The summary uses the most stilted possible working for the facts presented in the article. (In other words, the summary is accurate, it just has a much more accusatory tone. Also, the article is 2 pages printed: people can stop being lazy and just read it.)
But you, petry, are also putting on blinders. The D&D fireball is what WoW and Magic cribbed from, because it's the famous fireball. (And if by "the gods" you just mean Zeus, then yes, things were thrown: lightning, not fire.) D&D linked fireball and wizards in peoples' minds. Chainmail is the basis of D&D, and now we find Chainmail cribbed from another game, which is interesting. Nobody is trying to claim ownership or copyright or patent or whatever the people who only read the summary seem to believe. Certainly no one is looking for a settlement or royalty or free Arby's sandwich or whatever your feel angry about them "wanting".
Here are the facts:
* The mechanical roots of D&D are Chainmail. Chainmail's Fantasy appendix is more limited in scope to Tolkien than D&D would become. At one point Gygax called the Fantasy rules that became the most popular part of it, "an afterthought". Until now, the line of thought was that the wizard's fireball and lightning (the only spells they had in Chainmail) were respective fantasy versions of Medieval catapult and Napoleonic cannon rules. It is illuminating to find otherwise.
* The mechanics of the Fantasy appendix use similar terms, identical mechanics, and generally numbers within +/-1 of the rules of Patt. It's directly cribbed. The other author of Chainmail, Jeff Perren, is on the subscription list for the very issue where Patt's rules are printed. There's no real doubt.
* Gary Gygax did take from everything without attribution. In Dragon he presented aerial combat for D&D as "Battle in the Skies", never mentioning the rules are identical to those in Avalon Hill's "Fight in the Skies" board wargame. The thief class of later D&D was invented by Wagner of the Aero Hobbies crew and shared with Gygax by and Switzer of the same group: he later rolled his own version to market, but to many on the outside (and inside) it looked like he just stole it whole because there was no attribution. Pretty much the only time he did attribute is when he didn't want to type out the rules anew, such as when D&D refers the reader to Chainmail for combat rules and to the Outdoor Survival boardgame for overland journeys. This is how the hobby worked back then, and this friction is what happens when a friendly hobby becomes a real business.
In fairness to them, their strategy does make some sense. They are trying to support the mobile web, and the Australis design does do a better job of that on phones (where you want basically no interface at all). And extensions do break and destabilize things all the time. And once you acknowledge that, and note that the cross-platform interface structure Firefox is based on just flat does not work on adroid, it makes sense to get rid of that too. And once you acknowledge that, themes have to change pretty much every build anyway, so why even allow them that level of flexibility?
All their decisions have been perfectly reasonable, long-term decisions. Now, this is not to say that the ideas are good, because they sacrifice everything that made Firefox unique so that it can be the best possible also-ran browser. But I can at least see signs of thought.
So the response to a tool becoming unavailable is to make information about the tool unavailable? I appreciate that this is supposed to put some pressure on Jobb, and I enjoy petty acts of spite against nutjobs as much as the next guy. But this seems like it just further harms the tool users (and potential tool users), not so much Jobb.
I'm going to propose a more radical fix: we need to stop letting the DOM have reliable access to so damn much information.
When we started the move away from webpages and toward web applications, we let the DOM have access to pretty much everything, because applications are big and general and data-hungry: The DOM captures keystrokes so each website can have it's own controls and hotkeys (and which unintentionally lets a user be identified by keystroke dynamics). The DOM has access to blocks of offline memory so that applications can be stable offline or when infrequently connected (and which is another vector for super-cookie tracking). It has access to viewports and peripherals for responsive layouts (which is more data for a browser signature that can easily allow user activity to be correlated). CSS needs read access to layout colors if it's going to be changing them dynamically (which means that those colored as recently-visited by the browser are know, which allows for history-based signatures).
Hell, we still have to live with all the ancient tracking methods and features like HTTP referer [sic], cookies, and user agent strings. And even though the World Wide Web was meant to be extensible, fail gracefully wherever possible, and be tolerant or varying levels of technological support, most modern websites will go out of their way to detect that you are not 100% compliant with their demands, then tell you to play by their rules or get off the net. Usually this is couched in the language of "reasonable compatibility testing" or "consistent experience", but most such sites will work perfectly well once you spoof some parameter, thus proving it wasn't necessary after all (for example, Gmail after spoofing javascript). Some I can only believe are deliberately architectured to fail: static pages which could be served entirely as native HTML, but instead decided to have just enough HTML to call Javascript to do all the real work by manipulating DOM to insert HTML into a mostly-blank structure (looking at you, Board Game Geek).
The DOM has demanded every piece of data available to the browser in the name of ever more byzantine applications, even though all but an insignificant portion of the web is still consumed in a page-like way. You can use NoScript and set Opera/Firefox/Chrome preferences until your blue in the face, but you will never reduce your tracking cross-section while the standards bodies insist on pushing these very broad, demanding features in the standards themselves.
I'm reminded of one time back in high school when we were discussing a poem by Margaret Atwood. The English teacher mentioned as an aside, "who knows where Margaret Atwood is from," thinking it would be a good segue. Silence. "I'll give you a hint: she's writing in her native language."
"American?" - "No." "British?" - "No." "Australian" - "No." There was another pregnant silence and before I could hazard a guess on New Zealand, he gave up and said, "Canada! Margaret Atwood is perhaps the most famous Canadian poet!"
So help me, my thought at the time was actually, "Ohhh. Canada... they exist too."
The point of the story is, just because you speak English doesn't make it any more likely we'll remember that your country exists. Sorry, Canada. If it helps at all I'm in Texas, so you're not exactly foremost in our thoughts.
Most of my immediate neighbors are blonde, yet I still have no desire to dye my hair. What other people do amounts to squat from the American perspective. It only matters when you have a multinational company that wants to sell liters in the U.S.
And guess what: that's perfectly fine. They do it all the time. The U.S. standard AND metric. We buy milk by the gallon and soda by the liter. The supermarket sells bananas by the pound and drug dealers sell cocaine by the gram. Hell, two of my favorite bars serve completely different "pints" of beer. No one is confused because, frankly, there's not a lot of practical overlap to lead to confusion. No one compares milk to soda on a equal-volume basis. You just use whatever units you damn well feel like.
Confusion usually only reigns in technical fields. For example, a naval project may use miles, kilometers, and nautical miles all in the same bit of code. (And frankly, while it's a headache, we should be the most capable members of society when it comes to jumping through these hoops.) But for the the average person? It doesn't matter.
First, the headline is a "duh" headline. Of course the lure of robots is the ability to do without humans. That's the whole point -- the very defining characteristic -- of a robot. To automate complicated work.
Second, you assume an all-or-nothing future. That will not be the case. If you have a few more robots and a few more workers, you can drive unit prices down and pick up a few more customers, even without the recently dismissed human workers that can no longer afford to be those customers. That's true at every tier of production, from commodities to luxury goods. This drops the price of labor, and concentrates wages more in the (relatively) few jobs that can't yet be automated. What you see is further stratification of the economy, not collapse.
In your scenario, we're all too poor to be the economy going, and so the economy will never let us get to that point. In a more realistic scenario, a very large portion of the people are out of work, many more have dropped from middle- to lower-class, the wealthiest experience no change -- all while robot labor allows, say, 2/3 of the previous customer base to support the same level of profit for a given product.
10% unemployment is such an absurdly high number that it produces a lot of civil unrest when it actually happens. 30% unemployment would mean a complete re-structuring of society as we know it. The invisible hand proposes the stability of the market, not the stability of our place or our civilization's place in it.
It's especially sad to see this from an IEEE publication (even spectrum).
First, the major unifying concept in Maxwell's equation was the displacement current, a quantity for the changing field in a dielectric with units as current density. This answers the age-old question, "how do you have a current circuit when one part (a capacitor) is clearly 'broken' and not conducting?" Maxwell was the first to answer the question with a solid theory. So a better way to write the sentence you quote would be, "Maxwell’s equations explain how high-frequency flows of electrons in conductors generate electromagnetic waves, and they were also the very first to explain how an insulating material, where there is no flow of electrons, would also act in a circuit" Basic electromagnetics education fail.
Second and more to the topic: if we pretend that there is some sort of "magneto current carrier" (a magneton), then we can extend Maxwell's equations to cover a hypothetical magneto current. Pretty much any electric current-flow problem can be re-stated as a dual magneto current-flow problem. There are a lot of practical upshots to this -- such as making simulations that converge to answer much more quickly -- but the one most related to antennas is that you can demonstrate that the radiation of an antenna is related to the conduction gap between it's elements. For example, if you have a dipole antenna with elements separated by width d, then you can also model that as a "cigar band" (open cylindrical sheet) of magneto current. For a molopole, you might use a "washer" (flat cylindrical ring) of magneto current between the conducting element and the ground plane. This is not new. It's been used for decades. This is the shortcut to the concept that's been known for decades. You do not need recourse to any concepts in quantum mechanics.
I usually lean on the inverse-Godwin theorem: if I can't figure out some way to compare something to the Nazi's, Hitler, or the Holocaust, I probably shouldn't be that upset by it.
If you think "inane, stupid, and soul-crushing" ends at high school, you've been sheltered.
While the goal if college per se is not to churn out office drones, there is a lot of drone-ery to be done, and someone in college can do worse than to fall into one of those jobs. It's a good fallback plan for, say, the history major who just can't find in-field work. For those people, a college degree proves you can show up every day, do a task of moderate complexity, and meet deadlines reliably. That's also exactly what being anything other a straight C student demonstrates.
But most History and Philosophy and Liberal Arts departments around the country don't feel (or at least can hope) that they are training people who will stick with and contribute to the field. At that point, you can argue that you need some creative skills to break new ground. Unfortunately, opportunities for ground-breaking is foreseeably rare, and it's not going to be done if you don't have the necessary information and tools to create. Even a kid making a building-block tower needs to be given building blocks. They need students who are going to absorb that information and grow through participation. Which is exactly what C students have failed to do.
For other fields -- such as engineering -- where you can reasonably expect to get a job in the field, and then to flex your creativity once you're there, "innovation" means being basic competence, coupled with experience. Innovation as people imagine it today -- that the fruits of hard, long work can be cheated out through something cheaper and easier -- is a myth.
I would gladly concede that we need to do more to give our C students real options for becoming productive, prosperous members of society. I just don't think the rest of us are missing out for lack of their "creativity".
I'm curious what kind of cutting edge file management, load balancing, and slide-show-presenting needs are such a challenge that the OS needs to be above 1 GB. It doesn't take that much effort to support people who just want to scroll through thumbnails of their vacation photos. If you have an interesting program -- a 3D video game, a compiler, a simulator -- it will have its own minimum system requirements. And like those programs that have lower requirements, the OS generally scales up (to a point) in capability with better specs.
1) We recognize that Summer break was never meant to be time off (it's time when you needed all hands in the field and wouldn't have sent your kids to school anyway), and that do-nothing, responsibility-free childhoods are a rather recent human development. However, it's still healthy for kids to have to learn through play and be free to pursue things on their own. They need the break.
2) We recognize that the break puts a burden on parents to find activities, day care, or camps during the summer. However, it also provides a huge block of time for lengthy family vacations, which would otherwise be impossible to schedule, or even costlier because all kids get the same three week-long mini-breaks. This is good for the entire family's health and quality of life.
3) We recognize that other countries are lapping us in education. But we also have to recognize that that has nothing to do with time or money spent per student. We invest more per student than pretty much any other country, but we get worse results. That's because the fundamental changes to in teaching methods that we've made over the past 50 years have been for the worse, and other countries have made changes for the better.
4) No one wants to pay teachers for the nine months of work that they do already. More time means more cost, which no district's taxpayers are going to pay.
Ending Summer break is another costly distraction from the real problems: many teachers are unqualified for lack of training or materials, all teacher now teach mechanically to standardized tests which distract from the actual material, and many students are never going to achieve their full potential unless we first address some very hard, very real social problems first.
For developers, there are some times when the documentation SHOULD be larger than the code. The most important questions for many documentation efforts should be along the lines of "why did we choose this value" and "what values can this never be changed to without breaking something". The undocumented code must always be treated fragile, because it only gives you the final state of an engineering process. It doesn't convey any of the many small decisions that hemmed in that design. It gives you something that may work, but does not tell you how to build something that will work in the future if things change. If you give good documentation to a competent programmer, he can probably build something very close to the original program.
"documentation is bad everywhere" is one of those lies developers tell themselves to help them sleep at night. There are programs out there with outstanding documentation. (For example, as a grad student who had never toughed MatLab before I was easily able to teach myself in about a week by just scrolling through the help files.) It's just that those programs are rare, and almost none are FOSS.
This makes sense, because involvement in projects is voluntary, and contributors choose where to dole out their time. There are generally no "customers" with a carrot and stick to make the developers sweat about their failures and oversights. It makes sense that almost no one choose to spend time documenting. Even if they understand that it's a necessary pain, no one wants to be stuck doing in.
The solutions would have to be institutional. I can't think of a single OS project I've seen that had something like "decent documentation for new features" as a gating condition for a major release. That kind of cultural change is hard (and unlikely), but needs to be done if anything is to be accomplished. The only alternative is automated documentation, which doesn't really do anything more than re-state the source code in a different form. It's still only useful if the developers are religious about updating meta-code comments, which they never are.
Is there any circumstance where you think USA prosecutors should not be allowed to force foreign entities to hand over evidence without going through that country's legal system?
Sadly, if you have a brick and mortar presence and employees in a country, operating under the legal auspices of a corporation under the laws of that country, you probably don't have much right to claim to be a "foreign entity". A better example would be "if an Amsterdam tourist is suspected of trafficking drugs, and the DEA gets a warrant to search his hotel room in the U.S." That's still not an example of what we're talking about in the article, but it's a more accurate version of a "foreign entity operating in the U.S." than your example.
But this is how it already works. For example, China could say to Google "give us access to G-Mail or we'll just block it completely, may be even kick your company out". Then it's a game of chicken. But China does have the right under their laws to block G-Mail or ban Google, as well as to demand unreasonable things from resident companies as the price of doing business. Laws everywhere have always worked this way. This is not new.
Now the question: if (beyond a certain point) businesses really have no choice but to deal with corrupt regimes, and customers have no choice but to deal with businesses that deal with corrupt regimes, what protects consumers in one jurisdiction from corruption in another? The answer is competing laws. If China imposes harsh penalties for failing to do X, but the U.S. or Europe impose equally harsh penalties for doing X, then businesses torn between them actually have some refuge through ceded responsibility.
This is exactly how U.S. bribery laws work: "We would love grease your palms, great Poo-bah, but U.S. law says that if we do then we can't do business there, which would mean we also don't have business to do here, so please don't even ask." When there is risk of cross-corruption in the market, it is the government's responsibility to step in and throw up a wall.
(As a side note, this notion of ceded responsibility is why there are some industries that actually petition for _stronger_ regulations. For example, it's common in some parts for large arms dealers to have to "sweeten the pot" with government buyers by agreeing to pay for side projects, such as the construction of a hospital, as a condition of sale. This is a cost arms dealers would rather avoid, so they petitioned Congress for years to have such "gifts" declared a form of illegal bribery.)
California generally has immaculate consumer protection laws. A good number of those laws eliminate methods stores sue to lock money that could otherwise be taken elsewhere, or even strip money away without providing any services at all. For example, they were first to make it illegal to charge monthly fees on a gift card (which would eventually bring a card's worth down to nothing even if the owner never spent a dime of it's starting value).
Gift certificates and cash-like coupons like Starbuck's stars, Kohl's cash, and the like are fine as as an option, but I certainly wouldn't want to get them back in lieu of real cash if I, say, returned a purchase.
Sometimes California is a large enough market to drag the whole country along for the ride, and sometimes not. In this case, I think Californians will mostly be affected, ad the rest of the country will plow on as usual. Even so, we should all have a critical eye towards any reduction in consumer protections.
The line is drawn pretty clearly at psychological testing. Facebook did NOT test it's systems: it manipulated their systems to test the psychology of the population. This was not a usability study, or even a technical study, just a a psychological study. The deliberately skewed their results and monitored feedback with the intention of studying how their subjects (people, not devices) reacted.
In theory, there is a gray area where we might ask if something that might be ethical without technology is now somehow unethical (and vice versa). But that's not the case here. This case is blatant, deliberate, and callous.
It is common sense obvious. It is not common law obvious. Previous rulings on cell phones extended the findings for pagers, and the finding for pagers was that they were a container of information, like an address book, which can be searched like any other container during a stop or arrest.
There was obviously strain between previous rulings and reality, but that doesn't mean with any certainty that it was going to be corrected today by the Supreme Court. The court could have even further extended the previous cell phone findings, or even delivered a weaker test for whether the "container" can be searched. That makes this a rare, decisive, and unanimous(!) ruling from the court.
Back before the internet, it was common practice to put hard-coded admin passwords in documentation, in case anyone should forget the real password. In some industries (say, construction road signs) it just never occurred to them that anyone would ever care to look it up for a prank. In other industries, like ATMs, the assumption was that documentation was obscure and difficult to lay hands on without writing to a real person who then had to mail a manual to a real address of an existing customer.
The fact that they still do this is depressing, but doesn't surprise me in the least.
Saying that drone warfare is not particularly good at decapitating an institutional terrorist organization like Al Qaeda is missing the point. Or at least a key point. Drone warfare has made large scale terrorist training largely impossible. The boot camps and months long, practical courses in guerrilla warfare that used to be an Al Qaeda staple are now just very visible, attractive targets for drones. Drone warfare occasionally knocks out a head, but it really undermines the base.
In all force, there is some deterrence power. For some technologies, the deterrence is the whole point. For example, land mines aren't meant to be a good way to blow up people, they're meant to be a good way to prevent groups of people from traversing an area once you advertise that it's full of mines. Here, drones are useful for rapid, cheap attacks of opportunity... but the fact that they are almost always ready means long-term, open-air training camps are suicide.
Exactly. It was always a pretty bad idea. In fact, it reminds me a great deal of the RFC 3514 "evil bit"
Do-Not-Track is basically a "Don't be evil" bit. It makes a plea on behalf of the end user and the end user hopes some distant system honors it. Any time you implement some version of the evil bit, you should expect that it's not going to work.
(Then again, there are a lot of tech features in use now -- such as a PDF owner_pass edit lock, or phone service Caller ID blocking -- which are also based on "please keep private" bit, and those are effective for 98% of the people out there who are just to lazy to get around them. So maybe there's something to be said for an evil bit after all.)
Slashdot Mirror
The summary uses the most stilted possible working for the facts presented in the article. (In other words, the summary is accurate, it just has a much more accusatory tone. Also, the article is 2 pages printed: people can stop being lazy and just read it.)
But you, petry, are also putting on blinders. The D&D fireball is what WoW and Magic cribbed from, because it's the famous fireball. (And if by "the gods" you just mean Zeus, then yes, things were thrown: lightning, not fire.) D&D linked fireball and wizards in peoples' minds. Chainmail is the basis of D&D, and now we find Chainmail cribbed from another game, which is interesting. Nobody is trying to claim ownership or copyright or patent or whatever the people who only read the summary seem to believe. Certainly no one is looking for a settlement or royalty or free Arby's sandwich or whatever your feel angry about them "wanting".
Here are the facts:
* The mechanical roots of D&D are Chainmail. Chainmail's Fantasy appendix is more limited in scope to Tolkien than D&D would become. At one point Gygax called the Fantasy rules that became the most popular part of it, "an afterthought". Until now, the line of thought was that the wizard's fireball and lightning (the only spells they had in Chainmail) were respective fantasy versions of Medieval catapult and Napoleonic cannon rules. It is illuminating to find otherwise.
* The mechanics of the Fantasy appendix use similar terms, identical mechanics, and generally numbers within +/-1 of the rules of Patt. It's directly cribbed. The other author of Chainmail, Jeff Perren, is on the subscription list for the very issue where Patt's rules are printed. There's no real doubt.
* Gary Gygax did take from everything without attribution. In Dragon he presented aerial combat for D&D as "Battle in the Skies", never mentioning the rules are identical to those in Avalon Hill's "Fight in the Skies" board wargame. The thief class of later D&D was invented by Wagner of the Aero Hobbies crew and shared with Gygax by and Switzer of the same group: he later rolled his own version to market, but to many on the outside (and inside) it looked like he just stole it whole because there was no attribution. Pretty much the only time he did attribute is when he didn't want to type out the rules anew, such as when D&D refers the reader to Chainmail for combat rules and to the Outdoor Survival boardgame for overland journeys. This is how the hobby worked back then, and this friction is what happens when a friendly hobby becomes a real business.
I say again: they're not good decisions, just not completely mad.
In fairness to them, their strategy does make some sense. They are trying to support the mobile web, and the Australis design does do a better job of that on phones (where you want basically no interface at all). And extensions do break and destabilize things all the time. And once you acknowledge that, and note that the cross-platform interface structure Firefox is based on just flat does not work on adroid, it makes sense to get rid of that too. And once you acknowledge that, themes have to change pretty much every build anyway, so why even allow them that level of flexibility?
All their decisions have been perfectly reasonable, long-term decisions. Now, this is not to say that the ideas are good, because they sacrifice everything that made Firefox unique so that it can be the best possible also-ran browser. But I can at least see signs of thought.
So the response to a tool becoming unavailable is to make information about the tool unavailable? I appreciate that this is supposed to put some pressure on Jobb, and I enjoy petty acts of spite against nutjobs as much as the next guy. But this seems like it just further harms the tool users (and potential tool users), not so much Jobb.
If we're naming a lost, Jupiter-sized planet on the edge of the solar system, I'm pulling for "Yuggoth" before "Nibiru".
I'm going to propose a more radical fix: we need to stop letting the DOM have reliable access to so damn much information.
When we started the move away from webpages and toward web applications, we let the DOM have access to pretty much everything, because applications are big and general and data-hungry: The DOM captures keystrokes so each website can have it's own controls and hotkeys (and which unintentionally lets a user be identified by keystroke dynamics). The DOM has access to blocks of offline memory so that applications can be stable offline or when infrequently connected (and which is another vector for super-cookie tracking). It has access to viewports and peripherals for responsive layouts (which is more data for a browser signature that can easily allow user activity to be correlated). CSS needs read access to layout colors if it's going to be changing them dynamically (which means that those colored as recently-visited by the browser are know, which allows for history-based signatures).
Hell, we still have to live with all the ancient tracking methods and features like HTTP referer [sic], cookies, and user agent strings. And even though the World Wide Web was meant to be extensible, fail gracefully wherever possible, and be tolerant or varying levels of technological support, most modern websites will go out of their way to detect that you are not 100% compliant with their demands, then tell you to play by their rules or get off the net. Usually this is couched in the language of "reasonable compatibility testing" or "consistent experience", but most such sites will work perfectly well once you spoof some parameter, thus proving it wasn't necessary after all (for example, Gmail after spoofing javascript). Some I can only believe are deliberately architectured to fail: static pages which could be served entirely as native HTML, but instead decided to have just enough HTML to call Javascript to do all the real work by manipulating DOM to insert HTML into a mostly-blank structure (looking at you, Board Game Geek).
The DOM has demanded every piece of data available to the browser in the name of ever more byzantine applications, even though all but an insignificant portion of the web is still consumed in a page-like way. You can use NoScript and set Opera/Firefox/Chrome preferences until your blue in the face, but you will never reduce your tracking cross-section while the standards bodies insist on pushing these very broad, demanding features in the standards themselves.
I'm reminded of one time back in high school when we were discussing a poem by Margaret Atwood. The English teacher mentioned as an aside, "who knows where Margaret Atwood is from," thinking it would be a good segue. Silence. "I'll give you a hint: she's writing in her native language."
"American?"
- "No."
"British?"
- "No."
"Australian"
- "No." There was another pregnant silence and before I could hazard a guess on New Zealand, he gave up and said, "Canada! Margaret Atwood is perhaps the most famous Canadian poet!"
So help me, my thought at the time was actually, "Ohhh. Canada... they exist too."
The point of the story is, just because you speak English doesn't make it any more likely we'll remember that your country exists. Sorry, Canada. If it helps at all I'm in Texas, so you're not exactly foremost in our thoughts.
Most of my immediate neighbors are blonde, yet I still have no desire to dye my hair. What other people do amounts to squat from the American perspective. It only matters when you have a multinational company that wants to sell liters in the U.S.
And guess what: that's perfectly fine. They do it all the time. The U.S. standard AND metric. We buy milk by the gallon and soda by the liter. The supermarket sells bananas by the pound and drug dealers sell cocaine by the gram. Hell, two of my favorite bars serve completely different "pints" of beer. No one is confused because, frankly, there's not a lot of practical overlap to lead to confusion. No one compares milk to soda on a equal-volume basis. You just use whatever units you damn well feel like.
Confusion usually only reigns in technical fields. For example, a naval project may use miles, kilometers, and nautical miles all in the same bit of code. (And frankly, while it's a headache, we should be the most capable members of society when it comes to jumping through these hoops.) But for the the average person? It doesn't matter.
First, the headline is a "duh" headline. Of course the lure of robots is the ability to do without humans. That's the whole point -- the very defining characteristic -- of a robot. To automate complicated work.
Second, you assume an all-or-nothing future. That will not be the case. If you have a few more robots and a few more workers, you can drive unit prices down and pick up a few more customers, even without the recently dismissed human workers that can no longer afford to be those customers. That's true at every tier of production, from commodities to luxury goods. This drops the price of labor, and concentrates wages more in the (relatively) few jobs that can't yet be automated. What you see is further stratification of the economy, not collapse.
In your scenario, we're all too poor to be the economy going, and so the economy will never let us get to that point. In a more realistic scenario, a very large portion of the people are out of work, many more have dropped from middle- to lower-class, the wealthiest experience no change -- all while robot labor allows, say, 2/3 of the previous customer base to support the same level of profit for a given product.
10% unemployment is such an absurdly high number that it produces a lot of civil unrest when it actually happens. 30% unemployment would mean a complete re-structuring of society as we know it. The invisible hand proposes the stability of the market, not the stability of our place or our civilization's place in it.
It's especially sad to see this from an IEEE publication (even spectrum).
First, the major unifying concept in Maxwell's equation was the displacement current, a quantity for the changing field in a dielectric with units as current density. This answers the age-old question, "how do you have a current circuit when one part (a capacitor) is clearly 'broken' and not conducting?" Maxwell was the first to answer the question with a solid theory. So a better way to write the sentence you quote would be, "Maxwell’s equations explain how high-frequency flows of electrons in conductors generate electromagnetic waves, and they were also the very first to explain how an insulating material, where there is no flow of electrons, would also act in a circuit" Basic electromagnetics education fail.
Second and more to the topic: if we pretend that there is some sort of "magneto current carrier" (a magneton), then we can extend Maxwell's equations to cover a hypothetical magneto current. Pretty much any electric current-flow problem can be re-stated as a dual magneto current-flow problem. There are a lot of practical upshots to this -- such as making simulations that converge to answer much more quickly -- but the one most related to antennas is that you can demonstrate that the radiation of an antenna is related to the conduction gap between it's elements. For example, if you have a dipole antenna with elements separated by width d, then you can also model that as a "cigar band" (open cylindrical sheet) of magneto current. For a molopole, you might use a "washer" (flat cylindrical ring) of magneto current between the conducting element and the ground plane. This is not new. It's been used for decades. This is the shortcut to the concept that's been known for decades. You do not need recourse to any concepts in quantum mechanics.
I usually lean on the inverse-Godwin theorem: if I can't figure out some way to compare something to the Nazi's, Hitler, or the Holocaust, I probably shouldn't be that upset by it.
If you think "inane, stupid, and soul-crushing" ends at high school, you've been sheltered.
While the goal if college per se is not to churn out office drones, there is a lot of drone-ery to be done, and someone in college can do worse than to fall into one of those jobs. It's a good fallback plan for, say, the history major who just can't find in-field work. For those people, a college degree proves you can show up every day, do a task of moderate complexity, and meet deadlines reliably. That's also exactly what being anything other a straight C student demonstrates.
But most History and Philosophy and Liberal Arts departments around the country don't feel (or at least can hope) that they are training people who will stick with and contribute to the field. At that point, you can argue that you need some creative skills to break new ground. Unfortunately, opportunities for ground-breaking is foreseeably rare, and it's not going to be done if you don't have the necessary information and tools to create. Even a kid making a building-block tower needs to be given building blocks. They need students who are going to absorb that information and grow through participation. Which is exactly what C students have failed to do.
For other fields -- such as engineering -- where you can reasonably expect to get a job in the field, and then to flex your creativity once you're there, "innovation" means being basic competence, coupled with experience. Innovation as people imagine it today -- that the fruits of hard, long work can be cheated out through something cheaper and easier -- is a myth.
I would gladly concede that we need to do more to give our C students real options for becoming productive, prosperous members of society. I just don't think the rest of us are missing out for lack of their "creativity".
I'm curious what kind of cutting edge file management, load balancing, and slide-show-presenting needs are such a challenge that the OS needs to be above 1 GB. It doesn't take that much effort to support people who just want to scroll through thumbnails of their vacation photos. If you have an interesting program -- a 3D video game, a compiler, a simulator -- it will have its own minimum system requirements. And like those programs that have lower requirements, the OS generally scales up (to a point) in capability with better specs.
1) We recognize that Summer break was never meant to be time off (it's time when you needed all hands in the field and wouldn't have sent your kids to school anyway), and that do-nothing, responsibility-free childhoods are a rather recent human development. However, it's still healthy for kids to have to learn through play and be free to pursue things on their own. They need the break.
2) We recognize that the break puts a burden on parents to find activities, day care, or camps during the summer. However, it also provides a huge block of time for lengthy family vacations, which would otherwise be impossible to schedule, or even costlier because all kids get the same three week-long mini-breaks. This is good for the entire family's health and quality of life.
3) We recognize that other countries are lapping us in education. But we also have to recognize that that has nothing to do with time or money spent per student. We invest more per student than pretty much any other country, but we get worse results. That's because the fundamental changes to in teaching methods that we've made over the past 50 years have been for the worse, and other countries have made changes for the better.
4) No one wants to pay teachers for the nine months of work that they do already. More time means more cost, which no district's taxpayers are going to pay.
Ending Summer break is another costly distraction from the real problems: many teachers are unqualified for lack of training or materials, all teacher now teach mechanically to standardized tests which distract from the actual material, and many students are never going to achieve their full potential unless we first address some very hard, very real social problems first.
For developers, there are some times when the documentation SHOULD be larger than the code. The most important questions for many documentation efforts should be along the lines of "why did we choose this value" and "what values can this never be changed to without breaking something". The undocumented code must always be treated fragile, because it only gives you the final state of an engineering process. It doesn't convey any of the many small decisions that hemmed in that design. It gives you something that may work, but does not tell you how to build something that will work in the future if things change. If you give good documentation to a competent programmer, he can probably build something very close to the original program.
"documentation is bad everywhere" is one of those lies developers tell themselves to help them sleep at night. There are programs out there with outstanding documentation. (For example, as a grad student who had never toughed MatLab before I was easily able to teach myself in about a week by just scrolling through the help files.) It's just that those programs are rare, and almost none are FOSS.
This makes sense, because involvement in projects is voluntary, and contributors choose where to dole out their time. There are generally no "customers" with a carrot and stick to make the developers sweat about their failures and oversights. It makes sense that almost no one choose to spend time documenting. Even if they understand that it's a necessary pain, no one wants to be stuck doing in.
The solutions would have to be institutional. I can't think of a single OS project I've seen that had something like "decent documentation for new features" as a gating condition for a major release. That kind of cultural change is hard (and unlikely), but needs to be done if anything is to be accomplished. The only alternative is automated documentation, which doesn't really do anything more than re-state the source code in a different form. It's still only useful if the developers are religious about updating meta-code comments, which they never are.
Is there any circumstance where you think USA prosecutors should not be allowed to force foreign entities to hand over evidence without going through that country's legal system?
Sadly, if you have a brick and mortar presence and employees in a country, operating under the legal auspices of a corporation under the laws of that country, you probably don't have much right to claim to be a "foreign entity". A better example would be "if an Amsterdam tourist is suspected of trafficking drugs, and the DEA gets a warrant to search his hotel room in the U.S." That's still not an example of what we're talking about in the article, but it's a more accurate version of a "foreign entity operating in the U.S." than your example.
But this is how it already works. For example, China could say to Google "give us access to G-Mail or we'll just block it completely, may be even kick your company out". Then it's a game of chicken. But China does have the right under their laws to block G-Mail or ban Google, as well as to demand unreasonable things from resident companies as the price of doing business. Laws everywhere have always worked this way. This is not new.
Now the question: if (beyond a certain point) businesses really have no choice but to deal with corrupt regimes, and customers have no choice but to deal with businesses that deal with corrupt regimes, what protects consumers in one jurisdiction from corruption in another? The answer is competing laws. If China imposes harsh penalties for failing to do X, but the U.S. or Europe impose equally harsh penalties for doing X, then businesses torn between them actually have some refuge through ceded responsibility.
This is exactly how U.S. bribery laws work: "We would love grease your palms, great Poo-bah, but U.S. law says that if we do then we can't do business there, which would mean we also don't have business to do here, so please don't even ask." When there is risk of cross-corruption in the market, it is the government's responsibility to step in and throw up a wall.
(As a side note, this notion of ceded responsibility is why there are some industries that actually petition for _stronger_ regulations. For example, it's common in some parts for large arms dealers to have to "sweeten the pot" with government buyers by agreeing to pay for side projects, such as the construction of a hospital, as a condition of sale. This is a cost arms dealers would rather avoid, so they petitioned Congress for years to have such "gifts" declared a form of illegal bribery.)
California generally has immaculate consumer protection laws. A good number of those laws eliminate methods stores sue to lock money that could otherwise be taken elsewhere, or even strip money away without providing any services at all. For example, they were first to make it illegal to charge monthly fees on a gift card (which would eventually bring a card's worth down to nothing even if the owner never spent a dime of it's starting value).
Gift certificates and cash-like coupons like Starbuck's stars, Kohl's cash, and the like are fine as as an option, but I certainly wouldn't want to get them back in lieu of real cash if I, say, returned a purchase.
Sometimes California is a large enough market to drag the whole country along for the ride, and sometimes not. In this case, I think Californians will mostly be affected, ad the rest of the country will plow on as usual. Even so, we should all have a critical eye towards any reduction in consumer protections.
The line is drawn pretty clearly at psychological testing. Facebook did NOT test it's systems: it manipulated their systems to test the psychology of the population. This was not a usability study, or even a technical study, just a a psychological study. The deliberately skewed their results and monitored feedback with the intention of studying how their subjects (people, not devices) reacted.
In theory, there is a gray area where we might ask if something that might be ethical without technology is now somehow unethical (and vice versa). But that's not the case here. This case is blatant, deliberate, and callous.
It is common sense obvious. It is not common law obvious. Previous rulings on cell phones extended the findings for pagers, and the finding for pagers was that they were a container of information, like an address book, which can be searched like any other container during a stop or arrest.
There was obviously strain between previous rulings and reality, but that doesn't mean with any certainty that it was going to be corrected today by the Supreme Court. The court could have even further extended the previous cell phone findings, or even delivered a weaker test for whether the "container" can be searched. That makes this a rare, decisive, and unanimous(!) ruling from the court.
A terrible blow for Tacocopter, and taco-lovers everywhere.
Back before the internet, it was common practice to put hard-coded admin passwords in documentation, in case anyone should forget the real password. In some industries (say, construction road signs) it just never occurred to them that anyone would ever care to look it up for a prank. In other industries, like ATMs, the assumption was that documentation was obscure and difficult to lay hands on without writing to a real person who then had to mail a manual to a real address of an existing customer.
The fact that they still do this is depressing, but doesn't surprise me in the least.
Saying that drone warfare is not particularly good at decapitating an institutional terrorist organization like Al Qaeda is missing the point. Or at least a key point. Drone warfare has made large scale terrorist training largely impossible. The boot camps and months long, practical courses in guerrilla warfare that used to be an Al Qaeda staple are now just very visible, attractive targets for drones. Drone warfare occasionally knocks out a head, but it really undermines the base.
In all force, there is some deterrence power. For some technologies, the deterrence is the whole point. For example, land mines aren't meant to be a good way to blow up people, they're meant to be a good way to prevent groups of people from traversing an area once you advertise that it's full of mines. Here, drones are useful for rapid, cheap attacks of opportunity... but the fact that they are almost always ready means long-term, open-air training camps are suicide.
Exactly. It was always a pretty bad idea. In fact, it reminds me a great deal of the RFC 3514 "evil bit"
Do-Not-Track is basically a "Don't be evil" bit. It makes a plea on behalf of the end user and the end user hopes some distant system honors it. Any time you implement some version of the evil bit, you should expect that it's not going to work.
(Then again, there are a lot of tech features in use now -- such as a PDF owner_pass edit lock, or phone service Caller ID blocking -- which are also based on "please keep private" bit, and those are effective for 98% of the people out there who are just to lazy to get around them. So maybe there's something to be said for an evil bit after all.)