I wish we could get away from "isms", and focus on what works and what is counterproductive to a society rather than what flavour of ism it is. Else the debate goes around endlessly with people asserting what a country "is", rather than what it is actually doing.
We should have learned enough by now to know that there isn't a magic something-ism that works wonders economically and socially without any hiccups.
Whatever it is it sure as hell isn't producing favourable outcomes for an awful lot of people.
Lastly it would encourage savings rather than consumption which is something we need desperately right now.
Like it or not, if a consumption led service economy stops consuming, it'll be in far worse trouble than if it doesn't. Anything that stifles consumption (especially among the poorest) is in my opinion economic sabotage.
Yes, household debt ratios are very high, but this is due to poor job creation and stagnant wages, and could be solved through income redistribution. The consumption in itself is not the evil here, consumption is the way out of this mess.
We should really be enabling *all* segments of society to consume, including the poor. Non progressive sales taxes are detrimental to that effort. This isn't just on humantarian grounds but also one of economic self interest.
On a government level, compare the mess in Europe to China or the US if you wish to see the results of reduced consumption.
Good lord, they have got to be kidding? If Toyota (or their parts suppliers) are making those kinds of errors, you can bet your ass that other manufacturers will be making them as well.
There needs to be very strict set standards for car control systems. We have standards for OBD, so why not strict, over engineered and thoroughily coded critical systems standards? Even better, why not make them open standards, including the hardware?
Standardising would make parts cheaper as well as stopping manufacturers from building closed black box units that may be of dubious quality. It would also make it easier to maintain and repair modern cars as they get older, and allow third parties to provide new hardware long after the manufacturer loses interest.
As an aside, I do wonder what we're going to do in ten years time when the failure rate for most of the control hardware starts creeping up. Would they fail safely? Would the repair cost be prohibitive?
It would be a sad irony if these environmentally conscious efficiency improving measures resulted in cars being scrapped en masse because the ECU that superseded a $10 throttle cable costs a grand.
At the risk of sounding like a damned space hippy, I've missed Star Trek's fundamentally positive outlook towards the future of humanity. Trek gave a really strong feeling that we'd end up overcoming a lot of our problems as a species. I like that sort of utopianism, so any new series of Trek is good by me.
TOS seems much maligned, and 40 years later it does seem rather awkward and dated, but there's some good episodes in there. Besides, who doesn't love some serious acting..
As an aside, this would be a good time to recommend the Post Atomic Horror podcast for anyone re-watching any of the series.
I still have one here for occasional duties. It spent most of its life at an insurance company, so would have been absolutely hammered for about 20 years prior to getting it. Still works perfectly and without fuss. I believe you can still get toner for them as well.
I doubt you will want to do this, but you could also go down the semi-disposable route of buying very cheap old colour lasers and throwing them out again when they run out of toner. I bought an enormous old Konica Magicolor (with ethernet, duplexer and all assortments of bells & whistles) for £1 a couple of years back with this in mind and am still waiting for it to run out of toner. I suspect Windows will stop supporting it long before I run out of toner.
Just stay away from inkjets, they're absolutely hopeless.
What is to stop the NSA doing a form of DoS attack on these types of services by demanding keys, and giving the services little option but to shut down?
Nothing, seemingly. The NSA seem to act completely in secret, US citizens aren't privy to their actions or any court rulings except those disclosed months or years after the ruling. It's like playing a game where no-one but one player knows the rules, you are certain to lose.
The choice seems to be either compromise your service, or shut down your business. I really feel for anyone who is having to give up their livlihood on account of their actions.
One thing is certain. This is the antithesis of democracy.
Whenever there's an enormous new "objective" trend in psychology or social science, I always think of the Rosenhan experiment.
In a nutshell, volunteers went to different psychiatric hospitals in the US, complaining that they all suffered from (made up) voices in their heads. They were all admitted under different psychological disorders. At this point, they all acted completely normally and told staff they no longer heard voices. In all cases, they were only released once they'd submitted to treatment, and "made better".
In a follow up after the original paper, psychiatric hospitals challenged Rosenhan to send more volunteers, and the hospitals asserted they would spot them easily. He agreed, and after three months the participating hospitals said that they had weeded out 42 imposters.
Rosenhan hadn't sent a single person to the hospitals.
It's a perfect example of how inaccurate psychology is once it relies on distinct catagories like "insane" and "sane". A "positivity ratio" as created by Fredrickson is absolutely no different.
Like in any field the "experts" are often anything but.
Insights are one thing, but constantly trying to hammer objectivity into something so complex as human behaviour is always going to be flawed.
We've seen it over and over again. Once a few large successful companies develop an entrenched market position, they drop all of their pretenses of ideals and form a sort of symbiosis with the government.
The difference between now and 1998 is probably that internet companies at the time saw government control of the net as an impediment to their growth, where now they see it as an opportunity to make more money and protect their position from competitors.
He said "fine Corinthian leather" a lot as well, from what I gather.
If it wasn't for the fed and Mitsubishi, they would have gone under. There's an excellent book called Comeback that details just how hopelessly inept the big three were in the 80's.
Chrysler's lucky break was having a partnership with a Japanese company at a time when Japan were decimating the market share of GM and Ford.
If this were actually true we would have seen a steady increase in the number of unemployed people over time during the past 20 years. Instead we had near record low unemployment until around 2008 when we had a banking (not technology) related financial crisis.
During the Clinton administration, the average annual increase in jobs created was over 2.5% per year. Since 2000, that figure dropped to 0% and 0.21% during GWB's two terms. Obama's first term was also 0.21%. Population growth has been outpacing job creation for a while now, and youth unemployment in the US is around 17% and still rising.
Not only that, but Labour participation in the US has been steadily dropping since about 2000, from 67.5% to around 64%, with no signs of a reversal.
Underemployment has also been gradually increasing prior to 2008, and standing at about 17% today. Consumer debt levels are still standing at over 80%, up from 45% in 1980, suggesting that the jobs that are available are not sufficiently well paid, and are not keeping up with the cost of living.
These are not the indicators of a healthy labour market. Indeed, while unemployment is dropping slightly it is still roughly double pre 2008 levels, despite economic growth in the US.
An interesting thing to note is that not everyone employed is being paid. Being in a training scheme doesn't count to the unemployment list, nor being in education. Here in the UK, it's suggested that falling unemployment is mainly the result of government social security programs dumping people into either training or no income self employment, massaging the figures. The US might well be similar.
For me, the hypothesis that automation and technology are lowering job creation and wages is pretty sound.
In western societies where our economic growth is based around consumption of goods and services, what are we going to use to fuel growth when employment and wages drop even further? Are we just going to discard the unemployed we already have?
Let me condense the argument. I, as an individual, want as many rights and protections as possible. I couldn't give a toss if there's an argument that they're redundant, I'd rather have the rights than not.
That means advocating that other people should have more rights too. Yes, even bad people. A right that is occasionally abused doesn't mean a de facto argument for its removal.
Isn't the balance of power between the individual and enormous entities (government, corporations etc.) imbalanced enough without advocating for the removal of more rights?
Here we have a system where, early on, students are being sorted by behavior -- or more accurately, on the teacher's subjective impression of their behavior.
Not only that, but it also has absolutely no room for the cause of behaviour. It provides very little insight at all, nothing more than an observant teacher or parent can deduce in a few hours.
A lot of fields like this seem to mistake collecting data for improving something.
That said, I very much doubt better teaching is really the goal in this. We live in the age of the great data mines, where we take something, distort it into a metric and sell it on.
This will be purely for the data, and to hell with how accurate it is. We know how this works. The teachers and kids will be the product, not the customer.
I also wonder what condition the reels will be in.
Someone on another thread discussing old Doctor Who episodes pointed out that early tape stock was an absolute nightmare to keep in decent condition, and the expense was sufficient enough that the BBC decided it was too expensive.
It wasn't that they just carelessly throwed their archives away.
I don't think so. There's a big difference between the legal firepower available to a small service provider like Lavabit and someone like Yahoo or Google.
Agreed, but I wonder if this has anything to do with the backdoors to major service providers that Snowden alleged that the NSA had as part of the PRISM program. What is the probability of the NSA somehow acquiring SSL root certificates to all of their servers, either through secret court decisions or voluntarily? Not especially high in my opinion, but not impossible.
It wouldn't be the first time major, invasive collusion occured between a government agency and a private corporation. It also wouldn't be the first time it was done voluntarily.
There are documents suggesting that the NSA have unfettered access, and denials, and more assertions. We're pretty sure they're involved, but to what degree? Remember at first they all said they'd never even heard of PRISM, that is until documents were leaked mentioning their involvement by name.
We're all just guessing really, and I have no doubt that there's as much deliberate disinformation as there is real information. The "truth" doesn't really matter. The link of trust is already broken, and it's unlikely to be repaired for years if not decades.
The actual content only fills about a third of my browser's width.
This. On my 1024x768 laptop screen, the comments on the beta take up about 3/5 of the width. The rest are links, which is just ridiculous.
I don't go to/. to read the Freecode links. The comments *are*/., so why go from giving them the width of the screen to just over half?
The new homepage is just as poor./. has very clear visual cues - Headline white on green, summary in normal text, comments in larger dark green. Nice and simple, easy to follow. Comments are also framed in the same style, and replies follow easily (with the good use of screen width) and makes for easy reading. It's a good design.
The beta just goes for different sizes of text. Losing the styling cues makes everything harder to follow, both on the homepage and in the comments section. At the very least it needs clear, consistent framing between headline and summary, subject and comment. Not just using white on grey.
And please, please, lose the pictures. Look at the submission today about older people and money, it has a helpful picture of.. old people in a casino. What exactly does this contribute?
If signing up for some 'cyber reserve army' is what's needed to have a job that pays the bills, good health care, and a home in a low-crime area, I'm not gonna waste any time.
I'm sorry, you must be mistaken, the jobs are in Britain.
Watching the BBC iPlayer (or other catch-up services) is completely legal even without a licence, but the caveat is you cannot watching anything that is broadcast in real time.
Also, owning a television is not illegal either, assuming that it is not capable of receiving real time broadcast television (so detuned or otherwise not connected to an aerial).
The way that TV Licencing (the arm of the BBC that enforces licence fee payment) choose to deal with you depends entirely upon the postcode of the area you live in.
Those in postcodes deemed to be in poorer areas get red headed letters about once a month, that are full of threats about £1000 fines and imminent visits by TV Licencing, essentially treating you as a criminal. Those in more affluent areas get green headed letters which politely ask you whether you require a licence, after which they leave you alone for two years before sending another polite request.
Having lived in both, the difference in tone and content is astonishing. The way that they interact with people living in poor postcodes is quite sickening.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish we could get away from "isms", and focus on what works and what is counterproductive to a society rather than what flavour of ism it is. Else the debate goes around endlessly with people asserting what a country "is", rather than what it is actually doing.
We should have learned enough by now to know that there isn't a magic something-ism that works wonders economically and socially without any hiccups.
Whatever it is it sure as hell isn't producing favourable outcomes for an awful lot of people.
...that most of them are autobiographies.
Ghost written, surely? ;)
Lastly it would encourage savings rather than consumption which is something we need desperately right now.
Like it or not, if a consumption led service economy stops consuming, it'll be in far worse trouble than if it doesn't. Anything that stifles consumption (especially among the poorest) is in my opinion economic sabotage.
Yes, household debt ratios are very high, but this is due to poor job creation and stagnant wages, and could be solved through income redistribution. The consumption in itself is not the evil here, consumption is the way out of this mess.
We should really be enabling *all* segments of society to consume, including the poor. Non progressive sales taxes are detrimental to that effort. This isn't just on humantarian grounds but also one of economic self interest.
On a government level, compare the mess in Europe to China or the US if you wish to see the results of reduced consumption.
Good lord, they have got to be kidding? If Toyota (or their parts suppliers) are making those kinds of errors, you can bet your ass that other manufacturers will be making them as well.
There needs to be very strict set standards for car control systems. We have standards for OBD, so why not strict, over engineered and thoroughily coded critical systems standards? Even better, why not make them open standards, including the hardware?
Standardising would make parts cheaper as well as stopping manufacturers from building closed black box units that may be of dubious quality. It would also make it easier to maintain and repair modern cars as they get older, and allow third parties to provide new hardware long after the manufacturer loses interest.
As an aside, I do wonder what we're going to do in ten years time when the failure rate for most of the control hardware starts creeping up. Would they fail safely? Would the repair cost be prohibitive?
It would be a sad irony if these environmentally conscious efficiency improving measures resulted in cars being scrapped en masse because the ECU that superseded a $10 throttle cable costs a grand.
At the risk of sounding like a damned space hippy, I've missed Star Trek's fundamentally positive outlook towards the future of humanity. Trek gave a really strong feeling that we'd end up overcoming a lot of our problems as a species. I like that sort of utopianism, so any new series of Trek is good by me.
TOS seems much maligned, and 40 years later it does seem rather awkward and dated, but there's some good episodes in there. Besides, who doesn't love some serious acting..
As an aside, this would be a good time to recommend the Post Atomic Horror podcast for anyone re-watching any of the series.
I still have one here for occasional duties. It spent most of its life at an insurance company, so would have been absolutely hammered for about 20 years prior to getting it. Still works perfectly and without fuss. I believe you can still get toner for them as well.
I doubt you will want to do this, but you could also go down the semi-disposable route of buying very cheap old colour lasers and throwing them out again when they run out of toner. I bought an enormous old Konica Magicolor (with ethernet, duplexer and all assortments of bells & whistles) for £1 a couple of years back with this in mind and am still waiting for it to run out of toner. I suspect Windows will stop supporting it long before I run out of toner.
Just stay away from inkjets, they're absolutely hopeless.
What is to stop the NSA doing a form of DoS attack on these types of services by demanding keys, and giving the services little option but to shut down?
Nothing, seemingly. The NSA seem to act completely in secret, US citizens aren't privy to their actions or any court rulings except those disclosed months or years after the ruling. It's like playing a game where no-one but one player knows the rules, you are certain to lose.
The choice seems to be either compromise your service, or shut down your business. I really feel for anyone who is having to give up their livlihood on account of their actions.
One thing is certain. This is the antithesis of democracy.
Whenever there's an enormous new "objective" trend in psychology or social science, I always think of the Rosenhan experiment.
In a nutshell, volunteers went to different psychiatric hospitals in the US, complaining that they all suffered from (made up) voices in their heads. They were all admitted under different psychological disorders. At this point, they all acted completely normally and told staff they no longer heard voices. In all cases, they were only released once they'd submitted to treatment, and "made better".
In a follow up after the original paper, psychiatric hospitals challenged Rosenhan to send more volunteers, and the hospitals asserted they would spot them easily. He agreed, and after three months the participating hospitals said that they had weeded out 42 imposters.
Rosenhan hadn't sent a single person to the hospitals.
It's a perfect example of how inaccurate psychology is once it relies on distinct catagories like "insane" and "sane". A "positivity ratio" as created by Fredrickson is absolutely no different.
Like in any field the "experts" are often anything but.
Insights are one thing, but constantly trying to hammer objectivity into something so complex as human behaviour is always going to be flawed.
We've seen it over and over again. Once a few large successful companies develop an entrenched market position, they drop all of their pretenses of ideals and form a sort of symbiosis with the government.
The difference between now and 1998 is probably that internet companies at the time saw government control of the net as an impediment to their growth, where now they see it as an opportunity to make more money and protect their position from competitors.
Lee Iacocca said a lot of great things.
He said "fine Corinthian leather" a lot as well, from what I gather.
If it wasn't for the fed and Mitsubishi, they would have gone under. There's an excellent book called Comeback that details just how hopelessly inept the big three were in the 80's.
Chrysler's lucky break was having a partnership with a Japanese company at a time when Japan were decimating the market share of GM and Ford.
If this were actually true we would have seen a steady increase in the number of unemployed people over time during the past 20 years. Instead we had near record low unemployment until around 2008 when we had a banking (not technology) related financial crisis.
During the Clinton administration, the average annual increase in jobs created was over 2.5% per year. Since 2000, that figure dropped to 0% and 0.21% during GWB's two terms. Obama's first term was also 0.21%. Population growth has been outpacing job creation for a while now, and youth unemployment in the US is around 17% and still rising.
Not only that, but Labour participation in the US has been steadily dropping since about 2000, from 67.5% to around 64%, with no signs of a reversal.
Underemployment has also been gradually increasing prior to 2008, and standing at about 17% today. Consumer debt levels are still standing at over 80%, up from 45% in 1980, suggesting that the jobs that are available are not sufficiently well paid, and are not keeping up with the cost of living.
These are not the indicators of a healthy labour market. Indeed, while unemployment is dropping slightly it is still roughly double pre 2008 levels, despite economic growth in the US.
An interesting thing to note is that not everyone employed is being paid. Being in a training scheme doesn't count to the unemployment list, nor being in education. Here in the UK, it's suggested that falling unemployment is mainly the result of government social security programs dumping people into either training or no income self employment, massaging the figures. The US might well be similar.
For me, the hypothesis that automation and technology are lowering job creation and wages is pretty sound.
In western societies where our economic growth is based around consumption of goods and services, what are we going to use to fuel growth when employment and wages drop even further? Are we just going to discard the unemployed we already have?
Its an economic and social time bomb.
I wonder how many wars practical nuclear fusion would avert. I would wager that it would be more than the result of refining a nuclear deterrent.
Still, these are the sort of breakthroughs I love hearing about. Good work, science.
Not this shit again.
Let me condense the argument. I, as an individual, want as many rights and protections as possible. I couldn't give a toss if there's an argument that they're redundant, I'd rather have the rights than not.
That means advocating that other people should have more rights too. Yes, even bad people. A right that is occasionally abused doesn't mean a de facto argument for its removal.
Isn't the balance of power between the individual and enormous entities (government, corporations etc.) imbalanced enough without advocating for the removal of more rights?
Here we have a system where, early on, students are being sorted by behavior -- or more accurately, on the teacher's subjective impression of their behavior.
Not only that, but it also has absolutely no room for the cause of behaviour. It provides very little insight at all, nothing more than an observant teacher or parent can deduce in a few hours.
A lot of fields like this seem to mistake collecting data for improving something.
That said, I very much doubt better teaching is really the goal in this. We live in the age of the great data mines, where we take something, distort it into a metric and sell it on.
This will be purely for the data, and to hell with how accurate it is. We know how this works. The teachers and kids will be the product, not the customer.
I also wonder what condition the reels will be in.
Someone on another thread discussing old Doctor Who episodes pointed out that early tape stock was an absolute nightmare to keep in decent condition, and the expense was sufficient enough that the BBC decided it was too expensive.
It wasn't that they just carelessly throwed their archives away.
We have a lot more interesting and pressing things to dedicate time towards.
Sure, for now. Wasn't there also a time when X-Box Live didn't have adverts, or at the very least redesigns of the interface added more?
We'll see, give them a couple of years.
I don't think so. There's a big difference between the legal firepower available to a small service provider like Lavabit and someone like Yahoo or Google.
Agreed, but I wonder if this has anything to do with the backdoors to major service providers that Snowden alleged that the NSA had as part of the PRISM program. What is the probability of the NSA somehow acquiring SSL root certificates to all of their servers, either through secret court decisions or voluntarily? Not especially high in my opinion, but not impossible.
It wouldn't be the first time major, invasive collusion occured between a government agency and a private corporation. It also wouldn't be the first time it was done voluntarily.
There are documents suggesting that the NSA have unfettered access, and denials, and more assertions. We're pretty sure they're involved, but to what degree? Remember at first they all said they'd never even heard of PRISM, that is until documents were leaked mentioning their involvement by name.
We're all just guessing really, and I have no doubt that there's as much deliberate disinformation as there is real information. The "truth" doesn't really matter. The link of trust is already broken, and it's unlikely to be repaired for years if not decades.
SNAFU indeed.
It'll drop like a stone.
Only kidding, I imagine a lot of the smarter users moved on the very second the site was mentioned in the media./p
It'll be better than using the beta.
Yes, that was a cheap shot, I admit it.
The actual content only fills about a third of my browser's width.
This. On my 1024x768 laptop screen, the comments on the beta take up about 3/5 of the width. The rest are links, which is just ridiculous.
I don't go to /. to read the Freecode links. The comments *are* /., so why go from giving them the width of the screen to just over half?
The new homepage is just as poor. /. has very clear visual cues - Headline white on green, summary in normal text, comments in larger dark green. Nice and simple, easy to follow. Comments are also framed in the same style, and replies follow easily (with the good use of screen width) and makes for easy reading. It's a good design.
The beta just goes for different sizes of text. Losing the styling cues makes everything harder to follow, both on the homepage and in the comments section. At the very least it needs clear, consistent framing between headline and summary, subject and comment. Not just using white on grey.
And please, please, lose the pictures. Look at the submission today about older people and money, it has a helpful picture of.. old people in a casino. What exactly does this contribute?
I just hope they keep a classic version.
Sorry, but the way the US political class appear to act is absolutely fucking pathetic.
If signing up for some 'cyber reserve army' is what's needed to have a job that pays the bills, good health care, and a home in a low-crime area, I'm not gonna waste any time.
I'm sorry, you must be mistaken, the jobs are in Britain.
These reviews take about an hour for each film describing in detail just how dreadful the prequels are. Very insightful and well worth watching.
Anyone who has watched Network knows how this will pan out. Still a disturbingly prescient film.
Watching the BBC iPlayer (or other catch-up services) is completely legal even without a licence, but the caveat is you cannot watching anything that is broadcast in real time.
Also, owning a television is not illegal either, assuming that it is not capable of receiving real time broadcast television (so detuned or otherwise not connected to an aerial).
The way that TV Licencing (the arm of the BBC that enforces licence fee payment) choose to deal with you depends entirely upon the postcode of the area you live in.
Those in postcodes deemed to be in poorer areas get red headed letters about once a month, that are full of threats about £1000 fines and imminent visits by TV Licencing, essentially treating you as a criminal. Those in more affluent areas get green headed letters which politely ask you whether you require a licence, after which they leave you alone for two years before sending another polite request.
Having lived in both, the difference in tone and content is astonishing. The way that they interact with people living in poor postcodes is quite sickening.