Quick summary of actual facts: * 58.7 of all workers in the US earn hourly wages. * Among ALL hourly workers, 3.9 percent earn minimum wage (or 2.25 percent of the total work force). * 3 percent of hourly workers earning minimum wage (or 1.7 percent of the total work force) are under the age of 25. * Among teenagers (16-19 years old) earning hourly wages, about 15 percent of them earn the minimum wage. * 10 percent of part time workers earn minimum wage, compared to 2 percent of full time workers.
So, as it turns out, the vast majority of minimum wage earners are indeed quite young, often part-time, and as a percentage of the total work force are a fairly small percentage. Let's deal with facts and reality here, and not just make arguments based on ignorance and incorrect perceptions.
Not really, no. We've actually had "freedom of speech" cases ruled against private enterprise for their effective ability to infringe on the rights of others. That's generally only happened when you could reasonably prove that private enterprises can do such a thing, which is exceedingly-rare.
My understanding is that such cases typically involve suppression of their own employees' free speech, such as attempts to quell discussion of forming a union, for instance. I'd be surprised if there were many cases involving consumers and product selection, but I admit I'm not exactly knowledgeable about such case histories.
I actually agree with most of what you said, but don't quite see how it applies to the topic at hand, except through a rather tortuous leap of logic. You indicate that this topic may be too complex for non-lawyers to understand. I tend to disagree here - I think it's a very straightforward matter of retailers being allowed to sell what they want within reasonable, well-regulated constraints. The law is not intended to serve lawyers, but the public interest, and I can't see in this particular case how consumers were harmed in any way.
I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one. Fortunately, the courts so far seem to agree with my take on things.
P.S. Lawsuits are only "amusing" until one gets directed your way.
You seem to misunderstand "free speech" completely, as is sadly typical, even though you do at least acknowledge the fact that it involves private enterprise. The guarantee of free speech is primarily a prohibition on the government's ability to suppress your individual right to express your opinions, not a guarantee that anyone must listen to you, nor a mandate for businesses on which products they choose to sell.
I think perhaps you also misunderstand what a "monopoly" is. Even by your own admission, WalMart only accounted for just over 10% of music sales in the past, and probably far less these days. Since when is 10% of a market a monopoly? No one is hampering the ability of another retailer to sell those products, and obviously plenty of them did and still do. Consumers always had plenty of choices there, unlike with ISPs and carrier providers.
There are plenty of legitimate criticisms to direct at WalMart. I don't believe this to be one of them, though.
Who would willingly buy a product that purposefully makes things inconvenient for the user, or puts its makers' needs ahead of its primary function? Ask Microsoft how well that went over with the Xbox One with its "phone home once a day" requirement. Sony ate their lunch.
Consumers will still have a choice, because all it takes is ONE manufacturer to realize that privacy might be a feature worth touting to gain an edge in sales over their competitors. The idea that there won't be a single product among the hundreds or thousands per category out there that *won't* spy on you is a dystopian fantasy, something that seems strangely common here on this site.
There's another problem with this scenario. As more and more consumer data is collected, such data is going to be worth less and less. That's how markets work. An over-saturation of supply will inevitably mean driving down prices, which will in turn cut down on the incentive to do this.
And finally, this also neglects to account for the possibility of running afoul of current or future privacy laws and regulation. I think it's possible that many markets will eventually have tougher laws regulating how devices are able to snoop on people without their consent or permission. Privacy-minded individuals will simply import products from those regions.
And they say we are so close to full autonomous driving
Driving, maybe. Parking, no. The cars that park themselves today are a very specialized case - it's the human that navigated up to and chooses the space.
It sounds strange to say it, but I think in many ways parking is a harder problem than driving. There are no universal rules to follow, and every parking spot has it's own unique challenges (street-side, residential garage, open lot, commercial multi-floor garage with gates, etc), and isn't mapped as part of the common street data sets.
I'm betting the first self-driving cars probably won't be able to self-park, perhaps except for your own driveway or garage if it's not too tricky to navigate.
The 32/48/64 kb/s demos with 1.2 are astoundingly good for that low of a bit-rate. Nice job by the Opus team to get things sounding this good. Was also glad to see more robust fuzzing tests to help with potential security issues.
This is super-geeky stuff, but since I've integrated some of their older Ogg Vorbis stuff into previous game engines, I like to keep up with what they're doing. I might switch my game engine's decoder over from Vorbis to Opus at some point, but I've got to stop futzing with the engine and get my game out the door.
What happens after everyone is unemployed? The corporate overlords give the autonomous flying solar powered drone armies order to fire on starving, rioting civilians and remotely shut down all the public transport which renders everyone immobile since nonelectric motor vehicles have been banned. Megalopolises will be depopulated in short order.
I think I saw that movie. "They just want some food, for God's sake!"
A lot of people here seem to have dystopian predictions like this. I'd argue that history is against you though, as so far, technology and automation has improved the human condition immensely. I'm not quite going to predict a Star-Trek like utopia, but I think there will be enough benefits to outweigh most of the negatives.
One of the reasons I don't believe people will become all unemployed is that people will simply find work to do, and to trade with others. We've already invented entire leisure-based industries because we don't have enough work available for critical infrastructure. For instance, I make videogames for a living, a product the world could easily live without. This trend will just scale up until the population working in critical infrastructure is tiny, and the rest of us are more or less trading optional services and products that AI isn't really suited for. When you go eat out at a nice restaurant, people want to eat a meal cooked by a chef, not a robot, and be served by people they can interact with, not by plastic and steel machines. Likewise, I think creative endeavors like making videogames will be the domain of humans for quite some time.
Agreed. This is not being "politically correct". I'm about as far from the typical bleeding heart type as is possible, but I was very inspired as a videogame maker myself when I saw some of Naughty Dog's videos about this topic, and it got me thinking about what I can do in my own upcoming videogame to make sure it's as accessible to as many people as possible, even if there's no likelihood it will ever pay off financially.
For instance, my game already has a scaling UI system, ranging from small to very large, ensuring people with poorer eyesight have an easier time reading the text and in-game HUD, while still not forcing others to read giganto-text.
I'm also looking into adding some development-mode shaders that simulate various common types of color-blindness, to help make sure everything in the game is still legible by those who don't see color like everyone else. Maybe there's a way to add a high contrast mode or something as well.
Another idea I had was trying to figure out how to partially automate the game to allow people to control it with just a mouse (currently requires either kb+mouse or gamepad). Essentially, I'd need to build a custom AI system to help interpret where the player wanted to navigate just with mouse aiming hints and in-game context. I'd also have to figure out what to do about some mini-games that are keyboard-only at the moment. I doubt there are a lot of action games one-handed gamers have access to, so it would be nice to make that possible. It may not happen, as my time is very limited, but I think it's at least worth considering to see if it's possible.
Anyone who whines about small efforts to help improve the lives of people who have it hard enough already can piss off. I'm doing this because it's the right thing to do, not because I'm trying to virtue signal something to someone. I'll advertise these features solely to inform people who require them that they're available. If generating some positive buzz for the game encourages other devs to do likewise, so much the better.
It can't be sandboxing, because they're apparently limiting this to four processes. As far as I can tell, this is purely about improving performance. Moving to separate processes is typically a bit tricker, because everything has to go through some sort of interprocess communication channel, unlike threads which have access to shared memory. Why they would use processes and then NOT take advantage of their sandboxing nature as a side benefit doesn't make sense to me. It also doesn't have the same inherent robustness. If a process hangs or crashes, now instead of losing a single tab like in Chrome, you lose a quarter of them together.
Well, we're looking from the outside in, so it's hard for us to determine what the reasoning was. They talk about memory streamlining, so maybe the intent is to keep the memory footprint lower by sharing common resources, like the rendering and Javascript systems. Maybe they figure Chrome's one weakness is its notoriously high memory use. Hard to say.
By the time she took the reins, I am not sure that Yahoo was fixable.
One wonders what someone like Steve Jobs could have done with it. She had five years at the helm, you know, so I'm not sure I'd buy the notion that Yahoo was necessarily doomed.
Yahoo needed someone with a real vision to lead them. I don't believe Mayer was completely incompetent, but she certainly wasn't visionary. The fact that they never seemed to be able to get their tech in order (massive and completely unnecessary security breaches) and just don't seem to have a corporate identity speaks to a systemic rot from within.
It also feels like she wasn't a very inspired or inspiring leader. There are some real WTF moments, like when she read a children's book to her employees at a meeting when what they really wanted was answers about a new review system (which turned out to be pretty toxic). I can't imagine that endeared her to many employees. What does that say about how you view your employees? It seemed unbelievably condescending, at least to me looking from the outside in.
Well, it's nice work if you can get it, being a CEO. You always seem to land on your feet, no matter how badly you do.
Ah, persistent prompting... My PS3 did that by asking me if I wanted to allow an internet connection whenever I put in a BluRay disk. Every. Damn. Time. I got stubborn about it, and vowed to never allow it to talk to the internet out of sheer spite.
Basically, I think Sony was probably fulfilling some legal obligation, but making it so obnoxious that 99% of people would just turn that option to "always connect". There was no "never connect" option, just an "always ask" option.
In the case of Echo, Amazon's Alexa app allows you to answer "did I do the right thing?" for each query, showing you what Alexa thought it heard. When you answer "yes" or especially "no", the query likely gets flagged for future voice recognition improvement training. Someone can then look and see if it recognizes the query properly in future tests after making improvements to the core recognition algorithms. In short, having a massive database of stored queries allows Alexa developers to perform regression tests against known good and bad real-world samples on a massive scale.
You're correct, though, that no one would (or should) claim these agents are anywhere close to AI at all. They're monumentally stupid - at the moment, about as smart as a search engine query, with a bit of configuration to handle specific questions or topics.
Well said. Wikipedia is in great financial shape, and this somehow gets turned around as a bad thing. I think precisely the opposite.
I donated some amount to Wikipedia a few years ago, and had no expectations beyond that I wanted to support a site that, for many years now, I've considered part of the critical infrastructure of the internet (StackOverflow is another, as I'm a programmer, and Google Search makes up the trifecta, allowing me to find data on those sites).
The fact that they're doing so well financially is just proof to me that, whatever sort of internal problems they may have (because, you know... people), they're serving the public well enough to easily sustain themselves on pure donations. That means they're doing something right, and I think it's fine to pay their executives competitive compensation.
Then again, I don't lay awake at night gnashing my teeth, worrying about how other people earn more money than me.
Each doubling of bits is an exponential increase in memory, not just a doubling, of course. I'm thinking you aren't really cognizant of just how large an address space 64-bit allows you. It's a big difficult to imagine any consumer-facing applications such that 16 million terabytes of RAM isn't enough. Even the current CPUs on the market that "only" support 48-bit addressing can theoretically access 256 terabytes of RAM, which is still a staggering amount.
It's not me just being unimaginative, I think (i.e. like a certain famous-if-not-quite-true predictions about how much RAM anyone should ever need). There's a practical limit to the size of our data. A video file, for instance, only needs to get as big as necessary to approach the limit of human visual and audio resolution, and after that, it's just wasting space.
So, no, 64-bit is reasonably future-proof. I think its going to be a while before we start bumping up into those limits - maybe not even in our lifetimes. If we do move to 128-bit, it will probably be for reasons other than practical limitations.
This is the most absurd attempt at stirring up controversy yet, and that's saying something, what with Mr. Controversy Magnet as our POTUS. The phrase "tempest in a teacup" best describes the bizarre notion that being blocked from realDonaldTrump on Twitter is some sort of Constitutional crisis. Maybe it's a violation of someone's safe space, but not their First Amendment rights.
This isn't "fake news", but it sure seems like "manufactured news."
From what I understand, they also refreshed the current Mac Pro model as well, so people who happen to need high-end Mac hardware *now* at least have some better options.
To be honest, though, I don't remember anyone talking about process size until 90nm CPUs. Previously to that, everyone measured CPU performance by processor clock speed. So, I guess we needed a new performance metric to talk about (along with multi-core), since speeds more or less stalled.
Slashdot Mirror
Have any numbers to back up those assertions? I'll just leave this here: https://www.bls.gov/opub/repor...
Quick summary of actual facts:
* 58.7 of all workers in the US earn hourly wages.
* Among ALL hourly workers, 3.9 percent earn minimum wage (or 2.25 percent of the total work force).
* 3 percent of hourly workers earning minimum wage (or 1.7 percent of the total work force) are under the age of 25.
* Among teenagers (16-19 years old) earning hourly wages, about 15 percent of them earn the minimum wage.
* 10 percent of part time workers earn minimum wage, compared to 2 percent of full time workers.
So, as it turns out, the vast majority of minimum wage earners are indeed quite young, often part-time, and as a percentage of the total work force are a fairly small percentage. Let's deal with facts and reality here, and not just make arguments based on ignorance and incorrect perceptions.
Running Windows XP Embedded, and connected to the internet for convenient maintenance. What could possibly go wrong?
Not really, no. We've actually had "freedom of speech" cases ruled against private enterprise for their effective ability to infringe on the rights of others. That's generally only happened when you could reasonably prove that private enterprises can do such a thing, which is exceedingly-rare.
My understanding is that such cases typically involve suppression of their own employees' free speech, such as attempts to quell discussion of forming a union, for instance. I'd be surprised if there were many cases involving consumers and product selection, but I admit I'm not exactly knowledgeable about such case histories.
I actually agree with most of what you said, but don't quite see how it applies to the topic at hand, except through a rather tortuous leap of logic. You indicate that this topic may be too complex for non-lawyers to understand. I tend to disagree here - I think it's a very straightforward matter of retailers being allowed to sell what they want within reasonable, well-regulated constraints. The law is not intended to serve lawyers, but the public interest, and I can't see in this particular case how consumers were harmed in any way.
I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one. Fortunately, the courts so far seem to agree with my take on things.
P.S. Lawsuits are only "amusing" until one gets directed your way.
Okay, touché. I think about all you can get are pedometers if you don't want your fitness data up in the cloud.
You seem to misunderstand "free speech" completely, as is sadly typical, even though you do at least acknowledge the fact that it involves private enterprise. The guarantee of free speech is primarily a prohibition on the government's ability to suppress your individual right to express your opinions, not a guarantee that anyone must listen to you, nor a mandate for businesses on which products they choose to sell.
I think perhaps you also misunderstand what a "monopoly" is. Even by your own admission, WalMart only accounted for just over 10% of music sales in the past, and probably far less these days. Since when is 10% of a market a monopoly? No one is hampering the ability of another retailer to sell those products, and obviously plenty of them did and still do. Consumers always had plenty of choices there, unlike with ISPs and carrier providers.
There are plenty of legitimate criticisms to direct at WalMart. I don't believe this to be one of them, though.
Who would willingly buy a product that purposefully makes things inconvenient for the user, or puts its makers' needs ahead of its primary function? Ask Microsoft how well that went over with the Xbox One with its "phone home once a day" requirement. Sony ate their lunch.
Consumers will still have a choice, because all it takes is ONE manufacturer to realize that privacy might be a feature worth touting to gain an edge in sales over their competitors. The idea that there won't be a single product among the hundreds or thousands per category out there that *won't* spy on you is a dystopian fantasy, something that seems strangely common here on this site.
There's another problem with this scenario. As more and more consumer data is collected, such data is going to be worth less and less. That's how markets work. An over-saturation of supply will inevitably mean driving down prices, which will in turn cut down on the incentive to do this.
And finally, this also neglects to account for the possibility of running afoul of current or future privacy laws and regulation. I think it's possible that many markets will eventually have tougher laws regulating how devices are able to snoop on people without their consent or permission. Privacy-minded individuals will simply import products from those regions.
And they say we are so close to full autonomous driving
Driving, maybe. Parking, no. The cars that park themselves today are a very specialized case - it's the human that navigated up to and chooses the space.
It sounds strange to say it, but I think in many ways parking is a harder problem than driving. There are no universal rules to follow, and every parking spot has it's own unique challenges (street-side, residential garage, open lot, commercial multi-floor garage with gates, etc), and isn't mapped as part of the common street data sets.
I'm betting the first self-driving cars probably won't be able to self-park, perhaps except for your own driveway or garage if it's not too tricky to navigate.
The 32/48/64 kb/s demos with 1.2 are astoundingly good for that low of a bit-rate. Nice job by the Opus team to get things sounding this good. Was also glad to see more robust fuzzing tests to help with potential security issues.
This is super-geeky stuff, but since I've integrated some of their older Ogg Vorbis stuff into previous game engines, I like to keep up with what they're doing. I might switch my game engine's decoder over from Vorbis to Opus at some point, but I've got to stop futzing with the engine and get my game out the door.
What happens after everyone is unemployed? The corporate overlords give the autonomous flying solar powered drone armies order to fire on starving, rioting civilians and remotely shut down all the public transport which renders everyone immobile since nonelectric motor vehicles have been banned. Megalopolises will be depopulated in short order.
I think I saw that movie. "They just want some food, for God's sake!"
A lot of people here seem to have dystopian predictions like this. I'd argue that history is against you though, as so far, technology and automation has improved the human condition immensely. I'm not quite going to predict a Star-Trek like utopia, but I think there will be enough benefits to outweigh most of the negatives.
One of the reasons I don't believe people will become all unemployed is that people will simply find work to do, and to trade with others. We've already invented entire leisure-based industries because we don't have enough work available for critical infrastructure. For instance, I make videogames for a living, a product the world could easily live without. This trend will just scale up until the population working in critical infrastructure is tiny, and the rest of us are more or less trading optional services and products that AI isn't really suited for. When you go eat out at a nice restaurant, people want to eat a meal cooked by a chef, not a robot, and be served by people they can interact with, not by plastic and steel machines. Likewise, I think creative endeavors like making videogames will be the domain of humans for quite some time.
Agreed. This is not being "politically correct". I'm about as far from the typical bleeding heart type as is possible, but I was very inspired as a videogame maker myself when I saw some of Naughty Dog's videos about this topic, and it got me thinking about what I can do in my own upcoming videogame to make sure it's as accessible to as many people as possible, even if there's no likelihood it will ever pay off financially.
For instance, my game already has a scaling UI system, ranging from small to very large, ensuring people with poorer eyesight have an easier time reading the text and in-game HUD, while still not forcing others to read giganto-text.
I'm also looking into adding some development-mode shaders that simulate various common types of color-blindness, to help make sure everything in the game is still legible by those who don't see color like everyone else. Maybe there's a way to add a high contrast mode or something as well.
Another idea I had was trying to figure out how to partially automate the game to allow people to control it with just a mouse (currently requires either kb+mouse or gamepad). Essentially, I'd need to build a custom AI system to help interpret where the player wanted to navigate just with mouse aiming hints and in-game context. I'd also have to figure out what to do about some mini-games that are keyboard-only at the moment. I doubt there are a lot of action games one-handed gamers have access to, so it would be nice to make that possible. It may not happen, as my time is very limited, but I think it's at least worth considering to see if it's possible.
Anyone who whines about small efforts to help improve the lives of people who have it hard enough already can piss off. I'm doing this because it's the right thing to do, not because I'm trying to virtue signal something to someone. I'll advertise these features solely to inform people who require them that they're available. If generating some positive buzz for the game encourages other devs to do likewise, so much the better.
All the IoT shit will go belly up? Hallelujah! The future is looking bright!
It can't be sandboxing, because they're apparently limiting this to four processes. As far as I can tell, this is purely about improving performance. Moving to separate processes is typically a bit tricker, because everything has to go through some sort of interprocess communication channel, unlike threads which have access to shared memory. Why they would use processes and then NOT take advantage of their sandboxing nature as a side benefit doesn't make sense to me. It also doesn't have the same inherent robustness. If a process hangs or crashes, now instead of losing a single tab like in Chrome, you lose a quarter of them together.
Well, we're looking from the outside in, so it's hard for us to determine what the reasoning was. They talk about memory streamlining, so maybe the intent is to keep the memory footprint lower by sharing common resources, like the rendering and Javascript systems. Maybe they figure Chrome's one weakness is its notoriously high memory use. Hard to say.
By the time she took the reins, I am not sure that Yahoo was fixable.
One wonders what someone like Steve Jobs could have done with it. She had five years at the helm, you know, so I'm not sure I'd buy the notion that Yahoo was necessarily doomed.
Yahoo needed someone with a real vision to lead them. I don't believe Mayer was completely incompetent, but she certainly wasn't visionary. The fact that they never seemed to be able to get their tech in order (massive and completely unnecessary security breaches) and just don't seem to have a corporate identity speaks to a systemic rot from within.
It also feels like she wasn't a very inspired or inspiring leader. There are some real WTF moments, like when she read a children's book to her employees at a meeting when what they really wanted was answers about a new review system (which turned out to be pretty toxic). I can't imagine that endeared her to many employees. What does that say about how you view your employees? It seemed unbelievably condescending, at least to me looking from the outside in.
Well, it's nice work if you can get it, being a CEO. You always seem to land on your feet, no matter how badly you do.
Coming up with a title to fit the desired acronym alone probably ate up the better part of a day for a few congressional staffers.
Ah, persistent prompting... My PS3 did that by asking me if I wanted to allow an internet connection whenever I put in a BluRay disk. Every. Damn. Time. I got stubborn about it, and vowed to never allow it to talk to the internet out of sheer spite.
Basically, I think Sony was probably fulfilling some legal obligation, but making it so obnoxious that 99% of people would just turn that option to "always connect". There was no "never connect" option, just an "always ask" option.
In the case of Echo, Amazon's Alexa app allows you to answer "did I do the right thing?" for each query, showing you what Alexa thought it heard. When you answer "yes" or especially "no", the query likely gets flagged for future voice recognition improvement training. Someone can then look and see if it recognizes the query properly in future tests after making improvements to the core recognition algorithms. In short, having a massive database of stored queries allows Alexa developers to perform regression tests against known good and bad real-world samples on a massive scale.
You're correct, though, that no one would (or should) claim these agents are anywhere close to AI at all. They're monumentally stupid - at the moment, about as smart as a search engine query, with a bit of configuration to handle specific questions or topics.
Well said. Wikipedia is in great financial shape, and this somehow gets turned around as a bad thing. I think precisely the opposite.
I donated some amount to Wikipedia a few years ago, and had no expectations beyond that I wanted to support a site that, for many years now, I've considered part of the critical infrastructure of the internet (StackOverflow is another, as I'm a programmer, and Google Search makes up the trifecta, allowing me to find data on those sites).
The fact that they're doing so well financially is just proof to me that, whatever sort of internal problems they may have (because, you know... people), they're serving the public well enough to easily sustain themselves on pure donations. That means they're doing something right, and I think it's fine to pay their executives competitive compensation.
Then again, I don't lay awake at night gnashing my teeth, worrying about how other people earn more money than me.
Each doubling of bits is an exponential increase in memory, not just a doubling, of course. I'm thinking you aren't really cognizant of just how large an address space 64-bit allows you. It's a big difficult to imagine any consumer-facing applications such that 16 million terabytes of RAM isn't enough. Even the current CPUs on the market that "only" support 48-bit addressing can theoretically access 256 terabytes of RAM, which is still a staggering amount.
It's not me just being unimaginative, I think (i.e. like a certain famous-if-not-quite-true predictions about how much RAM anyone should ever need). There's a practical limit to the size of our data. A video file, for instance, only needs to get as big as necessary to approach the limit of human visual and audio resolution, and after that, it's just wasting space.
So, no, 64-bit is reasonably future-proof. I think its going to be a while before we start bumping up into those limits - maybe not even in our lifetimes. If we do move to 128-bit, it will probably be for reasons other than practical limitations.
It's an interesting question, really.
No, it really isn't.
This is the most absurd attempt at stirring up controversy yet, and that's saying something, what with Mr. Controversy Magnet as our POTUS. The phrase "tempest in a teacup" best describes the bizarre notion that being blocked from realDonaldTrump on Twitter is some sort of Constitutional crisis. Maybe it's a violation of someone's safe space, but not their First Amendment rights.
This isn't "fake news", but it sure seems like "manufactured news."
What other metric would you use to pay for those prisons? Customer satisfaction?
That could be. Maybe it's just today that we frame the measurements in such a way with the benefit of hindsight.
From what I understand, they also refreshed the current Mac Pro model as well, so people who happen to need high-end Mac hardware *now* at least have some better options.
Good point. It looks like a lot of the press are just calling it the "2018 Mac Pro", even though Apple never actually gave a firm date.
We've done it before, in the switch from micrometers to nanometers. The 80386 processors were 1um processes.
To be honest, though, I don't remember anyone talking about process size until 90nm CPUs. Previously to that, everyone measured CPU performance by processor clock speed. So, I guess we needed a new performance metric to talk about (along with multi-core), since speeds more or less stalled.
Apple promised a refresh of Mac Pros in 2018 and indicated it would be a "modular" system.