Just watch the credits roll and you see the word "Spam" inserted everywhere. Just like the junk messages littering you inbox, interspersed with the real messages.
You are making some good points here however, that people did have to face change in the past and learn a new trade.
However, if the changes happen once per generation, you can expect a person to face such an event once in a lifetime. Most people would go by with the one trade they learned when they were young.
Nowadays you cannot expect to face less than 3-4 major changes in a career.
Whenever a story about automation comes up most of the replies are of the type:
"It happened 100 years ago and then again 50 years ago, it we ended up better. We'll figure it out this time."
What these posts don't say is that the _pace_ of the change was much slower back then. Also, we keep on comparing mostly physical industries (e.g. railways) with the current tech industries.
In the tech industry the pace of the change is much faster and during the 80's 90's and 00's it was accelerating. I remember growing up in the 80's when studying electrical engineering and making money from repairing TVs was a perfectly good way to make a living.
Then TVs became almost disposable and computers came along and in the late 80's and early 90's many people made a living writing stuff in BASIC and Pascal. Try making a living from those skills today, only 15-18 years later.
The point is that in the past the major changes took longer or at least as long as the turn of the generations. You could learn a trade and it kept you going until retirement.
However, nowadays you can expect 3-4 major changes throughout the employable years of a person, and not everyone is able to keep up the pace with such change.
When selling a book it is a good idea to sell it in large numbers. Who's going to buy it ? His friends in high places ? There are only a few of them, not enough to make a profit for his book.
So now that he wants those he screwed to fork their hard-earned cash and help him meet his sales target, he has to make it sound like he was suffering while screwing them.
As if corporate interests like Apple and Google did not know that if they wanted the tax loopholes to stay firmly in place they will have to play nice with the powers that be. If you remember his attitude before he was fired, he was not the one to suffer.
Having finished my Ph.D. about 15 years ago, I remember how it was to work in a theoretical field that was described as "safely outside the reach of experiment". Statements were true or false depending on _who_ made them, not the content of the statement. Each person was judged by a different standard.Those who were known from the start to have the right connections were helped while the others were set up to fail. And the Ph.D. advisors waited until the very end before picking up a fight, when the student was under pressure to graduate.
Finishing the Ph.D. with a sane mind was indeed a huge victory. As a confirmation I had to hear on a daily basis the profs telling tales of students who had nervous breakdowns and being unable to graduate.
Later on as a postdoc I had to hear the exact same stories but with "graduation" replaced with "tenure" and "student" replaced with "junior professor". Academia is a very hostile place if you don't have the right connections.
I remember around 2006 (when AMD has just acquired ATI ?) Intel was making a lot of noise of running the graphics directly on the CPU, hence the GPU-less machines was their big prediction.
They were mentioning real-time ray-tracing as the next big thing in graphics and their CPUs were obviously the natural thing to do it. Here is an example from 2007: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
AMD and Nvidia immediately pointed out that their GPUs were much better for this job, and then nothing happened. Now I see they bring it up again, let's see if it is more than just vaporware.
There was a lot of debate before that, and it was dominated by Nigel Farage fanning the flames of racism. There was no reasonable discussion, just blame thrown at the immigrants.
If you want debate in Britain, just talk to Jo Cox about it. That's right, she cannot talk since she was assassinated just before the Brexit vote, and for what ?
For being moderate and not joining the chorus of voices blaming the immigrants.
I can tell you the view from ground zero, the people who voted for Brexit are not even able to use Facebook. They rely on the talk at the pub, and there they had the Romanians and Bulgarians to blame (highly visible as construction workers). Later the Bulgarian politicians started to make noise so only the Romanians were blamed.
Brexit is nothing more than the voice of racism and for that there is not need for Russia or Farcebook to stir it.
In the past bugs meant that the product was _not_ doing what it was supposed to do. For example a bug would mean that Firefox would fail to collect the reports.
Same with Google's voice-activated assistant: a bug would mean that it does not record conversations.
However, recent bugs mean that the Firefox collects everything, and that Google's assistant records 24/7. Or when Google's cars doing the mapping for Street View "accidentally" slurped all wi-fi passwords they could find.
I think a new word should be invented to describe this type of "mistake". How about "gub" instead of "bug" ?
Suffice to say, "it" is one of the words the Knights of Ni cannot hear. And if the Knights of Ni are not appeased, well, they will say "Ni!" again to them.
I keep seeing these derogatory comments, but let me remind you about 2004 being named "The year of the Linux Desktop".
Before that year not all desktop environments worked out of the box, and that year was the last time I had to tweak a stock installation. After that everyone had to make excuses for not installing Linux.
Heck, back in university even the most reluctant of the profs has been moved to Linux by 2001. The students have been using Linux-only since 1999. I know this is not representative of corporations, but is a good example.
Also, remember the Munich Linux project (and Ballmer's personal visit to Munich), the SCO lawsuit, Darl McBride's talk at MIT (with an armed bodyguard on stage next to him), and Ken Brown's "Samizdat" ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
They all happened in the 2003-2004 time frame. A lot of corporations were looking at migrating Linux at that time, so the timing is not a coincidence. Especially the SCO lawsuit. It spooked a lot of corporations, and all the momentum was lost. Yes, that Microsoft-bankrolled (with RBC's support) lawsuit has succeeded. Don't think that because Groklaw is silent now those things did not happen and the current state of the Linux desktop is due entirely to the misguided efforts of the developers.
After 2004 the reason for not using Linux has become mainly political, and it still is today. But go to any large corporation and start to scratch a bit below the surface. The front-end is indeed Windows, but below that is Linux all the way down.
I am much more interested in the IgNobel prizes than in the Nobel prizes, especially since Dunning and Kruger were awarded the IgNobel prize for their work.
I was so grateful that somebody finally did some research into a phenomenon I am encountering every day.
The price of the London tube passes has grown at rates well above the inflation rate for more than 10 years now.
If some of the money made from WIFi tracking will go towards slowing down the price hikes, I would approve. But we all know that the fare prices will keep increasing faster than the inflation rate "as long as the market can bear it". Only when the passengers will all bike to work because they cannot afford the tube rides will the increases slow (or who knows, even stop)
And the money made from _public_ transport will go into private pockets.
... I remember receiving a message from the library of a university (not the one I was at) encouraging everyone to boycott Elsevier. The reason ? Elsevier accounted for 1% of the journals in their library, but it took 25% of their budget.
This not about piracy, it is all about corporate greed.
Another problem is that species evolve on a time scale that is short compared with the time scale needed for galactic colonization. "A few million years" is all it takes for a species to become extinct because of they reach an evolutionary dead-end. They may start the colonization of the galaxy, but they may become extinct along the way simply because of biology.
I was told that it will become 70 by the time I retire. If the life expectancy increases more, the retirement age will increase accordingly.
Increased life expectancy does not necessarily increase the quality of life. It would be better to pay attention to the quality of life for those in their prime, rather than offering them more years of suffering in old age.
Slashdot Mirror
The company has morhped already:
https://www.metro.us/news/the-...
They are really catching the discarded skin of the snake.
It is the credits at the end.
Just watch the credits roll and you see the word "Spam" inserted everywhere.
Just like the junk messages littering you inbox, interspersed with the real messages.
Written and spam performed by:
Spam Terry Jones
Michael Spam Palin
John Spam John Spam
John Spam Cleese
Graham Spam Spam
Spam Chapman
etc..
You are making some good points here however, that people did have to face change in the past and learn a new trade.
However, if the changes happen once per generation, you can expect a person to face such an event once in a lifetime. Most people would go by with the one trade they learned when they were young.
Nowadays you cannot expect to face less than 3-4 major changes in a career.
Whenever a story about automation comes up most of the replies are of the type:
"It happened 100 years ago and then again 50 years ago, it we ended up better. We'll figure it out this time."
What these posts don't say is that the _pace_ of the change was much slower back then. Also, we keep on comparing mostly physical industries (e.g. railways) with the current tech industries.
In the tech industry the pace of the change is much faster and during the 80's 90's and 00's it was accelerating. I remember growing up in the 80's when studying electrical engineering and making money from repairing TVs was a perfectly good way to make a living.
Then TVs became almost disposable and computers came along and in the late 80's and early 90's many people made a living writing stuff in BASIC and Pascal. Try making a living from those skills today, only 15-18 years later.
The point is that in the past the major changes took longer or at least as long as the turn of the generations. You could learn a trade and it kept you going until retirement.
However, nowadays you can expect 3-4 major changes throughout the employable years of a person, and not everyone is able to keep up the pace with such change.
When selling a book it is a good idea to sell it in large numbers. Who's going to buy it ? His friends in high places ? There are only a few of them, not enough to make a profit for his book.
So now that he wants those he screwed to fork their hard-earned cash and help him meet his sales target, he has to make it sound like he was suffering while screwing them.
As if corporate interests like Apple and Google did not know that if they wanted the tax loopholes to stay firmly in place they will have to play nice with the powers that be. If you remember his attitude before he was fired, he was not the one to suffer.
Having finished my Ph.D. about 15 years ago, I remember how it was to work in a theoretical field that was described as "safely outside the reach of experiment". Statements were true or false depending on _who_ made them, not the content of the statement. Each person was judged by a different standard.Those who were known from the start to have the right connections were helped while the others were set up to fail. And the Ph.D. advisors waited until the very end before picking up a fight, when the student was under pressure to graduate.
Finishing the Ph.D. with a sane mind was indeed a huge victory. As a confirmation I had to hear on a daily basis the profs telling tales of students who had nervous breakdowns and being unable to graduate.
Later on as a postdoc I had to hear the exact same stories but with "graduation" replaced with "tenure" and "student" replaced with "junior professor". Academia is a very hostile place if you don't have the right connections.
I remember around 2006 (when AMD has just acquired ATI ?) Intel was making a lot of noise of running the graphics directly on the CPU, hence the GPU-less machines was their big prediction.
They were mentioning real-time ray-tracing as the next big thing in graphics and their CPUs were obviously the natural thing to do it. Here is an example from 2007:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
AMD and Nvidia immediately pointed out that their GPUs were much better for this job, and then nothing happened. Now I see they bring it up again, let's see if it is more than just vaporware.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.105...
Sorry, I could not resist mentioning this one.
My very favorite SF book, up there with "Dune".
It also contains one of the best quotes I ever read:
"One alien is a curiosity, two are an invasion."
Great writer, rest in peace.
There was a lot of debate before that, and it was dominated by Nigel Farage fanning the flames of racism. There was no reasonable discussion, just blame thrown at the immigrants.
If you want debate in Britain, just talk to Jo Cox about it. That's right, she cannot talk since she was assassinated just before the Brexit vote, and for what ?
For being moderate and not joining the chorus of voices blaming the immigrants.
I can tell you the view from ground zero, the people who voted for Brexit are not even able to use Facebook. They rely on the talk at the pub, and there they had the Romanians and Bulgarians to blame (highly visible as construction workers). Later the Bulgarian politicians started to make noise so only the Romanians were blamed.
Brexit is nothing more than the voice of racism and for that there is not need for Russia or Farcebook to stir it.
"One mistake, and you'll provide support for a lifetime."
The main utility of such a pill + phone app would be to let everyone else around me know when I'm about to fart. I will know anyway.
Also, it would make excuses like "It wasn't me!" completely moot.
The vulnerabilities discovered in the Intel CPUs will never be exploited, as the Intel Management Engine already provides all the necessary backdoors.
In the past bugs meant that the product was _not_ doing what it was supposed to do. For example a bug would mean that Firefox would fail to collect the reports.
Same with Google's voice-activated assistant: a bug would mean that it does not record conversations.
However, recent bugs mean that the Firefox collects everything, and that Google's assistant records 24/7. Or when Google's cars doing the mapping for Street View "accidentally" slurped all wi-fi passwords they could find.
I think a new word should be invented to describe this type of "mistake". How about "gub" instead of "bug" ?
Suffice to say, "it" is one of the words the Knights of Ni cannot hear. And if the Knights of Ni are not appeased, well, they will say "Ni!" again to them.
I can hear the Intel executives talking.
"AMD has had its failure in the graphics chip market, and we did not. We cannot be left behind on this one!"
"We must have our own failure !"
Will they call the new graphic chip i740 ?
I keep seeing these derogatory comments, but let me remind you about 2004 being named "The year of the Linux Desktop".
Before that year not all desktop environments worked out of the box, and that year was the last time I had to tweak a stock installation. After that everyone had to make excuses for not installing Linux.
Heck, back in university even the most reluctant of the profs has been moved to Linux by 2001. The students have been using Linux-only since 1999. I know this is not representative of corporations, but is a good example.
Also, remember the Munich Linux project (and Ballmer's personal visit to Munich), the SCO lawsuit, Darl McBride's talk at MIT (with an armed bodyguard on stage next to him), and Ken Brown's "Samizdat" ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
They all happened in the 2003-2004 time frame. A lot of corporations were looking at migrating Linux at that time, so the timing is not a coincidence. Especially the SCO lawsuit. It spooked a lot of corporations, and all the momentum was lost. Yes, that Microsoft-bankrolled (with RBC's support) lawsuit has succeeded. Don't think that because Groklaw is silent now those things did not happen and the current state of the Linux desktop is due entirely to the misguided efforts of the developers.
After 2004 the reason for not using Linux has become mainly political, and it still is today. But go to any large corporation and start to scratch a bit below the surface. The front-end is indeed Windows, but below that is Linux all the way down.
The software is able to identify with 100% reliability that some form of sexual activity is performed in every single video hosted by the site.
I am much more interested in the IgNobel prizes than in the Nobel prizes, especially since Dunning and Kruger were awarded the IgNobel prize for their work.
I was so grateful that somebody finally did some research into a phenomenon I am encountering every day.
The price of the London tube passes has grown at rates well above the inflation rate for more than 10 years now.
If some of the money made from WIFi tracking will go towards slowing down the price hikes, I would approve. But we all know that the fare prices will keep increasing faster than the inflation rate "as long as the market can bear it". Only when the passengers will all bike to work because they cannot afford the tube rides will the increases slow (or who knows, even stop)
And the money made from _public_ transport will go into private pockets.
... I remember receiving a message from the library of a university (not the one I was at) encouraging everyone to boycott Elsevier.
The reason ?
Elsevier accounted for 1% of the journals in their library, but it took 25% of their budget.
This not about piracy, it is all about corporate greed.
Another problem is that species evolve on a time scale that is short compared with the time scale needed for galactic colonization. "A few million years" is all it takes for a species to become extinct because of they reach an evolutionary dead-end. They may start the colonization of the galaxy, but they may become extinct along the way simply because of biology.
I was told that it will become 70 by the time I retire. If the life expectancy increases more, the retirement age will increase accordingly.
Increased life expectancy does not necessarily increase the quality of life. It would be better to pay attention to the quality of life for those in their prime, rather than offering them more years of suffering in old age.