It amuses me that all the left-leaning slashdotters are up in arms about H1B. I guess if it's YOUR job that's being threatened, ideology goes out the window.
Don't misunderstand me, I am also against H1B.
But if you replace "coders" and "H1B" with "manual laborers" and "guest worker program", well then that's all right, we have to help the poor brown people so sure let them all in. It's racist to keep them out.
You're crazy if you think a typical English speaker can pick up German in a couple of months. German is weird and not like English at all. It's hard, especially the coughing sounds that you have to make if you want to speak German properly.
Yes I'm aware that Old English came from the Anglo-Saxon language and they were closely related... thousands of years ago. Today? Just "Der die oder das" by itself will drive an American crazy.
Your other point is valid though, a computer programmer should have no problem getting by on English alone in Germany.
about 4 years ago now I guess. I thought Steve was exaggerating about Amazon, or trying to be humorous (or both), but now in hindsight I think he was probably being accurate.
"Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not.
Micro-managing isn't that third thing that Amazon does better than us, by the way. I mean, yeah, they micro-manage really well, but I wouldn't list it as a strength or anything. I'm just trying to set the context here, to help you understand what happened. We're talking about a guy who in all seriousness has said on many public occasions that people should be paying him to work at Amazon. He hands out little yellow stickies with his name on them, reminding people "who runs the company" when they disagree with him. The guy is a regular... well, Steve Jobs, I guess. Except without the fashion or design sense. Bezos is super smart; don't get me wrong. He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies.
So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses."
You forgot a third type of Republican: the conservative Republican.
Conservative as in they are for conservation, not because they're prudes who are against short skirts or raunchy behavior. Theodore Roosevelt was the model conservationist republican.
Basically these are people who like the things they had in their lives and want to conserve them for future generations. This includes their society, culture, and the environment.
In recent times they have lost power to Establishment republicans who favor big business above everything else, but back in the day Teddy would establish National Parks and limit development to preserve nature and tell Standard Oil to go fondle itself.
The key thing about them is that they had a happy childhood. As opposed to some politicians who had such a negative experience with their own upbringing that they want to "fundamentally change America".
Somewhat of an overstatement, but I suppose it will bring about changes.
Only those entities with money will be able to post any content.
Dead wrong. I pay $120 a year for my site hosting and $10 a year for the domain. You can do it for free actually, I just like having big mysql databases and cron jobs.
Smaller sites like/. may survive on subscriptions, but many will not. If you think the coroprtization of the internet is bad now...
No, sites will move toward self-hosted ads and rely less on ad networks. It will probably give rise to a new industry of ad brokering for smaller sites unable to find their own advertisers, replacing the current ad+malware delivery networks.
Furthermore, TFS boldly claims "Hackers remotely cut brakes...". Well duh, if you have physical access to your target and attach your own device to it (which is what these guys did), of course you can do whatever to it. I can remotely shove a gerbil up Bush's butt if I am given physical access to him and I'm allowed to attach my device on him.
The challenge is to remotely hack something that you have no physical access to and/or without attaching anything to it.
No. Google and Alphabet won't have separate stock. Google will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet. Like, you can't buy Chevrolet stock, you can only buy GM stock.
Existing Google shares will simply be converted to Alphabet shares.
I would personally not care one bit if a fast food worker got paid as much as me or more.... good for them, I wouldn't want to do that job so why would I complain?
There were no fast food workers at that firm.
A better comparison would be someone at YOUR company, who's a newer hire than you, has less experience and can't code as well as you, and basically just clocks in and out without contributing much, and because of a SJW CEO's action now makes the same salary as you.
Drones are to RC aircraft what dogs are to wolves. They are almost the same and have 99% identical DNA, but there are a few key characteristics that set them apart.
First, drones require little to no flying skills on the part of the operator. Think RC helicopters from >10 years ago, very difficult to fly and maintain (especially piston-engine choppers, which you had to have if you wanted any kind of serious flying capability). You had to be an expert to not only fly one, but also build and service it. Nowadays you buy a quadcopter and it's ready to go, literally right out of the box with zero setup or adjustments. Modern electronics and gyros means you need no skill whatsoever to fly; just push the throttle and hold it and it hovers.
Second, some drones have autonomous capability. With built-in GPS and advanced algorithms, they fly themselves. You punch in pre-programmed waypoints and the drone will fly there, loiter and drop a payload or take pictures or whatever, and fly back to you. It's not remote controlled anymore.
Third, "drone" is easier to say than "RC model aircraft", which is a mouthful and requires explaining what RC stands for if you're writing a news article.
The idiots that you refer to are Nixon and Clinton (B, not H).
Nixon "opened up" China and Clinton gave them "most favored nation" trading status.
Nixon's motivation is easy to understand, he thought he was breaking up the monolithic Communist bloc and weakening the Soviets who were considered the big threat at the time.
Clinton's motivation is harder to fathom. Why would he bend over backwards for the Chinese Communist party like that? Soviets were gone, China's human rights were still deplorable, it was still a totalitarian regime, and liberals are not supposed to favor that type of a government. Only answer I can think of is that he's a liberal in name only and he just did what his corporate campaign donors wanted him to do, which is get him cheap labor so they can make more profits (gutting domestic manufacturing jobs be damned).
Two things. First you're conflating market cap and GDP but they're not analogous at all. Market cap is what a company is worth. GDP is not what a country is worth, it's only the current economic output of a country. Total worth of a country is far more than its GDP numbers. For example, Yellowstone national park does not add anything to the GDP of the United States, yet no one can argue that Yellowstone is worthless.
If market capitalization is the only thing, does it still exist in the absence of humans?
No. Market cap requires humans to own stocks in a company. Robots and computers are not interested in buying stocks at the moment. In fact they're not interested in anything at all, the only thing they do is run code inputted by humans.
You could argue that one day soon computers will develop sentience and become interested in money, at which point they may want to invest in stocks. Well I'm not stoned enough for that discussion at the moment, so I'll just leave that to Ray Kurzweil.
Since road wear scales with the 3rd or 4th power of axle weight, a 200 lb cyclist should pay about 1000'th of the road taxes as a driver with a 2000 lb car (or 1/5360'th as much as a 3500 pound car). So if you pay $1000/year in taxes for your 3500 lb Honda Accord, the cyclist would pay about 20 cents.
There are other costs to building and maintaining a road besides simple road wear. The biggest cost of a road is usually the land acquisition in order to build one. A bike lane takes up far more than 1/5360th of the land that a car lane uses. Probably closer to 1/3rd.
And there are other causes of road wear than the weight of vehicles traveling on it, such as water damage from rain puddles, freeze/thaw cycle, etc
Especially given than history is littered with examples of airplanes not being able to pull out of dives due to control surfaces not responding properly (or ripping off) in supersonic or transonic flow. Alsbury would have been intensely aware of these concepts.
Well it's not exactly like deploying flaps at high speed and having them rip off the plane and damaging stuff. He didn't deploy anything, he only unlocked it. He thought the motors would hold the feather in place and nobody at Virgin or Scaled drilled into his head that prematurely unlocking feather = DEATH. Quite possibly because they also didn't think the feather would move by itself just from air pressure and vibration. We know it NOW, but before?
Unlocking the feather while going up was part of the procedure. He did it too soon but was not adequately informed of the disastrous consequences of mistiming the unlock. So yeah, I do agree they're blaming the dead guy too much.
Also, Alsbury was an experienced pilot but not exactly a Chuck Yeager. As to whether pilots would think through all the possible consequences of every action in a cockpit jam packed with switches and levers and knobs, under a heavy workload, well it's easy to say while we're sitting in a desk but reality is not that sterile.
Keep in mind the SS1 was a scary ride and I assume SS2 is no cupcake either. When that rocket lights, it kicks your ass not just with monster acceleration but also crazy vibration and deafening noise. It scared Brian Binnie shitless and he was used to flying F-18s off carriers. Even Mike Melville who is about as cool a customer as they come (and an excellent, excellent pilot btw) was quite impressed shall we say. A good pilot would get used to it pretty quick I'm sure, after doing it a couple times. The first time? It would mentally compromise most anyone including experienced pilots and you'd have to have superhuman levels of the Right Stuff to function at 100% the first time you're on that crazy rocket ride.
Moss: Having looked over the Mars One plans I must say I am also highly skeptical, but hesitantly so, because you never know what can happen. Humans are remarkable...
Then he proceeds to debate the technical details of Mars One plan. Dude, it doesn't matter what the finer points of their plan are, the reality of it is that 1) they need tens of billions of dollars, and there's no way in hell they're gonna raise that with a reality TV show. The money they need exceeds the entire world's TV advertising budget, probably by a lot. And 2) they are taking money from gullible "astronauts" who are hoping to go to Mars. Put 1 and 2 together and you have a fraud.
If they were taking money from banks or investors or advertisers, yes I would applaud them for trying to make a go of a laudable goal. But that's not what they're doing, they're taking money from future employees. What do you call a Hollywood casting director who says he's making a movie and hiring actors, then takes money from aspiring actors for the chance to be in his movie? You call him a con man. The director's is supposed to pay the actors, not take money from them.
Someone needs to do a serious accounting of what the Mars One guy is doing with the money he's taking.
what kind of retarded shit is that? I'm surprised it took this long before someone tampered with the computer to win.
California state lottery used to show their winning lotto numbers on live TV with a bunch of ping pong balls in a clear plastic chamber. High velocity air was pumped into it so that the balls bounced around like crazy. Then they would open a slot (also made of clear plastic) and 6 balls would fall in and those were your winning numbers. It was a very transparent setup (literally) and it was obvious to anyone looking that it was pretty random.
Come to think of it, they don't actually do that anymore and the live TV show is gone. Maybe nowadays CA also picks winning numbers in a back room somewhere with a computer algorithm. Wouldn't surprise me, common sense seems to be disappearing from the world.
There are little drones and there are big drones. The big ones can weigh 5 pounds or more. Also all drones have steel parts like electric motors.
Maybe Mythbusters or somebody can do a test, shouldn't be that hard or expensive. Get a helicopter tail rotor and mount it on a platform and spin it to normal operating RPM. Fly a popular drone such as a DJI Phantom with a GoPro mounted on it into the tail rotor. See what kind of damage occurs.
My guess is that the damage to the tail rotor will be major and the helicopter will experience yaw stability issues, but a decent pilot should be able to make an emergency landing.
I think the feathered reentry would still work at orbital speeds, it's just that the composite material from which SS2 is built can't withstand the heat. Putting heat tiles on SS2 would not work well as that would add too much weight, and they're still gonna have all kinds of problems with the tiles staying in place. So for all intents and purposes the feather reentry is strictly a suborbital design.
The most innovative orbital reentry design I saw was a proposal for using the rocket engine plume to deflect superheated air molecules away from the spacecraft. Yes you would need to use fuel for that but the weight of the fuel you would need compared favorably to the weight and complexity of a heat tile design. But then you have the problem of "what happens if the rocket engine fails to ignite", and the answer is that you melt. So it would be useful for unmanned vehicles that you can afford to lose to engine failure once in a while but not for manned reentry.
Slashdot Mirror
It amuses me that all the left-leaning slashdotters are up in arms about H1B. I guess if it's YOUR job that's being threatened, ideology goes out the window.
Don't misunderstand me, I am also against H1B.
But if you replace "coders" and "H1B" with "manual laborers" and "guest worker program", well then that's all right, we have to help the poor brown people so sure let them all in. It's racist to keep them out.
You're crazy if you think a typical English speaker can pick up German in a couple of months. German is weird and not like English at all. It's hard, especially the coughing sounds that you have to make if you want to speak German properly.
Yes I'm aware that Old English came from the Anglo-Saxon language and they were closely related... thousands of years ago. Today? Just "Der die oder das" by itself will drive an American crazy.
Your other point is valid though, a computer programmer should have no problem getting by on English alone in Germany.
The mouse was the Slashdot submitter.
I clicked on the link but it doesn't say what Smart City did exactly, it just says they "blocked" it.
Was it by using an active jammer? Was it with lead paint or a Faraday cage? Or?
Flashblock already has the option to block html5 videos. I think it's not enabled by default though.
Just go to "Add-ons" and click "Options" under Flashblock. Tick the "Block HTML5 video as well".
for general purpose desktop use anyways.
In the United States, there is literally NOTHING they cannot get into.
Except ClintonEmail.com server. NSA couldn't get into that.
about 4 years ago now I guess. I thought Steve was exaggerating about Amazon, or trying to be humorous (or both), but now in hindsight I think he was probably being accurate.
The rant
"Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not.
Micro-managing isn't that third thing that Amazon does better than us, by the way. I mean, yeah, they micro-manage really well, but I wouldn't list it as a strength or anything. I'm just trying to set the context here, to help you understand what happened. We're talking about a guy who in all seriousness has said on many public occasions that people should be paying him to work at Amazon. He hands out little yellow stickies with his name on them, reminding people "who runs the company" when they disagree with him. The guy is a regular... well, Steve Jobs, I guess. Except without the fashion or design sense. Bezos is super smart; don't get me wrong. He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies.
So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses."
You forgot a third type of Republican: the conservative Republican.
Conservative as in they are for conservation, not because they're prudes who are against short skirts or raunchy behavior. Theodore Roosevelt was the model conservationist republican.
Basically these are people who like the things they had in their lives and want to conserve them for future generations. This includes their society, culture, and the environment.
In recent times they have lost power to Establishment republicans who favor big business above everything else, but back in the day Teddy would establish National Parks and limit development to preserve nature and tell Standard Oil to go fondle itself.
The key thing about them is that they had a happy childhood. As opposed to some politicians who had such a negative experience with their own upbringing that they want to "fundamentally change America".
It will kill the internet as we know it.
Somewhat of an overstatement, but I suppose it will bring about changes.
Only those entities with money will be able to post any content.
Dead wrong. I pay $120 a year for my site hosting and $10 a year for the domain. You can do it for free actually, I just like having big mysql databases and cron jobs.
Smaller sites like /. may survive on subscriptions, but many will not. If you think the coroprtization of the internet is bad now...
No, sites will move toward self-hosted ads and rely less on ad networks. It will probably give rise to a new industry of ad brokering for smaller sites unable to find their own advertisers, replacing the current ad+malware delivery networks.
Furthermore, TFS boldly claims "Hackers remotely cut brakes...". Well duh, if you have physical access to your target and attach your own device to it (which is what these guys did), of course you can do whatever to it. I can remotely shove a gerbil up Bush's butt if I am given physical access to him and I'm allowed to attach my device on him.
The challenge is to remotely hack something that you have no physical access to and/or without attaching anything to it.
No. Google and Alphabet won't have separate stock. Google will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet. Like, you can't buy Chevrolet stock, you can only buy GM stock.
Existing Google shares will simply be converted to Alphabet shares.
I would personally not care one bit if a fast food worker got paid as much as me or more.... good for them, I wouldn't want to do that job so why would I complain?
There were no fast food workers at that firm.
A better comparison would be someone at YOUR company, who's a newer hire than you, has less experience and can't code as well as you, and basically just clocks in and out without contributing much, and because of a SJW CEO's action now makes the same salary as you.
Drones are to RC aircraft what dogs are to wolves. They are almost the same and have 99% identical DNA, but there are a few key characteristics that set them apart.
First, drones require little to no flying skills on the part of the operator. Think RC helicopters from >10 years ago, very difficult to fly and maintain (especially piston-engine choppers, which you had to have if you wanted any kind of serious flying capability). You had to be an expert to not only fly one, but also build and service it. Nowadays you buy a quadcopter and it's ready to go, literally right out of the box with zero setup or adjustments. Modern electronics and gyros means you need no skill whatsoever to fly; just push the throttle and hold it and it hovers.
Second, some drones have autonomous capability. With built-in GPS and advanced algorithms, they fly themselves. You punch in pre-programmed waypoints and the drone will fly there, loiter and drop a payload or take pictures or whatever, and fly back to you. It's not remote controlled anymore.
Third, "drone" is easier to say than "RC model aircraft", which is a mouthful and requires explaining what RC stands for if you're writing a news article.
The idiots that you refer to are Nixon and Clinton (B, not H).
Nixon "opened up" China and Clinton gave them "most favored nation" trading status.
Nixon's motivation is easy to understand, he thought he was breaking up the monolithic Communist bloc and weakening the Soviets who were considered the big threat at the time.
Clinton's motivation is harder to fathom. Why would he bend over backwards for the Chinese Communist party like that? Soviets were gone, China's human rights were still deplorable, it was still a totalitarian regime, and liberals are not supposed to favor that type of a government. Only answer I can think of is that he's a liberal in name only and he just did what his corporate campaign donors wanted him to do, which is get him cheap labor so they can make more profits (gutting domestic manufacturing jobs be damned).
Two things. First you're conflating market cap and GDP but they're not analogous at all. Market cap is what a company is worth. GDP is not what a country is worth, it's only the current economic output of a country. Total worth of a country is far more than its GDP numbers. For example, Yellowstone national park does not add anything to the GDP of the United States, yet no one can argue that Yellowstone is worthless.
If market capitalization is the only thing, does it still exist in the absence of humans?
No. Market cap requires humans to own stocks in a company. Robots and computers are not interested in buying stocks at the moment. In fact they're not interested in anything at all, the only thing they do is run code inputted by humans.
You could argue that one day soon computers will develop sentience and become interested in money, at which point they may want to invest in stocks. Well I'm not stoned enough for that discussion at the moment, so I'll just leave that to Ray Kurzweil.
Since road wear scales with the 3rd or 4th power of axle weight, a 200 lb cyclist should pay about 1000'th of the road taxes as a driver with a 2000 lb car (or 1/5360'th as much as a 3500 pound car). So if you pay $1000/year in taxes for your 3500 lb Honda Accord, the cyclist would pay about 20 cents.
There are other costs to building and maintaining a road besides simple road wear. The biggest cost of a road is usually the land acquisition in order to build one. A bike lane takes up far more than 1/5360th of the land that a car lane uses. Probably closer to 1/3rd.
And there are other causes of road wear than the weight of vehicles traveling on it, such as water damage from rain puddles, freeze/thaw cycle, etc
Especially given than history is littered with examples of airplanes not being able to pull out of dives due to control surfaces not responding properly (or ripping off) in supersonic or transonic flow. Alsbury would have been intensely aware of these concepts.
Well it's not exactly like deploying flaps at high speed and having them rip off the plane and damaging stuff. He didn't deploy anything, he only unlocked it. He thought the motors would hold the feather in place and nobody at Virgin or Scaled drilled into his head that prematurely unlocking feather = DEATH. Quite possibly because they also didn't think the feather would move by itself just from air pressure and vibration. We know it NOW, but before?
Unlocking the feather while going up was part of the procedure. He did it too soon but was not adequately informed of the disastrous consequences of mistiming the unlock. So yeah, I do agree they're blaming the dead guy too much.
Also, Alsbury was an experienced pilot but not exactly a Chuck Yeager. As to whether pilots would think through all the possible consequences of every action in a cockpit jam packed with switches and levers and knobs, under a heavy workload, well it's easy to say while we're sitting in a desk but reality is not that sterile.
Keep in mind the SS1 was a scary ride and I assume SS2 is no cupcake either. When that rocket lights, it kicks your ass not just with monster acceleration but also crazy vibration and deafening noise. It scared Brian Binnie shitless and he was used to flying F-18s off carriers. Even Mike Melville who is about as cool a customer as they come (and an excellent, excellent pilot btw) was quite impressed shall we say. A good pilot would get used to it pretty quick I'm sure, after doing it a couple times. The first time? It would mentally compromise most anyone including experienced pilots and you'd have to have superhuman levels of the Right Stuff to function at 100% the first time you're on that crazy rocket ride.
I was thinking more like crystal meth. Is the product I'm buying really 99.1% pure?
Moss: Having looked over the Mars One plans I must say I am also highly skeptical, but hesitantly so, because you never know what can happen. Humans are remarkable...
Then he proceeds to debate the technical details of Mars One plan. Dude, it doesn't matter what the finer points of their plan are, the reality of it is that 1) they need tens of billions of dollars, and there's no way in hell they're gonna raise that with a reality TV show. The money they need exceeds the entire world's TV advertising budget, probably by a lot. And 2) they are taking money from gullible "astronauts" who are hoping to go to Mars. Put 1 and 2 together and you have a fraud.
If they were taking money from banks or investors or advertisers, yes I would applaud them for trying to make a go of a laudable goal. But that's not what they're doing, they're taking money from future employees. What do you call a Hollywood casting director who says he's making a movie and hiring actors, then takes money from aspiring actors for the chance to be in his movie? You call him a con man. The director's is supposed to pay the actors, not take money from them.
Someone needs to do a serious accounting of what the Mars One guy is doing with the money he's taking.
Yes. Go to Settings -> Celullar and it will list all your apps and how much cellular bandwidth each app has used.
You can also enable/disable cellular access for each app.
what kind of retarded shit is that? I'm surprised it took this long before someone tampered with the computer to win.
California state lottery used to show their winning lotto numbers on live TV with a bunch of ping pong balls in a clear plastic chamber. High velocity air was pumped into it so that the balls bounced around like crazy. Then they would open a slot (also made of clear plastic) and 6 balls would fall in and those were your winning numbers. It was a very transparent setup (literally) and it was obvious to anyone looking that it was pretty random.
Come to think of it, they don't actually do that anymore and the live TV show is gone. Maybe nowadays CA also picks winning numbers in a back room somewhere with a computer algorithm. Wouldn't surprise me, common sense seems to be disappearing from the world.
There are little drones and there are big drones. The big ones can weigh 5 pounds or more. Also all drones have steel parts like electric motors.
Maybe Mythbusters or somebody can do a test, shouldn't be that hard or expensive. Get a helicopter tail rotor and mount it on a platform and spin it to normal operating RPM. Fly a popular drone such as a DJI Phantom with a GoPro mounted on it into the tail rotor. See what kind of damage occurs.
My guess is that the damage to the tail rotor will be major and the helicopter will experience yaw stability issues, but a decent pilot should be able to make an emergency landing.
You must be a Ranger, and the OP a Paladin.
Me, I'm just a fighter, neutral and available as a mercenary (in case anyone's hiring)
I think the feathered reentry would still work at orbital speeds, it's just that the composite material from which SS2 is built can't withstand the heat. Putting heat tiles on SS2 would not work well as that would add too much weight, and they're still gonna have all kinds of problems with the tiles staying in place. So for all intents and purposes the feather reentry is strictly a suborbital design.
The most innovative orbital reentry design I saw was a proposal for using the rocket engine plume to deflect superheated air molecules away from the spacecraft. Yes you would need to use fuel for that but the weight of the fuel you would need compared favorably to the weight and complexity of a heat tile design. But then you have the problem of "what happens if the rocket engine fails to ignite", and the answer is that you melt. So it would be useful for unmanned vehicles that you can afford to lose to engine failure once in a while but not for manned reentry.