I'm interested in creating really good open source software.
What differentiates "really good" software - open, free, libre, whatever - from all the rest has little to do with the code (so forget about the programmers, they're the easiest part) it is the design, support, the testing, the integration, the documentation, the UI design, the publicity and user-community.
If you want those to be "really good" then none of it comes for free. It is easy to get people to write code. But it is virtually impossible to get a good, free, user interface. The design is drawn out, the focus groups are hard to organise, the features that allow for disabled users need thought and experience, making it cross-platform is tricky and making it intuitive needs a huge amount of talent.
As for documentation. That needs a lot of work by a lot of people. It's dull, often sets the authors at odds with the developers and takes effort to keep up to date.
Add in all the other factors, running a community, testing, integration - and you have little chance of getting anything out of the door by relying on "free" help. So the only workable business model is to make sure you start your project with a great deal of hard cash. Then, when all the work is done and all your life savings spent - then, you will have some "really good" software that you can give away, for free.
50 percent of all respondents (ages 18-34) said they would give up their right to vote during the next two presidential elections in order to never have to make another loan payment again.
When put like that it sounds bad.
But when you turn it around it's a damn good deal. The average student debt in the US is about $37,000. If you asked the population in general whether they would give up 2 presidential votes in exchange for $37k I expect that way over 50% of the voting public would snatch it out of your hand.
And when you consider that the youngest adults will be the ones with the highest debt, they would be the most "expensive" ones to buy-off.
In order to maintain Moore's Law -- by which transistor density doubles every two years or so -- it now takes 18 times as many scientists as it did in the 1970s. That means each researcher's output today is 18 times less effective in terms of generating economic value than it was several decades ago
The leading edge in miniaturization now has transistors that are only 25 ATOMS across. An atom of Si being about 0.2nm.
As such the difficulty of the problem has increased hugely since the 1970s. This does seem to be an example of a problem that is nearing its fundamental, physical limits.
But that may be the issue. That the people writing about science, especially in the media, simply aren't qualified, don't have the talent to explain and are often writing to support a narrative rather than to enlighten their audience. Given that the report was written by economists, it is reasonable to assume they don't actually understand what they are talking about. That isn't really "running out of ideas" as not being educated enough to work at the sharp end.
And even if there is a shortage of ideas, might that be due to the fencing-off of vast tracts of the "ideascape" by the very poor patent laws we have at present?
No "ordinary" citizen can possibly afford the cost of invoking the american legal system. It is ruinously expensive and the entire prosecution system knows and relies on that fact.
As a consequence hardly any but the richest can even get as far as a "presumption of innocence" as that requires going to trial and the phenominal financial burn-rate that entails. So ordinary citizens simply have to take whatever sentence the prosecutors offer them. No trial, no evidence, no judgement - just "sign here" and then wait for your prison uniform.
And for foreigners the cost of mounting a defence is even higher. For crimes that weren't even committed on american soil the defence has to bear the added cost of transporting and accommodating any witnesses or experts they need to call. Even british millionaires have been broken by this system.
So in a country where "to be accused is to be guilty", there is no possibility that this guy would ever see justice. Either with or without being able to submit his autism as a defence or mitigation
there's literally nothing the FBI can do to stop a propaganda operation
And since it is not illegal, why should they want the power to try?
There are no laws apart from fraud, libel and slander that dictate that everything everyone says has to be true. And if there was, then no politician would last 5 minutes before having their ass hauled off to jail.
The FBI seem to have created their own "issue" here, defined it as bad and then decided that someone else should have the duty and the obligation to fix it for them. Well, that isn't how democracies work. If something is illegal, have the law enforcement deal with it. If it isn't illegal then either make it so, or let is go.
But trying to prevent people saying stuff, just because you don't like it, is not the way to go.
Is it because they do not support life?
That their live is not advanced enough?
That they are trying to contact us, but we cannot detect their message.
That it is a quality of advanced civilisations that they ignore each other (or defer contact until some defined "level" of civilisation has been reached).
or are they on their way, right now.
It does not inspire underrepresented groups to pursue careers in computer science,
Is there a rule that says a person will only be "inspired" by someone who is the same gender that they are and / or has the same colour skin? And if so, why not require them to be the same height, or eye-colour, too.
I find it difficult to accept that women only study physics because they have been "inspired" by a female physicist, or that men would need to have a shining example of a male nurse to "inspire" them into the profession.
And if it is that way, where does that leave all the major religions and their almost all male icons? Should women be almost all atheists if that idea was true.
Much of Science Fiction takes one or a small number of technological advances and examines how it will impact society, humanity.
But Harford's point (I read the article when it was published a couple of months ago) is that the approach doesn't work. You cannot say "This story explores the relationships between humans and androids" and then only make it about them.
The reason is that the development of androids does not happen in isolation, without a load of supporting technological developments. Ones that would have knock-on effects on everything else.
My neighbour bought a new car last year. It has been back to the garage 3 times now. Each time, he tells me how fantastic their service is - they give him a replacement vehicle (smaller) for the days or week that his car is in dock.
I have pointed out the obvious, but he won't hear a bad word. I guess he just likes obsequious, fawning, servers more than he likes his new car.
This might be good for developers, but it's a nightmare for the poor, bloody, customers.
Any professional outfit will test a new release (in-house or commercial product) thoroughly before letting it get anywhere close to an environment where their business is at stake.
This process can take anywhere from a day or two to several months, depending on the complexity of the operation, the scope of the changes, HOW MANY (developers note: not if any) bugs are found and whether any alterations to working practices have to be introduced.
So to have developers lob a new "release" over the wall at frequent intervals is not useful, it isn't clever, nor does it save (the users) any money or speed up their acceptance. It just costs more in integration testing, floods the change control process with "issues" and means that when you report (again, developers: not if) problems, it is virtually impossible to describe exactly which release you are referring to and even more impossible for whoever fixes the bugs to produce the same version to fix and then incorporate those fixes into whatever happens to be the latest version - that hour. Even more so when dozens of major corporate customers are ALL reporting bugs with each new version they test.
Many times I have seen 1 or 2 star reviews that complain about other aspects of the order. Packages arriving late, damage, being cancelled.
These might not be the proper place to complain about non-product issues, but they happen and they drag down the overall rating of the product, itself. Who knows, maybe some bad reviews are hoping for an offer from the maker to improve their ratings.
However, I do pay more attention to the bad reviews and the reasons given. If there is a pattern of failures, then I'll avoid a product. And I pay them more attention than I do to the good reviews, which even now often appear to be fake, exaggerated, written by idiots ("I've just received such'n'such, it looks wonderful though I haven't tried to use it yet - here's 5 *'s") or clearly from professional reviewers.
Next year marks my 30th anniversary with a mobile phone. During that time I have had many - and I have dropped pretty much all of them at one time or another.
However the only one that has broken its screen was my last (and only) bezel-free model. I do not consider this to be a coincidence.
So in future I'll be looking for a nice thick bezel ALL THE WAY AROUND my phone. If that means I don't appear cool and trendy, then that's another bonus, too!
Should four collisions in the same geographical area be chalked up to coincidence? Could a military vessel be hacked?
Coincidence? No.
Could the boats have been hacked? yes - but it's incredibly unlikely.
What other possibilities are there? The 99% reason is stupidity. Either some idiot doesn't know how to drive a boat ( x4) or the standard naval tactics to "dominate" any given situation have been taken to extremes - beyond the capabilities of the people and equipment in use.
What language should a child (of 8, from the article) be taught?
The answer is: their own native language. Follow that with the national language of the country they live in.
Once they have those off, pat then start to teach how to organise their thoughts and the order of doing things, the basics of logic, the concept of "if... then... else". The concepts of repetition. Introduce the idea of data - constants, variables.
Hopefully by the time they leave school at 18, they will be ready to start learning programming languages.
But the idea of "coding" is merely one of writing down how you wish a task to be performed. The linguistic part of that is different from the "design" element. There is no point trying to teach the HOW of writing a program until the children have some clue about WHAT they want it to do. And before they get to that point, they need the analytical skills to know where they are starting, where they want their program to end up and how to get there.
But merely to teach some syntax, style and rules without an understanding of why that is needed presupposes a lot and all those tacit assumptions (that the author seems to have) will leave the kids floundering.
The analytical part is a life-skill. Learning how to write that in a computer language needs to build on that foundation. Don't put the cart before the horse.
the United States should prepare for a global fish war.
Shouldn't they just stick to their own little bit of ocean. Rather than trying to impose their "interpretation" of international treaties by pointing guns at the people they disagree with?
a $3 million investment in Essential for around 0.25 percent of the fledgling phone company
That only works on paper and is pretty much irrelevant in the real word. You can't scale up from a 0.25% transaction to expect the same amount of money for a 100% transaction (i.e. selling the company). So this definition of a "unicorn" doesn't hold up. And the paper valuation of the company based on this is bogus.
If it did work, I would make an absolute packet by selling my brother a one-ten-millionth of a percent share in my company for $1 and then tell the world that I'm a billionaire (less $1).
Though this sort of silliness goes a long way to explaining financial crashes.
the possibility that we're living in a computer simulation. "If AI kills everyone in the future, then we cannot be living in a computer simulation created by our decedents. And if we are living in a computer simulation created by our decedents, then AI didn't kill everyone.
But we could be living in a simulation that the AIs produced - or we could merely be a lab experiment of some other intelligence: one that didn't allow AIs to dominate and then eradicate their civilisation.
But this guy seems to be more intent on promoting his opinions rather than presenting logical argumentation.
So far as AIs not having testosterone is concerned, he seems to have no real clue and is only able to talk in soundbites. I am sure that bacteria and amoeba don't have "testosterone" either, but they still manage to devour what they consider to be food and to attack potential threats. If the future AIs ever got to consider humanity to be a threat, then it doesn't take hormones to decide that removing the threat is an optimum solution to the "problem".
while the Dartmouth subjects were taken from a large general population, the Edinburgh subjects were college students.
Half the population of school-leavers now go to university in the UK. That is despite the fact that there are only sufficient "graduate level" jobs for a small fraction of them.
While the smartest graduates will get those jobs, the rest will be left with a crushingly large bill for their 3 more years of "education". You have to question just how clever those remaining graduates actually are.
So it comes as no surprise to learn that in this topic, university students can act just as dim as "ordinary" people - since most of them are exactly that.
A bit of a generalisation. The northern coastline of Tunisia is on the Med. But there is an awful lot of sand between that part of the country and the Saharan desert regions in the south. It also shares long borders with other countries - many parts of Tunisia are closer to Libya than to the northern coast.
makes me wonder if someone with an ulterior agenda is pushing this FUD.
The guy is a professional advisor (and professor) about vehicle pollution. His livelihood depends on speaking out about car pollution.
He can't say "it'll all be hunky-dory" because then he's just admitting that his work is now obsolete. This way he creates more doubt and alarm. Gets more TV appearances and performs the role of every successful advisor: keeps his name in the media.
I expect that if all cars were banned, he would "discover" a major source of air pollution due to shoe-leather wear, or farts or exhaling.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm interested in creating really good open source software.
What differentiates "really good" software - open, free, libre, whatever - from all the rest has little to do with the code (so forget about the programmers, they're the easiest part) it is the design, support, the testing, the integration, the documentation, the UI design, the publicity and user-community.
If you want those to be "really good" then none of it comes for free. It is easy to get people to write code. But it is virtually impossible to get a good, free, user interface. The design is drawn out, the focus groups are hard to organise, the features that allow for disabled users need thought and experience, making it cross-platform is tricky and making it intuitive needs a huge amount of talent.
As for documentation. That needs a lot of work by a lot of people. It's dull, often sets the authors at odds with the developers and takes effort to keep up to date.
Add in all the other factors, running a community, testing, integration - and you have little chance of getting anything out of the door by relying on "free" help. So the only workable business model is to make sure you start your project with a great deal of hard cash. Then, when all the work is done and all your life savings spent - then, you will have some "really good" software that you can give away, for free.
50 percent of all respondents (ages 18-34) said they would give up their right to vote during the next two presidential elections in order to never have to make another loan payment again.
When put like that it sounds bad.
But when you turn it around it's a damn good deal. The average student debt in the US is about $37,000. If you asked the population in general whether they would give up 2 presidential votes in exchange for $37k I expect that way over 50% of the voting public would snatch it out of your hand.
And when you consider that the youngest adults will be the ones with the highest debt, they would be the most "expensive" ones to buy-off.
cities such as Paris and Singapore to experiment with such services, which could prove crucial in Japan
Decide for yourself.
In order to maintain Moore's Law -- by which transistor density doubles every two years or so -- it now takes 18 times as many scientists as it did in the 1970s. That means each researcher's output today is 18 times less effective in terms of generating economic value than it was several decades ago
The leading edge in miniaturization now has transistors that are only 25 ATOMS across. An atom of Si being about 0.2nm.
As such the difficulty of the problem has increased hugely since the 1970s. This does seem to be an example of a problem that is nearing its fundamental, physical limits.
But that may be the issue. That the people writing about science, especially in the media, simply aren't qualified, don't have the talent to explain and are often writing to support a narrative rather than to enlighten their audience. Given that the report was written by economists, it is reasonable to assume they don't actually understand what they are talking about. That isn't really "running out of ideas" as not being educated enough to work at the sharp end.
And even if there is a shortage of ideas, might that be due to the fencing-off of vast tracts of the "ideascape" by the very poor patent laws we have at present?
We were instructed quite specifically that the state bringing a case against someone is not to be considered as any indication of guilt.
You have missed the point. Something like 97% of federal cases never even get to the courtroom.
Ref: Why U.S. Criminal Courts Are So Dependent on Plea Bargaining
No "ordinary" citizen can possibly afford the cost of invoking the american legal system. It is ruinously expensive and the entire prosecution system knows and relies on that fact.
As a consequence hardly any but the richest can even get as far as a "presumption of innocence" as that requires going to trial and the phenominal financial burn-rate that entails. So ordinary citizens simply have to take whatever sentence the prosecutors offer them. No trial, no evidence, no judgement - just "sign here" and then wait for your prison uniform.
And for foreigners the cost of mounting a defence is even higher. For crimes that weren't even committed on american soil the defence has to bear the added cost of transporting and accommodating any witnesses or experts they need to call. Even british millionaires have been broken by this system.
So in a country where "to be accused is to be guilty", there is no possibility that this guy would ever see justice. Either with or without being able to submit his autism as a defence or mitigation
there's literally nothing the FBI can do to stop a propaganda operation
And since it is not illegal, why should they want the power to try?
There are no laws apart from fraud, libel and slander that dictate that everything everyone says has to be true. And if there was, then no politician would last 5 minutes before having their ass hauled off to jail.
The FBI seem to have created their own "issue" here, defined it as bad and then decided that someone else should have the duty and the obligation to fix it for them. Well, that isn't how democracies work. If something is illegal, have the law enforcement deal with it. If it isn't illegal then either make it so, or let is go.
But trying to prevent people saying stuff, just because you don't like it, is not the way to go.
Is it because they do not support life?
That their live is not advanced enough?
That they are trying to contact us, but we cannot detect their message.
That it is a quality of advanced civilisations that they ignore each other (or defer contact until some defined "level" of civilisation has been reached).
or are they on their way, right now.
It does not inspire underrepresented groups to pursue careers in computer science,
Is there a rule that says a person will only be "inspired" by someone who is the same gender that they are and / or has the same colour skin? And if so, why not require them to be the same height, or eye-colour, too.
I find it difficult to accept that women only study physics because they have been "inspired" by a female physicist, or that men would need to have a shining example of a male nurse to "inspire" them into the profession.
And if it is that way, where does that leave all the major religions and their almost all male icons? Should women be almost all atheists if that idea was true.
Much of Science Fiction takes one or a small number of technological advances and examines how it will impact society, humanity.
But Harford's point (I read the article when it was published a couple of months ago) is that the approach doesn't work. You cannot say "This story explores the relationships between humans and androids" and then only make it about them.
The reason is that the development of androids does not happen in isolation, without a load of supporting technological developments. Ones that would have knock-on effects on everything else.
Why would you rate a POS 5 stars?
But so many people do.
My neighbour bought a new car last year. It has been back to the garage 3 times now. Each time, he tells me how fantastic their service is - they give him a replacement vehicle (smaller) for the days or week that his car is in dock.
I have pointed out the obvious, but he won't hear a bad word. I guess he just likes obsequious, fawning, servers more than he likes his new car.
Any professional outfit will test a new release (in-house or commercial product) thoroughly before letting it get anywhere close to an environment where their business is at stake.
This process can take anywhere from a day or two to several months, depending on the complexity of the operation, the scope of the changes, HOW MANY (developers note: not if any) bugs are found and whether any alterations to working practices have to be introduced.
So to have developers lob a new "release" over the wall at frequent intervals is not useful, it isn't clever, nor does it save (the users) any money or speed up their acceptance. It just costs more in integration testing, floods the change control process with "issues" and means that when you report (again, developers: not if) problems, it is virtually impossible to describe exactly which release you are referring to and even more impossible for whoever fixes the bugs to produce the same version to fix and then incorporate those fixes into whatever happens to be the latest version - that hour. Even more so when dozens of major corporate customers are ALL reporting bugs with each new version they test.
These might not be the proper place to complain about non-product issues, but they happen and they drag down the overall rating of the product, itself. Who knows, maybe some bad reviews are hoping for an offer from the maker to improve their ratings.
However, I do pay more attention to the bad reviews and the reasons given. If there is a pattern of failures, then I'll avoid a product. And I pay them more attention than I do to the good reviews, which even now often appear to be fake, exaggerated, written by idiots ("I've just received such'n'such, it looks wonderful though I haven't tried to use it yet - here's 5 *'s") or clearly from professional reviewers.
and has minimal top and bottom bezels
Next year marks my 30th anniversary with a mobile phone. During that time I have had many - and I have dropped pretty much all of them at one time or another.
However the only one that has broken its screen was my last (and only) bezel-free model. I do not consider this to be a coincidence.
So in future I'll be looking for a nice thick bezel ALL THE WAY AROUND my phone. If that means I don't appear cool and trendy, then that's another bonus, too!
Should four collisions in the same geographical area be chalked up to coincidence? Could a military vessel be hacked?
Coincidence? No.
Could the boats have been hacked? yes - but it's incredibly unlikely.
What other possibilities are there? The 99% reason is stupidity. Either some idiot doesn't know how to drive a boat ( x4) or the standard naval tactics to "dominate" any given situation have been taken to extremes - beyond the capabilities of the people and equipment in use.
The answer is: their own native language. Follow that with the national language of the country they live in.
Once they have those off, pat then start to teach how to organise their thoughts and the order of doing things, the basics of logic, the concept of "if ... then ... else". The concepts of repetition. Introduce the idea of data - constants, variables.
Hopefully by the time they leave school at 18, they will be ready to start learning programming languages.
But the idea of "coding" is merely one of writing down how you wish a task to be performed. The linguistic part of that is different from the "design" element. There is no point trying to teach the HOW of writing a program until the children have some clue about WHAT they want it to do. And before they get to that point, they need the analytical skills to know where they are starting, where they want their program to end up and how to get there.
But merely to teach some syntax, style and rules without an understanding of why that is needed presupposes a lot and all those tacit assumptions (that the author seems to have) will leave the kids floundering.
The analytical part is a life-skill. Learning how to write that in a computer language needs to build on that foundation. Don't put the cart before the horse.
You do understand the oceans are all connected right?
All the more reason why global policy shouldn't be "enforced" or interpreted by the most belligerent asshole with the most guns.
the United States should prepare for a global fish war.
Shouldn't they just stick to their own little bit of ocean. Rather than trying to impose their "interpretation" of international treaties by pointing guns at the people they disagree with?
a $3 million investment in Essential for around 0.25 percent of the fledgling phone company
That only works on paper and is pretty much irrelevant in the real word. You can't scale up from a 0.25% transaction to expect the same amount of money for a 100% transaction (i.e. selling the company). So this definition of a "unicorn" doesn't hold up. And the paper valuation of the company based on this is bogus.
If it did work, I would make an absolute packet by selling my brother a one-ten-millionth of a percent share in my company for $1 and then tell the world that I'm a billionaire (less $1).
Though this sort of silliness goes a long way to explaining financial crashes.
the possibility that we're living in a computer simulation. "If AI kills everyone in the future, then we cannot be living in a computer simulation created by our decedents. And if we are living in a computer simulation created by our decedents, then AI didn't kill everyone.
But we could be living in a simulation that the AIs produced - or we could merely be a lab experiment of some other intelligence: one that didn't allow AIs to dominate and then eradicate their civilisation.
But this guy seems to be more intent on promoting his opinions rather than presenting logical argumentation.
So far as AIs not having testosterone is concerned, he seems to have no real clue and is only able to talk in soundbites. I am sure that bacteria and amoeba don't have "testosterone" either, but they still manage to devour what they consider to be food and to attack potential threats. If the future AIs ever got to consider humanity to be a threat, then it doesn't take hormones to decide that removing the threat is an optimum solution to the "problem".
while the Dartmouth subjects were taken from a large general population, the Edinburgh subjects were college students.
Half the population of school-leavers now go to university in the UK. That is despite the fact that there are only sufficient "graduate level" jobs for a small fraction of them.
While the smartest graduates will get those jobs, the rest will be left with a crushingly large bill for their 3 more years of "education". You have to question just how clever those remaining graduates actually are.
So it comes as no surprise to learn that in this topic, university students can act just as dim as "ordinary" people - since most of them are exactly that.
Tunisia is on the northern coast of Africa
A bit of a generalisation. The northern coastline of Tunisia is on the Med. But there is an awful lot of sand between that part of the country and the Saharan desert regions in the south. It also shares long borders with other countries - many parts of Tunisia are closer to Libya than to the northern coast.
makes me wonder if someone with an ulterior agenda is pushing this FUD.
The guy is a professional advisor (and professor) about vehicle pollution. His livelihood depends on speaking out about car pollution.
He can't say "it'll all be hunky-dory" because then he's just admitting that his work is now obsolete. This way he creates more doubt and alarm. Gets more TV appearances and performs the role of every successful advisor: keeps his name in the media.
I expect that if all cars were banned, he would "discover" a major source of air pollution due to shoe-leather wear, or farts or exhaling.
So reading a website counts as research now? When can I have my PhD?
more than one billion people use its instant messages and voice calling app WhatsApp every day
And if they started charging for use, even 1 cent per message, that number would drop by 99%