I'm not so sure this is going to be as big of a problem going forward. The abundance of formats and specialized hardware were due largely to the lack of standardization. And just getting the system to have acceptable performance often required tweaking not machine code, but the hardware itself.
Today we solve many more problems using general purpose hardware and software written in well-documented languages, and open-source is making that documentation live much longer than it might otherwise.
Plus the Internet in general has transformed the idea of archiving.
but a Reddit threat is not and never will be a source.
Neither is Slashdot, so who cares? OP gave you the primary information, if you need more confirmation in order to decide if this is "good" or "bad" or something else, you can do it yourself.
And if your research is for a more important purpose than personal satisfaction, you really should be ashamed of asking someone else to do your job.
Meanwhile, some of us realize there isn't much use for a clutch pedal in a fully automatic car.
Sometimes updates remove functionality; it's silly to keep a UI element if it doesn't do anything. Sometimes the needs of the majority outweigh the needs of the power user; if the function is confusing for new users or could cause severe problems if misused, perhaps it's better to put it into an advanced area.
I suspect what you really want is the same functionality/UI with security updates and such. Not a bad idea, but it's not free for the developer to maintain old versions... so don't be surprised if they ask you to open your wallet.
You are assuming that the criminal liability laws which govern human drivers would apply exactly the same to autonomous vehicles, but we have been arguing that they would not.
Today when 4 cars approach an intersection from all directions at about the same time and all want to go straight, the current protocol would be for all to slow to a stop and wait in turn to proceed based on who stops first. But if they communicate, there would be no need to come to a complete stop... the vehicles would speed up and slow down in such a manner that they would avoid collisions.
Here's an example with an intersection of two 12-lane highways. All directions flow with just a slight reduction in speed compared with no intersection.
And, communication at a higher urban level could spread out traffic volume in order to produce the most optimal traffic flows. Increasing traffic flow helps to reduce the time it takes for each vehicle to reach its destination, and can also save quite a bit in fuel costs.
Precisely, the only times criminal liability would be a factor is if there is evidence that an employee tampered with the vehicle, management decided to ignore internal warnings that a design defect could cause loss of control, or if the manufacturer systematically cheated regulatory tests designed to find such problems.
Well, they DO secure it. They made many tough decisions like including a breaking driver security model and UAC in Vista that ultimately gave them a very bad rap from users, but that be damned, it was much more secure. They have recently included (or will soon) a new kernel virtualization mode that makes it nearly impossible for even kernel-mode exploits and driver malware to cause damage to user-mode applications and data... because even the kernel doesn't have direct access to user mode processes.
You hate Microsoft, I get it. But get out of the 1990s; Microsoft security has been very serious for quite a while now.
The only remaining question is why Apple, Google and Microsoft all insisted on making smart phones and tablets entirely new beasts, incompatible with each other and with the modular, cohesive, loosely coupled web-based application stack that is obviously the clear winner for just about everything else (sorry embedded device guys).
But, Microsoft didn't. UWP/WinRT apps can be built using HTML/JS/CSS. (Or C#/XAML, VB/XAML, C++/XAML, or C++/DirectX if that's what you prefer.) Additional APIs can be accessed for platform and device capabilities like notifications, live tiles, persistence, 3D printing, etc. And you get the same security sandbox guarantees.
The real answer tends to be "it depends". Unions can be good, and they can be bad. Huge corporations can also be good or bad.
The attraction of the free market is that any transaction, large or small, ends up making things better for both parties. Add up all those transactions, they become an economy and the idealized open market makes the economy better.
But the big picture can't ignore that many transactions are not inside a closed system. If I pay you to dispose of millions of tons of radioactive waste into a river, that screws everyone else. If the president of a union negotiates a deal with the CEO that pockets the union president $10 million while providing each employee a free year of Jelly-of-the-Month Club, instead of real raises and bonuses and better working conditions, again people get screwed over.
So yes, union forces are market forces, but that doesn't mean they are always good.
Considering that the government raising the minimum wage to $70K is a hypothetical situation, and considering that even raising the minimum wage a couple of dollars per hour is very difficult especially on a national scale, I would say that my choice is still quite safe.
Regardless, I don't mind having this conversation. I may learn something, and someone else might too.
Not 100% of a product's or service's cost is human resources, and even the cost that is HR isn't 100% salary.
Every cost, for any product or service sold, can be traced back to labor and the ultimate value (supply/demand) of that labor or the products of that labor. A cotton shirt is the product of the labor used to plant, grow, and harvest the cotton, the labor used to move that cotton to textile workers who create the shirt, the labor involved in distribution to retailers, and finally the labor to put it on the shelves and work the registers. The electricity and other power sources like gasoline used in that process can be traced to the labor of building and maintaining plants, and extracting any natural resources such as coal mining, used to create or refine those resources. The vehicles used in the movement process were built using labor, and their parts created in similar processes that are traceable to labor. All products and services are traceable to labor costs.
So, yes, when something affects labor costs (especially policies that affect low-skilled labor), it pushes through the system and affects everything.
Even if you pass that cost on, it will likely only be after months or even a year or more, meaning that in the interim, the lag directly benefits those at the bottom
Good point, but that lag works both ways. A company that makes $4 million after paying bills, which pays an average of $30K to 100 employees and profits the remaining $1 million, cannot sustain an increase to $70K per employee. Even if they were willing to kill all their profits (which is never a goal of a business), they would be in the hole $3 million. Since they can't raise costs quickly to compensate, they have no choice but to cut employees. People lose jobs, meaning instead of $30K they are now making $0K.
And now the company is less productive because they are employing 40% fewer workers.
Some will gain, some will lose, and the economy will be much less stable while it works itself out.
And congratulations, now you know how millions of people feel who got degrees or otherwise invested in vocational training or certifications in stuff that was hot at the time, but has since cooled down.
So since I studied my choices adequately enough to safely predict a good future for my employment, but some other people didn't, the only fair thing to do is to make me suffer as though I made those bad choices?
But every time the minimum wage is raised, prices have never gone up an equal amount.
The minimum wage is always increased slowly. Even in Seattle, they aren't raising the minimum wage instantaneously to $15/hr. They are doing it in stages to reduce the obvious effects like those I described.
And keep in mind, I'm not saying that we should slow or stop the kinds of wealth redistribution approximated by the minimum wage. But sudden and very large increases in the minimum wage are destined to cause more short-term problems than they solve, and inevitably get us back to the same place we started. We need better solutions.
I didn't say or intend to imply that there is no current tax-based redistribution mechanism. My point is to abolish minimum wage, which means we need to move the entire problem of redistribution directly onto existing (or enhanced) government mechanisms.
If the government wants wealth redistribution, then why not do it directly? Wealthier people would pay some portion of their wealth to the government, who redistributes it directly to the poor.
I'm against the idea of minimum wage. It's a substitute for true wealth redistribution. Minimum wage does nothing for the middle class, and only takes wealth from businesses that utilize unskilled labor. Businesses that employ mostly workers who already make more than the new minimum wage would see no impact and their owners would still be just as wealthy. That's not fair.
Screw that... if we're going to redistribute wealth, I want someone in the government to grow a pair and propose a direct wealth redistribution plan.
Except that much of my money goes toward student loans that I needed in order to get the position I have, and toward other debt I incurred while I earned the degree.
I invested in my career through education, with the expectation that my life would be more difficult in the short term with more rewards in the future. (A future that is not guaranteed, of course, because some of us die early. But that's another topic.)
If I just graduated high school and learn that I can be a mail boy and be better off in both the near term and long term than someone with a degree, then I'll just skip the education. This will result in a lack of skilled workers, and businesses will need to raise the wage of skilled workers. All these raises cost money, so their products will cost more to the consumer. When applied across the economy as a matter of policy, the consumers have to pay more for everything, so their nice new salaries aren't really worth any more than they are today.
We're back where we started but with larger numbers behind every dollar sign... and with people now thinking that $200,000 should be the minimum wage.
Absolutely, a lot would change if this became the rule instead of the exception. But where does it stop? If it's good to raise the minimum wage to $70,000, then why not $70 billion? Prices would rise as a result, so that perhaps a hamburger is now like $35 million but that doesn't matter because people have billions of dollars. Rent would go up, mortgages would go up, everything would go up and it's ok because everyone has tons of cash.
Except it's not that simple. During the transition period where prices are stabilizing, practically everyone will lose their job. Very few companies on earth can currently afford to pay anyone $70 billion. And without employees, those companies stop making money. And if they can't make money, they go out of business and stop producing. Our economy is nearly instantaneously pushed back into the pre-industrialized era. Best case, the government carefully plans and collaborates with global businesses and other governments, to recognize an immediate day-zero devaluation of the dollar at the ratio of 5,000,000:1. In that best case scenario, what has that accomplished? Nothing except to completely wipe out both savings and credit across the nation (or globe, really).
So that's a bad idea, as extremes often are. Then tell me, what makes $70,000 specifically a better idea than $71,000, or $69,000? What makes it better than $200,000, or the current minimum which is near $15,000? What economically justifies that number other than it's a number that the majority of people would like to hear without causing a complete and instantaneous crash of the global economy?
Writing down a complex password is generally better and more secure than using a simple one. Attackers in China can't get into my desk drawer, and the lock keeps most who have physical access out.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not so sure this is going to be as big of a problem going forward. The abundance of formats and specialized hardware were due largely to the lack of standardization. And just getting the system to have acceptable performance often required tweaking not machine code, but the hardware itself.
Today we solve many more problems using general purpose hardware and software written in well-documented languages, and open-source is making that documentation live much longer than it might otherwise.
Plus the Internet in general has transformed the idea of archiving.
but a Reddit threat is not and never will be a source.
Neither is Slashdot, so who cares? OP gave you the primary information, if you need more confirmation in order to decide if this is "good" or "bad" or something else, you can do it yourself.
And if your research is for a more important purpose than personal satisfaction, you really should be ashamed of asking someone else to do your job.
Meanwhile, some of us realize there isn't much use for a clutch pedal in a fully automatic car.
Sometimes updates remove functionality; it's silly to keep a UI element if it doesn't do anything. Sometimes the needs of the majority outweigh the needs of the power user; if the function is confusing for new users or could cause severe problems if misused, perhaps it's better to put it into an advanced area.
I suspect what you really want is the same functionality/UI with security updates and such. Not a bad idea, but it's not free for the developer to maintain old versions... so don't be surprised if they ask you to open your wallet.
and still more people use XP than any version of windows except 7
Actually this isn't true. Windows 10 surpassed XP this month.
Eyeliner is a solution to a problem I don't have. But I don't go on makeup forums and suggest that Avon should stop making eyeliner.
You are assuming that the criminal liability laws which govern human drivers would apply exactly the same to autonomous vehicles, but we have been arguing that they would not.
Because it can still help with traffic flow.
Today when 4 cars approach an intersection from all directions at about the same time and all want to go straight, the current protocol would be for all to slow to a stop and wait in turn to proceed based on who stops first. But if they communicate, there would be no need to come to a complete stop... the vehicles would speed up and slow down in such a manner that they would avoid collisions.
Here's an example with an intersection of two 12-lane highways. All directions flow with just a slight reduction in speed compared with no intersection.
And, communication at a higher urban level could spread out traffic volume in order to produce the most optimal traffic flows. Increasing traffic flow helps to reduce the time it takes for each vehicle to reach its destination, and can also save quite a bit in fuel costs.
Precisely, the only times criminal liability would be a factor is if there is evidence that an employee tampered with the vehicle, management decided to ignore internal warnings that a design defect could cause loss of control, or if the manufacturer systematically cheated regulatory tests designed to find such problems.
Well, they DO secure it. They made many tough decisions like including a breaking driver security model and UAC in Vista that ultimately gave them a very bad rap from users, but that be damned, it was much more secure. They have recently included (or will soon) a new kernel virtualization mode that makes it nearly impossible for even kernel-mode exploits and driver malware to cause damage to user-mode applications and data... because even the kernel doesn't have direct access to user mode processes.
You hate Microsoft, I get it. But get out of the 1990s; Microsoft security has been very serious for quite a while now.
The only remaining question is why Apple, Google and Microsoft all insisted on making smart phones and tablets entirely new beasts, incompatible with each other and with the modular, cohesive, loosely coupled web-based application stack that is obviously the clear winner for just about everything else (sorry embedded device guys).
But, Microsoft didn't. UWP/WinRT apps can be built using HTML/JS/CSS. (Or C#/XAML, VB/XAML, C++/XAML, or C++/DirectX if that's what you prefer.) Additional APIs can be accessed for platform and device capabilities like notifications, live tiles, persistence, 3D printing, etc. And you get the same security sandbox guarantees.
Isn't that precisely what companies are doing with security bug bounty programs?
Extremists of any violence who use religion are wrong.
The second part of a for loop is a condition (implied "if").
But as you can clearly see, I did not avoid the IF statement. Again, wtf are you talking about?
Yes, but I'm not sure what the hell that has to do with what I wrote.
(Or, at least, something that is equivalent to if or decision-based branching.)
if (!programLogic.Contains("if"))
{
_isTrivial = true;
}
The real answer tends to be "it depends". Unions can be good, and they can be bad. Huge corporations can also be good or bad.
The attraction of the free market is that any transaction, large or small, ends up making things better for both parties. Add up all those transactions, they become an economy and the idealized open market makes the economy better.
But the big picture can't ignore that many transactions are not inside a closed system. If I pay you to dispose of millions of tons of radioactive waste into a river, that screws everyone else. If the president of a union negotiates a deal with the CEO that pockets the union president $10 million while providing each employee a free year of Jelly-of-the-Month Club, instead of real raises and bonuses and better working conditions, again people get screwed over.
So yes, union forces are market forces, but that doesn't mean they are always good.
Considering that the government raising the minimum wage to $70K is a hypothetical situation, and considering that even raising the minimum wage a couple of dollars per hour is very difficult especially on a national scale, I would say that my choice is still quite safe.
Regardless, I don't mind having this conversation. I may learn something, and someone else might too.
Not 100% of a product's or service's cost is human resources, and even the cost that is HR isn't 100% salary.
Every cost, for any product or service sold, can be traced back to labor and the ultimate value (supply/demand) of that labor or the products of that labor. A cotton shirt is the product of the labor used to plant, grow, and harvest the cotton, the labor used to move that cotton to textile workers who create the shirt, the labor involved in distribution to retailers, and finally the labor to put it on the shelves and work the registers. The electricity and other power sources like gasoline used in that process can be traced to the labor of building and maintaining plants, and extracting any natural resources such as coal mining, used to create or refine those resources. The vehicles used in the movement process were built using labor, and their parts created in similar processes that are traceable to labor. All products and services are traceable to labor costs.
So, yes, when something affects labor costs (especially policies that affect low-skilled labor), it pushes through the system and affects everything.
Even if you pass that cost on, it will likely only be after months or even a year or more, meaning that in the interim, the lag directly benefits those at the bottom
Good point, but that lag works both ways. A company that makes $4 million after paying bills, which pays an average of $30K to 100 employees and profits the remaining $1 million, cannot sustain an increase to $70K per employee. Even if they were willing to kill all their profits (which is never a goal of a business), they would be in the hole $3 million. Since they can't raise costs quickly to compensate, they have no choice but to cut employees. People lose jobs, meaning instead of $30K they are now making $0K.
And now the company is less productive because they are employing 40% fewer workers.
Some will gain, some will lose, and the economy will be much less stable while it works itself out.
And congratulations, now you know how millions of people feel who got degrees or otherwise invested in vocational training or certifications in stuff that was hot at the time, but has since cooled down.
So since I studied my choices adequately enough to safely predict a good future for my employment, but some other people didn't, the only fair thing to do is to make me suffer as though I made those bad choices?
But every time the minimum wage is raised, prices have never gone up an equal amount.
The minimum wage is always increased slowly. Even in Seattle, they aren't raising the minimum wage instantaneously to $15/hr. They are doing it in stages to reduce the obvious effects like those I described.
And keep in mind, I'm not saying that we should slow or stop the kinds of wealth redistribution approximated by the minimum wage. But sudden and very large increases in the minimum wage are destined to cause more short-term problems than they solve, and inevitably get us back to the same place we started. We need better solutions.
I didn't say or intend to imply that there is no current tax-based redistribution mechanism. My point is to abolish minimum wage, which means we need to move the entire problem of redistribution directly onto existing (or enhanced) government mechanisms.
If the government wants wealth redistribution, then why not do it directly? Wealthier people would pay some portion of their wealth to the government, who redistributes it directly to the poor.
I'm against the idea of minimum wage. It's a substitute for true wealth redistribution. Minimum wage does nothing for the middle class, and only takes wealth from businesses that utilize unskilled labor. Businesses that employ mostly workers who already make more than the new minimum wage would see no impact and their owners would still be just as wealthy. That's not fair.
Screw that... if we're going to redistribute wealth, I want someone in the government to grow a pair and propose a direct wealth redistribution plan.
You are already making enough money. Get over it.
Except that much of my money goes toward student loans that I needed in order to get the position I have, and toward other debt I incurred while I earned the degree.
I invested in my career through education, with the expectation that my life would be more difficult in the short term with more rewards in the future. (A future that is not guaranteed, of course, because some of us die early. But that's another topic.)
If I just graduated high school and learn that I can be a mail boy and be better off in both the near term and long term than someone with a degree, then I'll just skip the education. This will result in a lack of skilled workers, and businesses will need to raise the wage of skilled workers. All these raises cost money, so their products will cost more to the consumer. When applied across the economy as a matter of policy, the consumers have to pay more for everything, so their nice new salaries aren't really worth any more than they are today.
We're back where we started but with larger numbers behind every dollar sign... and with people now thinking that $200,000 should be the minimum wage.
Absolutely, a lot would change if this became the rule instead of the exception. But where does it stop? If it's good to raise the minimum wage to $70,000, then why not $70 billion? Prices would rise as a result, so that perhaps a hamburger is now like $35 million but that doesn't matter because people have billions of dollars. Rent would go up, mortgages would go up, everything would go up and it's ok because everyone has tons of cash.
Except it's not that simple. During the transition period where prices are stabilizing, practically everyone will lose their job. Very few companies on earth can currently afford to pay anyone $70 billion. And without employees, those companies stop making money. And if they can't make money, they go out of business and stop producing. Our economy is nearly instantaneously pushed back into the pre-industrialized era. Best case, the government carefully plans and collaborates with global businesses and other governments, to recognize an immediate day-zero devaluation of the dollar at the ratio of 5,000,000:1. In that best case scenario, what has that accomplished? Nothing except to completely wipe out both savings and credit across the nation (or globe, really).
So that's a bad idea, as extremes often are. Then tell me, what makes $70,000 specifically a better idea than $71,000, or $69,000? What makes it better than $200,000, or the current minimum which is near $15,000? What economically justifies that number other than it's a number that the majority of people would like to hear without causing a complete and instantaneous crash of the global economy?
Writing down a complex password is generally better and more secure than using a simple one. Attackers in China can't get into my desk drawer, and the lock keeps most who have physical access out.