If we repeat what we did with searching for Steve Fossett's plane using Google Earth crossed with FoldIt and SETI@home we can develop a real-time picture of exactly what the 1% are doing, where, and when. That's a tremendous amount of intelligence we can leverage in many ways.
Try it, get some data, publish it on the web, then tell me how long it takes you to get an injunction telling you to stop or face imprisonment. I can't tell you what the charge will be, but, rest assured, there will be something, and it will take more money than you have to fight it.
"There's almost parity,' writes Andrew Sprung. 'You have a truncheon or gun, I have a camera. You inflict pain, I inflict infamy.'""
haha come on, parity?
Has this guy ever been pepper sprayed or beaten up before?
People shouldnt have to endure this to receive justice
Its a sad day our society thinks this is some kind of achievement or "balance" of power
The balance of power has always been a slow, grinding play of justice against violent acts.
You rob a convenience store, or ten, it profits you in the moment, but spending years behind bars is the price. If a cop beats a protester to death for no apparent reason and it is covered by several independent video cameras, he's a lot more likely to answer for his actions than if it was merely witnessed by 50 protesters who were also being beaten.
So, just for clarification, you're a computer user that builds his own machines and doesn't understand the concept of paying more for stuff that other people don't understand the value of. Right?
Not exactly, I understand the value of video cards. I understand that a $19 video card will serve my needs, draw less current, while making less heat and noise. While a $300 video card would play StarCraft at higher settings and give me slightly more resolution and frame rate than the $19 card, StarCraft II is still playable on the $19 card, and for the other 99% of my computer usage, the $19 card is superior - even if it cost the same as the $300 card.
Yah, VAT is a bitch, and food in general is expensive as you approach the Arctic Circle, same problems in Alaska.
I traveled by train up to Narvik and back over the course of about a week - food was so damned expensive on the trip that I ate very little, but after a week, I finally went into a grocery store in the middle of northern Sweden and bought whatever I wanted for lunch from the deli, price no object. I think it was about 300Kr (US$40+) for stuff that might have cost $15 in the states.
I bought fresh cakes from a local grocery store bakery on Miami Beach for $6 to $9 in 1997ish - whole cakes, you know the kind that you could cut into a dozen slices and each slice would still be twice the size of a cupcake. Being Miami Beach, at some point they may have stepped up the prices, but their regular clientele in the 1990s were very cost conscious, so they did better with low prices and high volume.
Sadly, the mom and pop bakery around the corner may be suffering loss of business to these new "gourmet" bakeries, and thus have to raise their prices to stay in business... shouldn't be too much of a problem since they still cost less than the competition... but when you're squeezed between "snoberia" and WalMart, it can be hard to keep that niche open.
Nowhere in TFA does it actually say she lost 20k... so it costs her a little over £9 to make a dozen cupcakes... Though I also don't really understand who the hell pays £26 for a dozen cupcakes.
Yeah, and what kind of cupcake costs 75p to make? I suspect that 75p includes all overhead for the building, labor, accountancy firm, janitor, annual contribution to the neighborhood business association, and payments on the owner's leased Mercedes, which she only uses for business purposes, of course.
If they had a batch order for 100,000 units, I bet costs per unit dropped considerably.
I wanted Maemo to succeed, but it seems to be knocked back into Gentoo land, unlikely to ever reach more than a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of people, and cost them great effort to get at it.
Maemo never had time to develop soul sucking modules - if it had gotten anywhere near Verizon, you can be sure it would have become a world-class Dementor.
Microsoft may be many things, but they have always respected privacy. In fact, they have never really cared about personal data the way Google does. All they want to do is sell you the software and be done with it. Google, on the other hand, gives you the software for free but then keeps tracking your every move. I rather choose the first one, but i guess it's everyone's own choice.
And, therein lies the stagnation of MSFT and the growth of GOOG. Regardless of how any of us feel, personally, the majority of the world would rather be given something for free, and they don't much care about or understand the implications of sharing their personal data. Hopefully we continue to have choices and Microsoft doesn't start getting smart about beating Google at their own game.
Well - to take the "synthetic happiness is just as good" thing to an extreme, heroin users are some of the happiest people I can imagine, when they are fixing.
Circling back to the whole "alien contact" thing, if aliens do make significant contact with us at a time when we are not yet "up to their level," we may well be happier after they do - they may give us technology that ends the energy crisis, or disease, but as your videos point out, happiness is a fleeting thing, even if all of our current problems are solved, we will have new ones that will make us unhappy: too much choice at the grocery store, no quiet time away from constant availability to our friends and relatives, etc.
Then there is the darker side of alien first contact. I could well imagine an alien craft limping into our solar system in need of 10,000kg of some rare element - they make contact, and after 3 months getting to know us and our language, ask politely if we would collect it for them (after all, with the technology they have on their home planet, they can extract that easily...) we have difficulty helping them, they need it or they will be stuck here, how long before they decide to start taking out our satellites or dropping rocks on us from orbit to help us decide to help them? That's the kind of scenario where it would be desirable to have developed our own space travel capabilities as much as possible before first contact.
Sure, after the aliens have left and the bulk of human society is knocked back to the Middle Ages, when you ask them to self-rate their happiness on a scale of 1-10, those surviving humans will be just as happy then as we are now with our abundant food, easy planet-wide transportation and instant communications. Still, I think it is desirable to have the ability to chose to help the aliens, or not if that's what we really think is best for us, rather than have them chose to force us to.
And, back to Earth, I am well aware that the majority of humans on this planet do not have abundant food, etc. And, if you give them the same happiness self-reporting test (which has been done), what you get back will be more influenced by social norms about how people commonly express themselves, rather than anything I would call a true measure of happiness.
I don't have a true measure of happiness, that's not what I do - I just know it when I see it. As for those "scientists" who do have a bunch of data and charts to back up their assertions, be sure to nail them down about the fine print, limitations of their methods, scope of applicability, etc. 20 minute TED presentations are pretty cool to watch, neat to think about, and informative, but they tend to gloss over the fine print.
I think it is more the member banks who issue the cards rather than "Visa" or "MasterCard" themselves... I have had a Visa card from a small credit union, and it has never gone on "fraud alert" for any reason. I have also had a Visa card from a couple of large commercial banks, and they are pretty quick to notice when I'm in a strange town, or even buying things in my own town but out of my normal pattern.
I went on a "wardrobe replacement" shopping trip to the local mall, bought maybe $1000 worth of clothes - more than 10x what I had spent in that mall in the previous 5 years... next day I'm trying to buy some gas and the card isn't working. Most times the bank will reinstate the card immediately upon a phone call.
Read deeper, Visa denies knowing anything about marital status at all... So, maybe saying "Visa" or "MasterCard" knows these things is inaccurate, maybe we need to probe their member banks that issue the cards, you know the ones - the ones that shut down your credit when you take an unusual trip out of town or buy a gift from an unusual place so you have to call them, assure them that the charge was yours, and ask them to please let you buy some gasoline now?
Mr. Dan's synthetic happiness sounds data backed and plausible, but if it were really true, more people would go to prison and nursing homes willingly.
Barry Schwartz (Mr. BS), raises a very good point about too much choice. I don't think that having millions of choices brings happiness - I think that having the _power_ to choose those things you see is what brings happiness. In some sense, these millions of consumer choices that are presented to today's peasants is a way of distracting them from the fact that they cannot afford waterfront property, First Class travel, servants, handmade clothing, etc.
The denial I read said "Visa does not track marital status" blah blah blah, o.k. Visa may not, but the credit reporting bureaus used by the banks which issue Visa cards sure as hell do. And, I get a statement at the end of the year that breaks down my purchases into food, fuel, entertainment, etc. I find it hard to believe that nobody is tracking any of that data at a higher level of granularity than they are reporting it back to me... maybe not, maybe I'm just paranoid, but I know that 25 years ago, managers at grocery stores had real-time sales figures, down to the individual UPC codes and aggregated in a dozen different ways, I'm sure it wasn't long before that data made its way back to chain headquarters in real-time. And, yes, loyalty cards make it easier for the stores to track your patterns, but I use my cash-back credit card to buy groceries, they certainly could track me by that if they wanted to.
What might be interesting is an at-large election to vote for re-districting proposals. The top vote getting proposals that, in aggregate, received 50% of the vote could run-off again and again until we spend our entire lives voting on how we vote... that would be fair and equitable, right?
Wow, he couldn't have pushed the "Linux succeeded because BSD had legal troubles" thing any harder What was that? Three mentions of it? I don't personally agree, I think Linux succeeded on it's own merit, but anyhow
Everything succeeds on it's own merit, I think the sour apples he was complaining about was that BSD would likely have succeeded first or better than Linux, if only it hand't been mired in the legal problems.
Yeah, and I can point to a dozen things in my past that have "prevented" me from making millions...
The more interesting data mining is currently implemented as trade secrets. Apparently, the credit card companies can predict, with 99% accuracy, if you are going to get a divorce within the next two years.
They could do useful little tricks like reminding you about the yeast at the checkout counter, but that would be creepy to most people and not as profitable for the company with the data.
Can someone who is shed some light on what would need to happen for this quagmire to end?
A gradually increasing restriction on granting new silly, obvious patents. A gradual raising of the bar in what it takes to defend a patent successfully.
The real problem is: any shock to the status quo will make the people with money nervous, they'll feel uncertain about the future and less confident in predicting how they are going to turn their giant pile of cash into a more giant pile of cash, and in the face of that uncertainty, they'll just sit on their piles and watch them shrink slowly instead of putting the money at risk (in use).
Patents are a big part of that security blanket for investors, it makes them feel warm and fuzzy knowing how they can strike back at other kids who might try to steal their lunch money, it's kind of like that line "God created man, but Mr. Smith & Wesson made all men equal." A smaller version of nuclear detente'. If you have access to a sufficient nuclear arsenal of patents, you can go up against much larger companies and hold your own with a threat of mutual annihilation.
I put part of the blame on the.com bubble - investors were feeling all warm and fuzzy then, and the patent office was helping them feel that way by granting them patents on whatever they wanted. Change the rules quickly, and you'll have negative economic consequences.
How exactly does one get a patent on location-based reminders? I know I'm not the only one who has considered that idea and the actual implementation should be fairly straightforward (when you consider that APIs and hardware required for it all exist, hell even if you go the "IN THE CLOUD" route it would be relatively easy to figure out (Track position constantly, periodic "pings" to "The Cloud" that pass along your approximate coordinates, in return you get a JSON/XML reply with any nearby reminder positions which are cached locally, if/when you are close enough to a reminder position your device reminds you, new reminders are automagically submitted to the same "Cloud server", for local storage you just skip "The Cloud" and store everything locally)).
The whole concept of "obvious to a person skilled in the art" has been ground into the dirt for 20+ years now.
...I don't know who exactly, needs to step in and say "YOU DID NOT INVENT REMINDING PEOPLE TO DO STUFF!" and prevent these companies from spending (wasting) money and time on winning the patent... prevent all that wasted effort.
Yes, but whoever it is that might step in and stop the madness, remember, they likely are lawyers themselves, or sons of lawyers, or otherwise deeply connected to the legal profession. Effort is not wasted when it leads to remuneration of yourself, your family, or your colleagues.
So basically they make your life hell for a year till charges are dropped and would use any little excuse to question & detain you.
Yep, the most important lesson taught to me in High School was: if you piss off "the man," it doesn't matter if you break any rules or not, he's "the man," and he and his buddies are going to teach you a lesson, regardless.
Luckily, "the man" I pissed off was just an ex-coach English teacher (who just married an 18 year old ex-student of his), his powers seemed to be limited to a one-day in-school suspension, any more than that and he ran the risk of making it worth my (and my parent's) time to call attention to the administration's total lack of basis for the punishment they were handing out.
Local and national police have a little more range of actions they can take against the common man without putting themselves at risk, at least compared to a sad old high school English teacher.
I don't live in a loud urban environment. I walk the neighborhood streets with my young children all the time, we have about 3 Priuses in the neighborhood - there's no problem hearing them approach, around a corner, long before you can see them. Tire noise is usually enough, and when they get on the power, you can hear the switching transistors whine.
Electric cars sound nothing at all like a squirrel (the second most common sound heard on walks in the neighborhood...)
Slashdot Mirror
If we repeat what we did with searching for Steve Fossett's plane using Google Earth crossed with FoldIt and SETI@home we can develop a real-time picture of exactly what the 1% are doing, where, and when. That's a tremendous amount of intelligence we can leverage in many ways.
Try it, get some data, publish it on the web, then tell me how long it takes you to get an injunction telling you to stop or face imprisonment. I can't tell you what the charge will be, but, rest assured, there will be something, and it will take more money than you have to fight it.
First Post
"There's almost parity,' writes Andrew Sprung. 'You have a truncheon or gun, I have a camera. You inflict pain, I inflict infamy.'""
haha come on, parity?
Has this guy ever been pepper sprayed or beaten up before?
People shouldnt have to endure this to receive justice
Its a sad day our society thinks this is some kind of achievement or "balance" of power
The balance of power has always been a slow, grinding play of justice against violent acts.
You rob a convenience store, or ten, it profits you in the moment, but spending years behind bars is the price. If a cop beats a protester to death for no apparent reason and it is covered by several independent video cameras, he's a lot more likely to answer for his actions than if it was merely witnessed by 50 protesters who were also being beaten.
So, just for clarification, you're a computer user that builds his own machines and doesn't understand the concept of paying more for stuff that other people don't understand the value of. Right?
Not exactly, I understand the value of video cards. I understand that a $19 video card will serve my needs, draw less current, while making less heat and noise. While a $300 video card would play StarCraft at higher settings and give me slightly more resolution and frame rate than the $19 card, StarCraft II is still playable on the $19 card, and for the other 99% of my computer usage, the $19 card is superior - even if it cost the same as the $300 card.
Yah, VAT is a bitch, and food in general is expensive as you approach the Arctic Circle, same problems in Alaska.
I traveled by train up to Narvik and back over the course of about a week - food was so damned expensive on the trip that I ate very little, but after a week, I finally went into a grocery store in the middle of northern Sweden and bought whatever I wanted for lunch from the deli, price no object. I think it was about 300Kr (US$40+) for stuff that might have cost $15 in the states.
I bought fresh cakes from a local grocery store bakery on Miami Beach for $6 to $9 in 1997ish - whole cakes, you know the kind that you could cut into a dozen slices and each slice would still be twice the size of a cupcake. Being Miami Beach, at some point they may have stepped up the prices, but their regular clientele in the 1990s were very cost conscious, so they did better with low prices and high volume.
...do people really have that kind of disposable cash laying around these days?
How much did you spend on your video card?
$19 - but then, I value silence over fraggage.
Sadly, the mom and pop bakery around the corner may be suffering loss of business to these new "gourmet" bakeries, and thus have to raise their prices to stay in business... shouldn't be too much of a problem since they still cost less than the competition... but when you're squeezed between "snoberia" and WalMart, it can be hard to keep that niche open.
Nowhere in TFA does it actually say she lost 20k ... so it costs her a little over £9 to make a dozen cupcakes ... Though I also don't really understand who the hell pays £26 for a dozen cupcakes.
Yeah, and what kind of cupcake costs 75p to make? I suspect that 75p includes all overhead for the building, labor, accountancy firm, janitor, annual contribution to the neighborhood business association, and payments on the owner's leased Mercedes, which she only uses for business purposes, of course.
If they had a batch order for 100,000 units, I bet costs per unit dropped considerably.
I wanted Maemo to succeed, but it seems to be knocked back into Gentoo land, unlikely to ever reach more than a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of people, and cost them great effort to get at it.
Maemo never had time to develop soul sucking modules - if it had gotten anywhere near Verizon, you can be sure it would have become a world-class Dementor.
Microsoft may be many things, but they have always respected privacy. In fact, they have never really cared about personal data the way Google does. All they want to do is sell you the software and be done with it. Google, on the other hand, gives you the software for free but then keeps tracking your every move. I rather choose the first one, but i guess it's everyone's own choice.
And, therein lies the stagnation of MSFT and the growth of GOOG. Regardless of how any of us feel, personally, the majority of the world would rather be given something for free, and they don't much care about or understand the implications of sharing their personal data. Hopefully we continue to have choices and Microsoft doesn't start getting smart about beating Google at their own game.
Well - to take the "synthetic happiness is just as good" thing to an extreme, heroin users are some of the happiest people I can imagine, when they are fixing.
Circling back to the whole "alien contact" thing, if aliens do make significant contact with us at a time when we are not yet "up to their level," we may well be happier after they do - they may give us technology that ends the energy crisis, or disease, but as your videos point out, happiness is a fleeting thing, even if all of our current problems are solved, we will have new ones that will make us unhappy: too much choice at the grocery store, no quiet time away from constant availability to our friends and relatives, etc.
Then there is the darker side of alien first contact. I could well imagine an alien craft limping into our solar system in need of 10,000kg of some rare element - they make contact, and after 3 months getting to know us and our language, ask politely if we would collect it for them (after all, with the technology they have on their home planet, they can extract that easily...) we have difficulty helping them, they need it or they will be stuck here, how long before they decide to start taking out our satellites or dropping rocks on us from orbit to help us decide to help them? That's the kind of scenario where it would be desirable to have developed our own space travel capabilities as much as possible before first contact.
Sure, after the aliens have left and the bulk of human society is knocked back to the Middle Ages, when you ask them to self-rate their happiness on a scale of 1-10, those surviving humans will be just as happy then as we are now with our abundant food, easy planet-wide transportation and instant communications. Still, I think it is desirable to have the ability to chose to help the aliens, or not if that's what we really think is best for us, rather than have them chose to force us to.
And, back to Earth, I am well aware that the majority of humans on this planet do not have abundant food, etc. And, if you give them the same happiness self-reporting test (which has been done), what you get back will be more influenced by social norms about how people commonly express themselves, rather than anything I would call a true measure of happiness.
I don't have a true measure of happiness, that's not what I do - I just know it when I see it. As for those "scientists" who do have a bunch of data and charts to back up their assertions, be sure to nail them down about the fine print, limitations of their methods, scope of applicability, etc. 20 minute TED presentations are pretty cool to watch, neat to think about, and informative, but they tend to gloss over the fine print.
I think it is more the member banks who issue the cards rather than "Visa" or "MasterCard" themselves... I have had a Visa card from a small credit union, and it has never gone on "fraud alert" for any reason. I have also had a Visa card from a couple of large commercial banks, and they are pretty quick to notice when I'm in a strange town, or even buying things in my own town but out of my normal pattern.
I went on a "wardrobe replacement" shopping trip to the local mall, bought maybe $1000 worth of clothes - more than 10x what I had spent in that mall in the previous 5 years... next day I'm trying to buy some gas and the card isn't working. Most times the bank will reinstate the card immediately upon a phone call.
Read deeper, Visa denies knowing anything about marital status at all... So, maybe saying "Visa" or "MasterCard" knows these things is inaccurate, maybe we need to probe their member banks that issue the cards, you know the ones - the ones that shut down your credit when you take an unusual trip out of town or buy a gift from an unusual place so you have to call them, assure them that the charge was yours, and ask them to please let you buy some gasoline now?
Mr. Dan's synthetic happiness sounds data backed and plausible, but if it were really true, more people would go to prison and nursing homes willingly.
Barry Schwartz (Mr. BS), raises a very good point about too much choice. I don't think that having millions of choices brings happiness - I think that having the _power_ to choose those things you see is what brings happiness. In some sense, these millions of consumer choices that are presented to today's peasants is a way of distracting them from the fact that they cannot afford waterfront property, First Class travel, servants, handmade clothing, etc.
The denial I read said "Visa does not track marital status" blah blah blah, o.k. Visa may not, but the credit reporting bureaus used by the banks which issue Visa cards sure as hell do. And, I get a statement at the end of the year that breaks down my purchases into food, fuel, entertainment, etc. I find it hard to believe that nobody is tracking any of that data at a higher level of granularity than they are reporting it back to me... maybe not, maybe I'm just paranoid, but I know that 25 years ago, managers at grocery stores had real-time sales figures, down to the individual UPC codes and aggregated in a dozen different ways, I'm sure it wasn't long before that data made its way back to chain headquarters in real-time. And, yes, loyalty cards make it easier for the stores to track your patterns, but I use my cash-back credit card to buy groceries, they certainly could track me by that if they wanted to.
What might be interesting is an at-large election to vote for re-districting proposals. The top vote getting proposals that, in aggregate, received 50% of the vote could run-off again and again until we spend our entire lives voting on how we vote... that would be fair and equitable, right?
Wow,
he couldn't have pushed the "Linux succeeded because BSD had legal troubles" thing any harder
What was that? Three mentions of it?
I don't personally agree, I think Linux succeeded on it's own merit, but anyhow
Everything succeeds on it's own merit, I think the sour apples he was complaining about was that BSD would likely have succeeded first or better than Linux, if only it hand't been mired in the legal problems.
Yeah, and I can point to a dozen things in my past that have "prevented" me from making millions...
The more interesting data mining is currently implemented as trade secrets. Apparently, the credit card companies can predict, with 99% accuracy, if you are going to get a divorce within the next two years.
They could do useful little tricks like reminding you about the yeast at the checkout counter, but that would be creepy to most people and not as profitable for the company with the data.
Can someone who is shed some light on what would need to happen for this quagmire to end?
A gradually increasing restriction on granting new silly, obvious patents. A gradual raising of the bar in what it takes to defend a patent successfully.
The real problem is: any shock to the status quo will make the people with money nervous, they'll feel uncertain about the future and less confident in predicting how they are going to turn their giant pile of cash into a more giant pile of cash, and in the face of that uncertainty, they'll just sit on their piles and watch them shrink slowly instead of putting the money at risk (in use).
Patents are a big part of that security blanket for investors, it makes them feel warm and fuzzy knowing how they can strike back at other kids who might try to steal their lunch money, it's kind of like that line "God created man, but Mr. Smith & Wesson made all men equal." A smaller version of nuclear detente'. If you have access to a sufficient nuclear arsenal of patents, you can go up against much larger companies and hold your own with a threat of mutual annihilation.
I put part of the blame on the .com bubble - investors were feeling all warm and fuzzy then, and the patent office was helping them feel that way by granting them patents on whatever they wanted. Change the rules quickly, and you'll have negative economic consequences.
I know a Surinamese citizen who is kind of proud of their 1982 "kill a few lawyers" coup, they said it went pretty well for the rest of the country:
http://www.worldrover.com/history/suriname_history.html
How exactly does one get a patent on location-based reminders? I know I'm not the only one who has considered that idea and the actual implementation should be fairly straightforward (when you consider that APIs and hardware required for it all exist, hell even if you go the "IN THE CLOUD" route it would be relatively easy to figure out (Track position constantly, periodic "pings" to "The Cloud" that pass along your approximate coordinates, in return you get a JSON/XML reply with any nearby reminder positions which are cached locally, if/when you are close enough to a reminder position your device reminds you, new reminders are automagically submitted to the same "Cloud server", for local storage you just skip "The Cloud" and store everything locally)).
The whole concept of "obvious to a person skilled in the art" has been ground into the dirt for 20+ years now.
...I don't know who exactly, needs to step in and say "YOU DID NOT INVENT REMINDING PEOPLE TO DO STUFF!" and prevent these companies from spending (wasting) money and time on winning the patent... prevent all that wasted effort.
Yes, but whoever it is that might step in and stop the madness, remember, they likely are lawyers themselves, or sons of lawyers, or otherwise deeply connected to the legal profession. Effort is not wasted when it leads to remuneration of yourself, your family, or your colleagues.
So basically they make your life hell for a year till charges are dropped and would use any little excuse to question & detain you.
Yep, the most important lesson taught to me in High School was: if you piss off "the man," it doesn't matter if you break any rules or not, he's "the man," and he and his buddies are going to teach you a lesson, regardless.
Luckily, "the man" I pissed off was just an ex-coach English teacher (who just married an 18 year old ex-student of his), his powers seemed to be limited to a one-day in-school suspension, any more than that and he ran the risk of making it worth my (and my parent's) time to call attention to the administration's total lack of basis for the punishment they were handing out.
Local and national police have a little more range of actions they can take against the common man without putting themselves at risk, at least compared to a sad old high school English teacher.
I don't live in a loud urban environment. I walk the neighborhood streets with my young children all the time, we have about 3 Priuses in the neighborhood - there's no problem hearing them approach, around a corner, long before you can see them. Tire noise is usually enough, and when they get on the power, you can hear the switching transistors whine.
Electric cars sound nothing at all like a squirrel (the second most common sound heard on walks in the neighborhood...)