A good example is the Affordable Care Act. Because you're alive, you are compelled to do business with private health care insurance companies. If you don't want to pay health insurance, you can either pay a fine or get in trouble with the IRS. ERs had to service everyone by law. A several years later, this became economically unsound and patients had to buy health insurance. Like gays, sick patients are a bullied minority and frequently taken advantage of, and like sick patients, there can be an economic impact based on the choice the state makes on the issue.
No matter the choice, you're using a law to enforce some sort of outcome if the thing ever comes to trial. In pro-gay states, gays win in court. In anti-gay states, gays loose in court and are discouraged from even trying. The only thing that matters to me is what people want, and what economic impact it has. Does a society feel they need to protect a group or protect the people who hate or take advantage of a group? Which is least harmful to an economy? They can then find the right answer and work from there.
It has the potential to be a little worse than that.
Because of its character-based nature, any effort to figure out who's gay is going to go over about as well as finding the "Communists" did during the HUAC days. If business owners really care about keeping gays out of their Christian establishments, we'll find out pretty quickly when perfectly straight people start getting kicked out for simply having lunch with their friends.
Truthfully though I don't think it'll come to that. Already restaurants and other establishments are either putting up pro LGBT stickers or doing nothing different. I'm sure we'll have the odd ball BBQ shack in the woods show up in the news from time to time, but I'm beginning to doubt that these bills are anything more than for show. Republicans are saying, "Look, we get it! We're Tea Party. We're the new kind of conservative!", in an effort to reinvigorate the base.
If they really wanted to push gays out of society, they have a ready-made method for that, which they use on convicted sex offenders. Maybe we should reserve our freak-out for when they try to pass new sodomy laws.
In the past, serving a black customer anywhere other than the back door could cause you to lose all your white customers. I can imagine a similar situation, where a baker may be unwilling to advertise that she worked for a gay couple for fear of losing business from religious couples and good standing with the local churches.
Arkansas also has one of these Religious Freedom bills, as well as similar southern conservative cowboy type things, and I think this is a natural progression after years of voters being told by the conservative media that our elected conservatives weren't conservative enough, weren't religious enough, and too open to compromise with the left, and too slow to respond to issues regarding immigrants and terrorists. Add to that a general sense of failure or lack of inspiration in the left regarding their own leaders, and we leave a wide open door for this sort of thing.
I believe the response in Arkansas was the creation of a sticker that businesses began putting on their windows, saying that they welcome LGBT customers. This is where we are now... I suppose we should be thankful they haven't decided to simply force businesses to comply to "religious conscience" the way they're forcing universities to accept guns on their property.
I had your example scenario happen to me a couple years ago, except it was a Crown Vic. I was turning left onto a 6-lane street in my little Tercel (it was my light). The Crown Vic comes barreling through the intersection just behind me at 80 mph (speed limit is 50). His light was red. Cars to the left of me, cars to the right of me, I had no choice but to speed up until there was space for me to change lanes because he was not slowing down. I think he was riding my bumper for a while before I could get out of his way and let him barrel down another red light ahead. The brakes on that car aren't the best, so I probably shouldn't have done that, but at the time it made sense because I had plenty of space ahead of me and there were no intersections for another mile.
I don't think we'll be a safe haven for that kind of stuff for long... and don't look to Europe either. The whole world is turning hard right. It'll soon be the norm for scientists, activists, soldiers, and everyday citizens to be sent to psych wards and prisons for speaking the truth.
It's best to stay where you are, and fight where you are, because that's your country, and you might as well fight it at home because there will be no escape if all we do is run.
TBH, I can't really say how much a programmer makes here. I'm not a programmer by trade (though I do a little programming in my job anyway). I just know they make a lot less here than they would in say... Silicon Valley. If I were to guess, entry level may be at $40-50k. Solidly Middle Class for Arkansas.
A friend of mine handles databases and writes in Oracle SQL or whatever they call it, and I think he makes 80k. That's a university job, so I'm not sure if that's a little higher or a little lower than usual. Also, he's been there a while.
This isn't even physics. This is geometry. Light follows a straight path. Mirrors reflect it almost perfectly. Now get your laser range finder, and point it at a mirror. What happens? The range finder reports the total distance between you and the mirror + the mirror and the diffuse object it hits.
For a more accessible experiment, hold a mirror up in your face but at an angle so you can see the world behind you as well as your eyes. Your eyes are heavily crossed when focused on the dust on the mirror itself, but not so much when focused on the reflected world behind you. The position of your eyes determines what you focus on. In fact, you could determine distance by recording the angle of your eyes and using basic trig. The variables would be the distance between your eyes, and the angles of your eye positions. Laser range finders use a different method for determining distance, but the result is the same.
In my line of work, I use something called a laser scanner/LiDAR. This device is basically a laser range finder on steroids. It spins in every direction and creates a "point cloud" of the environment around it. The points in the cloud are calculated with basic trig - laser angle & distance can give you xyz coordinates and establish one point. A completed point cloud has millions of these points. If you put mirror in front of it, it'll record those points as though the mirror were a doorway into a reversed room. I have to delete these points afterwards.
I'm not sure why you're down-voted. That's the idea I believe Asa is trying to capitalize on. We'd cost more than India, but we're in a closer time zone and speak your language. You can even fly in for meetings and such without suffering extreme jet lag or cost. There's a lot of untapped creative potential here too. I believe AR has a future in tech, but we have to work for it.
30k would put you in the middle class here in AR. The cost of living here is low enough that your idea of a "low-wage, no-future" job is more than enough for the average Arkansan. I believe Arkansas is in a good position to be the place to "in-source" software and technology labor here in America. India's on the other side of the planet and there's a language and culture barrier. Send your work here please; you won't have any trouble understanding us, we're in a timezone you can tolerate, and we don't have an unintelligible accent.
Bonus: your customers won't give you grief for it like they do when you send labor overseas.
There's more white people on welfare than there are black people alive. Yet when people talk about welfare queens and lazy fucks and say that's the reason we need to cut back on welfare, they point to black people. Then these anti-welfare guys get elected, make cuts, and their own constituency suffers because guess what? Most people on welfare are in conservative areas. Most people on welfare are white, and even in percentage terms, blacks beat them by just a couple percentage points.
I bought a cheap camera three years ago. It's wireless and has a battery. Everything after that is just a matter of using a UPS and hiding the computer or DVR somewhere. I use a computer, and can set some free software I found to upload images and alert me when ever it detects something.
Newer cameras are better, and have all that stuff built in. There's no "line" to cut anymore.
I'm black and I've got a pretty technical job. It's not IT, it's better (to me). I could easily get a low level IT job if I wanted to.
When I was a young teen, I saw a few kids like me but not very many (black OR white). Computers were very much a "nerd" thing. This was about 15 years ago, so I doubt anything has changed. These days it might even be worse, since back then it was a necessary evil, which can now be worked around with tablets and smart phones.
These days, even the most run-down, underfunded inner-city libraries have computers with Internet connectivity, along with books about programming.
I learned Basic in just such a place. The library in a Boys and Girls Club. They didn't have the internet until shortly before I moved on. They had rows of old Apple//e, Macs, and old DOS systems. I was practically their unpaid IT person, fixing all of the things the other kids would break. They even gave me one of those computers my last day there when I moved out of town.
That doesn't answer your question exactly. Suffice it to say, kids don't want to be nerds if they can help it, especially black kids. Oh well. More jobs for me.
Cube 2 missed an opportunity, I think. I loved that octree-based map engine. Here was an accessible and powerful cube based engine from before Minecraft was a twinkle in Notch's eye. To this day, I don't know of any other engine that lets you collaborate with multiple people in real time as though it were part of the game - and with level editing so easy, it could have fostered the kind of mapping community not seen since the days of Doom, Quake, and Unreal (1/UT/2004).
Now everything is "model it in 3DSMax, Maya, or Blender." Complicated tools, meandering workflows, just a time consuming process in general. Even Unreal is like that now. Why use the shape editor when you can just import your model? Does the new engine even have that tool anymore? No it doesn't. Just import or use an existing mesh for your complex details. Want to make your own but don't know how? Time to learn this other tool over here.
I'm not complaining exactly. I'm pretty good with Max and Blender. I'm just reflecting (as an amateur) on what mapping felt like in the past, and how it compares to today. It was pretty straight forward back then. There was probably a lot of pent up creativity from people who didn't have the time to learn multiple tools. Minecraft quenched their thirst, but the Cube 2 engine could have been the thing to do that. If only it were better documented, and positioned better as an engine for hobbyists.
The farthest I got with it was map editing and compiling it from the source. So I know what you mean. It's been a while, but I doubt anything has changed. Sorry to hear about the state of your game.
I don't believe there's anything wrong with the idea. But it's just an idea, it's not a theory, nor is it anything you can test just yet. I have a similar idea, but it's not anything I can ever be certain of or claim as true, much less anything worth writing a book about. That would be called a religion, and as an agnostic, I automatically avoid doing such things anyway.
The idea doesn't make him crazy, what does is his confidence in an idea that is not a theory and cannot be tested. That's magical thinking.
A horse smart enough to memorize a city, is smart enough to learn to use restrooms built specifically for them. The only issue would be expanding the existing sewage infrastructure to handle the extra load.
Great point, as I've read this before and it's definitely worth mentioning. But the wormhole and the black hole were two separate objects in the movie. The wormhole was much smaller, and found in an orbit around Saturn.
This kills the self-driving car. Seriously. A sapient horse could learn the city like a London cabbie, and at your command, take you where ever you want to go.
Slashdot Mirror
A good example is the Affordable Care Act. Because you're alive, you are compelled to do business with private health care insurance companies. If you don't want to pay health insurance, you can either pay a fine or get in trouble with the IRS. ERs had to service everyone by law. A several years later, this became economically unsound and patients had to buy health insurance. Like gays, sick patients are a bullied minority and frequently taken advantage of, and like sick patients, there can be an economic impact based on the choice the state makes on the issue.
No matter the choice, you're using a law to enforce some sort of outcome if the thing ever comes to trial. In pro-gay states, gays win in court. In anti-gay states, gays loose in court and are discouraged from even trying. The only thing that matters to me is what people want, and what economic impact it has. Does a society feel they need to protect a group or protect the people who hate or take advantage of a group? Which is least harmful to an economy? They can then find the right answer and work from there.
It has the potential to be a little worse than that.
Because of its character-based nature, any effort to figure out who's gay is going to go over about as well as finding the "Communists" did during the HUAC days. If business owners really care about keeping gays out of their Christian establishments, we'll find out pretty quickly when perfectly straight people start getting kicked out for simply having lunch with their friends.
Truthfully though I don't think it'll come to that. Already restaurants and other establishments are either putting up pro LGBT stickers or doing nothing different. I'm sure we'll have the odd ball BBQ shack in the woods show up in the news from time to time, but I'm beginning to doubt that these bills are anything more than for show. Republicans are saying, "Look, we get it! We're Tea Party. We're the new kind of conservative!", in an effort to reinvigorate the base.
If they really wanted to push gays out of society, they have a ready-made method for that, which they use on convicted sex offenders. Maybe we should reserve our freak-out for when they try to pass new sodomy laws.
That is a heinous crime. To even get to that point is to let it happen in the first place.
In the past, serving a black customer anywhere other than the back door could cause you to lose all your white customers. I can imagine a similar situation, where a baker may be unwilling to advertise that she worked for a gay couple for fear of losing business from religious couples and good standing with the local churches.
But only in the deepest darkest South.
Arkansas also has one of these Religious Freedom bills, as well as similar southern conservative cowboy type things, and I think this is a natural progression after years of voters being told by the conservative media that our elected conservatives weren't conservative enough, weren't religious enough, and too open to compromise with the left, and too slow to respond to issues regarding immigrants and terrorists. Add to that a general sense of failure or lack of inspiration in the left regarding their own leaders, and we leave a wide open door for this sort of thing.
I believe the response in Arkansas was the creation of a sticker that businesses began putting on their windows, saying that they welcome LGBT customers. This is where we are now... I suppose we should be thankful they haven't decided to simply force businesses to comply to "religious conscience" the way they're forcing universities to accept guns on their property.
I had your example scenario happen to me a couple years ago, except it was a Crown Vic. I was turning left onto a 6-lane street in my little Tercel (it was my light). The Crown Vic comes barreling through the intersection just behind me at 80 mph (speed limit is 50). His light was red. Cars to the left of me, cars to the right of me, I had no choice but to speed up until there was space for me to change lanes because he was not slowing down. I think he was riding my bumper for a while before I could get out of his way and let him barrel down another red light ahead. The brakes on that car aren't the best, so I probably shouldn't have done that, but at the time it made sense because I had plenty of space ahead of me and there were no intersections for another mile.
I don't think we'll be a safe haven for that kind of stuff for long... and don't look to Europe either. The whole world is turning hard right. It'll soon be the norm for scientists, activists, soldiers, and everyday citizens to be sent to psych wards and prisons for speaking the truth.
It's best to stay where you are, and fight where you are, because that's your country, and you might as well fight it at home because there will be no escape if all we do is run.
TBH, I can't really say how much a programmer makes here. I'm not a programmer by trade (though I do a little programming in my job anyway). I just know they make a lot less here than they would in say... Silicon Valley. If I were to guess, entry level may be at $40-50k. Solidly Middle Class for Arkansas.
A friend of mine handles databases and writes in Oracle SQL or whatever they call it, and I think he makes 80k. That's a university job, so I'm not sure if that's a little higher or a little lower than usual. Also, he's been there a while.
This isn't even physics. This is geometry. Light follows a straight path. Mirrors reflect it almost perfectly. Now get your laser range finder, and point it at a mirror. What happens? The range finder reports the total distance between you and the mirror + the mirror and the diffuse object it hits.
For a more accessible experiment, hold a mirror up in your face but at an angle so you can see the world behind you as well as your eyes. Your eyes are heavily crossed when focused on the dust on the mirror itself, but not so much when focused on the reflected world behind you. The position of your eyes determines what you focus on. In fact, you could determine distance by recording the angle of your eyes and using basic trig. The variables would be the distance between your eyes, and the angles of your eye positions. Laser range finders use a different method for determining distance, but the result is the same.
In my line of work, I use something called a laser scanner/LiDAR. This device is basically a laser range finder on steroids. It spins in every direction and creates a "point cloud" of the environment around it. The points in the cloud are calculated with basic trig - laser angle & distance can give you xyz coordinates and establish one point. A completed point cloud has millions of these points. If you put mirror in front of it, it'll record those points as though the mirror were a doorway into a reversed room. I have to delete these points afterwards.
Nukenerd is right, and you are wrong.
I'm not sure why you're down-voted. That's the idea I believe Asa is trying to capitalize on. We'd cost more than India, but we're in a closer time zone and speak your language. You can even fly in for meetings and such without suffering extreme jet lag or cost. There's a lot of untapped creative potential here too. I believe AR has a future in tech, but we have to work for it.
30k would put you in the middle class here in AR. The cost of living here is low enough that your idea of a "low-wage, no-future" job is more than enough for the average Arkansan. I believe Arkansas is in a good position to be the place to "in-source" software and technology labor here in America. India's on the other side of the planet and there's a language and culture barrier. Send your work here please; you won't have any trouble understanding us, we're in a timezone you can tolerate, and we don't have an unintelligible accent.
Bonus: your customers won't give you grief for it like they do when you send labor overseas.
Sounds unworkable and unenforceable.
Right on.
Also:
There's more white people on welfare than there are black people alive. Yet when people talk about welfare queens and lazy fucks and say that's the reason we need to cut back on welfare, they point to black people. Then these anti-welfare guys get elected, make cuts, and their own constituency suffers because guess what? Most people on welfare are in conservative areas. Most people on welfare are white, and even in percentage terms, blacks beat them by just a couple percentage points.
I bought a cheap camera three years ago. It's wireless and has a battery. Everything after that is just a matter of using a UPS and hiding the computer or DVR somewhere. I use a computer, and can set some free software I found to upload images and alert me when ever it detects something.
Newer cameras are better, and have all that stuff built in. There's no "line" to cut anymore.
I'm black and I've got a pretty technical job. It's not IT, it's better (to me). I could easily get a low level IT job if I wanted to.
When I was a young teen, I saw a few kids like me but not very many (black OR white). Computers were very much a "nerd" thing. This was about 15 years ago, so I doubt anything has changed. These days it might even be worse, since back then it was a necessary evil, which can now be worked around with tablets and smart phones.
These days, even the most run-down, underfunded inner-city libraries have computers with Internet connectivity, along with books about programming.
I learned Basic in just such a place. The library in a Boys and Girls Club. They didn't have the internet until shortly before I moved on. They had rows of old Apple //e, Macs, and old DOS systems. I was practically their unpaid IT person, fixing all of the things the other kids would break. They even gave me one of those computers my last day there when I moved out of town.
That doesn't answer your question exactly. Suffice it to say, kids don't want to be nerds if they can help it, especially black kids. Oh well. More jobs for me.
Cube 2 missed an opportunity, I think. I loved that octree-based map engine. Here was an accessible and powerful cube based engine from before Minecraft was a twinkle in Notch's eye. To this day, I don't know of any other engine that lets you collaborate with multiple people in real time as though it were part of the game - and with level editing so easy, it could have fostered the kind of mapping community not seen since the days of Doom, Quake, and Unreal (1/UT/2004).
Now everything is "model it in 3DSMax, Maya, or Blender." Complicated tools, meandering workflows, just a time consuming process in general. Even Unreal is like that now. Why use the shape editor when you can just import your model? Does the new engine even have that tool anymore? No it doesn't. Just import or use an existing mesh for your complex details. Want to make your own but don't know how? Time to learn this other tool over here.
I'm not complaining exactly. I'm pretty good with Max and Blender. I'm just reflecting (as an amateur) on what mapping felt like in the past, and how it compares to today. It was pretty straight forward back then. There was probably a lot of pent up creativity from people who didn't have the time to learn multiple tools. Minecraft quenched their thirst, but the Cube 2 engine could have been the thing to do that. If only it were better documented, and positioned better as an engine for hobbyists.
The farthest I got with it was map editing and compiling it from the source. So I know what you mean. It's been a while, but I doubt anything has changed. Sorry to hear about the state of your game.
I don't believe there's anything wrong with the idea. But it's just an idea, it's not a theory, nor is it anything you can test just yet. I have a similar idea, but it's not anything I can ever be certain of or claim as true, much less anything worth writing a book about. That would be called a religion, and as an agnostic, I automatically avoid doing such things anyway.
The idea doesn't make him crazy, what does is his confidence in an idea that is not a theory and cannot be tested. That's magical thinking.
Somewhat related: Newton's Flaming Laser Sword
Google bought them off. They don't understand the internet anyway.
A horse smart enough to memorize a city, is smart enough to learn to use restrooms built specifically for them. The only issue would be expanding the existing sewage infrastructure to handle the extra load.
Great point, as I've read this before and it's definitely worth mentioning. But the wormhole and the black hole were two separate objects in the movie. The wormhole was much smaller, and found in an orbit around Saturn.
By having governments enforce contracts you just externalize the costs of dealing with dishonorable people.
I thought that was the point.
Consider a horse that isn't stupid.
This kills the self-driving car. Seriously. A sapient horse could learn the city like a London cabbie, and at your command, take you where ever you want to go.
Chimps are really violent, strong, and just all around monstrous. I couldn't think of a worse animal to make sapient.
Is growing a non-human sapient any different from building a perfect artificially intelligent robot?
Should we be okay with those possibilities, or should we artificially limit ourselves from making such things to begin with?
That's correct. People aren't sheep when cornered. A government worth anything will keep that in mind.