Oh hello Soulskill, nice to see you in the comments.
Unfortunately "last few days are hectic" isn't remotely close to right. Last Few Years, if you wheeled out that excuse. But no, don't do that either. "Last Few X is Hectic" is a tired phrase now that Big Bad Dice owns you and you have lots of firepower to add!
Uh... oh. Wait. I just heard 3rd hand they just decided both you AND us are... worth zero!
So what exactly are any of us here doing with a value of Zero? Can you buy them out with a Dollar? (Rhetoric, Wall Street Shenanigans may apply.)
I'll leave the extended comedy routines to others. X of us see a value in a quiet eddy current called Slashdot. Since your value is officially zero, why again exactly are you going with Beta?
Plus, I asked months/a year ago about exporting existing comments out of Slashdot but you/They made sure that was never close to a possibility... really now? Data Capture? I calculate I have almost 100 blog topics stored in raw material here. But no. You gang NEVER made ANY easy export tools under ANY management even BEFORE Dice.
So I'm not going all Swearword-Beta. I'm attacking different problems. But still unhappy.
There's a softer version of the same effect... "drifting away from Slashdot".
"Boycotting" implies passion and anger and attempts to save something.
But perhaps folks such as I will simply silently-but-surprisingly-quickly just fade away when it becomes unreadable, and reinvest the newly found time to more offline pursuits.
Maybe the analogy is Coke vs NewCoke. I wasn't around to know if there were passionate boycotts... but my vague history of it all was closer to my attempt to describe "yuck, so I won't buy it".
Maybe a year off might be good for perspective, like an old short story called "the very slow time machine". I can see what MS's new tech oriented CEO is beginning to evolve for Windows 9, which might be near Beta by that point. Obama would be winding down on his last big initiative, whatever that becomes. The early shape of the 2016 Pres race should be clearer. "The Aftermath of Edward Snowden" might be clearer. A few cool rulings by smart judges. A few horrible ones that enrage the tech community.
And then a year into Beta... a year is long enough for the inertia and nostalgia to fade away... so Dice will either have realized its evil plans with... uh... the "goodwill and intangible benefits" they just wrote down to zero... or if as a few people are beginning to explore, if we *FINALLY* produce a successor to Slashdot, then we'll all just go there.
Heh come on, y'all are programmers - What would a *Near-Perfect* Slashdot look like, UI Wise? I'd LOVE for someone to do a mockup, even if it has some capacity issues - just for us to show *ourselves* what "Listening" means. We can solve the "staffing and picking stories" later - just do a mockup with ten stories, just so we can have the true answer to the Beta abomination!
My quick suggestions:
1. I have never ever used the left sidebar of
Stories
Submissions
Popular
Blog...
So I'm happy if that gets hidden behind a special menu.
2. I don't use the right side boxes for very much.
3. Make comments "Level 1 2 3 4" and then the sideways space usage becomes much better.
I didn't know they were censoring stuff at this level!
Forget the layout etc, is THIS the real problem - that the site that once allowed absolutely everything to be posted (except Scientology), under the heavy reliance on the -1 mod system, and posts "YourRightsOnline" stories all week, is now censoring posts just because they don't like them??!
I should make the Dice annual report about "Slashdot value on the books being reduced to zero" into MY new sig!
1. I've been 75% okay with the topic-mix even in the new "bad period". My big peeve is about source validity; 75% of what Nick Kolakowski posts is indeed business news. I just get grumpy with him calling it "Nerval's Lobster" hoping newbies will think it's an unbiased story, rather than "Slashdot Senior Editor Nick Kolakowski reports..."
2. Tone. Something has definitely gotten darker holistically since the "Linux on Desktop" days of 2006. I'm riding out WinXP, maybe moving to Win7 and later maybe even Win9 if they in fact fix it with that new CEO at Microsoft. But I've kinda given up on Linux. Awesome philosophy, really hard in the details.
3. How do you avoid mediocrity? Echoing a user elsewhere, Slashdot purposely refused to allow a bulk download of user contributions. I once thought of making a blog out of my comments, but got bogged down in a manual scrape. So if you re-invent wheels, a comment-download would be much appreciated!
After all, in 2004 I had no idea that faceless Dice.com would own Slashdot in 2014!
"Be careful of what you invoke - you might get it!"
On top of my page today:
"MOVINâ(TM) ON UP. You are on Slashdot Classic. We are starting to move into new digs in February by automatically redirecting greater numbers of you. The new site is a work in progress so Classic Slashdot will be available from the footer for several more months. As we migrate our audience, we want to hear from you to make sure that the redesigned page has all the features you expect. Find out more."
Fresh into returning to the field of Tax Prep, maybe there was a potential other angle of this, and I look forward to anyone chiming in about this. But what if you fight the "grumpy dog" (Child Svc) with a Grumpier Dog? (IRS)!?
When you file/filed your taxes, even though maybe you're smart enough to usually do stuff yourself, go to a really good tax prep service on purpose and then file your return. The Claiming rules from the IRS have pretty fierce residency duration checks. The point here is not about the tax effects, it's to use the preparer's credentials (and file with an Enrolled Agent etc) who can aggressively back up your case from day one.
So then when it bounces around at the Child Svc level, that "Phone Call" would go to an IRS rep back to Child Svc of the state.
I had a chance to log in and remotely look at a buddy's Win 8 system.
The big problem I noticed was all those tiles there that I would never ever use. "Photos, Facebook, Gmail, Other Social Media, Calendar, Contacts,..." and I can't remember the other 20.
Holistically it's that all those things are dumped there, vs in the old days I use my desktop space for what *I* want there.
Well, there's at least two - Adblock Plus and Adblock Edge, which is a fork. So it would take a few more dollars to both buy them both AND re-license it with a mean lawyer who takes out the forking permission rights!
A comment from someone who just was learning about computers then, so take this with some salt...
One basic problem about Windows Me is that its timing was wrong. We all heard about the crash happenings of Win 95. Win 98 was a decent effort at least to tidy all that up. Not perfect, but you could see that someone tried. My first comp I learned on was Win 98.
The problem was, behind the scenes someone started a "skunkworks" second dev track based on the Win NT line that was at that time much more stable. Then they managed to get hold of the legendary Dave Cutler who poured himself into it all, and basically stamped the Win 2000, which when tweaked, became the Win XP that we all argue about today.
Win Me was a last left over holdover from the Win 98 codebase without all that extra hardening in, so it ran up against too many things that had been solved on the other dev track from Win 2000 / Win XP.
"AmEx isn't one of the big 2, and they charge the most of anyone."
However, if I chime my voice in as "just one from the average streetgoer", American Express has made its name in infamy as the card many businesses don't accept! (Because of those higher fees.)
So to be sure someone has held a few meetings over at AmEx, and decided losing those smaller accounts aren't worth whatever other clout they have among the executive set.
In contrast, I can't think of any tangible difference to me between Visa and Mastercard.
Real AI absolutely has both "Big Data" and some surprising small data attributes.
The early stumbling block was the old question of how an 8 year old can know that you eat an apple the apple sits on the table, and you don't eat the table. Then you *can* write on both the table and the apple with a ball point pen, but your Mother would be upset if you wrote on the table, and your Doctor would be upset if you wrote on the apple, ate it, reacted to the ink, then got sick.
So there are these branching use cases, but they do in fact have a finite (but large) ending.
But those guys didn't have "today's resources". And apparently, not "Today's Money". What I take away from this story is that via the "expert apps", AI is becoming possible, and the Singularity *will* happen, When-Not-If.
A devastating case example is the low tier workers in places like McDonalds. The "people app" isn't that hard... any competent programmer could get close within four tries at the basic duty set. The only missing equation is that people have low level abilities like walking and (not often) dropping things, so then you just train them for a week and they can do it. To get a fleet of Robots is such a huge sunk cost, but that's the only equation.
Jeopardy was a tougher challenge than most people realize, because it was about obfuscated and obscured knowledge. So if the program can parse that, it can parse more direct English as a piece of cake, sometimes.
"In Manhattan where slices are sold for a dollar. The exhibit to be provided separately contains the ratings of 48 such pizza stores. Only you can know if your precise pizza preference differs from the public rating."
We have a nice discussion going, but I think you missed both of my points.
"Once you have standardized page size and other challenges inherent with POD, you might as well just be downloading an e-book. Cost may be an issue for e-readers today, but you already can get some pretty damn cheap e-readers if you are willing to buy something other than the big name brands. So if you are talking about the future of books, not just trends over the next 5-10 years, it is most likely going to be incredibly cheap color e-ink tablets that most books are read from."
I think you mixed up the nouns of who is doing what. A. Harvard Book Store (in discussion with the Rights Holders) has this same big databank of the digital files. But instead of a e-reader file, it's a POD machine file.
B. Me. *I* am not the one standardizing page files! And there are no challenges! Here, one min, lemme go to my shelf with the prototype books. I have here:
"The outlines of Mahayana Buddhism" 7x4.5 inches, 410 pages.
and "An Introduction to Mahayana Buddhism". 8.5 X 5.5 inches, 230 pages.
Each cost about $5. I get all that old time feel of having a physical reference, including turning down page corners and making pencil notes. And I just walked in, paid the cashier, and walked out with them an hour later. So no problems for me at all!
"They are for highly specialized content and for reference information that has not yet been posted online (which is more and more rare as the years go on)." All non-fiction content is highly specialized! A good non-fiction author too his/her time and created the info flow to demonstrate a larger premise. Not a single one of the 1000 ish books in my library can be duplicated *in the same order* online! Sure, with exhaustive work page by page you can begin to do it, but... that's the point of a book!
The whole point of POD is... on demand. You can bulk buy the 1000 books in digital format, then for the few you want in that old time format, you'd go down to your properly equipped store (theoretically *any* store!) and get your physical copy.
The tech has been here for half a decade. A little bit of sunk cost for the machine. But paper wise it might be as low as $2 a copy in raw costs. But the publishers are fighting it.
I completely disagree that the internet is a "better source". It's a stunning *complementary source*. But books (medium, to be discussed later) are the exclusive domain of a ton of "long form content" with certain types of structure that don't really exist per se in the internet.
The big elephant in the room I still don't see really taken seriously is... Print On Demand.
Clearly if someone has the digital file en masse for these kinds of e-libraries, then it's "not hard" to POD it. Then people could get their cumulative favorite 100 "tree books", but the library doesn't have to stock the massive 30,000 item collection with Long Tail problems.
POD is here. *Five years ago* the Hardvard book store had a prototype (cover art rights issues, sure) that produced books as solid as anything done by the pros "in about an hour".
But I'm amazed that no one is constructively talking about POD in these "future of books" discussions, even at the risk on the store side of the big chains folding. (ProTip - why would I even order from amazon if I could get my copy in my hand at lunch?)
"Brooding over existential issues is a pastime largely confined to the better off (it's hard to worry about the meaning of life when you're more worried about getting enough food to eat)."
I'm not sure this is true. Brooding is a Smart Person's activity. So for example with a junky job for example at the bottle factory I worked at in college, you had plenty of time to brood - all day every day! That's because you just packed boxes with empty gatorade boxes in the same pattern all eight hours a day.
"GEB (Score:4, Interesting) by gbjbaanb (229885) on Wednesday January 01, 2014 @05:28PM (#45840105)
GÃfdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid [goodreads.com]
Godel, Escher, Bach is not a simple read. The ideas are complex and the logic subtle. But it is a completely satisfying book, and reading it is one of those rare experiences when you leave feeling smarter than when you started.
its true, though I felt like a complete simpleton after reading it - its an awesome piece of writing. Its not something to read casually though, you're gonna have to think, a lot."
Let's see if I can do an homage to that funky book. 4 3 2 1 3 2 2 6 2 4 5 4. The sentence I will write in my next post is true. The one I wrote in my last post wants to be true.... Nah. It's been too long since I read it to do it right. : (
There's a bit of an idea here about "sunk costs" etc getting equipment past the Earth Gravity well. After that it's rather simple "relatively" to stockpile food. Air is a bit of the trickier part. But let's say they figured that out.
What 75 years of (even bad) Scifi has taught us is that you need a ridiculous batch of skillsets to do Mars right, way worse than planting flags on the moon. So I totally don't get why "with a little more engineering" they're not sending a Terraform team of 50, and then they get to study Group Dynamics and all that jazz. As it is, the second the pilot catches some dormant flu they're hosed.
The Replicator is partially here, for Digital Entertainment. And look at the fight to the death for it!
We can forgive T.O.S. for a lot of things being the first, and "being far enough back" they had a lot of ground to break and computers were 3rd generation ENIACS with better hardware. But it's interesting that Next Generation takes place in an updated time (including the early 90's) when enough of the early future of computing was clear enough...... and they still missed the Digital Rights theme. (Or else were told by the studios not to feature it!!)
Meanwhile, we're half way there on the physical printing side. "Everything is a file", and you become limited only by the "quality" of your "Replicator". The early days, all they could do is fill cheap plastic molds so you could make toy models and stuff. But slowly the surprises are coming.
As a "Scale Model", that kind of thing could be an immense help for people like Indie Film-makers. Because a big limiting factor is props. Let's presuming the model car doors open, and you can get inside. Then it's 1982 Atari all over again, and you can just add CGI to the Windshield area to look like you are driving somewhere in your Porsche. Then you get out and go back to your film.
Or, as the homage itself,... just print the props for a SciFi show!
You can "visit it" any time you like, thus to ponder your idea above. Go to http://beta.slashdot.org/
At least twice it has been automatically "foisted" on me.
Down in an obscure place that's hard to see in the footer, there's a link to "Slashdot Classic". Here is the Link Location: http://slashdot.org/?nobeta=1
Meanwhile on phones, it sends up the Mobile Version, which is also pretty bad. But some sub browsers out there let you fiddle with the agent string to get back to Classic as well. (Though one of them gets chewed up trying to render the whole page.)
"Judges swearing oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights find it inconvenient to acknowledge the open-ended nature of the Bill of Rights (the 9th Amendment provides for unspecified rights retained by the people, the 10th Amendment for unspecified rights reserved to the people, thus requiring the government to NOT enforce any law that could reasonably be supposed to violate rights the people might want to assert, a check and balance over the system that many people overlook)."
Wow. To use the rhetorical flourish, "brainwashing is complete when you no longer even realize it"!
I'm pretty well aware of the emerging news under Amendments 1,4 and 5.
But it's time to re-write the reality of 9 and 10!
New #9: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the GOVERNMENT AND CORPORATIONS."
New #10: "The powers not delegated to the PEOPLE by the Constitution, or the States, are reserved to the United States, or the States."
(Executive Memo added: "A Reason must be given each time a Right of the People is granted to the Governments. The current Reasons are Preventing Terrorism, Protecting Children, and various alternates.")
All the battlegrounds over the lower amendments can be viewed in light of usurping #9 and #10! Yikes!
So far #3 hasn't been subjected to the wholesale assault yet...
I'll reply to you just so you see it because the other fella was AC.
Another incentive is that slowly we begin to roughly notice each other. It's the same "1000 posters" in all the threads, any 60-130 +/- 17. I'll leave that to my statistical betters, but slowly you begin to notice the "regulars", confirmed by checking the id's, vs the scores of newer accounts.
The surprising thing is we have magically resisted the urge to create a downloadable database of our comments - nothing could be conceptually easier. But we sorta let "bygones be bygones" once or twice. Like the day I thought I was Teh $hit creating a Book Cypher. (But which would have still been beyond 91% of people here to break.)
We can gripe where the "magic cutoff is", but both of us are Under -1Mil in our ID, you're ahead of me, I'm guessing July 2002 or something when you joined.
The other annoying thing according to help is there's no interface to auto-bulk download our comments here because I have at least 700 Blog topics in my cumulative comments here, but one project to hand harvest them just died out.
But no, joining in January 2014 with an ID like 3142344 doesn't do anything for anyone anymore. You have to have "been here".
(No lawn to get off of. Remember? We can't afford lawns. Just have a coffee on me.)
I set out years ago to build this "online brand" (my term for it). It's pretty solidly PG-13, maybe with a few comments straying into R. Now, PG-13 does include a few pointed words... but when it's a movie, we're all fine with it.
But overall the tone is pretty level - I try for a +1 Funny +1 Insightful spin.
"Not unconstitutional (very arguable in this case) != OK."
Absolutely incorrect.
One reason we get upset at a lot of *other* Supreme Court cases is because at that level the rules change. They sometimes let "smaller things" slide that feel unfair, including mistakes by courts, but then decide on "is X constitutional", say yes it is, then kick it back for re-do in the lower courts.
The very definition of what the S. C. does is decide if things are constitional, and if not, it is *NOT OKAY*. It's the highest level of Not-Okay in the land.
Now, there's plenty of arguing, but re-phrasing your partial point would go like: "There's nothing direct in the const. to cover this, but we feel it *does not violate the spirit*, so it's Okay." There's been some pretty bad results there, to be sure. But by definition the S. C. picks which of its two stamps it wants to bang on the motion.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh hello Soulskill, nice to see you in the comments.
Unfortunately "last few days are hectic" isn't remotely close to right. Last Few Years, if you wheeled out that excuse. But no, don't do that either. "Last Few X is Hectic" is a tired phrase now that Big Bad Dice owns you and you have lots of firepower to add!
Uh... oh. Wait. I just heard 3rd hand they just decided both you AND us are ... worth zero!
So what exactly are any of us here doing with a value of Zero? Can you buy them out with a Dollar? (Rhetoric, Wall Street Shenanigans may apply.)
I'll leave the extended comedy routines to others. X of us see a value in a quiet eddy current called Slashdot. Since your value is officially zero, why again exactly are you going with Beta?
Plus, I asked months/a year ago about exporting existing comments out of Slashdot but you/They made sure that was never close to a possibility... really now? Data Capture? I calculate I have almost 100 blog topics stored in raw material here. But no. You gang NEVER made ANY easy export tools under ANY management even BEFORE Dice.
So I'm not going all Swearword-Beta. I'm attacking different problems. But still unhappy.
Yours,
--Tao
There's a softer version of the same effect ... "drifting away from Slashdot".
"Boycotting" implies passion and anger and attempts to save something.
But perhaps folks such as I will simply silently-but-surprisingly-quickly just fade away when it becomes unreadable, and reinvest the newly found time to more offline pursuits.
Maybe the analogy is Coke vs NewCoke. I wasn't around to know if there were passionate boycotts ... but my vague history of it all was closer to my attempt to describe "yuck, so I won't buy it".
Maybe a year off might be good for perspective, like an old short story called "the very slow time machine". I can see what MS's new tech oriented CEO is beginning to evolve for Windows 9, which might be near Beta by that point. Obama would be winding down on his last big initiative, whatever that becomes. The early shape of the 2016 Pres race should be clearer. "The Aftermath of Edward Snowden" might be clearer. A few cool rulings by smart judges. A few horrible ones that enrage the tech community.
And then a year into Beta ... a year is long enough for the inertia and nostalgia to fade away... so Dice will either have realized its evil plans with ... uh ... the "goodwill and intangible benefits" they just wrote down to zero ... or if as a few people are beginning to explore, if we *FINALLY* produce a successor to Slashdot, then we'll all just go there.
Heh come on, y'all are programmers - What would a *Near-Perfect* Slashdot look like, UI Wise? I'd LOVE for someone to do a mockup, even if it has some capacity issues - just for us to show *ourselves* what "Listening" means. We can solve the "staffing and picking stories" later - just do a mockup with ten stories, just so we can have the true answer to the Beta abomination!
My quick suggestions:
1. I have never ever used the left sidebar of
Stories ...
Submissions
Popular
Blog
So I'm happy if that gets hidden behind a special menu.
2. I don't use the right side boxes for very much.
3. Make comments "Level 1 2 3 4" and then the sideways space usage becomes much better.
Okay gang, see ya less for a while!
--Tao
Uh oh,
I didn't know they were censoring stuff at this level!
Forget the layout etc, is THIS the real problem - that the site that once allowed absolutely everything to be posted (except Scientology), under the heavy reliance on the -1 mod system, and posts "YourRightsOnline" stories all week, is now censoring posts just because they don't like them??!
I should make the Dice annual report about "Slashdot value on the books being reduced to zero" into MY new sig!
1. I've been 75% okay with the topic-mix even in the new "bad period". My big peeve is about source validity; 75% of what Nick Kolakowski posts is indeed business news. I just get grumpy with him calling it "Nerval's Lobster" hoping newbies will think it's an unbiased story, rather than "Slashdot Senior Editor Nick Kolakowski reports..."
2. Tone. Something has definitely gotten darker holistically since the "Linux on Desktop" days of 2006. I'm riding out WinXP, maybe moving to Win7 and later maybe even Win9 if they in fact fix it with that new CEO at Microsoft. But I've kinda given up on Linux. Awesome philosophy, really hard in the details.
3. How do you avoid mediocrity? Echoing a user elsewhere, Slashdot purposely refused to allow a bulk download of user contributions. I once thought of making a blog out of my comments, but got bogged down in a manual scrape. So if you re-invent wheels, a comment-download would be much appreciated!
After all, in 2004 I had no idea that faceless Dice.com would own Slashdot in 2014!
"Be careful of what you invoke - you might get it!"
On top of my page today:
"MOVINâ(TM) ON UP. You are on Slashdot Classic. We are starting to move into new digs in February by automatically redirecting greater numbers of you. The new site is a work in progress so Classic Slashdot will be available from the footer for several more months. As we migrate our audience, we want to hear from you to make sure that the redesigned page has all the features you expect. Find out more."
(one of) the other concerns is Police Work as Social Media Gamification.
It's like Ender's Game - They can turn it into some kind of dehumanized gamification contest, whereas until now people had a bit of slack leeway.
Fresh into returning to the field of Tax Prep, maybe there was a potential other angle of this, and I look forward to anyone chiming in about this. But what if you fight the "grumpy dog" (Child Svc) with a Grumpier Dog? (IRS)!?
When you file/filed your taxes, even though maybe you're smart enough to usually do stuff yourself, go to a really good tax prep service on purpose and then file your return. The Claiming rules from the IRS have pretty fierce residency duration checks. The point here is not about the tax effects, it's to use the preparer's credentials (and file with an Enrolled Agent etc) who can aggressively back up your case from day one.
So then when it bounces around at the Child Svc level, that "Phone Call" would go to an IRS rep back to Child Svc of the state.
Not an easy path to take but it might work.
I had a chance to log in and remotely look at a buddy's Win 8 system.
The big problem I noticed was all those tiles there that I would never ever use. "Photos, Facebook, Gmail, Other Social Media, Calendar, Contacts, ..." and I can't remember the other 20.
Holistically it's that all those things are dumped there, vs in the old days I use my desktop space for what *I* want there.
Well, there's at least two - Adblock Plus and Adblock Edge, which is a fork. So it would take a few more dollars to both buy them both AND re-license it with a mean lawyer who takes out the forking permission rights!
Hallo,
A comment from someone who just was learning about computers then, so take this with some salt...
One basic problem about Windows Me is that its timing was wrong. We all heard about the crash happenings of Win 95. Win 98 was a decent effort at least to tidy all that up. Not perfect, but you could see that someone tried. My first comp I learned on was Win 98.
The problem was, behind the scenes someone started a "skunkworks" second dev track based on the Win NT line that was at that time much more stable. Then they managed to get hold of the legendary Dave Cutler who poured himself into it all, and basically stamped the Win 2000, which when tweaked, became the Win XP that we all argue about today.
Win Me was a last left over holdover from the Win 98 codebase without all that extra hardening in, so it ran up against too many things that had been solved on the other dev track from Win 2000 / Win XP.
"AmEx isn't one of the big 2, and they charge the most of anyone."
However, if I chime my voice in as "just one from the average streetgoer", American Express has made its name in infamy as the card many businesses don't accept! (Because of those higher fees.)
So to be sure someone has held a few meetings over at AmEx, and decided losing those smaller accounts aren't worth whatever other clout they have among the executive set.
In contrast, I can't think of any tangible difference to me between Visa and Mastercard.
Real AI absolutely has both "Big Data" and some surprising small data attributes.
The early stumbling block was the old question of how an 8 year old can know that you eat an apple the apple sits on the table, and you don't eat the table. Then you *can* write on both the table and the apple with a ball point pen, but your Mother would be upset if you wrote on the table, and your Doctor would be upset if you wrote on the apple, ate it, reacted to the ink, then got sick.
So there are these branching use cases, but they do in fact have a finite (but large) ending.
But those guys didn't have "today's resources". And apparently, not "Today's Money". What I take away from this story is that via the "expert apps", AI is becoming possible, and the Singularity *will* happen, When-Not-If.
A devastating case example is the low tier workers in places like McDonalds. The "people app" isn't that hard... any competent programmer could get close within four tries at the basic duty set. The only missing equation is that people have low level abilities like walking and (not often) dropping things, so then you just train them for a week and they can do it. To get a fleet of Robots is such a huge sunk cost, but that's the only equation.
Jeopardy was a tougher challenge than most people realize, because it was about obfuscated and obscured knowledge. So if the program can parse that, it can parse more direct English as a piece of cake, sometimes.
"In Manhattan where slices are sold for a dollar. The exhibit to be provided separately contains the ratings of 48 such pizza stores. Only you can know if your precise pizza preference differs from the public rating."
We have a nice discussion going, but I think you missed both of my points.
"Once you have standardized page size and other challenges inherent with POD, you might as well just be downloading an e-book. Cost may be an issue for e-readers today, but you already can get some pretty damn cheap e-readers if you are willing to buy something other than the big name brands. So if you are talking about the future of books, not just trends over the next 5-10 years, it is most likely going to be incredibly cheap color e-ink tablets that most books are read from."
I think you mixed up the nouns of who is doing what.
A. Harvard Book Store (in discussion with the Rights Holders) has this same big databank of the digital files. But instead of a e-reader file, it's a POD machine file.
B. Me. *I* am not the one standardizing page files! And there are no challenges! Here, one min, lemme go to my shelf with the prototype books. I have here:
"The outlines of Mahayana Buddhism" 7x4.5 inches, 410 pages.
and "An Introduction to Mahayana Buddhism". 8.5 X 5.5 inches, 230 pages.
Each cost about $5. I get all that old time feel of having a physical reference, including turning down page corners and making pencil notes. And I just walked in, paid the cashier, and walked out with them an hour later. So no problems for me at all!
"They are for highly specialized content and for reference information that has not yet been posted online (which is more and more rare as the years go on)." All non-fiction content is highly specialized! A good non-fiction author too his/her time and created the info flow to demonstrate a larger premise. Not a single one of the 1000 ish books in my library can be duplicated *in the same order* online! Sure, with exhaustive work page by page you can begin to do it, but ... that's the point of a book!
The whole point of POD is ... on demand. You can bulk buy the 1000 books in digital format, then for the few you want in that old time format, you'd go down to your properly equipped store (theoretically *any* store!) and get your physical copy.
The tech has been here for half a decade. A little bit of sunk cost for the machine. But paper wise it might be as low as $2 a copy in raw costs. But the publishers are fighting it.
Okay, time to bring up a new topic.
I completely disagree that the internet is a "better source". It's a stunning *complementary source*. But books (medium, to be discussed later) are the exclusive domain of a ton of "long form content" with certain types of structure that don't really exist per se in the internet.
The big elephant in the room I still don't see really taken seriously is ... Print On Demand.
Clearly if someone has the digital file en masse for these kinds of e-libraries, then it's "not hard" to POD it. Then people could get their cumulative favorite 100 "tree books", but the library doesn't have to stock the massive 30,000 item collection with Long Tail problems.
POD is here. *Five years ago* the Hardvard book store had a prototype (cover art rights issues, sure) that produced books as solid as anything done by the pros "in about an hour".
But I'm amazed that no one is constructively talking about POD in these "future of books" discussions, even at the risk on the store side of the big chains folding. (ProTip - why would I even order from amazon if I could get my copy in my hand at lunch?)
"Brooding over existential issues is a pastime largely confined to the better off (it's hard to worry about the meaning of life when you're more worried about getting enough food to eat)."
I'm not sure this is true. Brooding is a Smart Person's activity. So for example with a junky job for example at the bottle factory I worked at in college, you had plenty of time to brood - all day every day! That's because you just packed boxes with empty gatorade boxes in the same pattern all eight hours a day.
"GEB (Score:4, Interesting)
by gbjbaanb (229885) on Wednesday January 01, 2014 @05:28PM (#45840105)
GÃfdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid [goodreads.com]
Godel, Escher, Bach is not a simple read. The ideas are complex and the logic subtle. But it is a completely satisfying book, and reading it is one of those rare experiences when you leave feeling smarter than when you started.
its true, though I felt like a complete simpleton after reading it - its an awesome piece of writing. Its not something to read casually though, you're gonna have to think, a lot."
Let's see if I can do an homage to that funky book. ... Nah. It's been too long since I read it to do it right. : (
4 3 2 1 3 2 2 6 2 4 5 4.
The sentence I will write in my next post is true. The one I wrote in my last post wants to be true.
This is the basic idea.
There's a bit of an idea here about "sunk costs" etc getting equipment past the Earth Gravity well. After that it's rather simple "relatively" to stockpile food. Air is a bit of the trickier part. But let's say they figured that out.
What 75 years of (even bad) Scifi has taught us is that you need a ridiculous batch of skillsets to do Mars right, way worse than planting flags on the moon. So I totally don't get why "with a little more engineering" they're not sending a Terraform team of 50, and then they get to study Group Dynamics and all that jazz. As it is, the second the pilot catches some dormant flu they're hosed.
The Replicator is partially here, for Digital Entertainment. And look at the fight to the death for it!
We can forgive T.O.S. for a lot of things being the first, and "being far enough back" they had a lot of ground to break and computers were 3rd generation ENIACS with better hardware. But it's interesting that Next Generation takes place in an updated time (including the early 90's) when enough of the early future of computing was clear enough ... ... and they still missed the Digital Rights theme. (Or else were told by the studios not to feature it!!)
Meanwhile, we're half way there on the physical printing side. "Everything is a file", and you become limited only by the "quality" of your "Replicator". The early days, all they could do is fill cheap plastic molds so you could make toy models and stuff. But slowly the surprises are coming.
Porsche Provides 3D Printer Blueprints for Scale Model Cayman
http://wot.motortrend.com/1312_porsche_provides_3d_printer_blueprints_for_scale_model_cayman.html
As a "Scale Model", that kind of thing could be an immense help for people like Indie Film-makers. Because a big limiting factor is props. Let's presuming the model car doors open, and you can get inside. Then it's 1982 Atari all over again, and you can just add CGI to the Windshield area to look like you are driving somewhere in your Porsche. Then you get out and go back to your film.
Or, as the homage itself, ... just print the props for a SciFi show!
So it's coming.
Beta Hath Been Foisted.
You can "visit it" any time you like, thus to ponder your idea above. Go to
http://beta.slashdot.org/
At least twice it has been automatically "foisted" on me.
Down in an obscure place that's hard to see in the footer, there's a link to "Slashdot Classic". Here is the Link Location:
http://slashdot.org/?nobeta=1
Meanwhile on phones, it sends up the Mobile Version, which is also pretty bad. But some sub browsers out there let you fiddle with the agent string to get back to Classic as well. (Though one of them gets chewed up trying to render the whole page.)
"Judges swearing oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights find it inconvenient to acknowledge the open-ended nature of the Bill of Rights (the 9th Amendment provides for unspecified rights retained by the people, the 10th Amendment for unspecified rights reserved to the people, thus requiring the government to NOT enforce any law that could reasonably be supposed to violate rights the people might want to assert, a check and balance over the system that many people overlook)."
Wow. To use the rhetorical flourish, "brainwashing is complete when you no longer even realize it"!
I'm pretty well aware of the emerging news under Amendments 1,4 and 5.
But it's time to re-write the reality of 9 and 10!
New #9: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the GOVERNMENT AND CORPORATIONS."
New #10: "The powers not delegated to the PEOPLE by the Constitution, or the States, are reserved to the United States, or the States."
(Executive Memo added: "A Reason must be given each time a Right of the People is granted to the Governments. The current Reasons are Preventing Terrorism, Protecting Children, and various alternates.")
All the battlegrounds over the lower amendments can be viewed in light of usurping #9 and #10! Yikes!
So far #3 hasn't been subjected to the wholesale assault yet ...
I'll reply to you just so you see it because the other fella was AC.
Another incentive is that slowly we begin to roughly notice each other. It's the same "1000 posters" in all the threads, any 60-130 +/- 17. I'll leave that to my statistical betters, but slowly you begin to notice the "regulars", confirmed by checking the id's, vs the scores of newer accounts.
The surprising thing is we have magically resisted the urge to create a downloadable database of our comments - nothing could be conceptually easier. But we sorta let "bygones be bygones" once or twice. Like the day I thought I was Teh $hit creating a Book Cypher. (But which would have still been beyond 91% of people here to break.)
We can gripe where the "magic cutoff is", but both of us are Under -1Mil in our ID, you're ahead of me, I'm guessing July 2002 or something when you joined.
The other annoying thing according to help is there's no interface to auto-bulk download our comments here because I have at least 700 Blog topics in my cumulative comments here, but one project to hand harvest them just died out.
But no, joining in January 2014 with an ID like 3142344 doesn't do anything for anyone anymore. You have to have "been here".
(No lawn to get off of. Remember? We can't afford lawns. Just have a coffee on me.)
There's a theme here that I haven't seen explored enough yet, of "auto post" vs "super-mod".
Gunnerkrigg Court and xkcd's comments come out pretty well. I forget what Randall M does for xkcd, but Gunnerkrigg Super-mods his.
But those kinds of things taken too far miss a bit of the refreshingly Low-R tone that Slashdot has developed over 15 years.
I try.
I set out years ago to build this "online brand" (my term for it). It's pretty solidly PG-13, maybe with a few comments straying into R. Now, PG-13 does include a few pointed words ... but when it's a movie, we're all fine with it.
But overall the tone is pretty level - I try for a +1 Funny +1 Insightful spin.
"Not unconstitutional (very arguable in this case) != OK."
Absolutely incorrect.
One reason we get upset at a lot of *other* Supreme Court cases is because at that level the rules change. They sometimes let "smaller things" slide that feel unfair, including mistakes by courts, but then decide on "is X constitutional", say yes it is, then kick it back for re-do in the lower courts.
The very definition of what the S. C. does is decide if things are constitional, and if not, it is *NOT OKAY*. It's the highest level of Not-Okay in the land.
Now, there's plenty of arguing, but re-phrasing your partial point would go like:
"There's nothing direct in the const. to cover this, but we feel it *does not violate the spirit*, so it's Okay." There's been some pretty bad results there, to be sure. But by definition the S. C. picks which of its two stamps it wants to bang on the motion.