When your immediate usefulness is perceived to have ended, your "friends" would grind you up and sell you as dog food for a few extra pounds if they thought they could get a way with it.
The wholesale slaughter of the golden egg laying geese is being carried out by the corporate/rentier class. As an inventor or designer, my odds of making a profit on my creativity or software/hardware design skills are just precisely zero. If successful, I'll be sued out of existence. If I work for others, I'm forced to sign away my rights. Basically, the economic/legal environment is telling me to be a chicken farmer, not an inventor.
1) Patent law and corporate ownership of ideas. Why would I ever bother to exploit my idea if I'm just going to be screwed by either the government's patent process (subverted by legislation influenced by corporate money) or the company I work for who would sue me because I might have gotten the idea while I was working for them?
2) Regulation and litigation. Say tomorrow, I figure out how to make a thorium battery the size of a baseball that can run your house, but it puts out some radiation. Rather than simply and sensibly putting it in a lead box with some warnings, I'd have to deal with mile of red tape and incredible amounts of insurance costs due to liability exposure as every white-trash gomer in the USA tries to sue me when they get lung cancer.
3) The incredible shrinking politician. Politicians have become tragicomically risk-averse. They don't want to upset anyone's eminent domain, the environmental lobby to protect the tweeting titmouse, or the vast herds of NIMBY that roam the land. They don't worry about that sort of thing in China. Flawed or not, they can get high speed rail done. In the USA, we never will.
It's all about trade-offs. Patent law still serves some people quite well (If they have access to money). Regulations have good and bad effects. Tort litigation has admittedly curtailed some of the more blatant corporate abuses, but it has also reduced the effectiveness of both government and corporations.
It's about what kind of society you want, and about that, there is simply no overwhelming consensus.
If *anyone* in government is so stupid that they haven't figured out the potential threat of outsourcing as an attack vector, just take their two hands, flashlight and map and fire them now.
wherein [insert solar collector here (e.g. algae)] is used to output [lipids, hydrocarbons, hydrogen, or electricity], but has a net negative energy return and won't scale worth a crap even if it was energy positive.
Can we algorithmically ban these stories? Hey, just askin.
If NASA had focused on near-earth, problem solving activities like large scale power generation, zero-G industrial fabrication, asteroid mining, or *anything* but "let's be first to [insert celestial body], would we even be having this discussion now?
What's embarrassing about NASA is that they are so government-oriented that it never, ever, occurs to anyone there to do anything that has a DIRECT real world purpose that might benefit people with something other than abstract non-astronomical information.
Yes, we got new technology out of it, that we could have gotten anyway, and would have. Please, we've all heard the argument before. What have they invented lately?
Wow. It's the obligatory "New discovery of an inefficient solar energy collection system using [seawater, algae, corn, etc.] whose output is [hydrogen, hydrocarbon lipids, alcohol] which [wrecks metal machinery, doesn't scale and has an EROEI is either barely over 1, or sometimes less]."
Man, it's been over a week since I read one of those. Guess we don't have to worry about that pesky cheap, high-EREOI hydrocarbon depletion thing now.
I work at home a lot. On the weekends and occasional evenings when something is bugging me. Sometimes I'm logged in. Sometimes not. Rarely do my Sunday afternoon sessions start later than 10 am or end before 8 pm. Most of the people in my department who are any good do something similar.
That subdomains such as WoW are the collection of uber-cyberdomains (i.e that interweb thingy) in which humans interact more than some others. The Scada domain? Not so much.
Not sure where facebook falls here. Subdomains evolve, I guess.
Actually, it's having been burned by that very thing that makes me no longer trust companies that can afford to fuck over their developer base without consequence. De facto standards like Java and Javascript, despite their flaws, aren't going to disappear because a marketing VP at Microsoft/Google/Oracle/etc. wants to get his bonus this year by cutting support for [insert programming language or standard here].
that I doubt anyone can save it. This isn't a Carly Fiona situation where the new manager took a good company and turned it into shit for her own personal benefit. It's already shit. Bartz simply discovered that she was incapable of miracles. That's all. What can you do with a company that can't even keep a comics page updated? If you or I couldn't even do that, how long would we last at our jobs?
Even if it's a lousy *technical* solution. As anybody who's been paying attention and heard the words, "Mac" or "Apple" for the last 3 decades should have figured out by now, it's the interface, stupid!
Roving bands of heavily armed children... children will eat the hobos and trespassers. Given my experience living in New Mexico, this will happen on its own. Just put the city next to Espanola.
And the way we've increased population since we started to do so was by burning hydrocarbons (first coal and then oil) like a son of a bitch.
That ends pretty soon. The decline so far has only shown up as higher prices (Oil was $12 a barrel in 1997. It's a bit more now), but it looks like the proven reserves aren't going to last more than 40 years at current rates even if we were all to share it all equally whilst singing "Kumbaya." Probably some time before then, folks who expected magic fairies to deliver food direct to the supermarket and coal to the electricity plant are going to discover how idiotically dependent we are on having about 160 exajoules of cheap, high energy return oil per year to play with.
It's not the end of the world, though it may be the end of 90% of the human population (more, if we start throwing nukes around) by the end of the century, but adjustment promises to be an interesting process.
Of course, many are betting on techno-capitalists to ride in on white horses with solutions to all of our problems. Good luck with that.
Agreed. At 53, I have no interest in pretending to be the idiot I was at 23. I want to come in, get my work done and go home. I'm no longer gullible enough to believe in "team" anything when it comes to any company. It's nothing more than a ham-fisted attempt at behavior manipulation to increase profits. It's not just annoying, it's an insult to my intelligence.
I think it's safe to use UDP on this one. They're pictures. Mostly. A bit lost here. A bit lost there. No worse than a few dropped pixels. Sorta like Rick Perry or Palin. Just a little fuzzy around the edges.
Slashdot Mirror
When your immediate usefulness is perceived to have ended, your "friends" would grind you up and sell you as dog food for a few extra pounds if they thought they could get a way with it.
Short answer? Don't be an idiot.
Dammit!
The wholesale slaughter of the golden egg laying geese is being carried out by the corporate/rentier class. As an inventor or designer, my odds of making a profit on my creativity or software/hardware design skills are just precisely zero. If successful, I'll be sued out of existence. If I work for others, I'm forced to sign away my rights. Basically, the economic/legal environment is telling me to be a chicken farmer, not an inventor.
1) Patent law and corporate ownership of ideas. Why would I ever bother to exploit my idea if I'm just going to be screwed by either the government's patent process (subverted by legislation influenced by corporate money) or the company I work for who would sue me because I might have gotten the idea while I was working for them?
2) Regulation and litigation. Say tomorrow, I figure out how to make a thorium battery the size of a baseball that can run your house, but it puts out some radiation. Rather than simply and sensibly putting it in a lead box with some warnings, I'd have to deal with mile of red tape and incredible amounts of insurance costs due to liability exposure as every white-trash gomer in the USA tries to sue me when they get lung cancer.
3) The incredible shrinking politician. Politicians have become tragicomically risk-averse. They don't want to upset anyone's eminent domain, the environmental lobby to protect the tweeting titmouse, or the vast herds of NIMBY that roam the land. They don't worry about that sort of thing in China. Flawed or not, they can get high speed rail done. In the USA, we never will.
It's all about trade-offs. Patent law still serves some people quite well (If they have access to money). Regulations have good and bad effects. Tort litigation has admittedly curtailed some of the more blatant corporate abuses, but it has also reduced the effectiveness of both government and corporations.
It's about what kind of society you want, and about that, there is simply no overwhelming consensus.
If *anyone* in government is so stupid that they haven't figured out the potential threat of outsourcing as an attack vector, just take their two hands, flashlight and map and fire them now.
wherein [insert solar collector here (e.g. algae)] is used to output [lipids, hydrocarbons, hydrogen, or electricity], but has a net negative energy return and won't scale worth a crap even if it was energy positive.
Can we algorithmically ban these stories? Hey, just askin.
If NASA had focused on near-earth, problem solving activities like large scale power generation, zero-G industrial fabrication, asteroid mining, or *anything* but "let's be first to [insert celestial body], would we even be having this discussion now?
What's embarrassing about NASA is that they are so government-oriented that it never, ever, occurs to anyone there to do anything that has a DIRECT real world purpose that might benefit people with something other than abstract non-astronomical information.
Yes, we got new technology out of it, that we could have gotten anyway, and would have. Please, we've all heard the argument before. What have they invented lately?
Wow. It's the obligatory "New discovery of an inefficient solar energy collection system using [seawater, algae, corn, etc.] whose output is [hydrogen, hydrocarbon lipids, alcohol] which [wrecks metal machinery, doesn't scale and has an EROEI is either barely over 1, or sometimes less]."
Man, it's been over a week since I read one of those. Guess we don't have to worry about that pesky cheap, high-EREOI hydrocarbon depletion thing now.
I work at home a lot. On the weekends and occasional evenings when something is bugging me. Sometimes I'm logged in. Sometimes not. Rarely do my Sunday afternoon sessions start later than 10 am or end before 8 pm. Most of the people in my department who are any good do something similar.
That subdomains such as WoW are the collection of uber-cyberdomains (i.e that interweb thingy) in which humans interact more than some others. The Scada domain? Not so much.
Not sure where facebook falls here. Subdomains evolve, I guess.
responsive enough to use in real time.
Actually, it's having been burned by that very thing that makes me no longer trust companies that can afford to fuck over their developer base without consequence. De facto standards like Java and Javascript, despite their flaws, aren't going to disappear because a marketing VP at Microsoft/Google/Oracle/etc. wants to get his bonus this year by cutting support for [insert programming language or standard here].
projects when they get bored, tell me again why I would invest > zero seconds of my precious time on this?
They're not *supposed* to do that.
Certainly no chance of emergent behavior causing unpredictable behavior. Wait, did another flash crash just happen?
that I doubt anyone can save it. This isn't a Carly Fiona situation where the new manager took a good company and turned it into shit for her own personal benefit. It's already shit. Bartz simply discovered that she was incapable of miracles. That's all. What can you do with a company that can't even keep a comics page updated? If you or I couldn't even do that, how long would we last at our jobs?
Even if it's a lousy *technical* solution. As anybody who's been paying attention and heard the words, "Mac" or "Apple" for the last 3 decades should have figured out by now, it's the interface, stupid!
Roving bands of heavily armed children... children will eat the hobos and trespassers.
Given my experience living in New Mexico, this will happen on its own. Just put the city next to Espanola.
And the way we've increased population since we started to do so was by burning hydrocarbons (first coal and then oil) like a son of a bitch.
That ends pretty soon. The decline so far has only shown up as higher prices (Oil was $12 a barrel in 1997. It's a bit more now), but it looks like the proven reserves aren't going to last more than 40 years at current rates even if we were all to share it all equally whilst singing "Kumbaya." Probably some time before then, folks who expected magic fairies to deliver food direct to the supermarket and coal to the electricity plant are going to discover how idiotically dependent we are on having about 160 exajoules of cheap, high energy return oil per year to play with.
It's not the end of the world, though it may be the end of 90% of the human population (more, if we start throwing nukes around) by the end of the century, but adjustment promises to be an interesting process.
Of course, many are betting on techno-capitalists to ride in on white horses with solutions to all of our problems. Good luck with that.
that the worldwide million geek army disagrees. If they should choose to fight them, well , good luck.
I already do, you insensitive clod!
Agreed. At 53, I have no interest in pretending to be the idiot I was at 23. I want to come in, get my work done and go home. I'm no longer gullible enough to believe in "team" anything when it comes to any company. It's nothing more than a ham-fisted attempt at behavior manipulation to increase profits. It's not just annoying, it's an insult to my intelligence.
Is it as inefficient as algae or corn ethanol? I smell a ground floor penny stock opportunity not far behind.
and what about the cost? When I can get 5800000 Btu out of a barrel of it for 85 bucks or so, do let me know.
I think it's safe to use UDP on this one. They're pictures. Mostly. A bit lost here. A bit lost there. No worse than a few dropped pixels. Sorta like Rick Perry or Palin. Just a little fuzzy around the edges.