For normal people, investment companies are a racket. They exist to take your money...and keep it.
If you go to an investment brokerage that actively manages your money, they not only have their own fees, they also love to buy into high-fee mutual funds that give them a kick-back. My mother had her money with a name-brand brokerage, with a broker she considered a friend - and they still kept buying and selling these high-fee mutual funds. The buying is bad enough, but cashing out and buying into another fund a year later is... Well, it's very clever. For the broker. Who is fulfilling their primary goal of keeping their clients' money for themselves.
Normal people wanting to invest really have only two choices:
- Take charge of your own investments. Learn what you're doing, and buy stuff for the long-term. If you buy a stock, buy it with the intent to keep it for several years.
- If that's not your thing, they buy low-fee index funds. In addition to the market index funds, there are also more specific ones out there. The point is, they are funds with little management, and hence very low fees. Buy into index funds, and sit on them for the long term.
Ya know, if they'd stop messing with the data, and present objective results instead of panic-filled reports, it would be possible to take them seriously...
Lose original data, lose track of exactly what adjustments were made. Fail to account for poorly situated stations (UHC). Steadily reduce the number of climate monitoring stations, especially in important regions like the arctic. Satellite data showing no warming - quick, adjust it. Then publish stupid reports and articles like TFA, based on this questionable science. Creating panic apparently drives publications and funding.
I'm sure the climate is warming; this may be influenced by humans. Likely we shouldn't be pushing masses of CO2 into the atmosphere. But the climate science as currently practiced has zero credibility. We have no idea what is really happening.
It's easy so say "I wouldn't fall for this", but some scammers are good. The ones that call you are excellent actors, and can be damned convincing. Just look at the number of elderly people who fall for the "grandkid in trouble" scams. Yes, this guy shouldn't have given out his PIN - that was one step too far.
However, the root problem in this particular case remains spoofing. There is absolutely no excuse for spoofing numbers to still be possible, after all these decades of abuse. The phone company (or VoIP service, or whatever) knows what connection is placing the call, and the service should set the calling number accordingly. Since providers themselves are not always trustworthy, it must also be possible for the receiving company to verify the number, or at least to verify that it is legitimately under the control of the originating phone service. Sort of a DNS for phone numbers...
RTFS: "Ars attempted to reach Hagar by phone and email in September. In the course of this process, we learned that he did not actually submit many of these op-eds"
I can hope that Ars follows this up with the news organizations that published the editorials under his byline. As a fellow news organization, they may actually be able to draw attention to this, and the organizations that were suckered might delve into the financial backers who are pushing this agenda.
Dollars to donuts it's the companies involved in ULA, or possibly political organizations (or even politicians) who are funded by ULA companies.
The cost difference is actually really simple to explain - just ask anyone who ever worked in or around government procurement (as I have). It's simply bureaucracy. The government employs an army of bureaucrats, who justify their existence (and their little empires) by imposing insane paperwork requirements on contractors. So the contractors have to employ their own army of paper-pushers to deal with those requirements. Essentially none of this has anything to do with actually getting work done.
I remember one memorable situation: We (I was on the government side) had put out a small project for bid. A small company, expert in the field, came in with an offer at about 1/3 the cost of the next best offer. The thing was: they had never before had a government contract. My boss took the CEO out for coffee, discovered that he really had no idea what things were going to be like. My boss quietly told him to double his bid, to pay for all the people he would have to hire to deal with all the crap.
For larger projects, you then get the political aspects. The prime contractor must hire subcontractors, even if the prime contractor could do the work. This massively increases overhead costs yet again, but it is essential for two reasons: it distributes the financial gains among the political districts of the relevant Congresscritters - the subcontractors, of course, donate a portion of the largess to political campaigns. And second, political correctness: a certain portion of the subcontractors must be owned by people of the right minorities. Sometimes these subcontractors are only shells (with overheads, of course) that pass the actual work on to sub-subcontractors.
That's why ULA is expensive. I'm sure SpaceX has to play at least some of the same games, but obviously a lot less so.
You missed the rather important fact that he was specifically invited to speak on the topic of "gender issues". Which he did, only he came with an unwanted message. Just like Summers, or Dalmore. Oops...
This. I use Duckduckgo, and about 95% of the time it provides excellent results. In rare cases, I switch to Google, usually because I can't find decisive search tetms, and Google's scary context sensitivity is helpful.
But. American businesses are subject to the increasingly totalitarian tendencies of the US government. Any business that is serious, really serious about privacy should not be in the US.
Actually no. I've read a couple of articles by biologists, who are convinced that mosquitoes could disappear and not be missed. Anything that eats them also eats lots of other insects.
Find a modern app that doesn't use 17 different frameworks and external libraries. Each of which ist designed to be general purpose, meaning it does more than the app needs. And each of those external libraries brings in more external dependencies, each of which... How to write "Hello, World" in only 2GB. This is modern software development, and it is seriously insane.
Maybe people who have been using Twitter from the start have managed to follow the changes to how things are presented. For those of us who just occasionally click a link that lands us in the service, it's simply a mess. Tweets seems to be vaguely chronological, but only vaguely. There's simply no obvious way to know what has been selected for your viewing pleasure, and what has been omitted. And this doesn't even get into the whole question of censorship.
The catch is: if you give out cash, you have to be willing to say "no", if the recipient comes back a day later, having blown the cash on something stupid.
Numerous other attempts have shown: a lot of people will take your cash, and blow it on stupid stuff. Then, they are screwed all over again, having blowing their month's food budget on lottery tickets, or cigarettes, or whatever.
At that point, you have three choices: either give them even more (stupid, stupid), or take away their control by restricting what they can buy (the usual choice), or let causes have consequence - i.e. let them starve until next month. Personally, I'm all for the latter - humas are *supposed* to be smart - but this is apparently not an option....
I wonder what the next global panic event will be, that the media decides to blow totally out of proportion. I mean, in the US, the media is undoubtedly cursing Hurricane Florence for no longer being a proper hurricane, but just a strong storm. They'll still find some idiot in his beach house, and splash it all over the news - that will keep them occupied for a couple of weeks. After that, what's next?/s
Exactly. The EU now wants their "right to be forgotten" to apply worldwide. EU censorship is good. But Chinese censorship is bad,and they would howl if China insisted on worldwide application of Chinese rules.
So: kudos to this guy, but his objections are too narrow.
If content is not illegal, Twitter should not be restricting it in any way. Seriously, WTF? You don't have to follow someone you don't like, so you'll never see their posts unless you want to.
This is all about denying a platform to people you disagree with. A bunch of sensitive snowflakes who just can't stand the fact that some other people in the world disagree with them.
It's a cute idea, with an obvious implementation (running both language modules simultaneously). Presumably, part of the input into the language ID is also seeing which language module is successfully making sense of the input.
However... We have a bilingual household (English/German), and part of the reality is also that the languages get mixed. There is always some word in the "other" language that is handy, or maybe you just can't find the word you're looking for. If you're free to talk to your devices in either language, then you will unvermeidlich talk to them in beide Sprachen (inevitably talk to them in both languages). And that will be a lot more challenging...
This. I have to children, both in their early 20s. One of them is interested in voting, and informs himself on the issues. He votes almost every time. The other one has zero interest in politics or ballot issues. If you forced him to vote, the result would be based on whatever subliminal impressions he's formed from seeing ads. Forcing people to vote would not produce good results - if anything, it would reinforce the benefit of stupid ad campaigns.
The fundamental problem that you have are uninformed people who vote anyway. If anything, voting is too easy. What if you had to answer some black-and-white factual questions about current issues, before being allowed to vote on them? I'd rather have fewer informed votes than more stupid votes.
This. It's all about subsidized flood insurance. Without it, people would have to pay realistic rates for flood insurance, meaning that many properties would become worthless - as they should be.
FWIW, here's the FEMA page about the flood insurance renewal. They write: "NFIP reauthorization is an opportunity for Congress to take bold steps to reduce the complexity of the program and strengthen the NFIP’s financial framework so that the program can continue helping individuals and communities take the critical step of securing flood insurance.".
As usual, Congress is kicking the can down the road, with the next renewal date being November 30th. What are the chances that Congress will have the guts to not renew the program? There is just no reason for this program to exist - if you build in a flood zone, buy your own damned insurance. But not renewing the program would piss off lots of rich campaign donors, so...
Flinging off-the-cuff ideas onto a public forum is pretty much fine for your average person. At worst, they may embarrass themselves. For an officer of a company, this is at best irresponsible, and at worst criminal.
Musk is already facing lawsuits due to his tweets. Now that he is apparently not taking Tesla private, he may be really screwed. He never did due diligence, he never did have the funding ("compliance issues"), so his tweets look even more deliberately manipulative.
At best, it is likely that he (or Tesla) will have to pay some substantial judgments to make those lawsuits go away. At worst, he personally could very well be facing criminal prosecution and jail time. Stupid, stupid mistake.
This is an odd decision, given the high-quality Linux support that Dropbox has provided until now.
One question I want to ask: why would encrypting be an issue? Why would you bother to encrypt your files on your disk, if you upload them unencrypted to a cloud service outside your control? I have a lot of stuff in Dropbox, but I do encryption the other way around: Anything sensitive is in an encrypted folder (EncFS) inside my Dropbox folder. That folder is decrypted locally using Cryptkeeper or some equivalent. So my local disk is also unecrypted. This offers (imho) a lot of advantages, for example (a) my own ability to do data recovery in case of disaster, and (b) those encrypted files are also encrypted in backups.
I have used a paid Dropbox account for years now, because their service has been so reliable, and the Linux support so good. If they cripple Linux support, this will be the motivation I finally need to get OwnCloud (or similar) up and running locally.
92% of cooks do not know how to check their tire pressure. Will that do for a car-oriented example?
Security and DevOps have almost nothing to do with each other. DevOps is all about integrating your software development and your IT operations. Done right, it means that developed software flows smoothly into production. Done wrong, it means that your company is trying to save money by having the developers run the infrastructure, or the other way around.
Either way, it has little or nothing to do with security. Newly written or modified sofware - is it written with security in mind? Has nothing to do with DevOps. Is your IT infrastructure secured? Has nothing to do with DevOps.
Security is important. This kind of article is a disservice - it's aimed at PHBs who like buzzwords.
Y'all have gone and done it now: college is screwed up, and the only hope will be a painful solution. The solution at least has the virtue of being simple: end student loans. After a major period of adjustment, fewer people will be going to college, and tuition will plummet. With luck, this will also eliminate overpaid administrators, and kill off stupid money-wasting programs.
Unfortunately, it won't make incoming students more qualified. For that, you need to fix the rest of your educational system...
A bad programmer can screw up in any programming environment. Running away from PHP isn't going to help. The real question is: what is this person doing, that involves him with so many poor programmers?
The differences between PHP and.Net are huge, and should be based on something other than your spleen.
The problem is: anti-trust just serves to shovel money into the pockets of lawyers, lobbiests and politicians. It takes years, even decades to come to an end. Remember the anti-trust hearings against IBM? By the time they were over, they were irrelevant.
What's needed is a simple, objective solution that avoids eternal hearings and court cases. For example, how about the following two rules:
- Any company with a valuation over $x may no longer merge, or acquire other companies.
- Any company with a valuation over $x * y must divest within z months, with the largest resulting fragment is valued under $x.
Valuation of public companies is easy: stock market capitalization. Privately held companies are somewhat more difficult, but they still file financial documents: if valuation is too difficult, one could substitute total turnover. Penalties for failing to divest must be massive: immediate and permanent closure, plus criminal liability for the corporate officers.
What values are reasonable? The threshold needs to be low enough to avoid large monopolies, and also to avoid companies becoming "too big to fail". Lower is better - I suggest that y = 4, and x = $25 billion, putting the upper limit at $100 billion.
What are/. opinions of Mycroft.ai? For those who've never heard of it, it is a commercial effort to create and maintain open-source software to compete with Alexa & co..
I only skimmed TFA, but the points it makes are interesting. The Drake equation is well known - multiply the probabilities of all the factors required for a civilization. The interesting point is this: those probabilities have ranges, in many cases with a lower bound of zero. In the absence of knowledge, if you actually randomly choose values from the entire range, then odds are good that at least one of the parameters will be close to zero - thus giving you an empty universe.
Of course, our real goal should be to improve our knowledge. As it is, even TFA is purest speculation.
Slashdot Mirror
For normal people, investment companies are a racket. They exist to take your money...and keep it.
If you go to an investment brokerage that actively manages your money, they not only have their own fees, they also love to buy into high-fee mutual funds that give them a kick-back. My mother had her money with a name-brand brokerage, with a broker she considered a friend - and they still kept buying and selling these high-fee mutual funds. The buying is bad enough, but cashing out and buying into another fund a year later is... Well, it's very clever. For the broker. Who is fulfilling their primary goal of keeping their clients' money for themselves.
Normal people wanting to invest really have only two choices:
- Take charge of your own investments. Learn what you're doing, and buy stuff for the long-term. If you buy a stock, buy it with the intent to keep it for several years.
- If that's not your thing, they buy low-fee index funds. In addition to the market index funds, there are also more specific ones out there. The point is, they are funds with little management, and hence very low fees. Buy into index funds, and sit on them for the long term.
Ya know, if they'd stop messing with the data, and present objective results instead of panic-filled reports, it would be possible to take them seriously...
Lose original data, lose track of exactly what adjustments were made. Fail to account for poorly situated stations (UHC). Steadily reduce the number of climate monitoring stations, especially in important regions like the arctic. Satellite data showing no warming - quick, adjust it. Then publish stupid reports and articles like TFA, based on this questionable science. Creating panic apparently drives publications and funding.
I'm sure the climate is warming; this may be influenced by humans. Likely we shouldn't be pushing masses of CO2 into the atmosphere. But the climate science as currently practiced has zero credibility. We have no idea what is really happening.
It's easy so say "I wouldn't fall for this", but some scammers are good. The ones that call you are excellent actors, and can be damned convincing. Just look at the number of elderly people who fall for the "grandkid in trouble" scams. Yes, this guy shouldn't have given out his PIN - that was one step too far.
However, the root problem in this particular case remains spoofing. There is absolutely no excuse for spoofing numbers to still be possible, after all these decades of abuse. The phone company (or VoIP service, or whatever) knows what connection is placing the call, and the service should set the calling number accordingly. Since providers themselves are not always trustworthy, it must also be possible for the receiving company to verify the number, or at least to verify that it is legitimately under the control of the originating phone service. Sort of a DNS for phone numbers...
RTFS: "Ars attempted to reach Hagar by phone and email in September. In the course of this process, we learned that he did not actually submit many of these op-eds"
I can hope that Ars follows this up with the news organizations that published the editorials under his byline. As a fellow news organization, they may actually be able to draw attention to this, and the organizations that were suckered might delve into the financial backers who are pushing this agenda.
Dollars to donuts it's the companies involved in ULA, or possibly political organizations (or even politicians) who are funded by ULA companies.
The cost difference is actually really simple to explain - just ask anyone who ever worked in or around government procurement (as I have). It's simply bureaucracy. The government employs an army of bureaucrats, who justify their existence (and their little empires) by imposing insane paperwork requirements on contractors. So the contractors have to employ their own army of paper-pushers to deal with those requirements. Essentially none of this has anything to do with actually getting work done.
I remember one memorable situation: We (I was on the government side) had put out a small project for bid. A small company, expert in the field, came in with an offer at about 1/3 the cost of the next best offer. The thing was: they had never before had a government contract. My boss took the CEO out for coffee, discovered that he really had no idea what things were going to be like. My boss quietly told him to double his bid, to pay for all the people he would have to hire to deal with all the crap.
For larger projects, you then get the political aspects. The prime contractor must hire subcontractors, even if the prime contractor could do the work. This massively increases overhead costs yet again, but it is essential for two reasons: it distributes the financial gains among the political districts of the relevant Congresscritters - the subcontractors, of course, donate a portion of the largess to political campaigns. And second, political correctness: a certain portion of the subcontractors must be owned by people of the right minorities. Sometimes these subcontractors are only shells (with overheads, of course) that pass the actual work on to sub-subcontractors.
That's why ULA is expensive. I'm sure SpaceX has to play at least some of the same games, but obviously a lot less so.
You missed the rather important fact that he was specifically invited to speak on the topic of "gender issues". Which he did, only he came with an unwanted message. Just like Summers, or Dalmore. Oops...
This. I use Duckduckgo, and about 95% of the time it provides excellent results. In rare cases, I switch to Google, usually because I can't find decisive search tetms, and Google's scary context sensitivity is helpful.
But. American businesses are subject to the increasingly totalitarian tendencies of the US government. Any business that is serious, really serious about privacy should not be in the US.
Actually no. I've read a couple of articles by biologists, who are convinced that mosquitoes could disappear and not be missed. Anything that eats them also eats lots of other insects.
Well, OK, the malaria parasite would miss them...
Find a modern app that doesn't use 17 different frameworks and external libraries. Each of which ist designed to be general purpose, meaning it does more than the app needs. And each of those external libraries brings in more external dependencies, each of which... How to write "Hello, World" in only 2GB. This is modern software development, and it is seriously insane.
Maybe people who have been using Twitter from the start have managed to follow the changes to how things are presented. For those of us who just occasionally click a link that lands us in the service, it's simply a mess. Tweets seems to be vaguely chronological, but only vaguely. There's simply no obvious way to know what has been selected for your viewing pleasure, and what has been omitted. And this doesn't even get into the whole question of censorship.
The catch is: if you give out cash, you have to be willing to say "no", if the recipient comes back a day later, having blown the cash on something stupid.
Numerous other attempts have shown: a lot of people will take your cash, and blow it on stupid stuff. Then, they are screwed all over again, having blowing their month's food budget on lottery tickets, or cigarettes, or whatever.
At that point, you have three choices: either give them even more (stupid, stupid), or take away their control by restricting what they can buy (the usual choice), or let causes have consequence - i.e. let them starve until next month. Personally, I'm all for the latter - humas are *supposed* to be smart - but this is apparently not an option....
I wonder what the next global panic event will be, that the media decides to blow totally out of proportion. I mean, in the US, the media is undoubtedly cursing Hurricane Florence for no longer being a proper hurricane, but just a strong storm. They'll still find some idiot in his beach house, and splash it all over the news - that will keep them occupied for a couple of weeks. After that, what's next? /s
Exactly. The EU now wants their "right to be forgotten" to apply worldwide. EU censorship is good. But Chinese censorship is bad,and they would howl if China insisted on worldwide application of Chinese rules.
So: kudos to this guy, but his objections are too narrow.
If content is not illegal, Twitter should not be restricting it in any way. Seriously, WTF? You don't have to follow someone you don't like, so you'll never see their posts unless you want to.
This is all about denying a platform to people you disagree with. A bunch of sensitive snowflakes who just can't stand the fact that some other people in the world disagree with them.
It's a cute idea, with an obvious implementation (running both language modules simultaneously). Presumably, part of the input into the language ID is also seeing which language module is successfully making sense of the input.
However... We have a bilingual household (English/German), and part of the reality is also that the languages get mixed. There is always some word in the "other" language that is handy, or maybe you just can't find the word you're looking for. If you're free to talk to your devices in either language, then you will unvermeidlich talk to them in beide Sprachen (inevitably talk to them in both languages). And that will be a lot more challenging...
This. I have to children, both in their early 20s. One of them is interested in voting, and informs himself on the issues. He votes almost every time. The other one has zero interest in politics or ballot issues. If you forced him to vote, the result would be based on whatever subliminal impressions he's formed from seeing ads. Forcing people to vote would not produce good results - if anything, it would reinforce the benefit of stupid ad campaigns.
The fundamental problem that you have are uninformed people who vote anyway. If anything, voting is too easy. What if you had to answer some black-and-white factual questions about current issues, before being allowed to vote on them? I'd rather have fewer informed votes than more stupid votes.
This. It's all about subsidized flood insurance. Without it, people would have to pay realistic rates for flood insurance, meaning that many properties would become worthless - as they should be.
FWIW, here's the FEMA page about the flood insurance renewal. They write: "NFIP reauthorization is an opportunity for Congress to take bold steps to reduce the complexity of the program and strengthen the NFIP’s financial framework so that the program can continue helping individuals and communities take the critical step of securing flood insurance.".
As usual, Congress is kicking the can down the road, with the next renewal date being November 30th. What are the chances that Congress will have the guts to not renew the program? There is just no reason for this program to exist - if you build in a flood zone, buy your own damned insurance. But not renewing the program would piss off lots of rich campaign donors, so...
Flinging off-the-cuff ideas onto a public forum is pretty much fine for your average person. At worst, they may embarrass themselves. For an officer of a company, this is at best irresponsible, and at worst criminal.
Musk is already facing lawsuits due to his tweets. Now that he is apparently not taking Tesla private, he may be really screwed. He never did due diligence, he never did have the funding ("compliance issues"), so his tweets look even more deliberately manipulative.
At best, it is likely that he (or Tesla) will have to pay some substantial judgments to make those lawsuits go away. At worst, he personally could very well be facing criminal prosecution and jail time. Stupid, stupid mistake.
This is an odd decision, given the high-quality Linux support that Dropbox has provided until now.
One question I want to ask: why would encrypting be an issue? Why would you bother to encrypt your files on your disk, if you upload them unencrypted to a cloud service outside your control? I have a lot of stuff in Dropbox, but I do encryption the other way around: Anything sensitive is in an encrypted folder (EncFS) inside my Dropbox folder. That folder is decrypted locally using Cryptkeeper or some equivalent. So my local disk is also unecrypted. This offers (imho) a lot of advantages, for example (a) my own ability to do data recovery in case of disaster, and (b) those encrypted files are also encrypted in backups.
I have used a paid Dropbox account for years now, because their service has been so reliable, and the Linux support so good. If they cripple Linux support, this will be the motivation I finally need to get OwnCloud (or similar) up and running locally.
92% of cooks do not know how to check their tire pressure. Will that do for a car-oriented example?
Security and DevOps have almost nothing to do with each other. DevOps is all about integrating your software development and your IT operations. Done right, it means that developed software flows smoothly into production. Done wrong, it means that your company is trying to save money by having the developers run the infrastructure, or the other way around.
Either way, it has little or nothing to do with security. Newly written or modified sofware - is it written with security in mind? Has nothing to do with DevOps. Is your IT infrastructure secured? Has nothing to do with DevOps.
Security is important. This kind of article is a disservice - it's aimed at PHBs who like buzzwords.
Y'all have gone and done it now: college is screwed up, and the only hope will be a painful solution. The solution at least has the virtue of being simple: end student loans. After a major period of adjustment, fewer people will be going to college, and tuition will plummet. With luck, this will also eliminate overpaid administrators, and kill off stupid money-wasting programs.
Unfortunately, it won't make incoming students more qualified. For that, you need to fix the rest of your educational system...
A bad programmer can screw up in any programming environment. Running away from PHP isn't going to help. The real question is: what is this person doing, that involves him with so many poor programmers?
The differences between PHP and .Net are huge, and should be based on something other than your spleen.
The problem is: anti-trust just serves to shovel money into the pockets of lawyers, lobbiests and politicians. It takes years, even decades to come to an end. Remember the anti-trust hearings against IBM? By the time they were over, they were irrelevant.
What's needed is a simple, objective solution that avoids eternal hearings and court cases. For example, how about the following two rules:
- Any company with a valuation over $x may no longer merge, or acquire other companies.
- Any company with a valuation over $x * y must divest within z months, with the largest resulting fragment is valued under $x.
Valuation of public companies is easy: stock market capitalization. Privately held companies are somewhat more difficult, but they still file financial documents: if valuation is too difficult, one could substitute total turnover. Penalties for failing to divest must be massive: immediate and permanent closure, plus criminal liability for the corporate officers.
What values are reasonable? The threshold needs to be low enough to avoid large monopolies, and also to avoid companies becoming "too big to fail". Lower is better - I suggest that y = 4, and x = $25 billion, putting the upper limit at $100 billion.
What are /. opinions of Mycroft.ai? For those who've never heard of it, it is a commercial effort to create and maintain open-source software to compete with Alexa & co..
I only skimmed TFA, but the points it makes are interesting. The Drake equation is well known - multiply the probabilities of all the factors required for a civilization. The interesting point is this: those probabilities have ranges, in many cases with a lower bound of zero. In the absence of knowledge, if you actually randomly choose values from the entire range, then odds are good that at least one of the parameters will be close to zero - thus giving you an empty universe.
Of course, our real goal should be to improve our knowledge. As it is, even TFA is purest speculation.