Also remember that we hit a time limit. October 1st is just the start of the fiscal year, and the shutdown is just waiting for direction on how the next year is going to run.
So let me get this straight... the "senior advisor on innovation" thinks that data analytics will pinpoint successful systems for an individual, and do so accurately enough that parents would pay $30,000 a piece for it. I think I see the problem.
Data analytics can't predict the future. It can, however, give a good indication of statistical probabilities, such that the average effect over many individuals will be predictable. This is much more suited to evaluating new general techniques, rather than specific curricula. Evaluate a few tens of thousands of students, analyze what worked and what didn't, and try that as a program for everybody. On a widespread basis, you'll get good results.
For individual good results, the old way still works best: Encourage students and teachers to work together to understand each other, and take the time to understand what the student wants or needs to learn effectively. While the teacher can create a good learning environment in the classroom, the parents should continue that at home. If you're looking for a way to ensure your kid has a successful education, $30,000 of specialized data analysis won't help, but an hour of parent-teacher conferences just might. Then take the extra $30,000 and add it to teachers' salaries.
Any reason will do, as long as its plausibility is proportional to how far it lies outside the charter.
The reason $COMPANY funded $CHARITY was for improving public relations, increasing sales.
The reason $COMPANY didn't pay a dividend was to increase investment in $SECTOR, increasing $QUALITY and therefore profits.
The reason $COMPANY hired extra employees during the recession was to take advantage of lower acceptable wages during training, reducing overall expenses.
The only motivation of a corporation is to maximize shareholder value, and a CEO is required to act in this interest by law.
No, it isn't, and no, they're not, and you're getting the terms mixed up, anyway.
Starting with terminology, "shareholder value" is a different concept from "shareholder profit". While profit is monetary, value includes progress toward long-term goals, market share, and industry stability (as in Starbucks' case), as well as profit... sometimes. Companies can be incorporated in many different ways, and though the most common is certainly for-profit, there are certainly a good many companies that are non-profit. In the case of nonprofits, their "shareholder value" is more often measured by progress toward their mission.
Over the past few decades, "maximizing shareholder value" has become a general guideline for how to run a business, but it is not law. Rather, the generally-applicable laws only require that companies be managed according to their charter. There is also no stipulation (except a judgement after a lawsuit by angry shareholders) as to how closely the charter must be followed. If a for-profit company's CEO decides, for instance, to protest China's firewall by not selling there, and the shareholders agree, then that's perfectly fine. If a for-profit CEO decides to support charities, and some shareholders do sue over it, a judge may very well still side with the CEO, since charities make for very good advertising.
Generally speaking, for-profit corporations operate for profits, but not always, and not all companies are for-profit. The idea that all corporations must maximize profits is simply incorrect.
Or in other words, "Gee, Sarten-X, I don't actually have facts, but I want to believe!"
That's okay. I happen to have some time to kill. A quick search for "federal drug trafficking code", turns up a nice list of limits by schedule, which nicely points out the lower bound is 500 grams. That's quite a lot for simply detecting the composition of a sample.
On the contrary, I recently did support at a company migrating from Office to LibreOffice to save on transition costs. Standard issue was Office 2007, but 2010 was present and 2013 was announced, boasting yet another new interface to learn. The company switched to LibreOffice, with only a few key Office installations for things that had to be perfectly correct to leave the company.
There was no real training budget, but there was only one brief period of transition rather than several, no licensing costs, and everything just worked.
Apparently, by "often" you mean "two cases out of over a hundred", both of which involved the farmers taking significant action to get Monsanto seed without buying it from Monsanto.
Tesla's battery packs are large multiple-battery units, with a crunchy plastic shell. If the fire is on the wiring in the shell, the proper way to extinguish it is to puncture the shell and apply a chemical extinguisher. That seems to be exactly what they did.
But so many patents are just bafflegab intended to make it look like you've solved a problem -- when in fact you've just enumerated some of the things you'd need and don't have a way of doing it.
There's actually very few patents like this, as such scams are usually pretty easy to see in patent applications. There are, however, a lot of folks on Slashdot who don't understand patent law, don't bother trying to understand the actual patent, and just accept an inflammatory headline as fact.
That said, enumerations are patentable, if they're complete enough that someone could build a working system from the patent description (and reasonable skill in the art) alone. Since algorithms aren't patentable, and their inclusion in a patent raises flags during examination, there are a lot of patents that cover the setup to run a particular algorithm, even if the algorithm itself is unencumbered.
Also note that patents do not have to cover the entire product, but as little as the solution to a single problem. A white paper describing the analysis and evaluation process may be valid regardless of a patent on the matchmaking process. Having a few whitepapers describing part of the process is still progress.
Patents do not cover mere ideas, but rather specific implementations. Find a sci-fi novel that uses exactly the same procedure 23andMe does, describing in detail all of the mechanisms and processes used, and that might be prior art.
The point of "prior art" isn't to stop inventors from using old ideas. Rather, it's to stop inventors from copying existing technology exactly.
That's not how it works because a conspirator must have an active role, knowing that their actions would contribute to the crime. If the FBI did know in advance about a planned second murder, and intentionally chose to let someone die just so they'd have a better case, that's just negligence.
That's also not how it works because the second murder didn't actually occur, either. If the FBI were actively involved in it to conspiracy levels, that's be for a solicitation charge or attempted murder, not actual murder.
Finally, that's not how it works because that's not at all how the criminal justice system works. There is no golden truth that determines right or wrong. Rather, a prosecutor proposes a theory of how the events unfolded, and the defense presents a different theory. They both either agree, or present evidence to a panel of jurors whose job is not actually to decide guilt or innocence, but rather to decide whether the prosecutor's evidence proves the theory.
You are welcome to submit a theory that the FBI intended to cause a murder, but now you have to prove it. So far you've shown that the FBI knew he'd tried to hire a hitman at one point, but you haven't shown that they intended to cause further murders. You're allowing a window of under a month to wrap up the investigation and arrest, with no prior indication that a second murder attempt was imminent. You'll also need to prove that such a short schedule was obviously necessary, rather than allowing more time to gather more complete evidence.
Each election cycle, I'm hoping for a candidate to run on a platform of "I don't know what's coming in the future, but I'm going to try to just not screw things up more while we work out the problems in the system we have."
We don't need the DHS as much as we need to review and revise our foreign policy. We don't need gun control laws as much as we need owner education. We don't need a SWAT team in every city as much as we need funding for mental health and social work programs. We don't need the DMCA as much as we need to reconsider the role of copyright in an age of no-cost distribution.
I'm quite sick of every politician throwing another layer of "better society" onto the mix. There are too many conflicts already.
They may have police around, but no "federal guards". They have staff - that were there for posted hours, not the 24x7 the monument is available to walk through.
I've spent a good chunk of my life shuffling around in the National Park Service, and I can assure you that there are indeed staff operating 24/7, regardless of the park's operating hours. Since the whole point of most parks is natural beauty, they generally try not to be seen. They wear dull clothes, avoid the visitors, and mostly just watch for anything that needs immediate attention. Any major work is done after hours, so as not to interfere with visitors.
And just how do you imagine simple barricades would stop a grafitti artist anyway?
I never suggested they would. They do keep most people out, though, so one guard can watch a whole side of a monument, rather than normal operations where a guard can only watch a small section of the usual crowd.
Come on.
I've also spent a good chunk of my life in data centers and NOCs. Every major system has a startup and shutdown procedure, and I have yet to meet a system that worked best after an unexpected failure. Please go find a good sysadmin (or his boss), and tell him that he'll be locked outside his server room for the next week, and though the services will continue running and the servers will remain on the Internet, his remote administration access will be blocked and nobody else will be allowed normal access to the servers, either. He'll also be responsible for fixing anything that goes wrong. Then ask if he'd prefer to just shut down for the week.
Are you so sure it's the majority? I would warrant if you polled every citizen if they should be able to enter a monument...
You've failed your reading comprehension. The majority still accept government authority, period. Yes, we may disagree with individual decisions, but we abide by government rules because having the system in place is preferred to not having it. Personally, I think that in the event that no budget can be approved, the government offices should stay operating under the previous year's budget, prorated to cover the additional time, except for congressional salaries, which should be forfeited until an agreement is reached.
a majority would say you could just go in
[citation needed]. Please, give me any source where a statistically-valid majority say that access rules should be ignored in favor of the tragedy of the commons.
And that is the real damage that absurd shutdown closures have, weakening respect for all other laws and authority.
So, in other words, if the government doesn't cater to your every whim, granting you 24/7 access to everywhere you want to go, you advocate lawlessness, counteracting the efforts of the last hundred years of conservation? It takes only a moment for a careless visitor to destroy thousands of years of natural beauty. Yes, people are ignorant enough to damage monuments without knowing it.
"Your" government sucks which is why it's being slowly rebooted or ignored.
It's your government, too. You did vote in the last congressional election, didn't you? You did follow the procedure to have your voice heard, right? Or do you only speak when you're angry?
Usually it's because France (or any other ally) has already paid (or at least agreed to pay) for the latest greatest military technology the US is willing to export, and they do so as a package deal. Then the US sends out the drones, the control stations, the trainers, the spare parts, the technicians... everything France needs, without France needing to run their own R&D program just to figure out what parts they need to purchase individually.
Law enforcement is essential. Guiding tours, emptying trash cans, cleaning restrooms, and having enough security to watch tens of thousands of visitors each day are all non-essential.
You've never run a webcam site, have you? I have. If it fails, it fails. There is no "clean shutdown" necessary. You still fix the same thing when it breaks.
I've run a streaming radio station. Whenever we shut down, we had to first shut down our external relay, or it would get badly confused when we came back, and it took about three hours to fix. I doubt the Panda Cam is run on a dedicated relay, though... it's more likely stuck on to another server running other services, which are probably more complicated, and probably also much more damaging if failed. There's also the strong possibility that the order came down to shut down the whole data center, rather than just the Panda Cam. My radio station never shut down just its Internet stream, but we occasionally stopped broadcasting from the main station.
This isn't a layoff, it's a furlough.
I'm just using the example the OP did. As I understand, though, there is still the threat of layoffs in several places, since the budget that does eventually pass is a pretty wild unknown.
Except that, by now becoming a government contractor, Autonomous Killer Robots Inc. is now subject to oversight from the Government Accountability Office, and must submit loads of paperwork detailing where all that money went and why. Any internal waste or excesses must be documented, and if the GAO doesn't like what they see, you won't get another government contract until the GAO is happy with your reports. There's not a terribly large market for headgear-targeting weaponry, so those future contracts are vital to AKR Inc. That's a pretty strong incentive to sell the product at a low cost, and cut expenses everywhere you can.
The government, after the shutdown, spent money to rent barricades to close off national monuments that are normally open 24x7 with no means of closing access.
...And now it's spending less money on having fewer security guards.
They also spent money and time to turn off things like the "Panda Cam" that they could have just kept on until it failed.
...Ensuring a clean shutdown from a known-good state, rather than expecting they'll need to spend more time troubleshooting everything when they get back.
Any actual layoffs or closures are wholly there to annoy you and make you think you need government more than you do.
If you're in a position to be laid off by the government, you're already pretty dependent on it. Once laid off, you have time to look for a job that isn't so tightly integrated with the madness of Congress. Layoffs seem to have the effect of pushing people away from government dependence.
Reject closures and go where you like. It's your land.
It is my land, isn't it? And it's also my neighbor's land, and his cousin's, and his nephew's friend's dog's mother's owner's dentist's son's land, too. It's all of ours, and the majority of us have decided to accept a common authority to ensure that the freedoms and amenities we have today are still around for our descendents. That means we want adequate security to keep vandals from screwing up our shiny monuments, and we want jackasses in the vocal minority to stop assuming they can be exempt from the rules by just ignoring authority. That's my government you're denouncing, and my neighbor's, and his cousin's, and his nephew's friend's dog's mother's owner's dentist's son's, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Also remember that we hit a time limit. October 1st is just the start of the fiscal year, and the shutdown is just waiting for direction on how the next year is going to run.
So let me get this straight... the "senior advisor on innovation" thinks that data analytics will pinpoint successful systems for an individual, and do so accurately enough that parents would pay $30,000 a piece for it. I think I see the problem.
Data analytics can't predict the future. It can, however, give a good indication of statistical probabilities, such that the average effect over many individuals will be predictable. This is much more suited to evaluating new general techniques, rather than specific curricula. Evaluate a few tens of thousands of students, analyze what worked and what didn't, and try that as a program for everybody. On a widespread basis, you'll get good results.
For individual good results, the old way still works best: Encourage students and teachers to work together to understand each other, and take the time to understand what the student wants or needs to learn effectively. While the teacher can create a good learning environment in the classroom, the parents should continue that at home. If you're looking for a way to ensure your kid has a successful education, $30,000 of specialized data analysis won't help, but an hour of parent-teacher conferences just might. Then take the extra $30,000 and add it to teachers' salaries.
Any reason will do, as long as its plausibility is proportional to how far it lies outside the charter.
The reason $COMPANY funded $CHARITY was for improving public relations, increasing sales.
The reason $COMPANY didn't pay a dividend was to increase investment in $SECTOR, increasing $QUALITY and therefore profits.
The reason $COMPANY hired extra employees during the recession was to take advantage of lower acceptable wages during training, reducing overall expenses.
The only motivation of a corporation is to maximize shareholder value, and a CEO is required to act in this interest by law.
No, it isn't, and no, they're not, and you're getting the terms mixed up, anyway.
Starting with terminology, "shareholder value" is a different concept from "shareholder profit". While profit is monetary, value includes progress toward long-term goals, market share, and industry stability (as in Starbucks' case), as well as profit... sometimes. Companies can be incorporated in many different ways, and though the most common is certainly for-profit, there are certainly a good many companies that are non-profit. In the case of nonprofits, their "shareholder value" is more often measured by progress toward their mission.
Over the past few decades, "maximizing shareholder value" has become a general guideline for how to run a business, but it is not law. Rather, the generally-applicable laws only require that companies be managed according to their charter. There is also no stipulation (except a judgement after a lawsuit by angry shareholders) as to how closely the charter must be followed. If a for-profit company's CEO decides, for instance, to protest China's firewall by not selling there, and the shareholders agree, then that's perfectly fine. If a for-profit CEO decides to support charities, and some shareholders do sue over it, a judge may very well still side with the CEO, since charities make for very good advertising.
Generally speaking, for-profit corporations operate for profits, but not always, and not all companies are for-profit. The idea that all corporations must maximize profits is simply incorrect.
Or in other words, "Gee, Sarten-X, I don't actually have facts, but I want to believe!"
That's okay. I happen to have some time to kill. A quick search for "federal drug trafficking code", turns up a nice list of limits by schedule, which nicely points out the lower bound is 500 grams. That's quite a lot for simply detecting the composition of a sample.
I recommend doing your own research next time.
[citation needed]
On the contrary, I recently did support at a company migrating from Office to LibreOffice to save on transition costs. Standard issue was Office 2007, but 2010 was present and 2013 was announced, boasting yet another new interface to learn. The company switched to LibreOffice, with only a few key Office installations for things that had to be perfectly correct to leave the company.
There was no real training budget, but there was only one brief period of transition rather than several, no licensing costs, and everything just worked.
Much of my time in Canada has been spent camping, with only basic water purification. "Diluted by moose" is not something I consider a good quality.
Probably still better than being French, though.
Apparently, by "often" you mean "two cases out of over a hundred", both of which involved the farmers taking significant action to get Monsanto seed without buying it from Monsanto.
Tesla's battery packs are large multiple-battery units, with a crunchy plastic shell. If the fire is on the wiring in the shell, the proper way to extinguish it is to puncture the shell and apply a chemical extinguisher. That seems to be exactly what they did.
But so many patents are just bafflegab intended to make it look like you've solved a problem -- when in fact you've just enumerated some of the things you'd need and don't have a way of doing it.
There's actually very few patents like this, as such scams are usually pretty easy to see in patent applications. There are, however, a lot of folks on Slashdot who don't understand patent law, don't bother trying to understand the actual patent, and just accept an inflammatory headline as fact.
That said, enumerations are patentable, if they're complete enough that someone could build a working system from the patent description (and reasonable skill in the art) alone. Since algorithms aren't patentable, and their inclusion in a patent raises flags during examination, there are a lot of patents that cover the setup to run a particular algorithm, even if the algorithm itself is unencumbered.
Also note that patents do not have to cover the entire product, but as little as the solution to a single problem. A white paper describing the analysis and evaluation process may be valid regardless of a patent on the matchmaking process. Having a few whitepapers describing part of the process is still progress.
Mechanical engineering produces patents on the math for physics. That is pretty much pure math which they have wrapped in a physical form.
The patent system has "failed" by this definition since its inception.
That depends... did you sign a contract saying your kid wouldn't reproduce?
Patents do not cover mere ideas, but rather specific implementations. Find a sci-fi novel that uses exactly the same procedure 23andMe does, describing in detail all of the mechanisms and processes used, and that might be prior art.
The point of "prior art" isn't to stop inventors from using old ideas. Rather, it's to stop inventors from copying existing technology exactly.
Which law did they break, and does it include a minimum amount that must be transferred for the law to be in force?
That's not how it works because a conspirator must have an active role, knowing that their actions would contribute to the crime. If the FBI did know in advance about a planned second murder, and intentionally chose to let someone die just so they'd have a better case, that's just negligence.
That's also not how it works because the second murder didn't actually occur, either. If the FBI were actively involved in it to conspiracy levels, that's be for a solicitation charge or attempted murder, not actual murder.
Finally, that's not how it works because that's not at all how the criminal justice system works. There is no golden truth that determines right or wrong. Rather, a prosecutor proposes a theory of how the events unfolded, and the defense presents a different theory. They both either agree, or present evidence to a panel of jurors whose job is not actually to decide guilt or innocence, but rather to decide whether the prosecutor's evidence proves the theory.
You are welcome to submit a theory that the FBI intended to cause a murder, but now you have to prove it. So far you've shown that the FBI knew he'd tried to hire a hitman at one point, but you haven't shown that they intended to cause further murders. You're allowing a window of under a month to wrap up the investigation and arrest, with no prior indication that a second murder attempt was imminent. You'll also need to prove that such a short schedule was obviously necessary, rather than allowing more time to gather more complete evidence.
Dude's got my vote.
Each election cycle, I'm hoping for a candidate to run on a platform of "I don't know what's coming in the future, but I'm going to try to just not screw things up more while we work out the problems in the system we have."
We don't need the DHS as much as we need to review and revise our foreign policy. We don't need gun control laws as much as we need owner education. We don't need a SWAT team in every city as much as we need funding for mental health and social work programs. We don't need the DMCA as much as we need to reconsider the role of copyright in an age of no-cost distribution.
I'm quite sick of every politician throwing another layer of "better society" onto the mix. There are too many conflicts already.
I disagree with girlintraining, just on principle. That will get me modded up.
This post has no useful content, so it will be modded down.
It is, however, very informative as to what kind of useless content it has, so it will be modded up.
None of this has anything to do with the hivemind effect the article's discussing, so I will be modded down.
The writing style, however, illustrates an indecisive caricature which some mod may find funny, so it will be modded up.
That's three up mods and only two down for an otherwise uninteresting post, so it will be considered overrated, and modded down.
I predict this post will be forgotten quickly and accomplish nothing... much like our Congress!
Political joke... it'll be modded up.
They may have police around, but no "federal guards". They have staff - that were there for posted hours, not the 24x7 the monument is available to walk through.
I've spent a good chunk of my life shuffling around in the National Park Service, and I can assure you that there are indeed staff operating 24/7, regardless of the park's operating hours. Since the whole point of most parks is natural beauty, they generally try not to be seen. They wear dull clothes, avoid the visitors, and mostly just watch for anything that needs immediate attention. Any major work is done after hours, so as not to interfere with visitors.
And just how do you imagine simple barricades would stop a grafitti artist anyway?
I never suggested they would. They do keep most people out, though, so one guard can watch a whole side of a monument, rather than normal operations where a guard can only watch a small section of the usual crowd.
Come on.
I've also spent a good chunk of my life in data centers and NOCs. Every major system has a startup and shutdown procedure, and I have yet to meet a system that worked best after an unexpected failure. Please go find a good sysadmin (or his boss), and tell him that he'll be locked outside his server room for the next week, and though the services will continue running and the servers will remain on the Internet, his remote administration access will be blocked and nobody else will be allowed normal access to the servers, either. He'll also be responsible for fixing anything that goes wrong. Then ask if he'd prefer to just shut down for the week.
Are you so sure it's the majority? I would warrant if you polled every citizen if they should be able to enter a monument...
You've failed your reading comprehension. The majority still accept government authority, period. Yes, we may disagree with individual decisions, but we abide by government rules because having the system in place is preferred to not having it. Personally, I think that in the event that no budget can be approved, the government offices should stay operating under the previous year's budget, prorated to cover the additional time, except for congressional salaries, which should be forfeited until an agreement is reached.
a majority would say you could just go in
[citation needed]. Please, give me any source where a statistically-valid majority say that access rules should be ignored in favor of the tragedy of the commons.
And that is the real damage that absurd shutdown closures have, weakening respect for all other laws and authority.
So, in other words, if the government doesn't cater to your every whim, granting you 24/7 access to everywhere you want to go, you advocate lawlessness, counteracting the efforts of the last hundred years of conservation? It takes only a moment for a careless visitor to destroy thousands of years of natural beauty. Yes, people are ignorant enough to damage monuments without knowing it.
"Your" government sucks which is why it's being slowly rebooted or ignored.
It's your government, too. You did vote in the last congressional election, didn't you? You did follow the procedure to have your voice heard, right? Or do you only speak when you're angry?
But why ARE we paying for France to buy drones?
Usually it's because France (or any other ally) has already paid (or at least agreed to pay) for the latest greatest military technology the US is willing to export, and they do so as a package deal. Then the US sends out the drones, the control stations, the trainers, the spare parts, the technicians... everything France needs, without France needing to run their own R&D program just to figure out what parts they need to purchase individually.
Law enforcement is essential. Guiding tours, emptying trash cans, cleaning restrooms, and having enough security to watch tens of thousands of visitors each day are all non-essential.
You've never run a webcam site, have you? I have. If it fails, it fails. There is no "clean shutdown" necessary. You still fix the same thing when it breaks.
I've run a streaming radio station. Whenever we shut down, we had to first shut down our external relay, or it would get badly confused when we came back, and it took about three hours to fix. I doubt the Panda Cam is run on a dedicated relay, though... it's more likely stuck on to another server running other services, which are probably more complicated, and probably also much more damaging if failed. There's also the strong possibility that the order came down to shut down the whole data center, rather than just the Panda Cam. My radio station never shut down just its Internet stream, but we occasionally stopped broadcasting from the main station.
This isn't a layoff, it's a furlough.
I'm just using the example the OP did. As I understand, though, there is still the threat of layoffs in several places, since the budget that does eventually pass is a pretty wild unknown.
Except that, by now becoming a government contractor, Autonomous Killer Robots Inc. is now subject to oversight from the Government Accountability Office, and must submit loads of paperwork detailing where all that money went and why. Any internal waste or excesses must be documented, and if the GAO doesn't like what they see, you won't get another government contract until the GAO is happy with your reports. There's not a terribly large market for headgear-targeting weaponry, so those future contracts are vital to AKR Inc. That's a pretty strong incentive to sell the product at a low cost, and cut expenses everywhere you can.
Who makes the parts that go in those weapons? Who assembles them? Those "assloads" of cash don't just sit in a defense contractor's warehouse.
The government, after the shutdown, spent money to rent barricades to close off national monuments that are normally open 24x7 with no means of closing access.
...And now it's spending less money on having fewer security guards.
They also spent money and time to turn off things like the "Panda Cam" that they could have just kept on until it failed.
...Ensuring a clean shutdown from a known-good state, rather than expecting they'll need to spend more time troubleshooting everything when they get back.
Any actual layoffs or closures are wholly there to annoy you and make you think you need government more than you do.
If you're in a position to be laid off by the government, you're already pretty dependent on it. Once laid off, you have time to look for a job that isn't so tightly integrated with the madness of Congress. Layoffs seem to have the effect of pushing people away from government dependence.
Reject closures and go where you like. It's your land.
It is my land, isn't it? And it's also my neighbor's land, and his cousin's, and his nephew's friend's dog's mother's owner's dentist's son's land, too. It's all of ours, and the majority of us have decided to accept a common authority to ensure that the freedoms and amenities we have today are still around for our descendents. That means we want adequate security to keep vandals from screwing up our shiny monuments, and we want jackasses in the vocal minority to stop assuming they can be exempt from the rules by just ignoring authority. That's my government you're denouncing, and my neighbor's, and his cousin's, and his nephew's friend's dog's mother's owner's dentist's son's, too.