This issue is coming in every non-creative industry, and everyone paying attention has known this for a long while now. At first I expect many of the current unskilled jobs will be converted into "machine overseer" jobs, but there will be fewer of those positions and they will go away at some point as well. Eventually we're going to have deal with the reality that there is simply not enough work to go around, especially for unskilled laborers.
Self-driving electric cars can be self-recharging (when not in use), widely shared (why own when you can rent an autonomous taxi at any time?), and more efficient (tested and efficient algorithms over human randomness, less traffic, etc). These cars won't approach the efficiency of mass transit, sure, but they'll be a big improvement over the current situation in terms of energy usage/pollution. Suburban sprawl is another issue, but that's happening either way.
It's a step in the right direction. You're not going to flip a switch one day and get everyone to give up driving in favor of mass transit. It's just not going to ever happen, at least in the US. Better that we make improvements in a way that people will adopt rather than try and force something they won't only to end up achieving nothing at all.
While I'd love to blame an economic system for this, I feel the truth is more mundane: consumers are oblivious to what they are purchasing and are content to pay high prices for bad service.
What difference does it make? Saying capitalism doesn't work because consumers are ignorant is no different than saying socialism doesn't work because people are greedy. Yeah, it'd be great if we could change behavior to make these systems work as intended, but that's not really an option. If the system doesn't work, it doesn't work, period. The reasons don't much matter unless you have a solution to match them.
I think you've got it more right than anyone else here. Features like an SD card and removable battery are nice, but very few people care. Just look at how well the iPhone does with neither. What really makes a difference is how you sell your product. Samsung and Apple sell the exact* same phone across all carriers. Then they advertise that single phone straight to consumers, knowing that the carrier they're on doesn't matter. HTC sells the One X exclusively on AT&T. They sell Evos on Sprint. They sell Droid Incredibles on Verizon. They can't advertise a single product line to consumers, leaving them pretty much reliant on the carriers to push their phones for them. What do they expect?
When people think Apple, they think iPhone. Samsung, they think Galaxy S. HTC, they think... well, probably nothing. None of their product lines have a strong brand identity, so people won't ask for them. And when people won't ask for you product, how do you plan to sell any when you're competing against the products people will ask for?
* I realize some internal components are different, but as far as the average consumer is concerned, they're exactly the same.
I don't see how you can really blame this on Samsung. The Galaxy Nexus was subject to an import ban over this feature and couldn't be sold til it was removed. Yeah, that ruling technically only applies to the Nexus, but the feature is exactly identical across their other products. I wouldn't expect them to wait for each product to be banned before making this change, especially when that puts them at risk for Apple to claim willful infringement (subject to much harsher penalties), since they now obviously know the feature is infringing.
If this gets upheld, Apple will be able to get an injunction on every Android phone because this is a core OS feature. I'd say that affects consumers. Plus, it seems like there's a pretty good chance that Google could find some patent between theirs and Motorola's that applies to the iPhone, which could lead to a counter ban. Maybe (hopefully) it won't get that far, but this is the patent armageddon that people have been worrying about with all these lawsuits.
Re:Tab syncing: first thing I'll disable
on
Google I/O Day Two
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· Score: 1
It doesn't actually keep your open tabs in sync across different browsers, it just presents a list of all tabs you have open in each of your Chrome browsers. It shows up on the new tab screen in a popup menu along the bottom (or a tab on mobile). I agree with you that I wouldn't want my open tabs to actually stay in sync, but this implementation of it is really handy. You can totally ignore it if you want, but it's nice to have around.
Because we aren't a direct democracy. Majority opinion doesn't always become law, and it definitely doesn't happen immediately. That's by design. But it still lies with the people to select the government. If our government representatives aren't doing what we want, then we have the power to select new representatives. If they're not doing what we want but we're re-electing them anyway, then that's our fault. No amount of money and corporate friends can buy a place in Congress. Instead, all that cash buys votes, but it's our fault for putting our votes up for sale.
A beauracracy the size of the US government will always have corruption in it, but it still always comes back to us when we don't remove those responsible.
This is partially my point, though. This article says "sham" acupuncture is equivalent or better than the real thing, but leaves out that both are better than the usual treatment:
So yeah, all of the magic behind acupuncture and placement points and whatever other junk may not be true, but that doesn't change that there's something about the process of acupuncture that seems to help. So there's no need to throw it out. It really does help, and science should work to figure out why so we can make it better, not throw it away because it doesn't work exactly like practitioners think it does.
The trouble is that you are basically jumping from "science can't explain everything" to "maybe one of these wooly theories is correct". Yes, it is certainly true that not everything is explained. That doesn't make some random wooly theory likely to be correct.
True, but at the same time, let's not throw all of the "wooly theories" away out of hand. I sometimes think that a lot of people see something like "Eastern Medicine" and stop listening right there. But just because science didn't generate the theory doesn't meant the theory can't be correct. Let's test them and see how they work, then teach the ones that make sense. There's no reason to limit ourselves wholly to theories originating from science or non-science when the ultimate goal should be improving medicine, whatever the source.
I think this is an excellent idea. If other tech industry people could be convinced to write one, even better. The RIAA has chosen to go to the public and try to paint the tech industry as the bad guys. Fight fire with fire, especially when they're the bad guys to begin with.
The point of speed limits is usually not to keep you from going "too fast", it's to keep everyone going roughly the same speed. Driving gets more dangerous when cars are all going vastly different speeds. That's why highways also have minimum speed limits. Having someone going 25 on a 60+ mph highway is just as dangerous as having someone go 100.
This is less of an issue where there's not much traffic (parts of the Autobahn, for instance), and you could maybe make it work by having different lanes going different speeds, but there is a point beyond just making you drive slower than you're capable of doing.
Why shouldn't they pay the same tax, in both examples? Where you live should have no bearing on federal taxes, unless you're not in the country. Neither should kids. Kids are a personal choice, and if you can't afford them you shouldn't have them. But if you wanted to ease some of the burden, you could always create a deduction for the situation. Deductions make sense, especially in the case of something like charity, it's just the multiple types of income that bother me.
In the other case, presumably a retired millionaire has already paid taxes on the money he's earned, and he shouldn't be punished for saving a bunch of it in a bank account somewhere. And hey, if you wanted to reward someone for taking a low paying but very important job like school teacher, deductions are still there. There is still the question of the transition from one system to the other, but I'm only concerning myself with what the effect of either system in place would be.
Absolutely. I don't understand what's so hard about saying "regardless of its source, all of your income just counts as income, minus some deductions, and you pay a percentage in tax based on these brackets". No special taxes, no loopholes, you just take your total income, put it in brackets, and pay the percentages required. I'm far from an expert so maybe I'm missing something, but I'd love to hear it. This seems so clear cut and simple.
Or simple marketing. Being able to say your product is not manufactured in China is probably worth something these days, rightly or wrongly. There's also a possibility of environmental concerns. Though I admit ignorance as to whether Brazil is actually better in that area, China has quite a rep for pollution. Apple gets a well deserved bad rep for a lot of things, but I think they do legitimately care about the environment to some extent and, again, environmentally friendly is also good for marketing.
I've always thought a forced sunset provision for every bill would be a good idea, perhaps with it being made permanent after being passed a number of times. Something like 5 years for the first, 10 for the second, permanent after that. Or whatever. Just the idea of revisiting laws after them being in force for some number of years would greatly improve the whole law making process IMO.
I think that greatly undersells the difficulty in taking the input of millions or billions of people and turning it into output that is useful to every one of them with little or no human tweaking involved. Plus, they're essentially paying us back by giving us the majority of that output for free.
Strongly agreed. I'm far, far from a libertarian, but this is the idea of the free market at work here. We give our money to the companies that give us what we want and the rest go out of business. Copyright is a disruption of the free market, but one we deem acceptable given the theoretical benefit of encouraging new artwork. The problem here is that the recording industry is trying to push copyright way past it's intended use in order to simple prop up their own companies and business models.
This strategy has been hugely successful for them in the past because it never directly affected consumers. It may have prevented consumers from doing certain things, but only by not allowing the technology, not by taking anything away. Now we have the internet which allows us to do all kinds of things and the recording industry is trying to artificially limit and take those things away. This has a different effect on the public consciousness than does simply not giving them the technology in the first place, and I think it makes it very dangerous for the copyright industries to go after music lockers and the like too hard.
Having large, popular, powerful companies like Google and Amazon against you is going to be bad enough for these relatively small corporations, but if public opinion aligns in the same way I think they're going to be in big, big trouble. They have lots of friends in Washington, but if this becomes a real issue I think most of that support will evaporate in the face of elections.
IIRC, the new release cycle also involves moving to Chrome's three channel system. Essentially an alpha, beta, and stable channel. New features are introduced to the alpha channel and move through beta and into stable as they reach the necessary maturity. Releases are essentially just snapshots of the stable channel at predetermined points. So instead of no testing you are in fact getting the opposite: continuous testing. And, even better, it's actual user testing, as each channel will have users who are not associated with Mozilla.
As for the auth and admin issues, those are simply not an issue for the vast majority of users. The opposite even. Most people will want the most up to date browser at all times and the easier it is to maintain that the better. Not having to actually go and download new versions will be a bonus for them, not a drawback.
I agree. It doesn't appear that they thought this out very well, and they were probably a bit premature in moving to this release model. However, on the bright side, these problems can all be fixed relatively simply, and I have hope that they'll have the kinks worked out by FF6. Once we get past the transition issues I think the new release model will be excellent for Firefox, just as it has been for Chrome (IMO anyway).
Again, think Chrome-like. Chrome has automatic silent updates without a problem. The only way you know is when the little up arrow appears on your toolbar to let you know an update will be installed on next restart. Firefox needs to be similar. And don't actually get rid of version numbers, just stop using them for anything besides bug reports and stop publicizing them. Instead, relegate them to the about dialog. Like Chrome.
This isn't to say that Chrome is perfect and every browser should follow its lead, but if Firefox is going to follow its lead it needs to not stop halfway.
But the idea is to speed up the release cycle into what is almost a "rolling release" style. And, in fact, this is exactly what the Ars article is arguing is a good thing (which I agree with). I think if they're going to follow Chrome's release style, though, they need to get the rest of what makes it work for Chrome. By that I mean automatic, almost silent updates and an almost total disregard for the version number. Chrome still has versions, but they don't really mean anything significant. Firefox needs to stop calling this Firefox 5 and start calling it just Firefox. The version is no longer important. Similarly, extension support needs to stop being based on the version number and go to some other system. My initial thought would be to assume all extensions will work and allow the community of users to report broken extensions which can be automatically tallied and turned into a warning of some sort when you install. Think something like: "This extension has been reported to be incompatible with Firefox since dd/mm/yyyy."
Why not just not put that info up there in the first place? The only info I put on my facebook profile (or anywhere online, really) is info that I don't mind being public. I'd prefer that some of it stay private (email address for instance), but nothing in my profile is truly sensitive. Ergo, I don't even really have to care about the privacy dance while still being able to maintain my connections and event invitations and the like. Win-win.
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This issue is coming in every non-creative industry, and everyone paying attention has known this for a long while now. At first I expect many of the current unskilled jobs will be converted into "machine overseer" jobs, but there will be fewer of those positions and they will go away at some point as well. Eventually we're going to have deal with the reality that there is simply not enough work to go around, especially for unskilled laborers.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Self-driving electric cars can be self-recharging (when not in use), widely shared (why own when you can rent an autonomous taxi at any time?), and more efficient (tested and efficient algorithms over human randomness, less traffic, etc). These cars won't approach the efficiency of mass transit, sure, but they'll be a big improvement over the current situation in terms of energy usage/pollution. Suburban sprawl is another issue, but that's happening either way.
It's a step in the right direction. You're not going to flip a switch one day and get everyone to give up driving in favor of mass transit. It's just not going to ever happen, at least in the US. Better that we make improvements in a way that people will adopt rather than try and force something they won't only to end up achieving nothing at all.
While I'd love to blame an economic system for this, I feel the truth is more mundane: consumers are oblivious to what they are purchasing and are content to pay high prices for bad service.
What difference does it make? Saying capitalism doesn't work because consumers are ignorant is no different than saying socialism doesn't work because people are greedy. Yeah, it'd be great if we could change behavior to make these systems work as intended, but that's not really an option. If the system doesn't work, it doesn't work, period. The reasons don't much matter unless you have a solution to match them.
I think you've got it more right than anyone else here. Features like an SD card and removable battery are nice, but very few people care. Just look at how well the iPhone does with neither. What really makes a difference is how you sell your product. Samsung and Apple sell the exact* same phone across all carriers. Then they advertise that single phone straight to consumers, knowing that the carrier they're on doesn't matter. HTC sells the One X exclusively on AT&T. They sell Evos on Sprint. They sell Droid Incredibles on Verizon. They can't advertise a single product line to consumers, leaving them pretty much reliant on the carriers to push their phones for them. What do they expect?
When people think Apple, they think iPhone. Samsung, they think Galaxy S. HTC, they think... well, probably nothing. None of their product lines have a strong brand identity, so people won't ask for them. And when people won't ask for you product, how do you plan to sell any when you're competing against the products people will ask for?
* I realize some internal components are different, but as far as the average consumer is concerned, they're exactly the same.
I don't see how you can really blame this on Samsung. The Galaxy Nexus was subject to an import ban over this feature and couldn't be sold til it was removed. Yeah, that ruling technically only applies to the Nexus, but the feature is exactly identical across their other products. I wouldn't expect them to wait for each product to be banned before making this change, especially when that puts them at risk for Apple to claim willful infringement (subject to much harsher penalties), since they now obviously know the feature is infringing.
If this gets upheld, Apple will be able to get an injunction on every Android phone because this is a core OS feature. I'd say that affects consumers. Plus, it seems like there's a pretty good chance that Google could find some patent between theirs and Motorola's that applies to the iPhone, which could lead to a counter ban. Maybe (hopefully) it won't get that far, but this is the patent armageddon that people have been worrying about with all these lawsuits.
It doesn't actually keep your open tabs in sync across different browsers, it just presents a list of all tabs you have open in each of your Chrome browsers. It shows up on the new tab screen in a popup menu along the bottom (or a tab on mobile). I agree with you that I wouldn't want my open tabs to actually stay in sync, but this implementation of it is really handy. You can totally ignore it if you want, but it's nice to have around.
Uh, yes? Do you think all of those exports, from cheap junk to high end tech products, come from a government not interested in capitalism?
Because we aren't a direct democracy. Majority opinion doesn't always become law, and it definitely doesn't happen immediately. That's by design. But it still lies with the people to select the government. If our government representatives aren't doing what we want, then we have the power to select new representatives. If they're not doing what we want but we're re-electing them anyway, then that's our fault. No amount of money and corporate friends can buy a place in Congress. Instead, all that cash buys votes, but it's our fault for putting our votes up for sale.
A beauracracy the size of the US government will always have corruption in it, but it still always comes back to us when we don't remove those responsible.
Sadly, our tests of these pseudo-scientific medical practices has shown them to come up short:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2008/04/sham_acupuncture_is_better_than_true_acu.php
This is partially my point, though. This article says "sham" acupuncture is equivalent or better than the real thing, but leaves out that both are better than the usual treatment:
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2007/09/acupuncture-may-be-more-effective-for-back-pain-treatment-than-conventional-medicine.ars
So yeah, all of the magic behind acupuncture and placement points and whatever other junk may not be true, but that doesn't change that there's something about the process of acupuncture that seems to help. So there's no need to throw it out. It really does help, and science should work to figure out why so we can make it better, not throw it away because it doesn't work exactly like practitioners think it does.
The trouble is that you are basically jumping from "science can't explain everything" to "maybe one of these wooly theories is correct". Yes, it is certainly true that not everything is explained. That doesn't make some random wooly theory likely to be correct.
True, but at the same time, let's not throw all of the "wooly theories" away out of hand. I sometimes think that a lot of people see something like "Eastern Medicine" and stop listening right there. But just because science didn't generate the theory doesn't meant the theory can't be correct. Let's test them and see how they work, then teach the ones that make sense. There's no reason to limit ourselves wholly to theories originating from science or non-science when the ultimate goal should be improving medicine, whatever the source.
I think this is an excellent idea. If other tech industry people could be convinced to write one, even better. The RIAA has chosen to go to the public and try to paint the tech industry as the bad guys. Fight fire with fire, especially when they're the bad guys to begin with.
The point of speed limits is usually not to keep you from going "too fast", it's to keep everyone going roughly the same speed. Driving gets more dangerous when cars are all going vastly different speeds. That's why highways also have minimum speed limits. Having someone going 25 on a 60+ mph highway is just as dangerous as having someone go 100.
This is less of an issue where there's not much traffic (parts of the Autobahn, for instance), and you could maybe make it work by having different lanes going different speeds, but there is a point beyond just making you drive slower than you're capable of doing.
Exactly. Filtering by type of traffic? Ok. Filtering by source or destination of traffic? Not ok.
Why shouldn't they pay the same tax, in both examples? Where you live should have no bearing on federal taxes, unless you're not in the country. Neither should kids. Kids are a personal choice, and if you can't afford them you shouldn't have them. But if you wanted to ease some of the burden, you could always create a deduction for the situation. Deductions make sense, especially in the case of something like charity, it's just the multiple types of income that bother me.
In the other case, presumably a retired millionaire has already paid taxes on the money he's earned, and he shouldn't be punished for saving a bunch of it in a bank account somewhere. And hey, if you wanted to reward someone for taking a low paying but very important job like school teacher, deductions are still there. There is still the question of the transition from one system to the other, but I'm only concerning myself with what the effect of either system in place would be.
Absolutely. I don't understand what's so hard about saying "regardless of its source, all of your income just counts as income, minus some deductions, and you pay a percentage in tax based on these brackets". No special taxes, no loopholes, you just take your total income, put it in brackets, and pay the percentages required. I'm far from an expert so maybe I'm missing something, but I'd love to hear it. This seems so clear cut and simple.
Or simple marketing. Being able to say your product is not manufactured in China is probably worth something these days, rightly or wrongly. There's also a possibility of environmental concerns. Though I admit ignorance as to whether Brazil is actually better in that area, China has quite a rep for pollution. Apple gets a well deserved bad rep for a lot of things, but I think they do legitimately care about the environment to some extent and, again, environmentally friendly is also good for marketing.
I've always thought a forced sunset provision for every bill would be a good idea, perhaps with it being made permanent after being passed a number of times. Something like 5 years for the first, 10 for the second, permanent after that. Or whatever. Just the idea of revisiting laws after them being in force for some number of years would greatly improve the whole law making process IMO.
I think that greatly undersells the difficulty in taking the input of millions or billions of people and turning it into output that is useful to every one of them with little or no human tweaking involved. Plus, they're essentially paying us back by giving us the majority of that output for free.
Strongly agreed. I'm far, far from a libertarian, but this is the idea of the free market at work here. We give our money to the companies that give us what we want and the rest go out of business. Copyright is a disruption of the free market, but one we deem acceptable given the theoretical benefit of encouraging new artwork. The problem here is that the recording industry is trying to push copyright way past it's intended use in order to simple prop up their own companies and business models.
This strategy has been hugely successful for them in the past because it never directly affected consumers. It may have prevented consumers from doing certain things, but only by not allowing the technology, not by taking anything away. Now we have the internet which allows us to do all kinds of things and the recording industry is trying to artificially limit and take those things away. This has a different effect on the public consciousness than does simply not giving them the technology in the first place, and I think it makes it very dangerous for the copyright industries to go after music lockers and the like too hard.
Having large, popular, powerful companies like Google and Amazon against you is going to be bad enough for these relatively small corporations, but if public opinion aligns in the same way I think they're going to be in big, big trouble. They have lots of friends in Washington, but if this becomes a real issue I think most of that support will evaporate in the face of elections.
IIRC, the new release cycle also involves moving to Chrome's three channel system. Essentially an alpha, beta, and stable channel. New features are introduced to the alpha channel and move through beta and into stable as they reach the necessary maturity. Releases are essentially just snapshots of the stable channel at predetermined points. So instead of no testing you are in fact getting the opposite: continuous testing. And, even better, it's actual user testing, as each channel will have users who are not associated with Mozilla.
As for the auth and admin issues, those are simply not an issue for the vast majority of users. The opposite even. Most people will want the most up to date browser at all times and the easier it is to maintain that the better. Not having to actually go and download new versions will be a bonus for them, not a drawback.
I agree. It doesn't appear that they thought this out very well, and they were probably a bit premature in moving to this release model. However, on the bright side, these problems can all be fixed relatively simply, and I have hope that they'll have the kinks worked out by FF6. Once we get past the transition issues I think the new release model will be excellent for Firefox, just as it has been for Chrome (IMO anyway).
Again, think Chrome-like. Chrome has automatic silent updates without a problem. The only way you know is when the little up arrow appears on your toolbar to let you know an update will be installed on next restart. Firefox needs to be similar. And don't actually get rid of version numbers, just stop using them for anything besides bug reports and stop publicizing them. Instead, relegate them to the about dialog. Like Chrome.
This isn't to say that Chrome is perfect and every browser should follow its lead, but if Firefox is going to follow its lead it needs to not stop halfway.
But the idea is to speed up the release cycle into what is almost a "rolling release" style. And, in fact, this is exactly what the Ars article is arguing is a good thing (which I agree with). I think if they're going to follow Chrome's release style, though, they need to get the rest of what makes it work for Chrome. By that I mean automatic, almost silent updates and an almost total disregard for the version number. Chrome still has versions, but they don't really mean anything significant. Firefox needs to stop calling this Firefox 5 and start calling it just Firefox. The version is no longer important. Similarly, extension support needs to stop being based on the version number and go to some other system. My initial thought would be to assume all extensions will work and allow the community of users to report broken extensions which can be automatically tallied and turned into a warning of some sort when you install. Think something like: "This extension has been reported to be incompatible with Firefox since dd/mm/yyyy."
Why not just not put that info up there in the first place? The only info I put on my facebook profile (or anywhere online, really) is info that I don't mind being public. I'd prefer that some of it stay private (email address for instance), but nothing in my profile is truly sensitive. Ergo, I don't even really have to care about the privacy dance while still being able to maintain my connections and event invitations and the like. Win-win.