If you think that spending $1200 per year on Zunes is enough to make any noticeable change in either MS's or the federal government's finances you're insane. All that this takes is one manager who wants to give a bonus for good performance that isn't cash.
[sarcasm]5 Zunes per year? No wonder our country is going broke![/sarcasm]
I can't imagine a news item being less news worthy... there are 2.5 million full time federal employees. That means that the federal government spends on average $4.70 dollars per year, per employee on phones (including for service). Somehow that doesn't seem at all unreasonable to me. I'd presume iOS devices are almost exclusively phones (~1 per 50 employees), perhaps with some company use tablets thrown in as well. As for the rest: PS3s are used all over the place to make cheap super computers, and I'd guess xBoxes and Zunes would be either for the troops or for performance giveaways. Yes, lets all be upset that they spent half a penny per employee on Zunes.
Also, to really put this in perspective. At the height of the Iraq war, a single day's operations cost more than 5.5x the 10 year 'gadget budget'. 4.5 hours of operations in Iraq, 10 years of gadgets for every federal employee.
No, that empirically does not work on this subject. That is how scientists around the country tried to deal with the problem for 50 years and at the end of that half century there were more people against the teaching of evolution than there were at the beginning of it. The problem is that for every troll, there is an actual creationist out there who believes what they are saying (which, IMO, makes them uneducated, but not a troll). Leaving these people to their own devices just sets them up in an echo chamber of their own misunderstandings until we end up in a situation where decision makers believe this nonsense. Then you have school boards, text book publishers, even presidential nominees who will state proudly that they don't believe in evolution. At the very least, I will voice my disagreement to make it clear that there are those who disagree, those that will hear the proud statement of a candidate's ignorance and irrevocably put them on the 'will not vote for' list.
So please, if you see someone politely, non-aggressively stating their misunderstandings, correct them politely and non-aggressively. If it's a troll, you won't have given them the satisfaction of making you angry because you will have been polite. If it's someone who actually believes what they are saying maybe, just maybe, you'll convince them to take another look at what they believe. Even if they don't believe what they are saying, someone reading it probably does, and if you can convince just a single person to rethink the subject it is, IMO, worth the 2 minutes it took to write out a reasoned, polite response.
The problem is that the human brain really likes to put things into categories. That is an hamster, but that over there is not. Just because that is the way the human brain likes to work doesn't mean that it's a universal truth. Species do not exist as a phenomenon outside of the human brain. Trying to decide where one species starts and another species ends is like picking two points of the visual spectrum at random as new colors and then arguing over where one starts and the other stops. Sure, if you look at one color and then the other, you can tell that they're different, but if how do you decide where the cutoff point is? Any point you choose is going to be arbitrary because your starting points were arbitrary. The same is true for organisms.
There are organisms which are genetically similar enough to allow for viable offspring, and organisms that are not. But even that can't magically create an immutable category, everything inside of which is a hamster and everything outside of which isn't.
This would make it quite obvious, to their friends and family if no one else, who the members of Seal Team 6 are. That information is classified Top Secret, presumably in this case for good reason, there are good reasons why we know next to nothing about the actual people who performed the raid. These people went home to their wives and when asked how their day was, said "pretty good" and changed the subject because that's part of the job they signed up for.
Engineers working for defense contractors get approached commonly enough that most defense contractors have explicit instructions given to their employees on how to handle the situation. These guys know enough about the intelligence agencies and black ops technologies that just having their identities known is a bad idea. Maybe they'll get a reward of some kind, but it'll be buried with a deep cover story or more likely just be a promotion to a higher pay grade (but spread out over several years).
The same reason the average persons should know that a toaster works by running current through some wire coils to heat up the bread. The same reason people should know how to do basic math without a calculator. Basic programming skills simply don't go out of date. Put a 70 year old FORTRAN programmer who's willing to learn in front of any modern language and they could be up to date in a matter of weeks. Knowing how your computer works, hell, just knowing that it isn't a magical box that is impossible to understand is a huge, huge deal.
High school should be about turning every kid into a little Renaissance Man, familiar with as many subjects as possible but experts in none. They don't have to know coming into graduation what they want to do with the rest of their life, but they should know where to start looking. That means a good base in all the essentials of modern society: language skills, math, science, computers, and yes, they should have some experience doing manual labor as well. At least then if they choose to enter the work force they'll know what they're getting themselves into.
This has the potential to make Global Warming so much worse. Lets assume global warming is real and we're headed for a maunder minimum level of hibernation. The expected temperature increases are pretty similar to the temperature drops associated with the last major minimum. It would convince people that global warming was all a big sham or even a blessing, and in the short term the blessing idea wouldn't even be totally incorrect, since the effects of a half century long solar minimum would almost certainly be at least as devastating to civilization as global warming.
But, that means that in 50-70 years, when the little ice age ends, we could be faced with the full force of global warming in less than a decade, instead of spread out over the course of half a century. It would be even more so to late to do anything about it, short of geoengineering at a massive scale, and even I, techno-optimist that I am, have difficulty accepting the idea that we'll be able to accurately manipulate the kinds of energy needed to alter the Earth's climate in a controlled way.
406 Comments so far; apparently enough people are interested to drive traffic, which is how Slashdot actually makes its money. If the Bitcoin articles had low comment counts, I'd agree with you that something is fishy, but speaking for myself I find the ideas that Bitcoins bring up interesting enough to be worth discussing. Not interesting enough to go and buy some Bitcoins, but as a subject that is worth thinking about longer term.
His union-busting went well enough for his purposes
If WI laws allowed it, he'd be facing a recall vote along with the 6 Republican senators that are already being recalled. And I'd be shocked if he doesn't face a recall when he becomes eligible for one in January. He pissed a lot of people off and if his goal was to weaken support for the unions he failed miserably. A lot of people who started out against the unions watched the unions agree to a pay cut, a benefits cut, and even a temporary moratorium on collective bargaining. There are people angry with the Democratic senators for their walk out, but even that anger isn't directed at the Unions. In the end, it was the unions who looked reasonable; while the Democrats looked petty and weak and the Republicans looked like card carrying villains.
I think he'd be hard pressed to explain his behavior on a national stage to anyone other than anti-union Republicans. Not to mention that there are about 100k people in WI that have shown themselves ready and willing to take time off from work to stand in the literally freezing rain just to show their displeasure for him. Sometimes the "Would never vote for" column is just as important as the "Would vote for" column in polling, because it shows how active and engaged people would be to someone who is opposing him.
Reminds me of a story I read somewhere, where the police didn't have a polygraph available. So they rigged up a headband with some wires, ran the wires into a photocopier and printed off copies of "HE'S LYING" in huge letters every time they thought he was. Probably and urban legend, but also probably about as effective as a 'real' polygraph is.
The official duties part is totally unnecessary. The judges have to realize these laws are broken, if they are upheld, simply taking a video camera to record your kid at the park would be an illegal act (with some ridiculously heavy penalties associated with it in some states).
Has a lightsaber ever been totally destroyed on screen? I remember at least one being cut in half or disabled and even that would be terrifying if the power source were anti-matter. Remember, any containment failure will result in all that energy, enough to melt through a meter thick blast door in Ep 1 without concern, being released instantly.
Nah, just too fast. They'll back off, wait a few months, then ease in with the same restrictions, maybe with a couple of intermediate steps in between so that people can rationalize it to themselves better. It's the exact same way you avoid outrage while increasing gas prices, removing citizens rights, etc...
In fairness, a significant part of their jobs as corporate executives is to be heard by as many people as possible. Not to mention that by virtue of their jobs they most likely meet hundreds, if not thousands of people every year. This whole thing is kind of ridiculous; they're public figures, their use cases for Facebook are different from the average person. Where I would recommend to most people that they personally know every person on their friends list, that advice doesn't make sense for people using Facebook the way these people are.
A hardcover book page of text averages 2500 bytes, making 25000 pages of text a whopping 60 megabytes. If 10,000 people download the documents over the course of a few weeks, their servers would need to average 340 kBps, I find their argument hard to believe. Of course, there's going to be pictures, attachments (which I doubt are included in this print out anyway), etc. on some of the emails, but I'm guessing based on their description of the 'process' used that every email is getting at least one page, that means that a single word response is going to get a whole page to itself. I suspect the average will work out to something quite a bit less than 2500 bytes average per page.
Word is that they're charging $400+ to receive a copy of the documents, which by my understanding is supposed to cover incremental costs only. A 1GB SD card can be had for $5, which should cover the emails with ease even if they include attached attached files. They may be following the letter of the law, but they are certainly not in line with the purpose which was to make government data available to the people who it belongs to. After all, the law just says that the information needs to be available at cost, it never says you have to reduce the costs as much as possible, now does it?
Because safety regulation is hard to enforce. Not hard as in actually difficult, but hard as in it takes real, physical work by highly educated people on the ground. Work that is dirty and potentially dangerous all to uncover issues that are so rare that a person might work their whole careers doing inspections without finding a single serious safety issue. And even that rate would fall dramatically if inspections really stepped up to the levels they should be because there would be significant incentive for the plants to take their own inspections seriously or risk a fine.
Basically, it is a job that leads to complacency. The people doing the work know how important the checks are, but at the same time they know that the odds of any one check discovering an issue are tiny. Find some way to keep the regulators at all levels motivated and engaged, from the people doing the actual inspections to their managers to the people in congress. It's orders of magnitude cheaper to enforce the rules than it would be to try and replace the nuclear plants.
That's what I don't understand, put the "cloud" server in a closet somewhere in my house and connect all the other machines up through a strong wireless N network and you might have something usable. I just can't imagine relying on your ISPs latency when it comes to graphics.
To be fair, when they released the first game the company was circling the drain. They used every last penny they had to publish the game and were more surprised than anyone that it was the hit that it was. That's where the "Final Fantasy" moniker comes from.
And since you are self admittedly unaware of the games, it's worth pointing out that there are very few sequels in the family. In fact, until FF X2 there were none that even took place in the same universe as any of the other entries. Since then, there have been a number that overlap universes, but generally separated by hundreds or thousands of years in universe time; enough so that the events of one game have virtually no impact on the other. There have also been a few more direct sequels (the aforementioned FF X2, Tactics Advance 2, a couple of crappy FFVII cashcows), but even those generally have different mechanics and game play.
Maybe you didn't read the earlier articles about just how horrible Sony's security setup is. Here's a hint: It's every bit bad enough that a dedicated group could find a different way into the system every day for weeks on end.
Inflation at a controlled rate is good for the economy. Deflation, which is what bitcoins are designed from the ground up to produce, is much more dangerous. In a deflationary system, your money is worth more tomorrow than it is today. Why bother investing that money in anything when the money will be worth more tomorrow than it is today? And if the bitcoin economy is increasing fast enough, you'll reach a point where there is no conceivable investment that is better than just stashing bitcoins in a safe place. Which, of course, restricts the number of bitcoins in actual circulation even further, increasing demand, increasing the value, and making a mattress full of money an even better investment.
Obviously inflation beyond a certain point is also dangerous, but deflation it creates a positive feedback cycle of hoarding cash. No investment, no loans, bare minimum spending. One of the reasons for the Federal Reserve dropping and keeping interests rates to near 0% for the past 3 years was to prevent the US entering the deflation spiral, and it's still not entirely clear if they succeeded; prices on many commodities have dropped for months at a time and the measured inflation rate was negative in many areas of the country last year.
A full 50% of your complaints are stylistic choices that many educators (incorrectly) teach students are bad English. A sentence can absolutely begin with the word 'and', especially if the writing is being done in a conversational tone of voice. Ending a sentence in a preposition has not been grammatically incorrect for something like 250 years.
Your other complaints, however, are completely valid; a little proof reading would have gone a long way towards preventing embarrassment.
Think about this though, the prison system is saying that it costs $35,000 at minimum to guard a prisoner. If you assume half of that goes to the actual 'prison' part of the equation, that leaves $17,500 to keep a prisoner alive and healthy; using tiny dormitory housing, cheap mass produced food, no travel budget, minimal healthcare, and few amenities. That is more money than a person makes, before taxes (no income taxes but other taxes are still applied at that income level) doing a minimum wage job 50 hours per week.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think that spending $1200 per year on Zunes is enough to make any noticeable change in either MS's or the federal government's finances you're insane. All that this takes is one manager who wants to give a bonus for good performance that isn't cash.
[sarcasm]5 Zunes per year? No wonder our country is going broke![/sarcasm]
I can't imagine a news item being less news worthy... there are 2.5 million full time federal employees. That means that the federal government spends on average $4.70 dollars per year, per employee on phones (including for service). Somehow that doesn't seem at all unreasonable to me. I'd presume iOS devices are almost exclusively phones (~1 per 50 employees), perhaps with some company use tablets thrown in as well. As for the rest: PS3s are used all over the place to make cheap super computers, and I'd guess xBoxes and Zunes would be either for the troops or for performance giveaways. Yes, lets all be upset that they spent half a penny per employee on Zunes.
Also, to really put this in perspective. At the height of the Iraq war, a single day's operations cost more than 5.5x the 10 year 'gadget budget'. 4.5 hours of operations in Iraq, 10 years of gadgets for every federal employee.
No, that empirically does not work on this subject. That is how scientists around the country tried to deal with the problem for 50 years and at the end of that half century there were more people against the teaching of evolution than there were at the beginning of it. The problem is that for every troll, there is an actual creationist out there who believes what they are saying (which, IMO, makes them uneducated, but not a troll). Leaving these people to their own devices just sets them up in an echo chamber of their own misunderstandings until we end up in a situation where decision makers believe this nonsense. Then you have school boards, text book publishers, even presidential nominees who will state proudly that they don't believe in evolution. At the very least, I will voice my disagreement to make it clear that there are those who disagree, those that will hear the proud statement of a candidate's ignorance and irrevocably put them on the 'will not vote for' list.
So please, if you see someone politely, non-aggressively stating their misunderstandings, correct them politely and non-aggressively. If it's a troll, you won't have given them the satisfaction of making you angry because you will have been polite. If it's someone who actually believes what they are saying maybe, just maybe, you'll convince them to take another look at what they believe. Even if they don't believe what they are saying, someone reading it probably does, and if you can convince just a single person to rethink the subject it is, IMO, worth the 2 minutes it took to write out a reasoned, polite response.
The problem is that the human brain really likes to put things into categories. That is an hamster, but that over there is not. Just because that is the way the human brain likes to work doesn't mean that it's a universal truth. Species do not exist as a phenomenon outside of the human brain. Trying to decide where one species starts and another species ends is like picking two points of the visual spectrum at random as new colors and then arguing over where one starts and the other stops. Sure, if you look at one color and then the other, you can tell that they're different, but if how do you decide where the cutoff point is? Any point you choose is going to be arbitrary because your starting points were arbitrary. The same is true for organisms.
There are organisms which are genetically similar enough to allow for viable offspring, and organisms that are not. But even that can't magically create an immutable category, everything inside of which is a hamster and everything outside of which isn't.
This would make it quite obvious, to their friends and family if no one else, who the members of Seal Team 6 are. That information is classified Top Secret, presumably in this case for good reason, there are good reasons why we know next to nothing about the actual people who performed the raid. These people went home to their wives and when asked how their day was, said "pretty good" and changed the subject because that's part of the job they signed up for.
Engineers working for defense contractors get approached commonly enough that most defense contractors have explicit instructions given to their employees on how to handle the situation. These guys know enough about the intelligence agencies and black ops technologies that just having their identities known is a bad idea. Maybe they'll get a reward of some kind, but it'll be buried with a deep cover story or more likely just be a promotion to a higher pay grade (but spread out over several years).
The same reason the average persons should know that a toaster works by running current through some wire coils to heat up the bread. The same reason people should know how to do basic math without a calculator. Basic programming skills simply don't go out of date. Put a 70 year old FORTRAN programmer who's willing to learn in front of any modern language and they could be up to date in a matter of weeks. Knowing how your computer works, hell, just knowing that it isn't a magical box that is impossible to understand is a huge, huge deal.
High school should be about turning every kid into a little Renaissance Man, familiar with as many subjects as possible but experts in none. They don't have to know coming into graduation what they want to do with the rest of their life, but they should know where to start looking. That means a good base in all the essentials of modern society: language skills, math, science, computers, and yes, they should have some experience doing manual labor as well. At least then if they choose to enter the work force they'll know what they're getting themselves into.
That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard!
It sounds like something an idiot would put on his planetary air shield. Wait... I think we got this joke backwards somehow.
Makes Sony's security setup look like Fort Knox. And that's saying something.
This has the potential to make Global Warming so much worse. Lets assume global warming is real and we're headed for a maunder minimum level of hibernation. The expected temperature increases are pretty similar to the temperature drops associated with the last major minimum. It would convince people that global warming was all a big sham or even a blessing, and in the short term the blessing idea wouldn't even be totally incorrect, since the effects of a half century long solar minimum would almost certainly be at least as devastating to civilization as global warming.
But, that means that in 50-70 years, when the little ice age ends, we could be faced with the full force of global warming in less than a decade, instead of spread out over the course of half a century. It would be even more so to late to do anything about it, short of geoengineering at a massive scale, and even I, techno-optimist that I am, have difficulty accepting the idea that we'll be able to accurately manipulate the kinds of energy needed to alter the Earth's climate in a controlled way.
406 Comments so far; apparently enough people are interested to drive traffic, which is how Slashdot actually makes its money. If the Bitcoin articles had low comment counts, I'd agree with you that something is fishy, but speaking for myself I find the ideas that Bitcoins bring up interesting enough to be worth discussing. Not interesting enough to go and buy some Bitcoins, but as a subject that is worth thinking about longer term.
His union-busting went well enough for his purposes
If WI laws allowed it, he'd be facing a recall vote along with the 6 Republican senators that are already being recalled. And I'd be shocked if he doesn't face a recall when he becomes eligible for one in January. He pissed a lot of people off and if his goal was to weaken support for the unions he failed miserably. A lot of people who started out against the unions watched the unions agree to a pay cut, a benefits cut, and even a temporary moratorium on collective bargaining. There are people angry with the Democratic senators for their walk out, but even that anger isn't directed at the Unions. In the end, it was the unions who looked reasonable; while the Democrats looked petty and weak and the Republicans looked like card carrying villains.
I think he'd be hard pressed to explain his behavior on a national stage to anyone other than anti-union Republicans. Not to mention that there are about 100k people in WI that have shown themselves ready and willing to take time off from work to stand in the literally freezing rain just to show their displeasure for him. Sometimes the "Would never vote for" column is just as important as the "Would vote for" column in polling, because it shows how active and engaged people would be to someone who is opposing him.
Reminds me of a story I read somewhere, where the police didn't have a polygraph available. So they rigged up a headband with some wires, ran the wires into a photocopier and printed off copies of "HE'S LYING" in huge letters every time they thought he was. Probably and urban legend, but also probably about as effective as a 'real' polygraph is.
The official duties part is totally unnecessary. The judges have to realize these laws are broken, if they are upheld, simply taking a video camera to record your kid at the park would be an illegal act (with some ridiculously heavy penalties associated with it in some states).
Has a lightsaber ever been totally destroyed on screen? I remember at least one being cut in half or disabled and even that would be terrifying if the power source were anti-matter. Remember, any containment failure will result in all that energy, enough to melt through a meter thick blast door in Ep 1 without concern, being released instantly.
Nah, just too fast. They'll back off, wait a few months, then ease in with the same restrictions, maybe with a couple of intermediate steps in between so that people can rationalize it to themselves better. It's the exact same way you avoid outrage while increasing gas prices, removing citizens rights, etc...
And a grammar mistake to boot: "How exactly does a sentence [...] ends up having..."
In fairness, a significant part of their jobs as corporate executives is to be heard by as many people as possible. Not to mention that by virtue of their jobs they most likely meet hundreds, if not thousands of people every year. This whole thing is kind of ridiculous; they're public figures, their use cases for Facebook are different from the average person. Where I would recommend to most people that they personally know every person on their friends list, that advice doesn't make sense for people using Facebook the way these people are.
A hardcover book page of text averages 2500 bytes, making 25000 pages of text a whopping 60 megabytes. If 10,000 people download the documents over the course of a few weeks, their servers would need to average 340 kBps, I find their argument hard to believe. Of course, there's going to be pictures, attachments (which I doubt are included in this print out anyway), etc. on some of the emails, but I'm guessing based on their description of the 'process' used that every email is getting at least one page, that means that a single word response is going to get a whole page to itself. I suspect the average will work out to something quite a bit less than 2500 bytes average per page.
Word is that they're charging $400+ to receive a copy of the documents, which by my understanding is supposed to cover incremental costs only. A 1GB SD card can be had for $5, which should cover the emails with ease even if they include attached attached files. They may be following the letter of the law, but they are certainly not in line with the purpose which was to make government data available to the people who it belongs to. After all, the law just says that the information needs to be available at cost, it never says you have to reduce the costs as much as possible, now does it?
Because safety regulation is hard to enforce. Not hard as in actually difficult, but hard as in it takes real, physical work by highly educated people on the ground. Work that is dirty and potentially dangerous all to uncover issues that are so rare that a person might work their whole careers doing inspections without finding a single serious safety issue. And even that rate would fall dramatically if inspections really stepped up to the levels they should be because there would be significant incentive for the plants to take their own inspections seriously or risk a fine.
Basically, it is a job that leads to complacency. The people doing the work know how important the checks are, but at the same time they know that the odds of any one check discovering an issue are tiny. Find some way to keep the regulators at all levels motivated and engaged, from the people doing the actual inspections to their managers to the people in congress. It's orders of magnitude cheaper to enforce the rules than it would be to try and replace the nuclear plants.
That's what I don't understand, put the "cloud" server in a closet somewhere in my house and connect all the other machines up through a strong wireless N network and you might have something usable. I just can't imagine relying on your ISPs latency when it comes to graphics.
To be fair, when they released the first game the company was circling the drain. They used every last penny they had to publish the game and were more surprised than anyone that it was the hit that it was. That's where the "Final Fantasy" moniker comes from.
And since you are self admittedly unaware of the games, it's worth pointing out that there are very few sequels in the family. In fact, until FF X2 there were none that even took place in the same universe as any of the other entries. Since then, there have been a number that overlap universes, but generally separated by hundreds or thousands of years in universe time; enough so that the events of one game have virtually no impact on the other. There have also been a few more direct sequels (the aforementioned FF X2, Tactics Advance 2, a couple of crappy FFVII cashcows), but even those generally have different mechanics and game play.
Maybe you didn't read the earlier articles about just how horrible Sony's security setup is. Here's a hint: It's every bit bad enough that a dedicated group could find a different way into the system every day for weeks on end.
Inflation at a controlled rate is good for the economy. Deflation, which is what bitcoins are designed from the ground up to produce, is much more dangerous. In a deflationary system, your money is worth more tomorrow than it is today. Why bother investing that money in anything when the money will be worth more tomorrow than it is today? And if the bitcoin economy is increasing fast enough, you'll reach a point where there is no conceivable investment that is better than just stashing bitcoins in a safe place. Which, of course, restricts the number of bitcoins in actual circulation even further, increasing demand, increasing the value, and making a mattress full of money an even better investment.
Obviously inflation beyond a certain point is also dangerous, but deflation it creates a positive feedback cycle of hoarding cash. No investment, no loans, bare minimum spending. One of the reasons for the Federal Reserve dropping and keeping interests rates to near 0% for the past 3 years was to prevent the US entering the deflation spiral, and it's still not entirely clear if they succeeded; prices on many commodities have dropped for months at a time and the measured inflation rate was negative in many areas of the country last year.
A full 50% of your complaints are stylistic choices that many educators (incorrectly) teach students are bad English. A sentence can absolutely begin with the word 'and', especially if the writing is being done in a conversational tone of voice. Ending a sentence in a preposition has not been grammatically incorrect for something like 250 years.
Your other complaints, however, are completely valid; a little proof reading would have gone a long way towards preventing embarrassment.
Think about this though, the prison system is saying that it costs $35,000 at minimum to guard a prisoner. If you assume half of that goes to the actual 'prison' part of the equation, that leaves $17,500 to keep a prisoner alive and healthy; using tiny dormitory housing, cheap mass produced food, no travel budget, minimal healthcare, and few amenities. That is more money than a person makes, before taxes (no income taxes but other taxes are still applied at that income level) doing a minimum wage job 50 hours per week.