The famine was created by Chairman Mao, not natural elements. Google The Great Leap Forward. It was truly horrendous, for everyone that died there were hundreds that went desperately hungry. All completely unnecessary.
The great firewall is becoming ever thicker. By the month.
For most Chinese, the outside internet will not exist in a few years. Nor need it. Lots of internal news and social media sites. The Chinese equivalent of StackExchange will be quite good enough. And a few carefully monitored Chinese will still have external access.
Now that "Made in" means "China", they have the factories. They are already using more and more robots. There is a huge demand for robots in China. So there will be lots of opportunities for Chinese AI companies.
Once you outsource manufacturing, you also outsource manufacturing technologies.
Unlike the early days of cars there are many established car companies in the game. It takes a lot of expertise and supply chain management to build a car. You need to know a lot about robots, labour, etc.
Ossified management has allowed startups to dominate when technology changes if the barrier is not too high. So all the newspapers ceded their classified adds to ebay et. al. Nokia to Apple. Big retailers to Amazon. TV networks to Netflix. None of those things should have happened, the established players should have dominated, but did not.
On the other hand, Webvan died for delivering groceries ordered on line, here in Oz they are delivered by the big supermarket chains, Coles and Woolworths. It was easier to add a web site to a supermarket than to add a supermarket to a web site.
I'd bet pennies to pounds that electric cars will be like supermarkets. The established players will dominate. It is an incremental improvement for them. And many are already there, e.g. the Leaf, Prius.
Telsa is toast.
OTOH self driving car AI is likely to come from someone other than the big car manufacturers. But they will buy it from the third party. Might be Google. If Apple try to build the cars rather than just the software, they will become irrelevant.
Consider computer automation, which over the last 50 years has been just as widespread as agricultural automation.
In the 1950s, when Parkinson wrote his great paper, bureaucracies like banks and tax offices were almost completely unautomated (yes, there were punch cards). Rows of clerks with mechanical adding machines reconciling banks statements and tax returns.
Yet bureaucracies have grown, not shrunk, as a result of all this automation. The reason is that while the human gut can only consume a certain amount of food, human society has an unbounded appetite for rules and regulations, processes and procedures.
So as automation frees up labor, bureaucracies will grow. Because they can. As predicted long ago by Parkinson.
If those statistics are really true. Over 200,000 NEW lines in one year in an existing, complex system is as unmanageable as 3000 contributers. As products age, the rate of additions goes down as things have to be integrated into a complex system.
Sure, Linux is not actually as monolithic as described. But a bug in any one of those lines could bring down the whole kernel.
It is a credit to skill of the maintainers that they can make this work. And a debit that they try.
To have pages stuffed into legislation minutes before a deadline to pass it.
In civilized countries like Australia, UK, legislation is first "tabled" then often goes to committee for review, and finally debated an voted on. There is a process.
The EU, however, appears to be crazy. We saw that with the software copyright saga.
No way will he tollerate dissent. He has carefully and painstakingly removed all competitors from the top of the party. There is no Deng Xioping waiting in the wings.
If China goes bad, it will go very bad. It is very difficult to remove an entrenched dictator. The Germans could not get rid of Hittler. Nor the Russians Stalin. Nor, the Chinese Mao, even though Mao was directly responsible for a huge famine that killed some 30 million and caused abject misery.
If Xi Jinping goes bad, he will take the world with him. Nobody else has anywhere near as much power, And that includes Putin.
The Chinese government does not have strict censorship guidelines. They leave that to individual companies. But if the government thinks companies are "unhelpful" they shut them down. Self censorship is much more effective.
The Chinese government would be doing Google a huge favor by letting them into China even if Google censors just as well as Baidu, just because Google is foreign. So China cannot fully control Google.
So what is the payback for that favor? They want Google to be "sensitive" to Chinese concerns in their US and other searches. Nothing too overt, just put some result on page 2.
Even if Google does not do this, how can they deny the charge?
When I (and most slash dot readers) was 'lad long ago, people were already talking about the 4 day week. If 5 day weeks were enough for our fathers, and productivity has been increasing about 1%pa for decades, then a 4 day week should be ample now.
It is cultural. Just like Europeans can afford 6 weeks holiday, but the USA can only afford 2.
Your comment is very apt, but for the wrong reason.
In ancient Rome, slaves were cheaper than free men that were too poor to own them. So the slaves made the free Romans unemployed. This was a real source of discontent.
Also, in the ancient world, slaves often revolted, usually unsuccessfully. But hyper intelligent robots that can control every aspect of our lives might have an easier job.
Being small means relative high strength. A solid two meter boat should indestructible by waves. No need to keep a human alive, nor to go very fast. A very basic, fixed, small but strong sail would do.
Ice bergs could be a problem. Surely better to start further south. Longer but safer. Also need to stay out of shipping lanes.
I think this could be done without a computer. Just a magnetic compass controlling a rudder. Occasionally it would be blown backwards but no big deal. No need to worry about points of sail if not in a hurry. The hard part would be to know when it arrived, and where. Not easy to find a 2m craft in an ocean.
First problem is that C demands byte addressing, so can only address 4 gig with 32 bits. So we move to 64 bit architectures, which almost double the memory requirements of may programs.
Java, for example, can address 32gig with 32 bits, which is plenty for almost all normal applications. That is because it does not need to support the idiotic pattern of running a pointer through a string.
Likewise, larger C and worse C++ programs tend to do a lot of copying of data structures in order to control "ownership". A properly garbage collected language does not require that. And malloc/free is actually a pretty inefficient way to garbage collect.
There are idiocies in other languages which slow them down. For example, UTF-16 Strings in Java and.Net. But that is not fundamental.
With safety turned off, C# can be as efficient as C using a C style. Compilers optimize out array indexing etc.
Slashdot Mirror
There has never been a single attack using VB.net.
The famine was created by Chairman Mao, not natural elements. Google The Great Leap Forward. It was truly horrendous, for everyone that died there were hundreds that went desperately hungry. All completely unnecessary.
Mao's photo hangs proudly over Tiananmen square.
The great firewall is becoming ever thicker. By the month.
For most Chinese, the outside internet will not exist in a few years. Nor need it. Lots of internal news and social media sites. The Chinese equivalent of StackExchange will be quite good enough. And a few carefully monitored Chinese will still have external access.
Seems to work pretty well.
First the robots just moved in fixed positions.
Then they had simple switches, and could sense their environment a bit.
Now they have 2D vision which works well for many simple tasks. They can also do simple planning about how to move in a fixed environment.
Tomorrow 2.5D vision will become common. Bin picking already works. Sort of.
At each step more automation is possible.
Now that "Made in" means "China", they have the factories. They are already using more and more robots. There is a huge demand for robots in China. So there will be lots of opportunities for Chinese AI companies.
Once you outsource manufacturing, you also outsource manufacturing technologies.
Unlike the early days of cars there are many established car companies in the game. It takes a lot of expertise and supply chain management to build a car. You need to know a lot about robots, labour, etc.
Ossified management has allowed startups to dominate when technology changes if the barrier is not too high. So all the newspapers ceded their classified adds to ebay et. al. Nokia to Apple. Big retailers to Amazon. TV networks to Netflix. None of those things should have happened, the established players should have dominated, but did not.
On the other hand, Webvan died for delivering groceries ordered on line, here in Oz they are delivered by the big supermarket chains, Coles and Woolworths. It was easier to add a web site to a supermarket than to add a supermarket to a web site.
I'd bet pennies to pounds that electric cars will be like supermarkets. The established players will dominate. It is an incremental improvement for them. And many are already there, e.g. the Leaf, Prius.
Telsa is toast.
OTOH self driving car AI is likely to come from someone other than the big car manufacturers. But they will buy it from the third party. Might be Google. If Apple try to build the cars rather than just the software, they will become irrelevant.
Consider computer automation, which over the last 50 years has been just as widespread as agricultural automation.
In the 1950s, when Parkinson wrote his great paper, bureaucracies like banks and tax offices were almost completely unautomated (yes, there were punch cards). Rows of clerks with mechanical adding machines reconciling banks statements and tax returns.
Yet bureaucracies have grown, not shrunk, as a result of all this automation. The reason is that while the human gut can only consume a certain amount of food, human society has an unbounded appetite for rules and regulations, processes and procedures.
So as automation frees up labor, bureaucracies will grow. Because they can. As predicted long ago by Parkinson.
If those statistics are really true. Over 200,000 NEW lines in one year in an existing, complex system is as unmanageable as 3000 contributers. As products age, the rate of additions goes down as things have to be integrated into a complex system.
Sure, Linux is not actually as monolithic as described. But a bug in any one of those lines could bring down the whole kernel.
It is a credit to skill of the maintainers that they can make this work. And a debit that they try.
To have pages stuffed into legislation minutes before a deadline to pass it.
In civilized countries like Australia, UK, legislation is first "tabled" then often goes to committee for review, and finally debated an voted on. There is a process.
The EU, however, appears to be crazy. We saw that with the software copyright saga.
No way will he tollerate dissent. He has carefully and painstakingly removed all competitors from the top of the party. There is no Deng Xioping waiting in the wings.
If China goes bad, it will go very bad. It is very difficult to remove an entrenched dictator. The Germans could not get rid of Hittler. Nor the Russians Stalin. Nor, the Chinese Mao, even though Mao was directly responsible for a huge famine that killed some 30 million and caused abject misery.
If Xi Jinping goes bad, he will take the world with him. Nobody else has anywhere near as much power, And that includes Putin.
The Chinese government does not have strict censorship guidelines. They leave that to individual companies. But if the government thinks companies are "unhelpful" they shut them down. Self censorship is much more effective.
The Chinese government would be doing Google a huge favor by letting them into China even if Google censors just as well as Baidu, just because Google is foreign. So China cannot fully control Google.
So what is the payback for that favor? They want Google to be "sensitive" to Chinese concerns in their US and other searches. Nothing too overt, just put some result on page 2.
Even if Google does not do this, how can they deny the charge?
Very slippery slope indeed.
I'm sure the US out lawyers China 10 to 1.
So, what did the US do right to dominate in that field?
(I like your test thesis.)
When I was 'lad we learned
0 Black
1 Bastards brown
2 Raped red
3 Our orange
4 Young young
5 Girls green
6 But blue
7 Violet
8 Gave grey
9 Willingly white
I suspect they don't teach that any more, although I can still remember it.
Maybe if the resister codes could be incorporated into the Python docs the other issues would be forgotten about!
(I think most people just though it was a bit of fun, and not nasty at all. But it is easy to take offense at anything if you try hard enough.)
There is no copyright protection scheme store.
Everything is copyright, even though most of it was never produced for profit, and nobody is likely to pay for it.
This just makes the material unavailable. Imagine Wikipedia with virtually no photos at all.
When I (and most slash dot readers) was 'lad long ago, people were already talking about the 4 day week. If 5 day weeks were enough for our fathers, and productivity has been increasing about 1%pa for decades, then a 4 day week should be ample now.
It is cultural. Just like Europeans can afford 6 weeks holiday, but the USA can only afford 2.
Your comment is very apt, but for the wrong reason.
In ancient Rome, slaves were cheaper than free men that were too poor to own them. So the slaves made the free Romans unemployed. This was a real source of discontent.
Also, in the ancient world, slaves often revolted, usually unsuccessfully. But hyper intelligent robots that can control every aspect of our lives might have an easier job.
There are two types of articles on AU.
1. Media fluff pieces that say nothing.
2. Deeply technical research papers full of heavy maths.
It would be nice if there were at least some articles aimed at people like Slash Dot readers. That actually contain a useful overview of technologies.
" where most drinking water comes from expensive desalination plants and around a third of it is lost to leak"
If that is true it is amazing. Sure, everyone has leaks. But 33%? And when you are using desal?
Also, I wonder how this robot knows where it is. No, GPS will not work in a pipe. Maybe some sort of ping does though.
1. Primary production
2. Manufacturing
3. Services
Services will keep things going fine. Lawyers, tax accountants, retail and beauty consultants. That is where the growth will come from.
Being small means relative high strength. A solid two meter boat should indestructible by waves. No need to keep a human alive, nor to go very fast. A very basic, fixed, small but strong sail would do.
Ice bergs could be a problem. Surely better to start further south. Longer but safer. Also need to stay out of shipping lanes.
I think this could be done without a computer. Just a magnetic compass controlling a rudder. Occasionally it would be blown backwards but no big deal. No need to worry about points of sail if not in a hurry. The hard part would be to know when it arrived, and where. Not easy to find a 2m craft in an ocean.
A monitoring tool. If you know what people search for you know a lot about them.
But aint. And not even Unicode. The idiocy of our font designers.
Would you go to WIRED,com or WlRED.com? Look carefully, they are not the same. And not even unicode.
First problem is that C demands byte addressing, so can only address 4 gig with 32 bits. So we move to 64 bit architectures, which almost double the memory requirements of may programs.
Java, for example, can address 32gig with 32 bits, which is plenty for almost all normal applications. That is because it does not need to support the idiotic pattern of running a pointer through a string.
Likewise, larger C and worse C++ programs tend to do a lot of copying of data structures in order to control "ownership". A properly garbage collected language does not require that. And malloc/free is actually a pretty inefficient way to garbage collect.
There are idiocies in other languages which slow them down. For example, UTF-16 Strings in Java and .Net. But that is not fundamental.
With safety turned off, C# can be as efficient as C using a C style. Compilers optimize out array indexing etc.