I'd hate to work where you do if the only motivation you people have to do a good job is the fear of being fired.
It's more than that. If you've ever seen a company where people are forced to train their replacements, you'd know what I'm talking about. If you know that you're about to lose your job, there's a definite sense that what you do must not be important, or else you would still be doing it.
Furthermore, it has been feared that with the push towards systems on chip, that Intel would eliminate the PCI-e bus as well leaving no way for any graphic company to supply a discrete graphics chip for netbook or notebook computers.
If they did that, every manufacturer of even moderately high-end laptops would drop their CPUs faster than an LSD addict drops acid.
Even if Intel's GPUs were the best in the industry, there are too many other critical things you wouldn't be able to properly support without PCIe---ExpressCard slots, FireWire, maybe even eSATA (unless they add more SATA ports to the chipset).... IMHO, dropping PCIe would be suicide for Intel.
More like this is a demonstration of why you don't fire a crucial employee with notice. You don't ever tell them that their job is ending after they finish with [x]. As soon as you do this, they are demotivated. They have no real motivation to do a good job because they could do a catastrophically bad job and they still wouldn't get fired.
It certainly should. here's no question that most college kids do not take education as seriously as they should. For many, college is really just a social gathering.
On the other hand, one could argue that the education you get is largely unrelated to the school you attend. I would instantly pick an A student from UC Berkeley (or even someone from a cow college in flyover country) who was actively involved in outside projects over a C student at MIT who wasn't involved in outside projects. At an undergrad level, you can get the basic skills anywhere, and beyond that basic level, what you get out of your college education is directly proportional to what you put in. In the grand scheme of things, I'm not convinced that there's a dime's worth of difference on the average between a Berkeley grad who puts in the effort and an MIT grad who does the same. Most of what you really will need to know on the job, you'll be picking up in your first few weeks anyway, and (good) employers know this.
The only real advantage I can see for MIT and other schools that have strong specialization in a particular area over smaller, less specialized schools is that students have more opportunities to work in various areas of specialization that would not be feasible at other schools. This matters if you are hiring somebody in that area of specialization, but only for maybe a few years after graduation. After that, the field has changed too much for what they learned to be relevant anyway. The ability of a graduate to learn is far, far more relevant to that person's success than which specific pieces of information the person has learned upon graduation. Also, a fair amount of what you need to know for a given job is going to be specific to that job anyway, so it is critically important to be able to hit the ground running and learn as you go. That matters much more than what you know going in.
I forgot a couple more things that ISPs provide in schemes like this:
Tax revenue. If the federal government built out the infrastructure and did all of the work to support it, the local governments would likely lose the franchise fees that they collect from cable and telcos now. Having the federal governments build it and lease it to the cities/counties to in turn lease the rights to ISPs means that the revenue stream continues to exist. Whether this is important or not is another question entirely, and it isn't unsolvable in other ways, but doing it this way is by far the most straightforward and leads to the least squabbling.
Limitation of liability. If the government builds out the infrastructure and a customer's service sucks, the customer has to sue the government, which is both difficult from the customer's perspective and undesirable from the government's perspective. Having the extra corporate layer of private companies offering the service means that there is a blame umbrella.
This may sound like a grammar nit, but I found it really distracting to read "commoner" in the summary. Although "commoner" can technically be used as an adjective, it is strongly discouraged due to the potential for confusion with the noun "commoner" which in some sentence constructions can function as an adjective with a somewhat different meaning. For example:
"The commoner dress of the era was rags."
This can be read in two ways:
The more common dress of the era (compared to something described previously) was rags.
Common folk in the era wore rags.
Hence you should always prefer "more common" over "commoner" for the comparative form of "common". For consistency, "most common" is also preferred to "commonest".
Just to get back on topic, I'm not sure why people would be surprised by this. Parthenogenesis has been observed in a number of reptile species. The interesting thing is the chromosomal oddity, which was that the sex chromosomes were inconsistent with those normally seen in sexual reproduction. (In snakes, females have two different chromosomes, while males have two of the same sex chromosome; in this case, the children formed by parthenogenesis had two of the opposite chromosome---a combination previously observed only in fish and amphibians.) Interesting, odd, and so on.
I'm not clear why this particular finding suggests that parthenogenesis is more common than previously imagined, or at least not significantly more. It's just one more reptile species that can be added to the better part of a dozen previously known to reproduce in this way. I think if it were a lot more common than previously believed, then we would already know that reptiles could exhibit this chromosomal combination. The fact that we didn't know this before actually suggests to me that it is much less common than previously believed. Maybe I'm missing something.
BTW, is this really the first post after almost three hours? Yikes. I guess the love of science really is dead in the world.:-D
Huh? No. I voted for Boxer because the Republican candidate was worse. Had the Republicans gone with a competent choice, I would likely not have voted for her.
Excuse me, but this isn't 1995. Once you have the connectivity to the homes, what the heck do you need an ISP for? Providing email services? I don't think so. Hosting web content? Not any more.
Want a list?
Backhaul: The government would own the fiber from the city center to the curb, but it makes little sense to not take advantage of existing wire infrastructure for long haul runs, at least for now. The cost of rebuilding it all would be prohibitive. (The cost of the last mile would be prohibitive enough by itself.)
Infrastructure configuration and management: It takes a fair amount of money to have truck rolls to connect new customers. Also, the amount of bandwidth, the number of static or dynamic IPs, etc. required by different customers will be different. This requires far more technical expertise than most local governments have, and you'd either be asking them to maintain it or you would be creating a giant nonprofit megacorp to do it nationwide, neither of which is conducive to getting good service with minimum overhead.
Customer relations management: There's substantial effort required to manage those customer relationships, from configuration to billing to tech support. That's not something the government is going to want to be in the business of doing. They can barely handle property tax, and that's billed once a year.
There are probably a few other things I'm not thinking of, but that's enough.
This isn't at all like municipal Wi-Fi. Municipal Wi-Fi doesn't work (except if it is free) for three reasons:
They already pay for a network connection at home, and outdoor Wi-Fi is neither reliable enough nor fast enough to replace that home service, particularly once you consider the extra reliability problems caused by adding an indoor repeater, further clogging the already-full spectrum.
To get service comparable with cable, you'd need an 802.11n base station with an independent fiber backhaul for every five or six houses. You basically have all the costs of running fiber to every house, but without the performance potential.
People aren't willing to pay for something they can get for free, and they already get free Wi-Fi at work and at Starbucks.
Anybody using the Internet outside of those locations is much more likely to be using a Wi-Fi-capable mobile device like an iPad. Most of those folks are paying for cell service anyway, and Wi-Fi can't replace the cellular service because Wi-Fi isn't ubiquitous except within the bounds of your muni Wi-Fi coverage area.
Thus, except for people who regularly use a laptop for a significant amount of time in a place that provides no free Wi-Fi, municipal Wi-Fi doesn't make sense as a paid service, and certainly not as an alternative to existing ISPs. Fiber, by contrast, does not have any of these fundamental problems. Its only real downside is the cost of infrastructure construction and maintenance. This sort of scheme has been tried for fiber in several communities around the U.S., and last I was aware, it was working remarkably well everywhere it has been tried.
Barbara Boxer, who has consistently pushed for more restrictive copyright. Even as someone who usually votes Democrat, the only reason I voted for her is that Carly Fiorina nearly brought a major Fortune 500 company to its knees, and we really don't need someone that bad at managing a business helping run our federal government. I was all set to vote against her until she ended up as the G.O.P. candidate.
There is a third option. I refer to it as the "single payer public option" just to get up the ire of the Tea Party folks. It's remarkably simple:
The government builds and owns the infrastructure and pays for it with public funds.
The government leases access to the infrastructure and allows ISPs to tunnel traffic over it in a non-preferential fashion.
The government transitions this to a government-owned nonprofit infrastructure corporation after ten years of operation (or after it is solvent if that takes a little more than ten years).
This takes the infrastructure costs out of the equation, making it possible to have substantial competition even in smaller markets. More importantly, however, it means that the government is not in control over the content because the government is not the ISP, and after ten years, the government is not even involved except in hiring somebody to run it. The key part of this is nonprofit. By taking the profit motive out of the equation, this ensures maximum areal coverage for minimum cost, yet does so in a way that minimizes the government's control over the infrastructure.
I would prefer a system that actually has a prayer of working: independent counting. The system works like this:
They hand you a magstripe card.
You enter the voting machine and cast your vote.
The voting machine keeps a record of the votes cast, assigning each vote a UUID.
The voting machine cryptographically signs the ballot card.
It spits out the card.
You carry it to the vote counting machine.
It shows you the vote.
If it is wrong, you invalidate the ballot and carry it back to a voting machine.
That voting machine invalidates its copy of the ballot and you revote.
If it is right, the vote counting machine wipes the ballot card and releases it to the user.
The user carries the card back to the polling people, and they scan it a third time and verify that it is blank (preventing invalidation of votes by giving someone an already-used card).
This is relatively secure so long as the following conditions are true:
The three systems (the voting booths, the vote counters, and the wiped card verifier) must be manufactured by different companies that share no parent company and share no code.
The voting booths are networked only to each other (for mutual vote invalidation), not to any other systems.
The vote counting computer network has a restricted OS and boot firmware that is resistant to tampering.
The vote counting computer stores a signed copy of the ballot database on a USB flash stick upon insertion.
The vote UUID and vote lists from the voting computers and the vote counting computers are compared, and if there is a discrepancy, an audit occurs prior to certification of the vote.
The UUID contains data that is sufficiently hashed so that determining a time/date stamp from it is infeasible.
The UUID is used as the database primary key and the database table's backing store is such that order of row insertion cannot be determined after the fact.
The UUID algorithm is properly scrutinized for its inability to reveal interesting information.
All of the data formats are fully specified, and any deviation from that format results in an appropriate exception getting logged, which results in an immediate audit.
Not all of these are easy to achieve, but it is possible. The problem with random checks is that when a problem is found (and there are frequently errors with any OCR system), you then have to determine whether the odds of the results being wrong are likely to result in a change in the outcome. In a close race, there's a decent chance that subtle fraud won't be detected at all because the machine might throw away one Democrat vote in a hundred, for example.
With electronic ballots, if done properly, you can guarantee with a relatively high degree of certainty that all of the ballots have been counted correctly, which is much better than simply stating that there's a statistically good probability that they have all been counted correctly.
If it looks that way from across the aisle, then you either aren't paying attention or you are deliberately manipulating reality to suit your agenda. The health care program that you so attack is massively watered down from what Obama originally tried to pass. Those changes were made in an attempt to gain GOP and conservative Democrat votes. As a result, instead of a proper, single-payer public option, thanks to concessions, the current plan is nearly useless---essentially a giant windfall for the insurance industry.
And lest you think private insurance is a good thing, some of the largest health insurance companies have as few as one employee for every 1,000 customers. That's woefully inefficient for a company that doesn't even interact with customers directly most of the time. They're bloated, profit-taking train wrecks that leach money from the American public without adding any real value. I'm not saying that a government-run system will necessarily be better, but there's no question whether the option of choosing to use a government-run system would be an improvement over the current situation.
I don't think this will compete with much of anything; there's no real market for Chrome OS, and I doubt there ever will be. As I understand it, the target audience is people who:
Type too much to use a tablet.
Only use web apps.
For the most part, anybody who types enough to need a laptop with a built-in keyboard is also somebody who uses apps like Office and isn't going to be satisfied with a web substitute. Anybody who doesn't type enough to need a built-in keyboard would probably find a tablet (either iPad or Android-based) easier to use (not to mention more capable due to native app availability), and since you can use a keyboard with most of those devices for when you need to type frequently, it's hard to imagine why anyone would choose a web-only device like these.
I'd expect this to be even less popular than Linux-based netbooks, which is to say, remarkably unpopular. I really can't imagine why anyone would be interested in this, frankly. It's basically the computer equivalent of Palm's WebOS, and we know how well that has worked out....
Not necessarily. The other web sites could use an opaque token that does not expose your Facebook credentials (for example). Ostensibly, they're supposed to be doing that, IIRC.... Now, that won't help you as far as somebody pretending to be you on those third-party websites, and to the extent that those sites can post things on your wall, etc., they're still a hole, but not nearly as big a hole as exposing a full set of login credentials.
Of course, all of this was caused by the social network websites being run by people who don't think that social network accounts are all that important. If they thought people stealing access to accounts was a big deal, they would be using https by default instead of making it really hard to use https (e.g. Facebook immediately redirecting you to the http page after logging in via https). So if anybody goes after you for this, it would have to be either the end users or the police, since the developers of the site don't seem to care enough to do it.
But realistically, if $300 will make a huge difference in your life, chances are they only took about a buck fifty from you, and about $1800 from people with more income....
I have to agree. Right now my feeling is this: If you really feel the need to see me naked, Mr TSA Guy, then I might as well give everyone a show and strip right here. Why should the guys in the booth have all of the fun?
Funny, I suggested the same thing on Facebook a couple of weeks ago---that people should just say, "Well if you wanted to see me naked that badly, why didn't you just say so!?!" and then do a striptease right in the middle of the security checkpoint line. I'm certain that if anyone actually did that, he/she would be on a no-fly list for the rest of his/her life, and probably a national sex offender registry as well, but it still might be worth it....
Have you seen these pictures? Even those that are leaked with the 'censor' part off are so far from naked picture of you that I really don't get the outrage.
The ones I've seen weren't far from a naked picture at all. Maybe the ones you saw weren't calibrated correctly, or maybe you were looking at pictures from the other type of machine (there are two systems in use: backscatter and millimeter wave). Or maybe you're seeing it after they apply the post-processing filters. That doesn't mean that the unfiltered data doesn't exist, and if it exists, it could be leaked.
And no, they're not effective. The only way they could possibly be effective is if the terrorists didn't know they were there. Now that the terrorists know that they are being scanned, they will simply hide the dangerous substances somewhere the scanners can't see---in a hollow leg, a body cavity, etc. It certainly wouldn't be the first time terrorists smuggled explosives in body cavities. It is the ultimate example of security through obscurity. It is an utterly useless security mechanism because A. its flaws are blindingly obvious, B. it is only effective if the attacker doesn't know that he/she needs to exploit those blindingly obvious flaws, and C. the attacker almost certainly knows it is there, and thus can see the blindingly obvious flaws readily, and thus should reasonably know to exploit those blindingly obvious flaws.
It's about as effective a security measure as checking for photo IDs at the security checkpoint. It's a completely perfunctory, superfluous gesture whose sole function is to keep people who aren't flying from going past security so that they have time for all the other foolishness. In other words, the billions of dollars they've spent on these bits of snake oil are a pretty clear example of the fleecing of America.
Slashdot Mirror
It's more than that. If you've ever seen a company where people are forced to train their replacements, you'd know what I'm talking about. If you know that you're about to lose your job, there's a definite sense that what you do must not be important, or else you would still be doing it.
Okay, bad analogy. You get the point, though....
If they did that, every manufacturer of even moderately high-end laptops would drop their CPUs faster than an LSD addict drops acid.
Even if Intel's GPUs were the best in the industry, there are too many other critical things you wouldn't be able to properly support without PCIe---ExpressCard slots, FireWire, maybe even eSATA (unless they add more SATA ports to the chipset).... IMHO, dropping PCIe would be suicide for Intel.
More like this is a demonstration of why you don't fire a crucial employee with notice. You don't ever tell them that their job is ending after they finish with [x]. As soon as you do this, they are demotivated. They have no real motivation to do a good job because they could do a catastrophically bad job and they still wouldn't get fired.
FTFY.
On the other hand, one could argue that the education you get is largely unrelated to the school you attend. I would instantly pick an A student from UC Berkeley (or even someone from a cow college in flyover country) who was actively involved in outside projects over a C student at MIT who wasn't involved in outside projects. At an undergrad level, you can get the basic skills anywhere, and beyond that basic level, what you get out of your college education is directly proportional to what you put in. In the grand scheme of things, I'm not convinced that there's a dime's worth of difference on the average between a Berkeley grad who puts in the effort and an MIT grad who does the same. Most of what you really will need to know on the job, you'll be picking up in your first few weeks anyway, and (good) employers know this.
The only real advantage I can see for MIT and other schools that have strong specialization in a particular area over smaller, less specialized schools is that students have more opportunities to work in various areas of specialization that would not be feasible at other schools. This matters if you are hiring somebody in that area of specialization, but only for maybe a few years after graduation. After that, the field has changed too much for what they learned to be relevant anyway. The ability of a graduate to learn is far, far more relevant to that person's success than which specific pieces of information the person has learned upon graduation. Also, a fair amount of what you need to know for a given job is going to be specific to that job anyway, so it is critically important to be able to hit the ground running and learn as you go. That matters much more than what you know going in.
I forgot a couple more things that ISPs provide in schemes like this:
Time-Life Clip Art?
This may sound like a grammar nit, but I found it really distracting to read "commoner" in the summary. Although "commoner" can technically be used as an adjective, it is strongly discouraged due to the potential for confusion with the noun "commoner" which in some sentence constructions can function as an adjective with a somewhat different meaning. For example:
"The commoner dress of the era was rags."
This can be read in two ways:
Hence you should always prefer "more common" over "commoner" for the comparative form of "common". For consistency, "most common" is also preferred to "commonest".
Just to get back on topic, I'm not sure why people would be surprised by this. Parthenogenesis has been observed in a number of reptile species. The interesting thing is the chromosomal oddity, which was that the sex chromosomes were inconsistent with those normally seen in sexual reproduction. (In snakes, females have two different chromosomes, while males have two of the same sex chromosome; in this case, the children formed by parthenogenesis had two of the opposite chromosome---a combination previously observed only in fish and amphibians.) Interesting, odd, and so on.
I'm not clear why this particular finding suggests that parthenogenesis is more common than previously imagined, or at least not significantly more. It's just one more reptile species that can be added to the better part of a dozen previously known to reproduce in this way. I think if it were a lot more common than previously believed, then we would already know that reptiles could exhibit this chromosomal combination. The fact that we didn't know this before actually suggests to me that it is much less common than previously believed. Maybe I'm missing something.
BTW, is this really the first post after almost three hours? Yikes. I guess the love of science really is dead in the world. :-D
Huh? No. I voted for Boxer because the Republican candidate was worse. Had the Republicans gone with a competent choice, I would likely not have voted for her.
Want a list?
There are probably a few other things I'm not thinking of, but that's enough.
This isn't at all like municipal Wi-Fi. Municipal Wi-Fi doesn't work (except if it is free) for three reasons:
Thus, except for people who regularly use a laptop for a significant amount of time in a place that provides no free Wi-Fi, municipal Wi-Fi doesn't make sense as a paid service, and certainly not as an alternative to existing ISPs. Fiber, by contrast, does not have any of these fundamental problems. Its only real downside is the cost of infrastructure construction and maintenance. This sort of scheme has been tried for fiber in several communities around the U.S., and last I was aware, it was working remarkably well everywhere it has been tried.
In hindsight, yeah, that's pretty flagrant. I should have reread that before posting. My bad.
Barbara Boxer, who has consistently pushed for more restrictive copyright. Even as someone who usually votes Democrat, the only reason I voted for her is that Carly Fiorina nearly brought a major Fortune 500 company to its knees, and we really don't need someone that bad at managing a business helping run our federal government. I was all set to vote against her until she ended up as the G.O.P. candidate.
There is a third option. I refer to it as the "single payer public option" just to get up the ire of the Tea Party folks. It's remarkably simple:
This takes the infrastructure costs out of the equation, making it possible to have substantial competition even in smaller markets. More importantly, however, it means that the government is not in control over the content because the government is not the ISP, and after ten years, the government is not even involved except in hiring somebody to run it. The key part of this is nonprofit. By taking the profit motive out of the equation, this ensures maximum areal coverage for minimum cost, yet does so in a way that minimizes the government's control over the infrastructure.
I would prefer a system that actually has a prayer of working: independent counting. The system works like this:
This is relatively secure so long as the following conditions are true:
Not all of these are easy to achieve, but it is possible. The problem with random checks is that when a problem is found (and there are frequently errors with any OCR system), you then have to determine whether the odds of the results being wrong are likely to result in a change in the outcome. In a close race, there's a decent chance that subtle fraud won't be detected at all because the machine might throw away one Democrat vote in a hundred, for example.
With electronic ballots, if done properly, you can guarantee with a relatively high degree of certainty that all of the ballots have been counted correctly, which is much better than simply stating that there's a statistically good probability that they have all been counted correctly.
If it looks that way from across the aisle, then you either aren't paying attention or you are deliberately manipulating reality to suit your agenda. The health care program that you so attack is massively watered down from what Obama originally tried to pass. Those changes were made in an attempt to gain GOP and conservative Democrat votes. As a result, instead of a proper, single-payer public option, thanks to concessions, the current plan is nearly useless---essentially a giant windfall for the insurance industry.
And lest you think private insurance is a good thing, some of the largest health insurance companies have as few as one employee for every 1,000 customers. That's woefully inefficient for a company that doesn't even interact with customers directly most of the time. They're bloated, profit-taking train wrecks that leach money from the American public without adding any real value. I'm not saying that a government-run system will necessarily be better, but there's no question whether the option of choosing to use a government-run system would be an improvement over the current situation.
No, without any native app support, it's going to be unusable long before the cloud goes away. :-D
And it's not a tablet. It's a notebook.
I don't think this will compete with much of anything; there's no real market for Chrome OS, and I doubt there ever will be. As I understand it, the target audience is people who:
For the most part, anybody who types enough to need a laptop with a built-in keyboard is also somebody who uses apps like Office and isn't going to be satisfied with a web substitute. Anybody who doesn't type enough to need a built-in keyboard would probably find a tablet (either iPad or Android-based) easier to use (not to mention more capable due to native app availability), and since you can use a keyboard with most of those devices for when you need to type frequently, it's hard to imagine why anyone would choose a web-only device like these.
I'd expect this to be even less popular than Linux-based netbooks, which is to say, remarkably unpopular. I really can't imagine why anyone would be interested in this, frankly. It's basically the computer equivalent of Palm's WebOS, and we know how well that has worked out....
Not necessarily. The other web sites could use an opaque token that does not expose your Facebook credentials (for example). Ostensibly, they're supposed to be doing that, IIRC.... Now, that won't help you as far as somebody pretending to be you on those third-party websites, and to the extent that those sites can post things on your wall, etc., they're still a hole, but not nearly as big a hole as exposing a full set of login credentials.
Of course, all of this was caused by the social network websites being run by people who don't think that social network accounts are all that important. If they thought people stealing access to accounts was a big deal, they would be using https by default instead of making it really hard to use https (e.g. Facebook immediately redirecting you to the http page after logging in via https). So if anybody goes after you for this, it would have to be either the end users or the police, since the developers of the site don't seem to care enough to do it.
But realistically, if $300 will make a huge difference in your life, chances are they only took about a buck fifty from you, and about $1800 from people with more income....
Why, precisely, is your gastric band made of Semtex?
Man, that is lucky.
Funny, I suggested the same thing on Facebook a couple of weeks ago---that people should just say, "Well if you wanted to see me naked that badly, why didn't you just say so!?!" and then do a striptease right in the middle of the security checkpoint line. I'm certain that if anyone actually did that, he/she would be on a no-fly list for the rest of his/her life, and probably a national sex offender registry as well, but it still might be worth it....
The ones I've seen weren't far from a naked picture at all. Maybe the ones you saw weren't calibrated correctly, or maybe you were looking at pictures from the other type of machine (there are two systems in use: backscatter and millimeter wave). Or maybe you're seeing it after they apply the post-processing filters. That doesn't mean that the unfiltered data doesn't exist, and if it exists, it could be leaked.
And no, they're not effective. The only way they could possibly be effective is if the terrorists didn't know they were there. Now that the terrorists know that they are being scanned, they will simply hide the dangerous substances somewhere the scanners can't see---in a hollow leg, a body cavity, etc. It certainly wouldn't be the first time terrorists smuggled explosives in body cavities. It is the ultimate example of security through obscurity. It is an utterly useless security mechanism because A. its flaws are blindingly obvious, B. it is only effective if the attacker doesn't know that he/she needs to exploit those blindingly obvious flaws, and C. the attacker almost certainly knows it is there, and thus can see the blindingly obvious flaws readily, and thus should reasonably know to exploit those blindingly obvious flaws.
It's about as effective a security measure as checking for photo IDs at the security checkpoint. It's a completely perfunctory, superfluous gesture whose sole function is to keep people who aren't flying from going past security so that they have time for all the other foolishness. In other words, the billions of dollars they've spent on these bits of snake oil are a pretty clear example of the fleecing of America.