CypherGhost wrote:

As I watched a Super Target being built near my office, I wondered why they were laying bricks by hand. Surely this repetitive job could be automated by some sort of giant robot scaffold?

This brick laying robot takes the idea a step further.

Its important, when you think about automation, to think about it in economic terms rather than in technological terms. The fundamental issues is whether the robots are more or less expensive than the wages of the brick layers.

In Japan, you see a lot of robots because they don't have a lot of immigration nor do they have a lot of teenagers, and so they don't have a lot of people to fill the kinds of jobs you'd pay minimum wage for.

In China, on the other hand, you have an economy that is still developing and so there are tons of people who'd kill for a job at any wage, and so a lot of construction gets done in old fashioned ways with fewer tools and automation (and safety protection) than you see in the west. The people are cheaper than the machines.

In the US, we're somewhere in the middle. We have a sophisticated economy, but we have more teenagers than Japan and a healthy supply of immigrants.

That means that the amount of robots that you have is a matter of government policy. Asimov wrote about labor unions competing against robots, but thats not science fiction. Its actually happening in America today, whether people realize it or not.

This is really the other side of the immigration debate that people don't understand. Everyone agrees that the status quo is unacceptable. You cannot have people living in your society who aren't allowed to be there. You must either change their legal status or you must kick them out. What people don't understand is the roll they play in the economy and the costs associated with kicking them out...

RE: MAKE: Blog: Robotic brick laying system ensures light and airflow to plants

Google sees the mobile phone as a ubiquitous sensor network.

You will be carrying with you, 24x7 (a recent study of Chinese mobile customers showed that the majority of them sleep within a meter of their phones), a very powerful, always connected, sensor-rich device. And the cool thing is, so will everyone else.

I wonder if the CALEA/key escrow ideas will be extended to a requirement that you keep a government backdoor running on your phone...

Official Google Blog: The future of mobile

Mike the Usurper wrote:

dmv wrote:
A side-by-side comparison of the language changes on Obama's Technology position. Not good... and do they imagine there is not versioning software out there to highlight this? These are not just linguistic changes.

But then again, I guess he's running on Change...

Some of it isn't, some of it is, some of it is response to various attacks, some is clarification and some is condensing. There are some significant changes, but the version checking isn't as extreme as it looks because you have sections moved which are tracked as new, which were simply cut and pasted into new zones.

Significant yes, but not as big as described.

I think its huge! There is one section, Employ Technology and Innovation to Solve Our Nation’s Most Pressing Problems, which was cut and pasted and therefore tracks as new.

The majority of the edits consist of a massive cutting of specific policy ideas. For example, a very specific 4 point platform on safeguarding privacy rights, an 8 point platform on government transparency, and a 5 point plan for broadband competitiveness, as well as 4 of the 5 points on protecting children online were completely deleted, and in their place we have simple platitudes that mean almost nothing and that any candidate from any party is likely to agree to. Calling this "condensing" is far too generous. We're left with almost no idea what Obama actually promises to do about technology issues, but rather just a list of issues that he cares about without specific policy prescriptions. That means we are likely to see more of the same from his administration that we've been seeing for years on these issues.

Oh, wait, I see that we added one specific promise to protect corporate intellectual property rights abroad, which could only have come from Biden. Thats a major change in policy! I'll bet the addition of that point will cause a stampede of donations from the netroots!

One could get the impression that Biden's team had a large influence on this editing overall, as his name is deliberately added in several places. If that is true, it would mean that Biden is having a big impact on Obama's domestic policy, something Obama supporters have been quick to ensure us was not going to be the case.

Of course, both texts vastly overstate the power of the Presidency to create policy. Both campaigns are guilty of this. One gets the impression that most Americans have absolutely no idea how the federal government of the United States actually works, and people in politics embrace the confusion rather than combating it, as its not like anyone actually gets held to task on campaign promises...

Regardless, the bottom line is that if Biden's influence adds an authoritarian element to Obama's domestic policy positions and whitewashes his technology positions, it will leave his campaign with very little for me to get excited about, and I don't think I'm alone there.

RE: Versionista: Page comparison

"If the surge had truly 'worked,' we would expect to see a steady increase in night-light output over time, as electrical infrastructure continued to be repaired and restored, with little discrimination across neighborhoods," said co-author Thomas Gillespie, an associate professor of geography at UCLA. "Instead, we found that the night-light signature diminished only in certain neighborhoods, and the pattern appears to be associated with ethno-sectarian violence and neighborhood ethnic cleansing."

Mike the Usurper memed this study here but this UCLA press release has more information and a link to the actual study. This raises a number of questions that are likely to be promptly ignored.

UCLA study of satellite imagery casts doubt on surge's success in Baghdad / UCLA Newsroom

Did Kraftwork do the soundtrack for this?

YouTube - Sesame Street - How Crayons Are Made

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed suit against the NSA, President Bush and Vice President Cheney on behalf of AT&T's customers to fight illegal wiretapping.

I know this is totally beside the point, but don't you wish that this actually was the NSA logo?

EFF sues Cheney, Bush, and the NSA to stop illegal wiretapping - Boing Boing

You basically make cool retro or vintage looking pictures by taking a picture through the viewfinder of an old top-down viewfinder camera, like a Duaflex.

I really like these.

Flickr pool of photos taken through viewfinders of old cameras - Boing Boing

Conservatism was once a frankly elitist movement. Conservatives stood against radical egalitarianism and the destruction of rigorous standards. They stood up for classical education, hard-earned knowledge, experience and prudence. Wisdom was acquired through immersion in the best that has been thought and said.

Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she’d be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness.

Of course, Brooks is preaching to the choir in the New York Times, but it is precisely this sort of uninformed brashness that leads a leader to violate ancient principals - its a lack of knowledge about history. If you don't know why a principal exists and its preventing you from fighting terrorism, well, you are going to embrace the council of people who are telling you that you can ignore it.

Op-Ed Columnist - Why Experience Matters - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

We pump absurd quantities of cash into subsidizing corn (we also have a huge tariff on Brazilian sugar cane, incidentally). Over the past 10 years alone, Congress has appropriated more than $50 billion to encourage farmers to grow the stuff. But people don't want to eat $50 billion in subsidized corn. And if the cobs just sat around developing mold, Congress would cut off the spigot. Enter high fructose corn syrup, which sucks up the subsidies and created a world in which calories from a sweet, highly caloric additive have become the cheapest of all energy sources. That's the primary way the syrup contributes to obesity: Not by being more fattening, but by being so heavily subsidized that it makes it far cheaper to sustain yourself on sweetened carbohydrates than on nutritious food. That might be fine if the sweetener were naturally cheap, but instead, taxpayers are funding a concerted effort to flood grocery stores with unnaturally cheap, utterly unhealthy, foods.

Corruption kills.

The truth about corn syrup

I have to admit it, when Charlie Gibson asked Sarah Palin about the Bush Doctrine, I had no idea what he was talking about, either. I'm not sure whether that cringe I get when I watch the exchange is out of embarrassment for his transparent attempt to catch her with an intentionally vague question or her idiotic response. "His world view?" I was awake enough in high school history class to clearly recall that the word "doctrine" after a President's name refers to his basic principals of military foreign policy. You'd think the concept would be close in mind for someone who was studying up to be Vice President. But I'll bet the average American also had no idea what Gibson was referring to and thought he sounded arrogant.

Now, if I was there, on national television, and I was asked to come up with a response to the Bush Doctrine, I think I probably would have guessed that it states that we have the right to invade countries that harbor terrorists or provide them with material support.

Turns out, on September 8th, Wikipedia said the same thing:

The Bush Doctrine is a phrase used to describe various related foreign policy principles of United States president George W. Bush, created in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. The phrase initially described the policy that the United States had the right to treat countries that harbor or give aid to terrorist groups as terrorists themselves, which was used to justify the invasion of Afghanistan.[1] Later it came to include additional elements, including the controversial policy of preventive war,

The answer that Palin gave when prodded with the advice that we're talking about the Iraq war, was an answer about the Iraq war:

I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hell bent on destroying our nation. There have been blunders along the way, though. There have been mistakes made. And with new leadership, and that's the beauty of American elections, of course, and democracy, is with new leadership comes opportunity to do things better.

That answer really isn't satisfactory. Its an "abortions for some, miniature American flags for others" kind of answer that attempts to placate both supporters and opponents of the Iraq war without actually saying anything substantive. It doesn't demonstrate a depth of understanding or a unique perspective, which are the only things that will silence her critics. In fact, it continues to bleat out that McCain/Palin is for some sort of change, although its not entirely clear what kind of change they are for. If she really wants to change the Bush doctrine th... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

Bush Doctrine Wikipedia Edit War