I think we can agree that any kind of central control over these things is bad.
That is why I am actually a supporter of government regulation - it's a compromise between the state actually running the damn thing (which nobody wants) and a commercial, unaccountable corporation owning the damn thing (which also nobody wants).
I'd like anarcho-capitalism to work, but it doesn't.
If I had written "monopsony", 2% of the readers would've had any idea what I'm talking about.
And yes, I've read economics books. Quite a few. I don't know where you got the impression that I claimed to have discovered anything. I simply stated a fact.
If your government controls your Internet, you have at least a theoretical way out - you can change your government. That might be just an election or it might be a revolution, but you can.
If an international corporation sitting in another country controls your Internet, you will do what, exactly? (no, going somewhere else is not an option, that's what "monopoly" means)
That is not how you define monopoly. You can look up the definition in any economics textbook.
Anti-monopoly laws were often used by less efficient firms to hurt the efficient competiton
Laws can be abused. News at 11.
The laws against murder are also sometimes abused. I don't see anyone asking for their removal on that grounds.
Monopoly is not damaging to the market (see definitions of monopoly and market).
I refer to the textbooks mentioned above. Yes, a monopoly is damaging to the market. There's even a specific term for the damage: Monopoly rents.
There is a very small, very specific sector where natural monopolies are acceptable due to circumstances, typically when the market is simply not large enough to support multiple suppliers, and competition would end up with all of them disappearing, but the service is essential to society.
Of course, you'd know all of that if you knew the first thing about macroeconomics.
Chrome itself has about 72 percent of the desktop-browser market share.
Which is one reason why I stick to Firefox, until it becoms entirely unusable. We've had this problem before with IE and we didn't learn from it?
Competition is a funny thing. On paper we all understand that a free market economy only works properly if there is enough competition on both sides (yes, customer monopolies are a real thing as well). Yet the same people who are so much for free markets are so much against regulation when it comes to curb monopolies, despite a monopoly is more damaging to a market than any government regulation short of a full planned economy could be.
Because companies do not like competition. This is a built-in paradox of the capitalist system: The system needs competition, but the players within it desire to have as little competition as possible, and thus markets have a tendency to drift into monopoly (a lot of tech) or oligopoly (the energy markets are good examples).
Internet and information technology are especially easy victims. The nature of information makes it so that distribution costs are near zero, so the sunk costs of product development dominate, which means that it is surprisingly difficult to break a market dominance once established. At the same time the dominance is fragile and can be broken, even by a newcomer. It's just a very hard thing to do.
The big tech companies, meanwhile, have figured out how to entrench themselves. The thing that the MS monopoly didn't get: User data. Once you own your customers social media profile (FB), or media collection (Apple) or mail, search and communications history and personalisation (Google), their cost of switching to anything else becomes high, reducing their likelihood to do so.
The Doctor was a male character the way Joan d'Arc is a woman. It just happens to be that way, get over it. I'm all for strong female characters in fiction and strong women in reality. But that doesn't mean everything needs to be genderized and every male character needs to be re-cast into a female form. Ghostbusters was perfectly fine with a male. Doctor Who already had a lot of strong women, many of whom could and did stand up to the Doctor.
It's just when it's done for easily transparent SJW reasons that it bothers me. I very much liked the interactions between the Doctor and his companions, or River Song, etc. - and it is in the interaction between the sexes that stories are made, both in fiction and the real world. By making sex meaningless, interchangeable and political the SJW crowd is taking so much cultural capital away from us that in a century or so we will be sorry that we let it happen.
Second this. I also started with the reboot and loved it. Still like Eccleston a lot, he had that edge that an ancient Time Lord who saw the worst should have.
With Capaldi, the quality of the show dramatically fell away, and it wasn't because of him or his acting. I wasn't even interested in the female Doctor, and not just because it felt like they made him a woman purely to satisfy the SJW crowd.
I seriously lost all interest in the show. It had a bunch of high points, like the Bad Wolf part, or some of the River Song pieces, or the episode where they run around inside the TARDIS and it turns out that it's powered by a freaking SUN. That was amazing, I wish I could remember which episode it was.
But no such high points for the last few years, and no indication that they'll be back.
I've written tens a couple hundred thousand lines of code in my life.
Sometimes, "fuck" is the exact word that expresses things correctly, precisely and honestly. Didn't they teach you in CS class to write good documentation? There's stuff out there that cannot be captured any more perfect than writing "fuck".
I'm all for maturity and professionalism. And when I get a piece of code from someone else and I need to fix it or maintain it or extend it, I don't want it white-washed to conform to someones idea of political correctness. If dealing with this particular piece is a case of fuck, then it is a piece of fuck and I want to know that so I can approach it properly, not thinking "ah, there's a small bit of complication here, no biggie".
So fuck them and their attitude. Comments are there to transport important information about the code. They aren't campaign speeches or scientific articles. They aren't job descriptions or diplomatic messages to foreign countries. If the author of the code put "fuck" in the comments, that transports important information to me about the code.
Probably the author has registered "ambientcomputing.com" or something.
I already don't sit down "to use a computer". I sit down to watch a movie, play a game, write an article, read the news or create software. The machine itself has faded into the background now that we've finally managed to the the darn things functioning most of the time so you don't spend half your waking hours just babysitting the operating system (can you tell I'm not a windows user?).
This trend has been going on for a long time and is continuing smoothly. Yes, the machine fades more and more into the background. Both my car and my HomePod have voice interfaces and hide the fact that they're essentially computers attached to a gadget. Robots have made a lot of progress now that machine learning is real (well, computing speed became fast enough. There's little in machine learning that wasn't invented 20 years ago, but we can finally run it on consumer hardware in real-time).
Sure, in 20 more years we will have computers in everything, reacting to sensor data, voice input and such. But that's just smart electronics. It'll blur the line to computers mostly because it's cheaper these days to put a general-purpose CPU and a full-blown OS in and write custom software than it was to build some custom electronics. From a security perspective, IoT is both a nightmare and an opportunity (where the window of opportunity is closing fast and almost nobody used it to do things the right way, but I'm not complaining it means job security for the next decades while we old guys can sell ourselves for great daily rates to all those startups who re-invented the wheel, made it square because time-to-market and now applaud our genius for telling them that it rolls better when it's round).
If I had a simple, straightforward solution, I would've patented it and be rich. So I can't say. But it's a fact that the obnoxious confirmation dialogs are not read.
20 years of information security experience tell me that users barely read the text on the buttons on such dialogs, and only to figure out which one they need to press so it goes away.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai thinks Android users have a good understanding of the volume of data Google collects on them,
Android users are people, and the vast majority of people have jobs outside IT. Normal people don't even know the difference between 2G, 3G and 4G except that the higher numbers mean "faster". They also couldn't list the sensors that their phone contains, and barely understand what information the OS has available at all. They know that GPS has something to do with maps, but that's it. They are almost certainly not aware that their phone is constantly doing data transfers in the background nor do they have any idea what data is being exchanged.
This is just the other version of the usual "blame the user" bullshit. We blame the user for being stupid and making mistakes, then we turn around and blame the user for knowing everything so its not our fault, again. Can't have it both ways.
A few years ago there was a survey asking people where they got their news. The number one TV show people reported getting news from was The Daily Show, a comedy show.
And I'm not surprised in the least. Over here in Germany, the quality of reporting and especially commenting upon anything related to politics, the economy or most topics of society is considerably higher in comedy shows than on the daily news. I thought that a fluke the first time I noticed it, but over the years it has become even more so.
Maybe comedy is the only channel that still knows how to be critical? I'm not sure, but for a long time now, if you want to be informed about what's going on, a few comedy shows will give you more background information and more analysis than all the news and political shows and talk shows and whatever else combined.
And if the union contract comes along for the ride, all labor intensive setup stuff is going to need at least one or two union workers doing the work, with another one or two watching - so double or quadruple the cost of labor.
I don't know what kind of unions you have in the US, but from a European perspective, that is total nonsense. I've worked in different companies with different closeness or distance to unions in my life, and when it comes down to the actual work, the differences are barely noticeable. The stronger the union, the more signs about safety will be hanging around, I think that sums it up pretty well.
If your above is true, then maybe it's not the unions that are the problem but the way that you guys interpret the word? You know, just like on the other extreme, "stock market" is actually not an idiom of "casino".
Tesla is not able to access capital markets according to the shorts,
Who have been saying that Tesla will go under any moment... wait for it... really soon now... almost there.... for a long, long time.
Meanwhile, I'm a happy Tesla stock owner and laughing about the shorts. They've been wrong, I've been right, and I'm looking forward to getting more profit out of my Tesla stocks. Let them talk. Every time they manage to get a big story somewhere and the price dips a little I have an opportunity to buy a few more stocks cheaper than they should be.
Wages have moved significantly in the last 30 years. Just not for the working or middle class. The upper middle class which makes up most of Apple's customers has been growing rapidly for the last few decades.
Not in Europe. The 0.1% have dramatically improved their share, at the expense of everyone else. I consider myself at the upper end of the middle class, and things have become more and more difficult over the past years. I've heard similar impressions from people who earn considerably more than me, but are not among the super-rich (millionaires, but not billionaires).
You drove 373 miles after 3 days of little or no sleep??
No, working long hours. That means leaving the office around 8 pm, getting some dinner, dropping into bed around 10 pm, maybe an hour talking to the wife at home and surfing the Internet. Waking up a 7, get breakfast in hotel and take the shuttle bus to the office. So I did get my 7-8 hours of sleep. Just not much else in the way of relaxing.
Parts of your brain were likely fully asleep while you soldiered on. Not cool.
I agree on that. Definitely wasn't an enjoyable experience. And I did indeed stop two or three times to get a short nap. I'm a very careful person, my wife would say overly so. Can't help it, risk management and security is my profession.
I second that anyone feeling sleepy while driving should stop.
I'm quite sure they didn't look into the autopilot source code for this. The debugging process probably went something like "ok, it's driving by itself and staying in lane, so it has lane keep assist. Most likely it also has adaptive cruise contorl. Let's try, but carefully. I'll watch the back, you slow down just a little bit."
Well, I happen to have a cinema with a wall-sized display. (around 450 cm diagonal) I can easily tell the difference between full HD and anything less. Nature movies ask for full HD, and I'd love to watch them in 4K but my projector doesn't do 4K. The next one will.
A 4K resolution at around 4m width gives me pixels of 1 mm size. 8K resolution would cut that in half. I don't think I'll see much of a difference (viewing distance is almost 5m) but it could make scenes appear more crisp.
I'm not some Bill Gates. I just have a home cinema. There's a lot of people like me.
Contrary to what I originally believed, higher resolution makes a massive difference.
I bought my first retina display iMac last year, and man does the screen look crisp. You notice it mostly in text or small details, that is why most test pictures don't show a difference.
I'd like to see 8K in action. Maybe no difference to 5K, but maybe I'd be surprised.
The thing is, the less work involved/required for driving, the more likely it is that you are going to fall asleep--that's why it's the long-straight-into-the-horizon stretches tend to have problems here.
But autopilot is the life-saver here, not the killer.
I've driven 600 km at night, after three full days of working long hours and it was damn tough to stay awake. In a car that had zero drive-assist systems.
Unless you want to install dead-man switches in cars, autopilot is really what you want.
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I think we can agree that any kind of central control over these things is bad.
That is why I am actually a supporter of government regulation - it's a compromise between the state actually running the damn thing (which nobody wants) and a commercial, unaccountable corporation owning the damn thing (which also nobody wants).
I'd like anarcho-capitalism to work, but it doesn't.
The funny thing is that copyright and patent laws are actually the little man/company's weapon against big corporations.
Because what else are you going to do if you invent something and they simply take it?
I'm all for reform, there's a lot that should be changed in those areas, but as an author of both software and articles/books, copyright is my friend.
If I had written "monopsony", 2% of the readers would've had any idea what I'm talking about.
And yes, I've read economics books. Quite a few. I don't know where you got the impression that I claimed to have discovered anything. I simply stated a fact.
I'm not even sure if this statement is true.
If your government controls your Internet, you have at least a theoretical way out - you can change your government. That might be just an election or it might be a revolution, but you can.
If an international corporation sitting in another country controls your Internet, you will do what, exactly? (no, going somewhere else is not an option, that's what "monopoly" means)
Sole firm in one market;
That is not how you define monopoly. You can look up the definition in any economics textbook.
Anti-monopoly laws were often used by less efficient firms to hurt the efficient competiton
Laws can be abused. News at 11.
The laws against murder are also sometimes abused. I don't see anyone asking for their removal on that grounds.
Monopoly is not damaging to the market (see definitions of monopoly and market).
I refer to the textbooks mentioned above. Yes, a monopoly is damaging to the market. There's even a specific term for the damage: Monopoly rents.
There is a very small, very specific sector where natural monopolies are acceptable due to circumstances, typically when the market is simply not large enough to support multiple suppliers, and competition would end up with all of them disappearing, but the service is essential to society.
Of course, you'd know all of that if you knew the first thing about macroeconomics.
No, I don't.
Oh, you guessed wrong?
Chrome itself has about 72 percent of the desktop-browser market share.
Which is one reason why I stick to Firefox, until it becoms entirely unusable. We've had this problem before with IE and we didn't learn from it?
Competition is a funny thing. On paper we all understand that a free market economy only works properly if there is enough competition on both sides (yes, customer monopolies are a real thing as well). Yet the same people who are so much for free markets are so much against regulation when it comes to curb monopolies, despite a monopoly is more damaging to a market than any government regulation short of a full planned economy could be.
Because companies do not like competition. This is a built-in paradox of the capitalist system: The system needs competition, but the players within it desire to have as little competition as possible, and thus markets have a tendency to drift into monopoly (a lot of tech) or oligopoly (the energy markets are good examples).
Internet and information technology are especially easy victims. The nature of information makes it so that distribution costs are near zero, so the sunk costs of product development dominate, which means that it is surprisingly difficult to break a market dominance once established. At the same time the dominance is fragile and can be broken, even by a newcomer. It's just a very hard thing to do.
The big tech companies, meanwhile, have figured out how to entrench themselves. The thing that the MS monopoly didn't get: User data. Once you own your customers social media profile (FB), or media collection (Apple) or mail, search and communications history and personalisation (Google), their cost of switching to anything else becomes high, reducing their likelihood to do so.
Competition. So necessary and so unwanted.
That was it. Thank you!
The Doctor was a male character the way Joan d'Arc is a woman. It just happens to be that way, get over it. I'm all for strong female characters in fiction and strong women in reality. But that doesn't mean everything needs to be genderized and every male character needs to be re-cast into a female form. Ghostbusters was perfectly fine with a male. Doctor Who already had a lot of strong women, many of whom could and did stand up to the Doctor.
It's just when it's done for easily transparent SJW reasons that it bothers me. I very much liked the interactions between the Doctor and his companions, or River Song, etc. - and it is in the interaction between the sexes that stories are made, both in fiction and the real world. By making sex meaningless, interchangeable and political the SJW crowd is taking so much cultural capital away from us that in a century or so we will be sorry that we let it happen.
Second this. I also started with the reboot and loved it. Still like Eccleston a lot, he had that edge that an ancient Time Lord who saw the worst should have.
With Capaldi, the quality of the show dramatically fell away, and it wasn't because of him or his acting. I wasn't even interested in the female Doctor, and not just because it felt like they made him a woman purely to satisfy the SJW crowd.
I seriously lost all interest in the show. It had a bunch of high points, like the Bad Wolf part, or some of the River Song pieces, or the episode where they run around inside the TARDIS and it turns out that it's powered by a freaking SUN. That was amazing, I wish I could remember which episode it was.
But no such high points for the last few years, and no indication that they'll be back.
I've written tens a couple hundred thousand lines of code in my life.
Sometimes, "fuck" is the exact word that expresses things correctly, precisely and honestly. Didn't they teach you in CS class to write good documentation? There's stuff out there that cannot be captured any more perfect than writing "fuck".
I'm all for maturity and professionalism. And when I get a piece of code from someone else and I need to fix it or maintain it or extend it, I don't want it white-washed to conform to someones idea of political correctness. If dealing with this particular piece is a case of fuck, then it is a piece of fuck and I want to know that so I can approach it properly, not thinking "ah, there's a small bit of complication here, no biggie".
So fuck them and their attitude. Comments are there to transport important information about the code. They aren't campaign speeches or scientific articles. They aren't job descriptions or diplomatic messages to foreign countries. If the author of the code put "fuck" in the comments, that transports important information to me about the code.
Probably the author has registered "ambientcomputing.com" or something.
I already don't sit down "to use a computer". I sit down to watch a movie, play a game, write an article, read the news or create software. The machine itself has faded into the background now that we've finally managed to the the darn things functioning most of the time so you don't spend half your waking hours just babysitting the operating system (can you tell I'm not a windows user?).
This trend has been going on for a long time and is continuing smoothly. Yes, the machine fades more and more into the background. Both my car and my HomePod have voice interfaces and hide the fact that they're essentially computers attached to a gadget. Robots have made a lot of progress now that machine learning is real (well, computing speed became fast enough. There's little in machine learning that wasn't invented 20 years ago, but we can finally run it on consumer hardware in real-time).
Sure, in 20 more years we will have computers in everything, reacting to sensor data, voice input and such. But that's just smart electronics. It'll blur the line to computers mostly because it's cheaper these days to put a general-purpose CPU and a full-blown OS in and write custom software than it was to build some custom electronics. From a security perspective, IoT is both a nightmare and an opportunity (where the window of opportunity is closing fast and almost nobody used it to do things the right way, but I'm not complaining it means job security for the next decades while we old guys can sell ourselves for great daily rates to all those startups who re-invented the wheel, made it square because time-to-market and now applaud our genius for telling them that it rolls better when it's round).
If I had a simple, straightforward solution, I would've patented it and be rich. So I can't say. But it's a fact that the obnoxious confirmation dialogs are not read.
20 years of information security experience tell me that users barely read the text on the buttons on such dialogs, and only to figure out which one they need to press so it goes away.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai thinks Android users have a good understanding of the volume of data Google collects on them,
Android users are people, and the vast majority of people have jobs outside IT. Normal people don't even know the difference between 2G, 3G and 4G except that the higher numbers mean "faster". They also couldn't list the sensors that their phone contains, and barely understand what information the OS has available at all. They know that GPS has something to do with maps, but that's it. They are almost certainly not aware that their phone is constantly doing data transfers in the background nor do they have any idea what data is being exchanged.
This is just the other version of the usual "blame the user" bullshit. We blame the user for being stupid and making mistakes, then we turn around and blame the user for knowing everything so its not our fault, again. Can't have it both ways.
A few years ago there was a survey asking people where they got their news. The number one TV show people reported getting news from was The Daily Show, a comedy show.
And I'm not surprised in the least. Over here in Germany, the quality of reporting and especially commenting upon anything related to politics, the economy or most topics of society is considerably higher in comedy shows than on the daily news. I thought that a fluke the first time I noticed it, but over the years it has become even more so.
Maybe comedy is the only channel that still knows how to be critical? I'm not sure, but for a long time now, if you want to be informed about what's going on, a few comedy shows will give you more background information and more analysis than all the news and political shows and talk shows and whatever else combined.
In such case maybe you should improve your interpretation of "union" instead of throwing out the concept?
And if the union contract comes along for the ride, all labor intensive setup stuff is going to need at least one or two union workers doing the work, with another one or two watching - so double or quadruple the cost of labor.
I don't know what kind of unions you have in the US, but from a European perspective, that is total nonsense. I've worked in different companies with different closeness or distance to unions in my life, and when it comes down to the actual work, the differences are barely noticeable. The stronger the union, the more signs about safety will be hanging around, I think that sums it up pretty well.
If your above is true, then maybe it's not the unions that are the problem but the way that you guys interpret the word? You know, just like on the other extreme, "stock market" is actually not an idiom of "casino".
Tesla is not able to access capital markets according to the shorts,
Who have been saying that Tesla will go under any moment... wait for it... really soon now... almost there.... for a long, long time.
Meanwhile, I'm a happy Tesla stock owner and laughing about the shorts. They've been wrong, I've been right, and I'm looking forward to getting more profit out of my Tesla stocks. Let them talk. Every time they manage to get a big story somewhere and the price dips a little I have an opportunity to buy a few more stocks cheaper than they should be.
Wages have moved significantly in the last 30 years. Just not for the working or middle class. The upper middle class which makes up most of Apple's customers has been growing rapidly for the last few decades.
Not in Europe. The 0.1% have dramatically improved their share, at the expense of everyone else. I consider myself at the upper end of the middle class, and things have become more and more difficult over the past years. I've heard similar impressions from people who earn considerably more than me, but are not among the super-rich (millionaires, but not billionaires).
You drove 373 miles after 3 days of little or no sleep??
No, working long hours. That means leaving the office around 8 pm, getting some dinner, dropping into bed around 10 pm, maybe an hour talking to the wife at home and surfing the Internet. Waking up a 7, get breakfast in hotel and take the shuttle bus to the office. So I did get my 7-8 hours of sleep. Just not much else in the way of relaxing.
Parts of your brain were likely fully asleep while you soldiered on. Not cool.
I agree on that. Definitely wasn't an enjoyable experience. And I did indeed stop two or three times to get a short nap. I'm a very careful person, my wife would say overly so. Can't help it, risk management and security is my profession.
I second that anyone feeling sleepy while driving should stop.
I'm quite sure they didn't look into the autopilot source code for this. The debugging process probably went something like "ok, it's driving by itself and staying in lane, so it has lane keep assist. Most likely it also has adaptive cruise contorl. Let's try, but carefully. I'll watch the back, you slow down just a little bit."
Well, I happen to have a cinema with a wall-sized display. (around 450 cm diagonal) I can easily tell the difference between full HD and anything less. Nature movies ask for full HD, and I'd love to watch them in 4K but my projector doesn't do 4K. The next one will.
A 4K resolution at around 4m width gives me pixels of 1 mm size.
8K resolution would cut that in half. I don't think I'll see much of a difference (viewing distance is almost 5m) but it could make scenes appear more crisp.
I'm not some Bill Gates. I just have a home cinema. There's a lot of people like me.
Contrary to what I originally believed, higher resolution makes a massive difference.
I bought my first retina display iMac last year, and man does the screen look crisp. You notice it mostly in text or small details, that is why most test pictures don't show a difference.
I'd like to see 8K in action. Maybe no difference to 5K, but maybe I'd be surprised.
The thing is, the less work involved/required for driving, the more likely it is that you are going to fall asleep--that's why it's the long-straight-into-the-horizon stretches tend to have problems here.
But autopilot is the life-saver here, not the killer.
I've driven 600 km at night, after three full days of working long hours and it was damn tough to stay awake. In a car that had zero drive-assist systems.
Unless you want to install dead-man switches in cars, autopilot is really what you want.