This paragraph is a mess, but yeah. Economic considerations are of broad numbers, not individuals. This sits fine with me, as I don't cry too much about saving 100,000 starving people at the expense of throwing 1,000 well-off people into the gutter. Many people balk at this: they either want to save some of the 100,000 without impacting anyone else (not trade 2:1 or 1,000:1, but do no trade), or they want to tax the shit out of the rich for malicious reasons. All I want is a more efficient system.

A more efficient system doesn't mean computer programmers become robotics guys; it means 100,000 computer programmers may become 100,000 robotics guys, but the original 100,000 programmers may be street urchins while the 100,000 robotics guys used to be street urchins. In three generations, they'll all be retired, and the new people will again just be who they are, and not people who were ousted and people who were elevated. If that means fewer starving people and a bigger middle class, that's fine.

That won't happen. It might cycle.

I've calculated the efficiency of a Citizen's Dividend to be higher than our current welfare system. Right now, it's more effective to broaden Social Security and eliminate other Federal welfare, while leaving state welfare to work itself out. We would eliminate OASDI, Federal unemployment, and so forth; we'd leave State food security (WIC, food stamps), housing assistance, and unemployment in place, although these would spin down over time. A Citizen's Dividend, as I describe, provides nothing for children (families) or immigrants, as doing so creates an incentive to neglect children (hey free money! Make babies!) or rush immigrate for free money; keeping state welfare only retains the existing, acceptable risk of these things, but it does allow state welfare to drop a lot.

Under a Citizen's Dividend, mass unemployment doesn't increase welfare costs. It does shrink the middle class: the very poor can get homes, food, and other basic needs; the middle class start folding into this. This retains our labor pool, providing a spending base in the economy (it replaces existing welfare for the same or lower cost, yet improves the economic spending foundation by converting all homeless and low-income families into additional, reliable, predictable markets) and supporting the rebound while minimizing the fall. The rebound, of course, involves cheaper goods, greater goods availability, and more jobs--meaning more middle class.

I should also note that my Citizen's Dividend plan, in particular, pins the dividend to a percentage of all income. Our society grows in wealth over time: the buying power of all total income dollars in the economy increases. This happens because we learn to use the same resources to produce more--we use fewer resources to produce the same goods and services--and so wealth increases. The total dollars increasing (inflation) is more familiar; understand that the total things purchasable by those total dollars also increases. By pinning the percentage at the point where a Citizen's Dividend is barely viable, I ensure that the very bottom increases in wealth.

By pinning to wealth, as described, I create an ever-rising lower class. Obviously, anyone with a job has more money--that's our middle-class--and the middle class increase in wealth as the economy becomes more wealthy. The gap between the lower and middle class remains roughly the same in this layout: the middle class become more wealthy, able to afford better cars, better food, shinier electronics, and so forth; but the poor also become exactly as much more wealthy, lagging behind the middle class, but only precisely as far as ever. The poor, thus, also find it easier to survive, and find life more comfortable; every step society makes carries the rich forward without additional burden, provides the middle class greater opportunities without additional burden, and pulls the poor along just as ever.

A Citizen's Dividend is viable now because our social safety net--our welfare system--constantly gets heavier. In 20 or 50 years, our existing welfare system will be so big as to crush our economy: the weight of carrying the poor will be so great that we cannot move, nay stand, with them on our backs. I only propose to take a different tactic which better supports the poor, yet stops them from becoming any greater of a burden on society, ever.

By the very existence of a basic standard of living for all individuals, you must recognize any individual with additional income would be much better off. An individual won't be incentived to work with minimal pay--let's say an individual gets $600/mo, and you offer $1/hr, such that 40hr weeks produce $160/mo extra--because the additional money will not improve their quality-of-life when also accounting for the misery of employment. The moment they can stably afford savings, better food, a larger apartment, and some entertainment luxuries, they're willing to work; currently, that could be as little as $5/hr for what would be minimum wage workers, while skilled workers would command more salary as more scarce resources. This necessarily places them into a fairly wealthy middle class.

It won't disappear. A new economic dynamic will appear.

Politicians are dependent on campaign contributions. And as long as they are, they will be little more than corporate whores.

I think it's time to get a crowdfunding scheme going. Maybe we can at least buy one congressman who's working for "the people".

Obviously, the wealthy fully-employed robots will buy them!

The summary says that Wikipedia does not have a mobile site. That isn't true. The BBC article linked from TFA actually says:

I just tested the Wikipedia mobile site with their tool and it says "Awesome! This page is mobile-friendly." However, if you feed it wikipedia.org instead of en.m.wikipedia.org it complains that the links are too close together, which is definitely not the case. Even the picture it shows of "How Googlebot sees the page" is quite clear.

I'm talking about things that are external, not inline. Do you know how many libraries Chrome, Firefox, LibreOffice, Gnome, or ls load?

>WTF is the definition of legal person at this point?

Considering that legal personhood is granted to corporations (literally a piece of paper with an official stamp on it - that's what a "corporation" in fact consists of), with no material existence, and "his" decisions made by a bunch of other people who all own a bit of "him", the word has been meaningless for decades.
I don't really see this as causing any major problems - at least, relatively speaking. If this is opening a can of worms, then granting personhood to corporations was a bucket of snakes, I think that remains a higher priority concern.

If a completely abstract entity with no mind at all can be a person, why not an actual living being with a mind that - in IQ tests have gotten scores comparable to young human children (which makes them rather smarter than the average CEO mind you) ?

In the end though - I see more interesting things from this, our days as the only truly sentient beings are numbered - sooner or later there will be others, whether it's highly advanced AI or extra-terestrial life, the day will come when we have to consider what does or does not get human rights like freedom of movement, what we can or cannot legally enslave.
We may as well get some prescedents set and test cases happening, it will be valuable in future.

While we're at it, maybe it's high time we challenge the assertion that a completely abstract legal fiction belongs on that list, or else take it to it's logical extreme. If corporations are persons - then share-holding is slavery and should be banned.

The Judge did nothing of the sort, the chimps were the ones named in the case by the animal rights activists, the Judge had to direct any motion at the chimps for the owners of the chimps to respond - and thats what he did here. He asked the owners to respond, via the Habeus Corpus motion - he had no other recourse.

The activists are claiming something that didn't happen.

I won't let mechanics install brakes because it costs $600-$800 for two wheels, whereas I buy upgraded brake pads (make sure they're street pads, not race pads--never upgrade to racing pads; they won't stop unless they're hot) and new rotors and do my brakes in 20 minutes for about $100. Brakes are ungodly simple: take tire off, unbolt caliper, slap new pads in, pop new rotor on (if you're doing a new rotor), stick caliper back on. If you want, you can flush the brakes with a bleeder kit or with someone in the car pumping the brake pedal (just make sure you do it right--close the petcock while they have the pedal down, not after they release it!).

So yeah. I can perform a $1500 job in around $200 and less than an hour of work. Brakes are one of the most overcharged things on a mechanic's list.

When you first run a C++ program, it runs through a list of symbols, resolves them against library addresses, and puts their addresses into a procedural linkage table (PLT). Each time you CALL, you get an indirect jump to an address in the PLT. In lazy resolution, the PLT is populated with a resolver function address, which does the symbol look-up and populates the PLT.

When you run an Objective-C program, it does exactly the same thing; however, the PLT lookup is done through a function that provides symbolic lookup, symbol to symbol, instead of address to symbol. It's effectively the same look-up (it looks in the symbol table), but handled differently (the structure of the class has to be resolved at run time, and the PLT can be later altered by using a different object and changing how the class looks up its members).

It's not much different. It resolves on first, unknown call; then it continues to use the cached address.

Everyone has this odd fantasy where robots replace all our jobs, so we all learn to be machine workers and maintain the robots. 10,000 jobs lost to robots means 10,000 new machine worker jobs; or, even better, 20,000 new engineering, machinist, and so forth jobs.

That would be expensive. Cheap, unskilled labor replaced by robot labor requiring the input of twice as much expensive, skilled labor? The whole premise is that you're replacing 10,000 $8/hr sandwich makers with 10,000 robots each supplying $25/hr to engineers, maintenance people, and so forth. 10,000 x $8/hr = $80,000/hr; 10,000 x $25/hr = $250,000/hr. We're imagining robots will cost less than humans, so obviously there must be less human labor involved in the building, operating, maintaining, and fueling of these robots.

The truth is robots will take our jobs, just like in the Industrial Revolution. 10,000 workers will become 10 robots supported by 100 workers who each make twice as much: 10,000 workers become 100 workers at the cost of 200 workers. Of course, that means your goods and services suddenly carry 1/500 of the human labor cost. Now, let's assume food becomes 20% cheaper--this is a poor assumption, based on fast food service labor being rated at 14% (at McDonalds, Wendy's, Burger King, and so forth, 14% is a common number: if the wages of your floor staff exceed 14% of your revenue for the hour, you start sending people home early), which is wholly unrelated to most food purchase. Still, let's use that for a base assumption and see what happens.

Well, first off, the average middle-class person may spend $300/month on food; it's possible, with discipline, to get down as low as $35/month, and in fact $100/mo is a good target, and I've personally eaten lots of sushi and chicken and bacon and eggs and mushrooms at $120/mo (dry beans and ramen diet be damned). Let's use $300 and $100. a poor person suddenly spends $80, and a middle-class person spends $240 on food. Food being 20% cheaper, there's $60 more in each middle-class pocket every month, and $20 more in the pockets of the poor.

Propagate this out to other goods and services. If, on average, you save even 10%, that's a good $800 billion extra in people's pockets. There's room for another $800 billion luxury industry--video games or smart phones, for example. These industries may or may not automate well, and so you will find new jobs to create, and possibly a lot of new jobs where automation hasn't caught up. These jobs only require some cheap human labor that's difficult to automate, and so your basis of unemployed McDonalds sandwich makers becomes your new basis for the next new product or service.

Or you know, you could *actually DO* sports instead of standing in front of a light box and shout at picture of sportsmen.

Common, we're ./ here. We're notoriously sociopathic. We don't have the needs to root for a team or other such pointless ritual to reinforce social identity.

Actually the footprint of binary is dwindling.

Before:
- either catalyst, which is a completely closed source down to the kernel module.
- or opensource, which is an entirely different stack, even the kernel module is different.

Now:
- open source stack is still here the same way as before.
- catalyst is just the opengl library which sits atop the same opensource stack as the opensource.

So no, actually I'm rejoincing. (That might also be because I don't style my facial hair as "neck bread" ).

The whole point of AMDGPU is to simplify the situation.
Now the only difference between catalyst and radeon drivers is the 3d acceleration - either run a proprietary binary opengl, or run mesa Gallium3D.
All the rest of the stack downward from this point is opensource: same kernel module, same library, etc.

Switching between prorietary and opensource driver will be just choosing which opengl implementation to run.

If you don't need performance, radeon works pretty well too.
Radeon have an opensource driver. It works best for a little bit older cards. Usually the latest gen cards lag a bit (driver is released after a delay, performance isn't as good as binary) (though AMD is working to reduce the delay).

Like Intel, the opensource driver is also supported by AMD (they have opensource developpers on their payroll for that), although compared to Intel, AMD's opensource driver team is a bit understaffed.
AMD's official policy is also to only support the latest few cards generation in their proprietary drivers. For older cards, the opensource *are* the official drivers.
(Usually by the time support is dropped out of catalyst, the opensource driver has caught up enough with performance to be a really good alternative).

The direction toward which AMD is moving with AMDGPU is even more reinforcing this approach:
- the stack is completely opensource at the bottom
- for older cards, stick with Gallium3D/mesa
- for newer cards, you can swap out the top opengl part with catalyst, and keep the rest of the stack the same.
- for cards in between it's up to you to make your choice between opensource or high performance.

If you look overall, the general tendency is toward more opensource at AMD.
- stack has moved toward having more opensource components, even if you choose catalyst.
- behind the scene AMD is doing efforts to make future cards more opensource friendly and be able to release faster the necessary code and documentation.

I don't know what you don't find clear, in their strategy.

They've always officially support opensource: they release documentation, code, and have a few developpers on their pay roll.
Open-source has always been the official solution for older cards.
Catalyst has always been the solution for latest cards which don't have opensource drivers yet, or if you want to max out performance or latest opengl 4.x

And if anything, they're moving more toward opensource: merging the to to rely more on opensource base component, to avoid duplication of development efforts,
and finding ways to be faster with opensource on newer generations.

For me that's good enough, that why I usually go with radeon when I have the choice (desktop PC that I build myself) , and I'm happy with the results.

Some games like Morrowind and SimCity 4, you could just delete the video files. This also saved a significant amount of space. To this day my archival copies of both of those games are ZIP files of the game folder after installing the desired expansions and mods, and ripping out the intro videos. (And the nocd patches of course.) The games are almost "portable" like that, in that you can just copy the folder to a new computer and run it. I think the latter game has a couple of registry entris in a .reg file, that's it as far as installation goes.

Still, there are opensource implementation of VDPAU using VAAPI as a back-end.
and there are VAAPI implementation using VDPAU as a backend (useful also for opensource drivers which tend to implement VDPAU).