On the other hand, if they make defend themselves, they may piss off the next mayor of New York (Liu is running for mayor) and that will be bad for business in the long run.
Let's try a proof by contradiction. Assuming for the moment that those documents do exist, that means that Liu or his underlings botched things, and he's trying to shift the blame. If HP went on the offensive and provided documentation that the news media could use to paint Liu as a liar trying to blame others for his own incompetence, then Liu almost certainly would not become the next mayor, so HP would have little to worry about. Thus, we can probably conclude that either:
HP is too afraid of their imminent collapse to actually act in their own best interest (in which case they are incompetent) or
Those documents don't exist (and HP is incompetent).
Either way, it doesn't make HP's leadership look too good....
No, it means the CPU clock was 63x the bus speed, which means that the bus speed was a dog-slow 111 MHz. The CPU would not be particularly useful running at this speed because of the slow bus speed.
Conversely a 90% tax on revenues in excess of 100.000$ a year will pass, leading to severe economic contraction and explosion of tax evasion. Can you argue that the minority of high earners who don't agree with the decision have no other options?
First, I can't imagine that happening. $100k is solidly middle class in most parts of the U.S. I could see a cap at $250,000, though. And although they would not have a choice, they also would not be "severely harmed" by such a tax. Sure, if you look at it in dollar terms, it looks like they're severely harmed because they have many fewer dollars. However, nobody actually needs that much money, and anyone who claims otherwise is kidding him/herself. Having huge amounts of money (beyond a reasonable amount to pay for retirement) is a luxury, and taking away a luxury is never considered severe harm. Severe harm means taking away something fundamental and basic.
Besides protecting actual minorities, an important issue of public policy is creating an inclusive social contract in which the individual choice is maximized. A country where poor people get school subsidies and rich people pay acceptable taxes is a better one for both the rich and the poor.
Not really. School subsidies that pay the same amount of money to a private school are likely to provide for about the same quality of education as public schools, statistically speaking. For private schools that aim to be better than public schools, it won't be enough money, which means the poor still won't be able to afford those schools. However, most of the people who can afford those private schools with the subsidies could also afford them without the subsidies. By providing those subsidies, the private schools are taking money away from the public schools, thus reducing the quality of education for the poor, while reducing the cost of education for the rich. That sort of reverse-Robin-Hoodism doesn't make any sense at all.
If each policy is decided on the spot by the largest minority the social contract breaks down. Spending more on roads is not a thing that should be decided by counting how many drivers there are among the populace, rather it's a complex political compromise that cannot be decided at the individual level. It's a collective game therefore the best solutions are negotiated collectively, and representative democracy is the bargaining tool.
Maybe, maybe not. I would argue that if the political leaders feel that the roads are of lesser importance, they should be able to convince the people. If they are so ineffectual as leaders that they cannot do so, they should not be political leaders. Thus, if one of them presents his or her arguments and the public still votes the other way, that strongly suggests that the leader's argument wasn't nearly as strong as he/she thought, which means that more often than not, had the decision been made by the politicians, the decision would have been wrong.
This ignores situations in which non-political leaders interfere with the process, of course—church leaders pushing their congregations to vote in a particular way, rich corporations and unions airing attack ads, etc.—but for most decisions, such interference should not occur.
And you could probably run servers on it, but you'd have to use DynDNS or similar.
But seriously, the cynic in me has to wonder how many of those employees they're about to lay off wouldn't be going away if they hadn't spent who-knows-how-much-money on a server farm that they probably don't actually need. Not that this one project would pay for more than a handful of employee-years by itself, mind you, but such waste rarely occurs in isolation. It's like seeing a termite in your house. You can be fairly certain that for every one you see, there are a thousand more destroying your home's foundation.
For something like a senior web developer 90-100k would be the usual top end, unless you happen to be somewhere where there is extensive competition.
I'm talking in terms of Silicon Valley wages. 150k isn't unreasonable here as a total annual compensation, including things like cash/stock/option bonuses, employee stock purchase plans, product discounts, etc. For companies that don't offer those other forms of compensation, they would have to pay 150k-ish to be competitive. For companies that do, the on-paper number would be lower, but the compensation would still come out close to that.
In parts of the country with a sane cost of living, scale all of those numbers down accordingly.:-)
The thing is, the people of the county have a right to decide whether their education or their roads are more important. The purpose of indirect democracy is not to protect the people from bad decisions, but to ensure that no group of people can unjustly oppress another merely because of their quantity. In order for such an unpopular decision to be appropriate, you would have to show that there was a group of people who were going to be severely harmed by the continued operation of the schools in such a manner who did not agree with the decision, and that those people had no other options (private schools, homeschooling, etc.). That's actually a pretty high bar because it only takes one stay-at-home parent out of said group of households to provide an alternative for the kids whose parents want them to learn.
Regarding the mine, operating under modern regulations, I wouldn't expect the mine to pose substantially greater threat to the environment while operating than it does just sitting there idle. The burden of proof should be on the environmentalists that this is not the case. This is a relatively high bar, because if reopening the mine were not relatively harmless, the environmentalists would have pushed for (and gotten) more regulations over the proper operation of mines years ago.
In other words, both of those are poor examples of why we should not have direct democracy. Good (recent) examples include California's prop 8, where the majority clearly denied the rights of significant minority groups.
Finally, although I agree in principle that tyranny of the majority is not that much better than our current plutocracy, in the absence of limits on paid political speech, it will inevitably devolve back into a plutocracy eventually anyway. The problem is not the form of government, but rather the fact that campaign finance laws have not been enhanced to mitigate the power imbalance caused by the growing disparity in wealth between big corporations/unions/PACs/political parties and the average member of the general public.
Depends on the size of the company. If you're a ten-person team, that could reasonably be one job because the time spent on any one of those tasks could easily be way less than a full-time position.
That said, as soon as you add the security clearance requirement, your applicant pool dries up. There's no good way around that unless you actively poach from other companies in your field. If you're big enough to do that, you're big enough for those to each be separate positions.
Or maybe they're asking IT employes to be able to fill in for five roles at once? I'm sorry but a Jack-of-all-trades isn't good enough for specific positions.
Just as an example, in the Web field, most employers seem to think that someone should be able to go from using Illustrator to writing HTML, CSS and Javascript and coding server-side stuff including databases.
I can do all of those things easily (well, with Photoshop anyway—why would you use a tool designed for vector output when you're just doing stuff on the web and will probably never need vector output?). I have a reasonably good eye for design, a decade of programming experience, and I am vigilant about auditing code for security problems, baking security into the overall design, etc. I design websites with complex database interactions on a regular basis and am fairy familiar with the problems that arise when doing so. I'm reasonably good with SQL queries, and have written code for constructing large filtered select queries that would make your head hurt.
The problem is that I'm employed as part of an engineering organization at engineering salaries. If you want an engineer, you have to hire an engineer, not an IT person, and you have to pay engineer salaries. Offer $150k with regular hours, full benefits and a reasonable assurance of long-term stability and you're in the right ballpark. Offer $38k and require the candidate to be on call 24x7 to reboot machines, and he or she is going to laugh in your face, call you an idiot, and never darken the door of your business again.
In other words, the problem is not that they want people who don't exist. The problem is that they want people with decades of experience, and they only want to pay them as though they were fresh out of high school with a couple of years experience setting up Linux boxes.
If the Apple Retina display is already beyond the point a human eye can resolve - what's more resolution going to get you?
Bigger numbers. Also, it is beyond the resolution that the human eye can resolve at a typical usage distance. That doesn't necessarily mean that you can't see the difference if you're holding it wrong.
I like to explain it in terms of humans. A watt is an instantaneous unit of power. It represents a resource that is available to do work at any given point of time. In much the same way, a company has employees. They are resources that are available to do work at any given point in time, and each employee can do roughly a fixed amount of work in a given period of time. If a company has ten employees working during the day, assuming an eight-hour work day, it gets eighty employee-hours of work done. If it needs to get more than that amount of work done, it must either increase the number of employees (the wattage available) or increase the period of time over which it does the work (longer hours).
Sadly, this explanation fails to account for folks who reply that they can also make the machine more efficient so that it does more work per watt—work smarter, not harder, and all that—at which point most people end up working longer hours and fudging the hours on their timecards. But I digress.
... it's not about finding a magic bullet, it's about helping cut back on (not eliminate) the need to use coal or nuclear power.
Only up to the point where all the daytime power needs are covered by solar. Given the slow ramp-up/ramp-down times for nuclear plants, they're pretty much suitable only for providing base load (24x7), so either you're using it all day and all night or you're not using it at all. In other words, solar power, if deployed broadly enough, could make nuclear power economically infeasible.
Actually, ESPN forces cable companies into an all-or-nothing situation: either all their customers pay for ESPN, or nobody gets to watch it. They are doing the same thing to ISPs, so it is not as if moving everyone onto the web will somehow help us escape this practice.
Yes. And when advertising dries up and it costs $200 per customer, the cable companies will nearly simultaneously tell them to get bent. They can get away with it now (barely) only because the cost is not insanely high.
Besides, knowing California, the law will probably require a prominent label that says, "Warning: This product contains genetically modified food. Some genetically modified food is known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm."
The downside is channels like SciFi will no longer exist.
It is far more likely that it would still exist, but would air more reruns and less new content. I wouldn't expect the older sci-fi reruns to be significantly more expensive than any other old TV show or movie, and it doesn't take a big audience to make airing such content profitable.
In fact, if Sci-Fi (I refuse to call it SyFy) aired a wider variety of older content, I think it might attract a wider audience. Its biggest problem is that it doesn't have a lot of variety, focuses too much on what I would argue crosses the line into horror, and generally isn't interesting to the average viewer, even among people who enjoy science fiction.
Then cable and satellite channels will no longer be subsidized by ads and will get more expensive.
Perfect. Then the cable companies will be forced to offer many of their more expensive channels a la carte, and I'll no longer have to subsidize all the folks who watch networks like ESPN that I don't care about.
Even better, we, the subscribers, will have more of a voice when it comes to the content, and it will no longer be profitable to do stupid crap like airing wrestling on the Sci-Fi channel just to bring in more ad revenue.
I fail to see the downside here. Instead of hidden costs that we pay by buying products from companies who have to make up for all the money they spent on ads, we'll simply be paying those fees directly to the entertainment companies. In the long run, the cost should be about the same; it will just be easier to see the bottom line.
Unless you wear string bikinis, most folks have plenty of skin that never sees the sun. That said, I would expect a cheek swab (the mouth variety) to be a more common way to get those cells.
On the contrary. What we have here is a situation in which legal precedent (case law) changes the traditional interpretation of the law significantly. Where the law allows, rulemaking by the Library of Congress can also define the interpretation of the law. Although strictly speaking, neither of these change what is and is not illegal, in effect, both do.
If you have been doing something that has been presumptively legal for decades and is determined to be illegal as a result of a court decision interpreting the law in an unconventional way, it is perfectly reasonable for Congress to make a clarification in the law to indicate that the action in question is not (and retroactively was not) illegal. This happens all the time when the courts make dubious decisions.
If 10.4 was certified at all, it would have been on Intel only. Most of the UNIX '03 conformance changes didn't happen until 10.5. 10.5 and 10.6 are both certified. I'm not sure what the status of 10.7 is. Either way, the hard part is achieving conformance in the first place; paying the fee is the easy part.
17 USC section 507 says that there's a three-year limit. In practice, AFAIK, this means that you can't sue for damages for earlier infringement. This does not mean that you cannot sue and obtain a permanent injunction against continuing infringement, or damages for recent/future infringement.
At the levels of radiation involved at Chernobyl, I suspect that no radiation protection that existed at the time would have helped prevent most of the deaths. Traditional hazmat suits predominantly are intended to prevent inhalation and direct contact with radioactive materials when operating in areas of moderate contamination, and to allow for rapid washing of the person after exposure. When you have people dying from exposure to as much as 16 grays, no thin piece of rubber is going to make much of a difference, and even a lead apron will only go so far.
To be fair, some of the long-term deaths from cancer might have been avoided with better radiation protection, even with the limited technology available at the time, but it would have still been a disaster, and most of the people who died would probably have died anyway. Newer technologies, such as Demron, might have helped, but that wasn't invented until almost 16 years after the Chernobyl disaster.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's try a proof by contradiction. Assuming for the moment that those documents do exist, that means that Liu or his underlings botched things, and he's trying to shift the blame. If HP went on the offensive and provided documentation that the news media could use to paint Liu as a liar trying to blame others for his own incompetence, then Liu almost certainly would not become the next mayor, so HP would have little to worry about. Thus, we can probably conclude that either:
Either way, it doesn't make HP's leadership look too good....
No, it means the CPU clock was 63x the bus speed, which means that the bus speed was a dog-slow 111 MHz. The CPU would not be particularly useful running at this speed because of the slow bus speed.
First, I can't imagine that happening. $100k is solidly middle class in most parts of the U.S. I could see a cap at $250,000, though. And although they would not have a choice, they also would not be "severely harmed" by such a tax. Sure, if you look at it in dollar terms, it looks like they're severely harmed because they have many fewer dollars. However, nobody actually needs that much money, and anyone who claims otherwise is kidding him/herself. Having huge amounts of money (beyond a reasonable amount to pay for retirement) is a luxury, and taking away a luxury is never considered severe harm. Severe harm means taking away something fundamental and basic.
Not really. School subsidies that pay the same amount of money to a private school are likely to provide for about the same quality of education as public schools, statistically speaking. For private schools that aim to be better than public schools, it won't be enough money, which means the poor still won't be able to afford those schools. However, most of the people who can afford those private schools with the subsidies could also afford them without the subsidies. By providing those subsidies, the private schools are taking money away from the public schools, thus reducing the quality of education for the poor, while reducing the cost of education for the rich. That sort of reverse-Robin-Hoodism doesn't make any sense at all.
Maybe, maybe not. I would argue that if the political leaders feel that the roads are of lesser importance, they should be able to convince the people. If they are so ineffectual as leaders that they cannot do so, they should not be political leaders. Thus, if one of them presents his or her arguments and the public still votes the other way, that strongly suggests that the leader's argument wasn't nearly as strong as he/she thought, which means that more often than not, had the decision been made by the politicians, the decision would have been wrong.
This ignores situations in which non-political leaders interfere with the process, of course—church leaders pushing their congregations to vote in a particular way, rich corporations and unions airing attack ads, etc.—but for most decisions, such interference should not occur.
And you could probably run servers on it, but you'd have to use DynDNS or similar.
But seriously, the cynic in me has to wonder how many of those employees they're about to lay off wouldn't be going away if they hadn't spent who-knows-how-much-money on a server farm that they probably don't actually need. Not that this one project would pay for more than a handful of employee-years by itself, mind you, but such waste rarely occurs in isolation. It's like seeing a termite in your house. You can be fairly certain that for every one you see, there are a thousand more destroying your home's foundation.
I'm talking in terms of Silicon Valley wages. 150k isn't unreasonable here as a total annual compensation, including things like cash/stock/option bonuses, employee stock purchase plans, product discounts, etc. For companies that don't offer those other forms of compensation, they would have to pay 150k-ish to be competitive. For companies that do, the on-paper number would be lower, but the compensation would still come out close to that.
In parts of the country with a sane cost of living, scale all of those numbers down accordingly. :-)
The thing is, the people of the county have a right to decide whether their education or their roads are more important. The purpose of indirect democracy is not to protect the people from bad decisions, but to ensure that no group of people can unjustly oppress another merely because of their quantity. In order for such an unpopular decision to be appropriate, you would have to show that there was a group of people who were going to be severely harmed by the continued operation of the schools in such a manner who did not agree with the decision, and that those people had no other options (private schools, homeschooling, etc.). That's actually a pretty high bar because it only takes one stay-at-home parent out of said group of households to provide an alternative for the kids whose parents want them to learn.
Regarding the mine, operating under modern regulations, I wouldn't expect the mine to pose substantially greater threat to the environment while operating than it does just sitting there idle. The burden of proof should be on the environmentalists that this is not the case. This is a relatively high bar, because if reopening the mine were not relatively harmless, the environmentalists would have pushed for (and gotten) more regulations over the proper operation of mines years ago.
In other words, both of those are poor examples of why we should not have direct democracy. Good (recent) examples include California's prop 8, where the majority clearly denied the rights of significant minority groups.
Finally, although I agree in principle that tyranny of the majority is not that much better than our current plutocracy, in the absence of limits on paid political speech, it will inevitably devolve back into a plutocracy eventually anyway. The problem is not the form of government, but rather the fact that campaign finance laws have not been enhanced to mitigate the power imbalance caused by the growing disparity in wealth between big corporations/unions/PACs/political parties and the average member of the general public.
Depends on the size of the company. If you're a ten-person team, that could reasonably be one job because the time spent on any one of those tasks could easily be way less than a full-time position.
That said, as soon as you add the security clearance requirement, your applicant pool dries up. There's no good way around that unless you actively poach from other companies in your field. If you're big enough to do that, you're big enough for those to each be separate positions.
I can do all of those things easily (well, with Photoshop anyway—why would you use a tool designed for vector output when you're just doing stuff on the web and will probably never need vector output?). I have a reasonably good eye for design, a decade of programming experience, and I am vigilant about auditing code for security problems, baking security into the overall design, etc. I design websites with complex database interactions on a regular basis and am fairy familiar with the problems that arise when doing so. I'm reasonably good with SQL queries, and have written code for constructing large filtered select queries that would make your head hurt.
The problem is that I'm employed as part of an engineering organization at engineering salaries. If you want an engineer, you have to hire an engineer, not an IT person, and you have to pay engineer salaries. Offer $150k with regular hours, full benefits and a reasonable assurance of long-term stability and you're in the right ballpark. Offer $38k and require the candidate to be on call 24x7 to reboot machines, and he or she is going to laugh in your face, call you an idiot, and never darken the door of your business again.
In other words, the problem is not that they want people who don't exist. The problem is that they want people with decades of experience, and they only want to pay them as though they were fresh out of high school with a couple of years experience setting up Linux boxes.
Bigger numbers. Also, it is beyond the resolution that the human eye can resolve at a typical usage distance. That doesn't necessarily mean that you can't see the difference if you're holding it wrong.
Or, to make the obligatory joke... Wait, watt?
Easy. 1000 hours. Wait, what?
I like to explain it in terms of humans. A watt is an instantaneous unit of power. It represents a resource that is available to do work at any given point of time. In much the same way, a company has employees. They are resources that are available to do work at any given point in time, and each employee can do roughly a fixed amount of work in a given period of time. If a company has ten employees working during the day, assuming an eight-hour work day, it gets eighty employee-hours of work done. If it needs to get more than that amount of work done, it must either increase the number of employees (the wattage available) or increase the period of time over which it does the work (longer hours).
Sadly, this explanation fails to account for folks who reply that they can also make the machine more efficient so that it does more work per watt—work smarter, not harder, and all that—at which point most people end up working longer hours and fudging the hours on their timecards. But I digress.
Only up to the point where all the daytime power needs are covered by solar. Given the slow ramp-up/ramp-down times for nuclear plants, they're pretty much suitable only for providing base load (24x7), so either you're using it all day and all night or you're not using it at all. In other words, solar power, if deployed broadly enough, could make nuclear power economically infeasible.
Why buy now when you can wait six months and buy a controlling stake for less than a burger and some fries?
Yes. And when advertising dries up and it costs $200 per customer, the cable companies will nearly simultaneously tell them to get bent. They can get away with it now (barely) only because the cost is not insanely high.
The last time California made a labeling law, the soda vendors changed their formulation. I see no reason why the reaction to this proposal would be any different.
Besides, knowing California, the law will probably require a prominent label that says, "Warning: This product contains genetically modified food. Some genetically modified food is known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm."
It is far more likely that it would still exist, but would air more reruns and less new content. I wouldn't expect the older sci-fi reruns to be significantly more expensive than any other old TV show or movie, and it doesn't take a big audience to make airing such content profitable.
In fact, if Sci-Fi (I refuse to call it SyFy) aired a wider variety of older content, I think it might attract a wider audience. Its biggest problem is that it doesn't have a lot of variety, focuses too much on what I would argue crosses the line into horror, and generally isn't interesting to the average viewer, even among people who enjoy science fiction.
Perfect. Then the cable companies will be forced to offer many of their more expensive channels a la carte, and I'll no longer have to subsidize all the folks who watch networks like ESPN that I don't care about.
Even better, we, the subscribers, will have more of a voice when it comes to the content, and it will no longer be profitable to do stupid crap like airing wrestling on the Sci-Fi channel just to bring in more ad revenue.
I fail to see the downside here. Instead of hidden costs that we pay by buying products from companies who have to make up for all the money they spent on ads, we'll simply be paying those fees directly to the entertainment companies. In the long run, the cost should be about the same; it will just be easier to see the bottom line.
*whimpers and crawls into a corner*
Unless you wear string bikinis, most folks have plenty of skin that never sees the sun. That said, I would expect a cheek swab (the mouth variety) to be a more common way to get those cells.
On the contrary. What we have here is a situation in which legal precedent (case law) changes the traditional interpretation of the law significantly. Where the law allows, rulemaking by the Library of Congress can also define the interpretation of the law. Although strictly speaking, neither of these change what is and is not illegal, in effect, both do.
If you have been doing something that has been presumptively legal for decades and is determined to be illegal as a result of a court decision interpreting the law in an unconventional way, it is perfectly reasonable for Congress to make a clarification in the law to indicate that the action in question is not (and retroactively was not) illegal. This happens all the time when the courts make dubious decisions.
If 10.4 was certified at all, it would have been on Intel only. Most of the UNIX '03 conformance changes didn't happen until 10.5. 10.5 and 10.6 are both certified. I'm not sure what the status of 10.7 is. Either way, the hard part is achieving conformance in the first place; paying the fee is the easy part.
17 USC section 507 says that there's a three-year limit. In practice, AFAIK, this means that you can't sue for damages for earlier infringement. This does not mean that you cannot sue and obtain a permanent injunction against continuing infringement, or damages for recent/future infringement.
At the levels of radiation involved at Chernobyl, I suspect that no radiation protection that existed at the time would have helped prevent most of the deaths. Traditional hazmat suits predominantly are intended to prevent inhalation and direct contact with radioactive materials when operating in areas of moderate contamination, and to allow for rapid washing of the person after exposure. When you have people dying from exposure to as much as 16 grays, no thin piece of rubber is going to make much of a difference, and even a lead apron will only go so far.
To be fair, some of the long-term deaths from cancer might have been avoided with better radiation protection, even with the limited technology available at the time, but it would have still been a disaster, and most of the people who died would probably have died anyway. Newer technologies, such as Demron, might have helped, but that wasn't invented until almost 16 years after the Chernobyl disaster.
Apple would be fine; Mac OS X is an actual, licensed UNIX implementation. Windows, however, would probably become illegal.