Ideally we'd do away with the ICEs entirely and eliminate all that crap
What a hippie! Ideally, come Paving Day, I'll be cruising the Paved Earth in my Atomic Hypercar under the light of the Chromed Moon, and hippies like you will be Pit Slaves, toiling endlessly to clean the restrooms and stock the vending machines for the driving elite.
What I like is "click anywhere is pause, scroll anywhere is volume", everything else is negotiable. Keyboard controls? In my living room? Damn Linux nerds!:p
X-wing shot: 'Hey I thought it wasn't safe for x-wings to fly in an atmosphere with the s-foils deployed.' Millenium Falcon shot: I hope he's got a new pilot, because I think Han's getting too old for this. Also: 25+ years later and they're still using original TIE fighters?
I noticed these and several other "no longer even pretending consistency" moments. I guess my reaction to the trailer is: "I've got a bad feeling about this."
McCarthyism came and went with no long-term effect on the nation. Eroding the Constitution is permanent - or at least I assume it will be as the GOP inevitably surrenders, rather than the House amending every bill the pass for the next 2 years with the sentence "Not withstanding any other provisions of law, no money shall be appropriated or otherwise spent on...". That's not a government shutdown, just an insistence on proper separation of powers.
Part of being a responsible adult is having enough savings to get you through hard times. Really.
One reason the crunch went on a while was "deleveraging" - maybe you heard the term - people deliberately paying down personal debt as they re-learned that lesson about adult responsibility, sobered up, and spent a few years borrowing less, to be less at the whim of the economy. Part of the reason for Japan's "lost decade" was carrying that to extremes, becoming I think the nation with the highest personal savings rate, which meant the economy went nowhere for a decade as people saved instead of spent (Japan had other issues as well, and no one understands that whole story yet).
Ultimately demand drives the economy - until people feel safe spending instead of saving, that won't happen. That's not so much about salary as it is about unemployment - unemployment needs to go down steadily for 12-18 months before people will generally switch from pessimism to optimism, as we tend to base our outlook on the past 1-2 years of personal experience, not abstract economic data (it's one reason individual investors tend to do poorly).
Also, you'll find most people don't switch from "keep my head down" to "I'm not paid enough!" only when we're well into economic upswing. From minimum wage fights to actual revolution, it's a sure sign of a growing economy when people start shouting "grow faster!"
You immediately dismissed the Constitution-defying means and talked about the ends. Without a government that respects the Constitution, America is nothing.
Every player should hold all my music, otherwise what's the point? But It's only a matter of time before a micro-SD card that can hold everything in FLAC is cheap, at which point it's a non-issue.
So you're say that methods matter and the ends don't automatically justify the means? What's your opinion on Obama's amnesty declaration vs the Constitution?
I'm sure you're right. Government can print infinite money with no negative consequences down the line. The only reason everyone isn't a millionaire already is the greed of evil bankers. Why didn't anyone realize this before in all of history?
I mean, it's clear as day: you just spend more money that you make, and life is therefore better. I can see no flaw in this plan.
Also, the economy can't recover because the same problem that keeps dragging it down still remains: people don't get paid enough to create enough demand to buy up everything the workforce can produce. As long as this situation persists, the only way to keep the economy even somewhat functional is to pump demand by flooding the market with cheap credit, with all the problems and risks that causes.
Every single economic recession in history looked like that. But we're already well on the upswing. Certainly everywhere around me (in the Seattle area) is hiring, from the minimum wages jobs to the construction sites to the tech companies.
The usual cycle starts up when people start buying durable consumer goods again: you put off buying that replacement car or washing machine or whatever when the future looks bleak, preferring to limp along with a somewhat-broken one. That demand broke out of the doldrums in early 2012, went back down for a year, and now has taken off like crazy. That's usually the spark that ignites recovery (or, questions of causation aside, it's reliably the sector that comes back first in a recovery).
As long as this situation persists, the only way to keep the economy even somewhat functional is to pump demand by flooding the market with cheap credit
There's just no evidence that actually works. Many nations have been trying that for decades without success. Once demand is booming, interest rates have proven a good tool to limit growth and pop bubbles, but the reverse doesn't seem to be true. Supply of money can curtail demand, but it can't create demand. When people are scared stability is all-important. Even when things are bad, people will adjust eventually and start spending again, and companies will adjust and start hiring again, if only the government doesn't keep changing the landscape.
Turns out the conspiracy theorists underestimated the NSA. Check the links in my reply to AC. Storing all US phone calls for a month is just a handful of PB, assuming reasonable compression.
It still astonishes me that people do personal stuff in the internet using their real name. I still can't get my head around that.
It's not like anyone's successfully hiding their identity from the NSA these days, sure, but from a casual search of your name by your boss? I don't even show up, except for my LinkedIn account.
So the top 1% can afford to have a political voice individually, without forming corporations, while the rest of us need some way to pool the money of thousands in order to accomplish that. Explain again how restricting corporate speech hurts that 1%? Would you have the government regulate the political speech of newspapers and cable news channels?
strangely conspiracy theorists are the first ones to jump on and believe such things (along with the "acres of datacentres listening to every call" junk)
Hey, welcome back to civilization, how did your 2 years without the internet go? While you were away, you missed some news (it was everywhere): turns out the US government was actually recording every voice call in a datacenter somewhere, and a lot more too! I know; crazy, huh? The truth was actually more extreme than the conspiracy theorists feared.
A CS degree shouldn't be thought of as providing the graduate with knowledge about how to use the latest toolsets. It should provide them with the answer to "why" rather than necessarily the "how".
Almost everything that's been useful from my college studies, 20 years back, came from about 3 courses: the first year in-major courses (which taught recursion, functional programming, and pointers), and the data structures and algorithms course.
There was a lot of crap that seemed interesting at the time, but was from other specialties (and no classes even offered related to my specialty). Those basics: recursion, functional programming, pointers, data structures and algorithms are quite important long term, and won't age out, but that's just a few classes.
Beyond that: people need jobs more than they need to keep professors busy, and practical skills with tool that will get you hired upon graduation need to be a priority, The future won't hold any unskilled labor - that will be all taken over by automation before much longer - and that means far more people will need to prepare for highly skilled jobs.
The only mechanism they have for that is one they've long abandoned: raising the "fractional" in "fractional reserve currency" above 0. And they weren't aggressive about that during the Carter years, no reason to assume they'd do it here. A return to 5-10 years of 10-15% inflation is possible - heck it may even be the goal of the Fed (we'll certainly never pay down the current debt without something like that).
The Fed created a couple trillion in new money to feed to the government for spending. That might have been enough to cause a currency collapse except for 2 things: other currencies were mostly worse, and the Fed paid banks billions (I'll wait while you recover from the surprise) to store a couple trillion in reserves with the Fed - so the net money in circulation didn't actually change much.
But as the economy recovers, the banks will likely withdraw that money from the Fed and invest it more profitably, putting those trillions into circulation that the Fed minted over the past decade or so. What happens then is anyone's guess - no nation has ever done this trick before, and there's no way to know what will happen to the currency.
No one should be cocky about this. It's nothing but intellectual arrogance to claim you know how this will play out over the coming decade.
Slashdot Mirror
Ideally we'd do away with the ICEs entirely and eliminate all that crap
What a hippie! Ideally, come Paving Day, I'll be cruising the Paved Earth in my Atomic Hypercar under the light of the Chromed Moon, and hippies like you will be Pit Slaves, toiling endlessly to clean the restrooms and stock the vending machines for the driving elite.
What I like is "click anywhere is pause, scroll anywhere is volume", everything else is negotiable. Keyboard controls? In my living room? Damn Linux nerds! :p
Indeed. Every single bit of technology ever devised has been used to kill people. It's what we do.
False. New technologies are divided between "invented to kill people" and "porn". With a few like the internet being dual-purpose.
Or, as the saying goes "there are two kinds of engineers: those who build weapons, and those who build targets".
Sitting here, watching it, I'm reminded of how awesome the trailer was for Episode 1 a long time ago and the reaction it got.
Quite so. OTOH, the Red Letter Media reviews (longer than the movies) were great. I hereby coin:
Plinkett's Law: The entertainment value of a Star Wars/Trek movie plus the entertainment value of the corresponding Plinkett review is constant.
X-wing shot: 'Hey I thought it wasn't safe for x-wings to fly in an atmosphere with the s-foils deployed.'
Millenium Falcon shot: I hope he's got a new pilot, because I think Han's getting too old for this. Also: 25+ years later and they're still using original TIE fighters?
I noticed these and several other "no longer even pretending consistency" moments. I guess my reaction to the trailer is: "I've got a bad feeling about this."
OK, I have no idea which side of this argument you're on, so I'll just leave this here.
McCarthyism came and went with no long-term effect on the nation. Eroding the Constitution is permanent - or at least I assume it will be as the GOP inevitably surrenders, rather than the House amending every bill the pass for the next 2 years with the sentence "Not withstanding any other provisions of law, no money shall be appropriated or otherwise spent on ...". That's not a government shutdown, just an insistence on proper separation of powers.
People aren't sitting on giant piles of treasure
Part of being a responsible adult is having enough savings to get you through hard times. Really.
One reason the crunch went on a while was "deleveraging" - maybe you heard the term - people deliberately paying down personal debt as they re-learned that lesson about adult responsibility, sobered up, and spent a few years borrowing less, to be less at the whim of the economy. Part of the reason for Japan's "lost decade" was carrying that to extremes, becoming I think the nation with the highest personal savings rate, which meant the economy went nowhere for a decade as people saved instead of spent (Japan had other issues as well, and no one understands that whole story yet).
Ultimately demand drives the economy - until people feel safe spending instead of saving, that won't happen. That's not so much about salary as it is about unemployment - unemployment needs to go down steadily for 12-18 months before people will generally switch from pessimism to optimism, as we tend to base our outlook on the past 1-2 years of personal experience, not abstract economic data (it's one reason individual investors tend to do poorly).
Also, you'll find most people don't switch from "keep my head down" to "I'm not paid enough!" only when we're well into economic upswing. From minimum wage fights to actual revolution, it's a sure sign of a growing economy when people start shouting "grow faster!"
You immediately dismissed the Constitution-defying means and talked about the ends. Without a government that respects the Constitution, America is nothing.
Wait, what? Oh, wait, do you actually believe in cold fusion? Now I'm just confused ...
VLCs UI constantly pisses me off - I just can't use it. Fortunately Media Player Classic is there, with the UI I like and no EULAs or DRM.
Every player should hold all my music, otherwise what's the point? But It's only a matter of time before a micro-SD card that can hold everything in FLAC is cheap, at which point it's a non-issue.
So you're say that methods matter and the ends don't automatically justify the means? What's your opinion on Obama's amnesty declaration vs the Constitution?
/thread
I'm sure you're right. Government can print infinite money with no negative consequences down the line. The only reason everyone isn't a millionaire already is the greed of evil bankers. Why didn't anyone realize this before in all of history?
I mean, it's clear as day: you just spend more money that you make, and life is therefore better. I can see no flaw in this plan.
Also, the economy can't recover because the same problem that keeps dragging it down still remains: people don't get paid enough to create enough demand to buy up everything the workforce can produce. As long as this situation persists, the only way to keep the economy even somewhat functional is to pump demand by flooding the market with cheap credit, with all the problems and risks that causes.
Every single economic recession in history looked like that. But we're already well on the upswing. Certainly everywhere around me (in the Seattle area) is hiring, from the minimum wages jobs to the construction sites to the tech companies.
The usual cycle starts up when people start buying durable consumer goods again: you put off buying that replacement car or washing machine or whatever when the future looks bleak, preferring to limp along with a somewhat-broken one. That demand broke out of the doldrums in early 2012, went back down for a year, and now has taken off like crazy. That's usually the spark that ignites recovery (or, questions of causation aside, it's reliably the sector that comes back first in a recovery).
As long as this situation persists, the only way to keep the economy even somewhat functional is to pump demand by flooding the market with cheap credit
There's just no evidence that actually works. Many nations have been trying that for decades without success. Once demand is booming, interest rates have proven a good tool to limit growth and pop bubbles, but the reverse doesn't seem to be true. Supply of money can curtail demand, but it can't create demand. When people are scared stability is all-important. Even when things are bad, people will adjust eventually and start spending again, and companies will adjust and start hiring again, if only the government doesn't keep changing the landscape.
Turns out the conspiracy theorists underestimated the NSA. Check the links in my reply to AC. Storing all US phone calls for a month is just a handful of PB, assuming reasonable compression.
Seriously, just scroll through this list of programs detailed on Bruce's page. Just the scope of programs is astonishing.
no, dumbledork. There's not that much tape production.
Citation fucking provided
"This is voice, not metadata." "In the initial deployment, collection systems are recording "every single" conversation nationwide."
It still astonishes me that people do personal stuff in the internet using their real name. I still can't get my head around that.
It's not like anyone's successfully hiding their identity from the NSA these days, sure, but from a casual search of your name by your boss? I don't even show up, except for my LinkedIn account.
Which category does the twitter account of a retired person go in?
Which category does the twitter account of an unemployed person go in?
That's the "employer discovered the Twitter account the employee thought was anonymous" bucket!
So the top 1% can afford to have a political voice individually, without forming corporations, while the rest of us need some way to pool the money of thousands in order to accomplish that. Explain again how restricting corporate speech hurts that 1%? Would you have the government regulate the political speech of newspapers and cable news channels?
strangely conspiracy theorists are the first ones to jump on and believe such things (along with the "acres of datacentres listening to every call" junk)
Hey, welcome back to civilization, how did your 2 years without the internet go? While you were away, you missed some news (it was everywhere): turns out the US government was actually recording every voice call in a datacenter somewhere, and a lot more too! I know; crazy, huh? The truth was actually more extreme than the conspiracy theorists feared.
A CS degree shouldn't be thought of as providing the graduate with knowledge about how to use the latest toolsets. It should provide them with the answer to "why" rather than necessarily the "how".
Almost everything that's been useful from my college studies, 20 years back, came from about 3 courses: the first year in-major courses (which taught recursion, functional programming, and pointers), and the data structures and algorithms course.
There was a lot of crap that seemed interesting at the time, but was from other specialties (and no classes even offered related to my specialty). Those basics: recursion, functional programming, pointers, data structures and algorithms are quite important long term, and won't age out, but that's just a few classes.
Beyond that: people need jobs more than they need to keep professors busy, and practical skills with tool that will get you hired upon graduation need to be a priority, The future won't hold any unskilled labor - that will be all taken over by automation before much longer - and that means far more people will need to prepare for highly skilled jobs.
The only mechanism they have for that is one they've long abandoned: raising the "fractional" in "fractional reserve currency" above 0. And they weren't aggressive about that during the Carter years, no reason to assume they'd do it here. A return to 5-10 years of 10-15% inflation is possible - heck it may even be the goal of the Fed (we'll certainly never pay down the current debt without something like that).
The Fed created a couple trillion in new money to feed to the government for spending. That might have been enough to cause a currency collapse except for 2 things: other currencies were mostly worse, and the Fed paid banks billions (I'll wait while you recover from the surprise) to store a couple trillion in reserves with the Fed - so the net money in circulation didn't actually change much.
But as the economy recovers, the banks will likely withdraw that money from the Fed and invest it more profitably, putting those trillions into circulation that the Fed minted over the past decade or so. What happens then is anyone's guess - no nation has ever done this trick before, and there's no way to know what will happen to the currency.
No one should be cocky about this. It's nothing but intellectual arrogance to claim you know how this will play out over the coming decade.