Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:It's already going on... (Score 1) 353

They do comply with OBDII. Some of the bits are different, obviously. I have an OBDII scanner I use regularly with my LEAF. It extends the spec to allow reporting on some EV-only parameters, such as the state of each of the hundreds of cells in the battery, but it also reports lots of the same data reported by an ICE.

Comment Re:It's already going on... (Score 1) 353

...ever put in that car insurance fob into your auto's computer port? (e.g. Progressive's Snapshot, where they treat it as a cute little device that aggressively records everything your car is doing when you drive.

Very interesting... thanks for the link, I just signed up. I did find it interesting that my 2004 Durango is compatible with their device, but my 2013 LEAF is not.

Comment Re:Github Followers (Score 3, Insightful) 285

Being a good programmer is orthogonal with being a good manager

I strongly disagree, assuming by "manager" we mean "team leader" rather than "HR manager".

Being an outstanding lone wolf programmer is of value, but significant projects are almost never single-person efforts. Real top programmers also have to be able to lead people.

Comment Re:OMG, not my tooth brushing!!! (Score 2) 150

... If somebody learns every detail of the motions I make when I brush my teeth...

While your comment sounds like over-the-top sarcasm, keep in mind the time when you go to the dentist and your dental insurance company refuses to pay their portion of the bill because you have not been brushing your teeth properly....

There are two sides to that. How would you like an option to buy dental insurance that is dramatically cheaper, but which you can only get if you allow your brushing habits to be monitored and corrected? I think there's value in allowing people who choose to manage their risks well to be able to benefit from the reduced costs. For such a policy it would be important that you find out that your brushing is substandard before you go to the dentist, though, not after. It shouldn't be a surprise.

We do need to draw a line that prevents preferential treatment based on characteristics which are not within the control of the individual, including past behaviors, but I see no problem and lots of advantages in enabling the use of pricing to encourage behavior that reduces costs.

Comment Re:more leisure time for humans! (Score 5, Insightful) 530

The final end result of mass mechanized production is that the available workers will far outnumber the available jobs

That assumption is not borne out by history. If it were true, we should already have arrived at that point long ago, since it used to be that 95-98% of human labor was dedicated to agriculture, and the number is more like 2% today. How is it that anyone has work to do? We dramatically expanded some jobs and invented lots of new ones, many of which would be utterly baffling or even ludicrous to farmers of a few centuries ago. What will people do in the future to add value? If I knew that, I could undoubtedly make several fortunes. But what I do know is that they'll do something. Perhaps the economy will mostly be service-based, driven by peoples' desire to be served by people rather than machines. Perhaps much of it will be highly-specialized, custom-tailored creative manufacturing, producing one-off, hand-made items. Maybe a lot of it will be creative or artistic, a world of painters, storytellers, etc. Maybe it will mostly be about designing and rushing to market the next mass-produced faddish gewgaw (this seems very likely to me). Some of it will definitely be around the design, care and feeding of the robots, even if much of that work becomes robot-assisted.

What I do know is that as long as there are people there will be something person A wants from person B and vice versa, and with that basis for trade there will be an economy, and something akin to jobs.

this is the problem that communism was intended to solve.

That's revisionist history, ludicrously so. Marx never foresaw anything of the sort. He believed firmly in the labor theory of value, and as such all economic power derived from human labor, not from mechanical power. Communism was about combating the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few people who owned the means of production, at the expense of the masses who provided the labor (and hence the real value).

His view was misguided in many ways, not least in that it almost completely ignores the value of intellectual work; the guy who figures out the right way to apply labor to raw materials is fantastically more effective than the one who does it the wrong way, and in fact this applies at all levels of the chain, up to and including the allocation of capital. Communism is inherently horrible at effectively allocating resources since it lacks the price signals that bundle cost and relative value and communicate them in a way that enables efficient allocation of resources to maximize what people collectively perceive as good, which is why communist economies always fail, and will always fail, even in the presence of automated systems that produce and distribute all of the essentials of life to everyone equally, even if said essentials include what we'd call luxuries. Those essentials will become the baseline expectation, much like oxygen, and economic competition will be around something else.

Comment Re:Some Problems (Score 3, Insightful) 110

I'd say it's actually a little more complex than that. It depends not just on the source server but on every point between the source server and your machine. In the case of the Netflix/Comcast spat a while ago, for example, the problem wasn't Comcast's network, or Netflix, or the network between them, but Comcast's connection to the network between them -- so it was Comcast's fault, but not in a way that would show up with connections to other servers that took a different path.

And regardless of whether or not *you* blame YouTube when it's slow, many users do, which is why Google is doing this.

Comment Re:Some Problems (Score 1) 110

When I cannot get downloads a MB/sec rates, I generally blame the server at the other end and not my broadband provider.

When the server at the other end is YouTube, it's not the server at the other end. Google has enormous capacity, both computing and bandwidth, and is extensively peered. But people do tend to blame the server, which is why Google is trying to make clear that it's not YouTube that's sucking when you have problems watching videos.

Comment Re:That does it (Score 2) 116

Better make it "No Cameras Allowed". Which, incidentally, also means "No Smartphones or Tablets Allowed", since they all have cameras... which would actually eliminate the risk of passwords being stolen as they're entered into a smartphone or tablet, since no smartphones or tablets are allowed. Problem solved!

Shut up, glasshole.

Jealous, much? Actually, I don't have Google Glass... but I'm hoping to get one for Christmas this year. Neener neener!

Comment Re:Battery not removeable? No HTC One M8 for me. (Score 1) 702

Considering all mobile phones had removable batteries until the past five years, it is a sneaky ploy. It'd be like buying a car that doesn't have a hood. Even if they don't explicitly say that you can service it, it is something that people expect.

The first really successful smartphone -- the iPhone, released in 2007 -- has never had removable batteries. In fact, since I got my first smartphone, about five years ago, I've only had one that did have removable batteries (Galaxy Nexus), and I never found it a particularly useful feature. I did buy an extra battery but swapping batteries frequently is inconsistent with keeping a good case on it, so after breaking a phone I found it was better to just charge it whenever I was near a charger. My Moto X doesn't have a removable battery.

Comment Re:That does it (Score 5, Funny) 116

Time to trademark a 'No Glass Allowed' symbol.

Better make it "No Cameras Allowed". Which, incidentally, also means "No Smartphones or Tablets Allowed", since they all have cameras... which would actually eliminate the risk of passwords being stolen as they're entered into a smartphone or tablet, since no smartphones or tablets are allowed. Problem solved!

Comment Re:Christmas is coming early this year (Score 1) 702

how many will it take for it to be a problem.

Given the amount of inconvenience and expense this is going to create for millions of people, I'd say it takes at least one, and probably more than that. Being pro-active is good, but security measures have to be balanced against probability of deployment, effectiveness and the cost of prevention. It's not possible to defend against every form of destructive sabotage of aircraft, so we have to pick and choose, and focus on high priority threats.

Comment continuing... (Score 1) 725

(Stupid touchpad...)

  - If this deviation is the result of burning fossil fuels, they are expected to run out in about 800 years - after which the temperature might crash toward the "Ice age already in progress" as the excess carbon is removed from the atomsphere by various processes, or simply be overwhelmed by the orbital mechanical function if it remains.

Does this scenario count as supporting or opposing anthropogenic global warming?

Slashdot Top Deals

One man's constant is another man's variable. -- A.J. Perlis

Working...