Comment Re:Sell any stock before they launch this... (Score 3, Insightful) 375
All of which will still outrank CNN. :)
And I could see a longship having a piece break off after getting shot at and having that debris end up in just the right spot to clog the subs engines or torpedo bays or something like that. Sure it's statistically unlikely, and probably not even a 1/1000 chance of actually happening, but for the sake of game play I can accept it.
At that point you're better off imagining the sub had a critical weapons malfunction and blew itself up so the longship wins on walkover. Or that the warrior sneaked into the riflemen's camp and poisoned their water supply.
Weren't people saying the same sort of things when the "assembly line" was first invented? After all, the main purpose of the "assembly line" was to make the same amount of stuff with fa fewer workers than had been needed previously.
Well first off you're not looking back far enough, during the first industrial revolution there was massive unemployment as machines replace skilled artisans and craftsmen with cheap, expendable factory workers that could receive minimal training in their one task on the line. The assembly line actually comes very late in a mostly industrialized society already and an old fashioned manual assembly line still employs a considerable number of people. And Ford famously doubled wages to get retention up, because the assembly line work was actually getting complex and needed trained workers.
This time we're not just dividing and rearranging the way workers produce their product, we're cutting the humans entirely out of the equation except for meta-roles like designers, developers and repairmen. For example take the banking industry, it used to be huge with branch offices all over the place. ATMs were the first blow, now online banking has reduced it down to next to nothing. I just checked the figures on one bank I know, 250 FTEs (full-time equivalents) supporting 380,000 customers.
Think about it, in how many service industries is the human staff actually a service? When I go to the grocery store, what I want are the groceries. I don't care if robots automate the whole shop if they keep delivering the same service and quality. When it comes to water/sewage/electricity/internet etc. I'd rather not deal with them at all, I pay a bill and it works. If a lot of those jobs disappear at the same time and I don't mind seeing them go, but I'm paying nearly the same for the robot/self-service service there won't be much left of my paycheck to pay whatever new jobs these people have found.
You are assuming the company would know the legal limits of an NSL. you are assuming the company would care about legal limits. If the NSA agent makes a good case of "Terrorism" then they will likely get what they want.
Of course the company would know the legal limits. They have attorneys.
That they might not care I addressed in the second paragraph.
If anything, what I want is for my DE not to be based on a major toolkit. This breaks down when it gets to the file manager
And the system settings, that one is much tighter integrated to the DE than the file manager. And it needs to manipulate the pointer. And context menus, arrange menu bars etc. so it need some kind of UI toolkit. I don't quite see what it has to gain by reinventing the wheel, it's not like pulling in Qt/Gtk drains that many resources by themselves.
I guess even if there was a way, the vendor would probably just get a NSL to put the backdoor in himself
NSLs can't do that. The law is quite specific about what an NSL can request. Not only can't it demand pro-active measures like backdoors, NSLs can't even demand the content of communications that the recipient already has. NSLs are limited by law to demanding communications metadata only.
Well, I suppose a letter can be issued that demands anything at all, and companies may choose to comply, but they don't legally have to if the letter specifies more than what is allowed by law.
Perhaps they should be asking for a ".google" gTLD, for that purpose, instead of trying to monopolize a generic identifier.
I was about to suggest the same, but with ".goog", to make it shorter.
They've applied for and received (been delegated) both.
https://gtldresult.icann.org/applicationstatus/applicationdetails/1429
https://gtldresult.icann.org/applicationstatus/applicationdetails/1430
URLs have a reason to exist, and they will. The same way that IPs have a reason to exist and will, even though we rarely use them today.
Clearly they're important, and will be whether or not people see or use them. To the degree we can build infrastructure that hides the technical details and provides people with more human-friendly interfaces, we've made progress. Of course, the security engineer in me worries about the attack surface provided by these additional layers of abstraction.
But 10 years ago, I knew the IPs of all my servers by heart. Today I need them rarely, but sometimes I do and I know where to find them.
A few years from now you'll be glad that you need them rarely. Even with zero-compression, IPv6 addresses are unwieldy for humans.
Today I know all my domains by heart. Maybe in 10 years I will use them rarely, but when I do, I know how to do it.
It will be interesting to see what direction we go.
At the assembly level it isn't so easy to automate with a lot of the designs. There are flex cables, adhesive, torque sensitive screws that all rely on a human to be able to manipulate and then quickly respond to misalignment. To automate this, the design constraints placed on the Industrial Designs need to change.
I think you underestimate how far sensor technology has come and will go, here for example is an example of automated salmon processing. Obviously there's a lot of natural variation, do we need to bioengineer a more robot-friendly salmon? No. They're measured out by a laser and intelligently cut. Head/tail/other cuts are dropped out to go on another processing line. Each cut is grabbed by a robot with robot vision and placed in pouches to be sealed. Skip to 3:12 if you just want to see that last part. Fillet-making machines are still in the research phase but there are examples of that too using X-rays to scan and find the pin bones. If they can deal with all that, I'm sure they can apply the right torque to a screw.
Assuming you are going to type something in that box, see if you can find the TAB key
Why? Why not just type without bothering with the tab and let the machine figure it out? That's my whole point.
Okay, so the submitter asked for "good" solutions, and this may not qualify, but it's what I do: A whiteboard at each location, with a camera pointed at it. I can't draw on your drawing, but I can see what you draw, and you can see what I draw. I've experimented with various web-based shared whiteboards, but they all require drawing on the computer. Even with a tablet (either Wacom-style attached to a laptop/PC or a mobile device) and a pen, a real whiteboard is better.
In my case, generally there are at most three locations in the meeting, and usually only two: My home office and a group of people in a conference room. Having more may make the "real whiteboards" solution less effective.
Well, then that's their limitation, not mine. I am tired of this trend of dumbing things down to the lowest possible.
Damn straight. It's like all these stupid GUI interfaces. I mean, I can see using a graphical interface if you're editing photos or something, but for reading and writing text? It's ridiculous and just makes it so that stupid people can do it without having to understand anything.
It all started with visual text editors, you know? Line editing was good enough, heck, you could argue that it made things too easy, too. What was really good was when we used toggle switches to enter data and read the output from a sequence of lights. If you can't mentally translate binary to ASCII you don't deserve the power of computation.
</sarcasm>
Real Programmers don't eat quiche. They eat Twinkies and Szechwan food.
