Just look at what happened during the 2007 TARP program. The US government was bought off to take toxic assets off banks hands and hand them over to the tax payer. The loans to the banks were made a ridiculous rate. Basically, if you believe in capitalism, then the banks should have sold off stocks based on market demand. Not some artificial price agreed upon by bankers and government officials. Even the loans given to "help out delinquent" taxpayers were done not to keep the person in his home, but to keep the banks receiving cash flow. If the government was interested in helping out the people, then the loans should have gone to the individual, who might decide to dump his mortgage and pay rent elsewhere. The law is full of all sorts of deals where rich can take over property via "imminent domain" laws, but these don't work the other way around.
The same thing happens with bankruptcy court. Big companies with strong ties to government get time to reorganize their debts and get out of unfavorable contracts.
I don't know about everyone else, but the contracting rates that I offered are not substantially higher than the comparably salary (including time-off and insurances). Moreover, contractors tend to get hired in the "crisis" of the project, so are expected to be highly effective with their resources and time, unlike management or BAs, which seem to just babble platitudes from a canned speech. Unless agencies or mid-management thinks that [we] programmers are smart enough to program, but stupid in the world of business, the only alternative that exists [for agencies or mid-level management] is to hold the line at a certain level of compensation. After all, either the project is not important enough, or the money needs to go to others, not the programmers. Even some of the "benefits" that we get are down right silly. I don't enjoy going to a baseball game or other parties, so its just not a "reward" for me. Maybe it is good for 60% of the team members, but the remaining 40% of us feel as if we are going through the motions of having a good time.
I think that some of this is linked to our expectations with stocks.
We have seen wild speculation in the market, so we want to get into the game! BitCoin has had the wildest ride, so many people think that the can grab it as it is going up and sell before it crashes.
Is this really any different than oil companies competing against Standard Oil. All other competitors were driven to bankruptcy, they think that this drive to bankruptcy is part of the process, they just think that than can sell before everyone else does.
About 20 years ago, jewwatch was in the top 3 listings when searching for jews on yahoo search, due to the way that links were created. Too many people got upset, so things were patched to prevent this, by adding code to explicitly prevent this.
Well, extracting ores from the moon is lucrative, but it is expensive getting them out of the moon's gravitational well.
It probably will be more economical to mine the asteroids instead. Yes, there are probably international treaties preventing this currently, but I doubt that they are enforceable, compared to the economical motivation of pursing them.
While as organs cannot be sold, the system can be rigged.
Steve Jobs got access to a transplant. He also "bought a house that his doctor was selling" in order to establish residence.
At UCLA, a Japanese mobster go access to a transplant. While as it cannot be proved that he bribed people to get access, it certainly raises suspicion. If some Arab pulled the same stunt, it would be an issue.
Well, AI is huge field, just like mathematics or computer science. Just because you are an expert in your subdomain within AI doesn't mean that you are better than average in another domain. Right now, we are seeing an explosion of research and techniques in AI, so even a field in which you might be an expert is growing so rapidly that you might find yourself falling behind. At best, you might claim to be an expert in some sub-subdomain.
The other question is what qualifies as an expert? There seems to be no objective way to measure that self identification label. Oftentimes, I find that many average people overrate themselves on their ability. Its usually the people who know more than their counterpart are humble enough to know that they don't know enough as they have met people who put themselves into perspective. Sort of like the MBA who claims to know programming [probably because he read an InfoWeek article on the can an hour ago], yet can't do squat if really put to the test, knowing full well that he won't be put to the test.
And, as the other authors pointed out, there is a point of having things behave as components and focusing on using black boxes without being overly concerned about the inside details. Moreover, as this is a growing field, there is going to be change and churn inside the black box.
Neil Tyson Degrasse said that the thing that started him the most during his career, the US went from being the world leader in particle physics (1980) to a has been contender. I was at Stony Brook at that time, so there was a lot of discussion about Isabelle (the bid on the next gen super collider competing against CERN), later known as Wasabelle,
Now, Google and Apple will dominate the patents (on technology which is twice as old as the company) in their industry, but serve to starve the industry in legal dispute.
After 9/11, I was listening to a interview with Rudy Giuliani. He made a joke, that while as some other countries might have the best engineers, America has the best Madison Avenue. He was referring to the propaganda pipeline, and how the US worked hard to make itself hear around the world and exerts its influence globally.
I remember hearing [re-]broadcasts by Ronald Reagan via "Voice of America" broadcast into Afghanistan in the 1970's. He went off the deep end and talked about how there are plenty of jobs for Afghan defectors. This was such bullshit, as there were lots of unemployed Americans, so I just didn't understand how shit like this would be believed (by the East). Apparently, it was reasonably successful, for the amount of descent it would cause. Similarly, most of the strikes in Gdansk Poland were strongly influenced by the US, with the help of the catholic church. All sorts of nonsense was promised to the workers in the shipyards, most ironically, that they would get Western wages if they broke away from the Eastern block. After the bankruptcy of the Gdansk shipyards and the fall of the Soviet Union, "Johnson and Johnson" negotiated purchasing the shipyards. The workers were getting around $.25/hour before the changes and managed to get $.50/hr, but with the changes in the economy, prices skyrocketed because the economy was opened up to the West (shook capitalism, it was called).
Probably the biggest source of propaganda came during the 2007 TARP. If the American people did not bail out the banks who had been holding CMOs, the economy would be devastated. All the wrong people would have the money, so the richest 1% had to work hard to maintain the status quo.
What do you say about a society that spends more money on Viagra subsidies than on brain research? Soon, we will have nursing homes full of honey old men with no idea of what to do?
What do you say about a society that spends more money on viagra subsidies and on brain research? Soon, we will have nursing homes full of honey old men with no idea of what to do?
Unfortunately, the hard part of programming is tightening up the requirements to exactly specify what is to be done. Most issues occur when there is a gap between what is specified and what is intended. While as simple tasks might be obvious, it does not translate for complicated tasks. Now in a complicated business environment, there are many ways to doing things. The worst ones are those that look right, but are not. Moreover, what is coded is subject to refinement and iteration. This is hard between people, so a machine might do what is asked but not what is wanted. Software developers make a lot of choices based on implicit requirements, many of which are not explicitly stated, just understood.
The biggest use of AI will be in keeping track of dissidence.
As brought out in an earlier SD article, Facebook, Twitter and others turn over photos and postings of people over to the police. This is great for data-mining and record keeping. Add to this the fact that most of our cloths and merchandise have RFID anti-shop-lifting tags, it is easy to trace you based on you passing through shopping checkouts and video surveillance. Even if you decide to yank off every RFID tag and avoid video cameras and a cell phone, most of your friends will not, and call you a tin-foil hat alarmist. "1984" was only off by a couple of years. As long as things are going well, most people's liberties are not strongly infringed. However, just in case things fall apart, the powers that be want to stay in charge. Just look at how successful was the Co-Intel program in the 1970s when it looked as if student and Black demonstrators got carried away. America does not want to pay reparations to Blacks and Indians, that is just for the Germans towards the Jews.
We laugh at the Soviet and their obsessive security system, but it arose because the Soviet Union was scared of collapsing from within and took measures to control what they could.
Just as in pharmaceutics, where most of the research comes from public grants and then successful drug research is taken over by private industry, AI and robotics has been largely developed with government grants funded by the tax payer.
The same thing also happened with space exploration. Most of the research and development came from the general public. I will say that the major reason that the US went to the moon was to explore its mineral content. This was outright stated by the astronauts, as they got the equivalent of a M. Sc. in geology. Had there been sufficient supply of exotic minerals, the industry would have been taken over by private forces. It just that the tax payer had to front the initial investment. Worse, maybe we'd find out that the distribution of resources was such that there was not much worth pursuing on the moon. Well, you would not want companies to take that sort of loss would you.
So, most of us paid to develop AI, so that it could be used by corporations to make a bigger profit, and we can go pay the bill.
Unless of course you think that the government is undemocratic, corrupt and repressive. Let's face it, the government tries to suppress dissent and marginalizes those not in power.
If I remember correctly from an article in Starlog in 1979, at.1c, interstellar hydrogen will create enough stress on a vessel made of a block of diamond to break it apart.
Slashdot Mirror
Just look at what happened during the 2007 TARP program. The US government was bought off to take toxic assets off banks hands and hand them over to the tax payer. The loans to the banks were made a ridiculous rate. Basically, if you believe in capitalism, then the banks should have sold off stocks based on market demand. Not some artificial price agreed upon by bankers and government officials. Even the loans given to "help out delinquent" taxpayers were done not to keep the person in his home, but to keep the banks receiving cash flow. If the government was interested in helping out the people, then the loans should have gone to the individual, who might decide to dump his mortgage and pay rent elsewhere. The law is full of all sorts of deals where rich can take over property via "imminent domain" laws, but these don't work the other way around.
The same thing happens with bankruptcy court. Big companies with strong ties to government get time to reorganize their debts and get out of unfavorable contracts.
I don't know about everyone else, but the contracting rates that I offered are not substantially higher than the comparably salary (including time-off and insurances). Moreover, contractors tend to get hired in the "crisis" of the project, so are expected to be highly effective with their resources and time, unlike management or BAs, which seem to just babble platitudes from a canned speech. Unless agencies or mid-management thinks that [we] programmers are smart enough to program, but stupid in the world of business, the only alternative that exists [for agencies or mid-level management] is to hold the line at a certain level of compensation. After all, either the project is not important enough, or the money needs to go to others, not the programmers. Even some of the "benefits" that we get are down right silly. I don't enjoy going to a baseball game or other parties, so its just not a "reward" for me. Maybe it is good for 60% of the team members, but the remaining 40% of us feel as if we are going through the motions of having a good time.
What made America great was the ability to buy cheap goods from abroad. As soon at phones cost three times what they do, people will cut back on them.
I thought that this was the country of freedom!
I thought this was the country of the free.
When I started out as a programmer, you never wanted to be anyone's beta tester. Now, people give up their free time to do so!
I think that some of this is linked to our expectations with stocks. We have seen wild speculation in the market, so we want to get into the game! BitCoin has had the wildest ride, so many people think that the can grab it as it is going up and sell before it crashes. Is this really any different than oil companies competing against Standard Oil. All other competitors were driven to bankruptcy, they think that this drive to bankruptcy is part of the process, they just think that than can sell before everyone else does.
About 20 years ago, jewwatch was in the top 3 listings when searching for jews on yahoo search, due to the way that links were created. Too many people got upset, so things were patched to prevent this, by adding code to explicitly prevent this.
Well, extracting ores from the moon is lucrative, but it is expensive getting them out of the moon's gravitational well. It probably will be more economical to mine the asteroids instead. Yes, there are probably international treaties preventing this currently, but I doubt that they are enforceable, compared to the economical motivation of pursing them.
While as organs cannot be sold, the system can be rigged. Steve Jobs got access to a transplant. He also "bought a house that his doctor was selling" in order to establish residence. At UCLA, a Japanese mobster go access to a transplant. While as it cannot be proved that he bribed people to get access, it certainly raises suspicion. If some Arab pulled the same stunt, it would be an issue.
Weinstein pays Israel intelligence to hack stories by former rape victims and their stories, but hey, money talks and shit walks.
Well, AI is huge field, just like mathematics or computer science. Just because you are an expert in your subdomain within AI doesn't mean that you are better than average in another domain. Right now, we are seeing an explosion of research and techniques in AI, so even a field in which you might be an expert is growing so rapidly that you might find yourself falling behind. At best, you might claim to be an expert in some sub-subdomain. The other question is what qualifies as an expert? There seems to be no objective way to measure that self identification label. Oftentimes, I find that many average people overrate themselves on their ability. Its usually the people who know more than their counterpart are humble enough to know that they don't know enough as they have met people who put themselves into perspective. Sort of like the MBA who claims to know programming [probably because he read an InfoWeek article on the can an hour ago], yet can't do squat if really put to the test, knowing full well that he won't be put to the test. And, as the other authors pointed out, there is a point of having things behave as components and focusing on using black boxes without being overly concerned about the inside details. Moreover, as this is a growing field, there is going to be change and churn inside the black box.
Whenever I have problems, I consult my Haitian Lugaru. Yes, sometime she is wrong, but doesn't charge as much as the certified quacks I do see.
Neil Tyson Degrasse said that the thing that started him the most during his career, the US went from being the world leader in particle physics (1980) to a has been contender. I was at Stony Brook at that time, so there was a lot of discussion about Isabelle (the bid on the next gen super collider competing against CERN), later known as Wasabelle, Now, Google and Apple will dominate the patents (on technology which is twice as old as the company) in their industry, but serve to starve the industry in legal dispute.
After 9/11, I was listening to a interview with Rudy Giuliani. He made a joke, that while as some other countries might have the best engineers, America has the best Madison Avenue. He was referring to the propaganda pipeline, and how the US worked hard to make itself hear around the world and exerts its influence globally. /hr, but with the changes in the economy, prices skyrocketed because the economy was opened up to the West (shook capitalism, it was called).
Probably the biggest source of propaganda came during the 2007 TARP. If the American people did not bail out the banks who had been holding CMOs, the economy would be devastated. All the wrong people would have the money, so the richest 1% had to work hard to maintain the status quo.
I remember hearing [re-]broadcasts by Ronald Reagan via "Voice of America" broadcast into Afghanistan in the 1970's. He went off the deep end and talked about how there are plenty of jobs for Afghan defectors. This was such bullshit, as there were lots of unemployed Americans, so I just didn't understand how shit like this would be believed (by the East). Apparently, it was reasonably successful, for the amount of descent it would cause. Similarly, most of the strikes in Gdansk Poland were strongly influenced by the US, with the help of the catholic church. All sorts of nonsense was promised to the workers in the shipyards, most ironically, that they would get Western wages if they broke away from the Eastern block. After the bankruptcy of the Gdansk shipyards and the fall of the Soviet Union, "Johnson and Johnson" negotiated purchasing the shipyards. The workers were getting around $.25/hour before the changes and managed to get $.50
Good thing that you pointed this out..
Someone should set a bail out limit of $1M per bank. I'm sure that they'd find a way around that.
Are there any waterbears on the moon waiting to spawn when there is enough O2?
What do you say about a society that spends more money on Viagra subsidies than on brain research? Soon, we will have nursing homes full of honey old men with no idea of what to do?
What do you say about a society that spends more money on viagra subsidies and on brain research? Soon, we will have nursing homes full of honey old men with no idea of what to do?
Unfortunately, the hard part of programming is tightening up the requirements to exactly specify what is to be done. Most issues occur when there is a gap between what is specified and what is intended. While as simple tasks might be obvious, it does not translate for complicated tasks. Now in a complicated business environment, there are many ways to doing things. The worst ones are those that look right, but are not. Moreover, what is coded is subject to refinement and iteration. This is hard between people, so a machine might do what is asked but not what is wanted. Software developers make a lot of choices based on implicit requirements, many of which are not explicitly stated, just understood.
The biggest use of AI will be in keeping track of dissidence.
As brought out in an earlier SD article, Facebook, Twitter and others turn over photos and postings of people over to the police. This is great for data-mining and record keeping. Add to this the fact that most of our cloths and merchandise have RFID anti-shop-lifting tags, it is easy to trace you based on you passing through shopping checkouts and video surveillance. Even if you decide to yank off every RFID tag and avoid video cameras and a cell phone, most of your friends will not, and call you a tin-foil hat alarmist. "1984" was only off by a couple of years. As long as things are going well, most people's liberties are not strongly infringed. However, just in case things fall apart, the powers that be want to stay in charge. Just look at how successful was the Co-Intel program in the 1970s when it looked as if student and Black demonstrators got carried away. America does not want to pay reparations to Blacks and Indians, that is just for the Germans towards the Jews.
We laugh at the Soviet and their obsessive security system, but it arose because the Soviet Union was scared of collapsing from within and took measures to control what they could.
Just as in pharmaceutics, where most of the research comes from public grants and then successful drug research is taken over by private industry, AI and robotics has been largely developed with government grants funded by the tax payer.
The same thing also happened with space exploration. Most of the research and development came from the general public. I will say that the major reason that the US went to the moon was to explore its mineral content. This was outright stated by the astronauts, as they got the equivalent of a M. Sc. in geology. Had there been sufficient supply of exotic minerals, the industry would have been taken over by private forces. It just that the tax payer had to front the initial investment. Worse, maybe we'd find out that the distribution of resources was such that there was not much worth pursuing on the moon. Well, you would not want companies to take that sort of loss would you.
So, most of us paid to develop AI, so that it could be used by corporations to make a bigger profit, and we can go pay the bill.
Unless of course you think that the government is undemocratic, corrupt and repressive. Let's face it, the government tries to suppress dissent and marginalizes those not in power.
If I remember correctly from an article in Starlog in 1979, at .1c, interstellar hydrogen will create enough stress on a vessel made of a block of diamond to break it apart.