> It's broken because it's not focused on managing companies it's focused on managing stock prices.
Yup. Nailed it in one sentence. Then nailed it again with the rest, just for good measure. For example:
> You tell your manager what you care about by how you pay them.
In the political sphere we hear a lot of talk about the profit motive being the only "realistic" way to shape policy. But clearly it's just as important to look at what kinds of profits/incentives are in play and how they are implemented. And clearly the incentive system (especially on Wall Street) is not working well.
Bullshit. I personally know several dozen just here in Taipei. (Including myself.)
1. You can get through a newspaper article pretty smoothly with anything over 2000 characters in your vocabulary. (Depending on your verbal fluency, of course.) 2. On the contrary, they have too many competing alphabets, much to the consternation of Westerners who want to study Chinese. Thankfully the world seems to be settling on Hanyu Pinyin as the standard, with Taiwan as the only holdout. 3. Having a phonetic writing system has its ups and downs. Our "phonetic" writing system in English is subject to changes in pronunciation over time, not to mention the periodic influx of vocabulary from conquerers (eg: Roman, Norman, Viking) which results in a "phonetic" spelling system that is fucked beyond belief. (We have spelling competitions in the USA; in China they compete on calligraphy.) With their ideographic writing system, Chinese kids are able to read ancient texts with no more difficulty than we read Shakespeare... despite the fact that several waves of conquering invasions have imposed new dialects over the centuries. 4. Yes, cognates are rarer, but not as rare as you'd think. For example, did you know that ketchup originated from the Chinese word for tomato juice? But the vast majority are not true cognates, but simply popular borrowings from English. (eg: han-bao = hamburger; san-ming-zhi = sandwich) 5. Yes and no... the tones are challenging at first, but if you have any modicum of a musical ear, you'll pick it up easily. 6. Used to be, yes, but not so much these days. In the digital age, it's not too difficult. 7. Not sure what you mean here.. I guess it's an attempt to mimic the way Chinese chops up meaning into ideographs instead of pseudo-phonetic transcriptions. Actually, that's the easy part... the grammar becomes much more "interesting" in this regard, but it gets much easier once you get the trick of it.
From an Asian perspective, it's much harder to learn English than most other Western languages, simply because it's so unpredictable. The spelling rules are a complete mess, making English writing almost as challenging to learn as the Chinese system. Verb conjugations in English are a mish-mash of borrowings from half a dozen influences (at least), which is particularly hard for Chinese speakers, whose language has more-or-less uniform tense-markers across the board.
In a nutshell, English is the hardest language for Asians to learn. Chinese is the hardest language for Westerners to learn.
Why do I find it so difficult to feel sorry for the Wall Street gamblers who got their precious "intellectual property" stolen?
BTW, speaking of Wall St. gamblers... there's a new bill in Congress to reinstate the Glass-Steagall "wall of separation" between investment and commercial banking. Contact your reps to get them on board.
Fifteen or twenty years ago, I saw a "student" film about a guy at an ATM, and "HAL" starts talking...
ATM: "Hello Dave, I see you're withdrawing 25 dollars." DAVE: "Yeah, I'm going on a date tonight." ATM: "Now Dave, you know you haven't had a date in 3 months." DAVE: "No, really! Honest!"
I wish I could remember the rest of it. Good stuff.;-)
Yes, it's illegal, but in some situations it's still the safer choice. For example, on a suburban strip-mall "main-drag" road that's six lanes wide, with no bike lane, and nothing but parking lots and a sidewalk between the road and the buildings... and usually in such places there's nobody actually walking on the sidewalk. In those cases, it seems like a much safer option for everyone concerned if the bicyclist uses the sidewalk.
OTOH, if you're serious about biking, you'll find other options. It's been a while since I used a bike as daily transportation, but I remember getting quite familiar with the side roads and residential streets. Usually you can find a quick, slick route that seldom crosses paths with the "big" traffic, and get there in less time with less stress.
How long will it take before Kinect-style 3D-ranging becomes "standard" for all or most cameras? With 3D display tech getting closer to usability and affordability in recent years, clearly some companies are seeing a market opportunity. And with all the interesting Kinect hacks that have come out lately, it's not hard to imagine this sort of thing cropping up all over the place in the near future.
How long will it take before depth sensing tech becomes a standard feature on your average smart phone? (If ever?)
Ok, that at least sounds like a useful application. Not sure if "sound profiling" would be my first choice for implementing it, but at least it's useful.
Maybe I missed something in TFA, but I don't remember it mentioning any ability to track someone else's phone, it just tells me the current location of my phone. Even if it does have that capability, it would be simple enough to spoof... just leave the phone in the kitchen (or at your workstation, etc.) while you scamper off to do something naughty.
It might be more useful if it had a shared, central database of sound profiles, which was coupled with a blueprint/map of each building. That might help if you were lost inside the Pentagon or some similar labyrinth. But most such places tend to have maps on their walls anyway.
Thanks. I understand that their "speed" will be similar, especially in LEO, but there's still a huge possible range in angle of attack, which would make a huge difference in the energy of an impact. I'm just curious what order of magnitude we're dealing with here. Are the two meeting at 500kph or 50,000kph? How big is this debris object... 0.5g or 500g?
If I were on the ISS at the time, I would be asking these questions.
By Kiyoshi Takenaka, Reuters Saturday, 14 May 2011
A worker at Japan's tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant died today, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co said, bringing the death toll at the complex to three since a massive earthquake and tsunami in March.
The cause of the death was unknown. The man, in his 60s, was employed by one of Tokyo Electric's contractors and started working at the plant yesterday. He was exposed to 0.17 millisieverts of radiation today, Tokyo Electric said.
The Japanese government's maximum level of exposure for male workers at the plant is 250 millisieverts for the duration of the effort to bring it under control.
The worker fell ill 50 minutes after starting work at 6am on Saturday and brought to the plant's medical room unconscious.
He was later moved to a nearby hospital and confirmed dead, a Tokyo Electric spokesman said.
Working conditions at the plant are harsh. Goshi Hosono, a special adviser to Prime Minister Naoto Kan and a ruling Democratic Party lawmaker, voiced concerns about the working environment at the Fukushima complex on Wednesday.
Yeah right, oil shale and tar sands... just the thing we need in our collective backyard. If we're lucky that would only be as bad as hydraulic fracturing for gas. The actual oil listed in the Kiplinger piece (OCS, Bakken, ANWR) totals about 200 billion barrels... enough to supply the USA's needs for about 30 months. Yay!
And if we do go for the shale/sand play, we'll get a paltry 3-to-1 return on energy inputs. Seriously, there are better ways to solve our petro-fuel problems.
As for the original topic (nukes), we need to get beyond the 1950's technology. If we're going to use them, at least we should use the safest designs possible.
Military applications were also a key factor in why the USA went down the Uranium path for commercial energy production. You can't make plutonium in a Thorium reactor (or so I've read). It's depressing to hear that India might be dumping Thorium research for the same reason. At least China seems to be pursuing it seriously. I suppose we can just wait for them to perfect the technology and then buy our reactors from them.
Slashdot Mirror
Like all things from Uranus, Brown-25 comes out a little differently.
> It's broken because it's not focused on managing companies it's focused on managing stock prices.
Yup. Nailed it in one sentence. Then nailed it again with the rest, just for good measure. For example:
> You tell your manager what you care about by how you pay them.
In the political sphere we hear a lot of talk about the profit motive being the only "realistic" way to shape policy. But clearly it's just as important to look at what kinds of profits/incentives are in play and how they are implemented. And clearly the incentive system (especially on Wall Street) is not working well.
> It's the only way to be sure.
Other than nuking the site from orbit. Just sayin... ;-)
What, no condoms? ;-)
Thanks for the link. You're right, it's much better than the GGP post. ;-)
Bullshit. I personally know several dozen just here in Taipei. (Including myself.)
1. You can get through a newspaper article pretty smoothly with anything over 2000 characters in your vocabulary. (Depending on your verbal fluency, of course.)
2. On the contrary, they have too many competing alphabets, much to the consternation of Westerners who want to study Chinese. Thankfully the world seems to be settling on Hanyu Pinyin as the standard, with Taiwan as the only holdout.
3. Having a phonetic writing system has its ups and downs. Our "phonetic" writing system in English is subject to changes in pronunciation over time, not to mention the periodic influx of vocabulary from conquerers (eg: Roman, Norman, Viking) which results in a "phonetic" spelling system that is fucked beyond belief. (We have spelling competitions in the USA; in China they compete on calligraphy.) With their ideographic writing system, Chinese kids are able to read ancient texts with no more difficulty than we read Shakespeare... despite the fact that several waves of conquering invasions have imposed new dialects over the centuries.
4. Yes, cognates are rarer, but not as rare as you'd think. For example, did you know that ketchup originated from the Chinese word for tomato juice? But the vast majority are not true cognates, but simply popular borrowings from English. (eg: han-bao = hamburger; san-ming-zhi = sandwich)
5. Yes and no... the tones are challenging at first, but if you have any modicum of a musical ear, you'll pick it up easily.
6. Used to be, yes, but not so much these days. In the digital age, it's not too difficult.
7. Not sure what you mean here.. I guess it's an attempt to mimic the way Chinese chops up meaning into ideographs instead of pseudo-phonetic transcriptions. Actually, that's the easy part... the grammar becomes much more "interesting" in this regard, but it gets much easier once you get the trick of it.
From an Asian perspective, it's much harder to learn English than most other Western languages, simply because it's so unpredictable. The spelling rules are a complete mess, making English writing almost as challenging to learn as the Chinese system. Verb conjugations in English are a mish-mash of borrowings from half a dozen influences (at least), which is particularly hard for Chinese speakers, whose language has more-or-less uniform tense-markers across the board.
In a nutshell, English is the hardest language for Asians to learn. Chinese is the hardest language for Westerners to learn.
Yeah, you're right, that's completely different. Fat-cat commodities gamblers in Chicago are nothing at all like the ones in NYC.
LOL! So that's what that "stux.zh.cn.jpg" file was all about... ;-)
Why do I find it so difficult to feel sorry for the Wall Street gamblers who got their precious "intellectual property" stolen?
BTW, speaking of Wall St. gamblers... there's a new bill in Congress to reinstate the Glass-Steagall "wall of separation" between investment and commercial banking. Contact your reps to get them on board.
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=184237
Good point. I think the reasoning is that it's a replacement of an existing organ, whereas an "implant" would be something added to the original.
Ha!~ Been a long day, thanks for the LOLz... ;-)
Guess I must be out of touch with the bleeding edge. What's the "new" thing here... that it works in a browser window?
Fifteen or twenty years ago, I saw a "student" film about a guy at an ATM, and "HAL" starts talking...
ATM: "Hello Dave, I see you're withdrawing 25 dollars."
DAVE: "Yeah, I'm going on a date tonight."
ATM: "Now Dave, you know you haven't had a date in 3 months."
DAVE: "No, really! Honest!"
I wish I could remember the rest of it. Good stuff. ;-)
Yes, it's illegal, but in some situations it's still the safer choice. For example, on a suburban strip-mall "main-drag" road that's six lanes wide, with no bike lane, and nothing but parking lots and a sidewalk between the road and the buildings... and usually in such places there's nobody actually walking on the sidewalk. In those cases, it seems like a much safer option for everyone concerned if the bicyclist uses the sidewalk.
OTOH, if you're serious about biking, you'll find other options. It's been a while since I used a bike as daily transportation, but I remember getting quite familiar with the side roads and residential streets. Usually you can find a quick, slick route that seldom crosses paths with the "big" traffic, and get there in less time with less stress.
How long will it take before Kinect-style 3D-ranging becomes "standard" for all or most cameras? With 3D display tech getting closer to usability and affordability in recent years, clearly some companies are seeing a market opportunity. And with all the interesting Kinect hacks that have come out lately, it's not hard to imagine this sort of thing cropping up all over the place in the near future.
How long will it take before depth sensing tech becomes a standard feature on your average smart phone? (If ever?)
Ok, that at least sounds like a useful application. Not sure if "sound profiling" would be my first choice for implementing it, but at least it's useful.
Maybe I missed something in TFA, but I don't remember it mentioning any ability to track someone else's phone, it just tells me the current location of my phone. Even if it does have that capability, it would be simple enough to spoof... just leave the phone in the kitchen (or at your workstation, etc.) while you scamper off to do something naughty.
It might be more useful if it had a shared, central database of sound profiles, which was coupled with a blueprint/map of each building. That might help if you were lost inside the Pentagon or some similar labyrinth. But most such places tend to have maps on their walls anyway.
I don't see the utility. "Gee, I can't tell if I'm in my kitchen or my living room. If only there was an app for this!"
Thanks. I understand that their "speed" will be similar, especially in LEO, but there's still a huge possible range in angle of attack, which would make a huge difference in the energy of an impact. I'm just curious what order of magnitude we're dealing with here. Are the two meeting at 500kph or 50,000kph? How big is this debris object... 0.5g or 500g?
If I were on the ISS at the time, I would be asking these questions.
Thanks for the info. Do you happen to know the relative velocity between the two in this near-miss?
Thanks man, it's been a long day, and that gave me a really good laugh. ;-)
Third worker dies at Fukushima nuclear plant
By Kiyoshi Takenaka, Reuters
Saturday, 14 May 2011
A worker at Japan's tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant died today, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co said, bringing the death toll at the complex to three since a massive earthquake and tsunami in March.
The cause of the death was unknown. The man, in his 60s, was employed by one of Tokyo Electric's contractors and started working at the plant yesterday. He was exposed to 0.17 millisieverts of radiation today, Tokyo Electric said.
The Japanese government's maximum level of exposure for male workers at the plant is 250 millisieverts for the duration of the effort to bring it under control.
The worker fell ill 50 minutes after starting work at 6am on Saturday and brought to the plant's medical room unconscious.
He was later moved to a nearby hospital and confirmed dead, a Tokyo Electric spokesman said.
Working conditions at the plant are harsh. Goshi Hosono, a special adviser to Prime Minister Naoto Kan and a ruling Democratic Party lawmaker, voiced concerns about the working environment at the Fukushima complex on Wednesday.
Yeah right, oil shale and tar sands... just the thing we need in our collective backyard. If we're lucky that would only be as bad as hydraulic fracturing for gas. The actual oil listed in the Kiplinger piece (OCS, Bakken, ANWR) totals about 200 billion barrels... enough to supply the USA's needs for about 30 months. Yay!
And if we do go for the shale/sand play, we'll get a paltry 3-to-1 return on energy inputs. Seriously, there are better ways to solve our petro-fuel problems.
As for the original topic (nukes), we need to get beyond the 1950's technology. If we're going to use them, at least we should use the safest designs possible.
Furthermore, the Thorium cycle can burn spent fuel from current reactors, which the UK already has in abundance.
Military applications were also a key factor in why the USA went down the Uranium path for commercial energy production. You can't make plutonium in a Thorium reactor (or so I've read). It's depressing to hear that India might be dumping Thorium research for the same reason. At least China seems to be pursuing it seriously. I suppose we can just wait for them to perfect the technology and then buy our reactors from them.