One basic problem of our economy is that unskilled labor is perfectly competitive, meaning that the price of unskilled labor is always driven down to the cost of subsistence. Combined with high structural unemployment, this also means that bosses can treat workers ever worse, because the workers have ever fewer options. As technology improves faster, automation becomes more frequent and things look even worse for the unskilled laborer because there are not even enough unskilled jobs to go around. We have historically solved this problem by making it more attractive to hire unskilled laborers rather than replace them with automation, but this has a trade-off: it retards technological progress, and we end up with a bunch of people doing terrible jobs that could easily be replaced by robots, just because we have a moral preference for work. We could, however, give an incentive to innovation and automation while also avoiding the problems of mass poverty. If everyone received a basic income just sufficient for subsistence, then workers could quit their terrible jobs without starving, and a large portion of these jobs could be automated without leading to any social crisis. We could also do away with restrictions on the labor market that make it difficult to hire and fire unskilled workers (such as the minimum wage), because losing your job would not put you in danger of starvation. Technology could finally spring ahead unimpeded by politicians distorting the labor market in order to save obsolete jobs. There would be large efficiency gains in society as a whole, as we could eliminate complex welfare schemes, and probably a lot of employment litigation as well. It is not a perfect system, since much of the gains would be redistributed from the owners of capital (who will benefit from the automation) to our unskilled laborers. This is, of course, a massive distortion in the labor market, but I would argue that it is a better distortion than the complex system we have now, which hinders technological progress. Instead of forcing companies to keep people in obsolete jobs, these workers would have time and opportunity for re-training, increasing the pool of skilled laborers and making technological investment easier. If someone is really unable to learn any useful skills, they might just receive the basic income and remain unemployed, but this is already what happens in our current economy; we just have a gigantic welfare bureaucracy designed to pretend that we're not already doing this. A basic income would streamline welfare and shrink all levels of government massively, leading to further savings.
You might say that it's immoral to give millions of people a living wage for nothing, and that it will ruin the country, but we actually already do this: it's called "inherited wealth." Many millions of Americans inherit enough wealth that they would never have to work if they didn't want to, and yet they are still in the labor force. Humans have worked for millions of years. Each generation has left something lasting for the following generations to build upon, and we're finally reaching a point whereby we can successfully automate most unskilled labor. By instituting a basic income, we would simply acknowledge that the world's capital stock is, to a certain extent, the common heritage of mankind. We would also get a lot of awesome robots.
Actually, maybe I'm totally wrong and a basic income combined with eliminating a minimum wage would make it more attractive to hire humans, since you could pay them less. Who knows? What's the worst that could happen?
Admitting the evidence is not the same as trusting it. The general rule is that any relevant evidence is admissible, and any evidence is relevant if "it has any tendency to make a fact more or less probable than it would be without the evidence." The Wayback Machine easily passes this test. The trier of fact has to look at all of the relevant evidence and make decisions about the quality of all of the items; he or she may decide that the data from the Wayback Machine is not of high quality. However, excluding the evidence means that the trier of fact cannot consider that evidence at all. It seems plain that the Wayback Machine is relevant evidence in an IP trial, as TFA says.
It seems that a lot of people in the comments don't know who she is, but she is one of my favorite musicians, and certainly one of the greatest living jazz composers. Obviously she has no legal argument for claims of racketeering, but her general opinion on matters of music and the business of music deserves attention. She is an extremely talented composer who is trying to make a living producing top-tier music. If anybody is making it difficult for her to do that, we ought to examine why that is, and we ought to listen to her opinion about what's fair and what's unfair. It's already hard enough to make good music. It's too bad that Slashdot is publishing this with a sensationalist headline, and linking to a sensationalist summary that goes out of its way to make her sound crazy. Here is a more pertinent quote that sums up the real issue: "for the vast majority of the artistic community, including me, and every musician I know (and I know thousands), YouTube is a resounding disaster." Here is her actual letter, if anyone cares: https://musictechpolicy.com/20...
I've never actually used the start menu in Windows 10; I took one look at that thing and just said "No." Instead, I just hit the Windows key and text-search for whatever I want to run. I barely even have to look at that awful mess. It's almost as good as using the command line!
I wonder if the rules will specify that the robots have to be anthropomorphic. If not, it seems a lot more sensible to just build one of the "human-piloted fighting robots" that we've been using for 100 years: a tank. Human-shaped fighting robots have the big disadvantage of being top-heavy and dependent on relatively small, delicate legs with complicated joints. Of course, that problem could also be solved by making a super-cool scorpion robot...
Exactly: these articles always make silly claims about making artists obsolete because now computers are "just as good" as the artists. But the touchstone of art is innovation. Algorithms have been able to copy established artists for decades, and students have been able to do it for thousands of years. Listening to Bach and reproducing Bach is clever, but I'll be really impressed when a computer can produce Bach after it listens to Palestrina. That would require computers that can understand human taste, history, and context. It's not so far-fetched, but it's still a long way off.
More accurate would be: "could give rise to a civil cause of action." We usually say that something is "illegal" when it violates criminal law, or some other statue passed by the legislature for a public purpose. Violating contract or license terms is not illegal in this sense. Any legal risk comes from the willingness of the aggrieved party to pursue a remedy. Crucially, there is no public stake in enforcing these rights: if the rightsholder does not want to pursue a remedy, nobody else will care. This is in contrast to activities which are prohibited by statue: the public at large has an interest in prohibiting these activities because they are bad for everyone for one reason or another. It's true that this claim could be based in copyright, which is a "creature of statue" so to speak, but copyright itself is designed to be enforced only by private parties. And more importantly, in this case the text of the license would be the determinative factor.
Anyhow, it's just a semantic niggle, but it really annoys me when people write deliberately misleading headlines like "flashing your firmware is now illegal," when they are really just talking about private causes of action based on licenses or private contracts. In fact, the word "illegal" does not appear at all in TFA.
I agree that Slashdot has a generally excellent format. Any changes should be made with great care, and with an eye to preserving what is good about the site. Slashdot has reached its current form after many years of refinement. It's unlikely that a "large overhaul" will improve more than it breaks. The users will tell you in comments what they dislike, even if you don't ask them to. They will tell you a lot. Welcome to Slashdot!
But for realzies, thanks for asking. I have been seeing some of the same complaints in comments over and over again for months, and nothing has been done about them. I am glad that you are listening to the users.
I once went to see Richard Posner speak, and I was going to have him sign my Law and Economics textbook. But after he said "I think we should be able to detain someone indefinitely without trial if there's a judicial determination that they're dangerous," I got so angry at him that I just left. Richard Posner is a very smart judge who is not afraid to espouse unpopular or counter-intuitive ideas, and frequently angers many people including me.
The problem is with the "science" journalism, of course. The sensational accounts reporting "billions of planets found!!!" set up the equally-sensational "half of planets false!"
Hoverboard users running into me on the sidewalk will be balanced by watching them accidentally run into small bumps and fall flat on their stupid faces.
... because then I would think this was so rad. Seriously, if my 12-year-old self had this game, he would have been in heaven. All I got back then was Rebel Assault, which blew my mind at the time because it came on a goddamn CD-ROM. Sadly, my older self does not share this enthusiasm. But to all you 12-year-olds out there, have a ball driving around in AT-STs.
Glass was always "stronger" than steel in that it will take more stress without bending. Glass will just shatter, whereas steel will bend but not break. Glass has more "strength," but steel has more "toughness." An article at Popular Science explores this distinction: "Strength refers to how much force a material can take before it deforms. Toughness explains the energy required to fracture or break something." The article is from 2011, and is entitled "NEW METALLIC GLASS BEATS STEEL AS THE TOUGHEST, STRONGEST MATERIAL YET."
It will save tons of time on all those repetitive replies like "Mmm, that would feel so good baby," and "Then I'd flip you over and do the same to you until you screamed with pleasure." I've been getting really bogged down with that type of thing lately.
Logical positivism holds that "only statements verifiable either logically or empirically would be cognitively meaningful." They reject any metaphysical entities that have no basis in reality, such as "the OS/2 community."
Our criminal justice system is biased in favor of Type II errors (false negatives), rather than Type I errors (false positives). We think it is worse to jail, kill, or harass an innocent person than to let a criminal go free. Recently, we have had a lot of Type I errors (false positives), and we have corrected our procedures to reduce this type of error. There is a corresponding rise in false negatives (criminals going free), but this is the way we have deliberately designed the system. We are going back to the way we want things to be.
I just plug a laptop into an external monitor and some bookshelf speakers for Netflix/Hulu streaming. The monitor sits on an old piano bench in front of my bookshelves. When I want to use the monitor for my desktop computer, I unplug it and carry it across the room to my desk. I also have an old Android phone that I use just for music from Pandora/Spotify. I switch the speakers between the phone and the laptop by unplugging the audio cable from one and plugging it into the other.
...from about 1995. I thought it was going to be the coolest thing ever. Fast forward 20 years, and I hear about it for the second time. Sounds like progress!
Duplicity, and by extension rsync. I tried using Duplicati on Windows for a while, but it didn't really work, so I migrated my server to Linux to get a more robust backup solution. It is true that this is a server and not a desktop, and all of my office and home desktops still run Windows. Microsoft has really improved Windows a lot in the last 10 years, and I don't miss Linux on the desktop at all anymore -- except for rsync. And if I really wanted it, I suppose I could use Cygwin.
Actually, I also miss Debian package management. apt-get is so incredibly easy and elegant. Nice try, "Windows Store."
Slashdot Mirror
One basic problem of our economy is that unskilled labor is perfectly competitive, meaning that the price of unskilled labor is always driven down to the cost of subsistence. Combined with high structural unemployment, this also means that bosses can treat workers ever worse, because the workers have ever fewer options. As technology improves faster, automation becomes more frequent and things look even worse for the unskilled laborer because there are not even enough unskilled jobs to go around. We have historically solved this problem by making it more attractive to hire unskilled laborers rather than replace them with automation, but this has a trade-off: it retards technological progress, and we end up with a bunch of people doing terrible jobs that could easily be replaced by robots, just because we have a moral preference for work. We could, however, give an incentive to innovation and automation while also avoiding the problems of mass poverty. If everyone received a basic income just sufficient for subsistence, then workers could quit their terrible jobs without starving, and a large portion of these jobs could be automated without leading to any social crisis. We could also do away with restrictions on the labor market that make it difficult to hire and fire unskilled workers (such as the minimum wage), because losing your job would not put you in danger of starvation. Technology could finally spring ahead unimpeded by politicians distorting the labor market in order to save obsolete jobs. There would be large efficiency gains in society as a whole, as we could eliminate complex welfare schemes, and probably a lot of employment litigation as well. It is not a perfect system, since much of the gains would be redistributed from the owners of capital (who will benefit from the automation) to our unskilled laborers. This is, of course, a massive distortion in the labor market, but I would argue that it is a better distortion than the complex system we have now, which hinders technological progress. Instead of forcing companies to keep people in obsolete jobs, these workers would have time and opportunity for re-training, increasing the pool of skilled laborers and making technological investment easier. If someone is really unable to learn any useful skills, they might just receive the basic income and remain unemployed, but this is already what happens in our current economy; we just have a gigantic welfare bureaucracy designed to pretend that we're not already doing this. A basic income would streamline welfare and shrink all levels of government massively, leading to further savings.
You might say that it's immoral to give millions of people a living wage for nothing, and that it will ruin the country, but we actually already do this: it's called "inherited wealth." Many millions of Americans inherit enough wealth that they would never have to work if they didn't want to, and yet they are still in the labor force. Humans have worked for millions of years. Each generation has left something lasting for the following generations to build upon, and we're finally reaching a point whereby we can successfully automate most unskilled labor. By instituting a basic income, we would simply acknowledge that the world's capital stock is, to a certain extent, the common heritage of mankind. We would also get a lot of awesome robots.
Actually, maybe I'm totally wrong and a basic income combined with eliminating a minimum wage would make it more attractive to hire humans, since you could pay them less. Who knows? What's the worst that could happen?
Admitting the evidence is not the same as trusting it. The general rule is that any relevant evidence is admissible, and any evidence is relevant if "it has any tendency to make a fact more or less probable than it would be without the evidence." The Wayback Machine easily passes this test. The trier of fact has to look at all of the relevant evidence and make decisions about the quality of all of the items; he or she may decide that the data from the Wayback Machine is not of high quality. However, excluding the evidence means that the trier of fact cannot consider that evidence at all. It seems plain that the Wayback Machine is relevant evidence in an IP trial, as TFA says.
It seems that a lot of people in the comments don't know who she is, but she is one of my favorite musicians, and certainly one of the greatest living jazz composers. Obviously she has no legal argument for claims of racketeering, but her general opinion on matters of music and the business of music deserves attention. She is an extremely talented composer who is trying to make a living producing top-tier music. If anybody is making it difficult for her to do that, we ought to examine why that is, and we ought to listen to her opinion about what's fair and what's unfair. It's already hard enough to make good music. It's too bad that Slashdot is publishing this with a sensationalist headline, and linking to a sensationalist summary that goes out of its way to make her sound crazy. Here is a more pertinent quote that sums up the real issue: "for the vast majority of the artistic community, including me, and every musician I know (and I know thousands), YouTube is a resounding disaster." Here is her actual letter, if anyone cares: https://musictechpolicy.com/20...
I've never actually used the start menu in Windows 10; I took one look at that thing and just said "No." Instead, I just hit the Windows key and text-search for whatever I want to run. I barely even have to look at that awful mess. It's almost as good as using the command line!
I wonder if the rules will specify that the robots have to be anthropomorphic. If not, it seems a lot more sensible to just build one of the "human-piloted fighting robots" that we've been using for 100 years: a tank. Human-shaped fighting robots have the big disadvantage of being top-heavy and dependent on relatively small, delicate legs with complicated joints. Of course, that problem could also be solved by making a super-cool scorpion robot...
Exactly: these articles always make silly claims about making artists obsolete because now computers are "just as good" as the artists. But the touchstone of art is innovation. Algorithms have been able to copy established artists for decades, and students have been able to do it for thousands of years. Listening to Bach and reproducing Bach is clever, but I'll be really impressed when a computer can produce Bach after it listens to Palestrina. That would require computers that can understand human taste, history, and context. It's not so far-fetched, but it's still a long way off.
And in the words of The Onion: I Bought An Awesome Gun That Makes Me Feel Like God, But I Hope I Never Have To Use It
Or, in the words of Wyatt Earp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It should at least start with P so that we can bring back "My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets."
More accurate would be: "could give rise to a civil cause of action." We usually say that something is "illegal" when it violates criminal law, or some other statue passed by the legislature for a public purpose. Violating contract or license terms is not illegal in this sense. Any legal risk comes from the willingness of the aggrieved party to pursue a remedy. Crucially, there is no public stake in enforcing these rights: if the rightsholder does not want to pursue a remedy, nobody else will care. This is in contrast to activities which are prohibited by statue: the public at large has an interest in prohibiting these activities because they are bad for everyone for one reason or another. It's true that this claim could be based in copyright, which is a "creature of statue" so to speak, but copyright itself is designed to be enforced only by private parties. And more importantly, in this case the text of the license would be the determinative factor.
Anyhow, it's just a semantic niggle, but it really annoys me when people write deliberately misleading headlines like "flashing your firmware is now illegal," when they are really just talking about private causes of action based on licenses or private contracts. In fact, the word "illegal" does not appear at all in TFA.
I hope we still have the option for chunky chocolate chips!
I agree that Slashdot has a generally excellent format. Any changes should be made with great care, and with an eye to preserving what is good about the site. Slashdot has reached its current form after many years of refinement. It's unlikely that a "large overhaul" will improve more than it breaks. The users will tell you in comments what they dislike, even if you don't ask them to. They will tell you a lot. Welcome to Slashdot!
But for realzies, thanks for asking. I have been seeing some of the same complaints in comments over and over again for months, and nothing has been done about them. I am glad that you are listening to the users.
I once went to see Richard Posner speak, and I was going to have him sign my Law and Economics textbook. But after he said "I think we should be able to detain someone indefinitely without trial if there's a judicial determination that they're dangerous," I got so angry at him that I just left. Richard Posner is a very smart judge who is not afraid to espouse unpopular or counter-intuitive ideas, and frequently angers many people including me.
The problem is with the "science" journalism, of course. The sensational accounts reporting "billions of planets found!!!" set up the equally-sensational "half of planets false!"
Hoverboard users running into me on the sidewalk will be balanced by watching them accidentally run into small bumps and fall flat on their stupid faces.
... because then I would think this was so rad. Seriously, if my 12-year-old self had this game, he would have been in heaven. All I got back then was Rebel Assault, which blew my mind at the time because it came on a goddamn CD-ROM. Sadly, my older self does not share this enthusiasm. But to all you 12-year-olds out there, have a ball driving around in AT-STs.
Glass was always "stronger" than steel in that it will take more stress without bending. Glass will just shatter, whereas steel will bend but not break. Glass has more "strength," but steel has more "toughness." An article at Popular Science explores this distinction: "Strength refers to how much force a material can take before it deforms. Toughness explains the energy required to fracture or break something." The article is from 2011, and is entitled "NEW METALLIC GLASS BEATS STEEL AS THE TOUGHEST, STRONGEST MATERIAL YET."
It will save tons of time on all those repetitive replies like "Mmm, that would feel so good baby," and "Then I'd flip you over and do the same to you until you screamed with pleasure." I've been getting really bogged down with that type of thing lately.
Logical positivism holds that "only statements verifiable either logically or empirically would be cognitively meaningful." They reject any metaphysical entities that have no basis in reality, such as "the OS/2 community."
Our criminal justice system is biased in favor of Type II errors (false negatives), rather than Type I errors (false positives). We think it is worse to jail, kill, or harass an innocent person than to let a criminal go free. Recently, we have had a lot of Type I errors (false positives), and we have corrected our procedures to reduce this type of error. There is a corresponding rise in false negatives (criminals going free), but this is the way we have deliberately designed the system. We are going back to the way we want things to be.
You know you're in the future when you see greebles.
I just plug a laptop into an external monitor and some bookshelf speakers for Netflix/Hulu streaming. The monitor sits on an old piano bench in front of my bookshelves. When I want to use the monitor for my desktop computer, I unplug it and carry it across the room to my desk. I also have an old Android phone that I use just for music from Pandora/Spotify. I switch the speakers between the phone and the laptop by unplugging the audio cable from one and plugging it into the other.
Why not just have one one-screen button that brings up all of the emojis, with the most-used ones on top? Oh wait...
...from about 1995. I thought it was going to be the coolest thing ever. Fast forward 20 years, and I hear about it for the second time. Sounds like progress!
Duplicity, and by extension rsync. I tried using Duplicati on Windows for a while, but it didn't really work, so I migrated my server to Linux to get a more robust backup solution. It is true that this is a server and not a desktop, and all of my office and home desktops still run Windows. Microsoft has really improved Windows a lot in the last 10 years, and I don't miss Linux on the desktop at all anymore -- except for rsync. And if I really wanted it, I suppose I could use Cygwin.
Actually, I also miss Debian package management. apt-get is so incredibly easy and elegant. Nice try, "Windows Store."