I've tried to like Twitter (or, for that matter, Twitter clones like Gab) a few times. The attempt never lasts more than a couple of days, because it's just chaos. Like trying to listen to a conversation or a single person all the way across a crowded bar. There's just no coherency - the signal is totally drowned out by the noise.
How have they not noticed this before? Actually, how does Twitter still exist?
You're perfectly right, if that is what he intended.\
His is a strange story. He says he wanted to just use the exchange to transfer his money - all $500,000 at once. That's a really strange choice: he is going through a third currency, meaning two transactions rather than one. The fees are going to be much higher than just an ordinary bank-to-bank transfer, plus that third currency is extremely volatile, meaning he has a lot of additional risk.
Then we have the "all your eggs in one basket" argument. With a traditional bank, that might not be a problem, but with an exchange? After Mt. Gox anyone in the IT world should understand that exchanges cannot be trusted. Multiple transactions, waiting for each one to go through before initiating the next. Or multiple exchanges. Or just leave his money in the US. Or his own offline wallet. Or, really, anything except what he actually did.
tl;dr: His story doesn't pass the sniff-test. I'm not sure what he was really doing, but it seems very likely that he was trying to bypass official notice of the assets - either their departure from the US, or their arrival in Canada. I wonder: did he make this money with crypto-speculation? And, perhaps, had never paid taxes on it?
OTOH: reality sometimes is stranger than fiction, and sometimes people really do just have brain farts...
We're all gonna die!!! Eleventy!!! This may be a genuine problem. Or it may not. There is no way for the average person to know. Breathless headlines touting climatic disaster have become so ubiquitous that my first reaction - and that of many people - is a yawn. Ecologists and climate alarmists have done their causes active harm.
Are insects declining? Sure, along with all other animal species that share our habitat. Intuitively, mass agriculture is the most likely culprit, since it creates huge zones of monoculture. Amusingly, the vegetarians may be doing active harm - I'll bet that good, natural grazing land has more biodiversity than a soy field. But the real problem is and remains human overpopulation.
tl;dr: Our planet would be a lot healthier if there were fewer of us.
Vaccinations are part of your public responsibility, like following traffic laws. If you don't want to obey traffic laws, that's easy: don't have a vehicle. If you don't want to vaccinate your kids, that's fine, don't have kids.
I'm not hugely worried about compliance. An idiot can speed through town a time or three, but eventually they'll get caught. Children's immunizations should be signed off by a pediatrician, and verified at the beginning of every school year, when buying that summer pass to the swimming pool, and other occasions.
For the mass market, they have not only multi-core CPUs, but also drivers for graphics cards. On modern PCs, that's a lot of compute power. So three questions: - Could they really improve performance by a significant amount (better be at least 3x), on custom hardware? - Are there a lot of power users who would shell out serious bucks for that custom hardware? - Will that be enough to justify the extra development effort, to create a customized version of their products? It seems to me that the answer to all three questions is "no". In order for this idea to make sense, the answer to all three needs to be "yes". Comments from the/. crowd?
but...I at least skimmed it. They state that the temperature in the Himalayas has risen "by nearly two degrees Fahrenheit since the start of the 20th century". So that's about 1 degree C in 120 years. Wow...that's...not very much. Given that the earth was/is still warming up after the "little ice age" of the 18th century, this is nothing more than natural warming.
Even with reduced glaciers, snow will still accumulate in the Winter and melt over the Summer. It's not like the rivers are going to dry up, although the flow patterns may change somewhat.
Furthermore, what many people forget: Glaciers are dead. Remove the glacier and you uncover potentially fertile valleys. Nature will take a few decades to reclaim the land - first, pioneer plants, then grass or shrubs, then perhaps forests, depending on the altitude.
I don't see why Tesla really needs ultracaps, at least, not to the point of buying the company. OTOH, Tesla stock is massively overvalued due to speculation based on the Musk reality distortion field. So it makes sense to use an all-stock transition: leverage that overvalued stock to buy things. What would actually make far more sense, would be to issue more stock, to suck in actual money, to build out their manufacturing capacity. That empty plot of dirt in China isn't going to build itself.
Just to be clear: I'm not down on Tesla. They have done an amazing job of making EVs into a mainstream product. They deserve a lot of kudos for that. But their ability to execute the boring, day-to-day stuff like running a manufacturing plant? Pretty awful.
IANAL, but I believe that the police can require you to produce a physical key, if one exists. So a key to your house, or your safe, or whatever. Obviously, they have the alternative of breaking in if you refuse, but they can also charge you with a crime for your refusal. However, as I understand it, they cannot force you to open a combination safe. And this seems like the obvious equivalent to a passcode on your phone. Again, IANAL.
It seems like the real answer should be: there should not be any legal requirement for you to cooperate with police. If they think they have a case against you, you should generally not have to participate in building that case. This includes the now infamous prohibition on lying to a federal officer - something the FBI regularly abuses in order to pile up more charges against people.
They already stated the best case against their own idea. This quote:
"The goal isn’t as much to get you to change, it’s instead to create systems that don’t make you change–but have you then solve the issue in the process. Creating consumer change is phenomenally difficult. So the first question we asked in developing the model was why did disposability win? Why did it take over? I think it did because disposability is convenient and affordable."
But they need consumers to change - by collecting and returning their little containers. Which is inconvenient for the consumer. Idea dead, by their own definitions.
As another poster pointed out, in a humorous but absolutely true way: We've already tried this for soft drinks, for beer, for milk, and for other products. Re-usable containers even still exist - but almost only as a curiosity.
Take beer as an example: Your local craft brewery may have reusable bottles, but none of the big brands do. It simply doesn't make economic sense to transport all those empty bottles around, to check and clean and sterilize and re-label them. This may be unfortunate, but it is the simple truth.
There's also the scam of renting an apartment, where the utilities are included in the rent. I have a friend whose family owns a vacation apartment. Someone rented it for a summer, stuffed it full of miners, and burned an astounding amount of electricity. At the end of the month, they disappeared. When the quarterly utility bill arrived, well...
I'm all for solving crimes, but there are (at least) two problems here...
First is privacy: Did anyone who sent their DNA to these companies agree to have it rooted through by law enforcement without a warrant? Privacy is a concept, but apparently not in the US. If privacy rights make life more difficult for law enforcement, that's a small price to pay for a free society.
Second, DNA tests are not nearly as reliable as people think. The test itself just looks at a sampling of markers, and interpretation of the results is somewhat subjective. Far worse, and nearly impossible to eliminate, is the danger of contamination. This is both on the side of DNA tests (saliva swab, but maybe you've kissed your SO) and at the crime scene (those skin flakes at the crime scene come from...who, exactly?).
Geez, do you think there's a day so sunny that this guy won't be able complain about the clouds? Sure, there are some problems with tech, but let's reformulate this just a bit:
If you look at the last 15 years in tech, it's just amazing! Everything you buy contains more processing power than an supercomputer. You don't have to keep buying and re-buying software - it comes as a subscription that you use just as long you want. With services like Steam, games "just work" - no more installation problems and driver nightmares. Gene editing to correct birth defects is just around the corner. Drones give us amazing aerial photography, and they're so cheap that anyone can play. We have new alternatives to currency, experiments from chips to Bitcoin, which may change the future of commerce.
And on, and on... The security problems on today's PCs are no worse than they were 10 years ago, just different. Cybercrime is through the roof? Only because so much more of modern life is online - crime as a whole has certainly not increased; it has just moved online along with the rest of our lives.
I'm not a greenie, but afaik this really is a problem. Hadn't heard about the sound blasts for oil surveys, but just the noise from ships is apparently a serious problems for certain species.
Anyone who has spent time in a swimming pool knows how well sound travels underwater. Noise pollution takes on a completely different dimension.
That's a very moving description of the kinds of problems that gambling can lead to. And you're right: gambling tends to be done - not by the millionaires - but by the people who can least afford it. Hoping for that one big win to heave themselves out of their misery, and thereby putting themselves on the street.
That said, banning activities is (usually) counterproductive, because it just drives them underground. In the case of gambling, would it not be better to treat it the way we do smoking? Prohibit advertising, make it as unattractive as possible. So you can have your betting shop, but you cannot advertise, and you cannot have anything but a plain shopfront. For internet sites, of course, it is a lot more difficult, but one can still try, and regulation of the payment processors may be the best lever.
OTOH there is no cure for human stupidity. People have been pissing away their wages for as long as there have been wages. If you could eliminate gambling, people would drink their wages, or smoke them, or give everything to some charismatic cult leader. The only "cure" is long-term, trying to ensure that kids get solid educations and employment opportunities, so that fewer of them turn into the hopeless types that do this kind of stuff...
If that's the way you want to be - unreliable - go for it. You probably also don't pay your bills on time, you miss appointments, and you generally live - let's be polite here - a "happy go lucky" life. Some people do.
OTOH, if you are a generally reliable person, then you just have to add your inbox to the other activities you deal with in daily life. That means sorting through every message, binning the crap, and answering the rest in a timely fashion. The same way you (hopefully!) handle your physical mail, only email is a lot easier.
If you get a lot of mail, you may want to use some tools. Automatically filter messages into categories, for example, or use different email addresses for different purposes. Tools can help, the same way you may use folders to sort your physical papers. Which doesn't change the basic fact that you need to answer your mail, because that's what responsible adults do.
It strikes me that this is related to the pushback against high frame rate movies. Apparently a substantial segment of people like 24fps, because of the "cinematic feel" it gives you. It's an artifact left from a previous age, but some people want to preserve the lack of realism it portrays.
Hiding actors freckles and blemishes is perhaps part of the same mentality. I remember when HDTV first came out: I was struck by the fact that I could actually see the wrinkles and freckles and little blemishes on people's faces. Apparently this is unwanted - too much realism?
It's also probably sheer egotism on the part of Hollywood & Co.. An actor or actress is no one special - they just have a talent for playing pretend in a convincing way. Yet they feel entitled to tell us all about their views on politics and society, and how we should live our lives. They think they know better. They certainly don't want us to see that they are just people with zits and wrinkles, like everyone else - that might dent their mystique.
"Acting up" - as if there's something wrong, when it's simply something that we don't understand. Following a few links, the mass media is already adding even more adjectives, like "going haywire", to make it sound like looming disaster. I'm sure some "science journalist" will now take this out of context and blame it on global warming, or Trump, or whatever...
Meanwhile, the magnetic pole is getting closer to the cartographic pole, which seems like a good thing overall...
The "right to be forgotten" is typical of legislation where no one thought about the side effects.
First, it only applies to particular search engines. There is no general applicability. In particular, the source information remains online - it just can't be found through Google or Bing.
Second, in attempting to have this right applied globally, EU courts are setting an excellent precedent to have other countries determine what content EU citizens can see. After all, if censorship flows in one direction, it will flow in the other. Does the EU really want Saudia Arabia determining what web content is allowable in the EU?
The link goes to a paper from 1974, and looks at data back into the 1950s. For example: "A population peak occurred in 1950 and 1951 followed by a marked reduction in numbers in 1952; by 1953 the populations had been reduced to such an extent that no over-night roosting colonies could be found in areas where they had previously occurred in thousands and only seven field specimens were collected throughout the entire summer period. "
I really want random underpaid drivers to have access to my garage, sure I do.
It would be better to just install a parcel drop box. This is essentially a mailbox that accepts and swallows packages. They can only be removed with a key. Any home that has a mailbox at the street can easily install one of these. There are also models for cluster mailboxes and apartments, though space can be an issue in those cases.
Aside from cleaning up the trash, note that TFA says the main problem is deferred maintenance. Specifically, maintenance that was already deferred, when the shutdown started. Which hints at the real problem: the Forest Service has stupid priorities for its money. Pournelle's Iron Law has taken over: it's better for your little empire to have a bunch of GS-13's on your staff than the same number of GS-9's, but you can't send a GS-13 to empty trash cans. And if you have the choice between some of that boring maintenance work, or hiring another employee in your empire, well, that's how the maintenance gets deferred in the first place.
Private industry cleans out the deadwood, when it has built up to the point of impacting profits. Government never has that impetus. The best thing that could happen to most government bureaucracies, would be to fire nearly everyone and start over. If the shutdown goes on long enough, maybe that will happen automatically, because people will have found jobs elsewhere.
I'm actually semi-serious: it seems to me that the days of mechanical storage are numbered. With SSDs, and now Intel's XPoint, one can seriously hope that hard disks will be phased out just as floppies were. Fewer mechanical parts ought to mean more reliability, not to mention the obvious speed advantages. Granted, I did buy two hard-disks last year, but only to replace disks in an existing NAS. Those might well be the last ones I ever buy...
If that one person is *only* applying for jobs through LinkedIn, they're an idiot. When you're job hunting, you use every channel you can find, or you're not serious. There are plenty of other channels out there, and you need to use them all.
That said, I have a son looking for an IT job. I had him create profiles on LinkedIn and on Xing. Now, we're in Europe, so things may be different, but: he's had activity from Xing, but absolutely nothing at all from LinkedIn.
I've personally found LinkedIn useful a couple of times as a way to contact someone, when you otherwise have no contact information.
"Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it"
Anyone proposing this clearly does not recall the futile attempt to restrict cryptography.
You cannot ban the export of software; it's simply not possible. If you have a closed development shop, you may be able to keep trade secrets. But publicly known software developments? It's not possible. Software is basically applied mathematics: if the principles are know, anyone can implement them.
Slashdot Mirror
I've tried to like Twitter (or, for that matter, Twitter clones like Gab) a few times. The attempt never lasts more than a couple of days, because it's just chaos. Like trying to listen to a conversation or a single person all the way across a crowded bar. There's just no coherency - the signal is totally drowned out by the noise.
How have they not noticed this before? Actually, how does Twitter still exist?
You're perfectly right, if that is what he intended.\
His is a strange story. He says he wanted to just use the exchange to transfer his money - all $500,000 at once. That's a really strange choice: he is going through a third currency, meaning two transactions rather than one. The fees are going to be much higher than just an ordinary bank-to-bank transfer, plus that third currency is extremely volatile, meaning he has a lot of additional risk.
Then we have the "all your eggs in one basket" argument. With a traditional bank, that might not be a problem, but with an exchange? After Mt. Gox anyone in the IT world should understand that exchanges cannot be trusted. Multiple transactions, waiting for each one to go through before initiating the next. Or multiple exchanges. Or just leave his money in the US. Or his own offline wallet. Or, really, anything except what he actually did.
tl;dr: His story doesn't pass the sniff-test. I'm not sure what he was really doing, but it seems very likely that he was trying to bypass official notice of the assets - either their departure from the US, or their arrival in Canada. I wonder: did he make this money with crypto-speculation? And, perhaps, had never paid taxes on it?
OTOH: reality sometimes is stranger than fiction, and sometimes people really do just have brain farts...
We're all gonna die!!! Eleventy!!! This may be a genuine problem. Or it may not. There is no way for the average person to know. Breathless headlines touting climatic disaster have become so ubiquitous that my first reaction - and that of many people - is a yawn. Ecologists and climate alarmists have done their causes active harm.
Are insects declining? Sure, along with all other animal species that share our habitat. Intuitively, mass agriculture is the most likely culprit, since it creates huge zones of monoculture. Amusingly, the vegetarians may be doing active harm - I'll bet that good, natural grazing land has more biodiversity than a soy field. But the real problem is and remains human overpopulation.
tl;dr: Our planet would be a lot healthier if there were fewer of us.
Vaccinations are part of your public responsibility, like following traffic laws. If you don't want to obey traffic laws, that's easy: don't have a vehicle. If you don't want to vaccinate your kids, that's fine, don't have kids.
I'm not hugely worried about compliance. An idiot can speed through town a time or three, but eventually they'll get caught. Children's immunizations should be signed off by a pediatrician, and verified at the beginning of every school year, when buying that summer pass to the swimming pool, and other occasions.
For the mass market, they have not only multi-core CPUs, but also drivers for graphics cards. On modern PCs, that's a lot of compute power. So three questions: /. crowd?
- Could they really improve performance by a significant amount (better be at least 3x), on custom hardware?
- Are there a lot of power users who would shell out serious bucks for that custom hardware?
- Will that be enough to justify the extra development effort, to create a customized version of their products?
It seems to me that the answer to all three questions is "no". In order for this idea to make sense, the answer to all three needs to be "yes".
Comments from the
Don't y'all have truth in advertising laws over there?
but...I at least skimmed it. They state that the temperature in the Himalayas has risen "by nearly two degrees Fahrenheit since the start of the 20th century". So that's about 1 degree C in 120 years. Wow...that's...not very much. Given that the earth was/is still warming up after the "little ice age" of the 18th century, this is nothing more than natural warming.
Even with reduced glaciers, snow will still accumulate in the Winter and melt over the Summer. It's not like the rivers are going to dry up, although the flow patterns may change somewhat.
Furthermore, what many people forget: Glaciers are dead. Remove the glacier and you uncover potentially fertile valleys. Nature will take a few decades to reclaim the land - first, pioneer plants, then grass or shrubs, then perhaps forests, depending on the altitude.
I don't see why Tesla really needs ultracaps, at least, not to the point of buying the company. OTOH, Tesla stock is massively overvalued due to speculation based on the Musk reality distortion field. So it makes sense to use an all-stock transition: leverage that overvalued stock to buy things. What would actually make far more sense, would be to issue more stock, to suck in actual money, to build out their manufacturing capacity. That empty plot of dirt in China isn't going to build itself.
Just to be clear: I'm not down on Tesla. They have done an amazing job of making EVs into a mainstream product. They deserve a lot of kudos for that. But their ability to execute the boring, day-to-day stuff like running a manufacturing plant? Pretty awful.
IANAL, but I believe that the police can require you to produce a physical key, if one exists. So a key to your house, or your safe, or whatever. Obviously, they have the alternative of breaking in if you refuse, but they can also charge you with a crime for your refusal. However, as I understand it, they cannot force you to open a combination safe. And this seems like the obvious equivalent to a passcode on your phone. Again, IANAL.
It seems like the real answer should be: there should not be any legal requirement for you to cooperate with police. If they think they have a case against you, you should generally not have to participate in building that case. This includes the now infamous prohibition on lying to a federal officer - something the FBI regularly abuses in order to pile up more charges against people.
They already stated the best case against their own idea. This quote:
"The goal isn’t as much to get you to change, it’s instead to create systems that don’t make you change–but have you then solve the issue in the process. Creating consumer change is phenomenally difficult. So the first question we asked in developing the model was why did disposability win? Why did it take over? I think it did because disposability is convenient and affordable."
But they need consumers to change - by collecting and returning their little containers. Which is inconvenient for the consumer. Idea dead, by their own definitions.
As another poster pointed out, in a humorous but absolutely true way: We've already tried this for soft drinks, for beer, for milk, and for other products. Re-usable containers even still exist - but almost only as a curiosity.
Take beer as an example: Your local craft brewery may have reusable bottles, but none of the big brands do. It simply doesn't make economic sense to transport all those empty bottles around, to check and clean and sterilize and re-label them. This may be unfortunate, but it is the simple truth.
There's also the scam of renting an apartment, where the utilities are included in the rent. I have a friend whose family owns a vacation apartment. Someone rented it for a summer, stuffed it full of miners, and burned an astounding amount of electricity. At the end of the month, they disappeared. When the quarterly utility bill arrived, well...
I'm all for solving crimes, but there are (at least) two problems here...
First is privacy: Did anyone who sent their DNA to these companies agree to have it rooted through by law enforcement without a warrant? Privacy is a concept, but apparently not in the US. If privacy rights make life more difficult for law enforcement, that's a small price to pay for a free society.
Second, DNA tests are not nearly as reliable as people think. The test itself just looks at a sampling of markers, and interpretation of the results is somewhat subjective. Far worse, and nearly impossible to eliminate, is the danger of contamination. This is both on the side of DNA tests (saliva swab, but maybe you've kissed your SO) and at the crime scene (those skin flakes at the crime scene come from...who, exactly?).
Geez, do you think there's a day so sunny that this guy won't be able complain about the clouds? Sure, there are some problems with tech, but let's reformulate this just a bit:
If you look at the last 15 years in tech, it's just amazing! Everything you buy contains more processing power than an
supercomputer. You don't have to keep buying and re-buying software - it comes as a subscription that you use just as long you want.
With services like Steam, games "just work" - no more installation problems and driver nightmares. Gene editing to correct
birth defects is just around the corner. Drones give us amazing aerial photography, and they're so cheap that anyone
can play. We have new alternatives to currency, experiments from chips to Bitcoin, which may change the future of commerce.
And on, and on... The security problems on today's PCs are no worse than they were 10 years ago, just different. Cybercrime
is through the roof? Only because so much more of modern life is online - crime as a whole has certainly not increased; it
has just moved online along with the rest of our lives.
The author needs some serious counseling...
I'm not a greenie, but afaik this really is a problem. Hadn't heard about the sound blasts for oil surveys, but just the noise from ships is apparently a serious problems for certain species.
Anyone who has spent time in a swimming pool knows how well sound travels underwater. Noise pollution takes on a completely different dimension.
That's a very moving description of the kinds of problems that gambling can lead to. And you're right: gambling tends to be done - not by the millionaires - but by the people who can least afford it. Hoping for that one big win to heave themselves out of their misery, and thereby putting themselves on the street.
That said, banning activities is (usually) counterproductive, because it just drives them underground. In the case of gambling, would it not be better to treat it the way we do smoking? Prohibit advertising, make it as unattractive as possible. So you can have your betting shop, but you cannot advertise, and you cannot have anything but a plain shopfront. For internet sites, of course, it is a lot more difficult, but one can still try, and regulation of the payment processors may be the best lever.
OTOH there is no cure for human stupidity. People have been pissing away their wages for as long as there have been wages. If you could eliminate gambling, people would drink their wages, or smoke them, or give everything to some charismatic cult leader. The only "cure" is long-term, trying to ensure that kids get solid educations and employment opportunities, so that fewer of them turn into the hopeless types that do this kind of stuff...
If that's the way you want to be - unreliable - go for it. You probably also don't pay your bills on time, you miss appointments, and you generally live - let's be polite here - a "happy go lucky" life. Some people do.
OTOH, if you are a generally reliable person, then you just have to add your inbox to the other activities you deal with in daily life. That means sorting through every message, binning the crap, and answering the rest in a timely fashion. The same way you (hopefully!) handle your physical mail, only email is a lot easier.
If you get a lot of mail, you may want to use some tools. Automatically filter messages into categories, for example, or use different email addresses for different purposes. Tools can help, the same way you may use folders to sort your physical papers. Which doesn't change the basic fact that you need to answer your mail, because that's what responsible adults do.
It strikes me that this is related to the pushback against high frame rate movies. Apparently a substantial segment of people like 24fps, because of the "cinematic feel" it gives you. It's an artifact left from a previous age, but some people want to preserve the lack of realism it portrays.
Hiding actors freckles and blemishes is perhaps part of the same mentality. I remember when HDTV first came out: I was struck by the fact that I could actually see the wrinkles and freckles and little blemishes on people's faces. Apparently this is unwanted - too much realism?
It's also probably sheer egotism on the part of Hollywood & Co.. An actor or actress is no one special - they just have a talent for playing pretend in a convincing way. Yet they feel entitled to tell us all about their views on politics and society, and how we should live our lives. They think they know better. They certainly don't want us to see that they are just people with zits and wrinkles, like everyone else - that might dent their mystique.
"Acting up" - as if there's something wrong, when it's simply something that we don't understand. Following a few links, the mass media is already adding even more adjectives, like "going haywire", to make it sound like looming disaster. I'm sure some "science journalist" will now take this out of context and blame it on global warming, or Trump, or whatever...
Meanwhile, the magnetic pole is getting closer to the cartographic pole, which seems like a good thing overall...
The "right to be forgotten" is typical of legislation where no one thought about the side effects.
First, it only applies to particular search engines. There is no general applicability. In particular, the source information remains online - it just can't be found through Google or Bing.
Second, in attempting to have this right applied globally, EU courts are setting an excellent precedent to have other countries determine what content EU citizens can see. After all, if censorship flows in one direction, it will flow in the other. Does the EU really want Saudia Arabia determining what web content is allowable in the EU?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions...
Massive fluctuations in the butterfly population are perfectly normal.
The link goes to a paper from 1974, and looks at data back into the 1950s. For example: "A population peak occurred in 1950 and 1951 followed by a marked reduction in numbers in 1952; by 1953 the populations had been reduced to such an extent that no over-night roosting colonies could be found in areas where they had previously occurred in thousands and only seven field specimens were collected throughout the entire summer period. "
I really want random underpaid drivers to have access to my garage, sure I do.
It would be better to just install a parcel drop box. This is essentially a mailbox that accepts and swallows packages. They can only be removed with a key. Any home that has a mailbox at the street can easily install one of these. There are also models for cluster mailboxes and apartments, though space can be an issue in those cases.
Aside from cleaning up the trash, note that TFA says the main problem is deferred maintenance. Specifically, maintenance that was already deferred, when the shutdown started. Which hints at the real problem: the Forest Service has stupid priorities for its money. Pournelle's Iron Law has taken over: it's better for your little empire to have a bunch of GS-13's on your staff than the same number of GS-9's, but you can't send a GS-13 to empty trash cans. And if you have the choice between some of that boring maintenance work, or hiring another employee in your empire, well, that's how the maintenance gets deferred in the first place.
Private industry cleans out the deadwood, when it has built up to the point of impacting profits. Government never has that impetus. The best thing that could happen to most government bureaucracies, would be to fire nearly everyone and start over. If the shutdown goes on long enough, maybe that will happen automatically, because people will have found jobs elsewhere.
"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
Or in the case of hard disks, a few terabytes.
I'm actually semi-serious: it seems to me that the days of mechanical storage are numbered. With SSDs, and now Intel's XPoint, one can seriously hope that hard disks will be phased out just as floppies were. Fewer mechanical parts ought to mean more reliability, not to mention the obvious speed advantages. Granted, I did buy two hard-disks last year, but only to replace disks in an existing NAS. Those might well be the last ones I ever buy...
If that one person is *only* applying for jobs through LinkedIn, they're an idiot. When you're job hunting, you use every channel you can find, or you're not serious. There are plenty of other channels out there, and you need to use them all.
That said, I have a son looking for an IT job. I had him create profiles on LinkedIn and on Xing. Now, we're in Europe, so things may be different, but: he's had activity from Xing, but absolutely nothing at all from LinkedIn.
I've personally found LinkedIn useful a couple of times as a way to contact someone, when you otherwise have no contact information.
"Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it"
Anyone proposing this clearly does not recall the futile attempt to restrict cryptography.
You cannot ban the export of software; it's simply not possible. If you have a closed development shop, you may be able to keep trade secrets. But publicly known software developments? It's not possible. Software is basically applied mathematics: if the principles are know, anyone can implement them.
Of course, on /. I'm preaching to the choir...