One thing to note is that we haven't explored the third dimension much in terms of cramming more transistors together. (ie it's still being researched and not marketed for now)
Hah, this reminds me of the firefly episode with a herd of cows on a spaceship. I wonder how NASA would handle that with no gravity. Lots of flying cow turds everywhere! At least there's little chance of a stampede.
Ya, I think the curve is pretty steep. I don't make much money myself, so I don't notice it, but my parents, who make a significant amount, are taxed pretty heavily. I think, no matter what, someone is going to complain that taxes are unfair unless they aren't really being taxed
As for the comment, I was only disagreeing with the point that '50% cannot afford taxes' versus '50% use various loopholes to avoid taxes'. The former implies that many people are poor and cannot make ends meet; the latter implies that people can make ends meet and pay their fair share, they just don't because they can. Yes, the system is convoluted, which is probably what happens with any set of instructions that exists for several years. Messy rules are applied to fix corner cases right now (just like software, but with no version control):).
I could kinda watch SNL back 5-10 years, but it seems to have significantly gotten worse. A lot of the 'jokes/skits' just seemed forced by actors whose careers are going nowhere. Sometimes if feels like they're recycling a comedic framework that worked back in the 80s, but not so much now; i.e. exaggerated gestures and poor/overdone inflections to let the audience 'know' when something is funny.
Ah, I feel that citation is slightly misrepresented. It says that about half of the nations taxpayers escaped paying taxes, not that they could not afford to; and, this was due to how the tax breaks are credits were setup. I read the article the other way. That is, many people who could afford to pay taxes are not due to various loopholes. This would then put a sizeable burden of 70% of the governments taxes on households making >250k a year. It seems to be advocating that there should be more taxes, at least for people making 50k+ a year such that the government has more to spend on projects that benefit everyone and do not put undue stress on the upper middle class.
I think things are less dire than you make them out to be. Moving from manual to automated labor will be a general process in which the most generic tasks will have machines built for them; there need to be a few more significant advances in machine learning (computer vision, robotic movement, etc) before robots can replace humans in many trivial tasks, and then they need to actually be cost effective. A robot might be cheaper for a single task but humans can perform a wider array of tasks (for now). Consequently the number of menial jobs will decline and income will have to be spent on education to maintain a certain lifestyle. This will probably result in a self-correcting feedback inhibition loop in which couples will have to balance how many children they can have with how many luxeries they desire. Also, I don't think many menial labor jobs will go away comepletely because humans are social creatures and having another human around helps sell products. For examples of this, look to the Apple store (which is setup to demo products more so than sell them) and the Wallmart greeter (a pointless job that exists). Note, I'm just hypothesizing how the dynamics of our society will change over time with the graduatl introduction of robots, nothing more. As for our current economic crisis...
Apparently only 51% made enough to pay a tax last year- most of the rest got varying amounts of money back from the government because their incomes were so low.
Citation needed. People can only pay tax if they have an income; and usually taxes are scaled such that people can afford to live and eat somewhere. (minus some insurance expenditures). To say that people cannot afford taxes implies that they are unemployed (maybe on welfare) or having living expenditures that exceed their income. For the former, I doubt that 50% or even 20% of the population is unemployeed. Worst average stats I've seen hover around 10% with 6% unemployment being optimal. So, I'm inclined to think you're being a tad hyperbolic without any concrete evidence to show otherwise.
Ultimately I think we're going through some interesting and somewhat scary globalization changes, what with outsourcing, multi-national corporations, and global IP treaties (ACTA). I think what we see occuring is economic equilibirium. That is wealth, in the most generic sense, is moving from higher concentrations to lower concentrations (with the super-mega rich being an exception). Whether this is good or bad, probably depends on your perspective. I don't think things are going well for the average Joe though.
I can't really comment on most of your post, but automating labor with robotics is not necessarily a bad thing (unless you fear the coming robotic overlords). That just means we'd be able to produce goods more efficiently at even cheaper costs. Yes, a good chunk of menial jobs goes away, but this ultimately allows people to have more free time to go to school and develop skills which are either creative or too difficult (or expensive to develop) for robots to accomplish. I might agree that outsourcing jobs makes us poorer (locally), but improving efficiency through automation usually does the opposite.
The worst part about this manipulation of language is that you cannot have a debate with these people because their bias is tightly ingrained into their language. E.g
me: The evidence for human-influenced climate change looks interesting.
other: It probably came from a liberal source. Where do you get your 'facts'; here subscribe to my sources.
The insidiousness of this, is that the manipulation of language has shut down their cognitive thought process. The argument is over before it began because it doesn't coincide with their pre-established views. Climate analysis is no longer a science, but a politically charged war for natural resources and the large sums of money that are involved.
I dunno, for some games, I've found manuals to be pretty useful: Neverwinter Nights, Civilization, i.e. games with lots of miscellaneous icons and skill trees that require a decent amount of planning. Sure you can put the content in game, but sometimes it's nice to have a reference guide. Plus the art and flavor text is nice sometimes too.
Well, short term studies tend to be more tractable in academia due to limited funding. But I don't really find the results all that surprising. The brain games don't really challenge deeper cognitive functions but try to simply train your physical memory to react better to rudimentary problems. Jotting down 6 x 7 really fast isn't likely to expand your mind. If you really wanted to sharpen your brain, you'd study something like physics, philosophy, or music in greater depth. Those and other subjects use rudimentary skills in a broader sense to build more complex models, which improve your understanding of the world.
I think, what most lay people don't understand is that the rule: 'Don't give out passwords indiscriminately' is equivalent to the Hippocratic oath for some IT admins, particularly those in charge of large networks. If he just handed out passwords insecurely, that would cause more damage than Childs locking down the network for a brief duration. I'm inclined to believe that he was acting in the good faith of his job, particularly because he was willing to be arrested over being fired/becoming redundant. I seriously hope he's cleared, because he performed his job to the letter.
By that same measure, it's not impossible to obfuscate python. If there's enough money involved, you can bet an innocuous hack will be coded in there somewhere.
The problem with his comments is that I can probably find a game or art that violates his claims.
[games have] rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite an immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film.
Flower, flOw, osmosis, and tetris (slightly less so) are abstract games that have no true objective in which you can simply experience the nuances of sound and art. Sure there is an endpoint, but they can easily be abstracted to have no end point. Then, there are notably games like heavy rain, hotel dusk, and myst, which have story, environments, and music, and the interactivity is more an artifact of the medium. Simply precluding something from being artistic because it's interactive is foolish. Doing so because it usually adheres to certain rules or conventions is even more foolish. Good paintings adhere to different aspects of shading and dimensions. Good music might adopt a standard tempo or melody. Good stories have beginings and ends, chapters and acts. I'd say games are the amalgamation of many art forms because it can have all of the above. Sometimes they don't because of market demand, but that's a different issue.
My favourite cheating story was told to me by a TA friend. He was administering a final exam when he noticed a student surreptitiously copying off of another student. The said student turned in his exam by placing it in the middle of the exam pile. The TA walked up to the pile, grabbed a random exam, and gave a knowing nod to the student as he was walking out the door. Ironically, while the TA did not really know the student, the student broke down the next day and confessed to cheating.
Well the problem is no so much that the bosses have a harder time claiming no law was broken, but that the prosecutors have a harder time proving some law was broken. Claiming the fifth might imply guilt, but the defendants (ideally) can't be prosecuted until proven guilty.
Technically, you could run a virtual machine, browse a few innocuous porn sites and then infect yourself with the trojan. That way it's a little safer, you have more control over the type of porn attached to your name, and you can bring the blackmailer to justice. When it comes to porn, most guys turn into batman with a batcave and high-end encrypted computer.
Nah, the sad thing about all of the great stuff done in the 1960s was that none of it was documented. NASA was in such a rush to beat Russia to the moon that they failed to maintain the knowledge it took to get there. Consequently, we have to reinvent bits and pieces of manned space-flight to even duplicate that challenge : P. It'd be nice if, in addition to reinvigorating NASA, if there was a clause about maintaining and distributing the technical details of space flight.
Eh, internet/intranet coding can be non-trivial for different reasons than traditional coding. With the former, you're often expected to be part developer, part IT admin, part ui designer, and part graphics designer with a broad knowledge of many disparate technologie: css, ajax, spring/hibernate, cgi, html, javascript, actionscript, flash, java/c*, sql, json, etc. On their own, they're usually not too bad, but when you toss them together, it can be daunting keeping track of the logic behind your server side and client side code while maintaining compatibility between different browsers and localization requirements. Such coding can be as easy as "Hello World" or as difficult as your standalone desktop application. There's much more variation in coding websites than there were ~5-10 years ago, and I wouldn't assume his tasks are trivial simply because they involve the internet.
Meh, how can you use the Nielsen ratings as a metric when the show was intentionally sabotaged? The first episode wasn't shown first, the time slot was shuffled around a lot, and it was often canceled or delayed in place of football games. This was in season 1, where it's critical to have time to actually build a fanbase. All the Nielsen ratings show are that their tactics were effective for destroying the show.
They were called popup books when I was a kid, though I think they fell out of style. Give marketing a few years to forget and they'll 'invent' these new books for 3-dimensional viewing.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing to note is that we haven't explored the third dimension much in terms of cramming more transistors together. (ie it's still being researched and not marketed for now)
Hah, this reminds me of the firefly episode with a herd of cows on a spaceship. I wonder how NASA would handle that with no gravity. Lots of flying cow turds everywhere! At least there's little chance of a stampede.
A positive outcome from this though is less demand for foreign (usually Chinese) sweatshop labor. :)
Ya, I think the curve is pretty steep. I don't make much money myself, so I don't notice it, but my parents, who make a significant amount, are taxed pretty heavily. I think, no matter what, someone is going to complain that taxes are unfair unless they aren't really being taxed
:).
As for the comment, I was only disagreeing with the point that '50% cannot afford taxes' versus '50% use various loopholes to avoid taxes'. The former implies that many people are poor and cannot make ends meet; the latter implies that people can make ends meet and pay their fair share, they just don't because they can. Yes, the system is convoluted, which is probably what happens with any set of instructions that exists for several years. Messy rules are applied to fix corner cases right now (just like software, but with no version control)
I could kinda watch SNL back 5-10 years, but it seems to have significantly gotten worse. A lot of the 'jokes/skits' just seemed forced by actors whose careers are going nowhere. Sometimes if feels like they're recycling a comedic framework that worked back in the 80s, but not so much now; i.e. exaggerated gestures and poor/overdone inflections to let the audience 'know' when something is funny.
Ah, I feel that citation is slightly misrepresented. It says that about half of the nations taxpayers escaped paying taxes, not that they could not afford to; and, this was due to how the tax breaks are credits were setup. I read the article the other way. That is, many people who could afford to pay taxes are not due to various loopholes. This would then put a sizeable burden of 70% of the governments taxes on households making >250k a year. It seems to be advocating that there should be more taxes, at least for people making 50k+ a year such that the government has more to spend on projects that benefit everyone and do not put undue stress on the upper middle class.
Apparently only 51% made enough to pay a tax last year- most of the rest got varying amounts of money back from the government because their incomes were so low.
Citation needed. People can only pay tax if they have an income; and usually taxes are scaled such that people can afford to live and eat somewhere. (minus some insurance expenditures). To say that people cannot afford taxes implies that they are unemployed (maybe on welfare) or having living expenditures that exceed their income. For the former, I doubt that 50% or even 20% of the population is unemployeed. Worst average stats I've seen hover around 10% with 6% unemployment being optimal. So, I'm inclined to think you're being a tad hyperbolic without any concrete evidence to show otherwise.
Ultimately I think we're going through some interesting and somewhat scary globalization changes, what with outsourcing, multi-national corporations, and global IP treaties (ACTA). I think what we see occuring is economic equilibirium. That is wealth, in the most generic sense, is moving from higher concentrations to lower concentrations (with the super-mega rich being an exception). Whether this is good or bad, probably depends on your perspective. I don't think things are going well for the average Joe though.
I can't really comment on most of your post, but automating labor with robotics is not necessarily a bad thing (unless you fear the coming robotic overlords). That just means we'd be able to produce goods more efficiently at even cheaper costs. Yes, a good chunk of menial jobs goes away, but this ultimately allows people to have more free time to go to school and develop skills which are either creative or too difficult (or expensive to develop) for robots to accomplish. I might agree that outsourcing jobs makes us poorer (locally), but improving efficiency through automation usually does the opposite.
pfft, I was wondering if it could get me a beer, without me ever having to leave my basement.
The worst part about this manipulation of language is that you cannot have a debate with these people because their bias is tightly ingrained into their language. E.g
me: The evidence for human-influenced climate change looks interesting.
other: It probably came from a liberal source. Where do you get your 'facts'; here subscribe to my sources.
The insidiousness of this, is that the manipulation of language has shut down their cognitive thought process. The argument is over before it began because it doesn't coincide with their pre-established views. Climate analysis is no longer a science, but a politically charged war for natural resources and the large sums of money that are involved.
I dunno, for some games, I've found manuals to be pretty useful: Neverwinter Nights, Civilization, i.e. games with lots of miscellaneous icons and skill trees that require a decent amount of planning. Sure you can put the content in game, but sometimes it's nice to have a reference guide. Plus the art and flavor text is nice sometimes too.
Well, short term studies tend to be more tractable in academia due to limited funding. But I don't really find the results all that surprising. The brain games don't really challenge deeper cognitive functions but try to simply train your physical memory to react better to rudimentary problems. Jotting down 6 x 7 really fast isn't likely to expand your mind. If you really wanted to sharpen your brain, you'd study something like physics, philosophy, or music in greater depth. Those and other subjects use rudimentary skills in a broader sense to build more complex models, which improve your understanding of the world.
I think, what most lay people don't understand is that the rule: 'Don't give out passwords indiscriminately' is equivalent to the Hippocratic oath for some IT admins, particularly those in charge of large networks. If he just handed out passwords insecurely, that would cause more damage than Childs locking down the network for a brief duration. I'm inclined to believe that he was acting in the good faith of his job, particularly because he was willing to be arrested over being fired/becoming redundant. I seriously hope he's cleared, because he performed his job to the letter.
By that same measure, it's not impossible to obfuscate python. If there's enough money involved, you can bet an innocuous hack will be coded in there somewhere.
[games have] rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite an immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film.
Flower, flOw, osmosis, and tetris (slightly less so) are abstract games that have no true objective in which you can simply experience the nuances of sound and art. Sure there is an endpoint, but they can easily be abstracted to have no end point. Then, there are notably games like heavy rain, hotel dusk, and myst, which have story, environments, and music, and the interactivity is more an artifact of the medium. Simply precluding something from being artistic because it's interactive is foolish. Doing so because it usually adheres to certain rules or conventions is even more foolish. Good paintings adhere to different aspects of shading and dimensions. Good music might adopt a standard tempo or melody. Good stories have beginings and ends, chapters and acts. I'd say games are the amalgamation of many art forms because it can have all of the above. Sometimes they don't because of market demand, but that's a different issue.
My favourite cheating story was told to me by a TA friend. He was administering a final exam when he noticed a student surreptitiously copying off of another student. The said student turned in his exam by placing it in the middle of the exam pile. The TA walked up to the pile, grabbed a random exam, and gave a knowing nod to the student as he was walking out the door. Ironically, while the TA did not really know the student, the student broke down the next day and confessed to cheating.
Well the problem is no so much that the bosses have a harder time claiming no law was broken, but that the prosecutors have a harder time proving some law was broken. Claiming the fifth might imply guilt, but the defendants (ideally) can't be prosecuted until proven guilty.
Technically, you could run a virtual machine, browse a few innocuous porn sites and then infect yourself with the trojan. That way it's a little safer, you have more control over the type of porn attached to your name, and you can bring the blackmailer to justice. When it comes to porn, most guys turn into batman with a batcave and high-end encrypted computer.
Nah, the sad thing about all of the great stuff done in the 1960s was that none of it was documented. NASA was in such a rush to beat Russia to the moon that they failed to maintain the knowledge it took to get there. Consequently, we have to reinvent bits and pieces of manned space-flight to even duplicate that challenge : P. It'd be nice if, in addition to reinvigorating NASA, if there was a clause about maintaining and distributing the technical details of space flight.
Ya, but the developers soon found it's NSFW.
Eh, internet/intranet coding can be non-trivial for different reasons than traditional coding. With the former, you're often expected to be part developer, part IT admin, part ui designer, and part graphics designer with a broad knowledge of many disparate technologie: css, ajax, spring/hibernate, cgi, html, javascript, actionscript, flash, java/c*, sql, json, etc. On their own, they're usually not too bad, but when you toss them together, it can be daunting keeping track of the logic behind your server side and client side code while maintaining compatibility between different browsers and localization requirements. Such coding can be as easy as "Hello World" or as difficult as your standalone desktop application. There's much more variation in coding websites than there were ~5-10 years ago, and I wouldn't assume his tasks are trivial simply because they involve the internet.
Meh, how can you use the Nielsen ratings as a metric when the show was intentionally sabotaged? The first episode wasn't shown first, the time slot was shuffled around a lot, and it was often canceled or delayed in place of football games. This was in season 1, where it's critical to have time to actually build a fanbase. All the Nielsen ratings show are that their tactics were effective for destroying the show.
They were called popup books when I was a kid, though I think they fell out of style. Give marketing a few years to forget and they'll 'invent' these new books for 3-dimensional viewing.
Ya, but he stopped going to movies with me. Something about them being all 'touchy-feely'.
Do they have special glasses that improve overall story and character development? I tried beer goggles, but I end up forgetting most of the movie.