Instead of trying to parasitically extract money from an arbitrary list of content providers, ISPs only need to charge us per bit. At that point those end users who are clogging up the Internet with UHD video traffic from Netflix & friends can pay a proportionally larger amount than people who read a blog and watch a few SD clips on YouTube.
What a marvelous idea. And since you leave your always-on connection always-on, for the convenience, you won't mind paying the bill for a 31 day DDoS, right?
Let's say you're subscribing to Comcast's middle tier, which is 100 Mbps. And let's say you're paying $15 per gigabyte, because that's what Verizon charges for overages, and therefore it must be a reasonable price. There are 2678400 seconds in a 31 day month. Let's say Comcast's throttling is very efficient and you actually get right at 100 Mbps. So in 31 days, a DDoS can send you 33,480,000 bytes. Comcast is a telco, so they think a gigabyte is 1000 megabytes and megabytes are 1000 bytes, so you've received 33.48 GB from that DDoS that month. So your bill is $502.20. Plus taxes and fees. Thank you come again.
Oh, and your only way to avoid that bill is to unplug your cable modem and not use your service at all the entire month, because the DDoS is being controlled by a malicious actor who is after you specifically, and can easily fingerprint your devices and detect when you come back online with a new IP.
Unless and until I can be informed of the number of bytes I will receive for every single request, before I send the request, and I can control every single byte sent to me, Internet service metered by byte or by hour is totally unacceptable. Oh wait, I can't do either of those things, and I especially can't do the second thing because it's FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE! The protocol doesn't work that way!
How a blithering idiot like you got modded up to plus 5, I'll never know...
Despite all the doom and gloom talk, where's the actual evidence of harm due to Net Neutrality being reversed?
The actual harm is being hidden from view in private contracts, the terms of which you are not privy to. What we do know is that Netflix has already paid a shakedown fee to Comcast, and we can guess that it was millions of dollars. That's an enormous amount of harm to anyone who might attempt to compete with Netflix while offering the same type of service.
The potential harm is even worse. Every popular Internet service was unpopular, once. Allowing popular services to squeeze out any new services with arbitrary rent-seeking fees would do fantastic harm to the Internet and to world economies.
We're still not powering every device in our house through one central electrical generator...it's all being worked on though folks...you just can't get it cheap now...
Nor will you ever get it. Your electric range, your refrigerator, your microwave, your electric clothes dryer, hell, even your hair dryer are all too high wattage to power from a central transmitting coil without suffering tremendous losses, even with resonant antennas.
Even if you're willing to tolerate the losses, only your appliances are large enough to accommodate the required antenna. Neither your hair dryer nor your vacuum cleaner is big enough to lug around an antenna large enough to be resonant with an antenna of the size required to cover the distance from your attic to anywhere in your house. Not even Nikola Tesla himself proposed such a thing. He wanted to exploit the Earth's atmosphere to transmit power wirelessly from generating stations to homes, but your home would have one large receiving antenna connected to internal wiring much like we have today. Individual devices would not have their own antennas because the required size to achieve resonance was, and is, too large.
Senator Rand Paul was there but he is not recorded as having done anything useful. He's an MD but he let others treat the wounded.
He's an ophthalmologist. He's qualified to give victims an eye exam. He's not the least bit qualified to provide emergency trauma care. MDs are not interchangeable.
In addition, he's licensed to practice medicine in Kentucky. There's no indication that he ever got licensed in Washington, D.C. so even attempting to provide trauma care would have been illegal, even if he were medically qualified.
The American Medical Association is the most effective union in history, and has managed to get remarkably bloodthirsty laws passed across the country. The end result is that it's far more legally hazardous to practice medicine without a license if you have medical training than it is to practice without a license without training. Good Samaritan laws have been passed to create exceptions for the untrained innocent bystander because of how severe the AMA-backed laws actually are.
The shooter was obviously not a gun enthusiast.... He had a high powered semi-auto long gun (likely either an AR or AK)...he put out approx 50 rounds or more and he only wounded 4 people or so??
Sheesh..this guy couldn't shoot worth shit...
US Army studies have shown that people's ability to shoot other people goes down significantly when the screaming starts. Even when not trying to hit moving targets, as other responders have pointed out. The vast majority of people have an aversion to causing harm that operates at a near instinctive level, so even when they convince themselves intellectually that they want to cause harm, when they actually try, they fail the way this guy did. It takes an out-and-out psychopath to keep shooting accurately when the screaming starts, and the number of authentic psychopaths is microscopic.
And because we don't have any idea who you are, or what your aims are, we should simply accept at face value your claim to know exactly what Mr Putin thinks and feels.
The Anonymous Coward is correct, but not because the Anonymous Coward has some secret backchannel access to Putin's brain. The Anonymous Coward is quoting Putin's own words in interviews with Western media, where he publicly and personally floated this theory to see how people would react. It's not guesswork. Putin said these things. It was widely covered in that same Western Media. I bet even Russia Today covered it, because they always repeat what Putin says.
11 comments and nothing but complaints and grousing. Where's the apps guy, to accuse you all of being Luddites?
I've been using a cordless keyboard and mouse since 2001, Logitech's very first model with a USB antenna. They're a marvelous invention. The antenna is a brick as big as the mouse with a four foot cable coming out of it with two separate USB connectors on the end. Still works beautifully, even though it looks like something from the last century. Admittedly it didn't cost $200-$250, even though I bought it when it was a brand new product, so I'm not impressed with the price point of this product, but the concept is immensely appealing. Not having to pop the batteries out of the mouse every few weeks and muck around with the battery charger is just the sort of tiny little convenience my lazy ass desires. (Why do I have sometimes have to rotate the batteries with my thumb after I plug in the charger before the charge light will come on?)
In the immortal words of Arnold Schwarzenegger, stop whining!
Instead, let's speculate about why Logitech is lying about their inability to use Qi. The Wireless Power Consortium has published a paper about how to use multiple cooperative flux generators to provide charging over an arbitrarily large surface, while not wasting power energizing coils that aren't underneath a receiver. Considering the size of the receiver puck in the picture of the Logitech product, it's obvious they're using precisely this technique in the mouse pad. Qi could have been used just fine, especially since the part that makes Qi what it is is the communications protocol between the receiver and the transmitter. Qi uses backscatter modulation from the receiver to tell the transmitter to give it power. When there's no receiver present, the Qi transmitter uses only 70 mW. With a receiver present and the protocol negotiated successfully, the transmitter ramps up to the power level requested by the receiver, up to 7.5W in the v1.2 standard.
I assume Logitech doesn't want to submit to any standards verification and doesn't want people to be able to use their mousepad to charge their Qi-enabled phones because Logitech hates their customers and wants them to die. I invite other opinions...
"The internet was made to be decentralized," says Sunde, "but we keep centralizing everything on top of the internet."
It's an inevitable consequence of asymmetrical Internet connections. The vast majority of Internet connections currently in use today have microscopic upstream bandwidth compared to downstream. The Internet would be a great deal more democratic if hosting a server at home didn't mean that your sister would be too impatient to wait for the family photos to load.
If high speed Internet provided by cable companies didn't have its origins in one giant kludge, things might have been different. Unfortunately they were in a far better position to take advantage of packet switched networking. The phone companies were stuck with a circuit switching legacy that really crippled their ability to deploy decent Internet. And here we are. The companies that viewed their customers as silent consumers own the majority of the Internet, and to this day they really hate that their customers are allowed to upload anything at all. The companies that viewed their customers as equal parts producers and consumers lost the market.
Fiber to the home, deployed by someone who isn't the incumbents, would solve the problem. And... yeah, that's over. Everywhere. So he's right, we've lost the Internet. Get ready to pay $65/month for your Basic Internet Bundle of Five Websites! For only $30/month extra, you can add ten more! All of them are owned by one of the existing media conglomerates! You will take this deal and you will like it! You have no choice!
Who's the cat that won't cop out when there's danger all about? (Schaft) Right on
You need to be kinda old to get this one.
Yeah, well, welcome to Slashdot.
Hmmph. If this were properly Slashdot, it would have been the correct old reference. Schaft Enterprises was originally a fictional manufacturer of military Labors in Europe and the US in the Patlabor anime series from 1989-1990. The company designed and manufactured the Griffin Labor, a recurring (and starring) antagonist. The real Japanese company Schaft was founded in 2012, with the name obviously chosen as an homage to the series/movies/manga.
You'd have thought they'd have chosen Shinohara Heavy Industries instead (the Japanese company in the series that manufactures the starring Ingram Labor), but they were indulging in a quintessentially Japanese bit of irony. Schaft was founded to allow its principals to accept money from military sources, specifically the US DARPA, who had issued their Grand Challenge in robotics, with prize money. As researchers at the University of Tokyo, they would not have been allowed to accept any money from DARPA. So naturally when choosing a name, they went with the rebellious criminal company name, rather than the establishment respectable name.
Your understanding of Rei's arguments about a useful model for Hyperloop appear to be severely flawed.
Building a pipe to send oil of certain density at certain pressure certain distance has completely different requirements than sending a big/heavy object inside a fluid under the same pressure that same distance. You are trying to make both situations equivalent by replacing that object with an equivalent amount of fluid by focusing on a generic analysis; and its mass is even irrelevant in comparison with what really matters here (= its big mass + velocity = tremendous momentum).
No, Rei is not trying to say anything like that. The fluid in a Hyperloop is a soft vacuum of gases of roughly the composition of Earth's atmosphere. The amount of mass of that fluid between any two pylons in the system is negligible. As in, the mass of a bird that elects to perch for a moment on top of that segment is greater than the mass of air within the tube beneath it.
As for your concerns about the tremendous momentum of the capsule, you are completely missing the point of the design of Hyperloop. Because the proposal includes a soft vacuum and a capsule designed with air skis, the lateral momentum imparted to the tube by the capsule is very small. It has to be, because the capsule is not under constant acceleration. It's coasting most of the time, and only being boosted at launch, at arrival (in reverse), and a minimal number of times in between to keep it moving. That design calls for the capsule to not be getting pushed the vast majority of the time. As such, if the capsule is transferring some large fraction of its momentum to each pylon as it passes, the design has failed—the capsule will come to a dead stop long before it reaches its goal.
With that in mind, Rei's emphasis on vertical loadings is indeed correct and useful. The transient mass of the capsule as it passes each pylon will be felt by that pylon almost exclusively vertically, except on curves. If the pylons are suffering significant lateral loads, it's because the capsule's suspension has catastrophically failed and it's busy grinding to a halt. The system has to be designed to tolerate that failure without suffering a cascade failure of pylons, but that aspect of the design is only for dealing with a failure mode, not normal operation.
They don't trust the government to protect internet access, but they want the government to do it anyway.
Correct. We want government to function properly. Republicans want government to malfunction horribly. Republicans control the government. Therefore, we believe that a shitheel FCC commissioner who uses phrases like "honor their wishes" when talking about the comments of a fucking astroturfing botnet can only be trusted to do what Comcast tells him to do, despite our wishes.
We thought Tom Wheeler was going to be an industry shill, because that was his job for many years before he became FCC Chair. He surprised us. Now we know Ajit Pai is an industry shill, because we've heard him talk, we've noticed that he's blatantly lied to us repeatedly, and we don't trust him.
So fans go to other less expensive options. Also, schools are not doing nearly as a good a job at indoctrinating students into believing expensive sports are a good use of their hard earned money.
Schools in the deep South are still doing yeoman's work making sure good ol' boys like expensive traditional sports. The deep South is where they build multi-million dollar stadiums while the textbooks literally fall apart. It's happened more than once in recent years. My ex is from Texas and has three sons. All three of them joined the football team in high school. Even the pudgy one. Two of the three still watch football, and profess to enjoy it. The formerly pudgy one doesn't. It's high schools in Chicago (and elsewhere in Illinois) that have started school sanctioned League of Legends teams. Times they are a-changin', but if there's one thing they don't like in the deep South, it's change.
Tesla has yet to turn a profit, claiming growth - yet every other firm manages to grow while it is profitable. Tesla has significant governance issues, so it isn't being managed well at all.
Firms which are profitable while growing are typically growing at single digit percentages per year, while not being in one of the most capital intensive industries in the world. Did you know there's a battery factory in Nevada now? It was empty desert a few years ago. Do you think that was free? Or even cheap? They spent half a billion dollars on capital expenditures in the fourth quarter of 2016 alone, then did it again in the first quarter of this year. They expect to spend an additional $1.5 billion on capital expenditures by September. The incumbent car companies thought they were completely safe from new competition because they knew how much money somebody would have to spend in order to actually compete with them. They believed that everybody was just like you, too cowardly to spend that money in order to build factories. Turns out they were wrong, just like you.
I read your links. They're both a year old, and almost totally obsolete. The SolarCity buy is a done deal. There is no SolarCity anymore. It's all Tesla now. I'm not so sure it was a good purchase, but all "will they/should they" analysis is irrelevant. They did. Meanwhile they made $2.7 billion in GAAP revenue in the first quarter of this year, up almost triple what they made a year ago. They did it by producing cars 64% faster than they did a year ago. And that's with zero ZEV sales in the quarter. Nobody has to buy the zero emissions credits from them anymore. The whining about the board of directors is nothing more than a naked attempt at a power grab. I consider Tesla's ability to tell the usual suspects to go to hell a serious strength, not a weakness. Those people only know how to fuck up old companies by gutting them, not grow new ones.
Badly managed? Not even close. You just don't have any idea how to evaluate them because what they're doing hasn't been done in your lifetime. They're spinning up a global car company from scratch. Fifteen years ago they didn't exist. Of the top 15 car companies in the world (by manufacturing volume), 7 of them are over a century old and 2 of them aren't global (neither SAIC nor Peugeot Citreon sell into the US market). None of them were founded less than 40 years ago. Groupe PSA, formerly Peugeot Citreon, is the youngest, founded in 1976. The rest date from the 1940s or earlier. Two of them, Fiat and Renault, date from the 1800s. When Tesla is a century old, maybe you'll be able to understand them.
Tesla Motors isn't one of the top 15 in the world and may never be, but they're competing directly with those top 15. That's expensive. Really expensive.
I can't deny that markets are delusional though...
We might actually get to hear all the nitty gritty details on this one, rather than the usual handful of accusations in the press followed by the company settling the lawsuit with a gag clause. If Tesla's lawyers think they're on firm enough ground to fire her after she filed suit, they must also think they're on extremely firm ground regarding the suit itself, in which case they should fight it out to a conclusion. Which is damn rare. We're going to get an unusually detailed look at the HR practices of a billion dollar company. Should be fascinating.
I wonder what the market will think of it tomorrow... Their stock hit a new 52 week high today of $344.88. Which happens to also be an all-time high. The previous high was $342.89.
I was about to start throwing my weight around in here, moderating up/down, but then I realised I could face legal consequences for endorsing anyones views.:-/
So move out of Switzerland. While not part of the EU, it's still pretty damn trivial to relocate to Germany, especially since you probably speak German as your first language. Most Swiss do. Just don't up-mod any Nazis and you'll be fine.
I wish there was one general-coverage news source that I could read first thing in the morning and trust that they would do a good, accurate, objective job, but since Murdoch destroyed the WSJ, I haven't found one. The next best thing is to read a diversity of sources, including the NYT, Washington Post, Democracy Now, Politico, the New Yorker, etc., and Google News makes that easier (I still haven't found a conservative news source that is as reliable and accurate as the WSJ.)
Try Reuters. They suffer a little bit from liberal bleeding heartitis, but they've isolated most of that to their non-profit foundation. Their business news is pretty much business news. Unvarnished and unbiased. Very rich people pay them quite a lot of money to do business news well, so they're quite careful not to screw that up.
I can't wait for ThreadRipper and i9 products to hit the market. I am building a new multi-threaded data management system that gets a lot faster as you add cores/threads...
Then you are wanting Epyc or Xeon chips, not Threadripper or i9. Epyc especially is reaching for 48 cores, while being considerably cheaper than Intel's competitor. The damn thing is the size of a credit card. Huge chip. Reminds me of the old Pentium II cartridge days, though of course the heat sinks are a helluva lot bigger. Anyway, get yourself a dual socket Epyc system. If you're too impatient to wait for 48 cores, the first ones are 32 cores, servicing 64 threads per socket, with a whopping 64 PCIe lanes per socket and 16 DIMM slots per socket driving DDR4 memory in 8 channels. With 16GB DIMMs, that's 256GB of RAM per socket. Available sometime in June, they say, though they don't say if that's OEMs only or if they'll be sold at retail too. So one machine, 128 threads, 128 PCIe lanes, and half a terabyte of RAM, probably for less than $10,000 fully populated. It's a bargain. And your estimate of 36 threads is significantly under par.
I heard that in one of his last semesters of teaching Donald Knuth was teaching an introductory programming class. Which would have been cool for the students, but is still a horrific misuse of the man's abilities.
You do realize he chose to teach that class, right? Nobody told Donald Knuth he had to teach an intro course against his will. College administrators are greedy and dumb, but they're not completely blind stupid (yet). I'm sure he wanted to teach the class in order to get in touch with the novice perspective again. Lots of smart people who do something revolutionary for the field forget what it was like not to know all the things they know. Donald Knuth is smart enough to know about that problem, and do something about it. You don't write textbooks for expert programmers (most of the time). You write them for programmers who are learning. As a legendary textbook author, Mr. Knuth needed to keep his finger on the pulse of the novice, and teaching an intro course is a good way to do that.
Justice Roberts was feeling pretty feisty about Lexmark, too. The wording he chose to use in writing the opinion of the court is entertaining. He wrote, "Lexmark, however, was not so ready to concede that its plan had been foiled." Word for word, page three of the opinion (not the syllabus preceding the opinion in the PDF). Gotta love a judge who uses phrasing to describe the petitioner against whom he is ruling as if they were a super-villain.
Of course, it requires more than the myopic 3-month planning that most MBAs are capable of at maximum. It also requires a real understanding of risk management and staying away from all short-term optimization. Otherwise, you end up at "save a million, lose a billion", as this seems to be a fine example of.
Claiming this was a "power supply issue" is just lying by misdirection. The root cause is lack of redundancy, lack of resilience and lack of effective business continuity management. All things that cost money and that do not generate profit _unless_ something like this happens. In a healthy infrastructure, one (or even several) power supplies blowing up will not kill your ability to do business.
Events like that are almost universally due to gross mismanagement and should not only result in termination but also prosecution of the "leadership" that allowed this to happen by not being prepared.
That's only going to happen if you can teach the Mouth Breathing Assholes (that's what MBA stands for, right?) who are hedge fund, 'wealth management', and other institutional investor representatives who are the only shareholders who matter that all their wonderfully insightful financial questions during the quarterly shareholder call are completely pointless if no one is paying attention to the fundamentals of the business—and functioning information technology is rather obviously a fundamental of the business of British Airways (and everyone else).
Peeps, this is what you get when you refuse to believe in all the things that got your parents and grandparents what they have.
I'm GenX and even I know that believing their parents and especially their grandparents is absolutely useless for Millennials. The economy their grandparents participated in that got them all their nice things doesn't exist anymore. Nothing like it exists anymore.
Nobody drops out of high school and goes to work and builds a nice middle class lifestyle for themselves anymore. Nobody starts in the mailroom and becomes a company president anymore. Nobody holds one job their whole lives anymore. Shit, that was already fading for my father, a Boomer. I'm not certain how many jobs he held, but it was at least six, and he has a chemical engineering degree. And speaking of Boomers, they're clinging to jobs they should have left to GenX by now, so GenX can move up and open up jobs for Millennials, but that hasn't happened. My neighbor across the street is 68 years old and still working. Why? Because his house isn't paid off yet and his youngest child (a Millennial) still lives in his basement. Statistically, he's not unusual.
Meanwhile houses have doubled and tripled in price, even in parts of the country that aren't hyper-inflated, and the hyper-inflated parts have risen by factors of five and eight and ten.. Car prices have doubled, both new and used.[1] Even food prices have risen dramatically since Boomers were young. All of that would be tolerable if wages had kept pace with inflation, but wages didn't keep pace with inflation even for those smug Boomers. Wage growth fell behind in the 1970s and never recovered, so even my father the Boomer never earned as much money as his own father, relative to his expenses.
Millennials would be fools to listen to economic advice from their parents and grandparents. The manufacturing economy that advice was relevant to doesn't exist anymore. The service economy that allegedly replaced it, didn't. I judge the health of the local economy by the number of Help Wanted signs (there aren't any) and by the number of hand-lettered signs offering lawn service (the number fluctuates, but hasn't dropped to zero in years). Lawn service 15 years ago was being done by Mexicans. Not anymore. It's all white boys now. Millennials, in fact, desperately participating in the gig economy, because that's all there is, and there isn't nearly enough of it to go around.
---- [1] Yes there are reasons why both real estate and car prices have gone up. The reasons are irrelevant when talking about purchasing power. Only the price matters.
Let's say "we're at the top," and one day in the future we have enough resources for there to simulate a universe for whatever reason, and do so, and it has enough fidelity to simulate another one within, eventually. Of the three universes' dwellers asking themselves "are we in a simiulation?" the answer is "yes" for 2 of them and "no" for 1. This ignores the possibility for branching and deeper nesting.
Now take it one step further, and say "we don't know if we're at the top." We already know that most universes are simulated... how would you bet?
Uh, no we don't. Right now we have no evidence whatsoever that a universe like ours can be simulated. You're suggesting that we're going to have four dozen husbands when we're actually somewhere very very VERY close to the zero point on the y-axis in that plot in terms of how many we have now. We have so few data points about simulating universes that we don't even know if our improvement in our ability to simulate them is linear or exponential. We've gone from Pong to Skyrim in 40 years, and nowhere on that continuum is anything that looks remotely like a simulated universe. Quite the opposite. We have arguments based on thermodynamics and Shannon's Limit that we can't simulate a universe within this universe—that it's not physically possible.
So no, we do not know that most universes are simulated. At the moment, we know of zero simulated universes.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of trying to parasitically extract money from an arbitrary list of content providers, ISPs only need to charge us per bit. At that point those end users who are clogging up the Internet with UHD video traffic from Netflix & friends can pay a proportionally larger amount than people who read a blog and watch a few SD clips on YouTube.
What a marvelous idea. And since you leave your always-on connection always-on, for the convenience, you won't mind paying the bill for a 31 day DDoS, right?
Let's say you're subscribing to Comcast's middle tier, which is 100 Mbps. And let's say you're paying $15 per gigabyte, because that's what Verizon charges for overages, and therefore it must be a reasonable price. There are 2678400 seconds in a 31 day month. Let's say Comcast's throttling is very efficient and you actually get right at 100 Mbps. So in 31 days, a DDoS can send you 33,480,000 bytes. Comcast is a telco, so they think a gigabyte is 1000 megabytes and megabytes are 1000 bytes, so you've received 33.48 GB from that DDoS that month. So your bill is $502.20. Plus taxes and fees. Thank you come again.
Oh, and your only way to avoid that bill is to unplug your cable modem and not use your service at all the entire month, because the DDoS is being controlled by a malicious actor who is after you specifically, and can easily fingerprint your devices and detect when you come back online with a new IP.
Unless and until I can be informed of the number of bytes I will receive for every single request, before I send the request, and I can control every single byte sent to me, Internet service metered by byte or by hour is totally unacceptable. Oh wait, I can't do either of those things, and I especially can't do the second thing because it's FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE! The protocol doesn't work that way!
How a blithering idiot like you got modded up to plus 5, I'll never know...
Despite all the doom and gloom talk, where's the actual evidence of harm due to Net Neutrality being reversed?
The actual harm is being hidden from view in private contracts, the terms of which you are not privy to. What we do know is that Netflix has already paid a shakedown fee to Comcast, and we can guess that it was millions of dollars. That's an enormous amount of harm to anyone who might attempt to compete with Netflix while offering the same type of service.
The potential harm is even worse. Every popular Internet service was unpopular, once. Allowing popular services to squeeze out any new services with arbitrary rent-seeking fees would do fantastic harm to the Internet and to world economies.
We're still not powering every device in our house through one central electrical generator...it's all being worked on though folks...you just can't get it cheap now...
Nor will you ever get it. Your electric range, your refrigerator, your microwave, your electric clothes dryer, hell, even your hair dryer are all too high wattage to power from a central transmitting coil without suffering tremendous losses, even with resonant antennas.
Even if you're willing to tolerate the losses, only your appliances are large enough to accommodate the required antenna. Neither your hair dryer nor your vacuum cleaner is big enough to lug around an antenna large enough to be resonant with an antenna of the size required to cover the distance from your attic to anywhere in your house. Not even Nikola Tesla himself proposed such a thing. He wanted to exploit the Earth's atmosphere to transmit power wirelessly from generating stations to homes, but your home would have one large receiving antenna connected to internal wiring much like we have today. Individual devices would not have their own antennas because the required size to achieve resonance was, and is, too large.
Senator Rand Paul was there but he is not recorded as having done anything useful. He's an MD but he let others treat the wounded.
He's an ophthalmologist. He's qualified to give victims an eye exam. He's not the least bit qualified to provide emergency trauma care. MDs are not interchangeable.
In addition, he's licensed to practice medicine in Kentucky. There's no indication that he ever got licensed in Washington, D.C. so even attempting to provide trauma care would have been illegal, even if he were medically qualified.
The American Medical Association is the most effective union in history, and has managed to get remarkably bloodthirsty laws passed across the country. The end result is that it's far more legally hazardous to practice medicine without a license if you have medical training than it is to practice without a license without training. Good Samaritan laws have been passed to create exceptions for the untrained innocent bystander because of how severe the AMA-backed laws actually are.
The shooter was obviously not a gun enthusiast....
He had a high powered semi-auto long gun (likely either an AR or AK)...he put out approx 50 rounds or more and he only wounded 4 people or so??
Sheesh..this guy couldn't shoot worth shit...
US Army studies have shown that people's ability to shoot other people goes down significantly when the screaming starts. Even when not trying to hit moving targets, as other responders have pointed out. The vast majority of people have an aversion to causing harm that operates at a near instinctive level, so even when they convince themselves intellectually that they want to cause harm, when they actually try, they fail the way this guy did. It takes an out-and-out psychopath to keep shooting accurately when the screaming starts, and the number of authentic psychopaths is microscopic.
And because we don't have any idea who you are, or what your aims are, we should simply accept at face value your claim to know exactly what Mr Putin thinks and feels.
The Anonymous Coward is correct, but not because the Anonymous Coward has some secret backchannel access to Putin's brain. The Anonymous Coward is quoting Putin's own words in interviews with Western media, where he publicly and personally floated this theory to see how people would react. It's not guesswork. Putin said these things. It was widely covered in that same Western Media. I bet even Russia Today covered it, because they always repeat what Putin says.
11 comments and nothing but complaints and grousing. Where's the apps guy, to accuse you all of being Luddites?
I've been using a cordless keyboard and mouse since 2001, Logitech's very first model with a USB antenna. They're a marvelous invention. The antenna is a brick as big as the mouse with a four foot cable coming out of it with two separate USB connectors on the end. Still works beautifully, even though it looks like something from the last century. Admittedly it didn't cost $200-$250, even though I bought it when it was a brand new product, so I'm not impressed with the price point of this product, but the concept is immensely appealing. Not having to pop the batteries out of the mouse every few weeks and muck around with the battery charger is just the sort of tiny little convenience my lazy ass desires. (Why do I have sometimes have to rotate the batteries with my thumb after I plug in the charger before the charge light will come on?)
In the immortal words of Arnold Schwarzenegger, stop whining!
Instead, let's speculate about why Logitech is lying about their inability to use Qi. The Wireless Power Consortium has published a paper about how to use multiple cooperative flux generators to provide charging over an arbitrarily large surface, while not wasting power energizing coils that aren't underneath a receiver. Considering the size of the receiver puck in the picture of the Logitech product, it's obvious they're using precisely this technique in the mouse pad. Qi could have been used just fine, especially since the part that makes Qi what it is is the communications protocol between the receiver and the transmitter. Qi uses backscatter modulation from the receiver to tell the transmitter to give it power. When there's no receiver present, the Qi transmitter uses only 70 mW. With a receiver present and the protocol negotiated successfully, the transmitter ramps up to the power level requested by the receiver, up to 7.5W in the v1.2 standard.
I assume Logitech doesn't want to submit to any standards verification and doesn't want people to be able to use their mousepad to charge their Qi-enabled phones because Logitech hates their customers and wants them to die. I invite other opinions...
"The internet was made to be decentralized," says Sunde, "but we keep centralizing everything on top of the internet."
It's an inevitable consequence of asymmetrical Internet connections. The vast majority of Internet connections currently in use today have microscopic upstream bandwidth compared to downstream. The Internet would be a great deal more democratic if hosting a server at home didn't mean that your sister would be too impatient to wait for the family photos to load.
If high speed Internet provided by cable companies didn't have its origins in one giant kludge, things might have been different. Unfortunately they were in a far better position to take advantage of packet switched networking. The phone companies were stuck with a circuit switching legacy that really crippled their ability to deploy decent Internet. And here we are. The companies that viewed their customers as silent consumers own the majority of the Internet, and to this day they really hate that their customers are allowed to upload anything at all. The companies that viewed their customers as equal parts producers and consumers lost the market.
Fiber to the home, deployed by someone who isn't the incumbents, would solve the problem. And... yeah, that's over. Everywhere. So he's right, we've lost the Internet. Get ready to pay $65/month for your Basic Internet Bundle of Five Websites! For only $30/month extra, you can add ten more! All of them are owned by one of the existing media conglomerates! You will take this deal and you will like it! You have no choice!
Who's the cat that won't cop out when there's danger all about? (Schaft)
Right on
You need to be kinda old to get this one.
Yeah, well, welcome to Slashdot.
Hmmph. If this were properly Slashdot, it would have been the correct old reference. Schaft Enterprises was originally a fictional manufacturer of military Labors in Europe and the US in the Patlabor anime series from 1989-1990. The company designed and manufactured the Griffin Labor, a recurring (and starring) antagonist. The real Japanese company Schaft was founded in 2012, with the name obviously chosen as an homage to the series/movies/manga.
You'd have thought they'd have chosen Shinohara Heavy Industries instead (the Japanese company in the series that manufactures the starring Ingram Labor), but they were indulging in a quintessentially Japanese bit of irony. Schaft was founded to allow its principals to accept money from military sources, specifically the US DARPA, who had issued their Grand Challenge in robotics, with prize money. As researchers at the University of Tokyo, they would not have been allowed to accept any money from DARPA. So naturally when choosing a name, they went with the rebellious criminal company name, rather than the establishment respectable name.
And get off my lawn!
Your understanding of Rei's arguments about a useful model for Hyperloop appear to be severely flawed.
Building a pipe to send oil of certain density at certain pressure certain distance has completely different requirements than sending a big/heavy object inside a fluid under the same pressure that same distance. You are trying to make both situations equivalent by replacing that object with an equivalent amount of fluid by focusing on a generic analysis; and its mass is even irrelevant in comparison with what really matters here (= its big mass + velocity = tremendous momentum).
No, Rei is not trying to say anything like that. The fluid in a Hyperloop is a soft vacuum of gases of roughly the composition of Earth's atmosphere. The amount of mass of that fluid between any two pylons in the system is negligible. As in, the mass of a bird that elects to perch for a moment on top of that segment is greater than the mass of air within the tube beneath it.
As for your concerns about the tremendous momentum of the capsule, you are completely missing the point of the design of Hyperloop. Because the proposal includes a soft vacuum and a capsule designed with air skis, the lateral momentum imparted to the tube by the capsule is very small. It has to be, because the capsule is not under constant acceleration. It's coasting most of the time, and only being boosted at launch, at arrival (in reverse), and a minimal number of times in between to keep it moving. That design calls for the capsule to not be getting pushed the vast majority of the time. As such, if the capsule is transferring some large fraction of its momentum to each pylon as it passes, the design has failed—the capsule will come to a dead stop long before it reaches its goal.
With that in mind, Rei's emphasis on vertical loadings is indeed correct and useful. The transient mass of the capsule as it passes each pylon will be felt by that pylon almost exclusively vertically, except on curves. If the pylons are suffering significant lateral loads, it's because the capsule's suspension has catastrophically failed and it's busy grinding to a halt. The system has to be designed to tolerate that failure without suffering a cascade failure of pylons, but that aspect of the design is only for dealing with a failure mode, not normal operation.
They don't trust the government to protect internet access, but they want the government to do it anyway.
Correct. We want government to function properly. Republicans want government to malfunction horribly. Republicans control the government. Therefore, we believe that a shitheel FCC commissioner who uses phrases like "honor their wishes" when talking about the comments of a fucking astroturfing botnet can only be trusted to do what Comcast tells him to do, despite our wishes.
We thought Tom Wheeler was going to be an industry shill, because that was his job for many years before he became FCC Chair. He surprised us. Now we know Ajit Pai is an industry shill, because we've heard him talk, we've noticed that he's blatantly lied to us repeatedly, and we don't trust him.
It's not hard to grasp.
No. Asians. Asians have better numbers than white women in all categories listed except the "up to 64%" lighter sentences.
You mean Asian-American women. Asian women in Asia don't enjoy nearly as much privilege as a white American woman in America.
So fans go to other less expensive options. Also, schools are not doing nearly as a good a job at indoctrinating students into believing expensive sports are a good use of their hard earned money.
Schools in the deep South are still doing yeoman's work making sure good ol' boys like expensive traditional sports. The deep South is where they build multi-million dollar stadiums while the textbooks literally fall apart. It's happened more than once in recent years. My ex is from Texas and has three sons. All three of them joined the football team in high school. Even the pudgy one. Two of the three still watch football, and profess to enjoy it. The formerly pudgy one doesn't. It's high schools in Chicago (and elsewhere in Illinois) that have started school sanctioned League of Legends teams. Times they are a-changin', but if there's one thing they don't like in the deep South, it's change.
Tesla has yet to turn a profit, claiming growth - yet every other firm manages to grow while it is profitable. Tesla has significant governance issues, so it isn't being managed well at all.
Firms which are profitable while growing are typically growing at single digit percentages per year, while not being in one of the most capital intensive industries in the world. Did you know there's a battery factory in Nevada now? It was empty desert a few years ago. Do you think that was free? Or even cheap? They spent half a billion dollars on capital expenditures in the fourth quarter of 2016 alone, then did it again in the first quarter of this year. They expect to spend an additional $1.5 billion on capital expenditures by September. The incumbent car companies thought they were completely safe from new competition because they knew how much money somebody would have to spend in order to actually compete with them. They believed that everybody was just like you, too cowardly to spend that money in order to build factories. Turns out they were wrong, just like you.
I read your links. They're both a year old, and almost totally obsolete. The SolarCity buy is a done deal. There is no SolarCity anymore. It's all Tesla now. I'm not so sure it was a good purchase, but all "will they/should they" analysis is irrelevant. They did. Meanwhile they made $2.7 billion in GAAP revenue in the first quarter of this year, up almost triple what they made a year ago. They did it by producing cars 64% faster than they did a year ago. And that's with zero ZEV sales in the quarter. Nobody has to buy the zero emissions credits from them anymore. The whining about the board of directors is nothing more than a naked attempt at a power grab. I consider Tesla's ability to tell the usual suspects to go to hell a serious strength, not a weakness. Those people only know how to fuck up old companies by gutting them, not grow new ones.
Badly managed? Not even close. You just don't have any idea how to evaluate them because what they're doing hasn't been done in your lifetime. They're spinning up a global car company from scratch. Fifteen years ago they didn't exist. Of the top 15 car companies in the world (by manufacturing volume), 7 of them are over a century old and 2 of them aren't global (neither SAIC nor Peugeot Citreon sell into the US market). None of them were founded less than 40 years ago. Groupe PSA, formerly Peugeot Citreon, is the youngest, founded in 1976. The rest date from the 1940s or earlier. Two of them, Fiat and Renault, date from the 1800s. When Tesla is a century old, maybe you'll be able to understand them.
Tesla Motors isn't one of the top 15 in the world and may never be, but they're competing directly with those top 15. That's expensive. Really expensive.
I can't deny that markets are delusional though...
We might actually get to hear all the nitty gritty details on this one, rather than the usual handful of accusations in the press followed by the company settling the lawsuit with a gag clause. If Tesla's lawyers think they're on firm enough ground to fire her after she filed suit, they must also think they're on extremely firm ground regarding the suit itself, in which case they should fight it out to a conclusion. Which is damn rare. We're going to get an unusually detailed look at the HR practices of a billion dollar company. Should be fascinating.
I wonder what the market will think of it tomorrow... Their stock hit a new 52 week high today of $344.88. Which happens to also be an all-time high. The previous high was $342.89.
Isn't the Slashdot moderation system based on likes? If moderators can get sued for promoting a post, Slashdot isn't long for the Internet.
If Slashdot were Swiss... This may come as a shock, but the Internet exists in many different legal jurisdictions.
I was about to start throwing my weight around in here, moderating up/down, but then I realised I could face legal consequences for endorsing anyones views. :-/
So move out of Switzerland. While not part of the EU, it's still pretty damn trivial to relocate to Germany, especially since you probably speak German as your first language. Most Swiss do. Just don't up-mod any Nazis and you'll be fine.
I wish there was one general-coverage news source that I could read first thing in the morning and trust that they would do a good, accurate, objective job, but since Murdoch destroyed the WSJ, I haven't found one. The next best thing is to read a diversity of sources, including the NYT, Washington Post, Democracy Now, Politico, the New Yorker, etc., and Google News makes that easier (I still haven't found a conservative news source that is as reliable and accurate as the WSJ.)
Try Reuters. They suffer a little bit from liberal bleeding heartitis, but they've isolated most of that to their non-profit foundation. Their business news is pretty much business news. Unvarnished and unbiased. Very rich people pay them quite a lot of money to do business news well, so they're quite careful not to screw that up.
I can't wait for ThreadRipper and i9 products to hit the market. I am building a new multi-threaded data management system that gets a lot faster as you add cores/threads...
Then you are wanting Epyc or Xeon chips, not Threadripper or i9. Epyc especially is reaching for 48 cores, while being considerably cheaper than Intel's competitor. The damn thing is the size of a credit card. Huge chip. Reminds me of the old Pentium II cartridge days, though of course the heat sinks are a helluva lot bigger. Anyway, get yourself a dual socket Epyc system. If you're too impatient to wait for 48 cores, the first ones are 32 cores, servicing 64 threads per socket, with a whopping 64 PCIe lanes per socket and 16 DIMM slots per socket driving DDR4 memory in 8 channels. With 16GB DIMMs, that's 256GB of RAM per socket. Available sometime in June, they say, though they don't say if that's OEMs only or if they'll be sold at retail too. So one machine, 128 threads, 128 PCIe lanes, and half a terabyte of RAM, probably for less than $10,000 fully populated. It's a bargain. And your estimate of 36 threads is significantly under par.
I heard that in one of his last semesters of teaching Donald Knuth was teaching an introductory programming class. Which would have been cool for the students, but is still a horrific misuse of the man's abilities.
You do realize he chose to teach that class, right? Nobody told Donald Knuth he had to teach an intro course against his will. College administrators are greedy and dumb, but they're not completely blind stupid (yet). I'm sure he wanted to teach the class in order to get in touch with the novice perspective again. Lots of smart people who do something revolutionary for the field forget what it was like not to know all the things they know. Donald Knuth is smart enough to know about that problem, and do something about it. You don't write textbooks for expert programmers (most of the time). You write them for programmers who are learning. As a legendary textbook author, Mr. Knuth needed to keep his finger on the pulse of the novice, and teaching an intro course is a good way to do that.
Justice Roberts was feeling pretty feisty about Lexmark, too. The wording he chose to use in writing the opinion of the court is entertaining. He wrote, "Lexmark, however, was not so ready to concede that its plan had been foiled." Word for word, page three of the opinion (not the syllabus preceding the opinion in the PDF). Gotta love a judge who uses phrasing to describe the petitioner against whom he is ruling as if they were a super-villain.
You'll never get that elephant on the plane.
I have a very small elephant you insensitive clod.
Of course, it requires more than the myopic 3-month planning that most MBAs are capable of at maximum. It also requires a real understanding of risk management and staying away from all short-term optimization. Otherwise, you end up at "save a million, lose a billion", as this seems to be a fine example of.
Claiming this was a "power supply issue" is just lying by misdirection. The root cause is lack of redundancy, lack of resilience and lack of effective business continuity management. All things that cost money and that do not generate profit _unless_ something like this happens. In a healthy infrastructure, one (or even several) power supplies blowing up will not kill your ability to do business.
Events like that are almost universally due to gross mismanagement and should not only result in termination but also prosecution of the "leadership" that allowed this to happen by not being prepared.
That's only going to happen if you can teach the Mouth Breathing Assholes (that's what MBA stands for, right?) who are hedge fund, 'wealth management', and other institutional investor representatives who are the only shareholders who matter that all their wonderfully insightful financial questions during the quarterly shareholder call are completely pointless if no one is paying attention to the fundamentals of the business—and functioning information technology is rather obviously a fundamental of the business of British Airways (and everyone else).
Good luck with that.
Peeps, this is what you get when you refuse to believe in all the things that got your parents and grandparents what they have.
I'm GenX and even I know that believing their parents and especially their grandparents is absolutely useless for Millennials. The economy their grandparents participated in that got them all their nice things doesn't exist anymore. Nothing like it exists anymore.
Nobody drops out of high school and goes to work and builds a nice middle class lifestyle for themselves anymore. Nobody starts in the mailroom and becomes a company president anymore. Nobody holds one job their whole lives anymore. Shit, that was already fading for my father, a Boomer. I'm not certain how many jobs he held, but it was at least six, and he has a chemical engineering degree. And speaking of Boomers, they're clinging to jobs they should have left to GenX by now, so GenX can move up and open up jobs for Millennials, but that hasn't happened. My neighbor across the street is 68 years old and still working. Why? Because his house isn't paid off yet and his youngest child (a Millennial) still lives in his basement. Statistically, he's not unusual.
Meanwhile houses have doubled and tripled in price, even in parts of the country that aren't hyper-inflated, and the hyper-inflated parts have risen by factors of five and eight and ten.. Car prices have doubled, both new and used.[1] Even food prices have risen dramatically since Boomers were young. All of that would be tolerable if wages had kept pace with inflation, but wages didn't keep pace with inflation even for those smug Boomers. Wage growth fell behind in the 1970s and never recovered, so even my father the Boomer never earned as much money as his own father, relative to his expenses.
Millennials would be fools to listen to economic advice from their parents and grandparents. The manufacturing economy that advice was relevant to doesn't exist anymore. The service economy that allegedly replaced it, didn't. I judge the health of the local economy by the number of Help Wanted signs (there aren't any) and by the number of hand-lettered signs offering lawn service (the number fluctuates, but hasn't dropped to zero in years). Lawn service 15 years ago was being done by Mexicans. Not anymore. It's all white boys now. Millennials, in fact, desperately participating in the gig economy, because that's all there is, and there isn't nearly enough of it to go around.
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[1] Yes there are reasons why both real estate and car prices have gone up. The reasons are irrelevant when talking about purchasing power. Only the price matters.
Let's say "we're at the top," and one day in the future we have enough resources for there to simulate a universe for whatever reason, and do so, and it has enough fidelity to simulate another one within, eventually. Of the three universes' dwellers asking themselves "are we in a simiulation?" the answer is "yes" for 2 of them and "no" for 1. This ignores the possibility for branching and deeper nesting.
Now take it one step further, and say "we don't know if we're at the top." We already know that most universes are simulated... how would you bet?
Uh, no we don't. Right now we have no evidence whatsoever that a universe like ours can be simulated. You're suggesting that we're going to have four dozen husbands when we're actually somewhere very very VERY close to the zero point on the y-axis in that plot in terms of how many we have now. We have so few data points about simulating universes that we don't even know if our improvement in our ability to simulate them is linear or exponential. We've gone from Pong to Skyrim in 40 years, and nowhere on that continuum is anything that looks remotely like a simulated universe. Quite the opposite. We have arguments based on thermodynamics and Shannon's Limit that we can't simulate a universe within this universe—that it's not physically possible.
So no, we do not know that most universes are simulated. At the moment, we know of zero simulated universes.