I think they're ultimately shooting for having future phones as thin as credit cards.
And that's a very dumb goal. No one complains, "I wish my phone was thinner." People do complain, "I wish my phone had better battery life" and "I wish my phone's screen wouldn't break so easily."
It's an interesting strategy really, you make phones impressively thin which only bolsters the idea that they're fragile, which makes people buy cases for them.
You're basically outsourcing the structural integrity of the device and providing customisation options in one hit.
Besides why would people what a smart contract based blockchain currency if the contracts wouldn't be solved by those smart contracts but by a traditional court? Doesn't that defeat the all purpose of the currency? I bet these people are not feeling so "libertarian" right now.
The point is that you no longer require a human 'trusted executor' of a contract, you can use the network for that. This means you don't have to worry about potentially having to sue the executor when they steal your money, because the executor is a computer and is literally bound by the code it runs.
There is nothing that Ethereum and Smart Contracts that do that you cannot accomplish with a human bound by a legal contract, but you can do it on a much greater scale.
Personally I think some kind of court system or arbitration is going to be required, just because you write something in a contract doesn't make it legal. Just because a contract will be executed perfectly doesn't make it fair.
It's not hard for anyone to write quickly write readable text, like I'm doing now. For me to make a comment like this in video it would either generate a stammering barely understandable video, or require fifteen minutes of planning, rehearsal and editing to make it a reasonable 30 second video, that is still less convent then the 10 seconds you look to read this.
Isn't this a function of how often you perform the former task rather than the latter? For people used to communicating via images and videos (aka snapchat), and who also have poor vocabularies; communicating well via text alone could take the same amount of time of planning and editing.
> It doesn't have to be a choice between the lesser of two evils
No, unfortunately because of our first-past-the-post voting system it does.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
So get behind Jill Stein and get rid of the first-past-the-post, which she is advocating doing
Anyone who suggests voting third party needs to study how first-past-the-post voting works in the context of control & game theory.
Spoiler alert: FPTP voting equals two parties.
This is even more reason to be voting for Jill Stein, as she is advocating an Instant-RunOff voting system for the US. Yes the FPTP system makes this an uphill struggle, but seriously Instant-RunOff is so much more democratic it's worth fighing for.
Seems like all my/. posts have been crabby, complacent, old-hat UNIX/Linux sys-admin ranting as of late. F me I need to lighten up...
With that out of the way, I do have to say: Who said that installing packages was hard on a *NIX platform that we needed snapd to solve this? I'm sorry, I really think package repositories like apt/yum are gosh-darn God-sends when set up, populated, built and maintained correctly.
Sure, however the distro maintainers are getting sick of having to package every piece of software themselves. This is part of allowing the software developers to do the packaging for them.
First, life and even intelligent life does not necessarily mean technology, or technology at an industrial scale.
We even have examples of this on Earth, Octopus are clearly intelligent and even use items as tools, and yet they didn't develop education, so that anything an individual Octopus discovers is not passed down as collective knowledge.
So the idea that intelligence means technology or even civilization, is tentative at best
Interfaces are essentially documentative in nature, not creative. All they really do is document the input and output of an implementation. The implementation is where the creativity of the work is expressed.
You're missing the forest for the trees.
On an individual level a function header is basically documentation. However once you get to something the size and complexity of Java what becomes important is the design of the whole. The difference being between the blueprints of a well architected building, and the actual building itself which used those blueprints to aid its implementation.
Would you argue that being an Architect is not a creative profession? I would argue that designing a large cohesive API to be a non-trivial thing to do that requires skill and creativity to successfully pull off.
But the big challenge for SpaceX now isn't one with astounding demonstrations of technology. It's doing the same thing over, and over, and doing it quickly, and making a profit. SpaceX wanted to reach a cadence of 18 launches this year, and they have so far launched 4 in the first third of the year. To be a profitable company and to reap the economic advantage of first-stage recovery, they will need to get higher than 18 per year.
Not true, maybe not as astounding to watch but a big demonstration of technology is actually flying those engines again, and again.
There's not much use to showy rocket landings unless they can cheaply run those engines again
Personally, I would consider the choice of whether or not to abort ones own pregnancy is a decision that nobody takes lightly, and the effects of that choice is going to stay with that person for the rest of their life. This meme that it's somehow water off a ducks back, or used as a backup to cheaper methods of birth control, seems to be quite incredulous to me.
With that said, I support a Woman's right to choose, however hard that choice may be. But you may also consider what kind of society we have created, that places Women in a position where they feel that the only desirable outcome is to abort their pregnancy.
Sure as a layman you have to trust someone to verify the code for you. However wouldn't you want to place that trust in an open truly independent third-party code audit? I'm not saying that Open Whisper Systems is corrupt or untrustworthy, but they have likely been paid or contracted by Whatsapp to develop/certify this feature, and without a possible third-party code audit they have low risk of reputation damage if something dodgy was done.
Thanks Snowden for pointing this out, now we will see a movement against open source software because it aids terrorists, just like unlockable iphones or other means of secure communications.
If it's connected, it can be hacked. If it's electronic, it can be modified.
Bitcoin has this problem solved though, there's plenty of incentive to try and break the bitcoin ledger and yet as far as anyone knows, nobody has managed it, and it has had a lifespan far greater than the average election.
That's not to say that there isn't other problems with mass electronic voting, and it would likely require very different protections than the current tried and true paper based system, but to argue that we cannot adequately secure a voting system for a relatively short period of time I think is a little antiquated
However, which way does the causality operate? Are victims of gun violence more likely to support gun control, and thus vote Democrat? or does gun control cause more gun violence?
If its the former, then isn't it unfair that the Republican states are stopping the Democrat states from addressing their problems how they see fit?
The second (theoretical) type is also skilled (or at least has the right inclinations and intelligence type), but she's uncomfortable with the male dominated workplace and so she either leaves the field early or never even gets into the field to begin with.
Some believe that the remedy for the second type of woman is seen to be a place where there are more women, period. This allows them to have friends and the ability to have a more balanced environment. The increase in women in general will make it more attractive to the skilled women as well.
Obviously, this is an assumption, but not a necessarily a terrible one. Many people only feel comfortable among people like them. Same goes for gender, skin color or ethnicity.
Doesn't this somewhat rely on the idea that "all women are the same"?
I'm male and I don't like working with incompetent males, much less being friends with them, why should women be any different in this regard?
To put it another way, if you throw a geek into a group with a bunch of jocks, would you expect the geek to feel comfortable?
So in that case the way to increase the number of competent female workers is to find competent female workers and hire them, and if they don't want to work for you (because male dominated workplace) then increase the salary/benefits until they do.
The gender pay gap thing is just dumb anyway. If I run a company, and I could save ~25% by just hiring women, why wouldn't I do that? We should see men having a hard time getting employment if this were the case, but it's not.
The key is maternity leave; during a woman's career she can fall pregnant at any time, and her already having children is no predictor of lack of future children, nor is her marital status any real indication either.
A company is on the hook for an unproductive (read: absent) employee for 6 months (or more) at their current salary, and this can happen more than once. If this doesn't put downward pressure on women's salaries I don't know what else will.
The problem with the OD expansion is that you have to do some serious digging through some rather hard stuff before you even get to the ore body. This means that prices need to be high enough and be expected to remain high for a good decade for that mine to make any financial sense.
I like the idea of everyone earning a set amount and then working for more, but then the system breaks down, because nobody wants to contribute back.
There are more rewards than money.
Those who don't contribute will be considered leeches just like they are today. Normal societal pressures will still remain, being part of the group, being a good citizen, and contributing to society are part of that. Many people already donate their time and effort to running community groups and clubs for free to improve their social standing, rather than monetary gain.
People already change the way they act in response to societal pressures to conform, and so long as the rewards for working are good enough then people will want to contribute. Mincome isn't about everyone living like kings, its about removing the bottom end off poverty, and allowing people to enter into working arrangements that benefit them, rather than being forced to take a bad job that exploits them because without it they cant afford to live.
Everyone wants to be a millionaire, but society can't support that.
Some people want that, some others seem reasonably content to live a comfortable life with their family, or just want to pursue their passions whatever they may be.
For a single tomato, 20 cents a tomato vs. 8 cents doesn't seem like a lot but to someone like a Sam's Club who buys millions of tomatoes it's a huge difference. And you have to remember that picking the tomato is just one step in the process of getting it to the produce counter. If you paid everyone along with way $20 an hour, the cost of a single tomato would be much larger than it is today. The other thing about tomatoes (and produce in general) is that there's a huge amount of loss between the time they are picked and the time they are bought. I used to work in a produce department while in college. We'd sometimes throw away entire cases as soon as they came off the truck. For the remaining cases, a certain percentage wasn't fit to sell, so they would get tossed in the process of filling the display. Then a couple of times a day at least, the ones on display would be gone through and the ones started to look bad would get pulled.
It wouldn't surprise me at all that for every tomato sold, at least one is tossed and that money has to be recouped in the price of the tomatoes that actually get sold.
Things aren't typically sold at the cheapest possible price, they are sold at the price that generates the maximum amount of profit. Increased labor costs will change that price to profit curve slightly, but if they could get away with selling the produce at a much higher price and still sell the same volume then they would be doing that already.
If the price is too high, for whatever reason, people will stop buying.
Comparing its performance to DRAM is a "tell" and shows what they're thinking; this may be the fabled "non-volatile RAM" solution that's been the Holy Grail researchers have been trying to develop pretty much ever since RAM was invented. (Yes, I know there are battery-backed-up RAM solutions that claim to be non-volatile but they're only non-volatile until the battery power runs out).
From TFA
The company will also come out with Optane DIMMs later this year for early testers, which will combine the performance of DRAM with the capacity and cost of flash. That means a two-socket server with Optane DIMMS will have a total of 6 TB of addressable memory, "virtually eliminating paging between memory and storage, taking performance truly to a whole new level.
Seems like we're going to find out soon, 6TB of addressable non-volatile ram sounds like a game changer
Given that the country, unlike the US, generates remarkably few thieving bastards; the motivation to adopt cash replacements is somewhat lower.
Actually its due to their cultural mistrust of banks (who can blame them). However, they are starting to use electronic subway cards as a payment method, for things like vending machines and convenience stores, but rather than anything associated with a bank, your mass transit company has your account.
Also, its not that crime is low in Japan, its that honesty is high, and that the overwhelming majority of people will go out of their way to do the right thing
There have been several near-misses to nuclear Armageddon on both sides of the Atlantic. We got real lucky.
With that many near misses, we statistically should not be here*. Common sense is usually hit and miss during crisis.
You're right, statistically we should be toast by now
Makes me think that when it comes to something of existential gravitas, like starting a nuclear war, that it not only requires psychopaths in charge, but all the way through the chain to the grunt that does the launch.
Sure, it only takes once to screw up, but it also only takes one person in the chain to stop the launch
Slashdot Mirror
I think they're ultimately shooting for having future phones as thin as credit cards.
And that's a very dumb goal. No one complains, "I wish my phone was thinner." People do complain, "I wish my phone had better battery life" and "I wish my phone's screen wouldn't break so easily."
It's an interesting strategy really, you make phones impressively thin which only bolsters the idea that they're fragile, which makes people buy cases for them.
You're basically outsourcing the structural integrity of the device and providing customisation options in one hit.
Besides why would people what a smart contract based blockchain currency if the contracts wouldn't be solved by those smart contracts but by a traditional court? Doesn't that defeat the all purpose of the currency? I bet these people are not feeling so "libertarian" right now.
The point is that you no longer require a human 'trusted executor' of a contract, you can use the network for that. This means you don't have to worry about potentially having to sue the executor when they steal your money, because the executor is a computer and is literally bound by the code it runs.
There is nothing that Ethereum and Smart Contracts that do that you cannot accomplish with a human bound by a legal contract, but you can do it on a much greater scale.
Personally I think some kind of court system or arbitration is going to be required, just because you write something in a contract doesn't make it legal. Just because a contract will be executed perfectly doesn't make it fair.
It's not hard for anyone to write quickly write readable text, like I'm doing now. For me to make a comment like this in video it would either generate a stammering barely understandable video, or require fifteen minutes of planning, rehearsal and editing to make it a reasonable 30 second video, that is still less convent then the 10 seconds you look to read this.
Isn't this a function of how often you perform the former task rather than the latter? For people used to communicating via images and videos (aka snapchat), and who also have poor vocabularies; communicating well via text alone could take the same amount of time of planning and editing.
> It doesn't have to be a choice between the lesser of two evils No, unfortunately because of our first-past-the-post voting system it does. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
So get behind Jill Stein and get rid of the first-past-the-post, which she is advocating doing
Anyone who suggests voting third party needs to study how first-past-the-post voting works in the context of control & game theory.
Spoiler alert: FPTP voting equals two parties.
This is even more reason to be voting for Jill Stein, as she is advocating an Instant-RunOff voting system for the US. Yes the FPTP system makes this an uphill struggle, but seriously Instant-RunOff is so much more democratic it's worth fighing for.
Seems like all my /. posts have been crabby, complacent, old-hat UNIX/Linux sys-admin ranting as of late. F me I need to lighten up...
With that out of the way, I do have to say: Who said that installing packages was hard on a *NIX platform that we needed snapd to solve this? I'm sorry, I really think package repositories like apt/yum are gosh-darn God-sends when set up, populated, built and maintained correctly.
Sure, however the distro maintainers are getting sick of having to package every piece of software themselves. This is part of allowing the software developers to do the packaging for them.
First, life and even intelligent life does not necessarily mean technology, or technology at an industrial scale.
We even have examples of this on Earth, Octopus are clearly intelligent and even use items as tools, and yet they didn't develop education, so that anything an individual Octopus discovers is not passed down as collective knowledge.
So the idea that intelligence means technology or even civilization, is tentative at best
Interfaces are essentially documentative in nature, not creative. All they really do is document the input and output of an implementation. The implementation is where the creativity of the work is expressed.
You're missing the forest for the trees.
On an individual level a function header is basically documentation. However once you get to something the size and complexity of Java what becomes important is the design of the whole. The difference being between the blueprints of a well architected building, and the actual building itself which used those blueprints to aid its implementation.
Would you argue that being an Architect is not a creative profession? I would argue that designing a large cohesive API to be a non-trivial thing to do that requires skill and creativity to successfully pull off.
...and this is why so many people are mystified by computing, the people that understand it are really bad at analogies.
But the big challenge for SpaceX now isn't one with astounding demonstrations of technology. It's doing the same thing over, and over, and doing it quickly, and making a profit. SpaceX wanted to reach a cadence of 18 launches this year, and they have so far launched 4 in the first third of the year. To be a profitable company and to reap the economic advantage of first-stage recovery, they will need to get higher than 18 per year.
Not true, maybe not as astounding to watch but a big demonstration of technology is actually flying those engines again, and again.
There's not much use to showy rocket landings unless they can cheaply run those engines again
Personally, I would consider the choice of whether or not to abort ones own pregnancy is a decision that nobody takes lightly, and the effects of that choice is going to stay with that person for the rest of their life. This meme that it's somehow water off a ducks back, or used as a backup to cheaper methods of birth control, seems to be quite incredulous to me.
With that said, I support a Woman's right to choose, however hard that choice may be. But you may also consider what kind of society we have created, that places Women in a position where they feel that the only desirable outcome is to abort their pregnancy.
Sure as a layman you have to trust someone to verify the code for you. However wouldn't you want to place that trust in an open truly independent third-party code audit? I'm not saying that Open Whisper Systems is corrupt or untrustworthy, but they have likely been paid or contracted by Whatsapp to develop/certify this feature, and without a possible third-party code audit they have low risk of reputation damage if something dodgy was done.
The word you're looking for is prejudiced.
Thanks Snowden for pointing this out, now we will see a movement against open source software because it aids terrorists, just like unlockable iphones or other means of secure communications.
Never attribute to malice etc etc...
Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice
If it's connected, it can be hacked. If it's electronic, it can be modified.
Bitcoin has this problem solved though, there's plenty of incentive to try and break the bitcoin ledger and yet as far as anyone knows, nobody has managed it, and it has had a lifespan far greater than the average election.
That's not to say that there isn't other problems with mass electronic voting, and it would likely require very different protections than the current tried and true paper based system, but to argue that we cannot adequately secure a voting system for a relatively short period of time I think is a little antiquated
However, which way does the causality operate? Are victims of gun violence more likely to support gun control, and thus vote Democrat? or does gun control cause more gun violence?
If its the former, then isn't it unfair that the Republican states are stopping the Democrat states from addressing their problems how they see fit?
The second (theoretical) type is also skilled (or at least has the right inclinations and intelligence type), but she's uncomfortable with the male dominated workplace and so she either leaves the field early or never even gets into the field to begin with.
Some believe that the remedy for the second type of woman is seen to be a place where there are more women, period. This allows them to have friends and the ability to have a more balanced environment. The increase in women in general will make it more attractive to the skilled women as well.
Obviously, this is an assumption, but not a necessarily a terrible one. Many people only feel comfortable among people like them. Same goes for gender, skin color or ethnicity.
Doesn't this somewhat rely on the idea that "all women are the same"?
I'm male and I don't like working with incompetent males, much less being friends with them, why should women be any different in this regard? To put it another way, if you throw a geek into a group with a bunch of jocks, would you expect the geek to feel comfortable?
So in that case the way to increase the number of competent female workers is to find competent female workers and hire them, and if they don't want to work for you (because male dominated workplace) then increase the salary/benefits until they do.
The gender pay gap thing is just dumb anyway. If I run a company, and I could save ~25% by just hiring women, why wouldn't I do that? We should see men having a hard time getting employment if this were the case, but it's not.
The key is maternity leave; during a woman's career she can fall pregnant at any time, and her already having children is no predictor of lack of future children, nor is her marital status any real indication either.
A company is on the hook for an unproductive (read: absent) employee for 6 months (or more) at their current salary, and this can happen more than once. If this doesn't put downward pressure on women's salaries I don't know what else will.
The problem with the OD expansion is that you have to do some serious digging through some rather hard stuff before you even get to the ore body. This means that prices need to be high enough and be expected to remain high for a good decade for that mine to make any financial sense.
I like the idea of everyone earning a set amount and then working for more, but then the system breaks down, because nobody wants to contribute back.
There are more rewards than money.
Those who don't contribute will be considered leeches just like they are today. Normal societal pressures will still remain, being part of the group, being a good citizen, and contributing to society are part of that. Many people already donate their time and effort to running community groups and clubs for free to improve their social standing, rather than monetary gain.
People already change the way they act in response to societal pressures to conform, and so long as the rewards for working are good enough then people will want to contribute. Mincome isn't about everyone living like kings, its about removing the bottom end off poverty, and allowing people to enter into working arrangements that benefit them, rather than being forced to take a bad job that exploits them because without it they cant afford to live.
Everyone wants to be a millionaire, but society can't support that.
Some people want that, some others seem reasonably content to live a comfortable life with their family, or just want to pursue their passions whatever they may be.
For a single tomato, 20 cents a tomato vs. 8 cents doesn't seem like a lot but to someone like a Sam's Club who buys millions of tomatoes it's a huge difference. And you have to remember that picking the tomato is just one step in the process of getting it to the produce counter. If you paid everyone along with way $20 an hour, the cost of a single tomato would be much larger than it is today. The other thing about tomatoes (and produce in general) is that there's a huge amount of loss between the time they are picked and the time they are bought. I used to work in a produce department while in college. We'd sometimes throw away entire cases as soon as they came off the truck. For the remaining cases, a certain percentage wasn't fit to sell, so they would get tossed in the process of filling the display. Then a couple of times a day at least, the ones on display would be gone through and the ones started to look bad would get pulled. It wouldn't surprise me at all that for every tomato sold, at least one is tossed and that money has to be recouped in the price of the tomatoes that actually get sold.
Things aren't typically sold at the cheapest possible price, they are sold at the price that generates the maximum amount of profit. Increased labor costs will change that price to profit curve slightly, but if they could get away with selling the produce at a much higher price and still sell the same volume then they would be doing that already.
If the price is too high, for whatever reason, people will stop buying.
Comparing its performance to DRAM is a "tell" and shows what they're thinking; this may be the fabled "non-volatile RAM" solution that's been the Holy Grail researchers have been trying to develop pretty much ever since RAM was invented. (Yes, I know there are battery-backed-up RAM solutions that claim to be non-volatile but they're only non-volatile until the battery power runs out).
From TFA
The company will also come out with Optane DIMMs later this year for early testers, which will combine the performance of DRAM with the capacity and cost of flash. That means a two-socket server with Optane DIMMS will have a total of 6 TB of addressable memory, "virtually eliminating paging between memory and storage, taking performance truly to a whole new level.
Seems like we're going to find out soon, 6TB of addressable non-volatile ram sounds like a game changer
Given that the country, unlike the US, generates remarkably few thieving bastards; the motivation to adopt cash replacements is somewhat lower.
Actually its due to their cultural mistrust of banks (who can blame them). However, they are starting to use electronic subway cards as a payment method, for things like vending machines and convenience stores, but rather than anything associated with a bank, your mass transit company has your account.
Also, its not that crime is low in Japan, its that honesty is high, and that the overwhelming majority of people will go out of their way to do the right thing
There have been several near-misses to nuclear Armageddon on both sides of the Atlantic. We got real lucky.
With that many near misses, we statistically should not be here*. Common sense is usually hit and miss during crisis.
You're right, statistically we should be toast by now
Makes me think that when it comes to something of existential gravitas, like starting a nuclear war, that it not only requires psychopaths in charge, but all the way through the chain to the grunt that does the launch.
Sure, it only takes once to screw up, but it also only takes one person in the chain to stop the launch