of trying to shove a square peg into a round hole. For God's sake why are we still attempting to make web page standards high level and human-readable?
Throw that shit right out the window. High-level should be handled by vendor products that compile to a standard so low-level that it really doesn't need to change more often than every few years.
Just because one person feels offended and calls something sexist/racist/insensitive/whatever doesn't make it so. The definitions of these words are almost completely a function of current, aggregate opinion. Is the comment still sexist if less than 20% of women think so? What about 5%? 1%? What if the 1% cry extra hard about it?
I remember in my college days being at Wellesley, and some of the students, I shit you not, made an 8 ft penis out of snow just for kicks. None of the guys that saw it gave sexism a moment's consideration. Back at MIT, some students made a set of boobs in the snow near Kresge. Again, no complaints of sexism, and the sky didn't fall.
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if there is also another snippet of code somewhere that reads 0xB16D1C.
The only reason there is a row over this is that the act was unprofessional and, above all, that it involved a sexual reference, in the good ol' puritanical US of A.
Why would you want to, when your reactions and awareness of the situation are worse than the computer's? Oh yeah, arrogance.
Do you talk to people like that in real life, or just here?
Reaction speed and awareness are not substitutes for judgement and foresight.
What if I chose to go over an embankment or deliberately hit another car for a really, really good reason, and the emergency system decides to fight me because that violates one of it's constraints.
Say, like I see a two year old that's about to run into the road after a little ball?
Space age or no, the natural modes of our organizations revolve around one or two basic primate behaviors, and tend to gather momentum over time. The only fix is to fire everyone (especially management) and start over.
The idea of holding onto a tangible valuable thing (commodity) rather than an abstract IOU (currency) has some advantages but some disadvantages. Yes, the tangible commodity (gold, copper, etc.) always has some intrinsic value, but letting it just sit there means it doesn't participate in the economy. That is, I can go and buy tons of copper on the London exchange, and sit it in a warehouse for decades waiting to "spend it" when I retire (a la the Alpha Strategy). However, that means all that useful copper is sitting there unused for decades, where we could be putting it to good use.
Currency is better because it's just an IOU. It says "we all agree I've done something of value, and I have this promise that someone will do something valuable for me later in exchange". Nothing tangible is taken out of the economy to do that. Digital currency needs to be the same.
Using energy, as you suggest, is no different than using copper, gold, etc. Instead of putting the energy to use, it sits in a battery/hydrogen cell/whatever probably losing a bit of energy over time, and not doing anything of use. While I can see using it for short term trades, it's a bad long term place to keep wealth.
But I already suggested the currency still be kept in banks, so backing would only be about 1% of total circulation (it ends up being about the square of the reserve requirement IIRC). And people don't keep all or even most of their wealth in just currency. Even the richest (that I've seen) only keep 10-50 million liquid at any one time. Lastly - unlike gold, copper or any metal, energy use and supply is guaranteed to grow with population and economy.
Of course an energy-based currency would be greatly dependent on a storage technology that currently doesn't exist. And yes, it would have to be lossless or very nearly so.
Oh, how sweet it would be to look at a 100TJ note and say, truly now, money is power.
Energy would make an excellent currency when we develop a suitable means of storage and transfer.
We'd probably still want to keep it in banks, though. Easier to distribute from central locations, and you don't want it too portable ("is that a Terajoule in your pocket or... ?").
In my possibly dated experience ("back in MY day!...") you couldn't just take a drive out of a hardware RAID configuration to recover anything, so keeping a whole copy on one drive versus spreading it out really doesn't matter.
I recommended RAID 5 because it can tolerate two drive failures if you give it all five, and I have seen two drives fail at once. It also performs better for SQL, not that it really matters in this case.
A laser expands to the size of a football field over the distance from Earth to the Moon. There is no way a laser (or any other beam-type weapon) could deliver an effective areal power density at the distances required (for large objects) to make any difference.
The only practical way to transfer energy at that scale is putting rocks of our own into orbit around the moon and mount thrusters on them. They wouldn't even need to be very big (i.e., safe for us) so long as you had enough of them.
Most of the work funded by the B&MGF doesn't directly save lives so much as reduce the DALY cost of neglected diseases, etc. In other words, you can improve individuals' lives, and concomittantly their economic output, without necessarily causing more people to be born. Actually such improvements typically allow birth rates to fall (compare the heat maps in both links).
There was nothing wrong with giving people a decent car to drive. So what if it is not god's gift to mankind.
You can't make a car analogy here, because it would be retarded. The problem with Windows has always been that Microsoft abused their position. They abused their position as an OS vendor by tweaking products to be less interoperable with their competitors' software. They abused their thus-gained monopoly position through all manner of anticompetitive practice. This resulted not only in a dearth of customer choice (necessary for a healthy marketplace) but also in actual negative financial impact to human beings.
There are plenty of reasons to hate Microsoft products, but the biggest reason not to pay for them is that the money will just be used to fuck the industry some more — and thus, all the users.
It is illegal for an executive member of a public corporation to run a business with any consideration other than profit. They're set up to run like this, it's what we asked for.
The real evidence that Gates is trying to really be helpful and that's his primary goal is what he has targeted. He isn't doing flashy stuff in the developed world, but rather looked and said "how can I save the most lives the most efficiently?" and then went and did this.
But the last thing we need on this planet is more human lives.
All well and good, but I think a VB6 application created by salespeople would be the sort of thing that you might see in the average slashdotters worst nightmare.
The biggest, most costly failures of SLDC is getting the spec wrong and having to put off a bunch of changes 'until the next release(s)'. Usually the users get blamed, which is standard CYA operating procedure for the incompetent. When I see a bunch of spreadsheets ("can you do it this way?") I get down on my knees and praise jeebus because there is the living spec, pretty much exactly what they want already spelled out for you in detail.
Same thing would go for sales people that wrote their own VB6 app. I don't care what they wrote it in. I'd be like, holy shit, this is awesome. There's the living spec, the most valuable part of the SLDC, and it's already halfway to being a real app! They give you something like THAT and say, could you make this a professional quality application, I'd be happy as a clam. No surprises, predictable estimate. Let the non-programming stakeholders develop with simplified tools. It's a good thing!
why people think it's OK to break the law, so long as you're doing it with tax dollars. Forget the other threats to the country, tolerate that long enough and you're practically begging for despotism.
I never had a theory of why right-wing / conservative nutjobs always get so angry when anyone suggests that there's nothing wrong with human sexuality until I came across this article on Wikipedia.
Slashdot Mirror
of trying to shove a square peg into a round hole. For God's sake why are we still attempting to make web page standards high level and human-readable?
Throw that shit right out the window. High-level should be handled by vendor products that compile to a standard so low-level that it really doesn't need to change more often than every few years.
Just because one person feels offended and calls something sexist/racist/insensitive/whatever doesn't make it so. The definitions of these words are almost completely a function of current, aggregate opinion. Is the comment still sexist if less than 20% of women think so? What about 5%? 1%? What if the 1% cry extra hard about it?
I remember in my college days being at Wellesley, and some of the students, I shit you not, made an 8 ft penis out of snow just for kicks. None of the guys that saw it gave sexism a moment's consideration. Back at MIT, some students made a set of boobs in the snow near Kresge. Again, no complaints of sexism, and the sky didn't fall.
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if there is also another snippet of code somewhere that reads 0xB16D1C.
The only reason there is a row over this is that the act was unprofessional and, above all, that it involved a sexual reference, in the good ol' puritanical US of A.
Why would you want to, when your reactions and awareness of the situation are worse than the computer's? Oh yeah, arrogance.
Do you talk to people like that in real life, or just here?
Reaction speed and awareness are not substitutes for judgement and foresight.
What if I chose to go over an embankment or deliberately hit another car for a really, really good reason, and the emergency system decides to fight me because that violates one of it's constraints.
Say, like I see a two year old that's about to run into the road after a little ball?
I would not want to be trying to manhandle the steering wheel and braking system out the control of a computer during an emergency maneuver.
Space age or no, the natural modes of our organizations revolve around one or two basic primate behaviors, and tend to gather momentum over time. The only fix is to fire everyone (especially management) and start over.
"Albeit an rather long example of one"
it makes you look like an idiot.
The idea of holding onto a tangible valuable thing (commodity) rather than an abstract IOU (currency) has some advantages but some disadvantages. Yes, the tangible commodity (gold, copper, etc.) always has some intrinsic value, but letting it just sit there means it doesn't participate in the economy. That is, I can go and buy tons of copper on the London exchange, and sit it in a warehouse for decades waiting to "spend it" when I retire (a la the Alpha Strategy). However, that means all that useful copper is sitting there unused for decades, where we could be putting it to good use.
Currency is better because it's just an IOU. It says "we all agree I've done something of value, and I have this promise that someone will do something valuable for me later in exchange". Nothing tangible is taken out of the economy to do that. Digital currency needs to be the same.
Using energy, as you suggest, is no different than using copper, gold, etc. Instead of putting the energy to use, it sits in a battery/hydrogen cell/whatever probably losing a bit of energy over time, and not doing anything of use. While I can see using it for short term trades, it's a bad long term place to keep wealth.
But I already suggested the currency still be kept in banks, so backing would only be about 1% of total circulation (it ends up being about the square of the reserve requirement IIRC). And people don't keep all or even most of their wealth in just currency. Even the richest (that I've seen) only keep 10-50 million liquid at any one time. Lastly - unlike gold, copper or any metal, energy use and supply is guaranteed to grow with population and economy.
Of course an energy-based currency would be greatly dependent on a storage technology that currently doesn't exist. And yes, it would have to be lossless or very nearly so.
Oh, how sweet it would be to look at a 100TJ note and say, truly now, money is power.
I recommend you read up on what this guy had to say about operations and engineering.
You may find many of his ideas surprisingly applicable to software development.
Energy would make an excellent currency when we develop a suitable means of storage and transfer.
... ?").
We'd probably still want to keep it in banks, though. Easier to distribute from central locations, and you don't want it too portable ("is that a Terajoule in your pocket or
In my possibly dated experience ("back in MY day!...") you couldn't just take a drive out of a hardware RAID configuration to recover anything, so keeping a whole copy on one drive versus spreading it out really doesn't matter.
I recommended RAID 5 because it can tolerate two drive failures if you give it all five, and I have seen two drives fail at once. It also performs better for SQL, not that it really matters in this case.
I have never seen SQL fail all by itself. In my experience, by far the most likely point of failure is the hard drives.
A laser expands to the size of a football field over the distance from Earth to the Moon. There is no way a laser (or any other beam-type weapon) could deliver an effective areal power density at the distances required (for large objects) to make any difference.
The only practical way to transfer energy at that scale is putting rocks of our own into orbit around the moon and mount thrusters on them. They wouldn't even need to be very big (i.e., safe for us) so long as you had enough of them.
Too bad you need an iPad (or install iTunes??) to even see what the article is talking about. Nope.
Oh, hey look. It's crappy.
Personally I wouldn't take anything unless it's irreplaceable
FTFY
Now I don't have to worry about my monkey getting Ebola any more.
Most of the work funded by the B&MGF doesn't directly save lives so much as reduce the DALY cost of neglected diseases, etc. In other words, you can improve individuals' lives, and concomittantly their economic output, without necessarily causing more people to be born. Actually such improvements typically allow birth rates to fall (compare the heat maps in both links).
I'd give that an +Informative if I could.
There was nothing wrong with giving people a decent car to drive. So what if it is not god's gift to mankind.
You can't make a car analogy here, because it would be retarded. The problem with Windows has always been that Microsoft abused their position. They abused their position as an OS vendor by tweaking products to be less interoperable with their competitors' software. They abused their thus-gained monopoly position through all manner of anticompetitive practice. This resulted not only in a dearth of customer choice (necessary for a healthy marketplace) but also in actual negative financial impact to human beings.
There are plenty of reasons to hate Microsoft products, but the biggest reason not to pay for them is that the money will just be used to fuck the industry some more — and thus, all the users.
It is illegal for an executive member of a public corporation to run a business with any consideration other than profit. They're set up to run like this, it's what we asked for.
The real evidence that Gates is trying to really be helpful and that's his primary goal is what he has targeted. He isn't doing flashy stuff in the developed world, but rather looked and said "how can I save the most lives the most efficiently?" and then went and did this.
But the last thing we need on this planet is more human lives.
Yes, I know I got the acronym wrong. Twice.
All well and good, but I think a VB6 application created by salespeople would be the sort of thing that you might see in the average slashdotters worst nightmare.
The biggest, most costly failures of SLDC is getting the spec wrong and having to put off a bunch of changes 'until the next release(s)'. Usually the users get blamed, which is standard CYA operating procedure for the incompetent. When I see a bunch of spreadsheets ("can you do it this way?") I get down on my knees and praise jeebus because there is the living spec, pretty much exactly what they want already spelled out for you in detail.
Same thing would go for sales people that wrote their own VB6 app. I don't care what they wrote it in. I'd be like, holy shit, this is awesome. There's the living spec, the most valuable part of the SLDC, and it's already halfway to being a real app! They give you something like THAT and say, could you make this a professional quality application, I'd be happy as a clam. No surprises, predictable estimate. Let the non-programming stakeholders develop with simplified tools. It's a good thing!
They'd do it and be great at it, if our country valued science a little more.
why people think it's OK to break the law, so long as you're doing it with tax dollars. Forget the other threats to the country, tolerate that long enough and you're practically begging for despotism.
Note the extra F.
I never had a theory of why right-wing / conservative nutjobs always get so angry when anyone suggests that there's nothing wrong with human sexuality until I came across this article on Wikipedia.
'[this will] help lend some accountability to the Internet age.'
Why don't we focus on transparency and accountability in our leadership first?
How could the problems caused by any individual even begin to compare to the damage government failures cause?