Minimum Wage is very needed. I've worked at our close to minimum wage several times in my life and having lived at that level of monetary compensation you'll notice it gets really hard to live.
The whole argument you make is a fallacy in the first place as it assumes people could live at this new minimum. That means the cost of goods would have to drop, and I just do not see that happening in the US. Cost of labor is not the key factor in pricing here. If it was we wouldn't see high cost in stores for items made with Chinese/Indoesian/Cheapest place on the Earth at the moment labor. A rush towards the bottom won't help anyone except the rich.
As a IT worker who can't find a new job and who does not work in SIlicon Valley or the West coast of the US at all, while you may have it good my career is basically gone now. I have kept up to date, I have paid my dues, but here their isn't that marvelous growth their is out your way. Having just run out of unemployment and literally having no way to live anymore because I just can't seem to get hired in the field at all (& lack experience for anything else). I can say that you should care, because except for a bit of fate on your part you could be me and just as equally in need of help right now.
Comparing disease to car accidents is very much apples and oranges.
What makes them strikingly different is that gps and cell phone use is not coming out of thin air for this 'increase' in accidents. It comes from the part already devoted to distractions. The pie isn't growing, it's just being sectioned differently. 'Eliminating' them won't get rid of part of the pie (ie it won't decrease accidents), it will simply decrease the portion of distraction accidents involving gps and cell phones.
This is why you see the argument above. It's also why these articles always fail to give a comprehensive view of what causes accidents with historical trends. Doing so would show that accidents aren't noticeably increasing compared to the number of vehicles and the expected accident growth due to busier roads.
Talking to the passengers in the car is just as distracting (if not more so) than the phone. However without a hands-free kit it does add to the issues lining up by having you drive with one hand.
The biggest problem is that absolutely everything not involved in directly driving the car (the foot pedals and the steering wheel) is a factor in accidents. Even those steering wheels and foot pedals can be as well when they fail. That means the dashboard displays, radio, passengers, sat nav, etc are all distractions.
Accidents happen when either: A) The car fails B) The driver fails C) Acts of 'God'
A is something that can happen because we don't spend hours each day caring for each part of our vehicles, so they accumulate wear and tear and hence cause sudden accidents. Vehicle sports show us lots of spectacular examples of this type.
B are usually mitigated by one or more distractions. This sort of thing isn't exactly new, horse and buggies and ox carts require the same amount of effort to control and had accidents to. We just didn't have several tens of millions of them to keep statistics on. They always occur because the situation changes and the person controlling the vehicle simply doesn't change to match.
C includes things like giant hail smashing your vehicle as driving, spontaneous zero visibility conditions (heavy rain becoming a hurricane style sheet of water for a few seconds or minutes), large animals (like deer) running into you, etc. Btw a large animal running into your car implies it hits you in the side which you cannot avoid, rather than a animal simply being in the road which you can avoid. It could also include other people hitting you from behind as well, though I'll consider those to be accidents in type B because they involve human failings.
I'm not exactly surprised 25% of accidents fall into B and are considered linked to gadgets. I expect the breakdown in general would be 47.5% A, 47.5% B, 5% C.
That said I don't think we need to get our panties in a bunch over things in B. Unless we are all supposed to drive in single person cars, that don't let us see anything to the sides, and have no electronics, and refuse to continue moving if we don't constantly prove we are awake and not under the influence of anything, then B will happen. Stopping some B's is just silly if you aren't going to do away with all of them.
No one will let nuclear power scale. We haven't actually built a new nuclear plant in 30 years. With old ones simply wearing out means nuclear is on a decline that just can't be stopped without new plants.
That said, most of the US energy supply still comes from coal and gas (in that order), with 'renewables' as a group taking a distant third, and nuclear still chugging along in a close fourth. We don't seem to really be decreasing coal and gas use, which are real problem areas and instead focus on the perfectly adequate nuclear as what needs to go away.
I'd really rather they replace some of those craptastic coal and gas power plants that make up the bulk of our energy production.
Lol, Being from the US I can say we don't (as drivers) give a rats ass if pedestrians have 'right of way'... and pedestrians don't give a rats ass about cars... I have literally seen pedestrians cross at random parts on a street without looking in either direction and expect cars to stop. I've also seen cars hit pedestrians... Like this group that crossed a busy 4 lane road, not at the crosswalks, but in the middle and for obvious reasons at night in heavy traffic were run over.
Lol, what world do you live in? I've been an admin... Multiple times. It has nothing to do with learning one skill and then plying your trade. Not only that, but they won't even look at you for many IT jobs if you don't have some sort of college degree on your resume. For an admin what I most often see requested are business degrees, including Business Information systems, and medical administration degrees (for hospitals). They don't tend to want CS degrees anymore, though that also used to be a good choice.
Either you live in a very different part of the world from me, or your just full of shit.
Bullshit. I've made less than 33k/year several times. Hell I've made less than that for 90% of my working life (14 years) here in PA. I have always paid federal taxes. The only time I haven't is the recent year I spent unemployed and even then it was because I had gone back to college during the gap and a change in the tax code that lets me apply the cost of college to my taxes.
I'm sure some people can manage not to pay federal taxes in that range (my ex rarely paid any, but she had kids), I don't see the 'average person' doing so.
Let me repeat: The people buying the stuff want the OS to trust random shit connected to it with little to no hassle.
They don't give a shit if you don't like how insecure it is, but unless your dropping 500k on PC's every year, who do you think manufacturers are listening to....?
You seemed to have missed the term 'rare', the number of cultures eating small cats, most tame dogs, and wild dolphins are all rare. A few cultures eat other people (or have until very recently), but those are also rare. The vast majority of cultures have very defined limits between 'smart non-food' and 'dumb food'. Heck Indian even protects some things most people consider 'dumb food' (cows).
Pigs don't have a well known rep of saving people from drowning or defending other animals in the oceans from sharks. Personally I'm 'farm bred' I've seen really dumb pigs, while on the other hand the few dolphins I've seen appeared at least as smart as a dog. I never said they were as smart as a human, but dog level is very likely.
Yes, it's always because IT 'trusts' the OS... It has nothing what-so-ever to do with management complaining in the 'your about to be fired!' fashion if they can't simply plugin x device at their whim... As an admin my job was to make things as secure as I couldn't, without pissing off the people writing my paycheck. Just as I have to leave the OS to automatically access USB devices, so to the OS must trust these devices because otherwise the people with the money get pissy.
You sir are clearly a dog person... Cat's can show alot of care for the humans around them, but are more independent than dogs (and usually smaller when we are talking about pets).
Most of us have a fairly clear limit between 'dumb animal and hence edible' and 'smart animal and a good pet'. For instance Dogs are rarely eaten, as is dolphin, most apes, etc... We tend to only break the taboos on these animals when in extreme emergencies. The same is usually true of humans and usually takes extreme times before one human eats another.
I think the engine it used was used by other companies, which may make things hard to opensource it... Kinda like the unreal engine being used in multiple titles... I certainly wouldn't mind seeing them open source it, but I just doubt it will happen...
That is not entirely true. We have many 'whitespace' rules in written language. Like leaving a space between words, after periods or commas, etc. So in effect it is a combination of punctuation and whitespace. Many programming languages use punctuation as well, but not usually in the way written language does or at least not the same types (ending 'lines' in C++ with ; for instance).
Brakes are the last thing you want in snow on a hill in either direction. The hard part for a car controlling program is that each incident is somewhat different, so exactly what needs to be done will change. So the computer can try the standard method, but will have problems when things don't go as someone plans. On the other hand a person can know in general what they need to do and vary it as needed. It's actually what we are best at. We may have more limited total control over the car, but a good driver can use what controls they have to do just about anything.
If you've ever seen some high performance automated functionality cars, often all the driving assists need to be turned off to really push the cars to their limits. A few cases are really over engineered for the car controlling what can be done show what can happen when the car has more control then the person... Often in those cases turning them off actually makes the car nearly undrivable because of the reliance on them...
I don't use neutral, but I can tell you many snow driving courses teach neutral for going down hills in snow... My Ex only learned how to drive a couple years ago. Still hasn't passed and has taken the only two winter driving courses offered here. Both taught 'neutral' as the technique to use. They also taught that brakes are your friend, another thing that is rubbish. Now stop complaining about how I'm the idiot when I'm not talking about myself, nor suggesting what you are complaining about?
Winter driving in general will be a huge issue, humans who otherwise are capable drivers typically go all nuts on even light snow. Simply lowering speed isn't the answer either. Going to slow can easily mean getting stuck (especially going up hills). Worse can sometimes be going down hills, where even in neutral you can slide and may need to actually add gas to straighten out...
More than anything I guess I just don't trust a programmer in Cali who has never even seen snow let alone driven in it to know what the heck to do in those conditions. GPS isn't really a solution either, GPS can often get flaky in storms and even in good weather can be off 10 or 15 feet...
Anyways... huge huge issues need to be taken care of before it's even viable where I live... And I can't imagine I'd be able to afford one anytime soon anyways.
Sometimes it does make a difference. Some times it doesn't. Usually how compelling a story is, and how immersive it is, can overcome a lack of of sexually identified characters. However I must say it pisses me off if a game is a cock fest and their isn't a woman in sight. Brink is the latest example I can think of, apparently the future has no women! Is it really that hard to make a female character model? Simply ignoring half the population is simply not the way to go... I actually like the trend of games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age that let you pick and don't 'typecast' by gender.
Exactly. Especially when it came to pilots, many female WWII aces came from the Russian forces. As well as a number of snipers among the army ranks. However after the 'crisis' was over women tended to be put into secondary roles again when it comes to the military. There is actually considerable work done on the topic of how men are considered expendable by most cultures of the world while women aren't. Hence we tend to downplay women, even frighteningly good at what they did women, when a crisis is over. Personally I think strong female leads are important culturally to break stereotypes.
Well having run the benchmark in question and many others (including open ones) on my newest system build, The current SYSmark scores lower then it should based on other tests which test the same things. So I don't think it's just whining. Something really is going on under the hood with SYSmark, compared to other benchmarking apps that do the same sorts of things. I seem to recall this isn't abnormal either, this has been something seen often in a variety of tools with bias often programmed in treating one cpu/platform specific different than another. It has never been done in AMD's favor though...
Just an FYI, but as someone who is friends with a anime/manga store owner, who has worked in the anime convention scene for a decade, and who gets notices from Tokyopop (one of the biggest manga publishers in the US)... I have only one thing to mention. Namely Yaoi is not a niche. In the growing manga market Yaoi is a driving force. A amazingly high number of girls and women seem to have a thing for seeing two 'pretty' boys making out (probably correlates to lesbian interest in men). Since more women are active readers in the US than men, male focused manga (action manga primarily) doesn't sell so well. On the other hand drama and Yaoi sell very very well, because they sell to women. Tokyopop sells about 40% Yaoi, 35% drama, and 25% every other category.
Manga is incredibly popular with younger people as well. It has been the fastest growing segment of publishing. I think it still is, but the recession has hurt their 'boom' numbers and many publishers in the US have scaled back their titles.
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Minimum Wage is very needed. I've worked at our close to minimum wage several times in my life and having lived at that level of monetary compensation you'll notice it gets really hard to live.
The whole argument you make is a fallacy in the first place as it assumes people could live at this new minimum. That means the cost of goods would have to drop, and I just do not see that happening in the US. Cost of labor is not the key factor in pricing here. If it was we wouldn't see high cost in stores for items made with Chinese/Indoesian/Cheapest place on the Earth at the moment labor. A rush towards the bottom won't help anyone except the rich.
As a IT worker who can't find a new job and who does not work in SIlicon Valley or the West coast of the US at all, while you may have it good my career is basically gone now. I have kept up to date, I have paid my dues, but here their isn't that marvelous growth their is out your way. Having just run out of unemployment and literally having no way to live anymore because I just can't seem to get hired in the field at all (& lack experience for anything else). I can say that you should care, because except for a bit of fate on your part you could be me and just as equally in need of help right now.
And you cannot tell someone on a cell phone to shut up? I have before...
Comparing disease to car accidents is very much apples and oranges.
What makes them strikingly different is that gps and cell phone use is not coming out of thin air for this 'increase' in accidents. It comes from the part already devoted to distractions. The pie isn't growing, it's just being sectioned differently. 'Eliminating' them won't get rid of part of the pie (ie it won't decrease accidents), it will simply decrease the portion of distraction accidents involving gps and cell phones.
This is why you see the argument above. It's also why these articles always fail to give a comprehensive view of what causes accidents with historical trends. Doing so would show that accidents aren't noticeably increasing compared to the number of vehicles and the expected accident growth due to busier roads.
Talking to the passengers in the car is just as distracting (if not more so) than the phone. However without a hands-free kit it does add to the issues lining up by having you drive with one hand.
The biggest problem is that absolutely everything not involved in directly driving the car (the foot pedals and the steering wheel) is a factor in accidents. Even those steering wheels and foot pedals can be as well when they fail. That means the dashboard displays, radio, passengers, sat nav, etc are all distractions.
Accidents happen when either:
A) The car fails
B) The driver fails
C) Acts of 'God'
A is something that can happen because we don't spend hours each day caring for each part of our vehicles, so they accumulate wear and tear and hence cause sudden accidents. Vehicle sports show us lots of spectacular examples of this type.
B are usually mitigated by one or more distractions. This sort of thing isn't exactly new, horse and buggies and ox carts require the same amount of effort to control and had accidents to. We just didn't have several tens of millions of them to keep statistics on. They always occur because the situation changes and the person controlling the vehicle simply doesn't change to match.
C includes things like giant hail smashing your vehicle as driving, spontaneous zero visibility conditions (heavy rain becoming a hurricane style sheet of water for a few seconds or minutes), large animals (like deer) running into you, etc. Btw a large animal running into your car implies it hits you in the side which you cannot avoid, rather than a animal simply being in the road which you can avoid. It could also include other people hitting you from behind as well, though I'll consider those to be accidents in type B because they involve human failings.
I'm not exactly surprised 25% of accidents fall into B and are considered linked to gadgets. I expect the breakdown in general would be 47.5% A, 47.5% B, 5% C.
That said I don't think we need to get our panties in a bunch over things in B. Unless we are all supposed to drive in single person cars, that don't let us see anything to the sides, and have no electronics, and refuse to continue moving if we don't constantly prove we are awake and not under the influence of anything, then B will happen. Stopping some B's is just silly if you aren't going to do away with all of them.
No one will let nuclear power scale. We haven't actually built a new nuclear plant in 30 years. With old ones simply wearing out means nuclear is on a decline that just can't be stopped without new plants.
That said, most of the US energy supply still comes from coal and gas (in that order), with 'renewables' as a group taking a distant third, and nuclear still chugging along in a close fourth. We don't seem to really be decreasing coal and gas use, which are real problem areas and instead focus on the perfectly adequate nuclear as what needs to go away.
I'd really rather they replace some of those craptastic coal and gas power plants that make up the bulk of our energy production.
Lol, Being from the US I can say we don't (as drivers) give a rats ass if pedestrians have 'right of way'... and pedestrians don't give a rats ass about cars... I have literally seen pedestrians cross at random parts on a street without looking in either direction and expect cars to stop. I've also seen cars hit pedestrians... Like this group that crossed a busy 4 lane road, not at the crosswalks, but in the middle and for obvious reasons at night in heavy traffic were run over.
Lol, what world do you live in? I've been an admin... Multiple times. It has nothing to do with learning one skill and then plying your trade. Not only that, but they won't even look at you for many IT jobs if you don't have some sort of college degree on your resume. For an admin what I most often see requested are business degrees, including Business Information systems, and medical administration degrees (for hospitals). They don't tend to want CS degrees anymore, though that also used to be a good choice.
Either you live in a very different part of the world from me, or your just full of shit.
Bullshit. I've made less than 33k/year several times. Hell I've made less than that for 90% of my working life (14 years) here in PA. I have always paid federal taxes. The only time I haven't is the recent year I spent unemployed and even then it was because I had gone back to college during the gap and a change in the tax code that lets me apply the cost of college to my taxes.
I'm sure some people can manage not to pay federal taxes in that range (my ex rarely paid any, but she had kids), I don't see the 'average person' doing so.
Let me repeat: The people buying the stuff want the OS to trust random shit connected to it with little to no hassle.
They don't give a shit if you don't like how insecure it is, but unless your dropping 500k on PC's every year, who do you think manufacturers are listening to....?
You seemed to have missed the term 'rare', the number of cultures eating small cats, most tame dogs, and wild dolphins are all rare. A few cultures eat other people (or have until very recently), but those are also rare. The vast majority of cultures have very defined limits between 'smart non-food' and 'dumb food'. Heck Indian even protects some things most people consider 'dumb food' (cows).
Pigs don't have a well known rep of saving people from drowning or defending other animals in the oceans from sharks. Personally I'm 'farm bred' I've seen really dumb pigs, while on the other hand the few dolphins I've seen appeared at least as smart as a dog. I never said they were as smart as a human, but dog level is very likely.
Yes, it's always because IT 'trusts' the OS... It has nothing what-so-ever to do with management complaining in the 'your about to be fired!' fashion if they can't simply plugin x device at their whim... As an admin my job was to make things as secure as I couldn't, without pissing off the people writing my paycheck. Just as I have to leave the OS to automatically access USB devices, so to the OS must trust these devices because otherwise the people with the money get pissy.
You sir are clearly a dog person... Cat's can show alot of care for the humans around them, but are more independent than dogs (and usually smaller when we are talking about pets).
Most of us have a fairly clear limit between 'dumb animal and hence edible' and 'smart animal and a good pet'. For instance Dogs are rarely eaten, as is dolphin, most apes, etc... We tend to only break the taboos on these animals when in extreme emergencies. The same is usually true of humans and usually takes extreme times before one human eats another.
I think the engine it used was used by other companies, which may make things hard to opensource it... Kinda like the unreal engine being used in multiple titles... I certainly wouldn't mind seeing them open source it, but I just doubt it will happen...
That is not entirely true. We have many 'whitespace' rules in written language. Like leaving a space between words, after periods or commas, etc. So in effect it is a combination of punctuation and whitespace. Many programming languages use punctuation as well, but not usually in the way written language does or at least not the same types (ending 'lines' in C++ with ; for instance).
Brakes are the last thing you want in snow on a hill in either direction. The hard part for a car controlling program is that each incident is somewhat different, so exactly what needs to be done will change. So the computer can try the standard method, but will have problems when things don't go as someone plans. On the other hand a person can know in general what they need to do and vary it as needed. It's actually what we are best at. We may have more limited total control over the car, but a good driver can use what controls they have to do just about anything.
If you've ever seen some high performance automated functionality cars, often all the driving assists need to be turned off to really push the cars to their limits. A few cases are really over engineered for the car controlling what can be done show what can happen when the car has more control then the person... Often in those cases turning them off actually makes the car nearly undrivable because of the reliance on them...
I don't use neutral, but I can tell you many snow driving courses teach neutral for going down hills in snow... My Ex only learned how to drive a couple years ago. Still hasn't passed and has taken the only two winter driving courses offered here. Both taught 'neutral' as the technique to use. They also taught that brakes are your friend, another thing that is rubbish. Now stop complaining about how I'm the idiot when I'm not talking about myself, nor suggesting what you are complaining about?
If they did, they may soon find themselves without internet access....
Winter driving in general will be a huge issue, humans who otherwise are capable drivers typically go all nuts on even light snow. Simply lowering speed isn't the answer either. Going to slow can easily mean getting stuck (especially going up hills). Worse can sometimes be going down hills, where even in neutral you can slide and may need to actually add gas to straighten out...
More than anything I guess I just don't trust a programmer in Cali who has never even seen snow let alone driven in it to know what the heck to do in those conditions. GPS isn't really a solution either, GPS can often get flaky in storms and even in good weather can be off 10 or 15 feet...
Anyways... huge huge issues need to be taken care of before it's even viable where I live... And I can't imagine I'd be able to afford one anytime soon anyways.
Sometimes it does make a difference. Some times it doesn't. Usually how compelling a story is, and how immersive it is, can overcome a lack of of sexually identified characters. However I must say it pisses me off if a game is a cock fest and their isn't a woman in sight. Brink is the latest example I can think of, apparently the future has no women! Is it really that hard to make a female character model? Simply ignoring half the population is simply not the way to go... I actually like the trend of games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age that let you pick and don't 'typecast' by gender.
Exactly. Especially when it came to pilots, many female WWII aces came from the Russian forces. As well as a number of snipers among the army ranks. However after the 'crisis' was over women tended to be put into secondary roles again when it comes to the military. There is actually considerable work done on the topic of how men are considered expendable by most cultures of the world while women aren't. Hence we tend to downplay women, even frighteningly good at what they did women, when a crisis is over. Personally I think strong female leads are important culturally to break stereotypes.
Well having run the benchmark in question and many others (including open ones) on my newest system build, The current SYSmark scores lower then it should based on other tests which test the same things. So I don't think it's just whining. Something really is going on under the hood with SYSmark, compared to other benchmarking apps that do the same sorts of things. I seem to recall this isn't abnormal either, this has been something seen often in a variety of tools with bias often programmed in treating one cpu/platform specific different than another. It has never been done in AMD's favor though...
Just an FYI, but as someone who is friends with a anime/manga store owner, who has worked in the anime convention scene for a decade, and who gets notices from Tokyopop (one of the biggest manga publishers in the US)... I have only one thing to mention. Namely Yaoi is not a niche. In the growing manga market Yaoi is a driving force. A amazingly high number of girls and women seem to have a thing for seeing two 'pretty' boys making out (probably correlates to lesbian interest in men). Since more women are active readers in the US than men, male focused manga (action manga primarily) doesn't sell so well. On the other hand drama and Yaoi sell very very well, because they sell to women. Tokyopop sells about 40% Yaoi, 35% drama, and 25% every other category.
Manga is incredibly popular with younger people as well. It has been the fastest growing segment of publishing. I think it still is, but the recession has hurt their 'boom' numbers and many publishers in the US have scaled back their titles.