When Symbian ruled the roost, most mobile phones sold were dumb phones which are more appliances than they are handheld computers.
Nowadays, your smartphone is in reality a computer that happens to make calls, and needs a lot of additional software for it to work more to the users liking. It will be harder to dislodge Android iOS for the same reason it is hard to dislodge Windows - inertia and a very high barrier to entry. Before smartphone, the only barrier to entry was to make a phone that was better than a Nokia phone. Now you not only need to get the OS right - you also need all the third party apps before customers are willing to buy your product en masse.
But then wouldn't it be better to let the end user choose whether something is optimized in a certain direction?
No, asking end-user to optimize their own software is the silliest thing I have ever heard. And people wonder why Apple is such a success and ${insert_random_OSS_company/software} isn't.
The solution to this is to allow privacy for certain court proceedings and to not allow reporting of the names of the people involved. Basically, grant anonymity to all people involved in criminal proceedings.
That is the easy, non-technological solution to the problem. Every person charged with a crime is a John Doe until he/she is convicted. All court records etc refer to John Doe unless the person has been found guilty and sentenced to prison.
In the Duke Lacrosse case, anyone searching on the internet would just see that x John Does were accused of a crime and, unless you name is actually John Doe, being accused and then acquitted need not leave you with a lifelong association with the crime you did not commit.
One of the "innovations" if you will, to come out of the Zimbabwe elections some years back was that votes are now counted at polling stations. This, together with clear ballot boxes makes it harder to cheat at the count stage. (Still plenty of problems regarding the free-ness and fairness of elections).
Results are posted outside each polling stations too.
In technological terms, we have distributed counting which is more efficient and quicker than transporting results to some central location and then counting there.
The whole point of debt, and in particular of investor imposing high interest rates, is that there is a chance that you will default. If Greece is not allowed to default, then they shouldn't be saddled with high interest payment.
If Greece has a primary surplus, and more importantly, a balance of payments surplus, then they should default, or force a restructuring of their debt. However, they will then know that no one, not even Greek investors, will want to buy any new bonds they issue.
I did not discuss the food pyramid, proteins vs carbs, the amount of fat people should be eating etc. And I don't know of anyone forcing anyone to eat off a food pyramid. You are getting rather hysterical about that. And the bit about where I got my argument from, it's from my brain. It's called logic - try it some time.
Anyway, back on topic, the only point I made was that the prime cause of people being obese is them eating too much. Too much is _obviously_ relative.
You countered by saying this was because they do not do enough exercise. I disagreed, and showed you a chart showing, as an _EXAMPLE_, that Americans eat much more than the Japanese, and that - surprise surprise - they are more obese. In fact, so are the Brits and the Germans.
The point I made is pretty simple, one should not eat more than they need to, otherwise they become obese. If you become obese, it is because you are eating more than your body needs, and your body just stores the excess as fat. I think this is beyond obvious.
If you are a professional athlete your calories needs are obviously greater than those of an office worker. The solution isn't for the office worker to eat as much as a football player and then exercise as much. it is to eat less. The amount you eat should be informed by your energy needs.
This is the point that I was making, perhaps too subtly for you. I made the point that exercise is not a substitute for not over-eating. You shouldn't exercise to get rid of calories you shouldn't have eaten in the first place. You should exercise to remain healthy, and eat enough to allow a healthy amount of exercise. If you can't understand that last point, then there is no point discussing this further.
And most people are not bodybuilders.And I wouldn't call bodybuilders healthy either.
Individuals might be able to do enough exercise to burn off the excess food that you eat, but why do that (except to have a healthy level of physical activity)? If you are exercising just to get rid of the excess food, then maybe the most efficient way to go about it is to eat less. You should be eating enough to maintain a healthy lifestyle, not using exercise as a way to get rid of food you shouldn't have eaten in the first place.
For the amounts that most obese people eat, they are not going to be able to do enough exercise to get rid of the excess food. So they gain weight instead.
I have actually been to Japan, and one thing they don't do is to eat large quantities of food. Oh, and they don't eat over-cook either - the body doesn't expend as much energy digesting cooked food than it does raw food. You certainly don't get 2 litre sodas with your food in Japan. They eat much more healthily than in the west, and in shows in their waistlines.
It's quite obvious than, for example, Americans eat a lot more than the Japanese - about 34% more. is it any wonder the US is one of the most obese countries on the planet?
The average Japanese person also walks a lot more than the average American person, in part because they use public transport a lot more, and are much more likely to cycle to work etc.
Slashdot Mirror
The value of currency is not just it's face value. The value of a currency is that it allows people to exchange goods and services.
Ideally, the coins ought to cost more to make than their face value (to discourage counterfeiting), but the value of the metal ought to be less than their face value (to discourage people melting them down for the metal).
Obviously, for notes, it is unlikely that the cost of printing will exceed the face value, but it is a lot harder to forge notes, and we can rely more on counterfeit detection technology. If, on the other hand, someone makes counterfeit coins, those would be much harder to detect (unless we start making some sort of smart coins with built-in counterfeiting technology).
Tell that to Brendan Eich.
How exactly are FAX machines making your costs higher?
Probably because electronic form filling allows you to skip the steps of printing, handwriting, and then scanning each document, in addition to the dial and handshake, and the transmit time, and remember, time is money. Furthermore it reduces material waste and reduces the need for data entry and/or transcription.
And then of course, since fax machines involve moving parts and in most cases ink/toner, there's added time and cost involved in routine maintenance tasks.
Or maybe it discourages them from sending pointless and avoidable communications, such as emails!
The problem isn't that he will stop making money _now_. The problem will surface when he starts losing his most senior staff, or when he wants some of his current staff to do more, take more responsibilities. At that point they might refuse and ask what is in it for them. If you are currently paid 80k and you are asked to do more, or take a more demanding role, you will ask for a raise. if you are a janitor, you can't demand a raise unless he asks you to do more hours.
He will also have trouble recruiting proven talent who will want to out-earn his janitors.
I think this sentiment can be utterly counterproductive.
By virtue of being rich, the rich can sow the seeds for their societies future wealth in many ways. One of the big ways they do this is by spending on things that seem frivolous to most, but slowly become things that everyone takes for granted. This is what progress is.
I could give endless example, but here are a few:
- Passenger air travel used to be the preserve of the wealthy - now this is something that is so cheap that air travel is now completely de-glamourised. i
- ABS brakes were once only in expensive and powerful cars that only the rich could afford. Now they are not only standard fare, they are mandatory in many jurisdictions.
- The first plasma TVs cost in the region of $10,000 and were definitely out of reach for the average person. Now you can get much better TVs for a 50th of that.
While that top end Mercedes is the definition of a true luxury, you should consider that the reason that the car you likely drive today contains features that were first bought by the rich, and their frivolity actually led to useful innovation that are now available in pretty much any car you can think of today.
A more appropriate example for Slashdot is the amount of money many here would be prepared to spend on high end computer gear, particularly back in the day when high end PC gear was incredibly expensive. This wealth effectively "trickled down" to most people who can now afford computers that once were the preserve of the frivolously rich (or of geeks).
So don't knock the spending habits of the wealthy. We need them to continue to spend on the things that we cannot yet afford because one day, all of us will be able to afford them once whoever makes them is all tooled up and wants to recoup their investment (and make a bit of money for themselves while they are at it).
It's not costing them any bandwidth. It's costing them actual money though, you know, dollars and cents.
Or maybe you have completely missed the point!
The point wasn't about whether or not the AF447 pilots could have saved the plane (I am sure they could have), the point was that they at least had some time to figure out why the autopilot had failed, and therefore to try and come up with a solution.
I am very aware that the plane still crashed, so ultimately, them having 3 minutes and 30 seconds didn't save them.
In contrast, on a busy highway, this is unlikely to be the case. And even if the highway were not busy, to give an example, if a tyre blows out, the effects are likely to be immediate and require an instant response from the driver if that is the failure mode for the "auto-driver". The driver will not have seconds to respond, and therefore the computer ought to assume that he would not be able to respond in time, and take the appropriate course of action such as stopping safely.
Unlike a plane, a car should ordinarily have the option of stopping and a computer can figure out how to do that. A plane will need to keep going in the event of trouble, and that is why the challenge is very different.
The airliner scenario is only superficially similar.
At cruising altitude, a plane typically has minutes before it crashes to the ground. For example, from the time its problem began, to the point in hit the ocean, Air France flight AF447's pilots had 3 minutes and 30 seconds to try and save the plane. There are typically few, if any other planes in its airspace to worry about, so pilots can do things like take our their operating manuals and run through operating prodecures to attempt to rescue the situation without worrying about hitting the kerb, another plane, etc. If my self driving car is going to give me 3 minutes before the actual crash, then fine. Otherwise, it is less than useless to give the control to a driver who likely doesn't have the correct situational awareness (who might even have fallen asleep).
Even if the driver had not been sleeping, a driver's awareness is reduced because he doesn't have to process what is happening around him all the time like one does when they are driving. So, for example, if the problem is that he is about to crash, unless he was hyper vigilant, he is the worst person in the world to drop into the driving seat so to speak.
Expecting a driver to take control in a failure scenario is not a solution.
I would never trust a car that could require me to take control in an emergency. At the very least, the autonomus driver should get the car to a safe stop before requiring a human to take over.
Woz didn't make Jobs a billionaire. Jobs became a billionaire when Pixar went public, you know, that small animation studio.
The only success that Woz has had was when he had Jobs.
Jobs had success over and over again without Woz.
Netflix are also producing Clarkson, May and Hamond's new show. It won't be called Top Gear of course, the BBC still own the name, but it's being made by the original production crew and the same cast of course.
Personally I'm looking forward to the three way super-hybrid showdown (McLaren P1, Porsche 918 Spyder, and Ferrari La Ferrari) which I've been informed will be filmed next month...
Disclosure: I don't work for Netflix but am friends with one of the ex Top Gear staff.
The Clarkson, Hammond and May show is actually on Amazon!
So are you saying that Netflix should pay real money to have titles that people don't actually watch but like to see that they are available in the library?
At the end of the day, people will renew their subscriptions if they always have something to watch when they fire up Netflix, and they will cancel their subscriptions if they can't find anything to watch on Netflix.
I certainly don't look for Citizen Kane in the library to let me know if the library is any good or not. I look for the stuff I want to watch, watch that stuff, then lok for more stuff.
Some shows are not funded for a whole season. Producers will only commit so much money while they wait for ratings to provide them with an indication of whether or not the show will make them a profit. So the fact that the producers were willing to fund half a season rather than just a pilot indicates that they were willing to risk a lot financially. The fact that it got cancelled means there wasn't enough interest. It is the way TV works unfortunately (unless you are a BBC type organisation which can fund a whole series without really caring about whether or not it is "profitable").
Given that Apple shipped this on 22 October, less than 2 months after the feature was first mainlined in the kernel, I think it is safe to say (on that basis alone) that the Mac had it first.
Dear Mr Stallman
It is now 8 years, in fact, a few days past 8 years (if Wikipedia is to be believed) since the final version of the GPL v3 license was published. It feels an appropriate length of time to gauge how successful the new license has been.
How do you think we should measure the success of GPL v3? And by this/these measure/(s), do you believe that GPL v3 has been more, less or just as successful as you hoped when you launched it?
Apples and Oranges.
When Symbian ruled the roost, most mobile phones sold were dumb phones which are more appliances than they are handheld computers.
Nowadays, your smartphone is in reality a computer that happens to make calls, and needs a lot of additional software for it to work more to the users liking. It will be harder to dislodge Android iOS for the same reason it is hard to dislodge Windows - inertia and a very high barrier to entry. Before smartphone, the only barrier to entry was to make a phone that was better than a Nokia phone. Now you not only need to get the OS right - you also need all the third party apps before customers are willing to buy your product en masse.
But then wouldn't it be better to let the end user choose whether something is optimized in a certain direction?
No, asking end-user to optimize their own software is the silliest thing I have ever heard. And people wonder why Apple is such a success and ${insert_random_OSS_company/software} isn't.
The solution to this is to allow privacy for certain court proceedings and to not allow reporting of the names of the people involved. Basically, grant anonymity to all people involved in criminal proceedings.
That is the easy, non-technological solution to the problem. Every person charged with a crime is a John Doe until he/she is convicted. All court records etc refer to John Doe unless the person has been found guilty and sentenced to prison.
In the Duke Lacrosse case, anyone searching on the internet would just see that x John Does were accused of a crime and, unless you name is actually John Doe, being accused and then acquitted need not leave you with a lifelong association with the crime you did not commit.
One of the "innovations" if you will, to come out of the Zimbabwe elections some years back was that votes are now counted at polling stations. This, together with clear ballot boxes makes it harder to cheat at the count stage. (Still plenty of problems regarding the free-ness and fairness of elections).
Results are posted outside each polling stations too.
In technological terms, we have distributed counting which is more efficient and quicker than transporting results to some central location and then counting there.
If you are not viewing their ads, you are not making them money.
You are as much a loss to them as I would be to BMW if I wanted a BMW but didn't want to pay for it. No loss.
The whole point of debt, and in particular of investor imposing high interest rates, is that there is a chance that you will default. If Greece is not allowed to default, then they shouldn't be saddled with high interest payment.
If Greece has a primary surplus, and more importantly, a balance of payments surplus, then they should default, or force a restructuring of their debt. However, they will then know that no one, not even Greek investors, will want to buy any new bonds they issue.
This battery could power a smaller sized home for a whole day. Kind of thing that can make solar energy viable.
Love him or loather him, but Musk is changing the world.
You are going remarkably offtopic!
I did not discuss the food pyramid, proteins vs carbs, the amount of fat people should be eating etc. And I don't know of anyone forcing anyone to eat off a food pyramid. You are getting rather hysterical about that. And the bit about where I got my argument from, it's from my brain. It's called logic - try it some time.
Anyway, back on topic, the only point I made was that the prime cause of people being obese is them eating too much. Too much is _obviously_ relative.
You countered by saying this was because they do not do enough exercise. I disagreed, and showed you a chart showing, as an _EXAMPLE_, that Americans eat much more than the Japanese, and that - surprise surprise - they are more obese. In fact, so are the Brits and the Germans.
The point I made is pretty simple, one should not eat more than they need to, otherwise they become obese. If you become obese, it is because you are eating more than your body needs, and your body just stores the excess as fat. I think this is beyond obvious.
If you are a professional athlete your calories needs are obviously greater than those of an office worker. The solution isn't for the office worker to eat as much as a football player and then exercise as much. it is to eat less. The amount you eat should be informed by your energy needs.
This is the point that I was making, perhaps too subtly for you. I made the point that exercise is not a substitute for not over-eating. You shouldn't exercise to get rid of calories you shouldn't have eaten in the first place. You should exercise to remain healthy, and eat enough to allow a healthy amount of exercise. If you can't understand that last point, then there is no point discussing this further.
And most people are not bodybuilders.And I wouldn't call bodybuilders healthy either.
Individuals might be able to do enough exercise to burn off the excess food that you eat, but why do that (except to have a healthy level of physical activity)? If you are exercising just to get rid of the excess food, then maybe the most efficient way to go about it is to eat less. You should be eating enough to maintain a healthy lifestyle, not using exercise as a way to get rid of food you shouldn't have eaten in the first place.
For the amounts that most obese people eat, they are not going to be able to do enough exercise to get rid of the excess food. So they gain weight instead.
I have actually been to Japan, and one thing they don't do is to eat large quantities of food. Oh, and they don't eat over-cook either - the body doesn't expend as much energy digesting cooked food than it does raw food. You certainly don't get 2 litre sodas with your food in Japan. They eat much more healthily than in the west, and in shows in their waistlines.
And if you don't believe me, check this out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
It's quite obvious than, for example, Americans eat a lot more than the Japanese - about 34% more. is it any wonder the US is one of the most obese countries on the planet?
The average Japanese person also walks a lot more than the average American person, in part because they use public transport a lot more, and are much more likely to cycle to work etc.
Obesity is not caused by lack of exercise. It is caused by eating too much.
Exercise is not a good way to reduce weight. Eating less (and better) is.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/heal...