This is a conjecture talk... it uses a lot of "could" and "might" to build a global picture of corruption, landed back in the banking system and corrupt government, failed to point out any non-obvious outcomes or opportunities, and didn't suggest any ways an attendee could constructively effect or participate in the problem.
I was thinking we had the same problem with work horses that got old, or with pre-OSHA workers who lost limbs in factories.
The solution is the same, but now there's no ethics to be worried about. If your system or device can no longer perform its job (including meeting security requirements), replace it. Oh, sure, there's lots of sentimental value in having something obsolete that you already own rather than paying again for something with a support life, but that's why you were able to afford the thing in the first place. It didn't need the expensive engineering for a century-long lifespan. It was designed for a few years' support, and that's what you paid for.
Despite making almost $13 billion primarily on search-related ads, Google is not a search company. Google is an intelligence company.
I don't mean the spying kind of intelligence, either. I'm referring to their use of enormous data sets to feed complex decision algorithms that learn in real time what decisions to make. I would call it "artificial intelligence", except that much of the process is guided by humans. Perhaps "guided intelligence" is a better term.
Regardless, the more data they have, the more accurate their results. That accuracy is where their money really comes from. Consider one revenue stream, that of targeted advertising. They target ads to people with a higher chance of being interested in the advertised product. That means their algorithm needs to understand not just the consumer's interests, but also what the product does, and what other solutions compete with it.
From global Internet coverage, without even looking at the data itself, Google can infer political trends (traffic response to major campaign events), working schedules (traffic cycles), and breaking local news (traffic spikes). In a developing country, Google gets to set the standard for service, gaining a de facto monopoly over those targeted ads, cell phone sales (because there will surely be a new Nexus model for compatible service), and of course, pure brand loyalty.
I started with doing stage crew as a hobby, but I've also done it professionally and found that there's a significant overlap with IT, especially in smaller houses where the whole stage system may need to be rebuilt for each production.
If you're old enough to remember the old bus-tobology networks, you already know enough to rig DMX lights. If newer networks are your thing, you can probably set up a cat5e-based audio network easily enough. If you're more comfortable with object-oriented design, passing data between objects apply well-defined functions based on their internal state, then the processing chains in the audio rack will be easy for you to manage.
The most important skill in IT is the ability to keep track of many pathways and failure modes. It turns out that's also a useful skill when you're trying to figure out which parts of your 500-component stage are misbehaving.
She's still in Africa, so she went to a hospital, got tested in an hour, and walked out with appropriate drugs in hand. She was feeling better the next day, and now is doing just fine. Thanks for the concern, though.
It helps that she's had malaria before (this is the third time, I think), so she recognized the symptoms immediately and knew to go to the hospital that day. In America, doctors aren't expecting to see malaria, and they aren't likely to recognize it, so treatment here is actually much more difficult.
My wife just got malaria a few weeks ago while visiting Africa. She heard there was a vaccine in development, so I figured it was the usual weakened culture, but I had no idea it actually required dissecting mosquitoes.
I also didn't realize it was Plasmodium falciparum. This is pretty amazing, as not only is falciparum the most deadly species, but it's also the one that responds least to current treatments. If successful (and mass-producible), this could be like the polio vaccine. It'd be a huge advancement in the health of malaria-threatened countries.
In fact, if you can reasonably claim that using those numbers somehow makes a useful improvement on a process (say, by having a perfect ink-to-paper ratio for combustion), you too can patent those numbers!
Patents were intended to promote competition and a viable public domain
[citation needed]. Per the Constitution:
The Congress shall have Power...To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts
and from the USPTO, "To foster innovation and competitiveness...", saying nothing about the public domain. In fact, I'd argue that a state-of-the-art public domain is actually bad for innovation, because there is little incentive to advance beyond the good-enough level of what's public.
From the perspective of competition, what exactly is the prize for competing? With weak patents, a company that does its own research and actually innovates has nothing to gain except a few months' lead to market, but a large investment being risked for it. Is that any better for the beloved "little guys", who can't afford to lose that investment to a bigger company with a better marketing department?
When rent seeking companies succeed, they are taking away from the public. I think that gets forgotten sometimes.:(
Along with the actual definition of "rent-seeking". Rent-seeking is when one spends wealth on lobbying to increase their share of some limited resource, without creating anything of value in return. The closest the term comes to patents is when a patent troll buys patents to increase its chances of winning a lawsuit, but even that's a stretch, because the purchase isn't lobbying. Patents do create value by incentivizing R&D, so they are economically different.
And yet if they did reinvent the wheel, they'd get sued into oblivion by these companies non[e]theless.
Maybe they shouldn't be using wheels, then. Perhaps a bearing caster would be better, or a nylon pad, or a small armature. If this "wheel" thing is patented, then it's because it's a particular solution for a particular problem. Avoid that solution and solve your problem differently.
Software patents need to pass the CS201 stink test (if a CS201 student can figure it out, it ain't novel)
Here's the catch: They aren't allowed to know the patented solution before they figure it out. If they're the standard for "reasonably skilled in the art", then a bad patent must be "obvious" to them before the state of the art has been advanced by the patented solution.
Having actually taught CS201 students, I expect this will be hilarious.
If your computer system is designed to avoid any other patents, a good chunk of those royalties probably do disappear. Of course, then you're missing most of the UI features that users have come to expect, and your naive implementations of subsystems are probably not as efficient as the patented implementations, so your cheap phone will seem awkward and slow to use.
I've done audits on spreadsheets. They're not terribly difficult, and I dare say they're easier than many of the code reviews I've been through.
The most important thing is to understand how to use the spreadsheets. Either use separate worksheets for each major step in the calculation, or at least separate the computations using extra blank space. That serves the same function as code blocks, breaking up the computation into smaller, more manageable, pieces. Each small piece can be audited separately, and it provides a clear trail of how one number becomes another.
Next, use your formatting, even if it's not in a worksheet ever intended for public viewing. I'm particularly a fan of using conditional formatting to highlight the cells in a sheet (especially minimums and maximums) that will be passed on to the next worksheet. Then it's easy to check that the correct values are being passed, and the intermediate values all make sense.
Finally, use your fill tools correctly to ensure that the same computation is being applied to all cells. You should be able to audit the top of your worksheet and fill down to the bottom, without any formatting or visual elements getting in the way, and know that the whole worksheet is correct. When reviewing an old worksheet, note that Excel will highlight (with a green corner mark, as I recall) cells that don't fit the pattern.
Finally, remember that writing an algorithm for a spreadsheet has some of the same pitfalls as any other implementation. Double-check any function of which you're not certain the parameters. Put comments in non-obvious areas. Don't be too clever, and of course, if someone else can't understand your brilliance, you're not being brilliant.
To make things more complicated, peppers are apparently not just okay, but good for cleansing. Since it's a religion coming out of India, peppers were a stable. You can probably guess how well that worked out for my cowardly American stomach.
The local parasites, however, thought that the cuisine was an invitation to a party, so they had a grand time carousing within my intestines. An interesting story, indeed... someday I'll get around to anonymizing my journal and posting it somewhere.
Yes, the physically-in-the-ground bit. Pulling from very old and vague memories of my time with the monk (about six months, a good many years ago, during which time I was more concerned with not dying than with deep religious exploration), I think the logic went something like this:
You must not hurt any innocent soul.
Animals are good people reincarnated, so don't eat or harm them
Evil souls are trapped in the Earth
Things from the Earth with a harsh taste must have absorbed evil souls
If you eat an evil soul, you'll be tainted with evil.
There were a few more forbidden foods, but I don't recall them offhand.
They fall under that "negative effect" category. They're considered to be tainted by evil, as their spice comes from the ground. I'm afraid I never looked too far into it, though.
I'm not trolling at all. As a fellow jackass, I just don't see how religion has anything to do with it.
What you describe is no different than a Christian asking Jesus to bless a Jewish wedding, or a Muslim preparing a nice onion-and-garlic sauce for an Ananda Marga meal. It's also no different from making dead-baby jokes in front of the mother of a stillborn child, or discussing depressing topics at a celebration.
Being "not constantly aware" is indeed the problem, but again, that has nothing to do with your religion. Your jokes, regardless of the topic, might offend someone, so the nice thing to do would be to take a moment to consider your surroundings. Apparently that's not your habit, though.
Now take the cost of that one particular obvious-in-hindsight test, multiplied by the incidence rate of your condition, and compare it to the cost of the several drugs, multiplied by the incidence rates of all the conditions you didn't have. See if it's really cost-effective to test for everything up front.
I've often said that Wikipedia should be considered like an expert in any given field: Usually right, especially on basics, but may be missing the finer points here and there.
Everything you say you've looked up on Wikipedia could also be done with a call to a colleague, but you didn't need to bother someone else with your query. You didn't need to explain what you were looking for to find it, and you don't need to maintain a large professional network outside your specialty. I see no problem here.
Editing error. I started typing, then went to double-check my math by redoing it in a spreadsheet. Apparently I didn't change it all. Yes, E10's correct price should be $3.601.
Since this is Slashdot, we'll make a few assumptions: A car with a 13-gallon tank gets 26 miles per gallon of pure gas, which costs $3.74. Ethanol is $2.33 per gallon*, so we'll assume E10 costs $3.83 per gallon.
We'll also pull in some facts: 1.4 gallons of ethanol has the equivalent energy to 1.0 gallons of gasoline. That means that E10 is 7.1% less energetic, which is why you're seeing roughly 7% lower mileage and a good amount of observer bias.
From that point, we can compute that our car can be expected to get only 24.18 miles per gallon of E10. The price per mile of driving on pure gas is 14.4 cents, and the price per mile of driving on E10 is... only 14.3 cents. Yes, you're getting less mileage per gallon, but the mileage per dollar is comparable.
This does also assume that gas stations are actually charging less for E10. The ones around me do, but your mileage may vary.
* Ethanol price is wholesale futures. It's the best I could find for a pure-ethanol price.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a conjecture talk ... it uses a lot of "could" and "might" to build a global picture of corruption, landed back in the banking system and corrupt government, failed to point out any non-obvious outcomes or opportunities, and didn't suggest any ways an attendee could constructively effect or participate in the problem.
...so in other words, it's perfect for Slashdot.
I was thinking we had the same problem with work horses that got old, or with pre-OSHA workers who lost limbs in factories.
The solution is the same, but now there's no ethics to be worried about. If your system or device can no longer perform its job (including meeting security requirements), replace it. Oh, sure, there's lots of sentimental value in having something obsolete that you already own rather than paying again for something with a support life, but that's why you were able to afford the thing in the first place. It didn't need the expensive engineering for a century-long lifespan. It was designed for a few years' support, and that's what you paid for.
Despite making almost $13 billion primarily on search-related ads, Google is not a search company. Google is an intelligence company.
I don't mean the spying kind of intelligence, either. I'm referring to their use of enormous data sets to feed complex decision algorithms that learn in real time what decisions to make. I would call it "artificial intelligence", except that much of the process is guided by humans. Perhaps "guided intelligence" is a better term.
Regardless, the more data they have, the more accurate their results. That accuracy is where their money really comes from. Consider one revenue stream, that of targeted advertising. They target ads to people with a higher chance of being interested in the advertised product. That means their algorithm needs to understand not just the consumer's interests, but also what the product does, and what other solutions compete with it.
From global Internet coverage, without even looking at the data itself, Google can infer political trends (traffic response to major campaign events), working schedules (traffic cycles), and breaking local news (traffic spikes). In a developing country, Google gets to set the standard for service, gaining a de facto monopoly over those targeted ads, cell phone sales (because there will surely be a new Nexus model for compatible service), and of course, pure brand loyalty.
I started with doing stage crew as a hobby, but I've also done it professionally and found that there's a significant overlap with IT, especially in smaller houses where the whole stage system may need to be rebuilt for each production.
If you're old enough to remember the old bus-tobology networks, you already know enough to rig DMX lights. If newer networks are your thing, you can probably set up a cat5e-based audio network easily enough. If you're more comfortable with object-oriented design, passing data between objects apply well-defined functions based on their internal state, then the processing chains in the audio rack will be easy for you to manage.
The most important skill in IT is the ability to keep track of many pathways and failure modes. It turns out that's also a useful skill when you're trying to figure out which parts of your 500-component stage are misbehaving.
She's still in Africa, so she went to a hospital, got tested in an hour, and walked out with appropriate drugs in hand. She was feeling better the next day, and now is doing just fine. Thanks for the concern, though.
It helps that she's had malaria before (this is the third time, I think), so she recognized the symptoms immediately and knew to go to the hospital that day. In America, doctors aren't expecting to see malaria, and they aren't likely to recognize it, so treatment here is actually much more difficult.
Wow.
My wife just got malaria a few weeks ago while visiting Africa. She heard there was a vaccine in development, so I figured it was the usual weakened culture, but I had no idea it actually required dissecting mosquitoes.
I also didn't realize it was Plasmodium falciparum. This is pretty amazing, as not only is falciparum the most deadly species, but it's also the one that responds least to current treatments. If successful (and mass-producible), this could be like the polio vaccine. It'd be a huge advancement in the health of malaria-threatened countries.
I'll add my two cents' worth:
In fact, if you can reasonably claim that using those numbers somehow makes a useful improvement on a process (say, by having a perfect ink-to-paper ratio for combustion), you too can patent those numbers!
Patents were intended to promote competition and a viable public domain
[citation needed]. Per the Constitution:
The Congress shall have Power...To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts
and from the USPTO, "To foster innovation and competitiveness...", saying nothing about the public domain. In fact, I'd argue that a state-of-the-art public domain is actually bad for innovation, because there is little incentive to advance beyond the good-enough level of what's public.
From the perspective of competition, what exactly is the prize for competing? With weak patents, a company that does its own research and actually innovates has nothing to gain except a few months' lead to market, but a large investment being risked for it. Is that any better for the beloved "little guys", who can't afford to lose that investment to a bigger company with a better marketing department?
When rent seeking companies succeed, they are taking away from the public. I think that gets forgotten sometimes. :(
Along with the actual definition of "rent-seeking". Rent-seeking is when one spends wealth on lobbying to increase their share of some limited resource, without creating anything of value in return. The closest the term comes to patents is when a patent troll buys patents to increase its chances of winning a lawsuit, but even that's a stretch, because the purchase isn't lobbying. Patents do create value by incentivizing R&D, so they are economically different.
And yet if they did reinvent the wheel, they'd get sued into oblivion by these companies non[e]theless.
Maybe they shouldn't be using wheels, then. Perhaps a bearing caster would be better, or a nylon pad, or a small armature. If this "wheel" thing is patented, then it's because it's a particular solution for a particular problem. Avoid that solution and solve your problem differently.
Software patents need to pass the CS201 stink test (if a CS201 student can figure it out, it ain't novel)
Here's the catch: They aren't allowed to know the patented solution before they figure it out. If they're the standard for "reasonably skilled in the art", then a bad patent must be "obvious" to them before the state of the art has been advanced by the patented solution.
Having actually taught CS201 students, I expect this will be hilarious.
If your computer system is designed to avoid any other patents, a good chunk of those royalties probably do disappear. Of course, then you're missing most of the UI features that users have come to expect, and your naive implementations of subsystems are probably not as efficient as the patented implementations, so your cheap phone will seem awkward and slow to use.
But hey, it was cheap.
That depends on whether you consider yourself the one being stood on.
Usually the purpose of a CSV is to have just values, not the function producing those values, so formulas are evaluated before saving.
I seem to recall some magical way to force Excel to save out formulas, but I don't remember it presently.
I've done audits on spreadsheets. They're not terribly difficult, and I dare say they're easier than many of the code reviews I've been through.
The most important thing is to understand how to use the spreadsheets. Either use separate worksheets for each major step in the calculation, or at least separate the computations using extra blank space. That serves the same function as code blocks, breaking up the computation into smaller, more manageable, pieces. Each small piece can be audited separately, and it provides a clear trail of how one number becomes another.
Next, use your formatting, even if it's not in a worksheet ever intended for public viewing. I'm particularly a fan of using conditional formatting to highlight the cells in a sheet (especially minimums and maximums) that will be passed on to the next worksheet. Then it's easy to check that the correct values are being passed, and the intermediate values all make sense.
Finally, use your fill tools correctly to ensure that the same computation is being applied to all cells. You should be able to audit the top of your worksheet and fill down to the bottom, without any formatting or visual elements getting in the way, and know that the whole worksheet is correct. When reviewing an old worksheet, note that Excel will highlight (with a green corner mark, as I recall) cells that don't fit the pattern.
Finally, remember that writing an algorithm for a spreadsheet has some of the same pitfalls as any other implementation. Double-check any function of which you're not certain the parameters. Put comments in non-obvious areas. Don't be too clever, and of course, if someone else can't understand your brilliance, you're not being brilliant.
To make things more complicated, peppers are apparently not just okay, but good for cleansing. Since it's a religion coming out of India, peppers were a stable. You can probably guess how well that worked out for my cowardly American stomach.
The local parasites, however, thought that the cuisine was an invitation to a party, so they had a grand time carousing within my intestines. An interesting story, indeed... someday I'll get around to anonymizing my journal and posting it somewhere.
Yes, the physically-in-the-ground bit. Pulling from very old and vague memories of my time with the monk (about six months, a good many years ago, during which time I was more concerned with not dying than with deep religious exploration), I think the logic went something like this:
There were a few more forbidden foods, but I don't recall them offhand.
They fall under that "negative effect" category. They're considered to be tainted by evil, as their spice comes from the ground. I'm afraid I never looked too far into it, though.
I'm not trolling at all. As a fellow jackass, I just don't see how religion has anything to do with it.
What you describe is no different than a Christian asking Jesus to bless a Jewish wedding, or a Muslim preparing a nice onion-and-garlic sauce for an Ananda Marga meal. It's also no different from making dead-baby jokes in front of the mother of a stillborn child, or discussing depressing topics at a celebration.
Being "not constantly aware" is indeed the problem, but again, that has nothing to do with your religion. Your jokes, regardless of the topic, might offend someone, so the nice thing to do would be to take a moment to consider your surroundings. Apparently that's not your habit, though.
I don't get it. If you're an atheist, you shouldn't have any religious requirement to say stupid things.
Perhaps you're just a jackass, and that's unrelated to your religious views?
science is NOT a citation competition, nor is it a pedantry pageant
I take it you've never worked in a research position.
Now take the cost of that one particular obvious-in-hindsight test, multiplied by the incidence rate of your condition, and compare it to the cost of the several drugs, multiplied by the incidence rates of all the conditions you didn't have. See if it's really cost-effective to test for everything up front.
I've often said that Wikipedia should be considered like an expert in any given field: Usually right, especially on basics, but may be missing the finer points here and there.
Everything you say you've looked up on Wikipedia could also be done with a call to a colleague, but you didn't need to bother someone else with your query. You didn't need to explain what you were looking for to find it, and you don't need to maintain a large professional network outside your specialty. I see no problem here.
This one's just a dumbass error. You're right again. I only double-checked the math leading to cost-per-mile, which was the intent of the post.
Editing error. I started typing, then went to double-check my math by redoing it in a spreadsheet. Apparently I didn't change it all. Yes, E10's correct price should be $3.601.
Since this is Slashdot, we'll make a few assumptions: A car with a 13-gallon tank gets 26 miles per gallon of pure gas, which costs $3.74. Ethanol is $2.33 per gallon*, so we'll assume E10 costs $3.83 per gallon.
We'll also pull in some facts: 1.4 gallons of ethanol has the equivalent energy to 1.0 gallons of gasoline. That means that E10 is 7.1% less energetic, which is why you're seeing roughly 7% lower mileage and a good amount of observer bias.
From that point, we can compute that our car can be expected to get only 24.18 miles per gallon of E10. The price per mile of driving on pure gas is 14.4 cents, and the price per mile of driving on E10 is... only 14.3 cents. Yes, you're getting less mileage per gallon, but the mileage per dollar is comparable.
This does also assume that gas stations are actually charging less for E10. The ones around me do, but your mileage may vary.
* Ethanol price is wholesale futures. It's the best I could find for a pure-ethanol price.
Unemployed? Commit a small crime, do a short sentence, then tack on "brings tax breaks" to your resume.