Posts by Charles 9 16605 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Can you think of anything better, though? I think the problem behind the problem is that, although our current model is the best of the lot (name any other and you'll find fatal flaws, guaranteed), it's still insufficient. Which means we're up the proverbial creek.
The biggest trouble with something like Basic Income is always the most overlooked:
How do you FUND such a thing?
Basically, you can't tax the beneficiaries as it's twice the work, which leaves people like employers who'd never play along. They'll cheat at best, bail out at worst.
There's a bigger problem. 9 times out of 10, there are more potential workers than jobs to fill, which means someone will get shafted, sometimes through no fault of their own. Meanwhile they still have to earn their keep, and with demands for efficiency, the need for human labor is shrinking, not growing. It's a pretty hard problem overall, and no one wants to be the to tell people, "You lose. Game Over. Better luck next life," since things risk turning ugly.
"And I also agree it is an aspect of Envy/Jealousy. However theres more to it than that. We have caused the deaths of their relatives by our governments actions."
That's just plain Wrath. They hate us for killing their families and want revenge. And some of them don't care about the whole Vicious Cycle thing.
"Wow, exactly the opposite of the direction that schooling should be moving."
But some won't take no for an answer. They're SO anti-social they'd rather live completely apart than integrate. If forced upon them, they'll push back tooth and nail. But since they were BORN there, you can't just exile them, so you have born-here malcontents who hate you simply because. Haters gonna hate. How do you solve that?
"I'm also of the belief that there should be no private schools."
But that will also be impossible to enforce. Not only do you have the above who'd rather pull their children out of school and enforce their parental duties to the death, but you also have to deal with specialty and trade schools that pretty much HAVE to be privately run because anything else would be hopelessly inefficient.
"Perhaps if Corporate and Wealth taxes were increased and Government incompetence/corruption was great decreased the schools for us plebs could be made to be much better."
Corporate taxes will never work because they'll just pass the costs on. As for corruption, that became intractable with the rise of transnational corporations who can play sovereignty against you ("Shame if I decided to just up and move...").
I don't know the exact word in the airliner industry, but there are damn good reasons there are lots of talks about "checklists" and "procedures" in regards to airliner operations. The idea is to take as much as you can into consideration so that when something does happen, there's a procedure already in place for it.
The trick there is that the plane's computer would need to be aware of its location, surroundings, and situation. With the current level of technology available, it is possible to provide all three. If it knew it had just taken off from New York City and was evaluating possible emergency landing sites, picking the Hudson for a water ditch could be reached under the right instructions (a return was impossible, and anywhere else on land was risky due to the dense population. A water ditch near a shore would be the preferred course in such a situation--not too close to people yet not too far away, either). Even for things not explicitly seen before, we should be able to tell the computer to use heuristics or other techniques to find a best fit (which if you think about it is how humans respond to novel situations).
For an aircraft, the failsafe goal is to LAND the plane. Now, given that, how you proceed to that goal depends on the conditions involved, but it should be noted that one universal condition about commercial airliners is that they need to be able to GLIDE in case all the engines fail.
""We're sorry but the party you've called doesn't accept the call you're trying to make. Please leave a message & perhaps they'll call you back?""
Tried that. The lousiest of the lousy simply take advantage and fill your answering machine/voicemail with a lengthy ad message. And since some of the callers are international, they can sometimes use foreign sovereignty to avoid getting caught.
Instead of anonymous callers, what about "false ID" callers who use VoIP technology to misdirect caller recipients? Should be a way to force callers to reveal either their true source number or (with a legally-binding document) the number of their main office or (in the case of calling agents) the firm the caller represents.
No matter how clearly one reads directions, Murphy WILL find a way for someone to MISread them and cause havoc, as seen here. See it all the time when I call for someone to "look behind you" and they spin 360 instead, or I say, "Look down!" and they say, "I AM looking down!" while looking UP.
"Jake gave you a suggestion recently. I do strongly suggest you take it. I've seen some great stuff from you and do hope to see more, but this "being disingenuous for the sake of argument" really does get annoying at times."
I REFUSE. It's called Playing the Devil's Advocate. Besides, (1) edge cases don't stay edge cases for long, and (2) I've seen enough edge cases firsthand to build a tesseract.
Heinlein keeps getting read because he still has some interesting ideas, such as not being allowed to vote before making a significant contribution to the country first (though in his case that universally meant serving in the military). Goes back to the roots of the original voting restrictions to landowners (people with actual skin in the game).
"I seem to recall reading somewhere that Russia have a missile farm that can launch automatically with no human intervention if it detects certain things like a nuclear detonation over Moscow, seismic activity over a certain level which would denote same etc."
I think you're referring to the Dead Hand (aka Perimetr) system. No one really knows if it still exists or not since it's considered top secret by the Soviet and now Russian military.
Besides, as a brick-and-mortar location, Walmart can consistently trounce Amazon in that niggling little necessity of everyday life that almost requires a physical presence: groceries. Is it any secret that ANY Walmart you see now does groceries (and in the case of the Neighborhood Markets, is their specialty)?
It would be wrong to state Evolution as a fact, but as a theory, it certainly has a decent amount of experimental data going for it. At this stage, changes to the theory are likely to be in the form of adjustments, solutions to edge cases, and other what might be best termed as "fine-tuning".
Epigenetics has interesting data going for it as well, some of the most interesting coming from studies of monozygotic twins that should have identical DNA yet have different fingerprints and plenty of times show signs (even when raised together in the same household) of divergent behavior: including but not limited to differing sexual orientations. It's a pretty fair sign that DNA can't speak for everything.
"So what do you say to the person that ignores this, spends every penny they earn and lives beyond their means so they can't make rent or pay for basic necessities as soon as the tiniest problem arises?"
You're assuming people have enough left over to squirrel away. That isn't true for many people. They're literally living paycheck-to-paycheck (if not day-to-day) because they can't ask for more out of the market without being turned down (the only thing worse than a penny pay is NO pay), and what they get is barely (or NOT) enough to accommodate even a Spartan living. It's tough to squirrel away when you're not even making the Cost of Living and can't negotiate for higher.
"Reduce your expenses, earn more, or get a job that you can live from. If the first time you don't get paid puts on the brink of bankruptcy, your pretty much an idiot."
Or out of options. If you can't get any job that pays more than a Spartan living even if you dedicated most of your waking hours to it, and it's the best option for a significant radius, what was that adage about beggars and choice?
"No, it isn't. If it really was then all similar devices would be banned from planes entirely, including checked luggage."
Until you realize too many people use such devices...ON the flights. IOW, a total ban would result in a total backlash, as it would be going TOO FAR. It's like with the liquids in the carry-ons (nitroglycerin threat). Ban all liquids from carry-ons and people would've rebelled for reasons of liquid medicines and so on.
That's why I'm waiting for something like the dildo bomb, where the government is forced to throw up its hands because nothing known to man can stop that without ending the airline industry as we know it, and such a shakeup of reliable quick travel (especially across oceans) can have severe consequences for western civilization since a lot of modern society is dependent on air transit.
No, it really IS about the batteries. Recent intel indicates bomb makers are developing bombs that (1) are concealed inside actual working batteries, meaning they can be turned on and running to pass TSA-type checks, AND (b) can't be distinguished from real batteries even under an x-ray, presumably because they can use the battery material itself as a screen.
Not even technology can fight physics. If you want to get work done and you're far from a source of power, you MUST take some with you. And bomb makers have now shown that they can make bombs out of practically ANYTHING portable AND make it such it can fool even x-rays. If it isn't laptop batteries, it'll be something else. They're even working on bombs IN people. Imagine the force of that one bomb in 2009 would've been if the bomber had been able to take it out first.
No, what this REALLY means is that bomb-making each has reached the "nuclear" stage. By that I mean, to use siege warfare terminology, the inevitable endpoint has been reached: the more-flexible attackers now have the means (like say a Tactical Nuke) to overcome any possible defense the other side can possibly present. The technology has reached the point where no defense known to man can be even practically effective unless the attacker is stupid and/or incompetent. Either because the bomb can get through or the defenses that work come with so many strings attached as to be impractical (like x-rays--you either die from the bombs or die from the cancer: no-win situation).
As an injet printer maker, no, Lexmark isn't a thing anymore, which is a good thing.
That said, Lexmark is still very much in business in the enterprise world where their strength (toner-based products like copiers and laser printers) keeps them going, even if in rebadged forms (many Dell laser printers, for example, are rebadged Lexmarks).
The trick is if it is possible to bypass or reset the chip. I think at least some companies use public-key cryptography to thwart this, as the communications part of the cartridge is black-boxed and unique to each cartridge. If the printer will ONLY accept encrypted communications coming from such chips, things get tricky. But as noted this is a technological obstacle, not a legal one, and pretty much in line with what the article is noting (a trend towards self-destructing authenticated consumables to block aftermarket sales). It's nothing new as it's been happening since about the fourth generation of gaming consoles.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
