Maybe we shouldn't have created a government bureaucracy capable of enacting laws like this then. Is it any wonder that corporations would attempt to seize control over it and bend it to their own whims?
I think it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. It's not that those applications can't be written to take advantage of parallelism, it's that there weren't (and maybe still aren't) a lot of developers who took classes on it (because hey, graphics!) so we end up still relying on improvements in single-threaded performance to drive gains. For a long while, it didn't even make sense to hire developers writing commercial software who had any skills with writing multi-threaded software, because consumer PCs all had a single core and no SMT.
Things have certainly changed over the last decade for a variety of reasons, but I do realize that there's still a lot of old code out there that isn't going to be fixed up. I would say that things are quite a bit better though and that there are a lot of applications that are at least lightly-threaded and aren't completely bound to a single core.
Because there're loads of people who want their opinions formed for them (regardless of what their political ideology is) and are more than happy to lap up content like this, which is also conveniently cheap to produce since you can just hire a bunch of low cost recent graduates who will work for chicken scratch because of the dearth of jobs in news media at respectable publications.
I'm surprised they even need staff at any of these places. It seems like you could train a bot to trot out the same old talking points article after article.
It's funny the words people invent just to avoid having to admit that socialism would improve things for the most people.
Worked out great for Venezuela. Supposedly the average person there lost some 20 lbs. over the last year. Maybe we could treat America's growing obesity problem with socialism.
I'm old enough to remember when we used to make fun of "European socialism", but now that those countries are kicking our asses, we're supposed to say that they're not "real socialism".
It's actually the case where for once, "not real socialism" is correct. If you think that the Scandinavian countries are an accurate representation of socialism, then you must love the Trump corporate tax cuts which brought the U.S. rate much closer to the socialist model that those countries employ. I suppose you could say that they tax the rich more heavily than the U.S. does, but they also tax the middle class nearly just as much, but with the exception of Sweden, all of those "socialist" countries have actually been reducing their top tax rates over the last decade.
Personally, I believe that the best approach would be for the city to create and own its own municipal network and then to allow multiple companies to sell services on it to the citizens. That's the surest way to make sure that your citizens get the best possible value. If a private company wants to build its own network to compete against the city, that's their business and I don't see why they should be prevented from doing so, but I suspect that most wouldn't.
It's ultimately competition that drives down prices and results in better services.
Most likely. There are all kinds of different crazy people on YouTube. I don't mean crazy as in believe some strange things, but as in diagnoseably mentally ill and in need of their medication.
There are also some people who are just susceptible to conspiracy stories because they want to believe in fantastical stories. The problem is that by trying to censor these videos or remove them from YouTube you just reinforce their idea that they must be on to something because Google (or the government who must really be behind it all) is trying to censor them.
The best treatment for falsehoods is to expose them. If the claims are utterly ridiculous, the YouTube community should have no problem making videos that offer counterpoints or expose the flaws in the reasoning of the first videos.
If you think people could learn critical thinking by being taught in the appropriate manner, this wouldn't be a problem. Read up on the massive number of cognitive biases that humans exhibit and some of the other literature that suggests they're baked in to the hardware as it were (and may have been beneficial at the time from an evolutionary standpoint) and you'll realize that you're dealing with a much harder problem than just adding it to the school curriculum.
Or to learn what causes SSD's to fail. Just because something appears unpredictable doesn't mean that it is so. If he doesn't have the time to devote to investigating this issue and acquire any requisite knowledge that will help him to uncover the truth, then he probably shouldn't be squandering any of that precious time whining or worrying about things that are out of his control.
There are certainly issues with the way the U.S. calculates unemployment to suggest that the numbers aren't as good as the government would like people to believe, but trying to relate the entire U.S. economy to the actions of a single company within it is just stupid.
It's basically the same as the idiots who dismiss global warming because they've had a slightly colder winter in their part of the world.
Accept the consequences of our choices as a society until voters can be bothered. Unless you're going to carry the torch on this topic to get the voters to care a little bit sooner or overthrow the government and try to fix things, there really isn't a lot left to do about it.
If you own something and it increases in value, are you not entitled to that value as the owner of the asset? If not, what does it even mean to own that asset?
I don't think the connection is difficult to make, unless your worldview very much relies on dismissing that connection.
Who is going to invest huge sums of money with someone who has no proven track record of a return on investment?
I get that people who like to go on rants about capitalism probably don't understand economics terribly well, but that is something that should be intuitively obvious if you stop to think about it for a few seconds.
Patents do eventually expire, though we can argue against whether or not they do so quickly enough. The problem with eliminating them entirely is that you trade one problem (market dominance by patent holder) for another (market dominance by large established manufacturers) and I'm not sure there's an argument for the latter being ultimately better than the former.
I do find it hard to believe that it's impossible to design around Qualcomm's patents. It may merely be expensive and difficult, but I suspect that has to do with the nature of the industry and the limited number of individuals capable of producing meaningful work within it.
They're kids, that's what they do. I told everyone I was going to be an astronaut when I was a kid. I even had an uncle who said he believed me because he said I was good at taking up space.
Cheaper is not the same thing as more profitable. In fact it's quite often the exact opposite.
There is a lot of money sunk into generating CO2. Mines, wells, refineries, transport, storage, power stations... And they are all quickly becoming worthless thanks to cheaper renewables. Battery storage is making peaker plants uneconomical too.
That doesn't matter, because there are plenty of wealthy people who have no money invested in any of that and therefore no reason to maintain it. We see other industries where the old entrenched players who refused to modernized get toppled all the time. Being able to do something at less expense than the competition means there's more profit available. If the existing market refuses to seize it, someone else will and the consumers really don't care about much beyond the price.
Only when you have strong government intervention into markets can you prevent them from naturally gravitating towards the most cost effective solutions. Otherwise, the more the existing companies dig in their heels, the more incentive it creates for someone to implement the cheaper solution.
Then next logical step would be to experimentally test this. Get a group of random people with Android phones and have them record the ads that they see on their phones over some span of time. Then have them spend an afternoon visiting a retirement home. Repeat the process of recording what ads they receive. If everyone is suddenly getting retirement home ads, it's a good indication that your location data is being sold.
Do any companies even care about grades that much? I’ve never seen any that insist on anything above a 3.0, and I suspect it’s because GPA is useless for comparing applicants across colleges. I’d probably be leery of anyone with a particularly low (say sub-2.0) GPA, past a certain point it doesn’t matter.
I think the worst part is that they eventually try to integrate any product with the rest of their ecosystem even if it makes no sense or isn't something that users want. This invariably pisses off the user base and garners all kinds of negative reactions and does nothing to help Google grow its other products. If people wanted to use them, they already would be using them. Then they eventually kill off the product when they realize that they can't get what they want or they've lost interest in it, only for the whole cycle to begin anew when some person or team craps out a new product.
The only real lesson in any of this is not to use one of these products or services to begin with because eventually Google will dick with it in ways that ruin what made it useful in the first place and if you're still using it after that point, they'll only drop support for it later and leave you in a lurch if you were depending on it for anything important.
Because as we all know, the actual product always works as well as the marketing demonstration. Similarly, companies (especially Chinese ones) would never lie about or misrepresent the capabilities of a product.
They'll put up with it as long as conditions continue to improve. It may not be perfect, but as long as they have a path towards greater personal wealth, there won't be widespread complaints. Perhaps this will change as future generations are born without the knowledge of what China was like prior to economic reforms it enacted, but the people who remember a time when things were far worse will not be so easy to stir up so long as things continue improving. Whether or not the Chinese government can continue to make that happen while maintaining the same level of control that they have historically had is an open question.
China is investing a lot of money in Africa in the same way that the U.S. invested a lot into China, so in some ways it seems as though they are trying to have our lifestyle. Unlike the western world, the Chinese aren't going to feel any guilt over colonialism or the like. Whether they'll be successful or not is another matter, but it's naive to think that the Chinese government is incompetent or incapable of trying to keep itself afloat as China continues to industrialize.
With certainty, governments will ultimately become tyrannical against some group, but we should seek to design the internet in such a way as to make it difficult for those governments (or other large organizations because a religion or corporation can be just as tyrannical) to censor the internet or cut those people off.
Trying to design something that only keeps the "bad guys" out is doomed to failure as someone will eventually decide that the bad guys are whoever they oppose. Sure that means that you'll get nazis (or some other group that's similarly reviled) but when everyone is free to participate and spread their point of view, you're just as able to expose those vile people to information that they might not otherwise receive.
Just make sure that it's open and accessible for anyone who wants to have a presence even if there are others in opposition to that presence. You're not going to be able to please everyone and there are plenty of governments, industries, or other groups that are only interested in control and appeasing them in any way will ensure that you've only really created a tool with which they can abuse or enslave humanity.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently thinking that unelected bureaucracies are a bad idea means that Congress (or a state's legislature) is prohibited from making laws.
Maybe we shouldn't have created a government bureaucracy capable of enacting laws like this then. Is it any wonder that corporations would attempt to seize control over it and bend it to their own whims?
Seriously, in 2018 does anyone still fall for this crap?
I don't know, but people keep thinking that trickle-down economics exists, so I'm hardly surprised.
I think it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. It's not that those applications can't be written to take advantage of parallelism, it's that there weren't (and maybe still aren't) a lot of developers who took classes on it (because hey, graphics!) so we end up still relying on improvements in single-threaded performance to drive gains. For a long while, it didn't even make sense to hire developers writing commercial software who had any skills with writing multi-threaded software, because consumer PCs all had a single core and no SMT.
Things have certainly changed over the last decade for a variety of reasons, but I do realize that there's still a lot of old code out there that isn't going to be fixed up. I would say that things are quite a bit better though and that there are a lot of applications that are at least lightly-threaded and aren't completely bound to a single core.
Because there're loads of people who want their opinions formed for them (regardless of what their political ideology is) and are more than happy to lap up content like this, which is also conveniently cheap to produce since you can just hire a bunch of low cost recent graduates who will work for chicken scratch because of the dearth of jobs in news media at respectable publications.
I'm surprised they even need staff at any of these places. It seems like you could train a bot to trot out the same old talking points article after article.
It's funny the words people invent just to avoid having to admit that socialism would improve things for the most people.
Worked out great for Venezuela. Supposedly the average person there lost some 20 lbs. over the last year. Maybe we could treat America's growing obesity problem with socialism.
I'm old enough to remember when we used to make fun of "European socialism", but now that those countries are kicking our asses, we're supposed to say that they're not "real socialism".
It's actually the case where for once, "not real socialism" is correct. If you think that the Scandinavian countries are an accurate representation of socialism, then you must love the Trump corporate tax cuts which brought the U.S. rate much closer to the socialist model that those countries employ. I suppose you could say that they tax the rich more heavily than the U.S. does, but they also tax the middle class nearly just as much, but with the exception of Sweden, all of those "socialist" countries have actually been reducing their top tax rates over the last decade.
Personally, I believe that the best approach would be for the city to create and own its own municipal network and then to allow multiple companies to sell services on it to the citizens. That's the surest way to make sure that your citizens get the best possible value. If a private company wants to build its own network to compete against the city, that's their business and I don't see why they should be prevented from doing so, but I suspect that most wouldn't.
It's ultimately competition that drives down prices and results in better services.
Most likely. There are all kinds of different crazy people on YouTube. I don't mean crazy as in believe some strange things, but as in diagnoseably mentally ill and in need of their medication.
There are also some people who are just susceptible to conspiracy stories because they want to believe in fantastical stories. The problem is that by trying to censor these videos or remove them from YouTube you just reinforce their idea that they must be on to something because Google (or the government who must really be behind it all) is trying to censor them.
The best treatment for falsehoods is to expose them. If the claims are utterly ridiculous, the YouTube community should have no problem making videos that offer counterpoints or expose the flaws in the reasoning of the first videos.
If you think people could learn critical thinking by being taught in the appropriate manner, this wouldn't be a problem. Read up on the massive number of cognitive biases that humans exhibit and some of the other literature that suggests they're baked in to the hardware as it were (and may have been beneficial at the time from an evolutionary standpoint) and you'll realize that you're dealing with a much harder problem than just adding it to the school curriculum.
Or to learn what causes SSD's to fail. Just because something appears unpredictable doesn't mean that it is so. If he doesn't have the time to devote to investigating this issue and acquire any requisite knowledge that will help him to uncover the truth, then he probably shouldn't be squandering any of that precious time whining or worrying about things that are out of his control.
Yeah, let me know when we get a robot that can do steaks.
There are certainly issues with the way the U.S. calculates unemployment to suggest that the numbers aren't as good as the government would like people to believe, but trying to relate the entire U.S. economy to the actions of a single company within it is just stupid.
It's basically the same as the idiots who dismiss global warming because they've had a slightly colder winter in their part of the world.
Accept the consequences of our choices as a society until voters can be bothered. Unless you're going to carry the torch on this topic to get the voters to care a little bit sooner or overthrow the government and try to fix things, there really isn't a lot left to do about it.
If you own something and it increases in value, are you not entitled to that value as the owner of the asset? If not, what does it even mean to own that asset?
I don't think the connection is difficult to make, unless your worldview very much relies on dismissing that connection.
Who is going to invest huge sums of money with someone who has no proven track record of a return on investment?
I get that people who like to go on rants about capitalism probably don't understand economics terribly well, but that is something that should be intuitively obvious if you stop to think about it for a few seconds.
Patents do eventually expire, though we can argue against whether or not they do so quickly enough. The problem with eliminating them entirely is that you trade one problem (market dominance by patent holder) for another (market dominance by large established manufacturers) and I'm not sure there's an argument for the latter being ultimately better than the former.
I do find it hard to believe that it's impossible to design around Qualcomm's patents. It may merely be expensive and difficult, but I suspect that has to do with the nature of the industry and the limited number of individuals capable of producing meaningful work within it.
They're kids, that's what they do. I told everyone I was going to be an astronaut when I was a kid. I even had an uncle who said he believed me because he said I was good at taking up space.
Cheaper is not the same thing as more profitable. In fact it's quite often the exact opposite.
There is a lot of money sunk into generating CO2. Mines, wells, refineries, transport, storage, power stations... And they are all quickly becoming worthless thanks to cheaper renewables. Battery storage is making peaker plants uneconomical too.
That doesn't matter, because there are plenty of wealthy people who have no money invested in any of that and therefore no reason to maintain it. We see other industries where the old entrenched players who refused to modernized get toppled all the time. Being able to do something at less expense than the competition means there's more profit available. If the existing market refuses to seize it, someone else will and the consumers really don't care about much beyond the price.
Only when you have strong government intervention into markets can you prevent them from naturally gravitating towards the most cost effective solutions. Otherwise, the more the existing companies dig in their heels, the more incentive it creates for someone to implement the cheaper solution.
Then next logical step would be to experimentally test this. Get a group of random people with Android phones and have them record the ads that they see on their phones over some span of time. Then have them spend an afternoon visiting a retirement home. Repeat the process of recording what ads they receive. If everyone is suddenly getting retirement home ads, it's a good indication that your location data is being sold.
Do any companies even care about grades that much? I’ve never seen any that insist on anything above a 3.0, and I suspect it’s because GPA is useless for comparing applicants across colleges. I’d probably be leery of anyone with a particularly low (say sub-2.0) GPA, past a certain point it doesn’t matter.
I think the worst part is that they eventually try to integrate any product with the rest of their ecosystem even if it makes no sense or isn't something that users want. This invariably pisses off the user base and garners all kinds of negative reactions and does nothing to help Google grow its other products. If people wanted to use them, they already would be using them. Then they eventually kill off the product when they realize that they can't get what they want or they've lost interest in it, only for the whole cycle to begin anew when some person or team craps out a new product.
The only real lesson in any of this is not to use one of these products or services to begin with because eventually Google will dick with it in ways that ruin what made it useful in the first place and if you're still using it after that point, they'll only drop support for it later and leave you in a lurch if you were depending on it for anything important.
Because as we all know, the actual product always works as well as the marketing demonstration. Similarly, companies (especially Chinese ones) would never lie about or misrepresent the capabilities of a product.
They'll put up with it as long as conditions continue to improve. It may not be perfect, but as long as they have a path towards greater personal wealth, there won't be widespread complaints. Perhaps this will change as future generations are born without the knowledge of what China was like prior to economic reforms it enacted, but the people who remember a time when things were far worse will not be so easy to stir up so long as things continue improving. Whether or not the Chinese government can continue to make that happen while maintaining the same level of control that they have historically had is an open question.
China is investing a lot of money in Africa in the same way that the U.S. invested a lot into China, so in some ways it seems as though they are trying to have our lifestyle. Unlike the western world, the Chinese aren't going to feel any guilt over colonialism or the like. Whether they'll be successful or not is another matter, but it's naive to think that the Chinese government is incompetent or incapable of trying to keep itself afloat as China continues to industrialize.
With certainty, governments will ultimately become tyrannical against some group, but we should seek to design the internet in such a way as to make it difficult for those governments (or other large organizations because a religion or corporation can be just as tyrannical) to censor the internet or cut those people off.
Trying to design something that only keeps the "bad guys" out is doomed to failure as someone will eventually decide that the bad guys are whoever they oppose. Sure that means that you'll get nazis (or some other group that's similarly reviled) but when everyone is free to participate and spread their point of view, you're just as able to expose those vile people to information that they might not otherwise receive.
Just make sure that it's open and accessible for anyone who wants to have a presence even if there are others in opposition to that presence. You're not going to be able to please everyone and there are plenty of governments, industries, or other groups that are only interested in control and appeasing them in any way will ensure that you've only really created a tool with which they can abuse or enslave humanity.