I hear arguments like this a lot, in general, but they forget that the S&P 500 (or whatever) is a selection of stocks which is continuously changed, and if you "held" the S&P 500, you'd have to sell the companies that drop out of it or go bankrupt, and buy into the companies that enter it. And suddenly, the amazing returns of whatever basket of stocks disappears. It doesn't take many lemons in the mix to ruin the supposed gain.
Sadly, I think the politicians like to think they can pay it off somehow. There will be unicorns or something. Or, some other bag holder after they get out of office, and it won't matter because they'll have their airports named after them and a nice golden parachute. They have to lie to themselves to be able to live with the system they are a part of.
Taxes are essentially money taken at gunpoint, and money borrowed by the government is essentially money taken from your children at gunpoint. We don't get to refuse to pay. I don't even get to vote.:-) However, unlike a lot of Americans, I did choose to live here, because I know how bad it can be elsewhere.
I treat it as the cost of living. There are worse places to live than the USA (I've lived in some of them), and I can work hard and save hard, and spread my money around in many forms, and hope that I get to keep a small part of it eventually. I'd love for things to be better than that, but I can't see a way to make it happen. I know I'll land on my feet, but I am now saving for a future family, and that's going to make things much more difficult.
I have no axe to grind here. One problem with the US two party system is that if you disagree with someone, they think you are in the other party, and assume all kinds of stuff about you. Don't, it's sloppy thinking. I'm not even American.
Defense spending is not part of a circle of bad debt that has a chance of generating a cascading failure across multiple markets.
Also, it's not a financial obligation already promised. Some might argue that staying in certain countries is a moral obligation, but the USA could slash defense spending without generating cries of default, or making pensioners eat dog food.
Also, defense spending may be a lot, but it is still chicken feed compared to the stuff I have already mentioned. Unfunded pension liabilities are close to 130 trillion (not a typo) dollars, and many of those pensions were invested in the housing market. Last I checked, the Fed is in hock for around 12 trillion dollars when you include things like guarantees on debt that is certain to go bad. Fannie and Freddie are basically a 100% loss in a 6 trillion dollar market. Defense spending is typically 0.5 to 1 trillion a year. It's significant, but like I said, not part of the interlocking bad debt that is truly going to screw the US.
If you take your blinkers off and read what I said again, you will noticed I did not specify what had to be cut, just that things have to change, and that bureaucracies are not capable of doing that.
So, why did you assume I had some axe to grind about the military? Hmm? Perhaps you should think about that.
You can inflate away old debt, but you lose the ability to sell new debt if so. Even if the government essentially defaults on all its existing obligations through inflation, I can't see politicians figuring out how to survive without being able to borrow money like crazy.:-) It'll be fun to watch though!
You can borrow until people decide you have no chance of paying back, then they refuse to lend you any more and demand their money back. This is not about partisan politics, so give it a rest. Reagan and Bush sure helped the USA down this path, but it is true that the Obama administration has been spending at about double the rate of the previous administration, and people who buy government debt (and thus are loaning the USA money) are noticing, and they are worried. If you really want someone to blame, blame FDR and Hoover for starting the USA down this path. Really though, it's just the way things are now regardless of who is nominally in charge. The bus has no driver.
I agree we should jump start our economy. Forcing those who are holding bad debt into bankruptcy, and cutting government spending to meet _existing_ tax revenues would be a good start. It would hurt like hell for a short while, but the economy would dramatically improve. I am not aware of any historical examples where government spending did anything beside drive the government into more debt, making things worse down the road (Japan is the perfect example). I am aware of examples where cutting spending and forcing bad banks into bankruptcy solved a country's financial problems in less than three years. Most recently, Iceland, and further back, the USA in 1920.
They can certainly do that with old debt, as long as they don't expect to sell any more treasuries in the meantime.
So, sure. They can default on all the existing debt, as long as they are willing to run the government on actual income after that. I don't have a big problem with that. Lending money is a form of gambling. Sometimes gamblers lose.
I just can't see the current crop of politicians dealing so well with having their purse strings cut.:-)
The solution to debt is not more debt. At some point someone is going to have to be grown up about this. It would be nice if they were grown up sooner, so that it hurts less. I'm not holding my breath.
Also, the US makes enough tax income to pay interest on it's current debt. In other words, "default" is not a consequence of refusing to raise the debt limit. Something will have to go unpaid, but it doesn't have to be the USA's debt interest. People are running fast and loose with the meaning of the word "default". Don't let them take you in.
Social security is an unfunded liability, currently funded through a Ponzi scheme, which is just now entering the "not enough new suckers" phase. (No, really, it is. There is no SS "trust fund". I can write checks to myself all day; it doesn't mean I have more money.)
Medicare is a disaster in terms of cost.
The US spends each day double what it takes in in taxes.
The US decided to take what was entirely a private problem (big banks would go bankrupt because they made bad bets on housing) and turn it into a government problem by bailing private entities out that should have gone bankrupt, and then guaranteeing lots of other debt. This actually prolongs the problem and makes it worse.
The Federal housing entities are some of the worst culprits, helping blow the housing bubble, and now pretending they are not bankrupt. They will have to implode and be shut down at some point. Bye bye Fannie and Freddie.
The inmates are running the asylum. It seems the solution to being seriously in debt is to spend more. There is also apparently a magical money multiplier that makes government spending somehow blessed and better than private spending. We have economists making arguments based on very dubious differential equations in which they carefully never specify their boundary conditions. The well known "economists" are more about justifying their political leanings than any actual scholarship.
Public union pensions for federal and state workers are unfunded to the tune of tens of trillions of dollars. These will never be paid out.
All of these chickens will have to come home to roost. Arguing about Democrats or Republicans or Left or Right completely ignores the fact that reality will eventually force a solution.
The current administration will do all of the worst possible things they could do. Not because they are evil, or Democrats, or whatever, but because bureaucracy is about protecting the way things are now. Their universe does not include actions which could fix this problem, because they would change the power balance and the money flows upon which they depend. The Republicans are being forced to pay lip service to the concept of being fiscally responsible by entities such as the Tea Party, but I can't see them doing anything real. They too are bureaucrats, and they too have rice bowls to fill.
If any entity did force some kind of resolution, it will be vilified by all and sundry, because resolution involves the death of a million sacred cows at all levels of this society. There's no upside for a politician in being vilified for doing something that will hurt this much, even if it's the right thing to do.
It would be nice to say that we get to pick whether we try to deal with it now, and maybe have a little control, or later, when it will be completely out of our control. In reality, I can't see that choice having any chance of being presented.
The Financial Crisis never ended. It was just temporarily papered over by insane government spending. Now we just have a bigger can to kick down the road.
A massive failure is coming, whether it be a cascade failure, or death by a thousand cuts. I have no idea when or how. I wish it would happen sooner so I can start concentrating on rebuilding, instead of trying to dodge falling pianos while the world at large tries to pretend we're in a light summer rainstorm.
Why do we need five different wireless data transfer standards when wireless USB will cover the same issues this technology Sony is trying to force would achieve?
First, it's two standards. Second, TransferJet's range limitation allows it to do things that W-USB can't do. Your questions have no merit because they are based on the fallacy that longer range is always better.
Using your logic, I could claim that the US should standardise on size 12 shoes. Why don't you try rewriting your question in terms of shoe sizes and see how well it comes out?
We'll leave demanding that there be only one (open) shoe design for later.
TransferJet is intended for transfer at high speeds over distances of around an inch. It uses negligible amounts of power and is very fast.
W-USB has a range of 10 feet, it uses some power, but not much, and is a little slower. It has 100 times the range of TransferJet.
They are intended for completely different markets. TransferJet is a intended for "base station" or "cradle" type applications where you would want to transfer data very fast, and don't want to have to muck with yet another cable. So, for example, you sit your HD Videocam on top of the DVR and the DVR gets a copy of the footage you just took.
They don't compete. They are for different things. There is no standards war here. It's like complaining that Xerox PARC were starting a standards war with keyboard manufacturers by releasing the mouse.
So, credit to kdawson for posting inflammatory drivel.
I think you should say they're far worse for whites. For blacks, things are slightly better.
Errr. Some of them. Maybe. For a while. The few that got into the power structure early are doing very well for themselves. The rest? Not so much. I have yet to see any real signs of a black middle class developing in SA. Wanna see how that turns out? Look at Nigeria.
Life expectancy for blacks in SA is DOWN almost 30 YEARS since the new government took over. Diseases that were almost wiped out among the black population are back in force because corruption in the entities that used to deal with those diseases.
Life expectancy for blacks in Zimbabwe is very very bad, especially if they live in one of the areas that voted against Mugabe last time around. It seems it's harder to get food there... Funny huh? I won't go into detail about torture during elections, or North Korean run death squads that have killed over a hundred thousand people.
Certain behaviors are toxic, and they eventually hurt everybody. Color is a first world obsession. If it's about anything, it's about culture. People outside Africa really have no idea what cultures they are dealing with and just how different they are. South Africa is sliding into a hole because of policies like affirmative action, which in the local cultural context actually evaluates to a particularly corrosive form of nepotism. Couple this with cultures that also happen to be particularly weak in value systems that are pretty much required to make a first world country work, and you have a recipe for disaster.
If you want to see what SA will look like in the future, look hard at Zimbabwe and Nigeria.
Then, you might want to reconsider your stance. It's ignorant, short sighted, and shallow.
One way of avoiding such techniques (other than writing correct code) is to use hardware support. The No-Execute page flag is one good start; having separate control-flow and data stacks would be another (where the control-flow stack would only be accessible through special instructions). Randomizing the location of the stack and the heap, and possibly make the memory allocation routine be less optimal and more random would also help a lot. Having a tagged memory architecture would be helpful as well (pointers to code could ONLY be manipulated through special instructions, and trying to load the wrong type of memory would cause a hardware exception).
We've been trying to push some hardware improvements for x86 that would make these kinds of attacks much more difficult. We aren't using a tagged memory architecture. The really hard part is making it backward compatible. Have a look at http://labyrinthcpu.com/ if you are interested, and follow the link to the standard. We are always looking for feedback from knowledgeable people. The idea is to be very open about the implementation and try to get feedback before we make a big push to get it into an x86 CPU (Heh. Wish us luck with that.:-P:-) ).
I'm not sure how much it affects things, but part of the reason I got a PS3 is that my girlfriend has a NetFlix subscription, and they will ship you the Blu-Ray version of a movie for no extra charge. If the special features on the Blu-Ray are as good as, or better than, those on the DVD (not a good assumption, we have to check each disk on Amazon), we get the Blu-Ray version.
I'm probably not going to buy any discs until I can buy them second hand. Until then, NetFlix is my friend.
I buy maybe 2 new DVDs a year. My girlfriend buys many times more than that, but she buys second-hand DVDs usually. Neither of us likes paying more than $10 for a 90 minute show.
I just pre-ordered the Planet Earth HD nature series for around $70, but that's a bit of an anomaly, as I get four disks with 11 episodes on them.
Just because I can afford a 42" screen and a PS3 doesn't mean I want to blow $35 on a single movie.:-P My girlfriend loves special features and the other bric a brac found on DVDs and Blu-Ray's poor initial offerings in that department meant they had no interest for her.
Given all of the above, I'm not all that surprised by Blu-Ray sales figures. I do wish I could see NetFlix's distribution figures for Blu-Rays though. That would be a very informative set of numbers, I think, as there is no price difference between DVD and Blu-Ray there.
Hey, I never claimed that I RTFA or did anything else remotely analytical. I just read Mr. Buesch's initial missive and stopped at Theo's response.
Pity. You would have seen a message from Mr. Buesch explaining exactly why each name was on the list. Basically, the individual names were people that were directly involved with the code or the driver in question, and the one list was a list for the driver. His reply seemed really reasonable to me.
Seems to me the BSD devs got caught with their hands in the cookie jar and Theo blew up instead of trying to fix things. *shrug*
Afterwards, you may have some relevant opinions. Until then, please pretend that the cryptographers designing this thing consulted with a five-year-old before publishing their results.
Afterwards, you may have some relevant opinions. Until then, please pretend that the cryptographers designing this thing consulted with a five-year-old before publishing their results.
The entire HF spectrum displays a wide variety of propogation. If one frequency isn't working, switch to another that is. It's exceedingly rare that there would be no HF band that would allow communication.
You are assuming that everyone is able to use every band. If the other guy is listening on the wrong band, no amount of switching is going to help you. Also, people are limited to the bands for which they have licenses (and/or antennas). Propogation is time of day specific, sun spot activity specific, dependent on whether you are crossing the equator, dependent on geomagnetic disturbances, and dependent on the distance between the two stations. It all adds up to being not that reliable.
Solar flares have forced en effective shutdown on most HF bands before. It happens. HF is variable enough that people don't assume they will have perfect HF connectivity. Removing HF connectivity with some advance warning (and to fix a far greater problem) shouldn't be that much of an issue. Anyone depending exclusively on 100% available HF connectivity is already asking for trouble.
I would be surprised if the ionosphere were more affected by the proposed plan than by a really bad solar flare. It's been a really long time since I did plasma physics, but I suspect plain old UV radiation from the sun would be enough to keep some bands open.
I wonder how both GPS and HF will be affected? If the ionosphere is not ionized enough to reflect HF, how can it stop microwaves?
There is nothing sudden about the anti-American nature of Slashdot. I think I can make a reasonable argument that Slashdot has more bad things to say about the USA than other nations:
1) People tend to talk more about things that annoy them. Things that annoy people generate more comments, and are more likely to be accepted as articles, because increased commenting is assumed to be correlated with increased interest. Your reply to me is an example. 2) People tend to be more annoyed about things that affect them. Typically things affect you more if they are in your country or are related to your country. 3) Slashdot editors are (as far as I know) exclusively American. This affects which articles they will find personally interesting. 4) There are more American slashdotters than any other nationality, by a large margin. 5) Hence, there will be more articles and comments about things that annoy Americans, and those things will be related to the USA.
It is unfortunate, but the absense of negative detail about other places will make many assume that the USA is worse than the other places. If those people read Slashdot a lot and comment too, this impression will be self-reinforcing.
Hence, you will see more negative stuff about America on Slashdot than about other countries.
The demographics of Slashdot readers implies that more readers would have bad things to say about the USA than not, even given a neutral environment, but I can't really construct a proper argument for that other than to suggest you have a look at the computer enthusiast / Internet user demographics data and draw your own conclusions.
Generally I find many an American's contempt for his own country annoying, as it usually based on ignorance about the rest of the world.
Um, the fact that there was even an article about something so pedestrian says something. The fact that they had to put the word "US" in front of almost every reference to the scheme says something. They told everyone it was a US plan at the beginning of the article; the redundancy was totally unnecessary.
*shrug* And yes, there is a general bias in many world media sources. They don't even know they have it. It's just that they spend most of their time speaking to each other, and the group "center of mass" is different from that of the rest of the world, or citizens of their own country. I strongly disagree with much of the conventional wisdom within those circles, and part of the conventional wisdom is a very distorted view of the USA and Europe.
New Zealand has its own problems. Their media is just as bad as usual, perhaps a bit worse, and they have destructive biases that come into play when talking about the environment and the USA. I am not a kiwi, but I have family there, so I'm not just making this up.
It is reasonable to say that that article may contain no bias whatsoever. It's just more statistically likely that there is some bias. Please feel free to ignore the first paragraph of my post and read the really important bits below it.
The article summary seems a little hysterical to me. It's "US plans" this and "US plans" that, combined with dark words about tampering with our environment. I am not American myself and am rather used to seeing this bias in reporting, especially in New Zealand press.
Solar sun spot activity often disrupts HF radio communications, and amazingly the world does not end. I have been involved in an HF station that provides missionaries and farmers in central Africa with a way to communicate, and you generally live with the fact that no communications are possible much of the time. HF is just plain unreliable. If GPS and HF communications were disrupted with some advance warning, it would be inconvenient for sure, but that's about it. In exchange the world would get a much safer radiation environment for satellites and human-occupied space stations.
So, we have a cost and a benefit. The cost isn't anything that people have had to do without before.
Political manoeuvering and a mildly hysterical press aside, there isn't much of a story here.
If you read the article, it says the distribution of half-lives of stories decreases as a power law, not that hit rates on stories decrease as a power law.
Half lives are a measurement of exponential decay. Individual stories still decrease in hits exponentially over time. If you look at lots of stories, the decays are distributed according to a power law.
The article directly contradicts the Slasdot summary.
Hits on stories do decrease exponentially.
I am stunned that I am the only one so far who seems to have picked up on this. Did anyone actually read the article, or did they just read into it what they were told they would see?
Er. Try reading what I said. Does that look like "going on"? Rabid frothing at the mouth? Promises of death and dismemberment if you don't come around to my view?
I had a look at the links. The one was a list of all the things circumcision was supposed to help with in the past. Yup. Long list of snake oil there... and totally irrelevant. Yeah, maybe it has been used as an excuse in the past, but that doesn't mean it has to be wrong this time around. Leeches were used for everything not too long ago. Now they are used for certain very specific problems and work well too.
The other link was a paper from 2000 interspersed with comments. So? A six year old refutation is given as proof that of a study from a year ago is flawed. The study in question is acknowledged as the first to use random selection and a large group of people, and seems to have been pretty well received.
You really didn't read a word I said, nor followed my link, did you?
Heh. And I just noticed that the bottom of the page says "Back to the Intactivism Index page" which goes to the root of the pages you linked, and where it says "Welcome to the Intactivism Pages" and tags itself as "The struggle for genital integrity and against the involuntary genital modification of children of any sex". It sounds like a worthy cause, and also a terribly biased source of refutations.
Also, I haven't come down hard on the side of circumcision either. I just presented what I knew, with qualifications. You are the one coming across like a bouncer in a bad bar. It appears you have an axe to grind, and you're grinding it now.
I'm not even advocating that people be circumcised. I'm just pointing out that already existing differences in rates of male circumcision may have made a difference. Get off your soap box and engage in real discussion, or stop wasting my time with dismissive comments.
Now. Last chance if you want me to reply. Say something substantive and address my questions, or I will ignore you henceforth.
(Hint: I don't really care much about male circumcision one way or another, and your dismissive and rude tone means you are on thin ice)
There are areas where the black rate of infection is very high and the white rate is very low. Nobody knows exactly why, but everyone has an opinion. I tried to give all the reasons I have heard that might make sense and that I think are most likely. Note the careful use of words like "seems" and "probably" in selected places.
The quote I saw about circumcision said there was a massive improvement, and they stopped the test early because it seemed unethical to not allow the uncircumcised participants the benefits of circumcision. I couldn't find the article I read, but I did find this, which may be about the same test, but I am not sure as I don't think the article I read said anything about it being in South Africa:
It's all still pretty new, and I am sure there will be some arguing back and forth.
I'm not sure why you would think I am trolling. I am just telling you what I know from things I have read and from people I have spoken to, and I happen to be from Africa myself, so I tend to see things rather differently than people from outside the continent. I have no sacred cows here, and am a bit confused why someone would be annoyed by my post. Tell me, why do you think there is such a large disparity in infection rates?
Besides the comment about circumcision, do you have any other particular problems with what I said?
(Hint: Someone who says something you disagree with is not necessarily a troll, and might be willing to speak civilly with you if civilly approached)
Slashdot Mirror
I hear arguments like this a lot, in general, but they forget that the S&P 500 (or whatever) is a selection of stocks which is continuously changed, and if you "held" the S&P 500, you'd have to sell the companies that drop out of it or go bankrupt, and buy into the companies that enter it. And suddenly, the amazing returns of whatever basket of stocks disappears. It doesn't take many lemons in the mix to ruin the supposed gain.
I hear you.
Sadly, I think the politicians like to think they can pay it off somehow. There will be unicorns or something. Or, some other bag holder after they get out of office, and it won't matter because they'll have their airports named after them and a nice golden parachute. They have to lie to themselves to be able to live with the system they are a part of.
Taxes are essentially money taken at gunpoint, and money borrowed by the government is essentially money taken from your children at gunpoint. We don't get to refuse to pay. I don't even get to vote. :-) However, unlike a lot of Americans, I did choose to live here, because I know how bad it can be elsewhere.
I treat it as the cost of living. There are worse places to live than the USA (I've lived in some of them), and I can work hard and save hard, and spread my money around in many forms, and hope that I get to keep a small part of it eventually. I'd love for things to be better than that, but I can't see a way to make it happen. I know I'll land on my feet, but I am now saving for a future family, and that's going to make things much more difficult.
I have no axe to grind here. One problem with the US two party system is that if you disagree with someone, they think you are in the other party, and assume all kinds of stuff about you. Don't, it's sloppy thinking. I'm not even American.
Defense spending is not part of a circle of bad debt that has a chance of generating a cascading failure across multiple markets.
Also, it's not a financial obligation already promised. Some might argue that staying in certain countries is a moral obligation, but the USA could slash defense spending without generating cries of default, or making pensioners eat dog food.
Also, defense spending may be a lot, but it is still chicken feed compared to the stuff I have already mentioned. Unfunded pension liabilities are close to 130 trillion (not a typo) dollars, and many of those pensions were invested in the housing market. Last I checked, the Fed is in hock for around 12 trillion dollars when you include things like guarantees on debt that is certain to go bad. Fannie and Freddie are basically a 100% loss in a 6 trillion dollar market. Defense spending is typically 0.5 to 1 trillion a year. It's significant, but like I said, not part of the interlocking bad debt that is truly going to screw the US.
If you take your blinkers off and read what I said again, you will noticed I did not specify what had to be cut, just that things have to change, and that bureaucracies are not capable of doing that.
So, why did you assume I had some axe to grind about the military? Hmm? Perhaps you should think about that.
You can inflate away old debt, but you lose the ability to sell new debt if so. Even if the government essentially defaults on all its existing obligations through inflation, I can't see politicians figuring out how to survive without being able to borrow money like crazy. :-) It'll be fun to watch though!
You can borrow until people decide you have no chance of paying back, then they refuse to lend you any more and demand their money back. This is not about partisan politics, so give it a rest. Reagan and Bush sure helped the USA down this path, but it is true that the Obama administration has been spending at about double the rate of the previous administration, and people who buy government debt (and thus are loaning the USA money) are noticing, and they are worried. If you really want someone to blame, blame FDR and Hoover for starting the USA down this path. Really though, it's just the way things are now regardless of who is nominally in charge. The bus has no driver.
I agree we should jump start our economy. Forcing those who are holding bad debt into bankruptcy, and cutting government spending to meet _existing_ tax revenues would be a good start. It would hurt like hell for a short while, but the economy would dramatically improve. I am not aware of any historical examples where government spending did anything beside drive the government into more debt, making things worse down the road (Japan is the perfect example). I am aware of examples where cutting spending and forcing bad banks into bankruptcy solved a country's financial problems in less than three years. Most recently, Iceland, and further back, the USA in 1920.
They can certainly do that with old debt, as long as they don't expect to sell any more treasuries in the meantime.
So, sure. They can default on all the existing debt, as long as they are willing to run the government on actual income after that. I don't have a big problem with that. Lending money is a form of gambling. Sometimes gamblers lose.
I just can't see the current crop of politicians dealing so well with having their purse strings cut. :-)
The solution to debt is not more debt. At some point someone is going to have to be grown up about this. It would be nice if they were grown up sooner, so that it hurts less. I'm not holding my breath.
Also, the US makes enough tax income to pay interest on it's current debt. In other words, "default" is not a consequence of refusing to raise the debt limit. Something will have to go unpaid, but it doesn't have to be the USA's debt interest. People are running fast and loose with the meaning of the word "default". Don't let them take you in.
Social security is an unfunded liability, currently funded through a Ponzi scheme, which is just now entering the "not enough new suckers" phase. (No, really, it is. There is no SS "trust fund". I can write checks to myself all day; it doesn't mean I have more money.)
Medicare is a disaster in terms of cost.
The US spends each day double what it takes in in taxes.
The US decided to take what was entirely a private problem (big banks would go bankrupt because they made bad bets on housing) and turn it into a government problem by bailing private entities out that should have gone bankrupt, and then guaranteeing lots of other debt. This actually prolongs the problem and makes it worse.
The Federal housing entities are some of the worst culprits, helping blow the housing bubble, and now pretending they are not bankrupt. They will have to implode and be shut down at some point. Bye bye Fannie and Freddie.
The inmates are running the asylum. It seems the solution to being seriously in debt is to spend more. There is also apparently a magical money multiplier that makes government spending somehow blessed and better than private spending. We have economists making arguments based on very dubious differential equations in which they carefully never specify their boundary conditions. The well known "economists" are more about justifying their political leanings than any actual scholarship.
Public union pensions for federal and state workers are unfunded to the tune of tens of trillions of dollars. These will never be paid out.
All of these chickens will have to come home to roost. Arguing about Democrats or Republicans or Left or Right completely ignores the fact that reality will eventually force a solution.
The current administration will do all of the worst possible things they could do. Not because they are evil, or Democrats, or whatever, but because bureaucracy is about protecting the way things are now. Their universe does not include actions which could fix this problem, because they would change the power balance and the money flows upon which they depend. The Republicans are being forced to pay lip service to the concept of being fiscally responsible by entities such as the Tea Party, but I can't see them doing anything real. They too are bureaucrats, and they too have rice bowls to fill.
If any entity did force some kind of resolution, it will be vilified by all and sundry, because resolution involves the death of a million sacred cows at all levels of this society. There's no upside for a politician in being vilified for doing something that will hurt this much, even if it's the right thing to do.
It would be nice to say that we get to pick whether we try to deal with it now, and maybe have a little control, or later, when it will be completely out of our control. In reality, I can't see that choice having any chance of being presented.
The Financial Crisis never ended. It was just temporarily papered over by insane government spending. Now we just have a bigger can to kick down the road.
A massive failure is coming, whether it be a cascade failure, or death by a thousand cuts. I have no idea when or how. I wish it would happen sooner so I can start concentrating on rebuilding, instead of trying to dodge falling pianos while the world at large tries to pretend we're in a light summer rainstorm.
Yeah. I know. I totally spaced that we were talking about integrated chipsets only. D'oh!
Well, there is also the interesting tidbit that it doesn't enable those optimizations unless the CPU is an Intel CPU.
Hmm.
Why do we need five different wireless data transfer standards when wireless USB will cover the same issues this technology Sony is trying to force would achieve?
First, it's two standards. Second, TransferJet's range limitation allows it to do things that W-USB can't do. Your questions have no merit because they are based on the fallacy that longer range is always better.
Using your logic, I could claim that the US should standardise on size 12 shoes. Why don't you try rewriting your question in terms of shoe sizes and see how well it comes out?
We'll leave demanding that there be only one (open) shoe design for later.
The heading and summary is a load of horseshit.
TransferJet is intended for transfer at high speeds over distances of around an inch. It uses negligible amounts of power and is very fast.
W-USB has a range of 10 feet, it uses some power, but not much, and is a little slower. It has 100 times the range of TransferJet.
They are intended for completely different markets. TransferJet is a intended for "base station" or "cradle" type applications where you would want to transfer data very fast, and don't want to have to muck with yet another cable. So, for example, you sit your HD Videocam on top of the DVR and the DVR gets a copy of the footage you just took.
They don't compete. They are for different things. There is no standards war here. It's like complaining that Xerox PARC were starting a standards war with keyboard manufacturers by releasing the mouse.
So, credit to kdawson for posting inflammatory drivel.
I think you should say they're far worse for whites. For blacks, things are slightly better.
Errr. Some of them. Maybe. For a while. The few that got into the power structure early are doing very well for themselves. The rest? Not so much. I have yet to see any real signs of a black middle class developing in SA. Wanna see how that turns out? Look at Nigeria.
Life expectancy for blacks in SA is DOWN almost 30 YEARS since the new government took over. Diseases that were almost wiped out among the black population are back in force because corruption in the entities that used to deal with those diseases.
Life expectancy for blacks in Zimbabwe is very very bad, especially if they live in one of the areas that voted against Mugabe last time around. It seems it's harder to get food there... Funny huh? I won't go into detail about torture during elections, or North Korean run death squads that have killed over a hundred thousand people.
Certain behaviors are toxic, and they eventually hurt everybody. Color is a first world obsession. If it's about anything, it's about culture. People outside Africa really have no idea what cultures they are dealing with and just how different they are. South Africa is sliding into a hole because of policies like affirmative action, which in the local cultural context actually evaluates to a particularly corrosive form of nepotism. Couple this with cultures that also happen to be particularly weak in value systems that are pretty much required to make a first world country work, and you have a recipe for disaster.
If you want to see what SA will look like in the future, look hard at Zimbabwe and Nigeria.
Then, you might want to reconsider your stance. It's ignorant, short sighted, and shallow.
One way of avoiding such techniques (other than writing correct code) is to use hardware support. The No-Execute page flag is one good start; having separate control-flow and data stacks would be another (where the control-flow stack would only be accessible through special instructions). Randomizing the location of the stack and the heap, and possibly make the memory allocation routine be less optimal and more random would also help a lot. Having a tagged memory architecture would be helpful as well (pointers to code could ONLY be manipulated through special instructions, and trying to load the wrong type of memory would cause a hardware exception).
:-P :-) ).
We've been trying to push some hardware improvements for x86 that would make these kinds of attacks much more difficult. We aren't using a tagged memory architecture. The really hard part is making it backward compatible. Have a look at http://labyrinthcpu.com/ if you are interested, and follow the link to the standard. We are always looking for feedback from knowledgeable people. The idea is to be very open about the implementation and try to get feedback before we make a big push to get it into an x86 CPU (Heh. Wish us luck with that.
I'm not sure how much it affects things, but part of the reason I got a PS3 is that my girlfriend has a NetFlix subscription, and they will ship you the Blu-Ray version of a movie for no extra charge. If the special features on the Blu-Ray are as good as, or better than, those on the DVD (not a good assumption, we have to check each disk on Amazon), we get the Blu-Ray version.
:-P My girlfriend loves special features and the other bric a brac found on DVDs and Blu-Ray's poor initial offerings in that department meant they had no interest for her.
I'm probably not going to buy any discs until I can buy them second hand. Until then, NetFlix is my friend.
I buy maybe 2 new DVDs a year. My girlfriend buys many times more than that, but she buys second-hand DVDs usually. Neither of us likes paying more than $10 for a 90 minute show.
I just pre-ordered the Planet Earth HD nature series for around $70, but that's a bit of an anomaly, as I get four disks with 11 episodes on them.
Just because I can afford a 42" screen and a PS3 doesn't mean I want to blow $35 on a single movie.
Given all of the above, I'm not all that surprised by Blu-Ray sales figures. I do wish I could see NetFlix's distribution figures for Blu-Rays though. That would be a very informative set of numbers, I think, as there is no price difference between DVD and Blu-Ray there.
Hey, I never claimed that I RTFA or did anything else remotely analytical. I just read Mr. Buesch's initial missive and stopped at Theo's response.
Pity. You would have seen a message from Mr. Buesch explaining exactly why each name was on the list. Basically, the individual names were people that were directly involved with the code or the driver in question, and the one list was a list for the driver. His reply seemed really reasonable to me.
Seems to me the BSD devs got caught with their hands in the cookie jar and Theo blew up instead of trying to fix things. *shrug*
I'm not sure why you think Punchcard doesn't allow you to do that, but I suggest you read the following thesis:
http://ben.adida.net/research/phd-thesis.pdf
Afterwards, you may have some relevant opinions. Until then, please pretend that the cryptographers designing this thing consulted with a five-year-old before publishing their results.
*rolls eyes* RTFA, idiot. You can't buy votes with this scheme.
There are guarantees. Mathematical ones. Every concern you have stated has been mulled over for over a decade now by very bright cryptographers.
Are you really arrogant enough to think that your blatantly obvious concerns aren't blatantly obvious to the designers of this scheme?
Try reading this if you are truly interested in what's possible:
http://ben.adida.net/research/phd-thesis.pdf
Afterwards, you may have some relevant opinions. Until then, please pretend that the cryptographers designing this thing consulted with a five-year-old before publishing their results.
The entire HF spectrum displays a wide variety of propogation. If one frequency isn't working, switch to another that is. It's exceedingly rare that there would be no HF band that would allow communication.
You are assuming that everyone is able to use every band. If the other guy is listening on the wrong band, no amount of switching is going to help you. Also, people are limited to the bands for which they have licenses (and/or antennas). Propogation is time of day specific, sun spot activity specific, dependent on whether you are crossing the equator, dependent on geomagnetic disturbances, and dependent on the distance between the two stations. It all adds up to being not that reliable.
Solar flares have forced en effective shutdown on most HF bands before. It happens. HF is variable enough that people don't assume they will have perfect HF connectivity. Removing HF connectivity with some advance warning (and to fix a far greater problem) shouldn't be that much of an issue. Anyone depending exclusively on 100% available HF connectivity is already asking for trouble.
I would be surprised if the ionosphere were more affected by the proposed plan than by a really bad solar flare. It's been a really long time since I did plasma physics, but I suspect plain old UV radiation from the sun would be enough to keep some bands open.
I wonder how both GPS and HF will be affected? If the ionosphere is not ionized enough to reflect HF, how can it stop microwaves?
There is nothing sudden about the anti-American nature of Slashdot. I think I can make a reasonable argument that Slashdot has more bad things to say about the USA than other nations:
1) People tend to talk more about things that annoy them. Things that annoy people generate more comments, and are more likely to be accepted as articles, because increased commenting is assumed to be correlated with increased interest. Your reply to me is an example.
2) People tend to be more annoyed about things that affect them. Typically things affect you more if they are in your country or are related to your country.
3) Slashdot editors are (as far as I know) exclusively American. This affects which articles they will find personally interesting.
4) There are more American slashdotters than any other nationality, by a large margin.
5) Hence, there will be more articles and comments about things that annoy Americans, and those things will be related to the USA.
It is unfortunate, but the absense of negative detail about other places will make many assume that the USA is worse than the other places. If those people read Slashdot a lot and comment too, this impression will be self-reinforcing.
Hence, you will see more negative stuff about America on Slashdot than about other countries.
The demographics of Slashdot readers implies that more readers would have bad things to say about the USA than not, even given a neutral environment, but I can't really construct a proper argument for that other than to suggest you have a look at the computer enthusiast / Internet user demographics data and draw your own conclusions.
Generally I find many an American's contempt for his own country annoying, as it usually based on ignorance about the rest of the world.
Um, the fact that there was even an article about something so pedestrian says something. The fact that they had to put the word "US" in front of almost every reference to the scheme says something. They told everyone it was a US plan at the beginning of the article; the redundancy was totally unnecessary.
*shrug* And yes, there is a general bias in many world media sources. They don't even know they have it. It's just that they spend most of their time speaking to each other, and the group "center of mass" is different from that of the rest of the world, or citizens of their own country. I strongly disagree with much of the conventional wisdom within those circles, and part of the conventional wisdom is a very distorted view of the USA and Europe.
New Zealand has its own problems. Their media is just as bad as usual, perhaps a bit worse, and they have destructive biases that come into play when talking about the environment and the USA. I am not a kiwi, but I have family there, so I'm not just making this up.
It is reasonable to say that that article may contain no bias whatsoever. It's just more statistically likely that there is some bias. Please feel free to ignore the first paragraph of my post and read the really important bits below it.
Argh. I should have previewed one more time. The cost is something that people have had to do without before.
The article summary seems a little hysterical to me. It's "US plans" this and "US plans" that, combined with dark words about tampering with our environment. I am not American myself and am rather used to seeing this bias in reporting, especially in New Zealand press.
Solar sun spot activity often disrupts HF radio communications, and amazingly the world does not end. I have been involved in an HF station that provides missionaries and farmers in central Africa with a way to communicate, and you generally live with the fact that no communications are possible much of the time. HF is just plain unreliable. If GPS and HF communications were disrupted with some advance warning, it would be inconvenient for sure, but that's about it. In exchange the world would get a much safer radiation environment for satellites and human-occupied space stations.
So, we have a cost and a benefit. The cost isn't anything that people have had to do without before.
Political manoeuvering and a mildly hysterical press aside, there isn't much of a story here.
If you read the article, it says the distribution of half-lives of stories decreases as a power law, not that hit rates on stories decrease as a power law.
Half lives are a measurement of exponential decay. Individual stories still decrease in hits exponentially over time. If you look at lots of stories, the decays are distributed according to a power law.
The article directly contradicts the Slasdot summary.
Hits on stories do decrease exponentially.
I am stunned that I am the only one so far who seems to have picked up on this. Did anyone actually read the article, or did they just read into it what they were told they would see?
Er. Try reading what I said. Does that look like "going on"? Rabid frothing at the mouth? Promises of death and dismemberment if you don't come around to my view?
I had a look at the links. The one was a list of all the things circumcision was supposed to help with in the past. Yup. Long list of snake oil there... and totally irrelevant. Yeah, maybe it has been used as an excuse in the past, but that doesn't mean it has to be wrong this time around. Leeches were used for everything not too long ago. Now they are used for certain very specific problems and work well too.
The other link was a paper from 2000 interspersed with comments. So? A six year old refutation is given as proof that of a study from a year ago is flawed. The study in question is acknowledged as the first to use random selection and a large group of people, and seems to have been pretty well received.
You really didn't read a word I said, nor followed my link, did you?
Heh. And I just noticed that the bottom of the page says "Back to the Intactivism Index page" which goes to the root of the pages you linked, and where it says "Welcome to the Intactivism Pages" and tags itself as "The struggle for genital integrity and against the involuntary genital modification of children of any sex". It sounds like a worthy cause, and also a terribly biased source of refutations.
Also, I haven't come down hard on the side of circumcision either. I just presented what I knew, with qualifications. You are the one coming across like a bouncer in a bad bar. It appears you have an axe to grind, and you're grinding it now.
I'm not even advocating that people be circumcised. I'm just pointing out that already existing differences in rates of male circumcision may have made a difference. Get off your soap box and engage in real discussion, or stop wasting my time with dismissive comments.
Now. Last chance if you want me to reply. Say something substantive and address my questions, or I will ignore you henceforth.
(Hint: I don't really care much about male circumcision one way or another, and your dismissive and rude tone means you are on thin ice)
Am I a troll? No.
v _recent_rep.cfm?dr_cat=1&show=yes&dr_DateTime=10-2 6-05#33323
There are areas where the black rate of infection is very high and the white rate is very low. Nobody knows exactly why, but everyone has an opinion. I tried to give all the reasons I have heard that might make sense and that I think are most likely. Note the careful use of words like "seems" and "probably" in selected places.
The quote I saw about circumcision said there was a massive improvement, and they stopped the test early because it seemed unethical to not allow the uncircumcised participants the benefits of circumcision. I couldn't find the article I read, but I did find this, which may be about the same test, but I am not sure as I don't think the article I read said anything about it being in South Africa:
http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_hi
It's all still pretty new, and I am sure there will be some arguing back and forth.
I'm not sure why you would think I am trolling. I am just telling you what I know from things I have read and from people I have spoken to, and I happen to be from Africa myself, so I tend to see things rather differently than people from outside the continent. I have no sacred cows here, and am a bit confused why someone would be annoyed by my post. Tell me, why do you think there is such a large disparity in infection rates?
Besides the comment about circumcision, do you have any other particular problems with what I said?
(Hint: Someone who says something you disagree with is not necessarily a troll, and might be willing to speak civilly with you if civilly approached)