This is the future we need to create, if you look at enablers like Uber or AirBnB and realise that through technology we can make individuals more productive and able to organise on an individual basis rather than these monolithic entities we call 'firms'. So what does an economy filled with self-employed people look like? how can we get there?
Strangely enough we need to look at developing countries, like Kenya, which is turning into quite the entrepreneurial economy. In Kenya they have co-op garages, where people with different skills loiter around the same area simply because those skills feed into one another, but they are still very much individuals working for themselves.
There are groups trying this idea like Colony, but obviously you need to be wealthy enough to stand on your own two feet before even considering joining such a project.
I really would like to know too. I write device driver for internal use, but I'll be torched down if I try to get them accepted in the kernel because there are so many things in them that I don't know how to do the 'correct' way.
No you probably won't be 'torched down', Linus' rants are typically aimed at people who aren't new to the Kernel and really should know better. If you're a newcomer to the Kernel they would afford you some leeway, just be prepared to take some constructive criticism on your code.
Solve out the server-side economics, and you have a shot at building an open-source Siri. Until then, you're better off putting your open-source efforts into client-side applications.
There is a new wave of decentralised open source applications occuring at the moment which changes the server-side economics considerably. Perhaps not so much in terms of something compute heavy like Siri, but certainly other bandwidth heavy things like youtube. Things like Ethereum, IPFS, ZeroNet.
This sounds like a good use for some torrent-type technology to supply "distributed websites"
Rather than having a server or "servers", articles go out from a seed source and are quickly seeded throughout the world. Maybe add some sort of checksumming/encryption to help validate that an article did in-fact come from the real source and not an impostor... it would stop sh*t like this from happening.
You've almost literally described IPFS, which is like the lovechild of Bittorrent and Git
So what you're saying here is that MIT have invented a wireless polygraph. Maybe we should build a bunch of portable ones and give them out to reporters.
Yes. Converting a digital signal into an analog signal, which vibrates a drum, which creates pressure waves in the air, which induces a vibration into another drum, which creates pressure waves in some fluid, which moves some hairs which gets converted back into an electrical signal... is a seriously a rube goldbergian solution that has no place in the 21st century.
On the flip side, don't you think that companies should pay for the studies needed to make sure their products are safe? Why should the public have to subsidise the development of a for profit company's products?
This is what gets me with the whole 'follow the money' idea here, the companies have a duty of care to make sure their products aren't hazardous, and if they were acting as socially responsible entities then they would genuinely be interested in conducting the tests.
If they don't buy food, they will be hungry. Next month their primary need will be food, not shopping. So they will go eat. If they keep getting the money, eventually they will learn to balance their spending on their needs.
If people spending the money on the wrong thing is a concern, why pay them monthly?
Retail workers in Australia get paid every week, and office professionals every two. If you are spending irresponsibly its not that difficult to wait until pay day if that's only next week, where as if someone has a gambling problem and loses too much of their monthly UBI they don't have to somehow survive for a whole month until getting another cash injection.
It's an especially pointless argument considering that the effect of CO2 is cumulative, and the only statistic that actually matters is total global greenhouse gas emissions per annum, not per capita or GDP or any other division.
Anything that lowers global emissions, even if only temporary, will help. This is a global issue and will affect us all, so all countries big and small need to do what they can.
Short of starting a war, China will do whatever China wants, and there's nothing to be done about that. Their air quality issues alone should be enough to get the attention of the political class over there, and they are expanding their use of nuclear power to try and combat that issue.
Lets do a little common sense here, I am a hiring manager and just interviewed two people with very similar qualifications, backgrounds, and work ethic, but one of them I can save ~20% on pay/benefits.... Wow, I wonder who I am hiring...
It's not pure crap, but you can explain it using market theory because the assumption here is that all other things are equal when they are not.
At any point in a womans career she can fall pregnant, whether this was planned or not. This means that at any point the employer is on the hook for maternity leave which is typically much greater than paternity leave. So given that disparity, if you had two otherwise equal candidates and decided to use economics as a tie breaker you would either choose the male candidate and not take the risk of maternity leave, or choose the female and hedge against the risk by paying her less.
I would expect that focussing purely on equal pay without accounting for this will lead to other effects, like less women getting hired, or promoted which isn't exactly what you'd call equality.
Most countries have anti-discrimination laws which could be used to guard against firing someone on the basis of political afilliation, at least in Australia we have a culture of respecting each others choice when it comes to politics and I've never heard of a company taking a stance on which party their employees should be voting for.
I don't see a need for one size fits all election process, some types of election might benefit more from being electronic than others. In particular it would be great if my home country national elections were electronic simply because it takes quite a long time to count all the votes, and do a nondeterministic number of recounts thanks to the wonders of ranked choice voting and crazy senate ballots in some states (I got to number candidates from 1-52 in my recent senate election).
For national elections I would be happy with pseudonymous elections, have the results on a public blockchain which everyone can verify the overall outcome and be given a code to check that their vote was unaltered and as they wished. People can destroy the code if they want it kept secret, even immedately if they trust the system.
However, if you're happy with your electoral process, and theres no issues with it then why ruin a good thing?
What about people who live or work in areas in which voting for the wrong person could have consequences? Someone working at a coal mine who wants to vote Democrat? A person with an abusive spouse who doesn't want to vote they way they were told to? Just because you are comfortable telling people who you vote for not everyone else has such luxury.
Voter coercion is a really bad way to rig an election though. Sure it sucks for the individual involved but it would have to be done on a mass scale to have any effect on the outcome for any major election. Lets take the Brexit vote in the UK as an example, the Leave side had a margin of around 1M votes, so if you wanted to rig this so that the result changed, you'd at minimum need to coerce 1M people or more likely 2M people to ensure the result you want. Keeping a lid on 2M people and making sure nobody talks is a rather significant consipiracy
Whilst keeping the process free and secure for the individual is important, I can't help but think in the grand scheme of things simply making voter coercion and vote buying illegal is enough to squash the most egregious examples from happening.
Blockchain-based entertainment industry startup SingularDTV plans to use distributed computation network Ethereum to sell access to a new Sci-Fi television show about the Singularity. The Ethereum Blockchain is known for it's 'Smart Contracts' or distributed programs that can handle transactions of arbitrary tokens between different cryptographically signed accounts. Unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum Tokens can be created in any quantity at will for any purpose without the need for computationally expensive mining operations.
SingularDTV will create their own Ethereum Token backed by a Smart Contract to handle access to their show, this is made possible by the cryptographically signed accounts and public blockchain so you can mathematically prove you control the account which has the access token in it.
It's so appalling I'm literally thinking of quitting.NET development rather than eventually being forced to use it.
Luckily, Microsoft seems to be gunning after Java by making.Net open source and cross platform. With Oracle stumbling with Java EE there might actually be a market for.Net on Linux.
Attempting to up the hype a bit... Physical Review Letters is the well respected publication where Einstein his paper 1936 “Do gravitational waves exist?”, in which he concludes they do not, which turned out to be wrong. A couple of takeaways here: 1) Physical Review Letters is a forum for heavyweight players in the physics world; 2) that doesn't mean it's always right; 3) Einstein predicted gravity waves in 1916. Later he changed his mind and thought that he was wrong, but he was wrong about that.
Slightly off topic, and I'm probably way off anyway. But if we have gravity waves, can we have gravity standing waves? Could this be a possible explanation to the gravitational lensing phenomena we currently attribute to Dark Matter?
The choice of 'automated" word is unfortunate. This helps coding, but an human operator still has to tell the machine what to do, which is programming.
True automated coding could only be claimed the day human operator will be removed from the process.
As someone who works in industrial automation, I have to disagree. This is what automation looks like, you take something that is labour intensive and make it less so with machinery. Until we create hard ai someone will always have to tell computers what to do, and the manner in which to do it, what this is doing is evolving the language we use to get computers to do what we want.
I admit to having little knowledge about them, but I think flow batteries have great potential.
It would be fine for at least industrial energy storage (from renewable sources), it seems.
I agree, it's a shame that for now the membranes used in flow batteries are rather difficult and expensive to manufacture, which is the main thing limiting their use in industry today, once that is sorted the tech should scale very nicely. Need more capacity? No problem add more tanks, need more throughput? add more pipes and membranes, simple.
As someone who works on Oil Depot systems, I think that aside from their locations (usually near docks) they would be perfect to convert into flow battery grid storage, since its all about pumping liquids around in big tanks, throw in some load prediction expertise from power companies and you're good to go.
Show up the day of the election, darken the oval next the candidate you want and feed it into the electronic counter - an unambiguous paper trail will remain.
What about ranked choice voting? How does that fit into the 'darken the oval' method? Ranked choice is a much fairer way of conducting elections
It is really the other way around as their brains grew the most in their childhood playing on their iphones and ipads. Windows 7 seems drastically different to them in comparison.
So called 'Millennial' here (Age 29, Born 1987), I grew up in the early 90's well before iphones and ipads were ever invented. My first computer was an Archimedes running RISCOS.
Sometimes I wonder if we need a new term for those born in the early Millennial period (1980-1990) compared to the later Millennials (1990-2000) because what I grew up with is certainly different to what those just a few years later grew up with. Sure enough Canada has Generation Z starting at about 1993, so maybe that's a better definition.
The mainstream media seemed to have missed this, but this is the first production phone to be using the Project Ara module interconnect using the Greybus Protocol.
More information about how the thing actually works and what its good for here
Looks like Apple is pulling a Sony, which is to release rumours about a controversial feature which mysteriously never appears after your competition have already copied you.
The only way to fix this is to change the system. Give voters papers where they can fill in priorities, with priority one two three etc. The system is called STV: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... The voters then will be free to support any candidate they want, regardless of strategy.
From Jill Steins Campaign Page... Abolish the Electoral College and directly elect the President using a national popular vote with ranked-choice voting..
Eliminate “winner take all / first past the post” elections in which the “winner” may not have the support of most of the voters. Replace that system with ranked choice voting and proportional representation.
Honestly, if nothing else you should consider Jill Stein because she advocates electoral reform and scrapping the first past the post system with something a lot fairer.
From an outsiders perspective, this should be the single biggest issue in American Politics, because clearly the system you guys have is not producing very good results if your choice is between Empress Clinton and the village idiot
The SA government is already investigating the use of Thermal Solar plants to help with baseboard generation, and let's be honest the place is hotter than hell so Thermal Solar will work quite well there I'd expect
Slashdot Mirror
This is the future we need to create, if you look at enablers like Uber or AirBnB and realise that through technology we can make individuals more productive and able to organise on an individual basis rather than these monolithic entities we call 'firms'. So what does an economy filled with self-employed people look like? how can we get there?
Strangely enough we need to look at developing countries, like Kenya, which is turning into quite the entrepreneurial economy. In Kenya they have co-op garages, where people with different skills loiter around the same area simply because those skills feed into one another, but they are still very much individuals working for themselves.
There are groups trying this idea like Colony, but obviously you need to be wealthy enough to stand on your own two feet before even considering joining such a project.
I really would like to know too. I write device driver for internal use, but I'll be torched down if I try to get them accepted in the kernel because there are so many things in them that I don't know how to do the 'correct' way.
No you probably won't be 'torched down', Linus' rants are typically aimed at people who aren't new to the Kernel and really should know better. If you're a newcomer to the Kernel they would afford you some leeway, just be prepared to take some constructive criticism on your code.
Solve out the server-side economics, and you have a shot at building an open-source Siri. Until then, you're better off putting your open-source efforts into client-side applications.
There is a new wave of decentralised open source applications occuring at the moment which changes the server-side economics considerably. Perhaps not so much in terms of something compute heavy like Siri, but certainly other bandwidth heavy things like youtube. Things like Ethereum, IPFS, ZeroNet.
This sounds like a good use for some torrent-type technology to supply "distributed websites" Rather than having a server or "servers", articles go out from a seed source and are quickly seeded throughout the world. Maybe add some sort of checksumming/encryption to help validate that an article did in-fact come from the real source and not an impostor... it would stop sh*t like this from happening.
You've almost literally described IPFS, which is like the lovechild of Bittorrent and Git
So what you're saying here is that MIT have invented a wireless polygraph. Maybe we should build a bunch of portable ones and give them out to reporters.
Digital all the way to the neural interface!
Yes. Converting a digital signal into an analog signal, which vibrates a drum, which creates pressure waves in the air, which induces a vibration into another drum, which creates pressure waves in some fluid, which moves some hairs which gets converted back into an electrical signal... is a seriously a rube goldbergian solution that has no place in the 21st century.
On the flip side, don't you think that companies should pay for the studies needed to make sure their products are safe? Why should the public have to subsidise the development of a for profit company's products?
This is what gets me with the whole 'follow the money' idea here, the companies have a duty of care to make sure their products aren't hazardous, and if they were acting as socially responsible entities then they would genuinely be interested in conducting the tests.
If they don't buy food, they will be hungry. Next month their primary need will be food, not shopping. So they will go eat. If they keep getting the money, eventually they will learn to balance their spending on their needs.
If people spending the money on the wrong thing is a concern, why pay them monthly?
Retail workers in Australia get paid every week, and office professionals every two. If you are spending irresponsibly its not that difficult to wait until pay day if that's only next week, where as if someone has a gambling problem and loses too much of their monthly UBI they don't have to somehow survive for a whole month until getting another cash injection.
It's an especially pointless argument considering that the effect of CO2 is cumulative, and the only statistic that actually matters is total global greenhouse gas emissions per annum, not per capita or GDP or any other division.
Anything that lowers global emissions, even if only temporary, will help. This is a global issue and will affect us all, so all countries big and small need to do what they can.
Short of starting a war, China will do whatever China wants, and there's nothing to be done about that. Their air quality issues alone should be enough to get the attention of the political class over there, and they are expanding their use of nuclear power to try and combat that issue.
Lets do a little common sense here, I am a hiring manager and just interviewed two people with very similar qualifications, backgrounds, and work ethic, but one of them I can save ~20% on pay/benefits.... Wow, I wonder who I am hiring...
It's not pure crap, but you can explain it using market theory because the assumption here is that all other things are equal when they are not.
At any point in a womans career she can fall pregnant, whether this was planned or not. This means that at any point the employer is on the hook for maternity leave which is typically much greater than paternity leave. So given that disparity, if you had two otherwise equal candidates and decided to use economics as a tie breaker you would either choose the male candidate and not take the risk of maternity leave, or choose the female and hedge against the risk by paying her less.
I would expect that focussing purely on equal pay without accounting for this will lead to other effects, like less women getting hired, or promoted which isn't exactly what you'd call equality.
Most countries have anti-discrimination laws which could be used to guard against firing someone on the basis of political afilliation, at least in Australia we have a culture of respecting each others choice when it comes to politics and I've never heard of a company taking a stance on which party their employees should be voting for.
I don't see a need for one size fits all election process, some types of election might benefit more from being electronic than others. In particular it would be great if my home country national elections were electronic simply because it takes quite a long time to count all the votes, and do a nondeterministic number of recounts thanks to the wonders of ranked choice voting and crazy senate ballots in some states (I got to number candidates from 1-52 in my recent senate election).
For national elections I would be happy with pseudonymous elections, have the results on a public blockchain which everyone can verify the overall outcome and be given a code to check that their vote was unaltered and as they wished. People can destroy the code if they want it kept secret, even immedately if they trust the system.
However, if you're happy with your electoral process, and theres no issues with it then why ruin a good thing?
What about people who live or work in areas in which voting for the wrong person could have consequences? Someone working at a coal mine who wants to vote Democrat? A person with an abusive spouse who doesn't want to vote they way they were told to? Just because you are comfortable telling people who you vote for not everyone else has such luxury.
Voter coercion is a really bad way to rig an election though. Sure it sucks for the individual involved but it would have to be done on a mass scale to have any effect on the outcome for any major election. Lets take the Brexit vote in the UK as an example, the Leave side had a margin of around 1M votes, so if you wanted to rig this so that the result changed, you'd at minimum need to coerce 1M people or more likely 2M people to ensure the result you want. Keeping a lid on 2M people and making sure nobody talks is a rather significant consipiracy
Whilst keeping the process free and secure for the individual is important, I can't help but think in the grand scheme of things simply making voter coercion and vote buying illegal is enough to squash the most egregious examples from happening.
Blockchain-based entertainment industry startup SingularDTV plans to use distributed computation network Ethereum to sell access to a new Sci-Fi television show about the Singularity. The Ethereum Blockchain is known for it's 'Smart Contracts' or distributed programs that can handle transactions of arbitrary tokens between different cryptographically signed accounts. Unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum Tokens can be created in any quantity at will for any purpose without the need for computationally expensive mining operations.
SingularDTV will create their own Ethereum Token backed by a Smart Contract to handle access to their show, this is made possible by the cryptographically signed accounts and public blockchain so you can mathematically prove you control the account which has the access token in it.
It's so appalling I'm literally thinking of quitting .NET development rather than eventually being forced to use it.
Luckily, Microsoft seems to be gunning after Java by making .Net open source and cross platform. With Oracle stumbling with Java EE there might actually be a market for .Net on Linux.
Attempting to up the hype a bit... Physical Review Letters is the well respected publication where Einstein his paper 1936 “Do gravitational waves exist?”, in which he concludes they do not, which turned out to be wrong. A couple of takeaways here: 1) Physical Review Letters is a forum for heavyweight players in the physics world; 2) that doesn't mean it's always right; 3) Einstein predicted gravity waves in 1916. Later he changed his mind and thought that he was wrong, but he was wrong about that.
Slightly off topic, and I'm probably way off anyway. But if we have gravity waves, can we have gravity standing waves? Could this be a possible explanation to the gravitational lensing phenomena we currently attribute to Dark Matter?
The choice of 'automated" word is unfortunate. This helps coding, but an human operator still has to tell the machine what to do, which is programming.
True automated coding could only be claimed the day human operator will be removed from the process.
As someone who works in industrial automation, I have to disagree. This is what automation looks like, you take something that is labour intensive and make it less so with machinery. Until we create hard ai someone will always have to tell computers what to do, and the manner in which to do it, what this is doing is evolving the language we use to get computers to do what we want.
Something like IPFS? The concept isn't that complicated once you realise its mostly git and bittorrent mashed together to great benefit
I admit to having little knowledge about them, but I think flow batteries have great potential.
It would be fine for at least industrial energy storage (from renewable sources), it seems.
I agree, it's a shame that for now the membranes used in flow batteries are rather difficult and expensive to manufacture, which is the main thing limiting their use in industry today, once that is sorted the tech should scale very nicely. Need more capacity? No problem add more tanks, need more throughput? add more pipes and membranes, simple.
As someone who works on Oil Depot systems, I think that aside from their locations (usually near docks) they would be perfect to convert into flow battery grid storage, since its all about pumping liquids around in big tanks, throw in some load prediction expertise from power companies and you're good to go.
Show up the day of the election, darken the oval next the candidate you want and feed it into the electronic counter - an unambiguous paper trail will remain.
What about ranked choice voting? How does that fit into the 'darken the oval' method? Ranked choice is a much fairer way of conducting elections
It is really the other way around as their brains grew the most in their childhood playing on their iphones and ipads. Windows 7 seems drastically different to them in comparison.
So called 'Millennial' here (Age 29, Born 1987), I grew up in the early 90's well before iphones and ipads were ever invented. My first computer was an Archimedes running RISCOS.
Sometimes I wonder if we need a new term for those born in the early Millennial period (1980-1990) compared to the later Millennials (1990-2000) because what I grew up with is certainly different to what those just a few years later grew up with. Sure enough Canada has Generation Z starting at about 1993, so maybe that's a better definition.
The mainstream media seemed to have missed this, but this is the first production phone to be using the Project Ara module interconnect using the Greybus Protocol.
More information about how the thing actually works and what its good for here
Looks like Apple is pulling a Sony, which is to release rumours about a controversial feature which mysteriously never appears after your competition have already copied you.
Sony did this with the Playstation 4, and the rumours saying that bought games would be locked to one console, which Microsoft dutifully followed causing a large backlash and sales hit
So despite all the rumours about the next iPhone lacking a headphone jack, I expect it will be there just like it always has been
The only way to fix this is to change the system. Give voters papers where they can fill in priorities, with priority one two three etc. The system is called STV: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... The voters then will be free to support any candidate they want, regardless of strategy.
From Jill Steins Campaign Page...
Abolish the Electoral College and directly elect the President using a national popular vote with ranked-choice voting..
Eliminate “winner take all / first past the post” elections in which the “winner” may not have the support of most of the voters. Replace that system with ranked choice voting and proportional representation.
Honestly, if nothing else you should consider Jill Stein because she advocates electoral reform and scrapping the first past the post system with something a lot fairer.
From an outsiders perspective, this should be the single biggest issue in American Politics, because clearly the system you guys have is not producing very good results if your choice is between Empress Clinton and the village idiot
The SA government is already investigating the use of Thermal Solar plants to help with baseboard generation, and let's be honest the place is hotter than hell so Thermal Solar will work quite well there I'd expect