Clearly, you can't have people living off someone else's work, even though that someone else is a machine, because...quick, help me someone here!
Because somebody will be running and maintaining that machine, and they see every day that they are directly responsible for 10x the production of their predecessors, so it seems fair to them that they be paid 10x as much. The way they see it, they're the ones doing the work, using tools that are 10x better than before.
That's also why executives see it as fair to have a $300 million starting salary for a crappy CEO: that one person is the craftsman responsible for the whole company's production. Of course, errors are due to faulty "tools" that must be replaced, so some scapegoat gets fired.
The bit I don't get is how "a genetic mutation that causes mammalian neural tissue to expand and fold" disproves "'dumber species will have different genes'? Since, well, it's a gene that's different.
It's a poorly worded sentence. The theory is that having a more intelligent and more complex brain requires significantly more complex genes to develop. A single gene making such a big change means that the genetic instructions for the "smart" and "dumb" variations are actually encoded into both genomes, and just require this "master gene" to activate them.
What makes this significant is that it may contradict our current theories of evolutionary history. Finding turned-off intelligence in "dumb" mammals suggests that at some point in the past, a common ancestor had evolved to be smarter, but that intelligence was lost for the "dumb" branch.
Because you know, all those people with defective, cancerous, or physically-damaged livers don't really need the second chance, either.
Yes, you've been told through all thirteen years of your life that drinking and abusing drugs can damage your liver. That doesn't mean it's the only way a liver can be damaged.
The investigational information was pretty crap. Lots of names and pictures of people being tossed out that had nothing to do with it. That said, a lot of it is similar to how the police do investigations, the 'internet' just had less information. We didn't get to see things like CCTV footage and such.
The other big difference is that police investigations aren't broadcasting every phase of the investigation to the entire world. For an hour or two, they might suspect that student from a politically-inconvenient country, but the public (and the politicians of that politically-inconvenient country) will never know. On 4chan, every suspicion is public, ready to be picked up by the echo chamber and presented as fact to the whole world.
Exactly. Take your platform, and burn it to the ground.
I want politicians who, when faced with legislation they support or not, will release a statement saying why it's a good or bad idea. Not a buzzword-filled piece about patriotism and inherent rights, but how the particular legislation helps or hinders your particular goals.
I want politicians who will vote however they feel is right, rather than how their party tells them to.
I want politicians who will act in support of not just their own constituents, but for all the neighboring regions as well, especially in regard to business incentives.
I want politicians who honestly care more about making the world better than about the day-to-day drama of American politics.
As an ex-developer IT admin in a financial company with history in medical data, let me state this in other words: "IT guys who have to deal with information security are afraid for their own jobs when the company is slapped with a fine for letting confidential information leak out on some cloud service that got hacked, or when the vital business process doesn't work because of a power outage in another country, or when a minor connectivity disruption shuts down every business process everywhere."
Developers want to make things work. IT admins want to make things work reliably, securely, and perpetually. In a well-functioning organization, this means the developers ask the IT guys for whatever they need, and the IT guys either deliver it or give a reason why they can't. Security and reliability requirements aren't always the domain of the developers, but they do weigh into IT's operations. Both groups have to be aware of the others' needs, and work together to meet them. Having a developer undermine IT restrictions is just as bad as having an admin placing unnecessary restrictions.
Hopefully they'll soon realize that the desktop and mobile platforms need different UI models
Meh... Call me argumentative if you like, but I'm not going to give up on the unified interface just yet. Rather weird, since I've previously argued strongly in favor of separate UIs.
I'll start by saying that every UI model we have today sucks. Some sucks less, and some sucks more, but everything has some degree of sucking to it. That said, I've been impressed by how the iOS interface scales between the iPhone and iPad form factors. My iPad was my first (modern) Apple device, and while its interface was a little awkward at times, it works decently well for its size, and scales gracefully down to the phone's smaller display. Some buttons disappear off the top of the screen, and some extra information just isn't displayed to save space, but it works well enough. Now if only I could remember which page that app I want is on...
I now think that ultimately, a unified interface is where we'll have to go, not necessarily because of today's corporate cost-cutting, but to reduce the learning curve as our most common devices become integrated. When I'm 85, I don't want to have to learn seven different UIs to make a pot of coffee, check my email, and get a weather forecast.
I expect that eventually, we'll settle on a single overarching design, preferably unencumbered by patents or copyright (here's looking at you, GNU), that is simply the standard interface on our devices in many different but similar forms. I'm reminded of the many variants and common theme of Star Trek's LCARS interface. After learning how the interface works, completing additional tasks are just a matter of telling the computer what to do, rather than figuring out how to communicate with the machine.
I mean value that won't diminish over time. As long as the US government accepts taxes at a certain rate with the dollar, the dollar will have some use. There's a reason to keep some dollars on hand. This is the intrinsic worth of any currency: The promise that if you accept it, you'll be able to spend it again later for something equitable. All currency is just an intermediate step in bartering. I sell my skilled labor today for my dinner next week, but in the middle I get a paycheck.
Bitcoins, though, have nothing that uses them naturally. Stores accepting them now use them as just a surrogate for other curriencies, so there's no reason to keep them on hand. Just convert what you need at the time of purchase, and never worry about a bubble bursting and losing the value of everything you've saved. Of course, if you have no reason to keep Bitcoins on hand, neither does anybody else, so why even accept them in the first place?
And that boils down to the only intrinsic wealth that Bitcoin has: its anonymity. Supposedly it's untraceable, which makes it valuable for those who care about having untraceable commerce, but that means the aforementioned promise of future use is limited to a small number of people. For most people, they're inherently worthless, being currently only an investment vehicle ridign a bubble.
The price can easily go far higher than the cost to mine. Consider gold. It costs well under $1000 for a large-scale mine to produce an ounce of gold, but because people are willing to pay a high price (hovering around $1500/oz) to get it now, the price is higher. It's the same with Bitcoins. People want them now, so the price risees. What keeps the bubble going is hype, making people want to get coins as quickly as possible, before the price rises even further.
How much is the cost? It's gone up a lot. You have to buy either a stack of cards (expensive) and a lot of electricity, an FPGA (hugely expensive) and a moderate amount of electricity or an ASIC (if you can even find one) and a small amount of electricity.
You can also build a particle collider and turn lead into gold, but that doesn't raise the price of gold to a few billion dollars per ounce. The cost that matters is the cost of people's effort to get a Bitcoin. If people are actively hoarding Bitcoins, the price rises until a cheaper long-run investment is to buy the mining equipment. If people are selling off Bitcoins, then the cost that matters is what they're selling them for.
What bubble? Plenty of people perform transactions using bitcoin to pay for goods and services every day and go away happy. How is that a bubble?
People bought and sold houses during the housing bubble, and used dot-com companies every day in the dot-com bubble. Use has little to do whith being a bubble or not. The notion of a "bubble" is where the price of a commodity far exceeds its actual value. Yes, this can even apply to foreign currency like bitcoins. People are buying bitcoins more as an investment than for actual trade, so the price climbs higher, making everybody happy.
Then something happens. A few more big thefts, or a flaw in the protocol is discovered, or an economic externality makes people sell off just a few coins at less-than-market price, so they're sure to sell quickly. Other investors see the price fall, and they worry about the bubble starting to burst, so they sell quick, too... and that makes the price drop more, and the cycle repeats, sending the price crashing back to a price on par with its actual value.
The problem is that Bitcoins have very little intrinsic value. The value of national currencies is based on the stability ogf the government backing it, ultimately reflecting the currency's use for paying taxes and other government charges. Bitcoin isn't backed by a government, though, and even the prices for day-to-day trade are effectively just national currencies with an exchange rate and transaction fees applied. When the bubble finally bursts, Bitcoins' value will hover around the cost of the electricity & equipment to mine them, so investors can write off the purchase as a slight loss or slight profit.
Like all bubbles, there are some get-rich-quick millionaires who made a fortune getting in early, but their money will effectively come at the expense of those who come in later, buying the bitcoins they're selling off. Someone's always left holding the bag.
The IRS is using it in a legal sense, and they are wrong here. From a practical sense, one should not expect email to be confidential. From a legal aspect we should have that expectation.
I am not a lawyer, but this guy is, and he illustrates well how email is not legally private.
Nobody higher up the food chain remembers anything even though there's evidence that they were informed of the progress of the program on occasion. Similarly, the people directly involved work somewhere in DC now. The head of the ATF had to resign without any other consequence. There's no indication that the Department of Justice will ever investigate the activities of Fast and Furious much less prosecute anyone for the crimes committed.
And that's exactly the problem. Being "informed of the progress" isn't the same as actually knowing what's happening. Rather than a general attitude of "let me think about this", the standing order is "don't let me know about this". Rather than increasing transparency in government, wrongdoing is just forcibly hidden.
I say we ditch FOIA and submit every report to an ethics oversight department, whose members are (re)elected by the public, not affiliated with any political party, and must by barred from related jobs for several years. Requests for information can go to that department, and that department would do any necessary redacting.
Pretty much. FOIA itself is a joke. The government is a big enough beurocracy that a six-year delay seems pretty quick to me, so I don't expect the purported transparency actually changed behavior at all. However, since some information might eventually come out, nobody with concerns can voice them to anybody else without risking a big scandal (and their career) later. That undermines any internal oversight, since nothing can be handled discreetly in an official capacity. Sure, we can ask for information now, but there won't be anything there to find, and the result is that nothing will improve. Mistakes, bad judgement, and outright evil will still happen, and now it's even less likely to stop.
Then, of course, there's the redaction. By allowing any redaction, FOIA releases are little more than publicity stunts. because the public will always question what's redacted - even if it's just all the adverbs. When the redactions are substantial, but justified, there's no real way to communicate to the public that they've stumbled on something important. In all courses, FOIA responses cast more doubt on the government, whether it's legitimate concern or not.
I've bought probably a dozen big-publisher games over the past two years... but often through GOG, which I can't praise highly enough, even though I risk sounding like a shill.
I don't know what kind of arrangement GOG has with the copyright holders, but their offerings are DRM-free*, unlimited in downloads, and cheap to boot. No, they don't have the latest greatest AAA titles, but they do have games that are fun, and once upon a time, they were big-name games, too. Even if half my purchase profits EA or another psychotic game baron, I'm glad to know that they see the purchase coming through GOG, in the hopes that some data-mining lackey in the hidden lair of evil game companies notices that a more liberal sales model is performing slightly better.
*I recall seeing a few listings that said the game included its original DRM but came with a fix to disable/bypass it. I also wouldn't be surprised to see a few of the old "find this word in the manual" prompts, but GOG usually includes the game manuals. Of course I can't find any such listings on demand.
The external drives, the only situation that I'd actually be interested in, are also stupid expensive. In the long run, just better off either using E-SATA, USB3, or internalizing the drives. Same goes for daisy chaining monitors. Want to run tons of monitors? Install more video cards! woo.
I'll get right on that, as soon as I figure out how to stuff more hard drives and more video cards into my smart watch.
The impetus for Thunderbolt isn't to do existing jobs for today's technology. Rather, I get the distinct impression that it's being over-engineered to be the standard of choice for the next few decades. No, we don't need 20 Gbps throughput and 4K video now, but when you walk into a friend's living room and plug your watch into his video game display, it's going to need the bandwidth to stream the real-time-rendered fully-immersive video out and pull in the data from the motion-tracking cameras.
Apple's business model is based on having ecosystems. Apple will make the core systems that everyone will need, and third-party manufacturers will make the accessories. The way I see it, Thunderbolt and the Lightning connector are a part of this. Thunderbolt will be the big backbone for high-throughput and high-quality systems, and Lightning will be the simple connector for miscellaneous (slower) accessories.
Assuming you're not trolling, that's a nice story, but that's not how science works.
The trouble is that "what we know about black holes" is all theoretical and mathematical.
Usually, the first step in science is to observe something. In the case of black holes, our knowledge of their existence can be traced back to a few experiments, which provided pretty solid evidence against the prevailing theories of aether. The observation that doesn't match the expectation means that the theories aren't right, and must be changed.
In fact, many of today's experiments are simply re-running old trials, but with more precise technology. Rather than dropping rocks off a tower, we can measure how fast individual atoms fall, giving us a more exact understanding of gravity. Usually the results are a perfect match for what's expected, but sometimes they aren't.
Black holes were invented to explain present-day theories about the motion of stars and galaxies.
Next comes the theory. Starting from the results of those experiments, Einstein hypothesized his theories of relativity, which are really little more than a collection of relationships derived from the assumption that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant. His theories explained the results of previous experiments, and importantly, provided a set of formulas that can be used to make predictions for future experiments.
Mathematics are very useful in describing measured experiments and observations in the physical universe. As soon as mathematics and computer simulations go beyond what is actually observed and measured, it no longer describes the real world were living in.
The relationships in the physical world are described with mathematics. Sometimes, when math is insufficient to easily describe a particular relationship, new mathematical forms are invented to accommodate the real world. Ultimately, though, every physicist knows that the mathematical models do not prescribe reality, but describe our understanding of it. Again, we use those models to predict the outcome of future experiments.
At the center of these hypothetical, theoretical black holes is this mathematical entity that has been called a "singularity". This is another mathematical fiction that can't exist in the known universe.
That depends on the rules of the known universe. in 1915, Karl Schwarzchild transformed Einstein's theories of relativity into a form that would require black holes. This means that Einstein's formulas can only be correct if the universe allows black holes. If the universe does not allow black holes, then Einsteins formulas must be wrong - though less wrong than the aether theory they replaced.
Perhaps it is time to examine some of these widely held theories that require these mathematical fictions.
Heck, considering what we know about the locations of black holes and the speed of manmade spacefcraft, old age will probably kill you before you get close enough to notice the gravity.
Everybody repeat after me: "Space is big. Don't mind Sarten-X, he is a jackass."
Zombies don't necessarily have to imply an each-man-for-himself festival of backstabbing. Zombies just make a nice set of boundary conditions and backstory.
You're camping on a mountain with two others, and one of your party has just sprained his ankle pretty badly. You have your smartphone, but calling 911, you are greeted by the groans of the undead. Get your whole party to the safety of the cars in the woods below.
A horde of zombies has damaged the building you've been hiding in. and it's starting to collapse. Going outside is lethal, of course, but you may be able to survive the building's collapse if you're in a sturdy-enough place. Find or build one with these common household supples.
You've escaped the horde by taking a makeshift raft down a river, but it falls apart in some rapids. Getting to shore is unlikely, though probably safe once you get there... but you have to survive the rapids first.
In your haste to escape the Canadian zombies (They're like regular zombies, but they want "bbbbrrrraaaaiiiinnnnssss, eh?"), you escaped in a car with a full tank of gas, but very little traction, and now you're stuck in foot-deep snow on the side of the road. The horde is coming after you, and they'll likely find you before a tow truck does.
The zombie menace hasn't hit your city yet, but the panic has. Rioters and looters have run rampant, and fires are spreading uncontrolled. You still have some valuable supplies, but you and your significant other need to find a safe place to spend the night before escaping the city.
Of course, these are plain old boring preparedness scenarios, just dressed up a bit. Rather than trying to justify that the survivor has to think for themselves by saying "911 isn't available in this area" or "there's a really bad storm outside", or "you were in a hurry and didn't load your snowmobile in your pickup truck", it's zombies. Zombies are just versatile stand-ins for the big bad anything, and they make the exercise a bit more memorable than a bog-standard lecture on preparedness.
...people can even begin to try to rationalise it and behave as though it could actually happen.
It's also an educational opportunity. I occasionally do mentoring, and I've used zombies as a good example for a worst-case scenario for emergency preparedness. It provides a good narrative to cover a wide variety of situations where everything's gone wrong, without entering into a ridiculous movie-plot-specific series of impossibly unlikely events. By starting out with the assumption that we're already in a worst-case scenario, where the survivor is one of only a few to survive an epidemic, it's not a terribly large stretch to assume that the car won't start, or that there's a storm coming, or that an earthquake has broken gas lines, and the survivor can't rely on government services.
Speaking of how impossible a zombie is, the zombie apocalypse also provides some ironically humane ways to discuss epidemiology, biology, medicine, and ethics, because pop-culture zombies are a convenient infection without suffering. The actual conversion process is rarely a focus in stories, and once the zombie is a zombie, they're too mindless to even fear harm. They just keep wandering, not even bothering to eat regularly... which brings us to discussing chemistry and thermodynamics.
Personally, I just think it's feeding the insane "survivalist" mentality that is spreading like a virus through the US. Oh, wait...
Jokes aside, we don't have any Communists or Nazis today to worry about, or Confederates, or British, or Spanish, or Visigoths, or Persians, or even rival tribes. We do have terrorists to fear, but there aren't any terrorists likely to launch a full occupation of the US. The survivalist mentality has always been here, but now we don't have any looming evil that we need to survive. While minor emergencies (such as those requiring the aforementioned preparedness) may happen, the barbarians aren't at the gate. They're in their living rooms, shouting insults into their XBox.
Minecraft (and other game) servers are just as good at learning proper administration techniques as the IRC servers I ran in my college days. The admins must go through the configuration process, think about uptime, anticipate resource needs, and put some concern into security, while carefully handling (or intentionally not) the interpersonal conflicts that arise among users... all the same tasks a good admin must mind in the real world of IT.
Coincidentally, I'm currently mentoring a high-school student preparing for an IT program at college. We're going over some basic admin skills in advance of his classes, focusing on the real-life experiences from my day job as an IT admin at a finance company. His main service is actually a Minecraft server... but behind the scenes, he's running Bash scripts for backup & housekeeping, Apache for a web-based world map, Nagios to alert him if/when something crashes, and some Perl hacks (that I wrote) to add a few server functions.
Of course, that's just for a silly little game, but it doesn't really matter what the user-facing service is. The demands of IT administration are pretty generic. I use similar services daily, though the backups are done less with Bash and more with Enterprise Agentless Backup Manager Plus Professional Ultimate Corporate Edition.
For the "existing" passwords that the memo says they'll be checking, they should be stored already hashed, so it's too late for that. If it's a check done at login (before the client hashes), that implies that there's a feasible way to inject code to access the unhashed password, and frankly that worries me more.
Linux distros and Windows will happily keep existing simple passwords, if you've set them before enabling complexity requirements. After enabling the requirements, the old passwords aren't re-checked, as MIT's memo implies they will do.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly, you can't have people living off someone else's work, even though that someone else is a machine, because...quick, help me someone here!
Because somebody will be running and maintaining that machine, and they see every day that they are directly responsible for 10x the production of their predecessors, so it seems fair to them that they be paid 10x as much. The way they see it, they're the ones doing the work, using tools that are 10x better than before.
That's also why executives see it as fair to have a $300 million starting salary for a crappy CEO: that one person is the craftsman responsible for the whole company's production. Of course, errors are due to faulty "tools" that must be replaced, so some scapegoat gets fired.
The bit I don't get is how "a genetic mutation that causes mammalian neural tissue to expand and fold" disproves "'dumber species will have different genes'? Since, well, it's a gene that's different.
It's a poorly worded sentence. The theory is that having a more intelligent and more complex brain requires significantly more complex genes to develop. A single gene making such a big change means that the genetic instructions for the "smart" and "dumb" variations are actually encoded into both genomes, and just require this "master gene" to activate them.
What makes this significant is that it may contradict our current theories of evolutionary history. Finding turned-off intelligence in "dumb" mammals suggests that at some point in the past, a common ancestor had evolved to be smarter, but that intelligence was lost for the "dumb" branch.
Because you know, all those people with defective, cancerous, or physically-damaged livers don't really need the second chance, either.
Yes, you've been told through all thirteen years of your life that drinking and abusing drugs can damage your liver. That doesn't mean it's the only way a liver can be damaged.
The investigational information was pretty crap. Lots of names and pictures of people being tossed out that had nothing to do with it. That said, a lot of it is similar to how the police do investigations, the 'internet' just had less information. We didn't get to see things like CCTV footage and such.
The other big difference is that police investigations aren't broadcasting every phase of the investigation to the entire world. For an hour or two, they might suspect that student from a politically-inconvenient country, but the public (and the politicians of that politically-inconvenient country) will never know. On 4chan, every suspicion is public, ready to be picked up by the echo chamber and presented as fact to the whole world.
Exactly. Take your platform, and burn it to the ground.
I want politicians who, when faced with legislation they support or not, will release a statement saying why it's a good or bad idea. Not a buzzword-filled piece about patriotism and inherent rights, but how the particular legislation helps or hinders your particular goals.
I want politicians who will vote however they feel is right, rather than how their party tells them to.
I want politicians who will act in support of not just their own constituents, but for all the neighboring regions as well, especially in regard to business incentives.
I want politicians who honestly care more about making the world better than about the day-to-day drama of American politics.
I also want a pony.
As an ex-developer IT admin in a financial company with history in medical data, let me state this in other words: "IT guys who have to deal with information security are afraid for their own jobs when the company is slapped with a fine for letting confidential information leak out on some cloud service that got hacked, or when the vital business process doesn't work because of a power outage in another country, or when a minor connectivity disruption shuts down every business process everywhere."
Developers want to make things work. IT admins want to make things work reliably, securely, and perpetually. In a well-functioning organization, this means the developers ask the IT guys for whatever they need, and the IT guys either deliver it or give a reason why they can't. Security and reliability requirements aren't always the domain of the developers, but they do weigh into IT's operations. Both groups have to be aware of the others' needs, and work together to meet them. Having a developer undermine IT restrictions is just as bad as having an admin placing unnecessary restrictions.
Hopefully they'll soon realize that the desktop and mobile platforms need different UI models
Meh... Call me argumentative if you like, but I'm not going to give up on the unified interface just yet. Rather weird, since I've previously argued strongly in favor of separate UIs.
I'll start by saying that every UI model we have today sucks. Some sucks less, and some sucks more, but everything has some degree of sucking to it. That said, I've been impressed by how the iOS interface scales between the iPhone and iPad form factors. My iPad was my first (modern) Apple device, and while its interface was a little awkward at times, it works decently well for its size, and scales gracefully down to the phone's smaller display. Some buttons disappear off the top of the screen, and some extra information just isn't displayed to save space, but it works well enough. Now if only I could remember which page that app I want is on...
I now think that ultimately, a unified interface is where we'll have to go, not necessarily because of today's corporate cost-cutting, but to reduce the learning curve as our most common devices become integrated. When I'm 85, I don't want to have to learn seven different UIs to make a pot of coffee, check my email, and get a weather forecast.
I expect that eventually, we'll settle on a single overarching design, preferably unencumbered by patents or copyright (here's looking at you, GNU), that is simply the standard interface on our devices in many different but similar forms. I'm reminded of the many variants and common theme of Star Trek's LCARS interface. After learning how the interface works, completing additional tasks are just a matter of telling the computer what to do, rather than figuring out how to communicate with the machine.
I mean value that won't diminish over time. As long as the US government accepts taxes at a certain rate with the dollar, the dollar will have some use. There's a reason to keep some dollars on hand. This is the intrinsic worth of any currency: The promise that if you accept it, you'll be able to spend it again later for something equitable. All currency is just an intermediate step in bartering. I sell my skilled labor today for my dinner next week, but in the middle I get a paycheck.
Bitcoins, though, have nothing that uses them naturally. Stores accepting them now use them as just a surrogate for other curriencies, so there's no reason to keep them on hand. Just convert what you need at the time of purchase, and never worry about a bubble bursting and losing the value of everything you've saved. Of course, if you have no reason to keep Bitcoins on hand, neither does anybody else, so why even accept them in the first place?
And that boils down to the only intrinsic wealth that Bitcoin has: its anonymity. Supposedly it's untraceable, which makes it valuable for those who care about having untraceable commerce, but that means the aforementioned promise of future use is limited to a small number of people. For most people, they're inherently worthless, being currently only an investment vehicle ridign a bubble.
The price can easily go far higher than the cost to mine. Consider gold. It costs well under $1000 for a large-scale mine to produce an ounce of gold, but because people are willing to pay a high price (hovering around $1500/oz) to get it now, the price is higher. It's the same with Bitcoins. People want them now, so the price risees. What keeps the bubble going is hype, making people want to get coins as quickly as possible, before the price rises even further.
How much is the cost? It's gone up a lot. You have to buy either a stack of cards (expensive) and a lot of electricity, an FPGA (hugely expensive) and a moderate amount of electricity or an ASIC (if you can even find one) and a small amount of electricity.
You can also build a particle collider and turn lead into gold, but that doesn't raise the price of gold to a few billion dollars per ounce. The cost that matters is the cost of people's effort to get a Bitcoin. If people are actively hoarding Bitcoins, the price rises until a cheaper long-run investment is to buy the mining equipment. If people are selling off Bitcoins, then the cost that matters is what they're selling them for.
What bubble? Plenty of people perform transactions using bitcoin to pay for goods and services every day and go away happy. How is that a bubble?
People bought and sold houses during the housing bubble, and used dot-com companies every day in the dot-com bubble. Use has little to do whith being a bubble or not. The notion of a "bubble" is where the price of a commodity far exceeds its actual value. Yes, this can even apply to foreign currency like bitcoins. People are buying bitcoins more as an investment than for actual trade, so the price climbs higher, making everybody happy.
Then something happens. A few more big thefts, or a flaw in the protocol is discovered, or an economic externality makes people sell off just a few coins at less-than-market price, so they're sure to sell quickly. Other investors see the price fall, and they worry about the bubble starting to burst, so they sell quick, too... and that makes the price drop more, and the cycle repeats, sending the price crashing back to a price on par with its actual value.
The problem is that Bitcoins have very little intrinsic value. The value of national currencies is based on the stability ogf the government backing it, ultimately reflecting the currency's use for paying taxes and other government charges. Bitcoin isn't backed by a government, though, and even the prices for day-to-day trade are effectively just national currencies with an exchange rate and transaction fees applied. When the bubble finally bursts, Bitcoins' value will hover around the cost of the electricity & equipment to mine them, so investors can write off the purchase as a slight loss or slight profit.
Like all bubbles, there are some get-rich-quick millionaires who made a fortune getting in early, but their money will effectively come at the expense of those who come in later, buying the bitcoins they're selling off. Someone's always left holding the bag.
The IRS is using it in a legal sense, and they are wrong here. From a practical sense, one should not expect email to be confidential. From a legal aspect we should have that expectation.
I am not a lawyer, but this guy is, and he illustrates well how email is not legally private.
or C: The White House is still deeply involved with a related ongoing operation.
Nobody higher up the food chain remembers anything even though there's evidence that they were informed of the progress of the program on occasion. Similarly, the people directly involved work somewhere in DC now. The head of the ATF had to resign without any other consequence. There's no indication that the Department of Justice will ever investigate the activities of Fast and Furious much less prosecute anyone for the crimes committed.
And that's exactly the problem. Being "informed of the progress" isn't the same as actually knowing what's happening. Rather than a general attitude of "let me think about this", the standing order is "don't let me know about this". Rather than increasing transparency in government, wrongdoing is just forcibly hidden.
I say we ditch FOIA and submit every report to an ethics oversight department, whose members are (re)elected by the public, not affiliated with any political party, and must by barred from related jobs for several years. Requests for information can go to that department, and that department would do any necessary redacting.
The Atlantean government, as usual, could not be reached for comment.
Pretty much. FOIA itself is a joke. The government is a big enough beurocracy that a six-year delay seems pretty quick to me, so I don't expect the purported transparency actually changed behavior at all. However, since some information might eventually come out, nobody with concerns can voice them to anybody else without risking a big scandal (and their career) later. That undermines any internal oversight, since nothing can be handled discreetly in an official capacity. Sure, we can ask for information now, but there won't be anything there to find, and the result is that nothing will improve. Mistakes, bad judgement, and outright evil will still happen, and now it's even less likely to stop.
Then, of course, there's the redaction. By allowing any redaction, FOIA releases are little more than publicity stunts. because the public will always question what's redacted - even if it's just all the adverbs. When the redactions are substantial, but justified, there's no real way to communicate to the public that they've stumbled on something important. In all courses, FOIA responses cast more doubt on the government, whether it's legitimate concern or not.
I've bought probably a dozen big-publisher games over the past two years... but often through GOG, which I can't praise highly enough, even though I risk sounding like a shill.
I don't know what kind of arrangement GOG has with the copyright holders, but their offerings are DRM-free*, unlimited in downloads, and cheap to boot. No, they don't have the latest greatest AAA titles, but they do have games that are fun, and once upon a time, they were big-name games, too. Even if half my purchase profits EA or another psychotic game baron, I'm glad to know that they see the purchase coming through GOG, in the hopes that some data-mining lackey in the hidden lair of evil game companies notices that a more liberal sales model is performing slightly better.
*I recall seeing a few listings that said the game included its original DRM but came with a fix to disable/bypass it. I also wouldn't be surprised to see a few of the old "find this word in the manual" prompts, but GOG usually includes the game manuals. Of course I can't find any such listings on demand.
The external drives, the only situation that I'd actually be interested in, are also stupid expensive. In the long run, just better off either using E-SATA, USB3, or internalizing the drives. Same goes for daisy chaining monitors. Want to run tons of monitors? Install more video cards! woo.
I'll get right on that, as soon as I figure out how to stuff more hard drives and more video cards into my smart watch.
The impetus for Thunderbolt isn't to do existing jobs for today's technology. Rather, I get the distinct impression that it's being over-engineered to be the standard of choice for the next few decades. No, we don't need 20 Gbps throughput and 4K video now, but when you walk into a friend's living room and plug your watch into his video game display, it's going to need the bandwidth to stream the real-time-rendered fully-immersive video out and pull in the data from the motion-tracking cameras.
Apple's business model is based on having ecosystems. Apple will make the core systems that everyone will need, and third-party manufacturers will make the accessories. The way I see it, Thunderbolt and the Lightning connector are a part of this. Thunderbolt will be the big backbone for high-throughput and high-quality systems, and Lightning will be the simple connector for miscellaneous (slower) accessories.
Assuming you're not trolling, that's a nice story, but that's not how science works.
The trouble is that "what we know about black holes" is all theoretical and mathematical.
Usually, the first step in science is to observe something. In the case of black holes, our knowledge of their existence can be traced back to a few experiments, which provided pretty solid evidence against the prevailing theories of aether. The observation that doesn't match the expectation means that the theories aren't right, and must be changed.
In fact, many of today's experiments are simply re-running old trials, but with more precise technology. Rather than dropping rocks off a tower, we can measure how fast individual atoms fall, giving us a more exact understanding of gravity. Usually the results are a perfect match for what's expected, but sometimes they aren't.
Black holes were invented to explain present-day theories about the motion of stars and galaxies.
Next comes the theory. Starting from the results of those experiments, Einstein hypothesized his theories of relativity, which are really little more than a collection of relationships derived from the assumption that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant. His theories explained the results of previous experiments, and importantly, provided a set of formulas that can be used to make predictions for future experiments.
Mathematics are very useful in describing measured experiments and observations in the physical universe. As soon as mathematics and computer simulations go beyond what is actually observed and measured, it no longer describes the real world were living in.
The relationships in the physical world are described with mathematics. Sometimes, when math is insufficient to easily describe a particular relationship, new mathematical forms are invented to accommodate the real world. Ultimately, though, every physicist knows that the mathematical models do not prescribe reality, but describe our understanding of it. Again, we use those models to predict the outcome of future experiments.
At the center of these hypothetical, theoretical black holes is this mathematical entity that has been called a "singularity". This is another mathematical fiction that can't exist in the known universe.
That depends on the rules of the known universe. in 1915, Karl Schwarzchild transformed Einstein's theories of relativity into a form that would require black holes. This means that Einstein's formulas can only be correct if the universe allows black holes. If the universe does not allow black holes, then Einsteins formulas must be wrong - though less wrong than the aether theory they replaced.
Perhaps it is time to examine some of these widely held theories that require these mathematical fictions.
That's what experiments are for.
No one has ever directly observed a black hole and thereby shown that these things even exist in the real world.
Black holes have been observed many times.
In 1929 an astronomer named Edwin Hubble discovered that "red shift" of distant galaxies. Then he made the assumption (belief, faith) about the cau
Heck, considering what we know about the locations of black holes and the speed of manmade spacefcraft, old age will probably kill you before you get close enough to notice the gravity.
Everybody repeat after me: "Space is big. Don't mind Sarten-X, he is a jackass."
Zombies don't necessarily have to imply an each-man-for-himself festival of backstabbing. Zombies just make a nice set of boundary conditions and backstory.
Of course, these are plain old boring preparedness scenarios, just dressed up a bit. Rather than trying to justify that the survivor has to think for themselves by saying "911 isn't available in this area" or "there's a really bad storm outside", or "you were in a hurry and didn't load your snowmobile in your pickup truck", it's zombies. Zombies are just versatile stand-ins for the big bad anything, and they make the exercise a bit more memorable than a bog-standard lecture on preparedness.
...people can even begin to try to rationalise it and behave as though it could actually happen.
It's also an educational opportunity. I occasionally do mentoring, and I've used zombies as a good example for a worst-case scenario for emergency preparedness. It provides a good narrative to cover a wide variety of situations where everything's gone wrong, without entering into a ridiculous movie-plot-specific series of impossibly unlikely events. By starting out with the assumption that we're already in a worst-case scenario, where the survivor is one of only a few to survive an epidemic, it's not a terribly large stretch to assume that the car won't start, or that there's a storm coming, or that an earthquake has broken gas lines, and the survivor can't rely on government services.
Speaking of how impossible a zombie is, the zombie apocalypse also provides some ironically humane ways to discuss epidemiology, biology, medicine, and ethics, because pop-culture zombies are a convenient infection without suffering. The actual conversion process is rarely a focus in stories, and once the zombie is a zombie, they're too mindless to even fear harm. They just keep wandering, not even bothering to eat regularly... which brings us to discussing chemistry and thermodynamics.
Personally, I just think it's feeding the insane "survivalist" mentality that is spreading like a virus through the US. Oh, wait...
Jokes aside, we don't have any Communists or Nazis today to worry about, or Confederates, or British, or Spanish, or Visigoths, or Persians, or even rival tribes. We do have terrorists to fear, but there aren't any terrorists likely to launch a full occupation of the US. The survivalist mentality has always been here, but now we don't have any looming evil that we need to survive. While minor emergencies (such as those requiring the aforementioned preparedness) may happen, the barbarians aren't at the gate. They're in their living rooms, shouting insults into their XBox.
Cute, but wrong.
Minecraft (and other game) servers are just as good at learning proper administration techniques as the IRC servers I ran in my college days. The admins must go through the configuration process, think about uptime, anticipate resource needs, and put some concern into security, while carefully handling (or intentionally not) the interpersonal conflicts that arise among users... all the same tasks a good admin must mind in the real world of IT.
Coincidentally, I'm currently mentoring a high-school student preparing for an IT program at college. We're going over some basic admin skills in advance of his classes, focusing on the real-life experiences from my day job as an IT admin at a finance company. His main service is actually a Minecraft server... but behind the scenes, he's running Bash scripts for backup & housekeeping, Apache for a web-based world map, Nagios to alert him if/when something crashes, and some Perl hacks (that I wrote) to add a few server functions.
Of course, that's just for a silly little game, but it doesn't really matter what the user-facing service is. The demands of IT administration are pretty generic. I use similar services daily, though the backups are done less with Bash and more with Enterprise Agentless Backup Manager Plus Professional Ultimate Corporate Edition.
For the "existing" passwords that the memo says they'll be checking, they should be stored already hashed, so it's too late for that. If it's a check done at login (before the client hashes), that implies that there's a feasible way to inject code to access the unhashed password, and frankly that worries me more.
Linux distros and Windows will happily keep existing simple passwords, if you've set them before enabling complexity requirements. After enabling the requirements, the old passwords aren't re-checked, as MIT's memo implies they will do.
Students aren't engaging in "learning activities"? What exactly are they doing at college, then?
...I ask as I take another sip of my beer...