I'm not seeing how your solution is "far better" considering that the "iPhone of similar vintage" is the iPhone 3GS (released June 2009) which still continues to receive updates.
This argument doesn't make sense since Craigslist is already a vehicle for advertisement. People pay for advertisements placed on Craigslist. They don't pay their operating costs through donations, they pay by having people give them money to provide a service (in this case, advertising).
I said it reminded me of something and described it.
Anyway, try looking for similarities. Anyone can find differences between things, but what do we learn from that? We already know no two things are perfectly identical.
I find we learn more from similarities in things we expect to be different.
As a personal note, disagree about what you think we learn more from. I find differences far more interesting. If the universe was all the same it would be immensely boring. It's the differences that make us question everything else that has been the same before.
Metaphysics and all, and quite useless practically. But it's fun to discuss :)
Where is anyone talking about conflicts light-years away? I think we may be discussing different things. The article itself concentrates on intra-system conflicts, primarily because it is trying to deal with realistic space combat using current technology. FTL drives are not part of that paradigm.
Yes, obviously if something is light-years away you would need to develop general purpose AI to make those decisions or send a command ship with a human crew to the location, but the post you are replying to was discussing 10s to 20s delays associated with local space combat.
> The article itself concentrates on intra-system conflicts
Neptune is more than 4 light-hours away, and the Oort cloud (discussed as a possible source of projectiles) a full light-year further. So I don't see how anything short of general purpose AI can be tele-operated for intra-system conflicts.
The two examples you cherry-picked are the furthest objects in our solar system. You've literally picked the outlying examples and made them the rule.
The same "problem" could be solved by sending a bunch of what are essentially missiles-carrying-missiles with algorithms that boil down to orders to shoot at any objects that are hot or fast moving or match certain radar signatures. This technology has been in place since the first heat-seeking missile... 1956! There are plenty of other solutions that do not require a general AI (such as sending command ships out).
The point is that the 10-20 seconds latency that was mentioned is not even close to covering the next planet, much less the entire solar system. Yes, you can send off a bunch of heat-seeking missiles, but, as I mentioned in my original post way up this thread, these missiles are routinely defeated by counter-measures even when seconds away from the target. So, in the absence of strong AI, it's vastly more efficient to actually have a few humans on board the ships.
How does a human-operated ship mitigate anti-missile counter-measures better than an AI operated ship, assuming the same munitions? You have yet to give a single concrete example. If anything, a human-operated vessel would have a worse reaction time than a machine-operated vessel (or AI-operated if you want to be romantic). This is simply due to the physics of operating a biological construct to mechanically manipulate things instead of an electronic construct to manipulate much smaller things on a much smaller level.
And to sum up, you've used these as synonyms in the argument:
strong AI
general-purpose AI
human-like AI
These are completely different things. What, exactly, are you referring to?
So, in the absence of strong AI, it's vastly more efficient to actually have a few humans on board the ships.
Have you done the math on that? Humans (and more importantly their life-support systems) are hugely, hugely expensive in terms of the carrying capacity of a space ship.
Huh, why do you require human-like AI to control a bunch of high-velocity objects, calculate intercepts, and release other high-velocity objects on those intercepts?
The only human-level decision that needs to be made is simply confirming the object is a target and should be attacked.
Most people haven't served in the military, but have you ever played a war game? Deciding where to move the weapons platforms and which objects are targets for what is the very essence of fighting a successful battle.
Don't these guys take an oath to uphold the Constitution when they are sworn into office? How is attempting to pass a law to subvert free speech not breaking what they swore to protect?
Politicians and most judges, and almost all lawyers, are paid specifically to come up with plausible sounding reasons why nothing violates the constitution.
It's a prestigious line of work, with a long and glorious tradition.
"Amazon [...] is taking business from local stores."
Why is this complaint even taken seriously? If your business model is superseded by someone else who can deliver a product in a manner that customers prefer (in this case, cheaper and delivered to their doorstep) then you either compete or you die. Because that's what competition is.
Their business model hasn't been superseded. Amazon is free-riding on the stores' display of physical goods. If the shoppers don't value being able to view, handle or browse the physical goods, why are they in the store? So they value having the store there but don't want to pay for it.
Maybe Amazon's plan is to drive these stores out of business and then open its own display stores where people can go to inspect merchandise before ordering it online.
Or perhaps Amazon, by offering a discount and an improved checkout experience (you're in the store, but don't have to wait in line or carry the item out), is converting people to not go to retail stores.
Or, as I've encountered myself doing, you're price checking because sometimes you run across an interesting item but want to make sure you're not getting ripped off. For a $5 discount, I'm unlikely to change my purchase action on anything - however I've been in situation where the price at the mall is 100% more than Amazon's.
Amazon isn't the one free-riding there--it is the customer in the store. If Amazon didn't have a bar-code scanner in their app, or even an app at all, I would still check store items versus Amazon on my phone. It is fair to say that local stores are providing a valuable browsing experience that customers don't necessarily compensate them for, but that was also true well before Amazon existed. I don't see how anyone can blame amazon here. They are just improving the experience for their existing customers.
I really haven't seen any evidence to back up your claims outside of fear-mongering news articles and general whining from the big box brick-and-mortars.
"Maybe Amazon's plan is to drive these stores out of business and then open its own display stores where people can go to inspect merchandise before ordering it online."
This cannot be a serious conjecture. Opening up quasi-retail locations with all the expenses of retail but no ability to actually making a sale? Didn't Gateway do this in the late 90s?
If it ever got to the point where brick-and-mortar stores for certain things ceased to exist since everyone was buying online, you could have a store that actually charged admission to browse (and to convince people to still come, you could make that admission count toward an online order or toward food at a store restaurant.)
Pretty unlikely, although maybe it would make sense in a less-developed community (third world countries, outer space) that does not already have modern brick and mortar stores.
Then the stores just aren't competitive enough if Amazon is taking business away from them. Tax isn't usually a big enough reason for me to order something online when I'm standing right in front of the product.
The store makes it free to see the items and so forth because they believe the customers are more likely to buy then.
Nobody is free-riding anything here. The offer is to view the merc for free. The offer is taken. That is the end of it.
If the stores don't make money this way they will have to change. Maybe they should charge for shoppers who don't buy anything, mayby they should charge for people coming in the door (like a museum or a zoo or a gallary of modern art).
There is no free-riding here.
And please in the future don't use such loaded terms. It does generally not lead to an improved debate and will make some here (me at least) suspect you of astro-turfing.
The Misc is probably my favorite general forum on the internet. Suprisingly-high level of discourse and genial atmosphere for a forum dedicated to lifting weights. HN would be pretty impressed with the number of engineers and entrepreneurs there as well :)
>The problem which many have mentioned here and elsewhere is that while Japan is unrivalled in craftsmanship ("monozukuri") -- making physical things -- exactly the opposite is true when it comes to "unphysical" things like software.
This is something I do not understand. Why is there a cultural aversion to creating beautiful software? As an example, Honda has some of the most beautifully designed interiors in the automotive world. Simple, elegant, functional, with quality materials. The design is often very Apple-like (at least relative to other manufacturers, though they are improving). I would think that the culture that gave us wonderful interaction with a vehicle would be able to provide a similar sort of experience with a phone. What's bizarre is that most pre-iPhone Japanese phones have the UX of a mid-90s Buick: lots of buttons, nothing really arranged properly.
To me it's just strange that they were unable to produce it, but I am not surprised at all that the iPhone is so popular. I feel like the iPhone should have come out of Japan, but didn't.
Have you looked at Japanese websites? Most of them have pretty terrible design/UI. It's the same thing.
My take on this is that you have to look more broadly to understand the tendency for cluttered design in Japanese interfaces. Walk around a small neighbourhood in Tokyo and you'll see how cluttered the layout is. On small "roji" (back alleyways), Japanese like to stack potted plants outside their front doors in a pretty disorganized arrangement. Streets are generally not straight, neighbourhoods rarely follow a grid layout.
It's the same thing with cluttered interface design, except that whereas in urban layout it produces something amazingly complex, intricate and fascinating to explore, in UI design it just results in frustration and inefficiency. But I'm convinced the two come from the same source, and that you can't entirely separate them.
The beautifully designed interiors you mention come from a completely different place (mentally, not physically). I don't quite know how to reconcile the fact that the two come from the same country/culture, but I do believe they have both been here for a long long time. It's just that software somehow tends to bring out the former, whereas monozukuri brings out the latter.
The thing with the winding streets is that they came out organically---nobody planned them that way. You can't really fix that without doing something horribly draconian.
The newspaper inserts, magazines and websites, though...you'd think someone could just say, "Wow, this is an incredible eyesore that's impossible to navigate," and, you know, just not do that anymore.
I've got a Panasonic TV with an HDD recorder(can't remember the model, I'm at work) that is incredibly simple and intuitive to use. Want to record a show? Click one button on the remote, and you're given a grid of the upcoming TV listings. Click on the show you want, and it's done. Even my 6-year-old son knows how to use it. I can't imagine Apple doing better. Good UI can certainly be done in Japan.
I'm baffled because historically, Japan is all about using limitation to great effect. In terms of food, art, language (is there a more contextual language?), and engineering, Japan very much has an island-nation use-limited-resources-and-achieve-great-things approach.
The website thing that you mentioned is true. .jp websites are TERRIBLE in UX. I wonder if there is some part of Japanese culture that wants to embrace complexity for it's own sake.
And, let's be honest, the US/EU/Everywhere-Else designs for phones weren't very good pre-iPhone either. It had the same complexity problems and close to the same UX ridiculousness that the Japanese phones had. Perhaps it's a human thing, to marvel at too much to comprehend and consider it a good thing.
That being said, if any company were to come up with an iPhone, I would think it would be a Japanese one. But Japan is very traditional and Apple is unique in that it disregards a lot of conventions. I think this might be to Japan's detriment. I don't feel that they've embraced the current approach to UX, they are still stuck in the "complexity = more features = better" days of the Web during the dot-com-boom days (aka ancient history).
I hope there are some Japanese entrepreneurs out there ready to shake things up, the cultural seeds are already there for beautiful and elegant products.
Concerning websites, when you compare rakuten Japan and say UK, you see a stark difference in how things are presented. This may just be due to the UK site being done outside Japan/by foreigners, but this would hint at a some preference toward clutter for Japanese customers ?
The classic case of this is Google vs Yahoo in Japan. Yahoo is more popular, and if you look at the layout, you'll see that it's much more cluttered (or at least, that there's loads more information). At one point Google caved in (in Japan) and added more buttons to their top page, but I see they've switched back to the basic logo + search bar.
Another thing to consider is that the cluttered thing is not only Japan: I've heard that other Asian countries also have a preference for clutter. I can't vouch for whether that's true, but it sounds pretty believable.
Yahoo Japan is a pretty Japanese company (dunno about the proportion of Japanese workers there). I only got a very small look at it during interview there, but google Japan seems much more westernized as far as the workforce is concerned.
It would really interesting to know who is responsible for rakuten UK (or any other country). Since prices are in JPY, I am quite confused about the meaning of rakuten UK...
I'm a student and the Khan Academy is saving my ass because a) he's a better instructor than my professor and b) the rewards and achievements make it really fun to "play the game" (read: learn high level mathematics). Of all the textbooks I've had over the years, I cannot think of one that has presented the information as clearly and practically as Mr. Khan has.
