"Be careful of what you invoke - you might get it!"

On top of my page today:

"MOVINâ(TM) ON UP. You are on Slashdot Classic. We are starting to move into new digs in February by automatically redirecting greater numbers of you. The new site is a work in progress so Classic Slashdot will be available from the footer for several more months. As we migrate our audience, we want to hear from you to make sure that the redesigned page has all the features you expect. Find out more."

(one of) the other concerns is Police Work as Social Media Gamification.

It's like Ender's Game - They can turn it into some kind of dehumanized gamification contest, whereas until now people had a bit of slack leeway.

Fresh into returning to the field of Tax Prep, maybe there was a potential other angle of this, and I look forward to anyone chiming in about this. But what if you fight the "grumpy dog" (Child Svc) with a Grumpier Dog? (IRS)!?

When you file/filed your taxes, even though maybe you're smart enough to usually do stuff yourself, go to a really good tax prep service on purpose and then file your return. The Claiming rules from the IRS have pretty fierce residency duration checks. The point here is not about the tax effects, it's to use the preparer's credentials (and file with an Enrolled Agent etc) who can aggressively back up your case from day one.

So then when it bounces around at the Child Svc level, that "Phone Call" would go to an IRS rep back to Child Svc of the state.

Not an easy path to take but it might work.

I had a chance to log in and remotely look at a buddy's Win 8 system.

The big problem I noticed was all those tiles there that I would never ever use. "Photos, Facebook, Gmail, Other Social Media, Calendar, Contacts, ..." and I can't remember the other 20.

Holistically it's that all those things are dumped there, vs in the old days I use my desktop space for what *I* want there.

Well, there's at least two - Adblock Plus and Adblock Edge, which is a fork. So it would take a few more dollars to both buy them both AND re-license it with a mean lawyer who takes out the forking permission rights!

Hallo,

A comment from someone who just was learning about computers then, so take this with some salt...

One basic problem about Windows Me is that its timing was wrong. We all heard about the crash happenings of Win 95. Win 98 was a decent effort at least to tidy all that up. Not perfect, but you could see that someone tried. My first comp I learned on was Win 98.

The problem was, behind the scenes someone started a "skunkworks" second dev track based on the Win NT line that was at that time much more stable. Then they managed to get hold of the legendary Dave Cutler who poured himself into it all, and basically stamped the Win 2000, which when tweaked, became the Win XP that we all argue about today.

Win Me was a last left over holdover from the Win 98 codebase without all that extra hardening in, so it ran up against too many things that had been solved on the other dev track from Win 2000 / Win XP.

"AmEx isn't one of the big 2, and they charge the most of anyone."

However, if I chime my voice in as "just one from the average streetgoer", American Express has made its name in infamy as the card many businesses don't accept! (Because of those higher fees.)

So to be sure someone has held a few meetings over at AmEx, and decided losing those smaller accounts aren't worth whatever other clout they have among the executive set.

In contrast, I can't think of any tangible difference to me between Visa and Mastercard.

Real AI absolutely has both "Big Data" and some surprising small data attributes.

The early stumbling block was the old question of how an 8 year old can know that you eat an apple the apple sits on the table, and you don't eat the table. Then you *can* write on both the table and the apple with a ball point pen, but your Mother would be upset if you wrote on the table, and your Doctor would be upset if you wrote on the apple, ate it, reacted to the ink, then got sick.

So there are these branching use cases, but they do in fact have a finite (but large) ending.

But those guys didn't have "today's resources". And apparently, not "Today's Money". What I take away from this story is that via the "expert apps", AI is becoming possible, and the Singularity *will* happen, When-Not-If.

A devastating case example is the low tier workers in places like McDonalds. The "people app" isn't that hard... any competent programmer could get close within four tries at the basic duty set. The only missing equation is that people have low level abilities like walking and (not often) dropping things, so then you just train them for a week and they can do it. To get a fleet of Robots is such a huge sunk cost, but that's the only equation.

Jeopardy was a tougher challenge than most people realize, because it was about obfuscated and obscured knowledge. So if the program can parse that, it can parse more direct English as a piece of cake, sometimes.

"In Manhattan where slices are sold for a dollar. The exhibit to be provided separately contains the ratings of 48 such pizza stores. Only you can know if your precise pizza preference differs from the public rating."

We have a nice discussion going, but I think you missed both of my points.

"Once you have standardized page size and other challenges inherent with POD, you might as well just be downloading an e-book. Cost may be an issue for e-readers today, but you already can get some pretty damn cheap e-readers if you are willing to buy something other than the big name brands. So if you are talking about the future of books, not just trends over the next 5-10 years, it is most likely going to be incredibly cheap color e-ink tablets that most books are read from."

I think you mixed up the nouns of who is doing what.
A. Harvard Book Store (in discussion with the Rights Holders) has this same big databank of the digital files. But instead of a e-reader file, it's a POD machine file.

B. Me. *I* am not the one standardizing page files! And there are no challenges! Here, one min, lemme go to my shelf with the prototype books. I have here:

"The outlines of Mahayana Buddhism" 7x4.5 inches, 410 pages.

and "An Introduction to Mahayana Buddhism". 8.5 X 5.5 inches, 230 pages.

Each cost about $5. I get all that old time feel of having a physical reference, including turning down page corners and making pencil notes. And I just walked in, paid the cashier, and walked out with them an hour later. So no problems for me at all!

"They are for highly specialized content and for reference information that has not yet been posted online (which is more and more rare as the years go on)." All non-fiction content is highly specialized! A good non-fiction author too his/her time and created the info flow to demonstrate a larger premise. Not a single one of the 1000 ish books in my library can be duplicated *in the same order* online! Sure, with exhaustive work page by page you can begin to do it, but ... that's the point of a book!

The whole point of POD is ... on demand. You can bulk buy the 1000 books in digital format, then for the few you want in that old time format, you'd go down to your properly equipped store (theoretically *any* store!) and get your physical copy.

The tech has been here for half a decade. A little bit of sunk cost for the machine. But paper wise it might be as low as $2 a copy in raw costs. But the publishers are fighting it.

Okay, time to bring up a new topic.

I completely disagree that the internet is a "better source". It's a stunning *complementary source*. But books (medium, to be discussed later) are the exclusive domain of a ton of "long form content" with certain types of structure that don't really exist per se in the internet.

The big elephant in the room I still don't see really taken seriously is ... Print On Demand.

Clearly if someone has the digital file en masse for these kinds of e-libraries, then it's "not hard" to POD it. Then people could get their cumulative favorite 100 "tree books", but the library doesn't have to stock the massive 30,000 item collection with Long Tail problems.

POD is here. *Five years ago* the Hardvard book store had a prototype (cover art rights issues, sure) that produced books as solid as anything done by the pros "in about an hour".

But I'm amazed that no one is constructively talking about POD in these "future of books" discussions, even at the risk on the store side of the big chains folding. (ProTip - why would I even order from amazon if I could get my copy in my hand at lunch?)

"Brooding over existential issues is a pastime largely confined to the better off (it's hard to worry about the meaning of life when you're more worried about getting enough food to eat)."

I'm not sure this is true. Brooding is a Smart Person's activity. So for example with a junky job for example at the bottle factory I worked at in college, you had plenty of time to brood - all day every day! That's because you just packed boxes with empty gatorade boxes in the same pattern all eight hours a day.

"GEB (Score:4, Interesting)
by gbjbaanb (229885) on Wednesday January 01, 2014 @05:28PM (#45840105)

GÃfdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid [goodreads.com]

Godel, Escher, Bach is not a simple read. The ideas are complex and the logic subtle. But it is a completely satisfying book, and reading it is one of those rare experiences when you leave feeling smarter than when you started.

its true, though I felt like a complete simpleton after reading it - its an awesome piece of writing. Its not something to read casually though, you're gonna have to think, a lot."

Let's see if I can do an homage to that funky book.
4 3 2 1 3 2 2 6 2 4 5 4.
The sentence I will write in my next post is true. The one I wrote in my last post wants to be true. ... Nah. It's been too long since I read it to do it right. : (

This is the basic idea.

There's a bit of an idea here about "sunk costs" etc getting equipment past the Earth Gravity well. After that it's rather simple "relatively" to stockpile food. Air is a bit of the trickier part. But let's say they figured that out.

What 75 years of (even bad) Scifi has taught us is that you need a ridiculous batch of skillsets to do Mars right, way worse than planting flags on the moon. So I totally don't get why "with a little more engineering" they're not sending a Terraform team of 50, and then they get to study Group Dynamics and all that jazz. As it is, the second the pilot catches some dormant flu they're hosed.

The Replicator is partially here, for Digital Entertainment. And look at the fight to the death for it!

We can forgive T.O.S. for a lot of things being the first, and "being far enough back" they had a lot of ground to break and computers were 3rd generation ENIACS with better hardware. But it's interesting that Next Generation takes place in an updated time (including the early 90's) when enough of the early future of computing was clear enough ... ... and they still missed the Digital Rights theme. (Or else were told by the studios not to feature it!!)

Meanwhile, we're half way there on the physical printing side. "Everything is a file", and you become limited only by the "quality" of your "Replicator". The early days, all they could do is fill cheap plastic molds so you could make toy models and stuff. But slowly the surprises are coming.

Porsche Provides 3D Printer Blueprints for Scale Model Cayman
http://wot.motortrend.com/1312_porsche_provides_3d_printer_blueprints_for_scale_model_cayman.html

As a "Scale Model", that kind of thing could be an immense help for people like Indie Film-makers. Because a big limiting factor is props. Let's presuming the model car doors open, and you can get inside. Then it's 1982 Atari all over again, and you can just add CGI to the Windshield area to look like you are driving somewhere in your Porsche. Then you get out and go back to your film.

Or, as the homage itself, ... just print the props for a SciFi show!

So it's coming.