Let's do some calculations. Cat-5 cable has eight strands of AWG 24 wire, which has 817.7 feet/lb, that means the cable contains one pound of copper for each 102.2 feet. Scrap copper is worth $4.30/lb, meaning 23.77 feet of cat-5 are worth $1.
The minimum wage in Armenia is, according to Wikipedia, equivalent to US$1888/year. Assuming someone works 50 weeks/year @ 40 hours/week, that is 2000 working hours to earn those $1888.
What all this means is that she has to steal 22.4 ft of cat-5 to get the same she would get working one hour at the Armenian minimum wage.
In the USA minimum wage is $7.25/hour, that is 172.3 ft worth of cat-5 scrap.
In conclusion, it may not be worth pulling cable out of a building in the USA unless you are doing other restorations or demolishing it, but in Armenia you should be less likely to find abandoned copper.
I wonder what a bank would do to the branch manager if a former employee could walk away with $200,000 six months after being fired. Or, to use a car analogy, if a former employee was able to walk into a dealership and drive away with a $200,000 car just like that.
The law about computer crimes should have strong penalties for managers that allow that shit to happen. It would be somewhat different if the guy still worked for the corporation, because it's much harder to guard against an attack from inside, but if someone is responsible for managing a valuable asset he should be competent enough to take reasonable precautions to protect it from any attack someone could bring from outside.
If you cause harm due to ignoring the possible consequences of your action you should be punished according to the consequences of your act, not according to your intent. That's what the law defines as "criminal negligence".
This sentence FTFA makes me rather dubious: "A new analysis of 10,000 proton-antiproton collisions at the Tevatron showed a weird result a couple hundred times".
Two problems here: a "new" analysis? Does it mean it needs massaging the results? And two hundred times out of ten thousand does not necessarily mean it's statistically significant, that's 2%, to know if it's significant or not one needs more information than those two numbers alone.
An intriguing result is in this paragraph: "Last fall, Fermilab physicists said they detected evidence for a new class of neutrino, a 'sterile' particle that only interacts through gravity. Those results came out of the MiniBooNE detector; this is is the result of a different experiment, Tevatron's CDF experiment."
If this is true, could that be the "dark mass" particle that cosmologists need?
Every one should come with a full copy of LiveCode or something that lets kids mess around with building their own apps right out of the box, without the training overhead that comes from so many modern IDEs
Python with PyQt is the closest thing I can imagine. Although programming GUIs is still a PITA compared to the old ways, Qt comes close to having the best possible GUI API and Python has the simplest syntax among modern languages.
And, yes, it should be a Linux computer. If you want to motivate kids, there's no reason to encumber them with all the cruft that MS-Windows has accumulated over twenty years.
Their worth is not that they are exactly "smart", but that they show that you don't need to be so "smart" to use your brains effectively. There are many times when I see they doing things in a sub-optimal way because they don't know better, but they aren't afraid to question their own beliefs. They are always ready to test things from a skeptic's point of view and that's more than many "smarter" people do.
It's like hardware vs. algorithms. The "typical" scientist would be like a supercomputer, the Mythbusters are a desktop PC running a streamlined algorithm to get equivalent results with less brainpower.
Of particular interest was communion whereby Christians "ate the flesh and drank the blood of Jesus Christ." You can understand why Romans were upset.
No, they didn't mind that, since Christians copied that part from the cult of Bacchus. What really upset the Roman government was that Christians insisted theirs was the only god and all others were fake and had to be destroyed.
And the funny thing is, you know what? History repeats itself. The current most extremist religious group is even worse. After all, during the Roman Empire Christians didn't mind if someone made a drawing of their prophet.
there are other parts of the world where it's basically just proof that they paid their fee or bribed an official. Some places for a nominal bribe they'll put whatever name you like on the documents.
And the Interpol would solve this problem exactly how?
No self-respecting sovereign country would allow the Interpol to send agents to verify that the data is correct, they would still depend on people being correctly identified by their nation of residence or citizenship. Not to mention the cost of installing Interpol offices everywhere in the world.
Besides, even in the USA or EU it's not so difficult to assume a fake identity once you realize everything starts with a birth certificate, and birth certificates do not contain any data from after you were born. Get a birth certificate from a person who could be plausibly you and you can get any other document. There are many ways of doing it.
And the grads have an even more difficult time finding employment outside academia
Why? Where do you think all those managers, salespeople, business consultants, etc come from? A liberal arts degree is the easiest first step to an MBA.
Of course, a PhD in liberal arts may be overkill, but a masters is great in your resume. It shows you have a flexible mind, can think outside the box, have appreciation for diversity, or whatever is the current trend in positive qualifications for a manager.
The only way a liberal arts graduate could feel miserable is if he actually enjoys his field of study...
Throughout my career (I have a PhD in Chemistry) I found the preparation in maths of Biology majors absolutely abysmal.
To make it worse, it seems to me that *every* college course today is very weak in computer programming. The college graduates I meet seem to rely entirely on excel spreadsheets, with a very few "hard" sciences majors knowing a little bit of matlab.
Computers have become the universal tool, but no one is able to explore their capabilities, recent graduates are like illiterate peasants in a library.
A good analogy is to compare software development with leadership. A leader is someone who gets people to do what cannot be done by a person alone. A programmer is someone who gets computers to do what cannot be done by humans. In an age when automation replaces workers, software developers are the leaders. Too bad university students cannot see this simple analogy.
A dividing line in human history is the invention of writing. That's what differentiates pre-history from history. After the invention of writing we have records of what happens, before that it's up to archaeologists to dig ancient garbage dumps to infer things.
Incredibly, there are people who want to run the inverse way in computing.
What next, will we have to climb trees to use computers?
Then they just SAID they couldn't find them any more when private space industry startups tried to get them when NASA was designing the shuttle and Congress was wondering why they couldn't continue to do launches with the proven technology rather than having to fund all this new stuff, including new big engines?
I'm sure the Ford corporation still has the plans for the Model T, which doesn't mean it would be better to continue using that proven technology.
The Saturn V was simply too big for commercial launches. The not so big launchers today launch two commercial satellites at a time. Having a bigger launcher would mean bigger logistics problems: how do you coordinate the construction of several satellites so that all of them are ready to launch at the same time?
If there existed a need for a bigger launcher than the Saturn V there would be no problem in designing one, and it would probably be cheaper after adjustment for inflation.
Japan had a functioning state which resembled what we have in the west. Contrast that with Afghanistan, a very large part of which is based around tribal governance and infrastructure.
"Tribalism" is the normal status of any nation. Consider that the USA is a federation of states, each with its own legislation. Germany was, until Bismark united it, a loose confederation of sovereign principalities. Same as Italy before Garibaldi. Look at what became of the former Soviet Union.
The existence of a powerful central government is the exception rather than the rule. And it's not even such a good situation all in all. Better a loosely bound federation of states, such as Europe today.
However, none of this has to do with the main problem in Afghanistan today, which is religion fanaticism dominating the culture of the country. In 1970 it was a civilized country, where a mullah was no more powerful than a Christian bishop is in a western European country of today.
The Soviet invasion and the subsequent disastrous Reagan policy of using religion to counteract Communism changed all that. This cultural transformation happened very quickly and there's no reason to believe it cannot be undone just as quickly. The only thing needed is to put religion in its place.
All VBA macros in excel would perform much better if a domain specific language is used. The tradeoff is development time vs performance, so for the average Joe they remain VBA macros in excel.
No, the tradeoff is in the first step of the learning curve. People learn excel by osmosis, the first small spreadsheet is intuitive enough, and they evolve by asking other people how to add this or that feature.
In contrast to that, you need to do a bit of learning before you start using a "true" programming language. However, once you take that first step, you can develop anything in a language like Python much faster than if you did it in excel.
The Soviet Union went into Afghanistan because they wanted Pakistan, in order to get a naval base that had access to open ocean all year round.
The USA, on the other hand, didn't want *any* resource from Afghanistan whatsoever. Different from the Soviet Union, it's not a strategic location for the USA. It has no mineral resources. No industry. No economic assets worth fighting for.
There was one and only one reason why the USA invaded Afghanistan: to fight the state-sponsored religious-motivated terrorism of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Other than that, Afghanistan is worth as much to the USA as any other piss-poor nation in Asia.
You don't see talks of intervention in Nepal or Tajikistan, do you?
By hanging a few military leaders who invoked "spiritual" values in order to make warriors commit suicide in battle, a war-torn country became one of the strongest economies in the world in a few decades.
I had a physics teacher who used to say "a scientist asks questions, nature answers". I have nothing against a model per se, but it should never be assumed as correct unless experimental tests give the same numbers. When you cherry-pick numbers from statistical data you can get any result you want. Politicians do it all the time.
This "smokers cost less because they live less" is a fallacy that has been debunked many times. The idea is that you create a curve relating cost of health care vs. age, then if you integrate the cost over the range of old age between the life expectancy of smokers and that of non-smokers, the additional expense would be more than the money raised by tobacco taxes.
By tweaking the parameters you may get wildly different results. For instance, compare people born on the same year. People who died earlier will cost proportionally much less, because the cost of health care has grown much more than inflation recently. Or forget to take into account people who quit smoking. They will live longer than smokers, but will have more health problems than people who never smoked. Or don't consider pensions to widows and orphans, because that cost isn't "health care", even if it's a cost that must be borne by the state and was caused by smoking or obesity.
The original intent still holds in that every state has the same number of senators, independent of the population.
If the Senate could create taxes, there would be the risk of low-population states getting together to tax the majority of the people.
Of course, since both chambers must approve every legislation, that still happens to some extent. That's one of the reasons why there is so much military spending in the states of the west, I suppose.
Slashdot Mirror
You're actually blaming the victim?
No. The victims are Gucci stockholders. The incompetent manager was an accessory to crime, therefore he should share the blame.
Let's do some calculations. Cat-5 cable has eight strands of AWG 24 wire, which has 817.7 feet/lb, that means the cable contains one pound of copper for each 102.2 feet. Scrap copper is worth $4.30/lb, meaning 23.77 feet of cat-5 are worth $1.
The minimum wage in Armenia is, according to Wikipedia, equivalent to US$1888/year. Assuming someone works 50 weeks/year @ 40 hours/week, that is 2000 working hours to earn those $1888.
What all this means is that she has to steal 22.4 ft of cat-5 to get the same she would get working one hour at the Armenian minimum wage.
In the USA minimum wage is $7.25/hour, that is 172.3 ft worth of cat-5 scrap.
In conclusion, it may not be worth pulling cable out of a building in the USA unless you are doing other restorations or demolishing it, but in Armenia you should be less likely to find abandoned copper.
I wonder what a bank would do to the branch manager if a former employee could walk away with $200,000 six months after being fired. Or, to use a car analogy, if a former employee was able to walk into a dealership and drive away with a $200,000 car just like that.
The law about computer crimes should have strong penalties for managers that allow that shit to happen. It would be somewhat different if the guy still worked for the corporation, because it's much harder to guard against an attack from inside, but if someone is responsible for managing a valuable asset he should be competent enough to take reasonable precautions to protect it from any attack someone could bring from outside.
I say pay her room and board, and free internet, until she dies.
At her age, she probably gets a pension from the government.
However, if you consider that the Armenian per-capita GDP is about one tenth of that of the USA, that must be a pretty small pension.
I mean, it was an accident
So said Exxon after the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
If you cause harm due to ignoring the possible consequences of your action you should be punished according to the consequences of your act, not according to your intent. That's what the law defines as "criminal negligence".
Stealing to survive is not thievery.
Only if you steal food and eat it. Or if you steal a coat to use during winter.
If you steal anything and sell it, then it *is* thievery, no matter how much you needed the money.
Maybe it just escaped.
This sentence FTFA makes me rather dubious: "A new analysis of 10,000 proton-antiproton collisions at the Tevatron showed a weird result a couple hundred times".
Two problems here: a "new" analysis? Does it mean it needs massaging the results? And two hundred times out of ten thousand does not necessarily mean it's statistically significant, that's 2%, to know if it's significant or not one needs more information than those two numbers alone.
An intriguing result is in this paragraph: "Last fall, Fermilab physicists said they detected evidence for a new class of neutrino, a 'sterile' particle that only interacts through gravity. Those results came out of the MiniBooNE detector; this is is the result of a different experiment, Tevatron's CDF experiment."
If this is true, could that be the "dark mass" particle that cosmologists need?
Every one should come with a full copy of LiveCode or something that lets kids mess around with building their own apps right out of the box, without the training overhead that comes from so many modern IDEs
Python with PyQt is the closest thing I can imagine. Although programming GUIs is still a PITA compared to the old ways, Qt comes close to having the best possible GUI API and Python has the simplest syntax among modern languages.
And, yes, it should be a Linux computer. If you want to motivate kids, there's no reason to encumber them with all the cruft that MS-Windows has accumulated over twenty years.
Their worth is not that they are exactly "smart", but that they show that you don't need to be so "smart" to use your brains effectively. There are many times when I see they doing things in a sub-optimal way because they don't know better, but they aren't afraid to question their own beliefs. They are always ready to test things from a skeptic's point of view and that's more than many "smarter" people do.
It's like hardware vs. algorithms. The "typical" scientist would be like a supercomputer, the Mythbusters are a desktop PC running a streamlined algorithm to get equivalent results with less brainpower.
Of particular interest was communion whereby Christians "ate the flesh and drank the blood of Jesus Christ." You can understand why Romans were upset.
No, they didn't mind that, since Christians copied that part from the cult of Bacchus. What really upset the Roman government was that Christians insisted theirs was the only god and all others were fake and had to be destroyed.
And the funny thing is, you know what? History repeats itself. The current most extremist religious group is even worse. After all, during the Roman Empire Christians didn't mind if someone made a drawing of their prophet.
there are other parts of the world where it's basically just proof that they paid their fee or bribed an official. Some places for a nominal bribe they'll put whatever name you like on the documents.
And the Interpol would solve this problem exactly how?
No self-respecting sovereign country would allow the Interpol to send agents to verify that the data is correct, they would still depend on people being correctly identified by their nation of residence or citizenship. Not to mention the cost of installing Interpol offices everywhere in the world.
Besides, even in the USA or EU it's not so difficult to assume a fake identity once you realize everything starts with a birth certificate, and birth certificates do not contain any data from after you were born. Get a birth certificate from a person who could be plausibly you and you can get any other document. There are many ways of doing it.
A "high class escort" may only have a dozen or so customers that they service per year, as they usually demand (and receive) repeat business.
Escorts aren't as expensive as you seem to believe.
And the grads have an even more difficult time finding employment outside academia
Why? Where do you think all those managers, salespeople, business consultants, etc come from? A liberal arts degree is the easiest first step to an MBA.
Of course, a PhD in liberal arts may be overkill, but a masters is great in your resume. It shows you have a flexible mind, can think outside the box, have appreciation for diversity, or whatever is the current trend in positive qualifications for a manager.
The only way a liberal arts graduate could feel miserable is if he actually enjoys his field of study...
Throughout my career (I have a PhD in Chemistry) I found the preparation in maths of Biology majors absolutely abysmal.
To make it worse, it seems to me that *every* college course today is very weak in computer programming. The college graduates I meet seem to rely entirely on excel spreadsheets, with a very few "hard" sciences majors knowing a little bit of matlab.
Computers have become the universal tool, but no one is able to explore their capabilities, recent graduates are like illiterate peasants in a library.
A good analogy is to compare software development with leadership. A leader is someone who gets people to do what cannot be done by a person alone. A programmer is someone who gets computers to do what cannot be done by humans. In an age when automation replaces workers, software developers are the leaders. Too bad university students cannot see this simple analogy.
You can always move to an Islamist country. In Saudi Arabia the only female skin you see on the street are the eyelids.
A dividing line in human history is the invention of writing. That's what differentiates pre-history from history. After the invention of writing we have records of what happens, before that it's up to archaeologists to dig ancient garbage dumps to infer things.
Incredibly, there are people who want to run the inverse way in computing.
What next, will we have to climb trees to use computers?
Then they just SAID they couldn't find them any more when private space industry startups tried to get them when NASA was designing the shuttle and Congress was wondering why they couldn't continue to do launches with the proven technology rather than having to fund all this new stuff, including new big engines?
I'm sure the Ford corporation still has the plans for the Model T, which doesn't mean it would be better to continue using that proven technology.
The Saturn V was simply too big for commercial launches. The not so big launchers today launch two commercial satellites at a time. Having a bigger launcher would mean bigger logistics problems: how do you coordinate the construction of several satellites so that all of them are ready to launch at the same time?
If there existed a need for a bigger launcher than the Saturn V there would be no problem in designing one, and it would probably be cheaper after adjustment for inflation.
Japan had a functioning state which resembled what we have in the west. Contrast that with Afghanistan, a very large part of which is based around tribal governance and infrastructure.
"Tribalism" is the normal status of any nation. Consider that the USA is a federation of states, each with its own legislation. Germany was, until Bismark united it, a loose confederation of sovereign principalities. Same as Italy before Garibaldi. Look at what became of the former Soviet Union.
The existence of a powerful central government is the exception rather than the rule. And it's not even such a good situation all in all. Better a loosely bound federation of states, such as Europe today.
However, none of this has to do with the main problem in Afghanistan today, which is religion fanaticism dominating the culture of the country. In 1970 it was a civilized country, where a mullah was no more powerful than a Christian bishop is in a western European country of today.
The Soviet invasion and the subsequent disastrous Reagan policy of using religion to counteract Communism changed all that. This cultural transformation happened very quickly and there's no reason to believe it cannot be undone just as quickly. The only thing needed is to put religion in its place.
What IS it with Drupal and Slashdot?
Apparently, /. editors love drag queens
All VBA macros in excel would perform much better if a domain specific language is used.
The tradeoff is development time vs performance, so for the average Joe they remain VBA macros in excel.
No, the tradeoff is in the first step of the learning curve. People learn excel by osmosis, the first small spreadsheet is intuitive enough, and they evolve by asking other people how to add this or that feature.
In contrast to that, you need to do a bit of learning before you start using a "true" programming language. However, once you take that first step, you can develop anything in a language like Python much faster than if you did it in excel.
The Soviet Union went into Afghanistan because they wanted Pakistan, in order to get a naval base that had access to open ocean all year round.
The USA, on the other hand, didn't want *any* resource from Afghanistan whatsoever. Different from the Soviet Union, it's not a strategic location for the USA. It has no mineral resources. No industry. No economic assets worth fighting for.
There was one and only one reason why the USA invaded Afghanistan: to fight the state-sponsored religious-motivated terrorism of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Other than that, Afghanistan is worth as much to the USA as any other piss-poor nation in Asia.
You don't see talks of intervention in Nepal or Tajikistan, do you?
history has repeatedly shown that you cannot wade into another culture and change it within a short amount of time
Oh, yeah? Explain this.
By hanging a few military leaders who invoked "spiritual" values in order to make warriors commit suicide in battle, a war-torn country became one of the strongest economies in the world in a few decades.
How's that for changing a culture.
I had a physics teacher who used to say "a scientist asks questions, nature answers". I have nothing against a model per se, but it should never be assumed as correct unless experimental tests give the same numbers. When you cherry-pick numbers from statistical data you can get any result you want. Politicians do it all the time.
This "smokers cost less because they live less" is a fallacy that has been debunked many times. The idea is that you create a curve relating cost of health care vs. age, then if you integrate the cost over the range of old age between the life expectancy of smokers and that of non-smokers, the additional expense would be more than the money raised by tobacco taxes.
By tweaking the parameters you may get wildly different results. For instance, compare people born on the same year. People who died earlier will cost proportionally much less, because the cost of health care has grown much more than inflation recently. Or forget to take into account people who quit smoking. They will live longer than smokers, but will have more health problems than people who never smoked. Or don't consider pensions to widows and orphans, because that cost isn't "health care", even if it's a cost that must be borne by the state and was caused by smoking or obesity.
The original intent still holds in that every state has the same number of senators, independent of the population.
If the Senate could create taxes, there would be the risk of low-population states getting together to tax the majority of the people.
Of course, since both chambers must approve every legislation, that still happens to some extent. That's one of the reasons why there is so much military spending in the states of the west, I suppose.