In inflected languages, the words with differently stemmed endings (or, beginnings) can just be treated as "extra" vocabulary -- so if a noun "apple" has 6 forms, you have 6 words with different parts of speech.
That's not how a futures market works. The "house" (or market) doesn't have a position -- you are buying and selling contracts with other individuals in the market. So there is no liability there, any more than in the real estate market.
Don't be silly. Everyone here is confusing an experimental system with an operational system. If the DoD REALLY wanted to use such a system, the actual "bettors" would be CIA Analysts, people from the NSC, Embassy staffers, Lt. Col's, people from the State Dept., etc. Not just J-random-luzer off the street, who typically has NO relevant insight into the problem at hand.
The US Navy didn't try it *flying a plane*, they tried it *finding* a plane -- specifically, one that had crashed in the Atlantic near Spain, if I remember correctly, with an atomic bomb inside! The success of this approach was detailed in the book "Blind Man's Bluff", about the Navy and Submarines:
Sorry, real libertarians voted for Harry Browne. At least, this one did. Bush is only nominally closer to the libertarian ideal than Al Gore, and probably further in many dimensions.
1) I would prefer not to store my private data on the servers of a nameless, faceless behemoth of a phone company, especially since that's my ONLY alternative (not only do I have to *trust* them with the data, I have to trust them to keep it safe!)
Keep in mind that "backing up" in the Palm world is simply the normal hotsync operation, which I usually do 1x/day anyway. I can throw my palm under the wheels of a bus, go buy a new one, synch it, and I'm back where I started.
2) Yea, I do realize that it's only the really dissatisfied people who post on hiptop.com:-) It does seem like the hardware issues are more than what I'd expect, even in a new system, and more to the point, T-Mobile doesn't really have a good procedure to deal with them. But this will certainly improve over time, no doubt.
I agree that the Sidekick is a hot contender, but (as I'm sure you know) it is missing at least one vital feature: local synch. There is no easy way to get data in and out, and you have to trust THEIR servers with your data (ick!).
Also, in reading hiptop.com, I've been rather appalled at their infant mortality rate. I don't know why their hardware has been so flakey, but they really need to step up quality control.
I think if they can lick the hardware issues and actually move out on feature development, they could own the space.
Wow, I'm sorry, but shootings, bombings, or hijackings are pretty cut and dry -- they are clearly crimes, and clearly terrorist acts. There is zero moral wiggle-room there.
Re:How many harddrives could you fill in a year?
on
The Searchable Life
·
· Score: 1
You wouldn't need to sample location at nearly that rate. It's easily compressible; why take a location-sample-a-minute when you're sitting at your desk? Or even walking to lunch?
What's "completely evil" about this? I want this thing, and have for years!
Re:Instead...
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I'm really sorry to say that your last sentence exactly encapsulates the US buying experience:-(. For your hypothetical $3.99 item, the price can be $4.19 (5% tax rate), $4.21 (5.5% tax rate), or ghod knows what -- sales tax in the US ranges from 0% to 8-9%, and sometimes you have state and local tax. It's really a P.I.T.A. (pain in the ass).
I'm not sure it's as proven as you think. In fact, I've never seen anyone actually point to a study that proved this to be the case, just cite it as urban legend.
I've noticed that the "99" pricing epidemic is not as prevalent (if at all!) in the ROW (rest of world) outside the US. In fact, most European nations seem to use the "round-price-inclusive-of-tax" technique. I would hazard a guess that part of the reason it hasn't died out HERE is that our inflation is so low: what if the dollar/penny were worth a fifth of what it is now? It would be more hassle for the store to keep that kind of krap change on hand than to do the "right" thing (so I bet Italy never did this while they still had the lire)
Re:Instead...
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Fine, who cares, let them! For god's sake, they're fooling no one. In addition, they should incorporate sales tax INTO the price so that the price you see is the price you pay. If an article is $4, it's $4! No change necessary!
I would second that -- I've been with them since '99, and they've held prices constant while continually adding services/bandwidth/disk space/you name it. They seem quite good for small to medium-sized web hosting (I just use them for a family site)
The real question is: how long before these clowns get real and realize that the floppy drive is GOING AWAY -- I mean, seriously, most BIOSes are bigger than 1.44mb now! It's silly to still be manacled to this outdated, ridiculous technology.
Amen. That was a well-written summary. I posted elsewhere that all the people writing to the poor PR officer at DARPA for explanations should save their breath to cool their porridge, since the only two people concerned were the PI and the PM. I agree that Theo's behaviour is completely infantile.
Holy cow, what utopia do you think you live in? It's NOT intimidation and "tyranny". It's called living amongst other people, and dealing with the consequences of your actions. I totally agree with the original poster. Hey, if I mouthed off to my parents, friends, schoolteacher, boss, WHATEVER, I should do so knowing that they might give me the boot. And it will be that way until I rule the world! Since that will never happen, I won't hold my breath.
I can virtually guarantee you that whatever country you live in, it is indeed run like that, unless it's a country I haven't heard of populated only by Mr. Malcontent.
Well, it is entirely possible that the government didn't know about the whole "hackathon" thing until it was made public. Unless I missed something.
I might add that the way Theo has been acting is very bad form. If something is going on, it is up to the Principle Investigator (PI, the guy from UPenn) to talk to the Program Manager (PM, the guy from DARPA). Theo is NOT the PI. The PR lady from DARPA is not the PM. Clearly neither of them have the story.
I'm sorry, since when is receiving a research contract a "state benefit"? People around here seem to be confusing DARPA with a charity!
If I had to say, I'd have to guess that this whole kerfuffle is over issues of export compliance. Like it or not, DARPA is part of the DoD is is obliged to deal with all of those (yes, very stupid) ITAR rules. My company has quite a number of DARPA contracts and we have to file these silly "export complaince" forms for every foreign national (non-citizen/green-card holder) that works on a contract. As a US citizen, I had to sign some form saying I understood what could and could not be exported.
Now, directly funneling money to a bunch of unknowns working on crypto technology in Canada is going to look pretty darn funny to a lot of people in DoD and congress. I'm not arguing that it's right or wrong, but DARPA is NOT going to capriciously break the rules that they have to operate under, that's just how it is.
All this whining about what they "should" and "should not do" is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. DARPA/DoD is not some church with high moral principles: they are a bureaucracy just like the IRS, the NSF, your state government, or your local school or college and you can't expect them to behave any differently.
It probably is what you say ("a contract with nebulous deliverables") -- but I have worked on DARPA projects as a member of a company where we had a contract ("you will provide x labor hours of category A and y pieces of hardware.."), and people working on the same project from at an academic institution said they had a grant.
I think the problem is that at least in the humanities, "grant" usually means "money given with no strings attached for a purpose of the grantee's desire", like a MacArthur award, or something like that. I suspect in this context it means "money given for research in a particular area, without the same strictures applied to a commercial organization such as deliverables, but also without benefits like profit, overhead, and the like".
Now that I think about it, the latter may be the major distinction. Most gov't contracts have the profit negotiated into the contract, as well as substantial overhead. These generally don't exist in academe.
A minor point of order. DARPA *does* give grants, as many academic institutions will not accept "contract"-like relations (hey, they're not companies/body shops).
However, what you said is true -- grant or otherwise, there are obligations, such as progress reports, etc. And, if the project fell out of favor at a higher level, it could easilly be axed. This is about the time of year that DARPA Program Managers (the guys who do the sponsoring) undergo reviews of their programs, and it's pretty common for lesser-performing programs to get their funds "swept" and given to someone else.
I agree. These guys are completely on drugs if they think that 2018 is a reasonable schedule for this to occur. Have they even been AROUND for the past two months? We can't even put a single human in space using our 20+ year old spacecraft! Needless to say, I think the guys proposing this are ALREADY on Mars:-)
Slashdot Mirror
In inflected languages, the words with differently stemmed endings (or, beginnings) can just be treated as "extra" vocabulary -- so if a noun "apple" has 6 forms, you have 6 words with different parts of speech.
That's not how a futures market works. The "house" (or market) doesn't have a position -- you are buying and selling contracts with other individuals in the market. So there is no liability there, any more than in the real estate market.
Don't be silly. Everyone here is confusing an experimental system with an operational system. If the DoD REALLY wanted to use such a system, the actual "bettors" would be CIA Analysts, people from the NSC, Embassy staffers, Lt. Col's, people from the State Dept., etc. Not just J-random-luzer off the street, who typically has NO relevant insight into the problem at hand.
The US Navy didn't try it *flying a plane*, they tried it *finding* a plane -- specifically, one that had crashed in the Atlantic near Spain, if I remember correctly, with an atomic bomb inside! The success of this approach was detailed in the book "Blind Man's Bluff", about the Navy and Submarines:
http://www.columbia.edu/~dj114/hbomb.doc
Sorry, real libertarians voted for Harry Browne. At least, this one did. Bush is only nominally closer to the libertarian ideal than Al Gore, and probably further in many dimensions.
Dude: think *Iraq*. The cameras could be placed after hostilities, to prevent the kind of sniping that's going on now.
Or, alternatively, they could be dropped in by air ahead of time.
1) I would prefer not to store my private data on the servers of a nameless, faceless behemoth of a phone company, especially since that's my ONLY alternative (not only do I have to *trust* them with the data, I have to trust them to keep it safe!)
:-) It does seem like the hardware issues are more than what I'd expect, even in a new system, and more to the point, T-Mobile doesn't really have a good procedure to deal with them. But this will certainly improve over time, no doubt.
Keep in mind that "backing up" in the Palm world is simply the normal hotsync operation, which I usually do 1x/day anyway. I can throw my palm under the wheels of a bus, go buy a new one, synch it, and I'm back where I started.
2) Yea, I do realize that it's only the really dissatisfied people who post on hiptop.com
I agree that the Sidekick is a hot contender, but (as I'm sure you know) it is missing at least one vital feature: local synch. There is no easy way to get data in and out, and you have to trust THEIR servers with your data (ick!).
Also, in reading hiptop.com, I've been rather appalled at their infant mortality rate. I don't know why their hardware has been so flakey, but they really need to step up quality control.
I think if they can lick the hardware issues and actually move out on feature development, they could own the space.
Wow, I'm sorry, but shootings, bombings, or hijackings are pretty cut and dry -- they are clearly crimes, and clearly terrorist acts. There is zero moral wiggle-room there.
Um, no?
You wouldn't need to sample location at nearly that rate. It's easily compressible; why take a location-sample-a-minute when you're sitting at your desk? Or even walking to lunch?
What's "completely evil" about this? I want this thing, and have for years!
I'm really sorry to say that your last sentence exactly encapsulates the US buying experience :-(. For your hypothetical $3.99 item, the price can be $4.19 (5% tax rate), $4.21 (5.5% tax rate), or ghod knows what -- sales tax in the US ranges from 0% to 8-9%, and sometimes you have state and local tax. It's really a P.I.T.A. (pain in the ass).
I'm not sure it's as proven as you think. In fact, I've never seen anyone actually point to a study that proved this to be the case, just cite it as urban legend.
I've noticed that the "99" pricing epidemic is not as prevalent (if at all!) in the ROW (rest of world) outside the US. In fact, most European nations seem to use the "round-price-inclusive-of-tax" technique. I would hazard a guess that part of the reason it hasn't died out HERE is that our inflation is so low: what if the dollar/penny were worth a fifth of what it is now? It would be more hassle for the store to keep that kind of krap change on hand than to do the "right" thing (so I bet Italy never did this while they still had the lire)
Fine, who cares, let them! For god's sake, they're fooling no one. In addition, they should incorporate sales tax INTO the price so that the price you see is the price you pay. If an article is $4, it's $4! No change necessary!
I thought there was some legal issue w.r.t. WiFi in France -- that the 2.4ghz spectrum area was reserved by the French military?
I would second that -- I've been with them since '99, and they've held prices constant while continually adding services/bandwidth/disk space/you name it. They seem quite good for small to medium-sized web hosting (I just use them for a family site)
The real question is: how long before these clowns get real and realize that the floppy drive is GOING AWAY -- I mean, seriously, most BIOSes are bigger than 1.44mb now! It's silly to still be manacled to this outdated, ridiculous technology.
Amen. That was a well-written summary. I posted elsewhere that all the people writing to the poor PR officer at DARPA for explanations should save their breath to cool their porridge, since the only two people concerned were the PI and the PM. I agree that Theo's behaviour is completely infantile.
Holy cow, what utopia do you think you live in? It's NOT intimidation and "tyranny". It's called living amongst other people, and dealing with the consequences of your actions. I totally agree with the original poster. Hey, if I mouthed off to my parents, friends, schoolteacher, boss, WHATEVER, I should do so knowing that they might give me the boot. And it will be that way until I rule the world! Since that will never happen, I won't hold my breath.
I can virtually guarantee you that whatever country you live in, it is indeed run like that, unless it's a country I haven't heard of populated only by Mr. Malcontent.
Well, it is entirely possible that the government didn't know about the whole "hackathon" thing until it was made public. Unless I missed something.
:-)
I might add that the way Theo has been acting is very bad form. If something is going on, it is up to the Principle Investigator (PI, the guy from UPenn) to talk to the Program Manager (PM, the guy from DARPA). Theo is NOT the PI. The PR lady from DARPA is not the PM. Clearly neither of them have the story.
Kerfuffle
I'm sorry, since when is receiving a research contract a "state benefit"? People around here seem to be confusing DARPA with a charity!
If I had to say, I'd have to guess that this whole kerfuffle is over issues of export compliance. Like it or not, DARPA is part of the DoD is is obliged to deal with all of those (yes, very stupid) ITAR rules. My company has quite a number of DARPA contracts and we have to file these silly "export complaince" forms for every foreign national (non-citizen/green-card holder) that works on a contract. As a US citizen, I had to sign some form saying I understood what could and could not be exported.
Now, directly funneling money to a bunch of unknowns working on crypto technology in Canada is going to look pretty darn funny to a lot of people in DoD and congress. I'm not arguing that it's right or wrong, but DARPA is NOT going to capriciously break the rules that they have to operate under, that's just how it is.
All this whining about what they "should" and "should not do" is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. DARPA/DoD is not some church with high moral principles: they are a bureaucracy just like the IRS, the NSF, your state government, or your local school or college and you can't expect them to behave any differently.
It probably is what you say ("a contract with nebulous deliverables") -- but I have worked on DARPA projects as a member of a company where we had a contract ("you will provide x labor hours of category A and y pieces of hardware.."), and people working on the same project from at an academic institution said they had a grant.
I think the problem is that at least in the humanities, "grant" usually means "money given with no strings attached for a purpose of the grantee's desire", like a MacArthur award, or something like that. I suspect in this context it means "money given for research in a particular area, without the same strictures applied to a commercial organization such as deliverables, but also without benefits like profit, overhead, and the like".
Now that I think about it, the latter may be the major distinction. Most gov't contracts have the profit negotiated into the contract, as well as substantial overhead. These generally don't exist in academe.
A minor point of order. DARPA *does* give grants, as many academic institutions will not accept "contract"-like relations (hey, they're not companies/body shops).
However, what you said is true -- grant or otherwise, there are obligations, such as progress reports, etc. And, if the project fell out of favor at a higher level, it could easilly be axed. This is about the time of year that DARPA Program Managers (the guys who do the sponsoring) undergo reviews of their programs, and it's pretty common for lesser-performing programs to get their funds "swept" and given to someone else.
I agree. These guys are completely on drugs if they think that 2018 is a reasonable schedule for this to occur. Have they even been AROUND for the past two months? We can't even put a single human in space using our 20+ year old spacecraft! Needless to say, I think the guys proposing this are ALREADY on Mars :-)