If Mr A gave Mr B billions of dollars of The Public's Money to play at a casino and both Mr A and Mr B got filthy rich when times were good, and when it blows up all that happens is Mr B loses his job and Mr A keeps his job by blaming Mr B or saying BS like "perfect storm/everyone was doing it".
Why then should Mr A and Mr B be doing things differently?
After all, in the following year, Mr A passes billions to Mr C who does pretty much the same thing as Mr B. And Mr B? He's hired by Mr D who wants Mr B to make him richer (just like he did for Mr A).
AFAIK, not long after LTCM blew up, its founder John Meriwether still managed to get hundreds of millions of dollars to start a hedge fund.
What I see are individuals making pretty rational decisions, those decisions sometimes just happen to be bad for a lot of other people. But why should those individuals care?
Their conscience should bother them? The last I checked the Economists leave the conscience stuff to "The Invisible Hand". People laugh at the religious, guess who really has even less of a clue on how things work? At least the religious have some idea about the "Invisible Hand" sort of stuff.
It's hilarious that you have all those people saying/writing stuff like "When Genius Failed".
That's like the sheep saying the wolves have failed just because the wolves dropped 95% of a billion sheep over a cliff, whilst "only" managing to stuff themselves to the brim with 1% of the billion sheep. I'm sure the wolves were a bit upset about the whole thing, but hey there are billions more sheep...
Yeah I see failure alright. Go figure where.
You want to reduce the risk of stuff blowing up, and how big they blow up? It has nothing to do with creating better financial models or better economic theories.
It has to do with making and enforcing rules like: if too many sheep die, we shoot and skin the wolves responsible. Simple as that.
All that transparency and regulation is worthless if at the end of the day the wolves get away.
"And then you can decide not to give them any more of your money. That's not an option with a government"
0) A far as I can see, the voters keep voting in Governments who happily take more of your money.
If you don't like it, take it up with the voters. Maybe they really want it that way, and it's only you who hates it. That's Democracy at work. Too bad.
1) In a democracy most people can vote (and perhaps even be candidates).
The last I checked the total number of voters who stayed home > the number of voters who voted for Obama or Bush.
If these bunch actually cared, they could have voted for someone else. If they all bothered, the parties would notice.
As it is those voters don't count, and effectively the two main US parties have 99% of the votes (go look it up) - so by the statistics they are doing the democracy thing right. If the voters don't like things, then they should be voting differently.
But the voters aren't, so the parties do not need to change at all. In fact they should not change or they may lose votes since the US voters are clearly split into three big groups - Democrats, Republicans and the "Stay Homers".
2) You are going to get a government anyway - unless you are living in an island on your own or something similar. So if you have any influence over who ends up in government, use it before it's too late.
The corporations are already using whatever influence they can over the government to hand YOUR money to them via bailouts, "incentives", tax reliefs, regulations etc. The corporations so far don't officially have a vote, but they appear to have more clue than the voters.
If voters keep voting in people who the corporations hand lots of money to, they will get exactly what they voted for.
3) Too many people are stupid and don't get it - it's not about big or small government. It's not quantity that counts. It's quality.
There is no big difference between having a small corrupt government that the big corrupt corporations can bribe (to be allowed to screw you), vs a big corrupt government that just screws you directly. Either way you are screwed.
It's perfectly fine to make assumptions, in fact it's part of designing stuff. You can't know everything in advance.
You WILL have to make assumptions anyway - after all you aren't going to ask for 2 billion IP addresses for the hospital. Even if someone argues that in the future some applications may require machines to have thousands of IP addresses, but as a designer you are going to say "Even if that's the case, a hospital is unlikely to want that app, or by that time, the hospital and the world would have gone to IPv6".
How good the assumptions are, shows you how good (or lucky;) ) the designer was.
It's perfectly reasonable to assume that most computers in the hospital should never need to have outsiders able to connect directly to them.
This may not be true for universities, but it is likely to be even more true for banks - only a very few ways in and out.
Many universities have an open campus, and outsiders can walk to any building and try to enter them, and the buildings themselves are designed with multiple entry points. Banks in contrast are desigend to have just a few entry points (that's why the crooks often make their own entry points;) ).
Drive seek times are typically in the order of 1-10ms (depending on whether to adjacent track or full sweep), that means it's 100-1000Hz which at least overlaps human vocal range.
My memory may be off, but I recall reading that originally the decision for clippy to pop up was to be bayesian as well (not just the "figuring out what you were doing" bit).
But apparently it didn't pop up enough for some people in Microsoft, so they made it pop up more often...
I'd rather be able to walk in public areas _every_day_ knowing that the very same people who can barely control their cars, don't have easy access to guns.
Better that, than to have access to guns just on the chance that one day I'd be caught in a hotel room with people outside about to kill me.
From my point of view, I'm more at risk from members of the public than from terrorists. If I can easily get a gun, it means they can easily get one too. Giving them guns would reduce my chances of survival far more. No thanks.
As for protection against criminals. People get robbed in my area quite often (it's hard to legally own a gun here). Yes it sucks, but so far most of the time they don't kill you - they don't have to. If more people had guns, the robbers would just start shooting first (already some robbers are doing the "slash them first" method). Then everyone would have to be on "super alert" mode all the time - so that the robbers don't shoot them first. You may think that's a great state to be in, but it's likely to be bad for most people's hearts.
Having to live "Hollywood Cowboy Style" is not my idea of progress and civilization. Might as well be living amongst wild dangerous animals in Africa.
If you think everyone should have guns, then by similar reasoning, every country should have nukes - so they can defend themselves against rogue nations that attack others without approval from the UN.
There might be other reasons to allow your citizens access to guns, but "killing terrorists" is not it.
In the Mumbai incident far fewer than a thousand were killed by the terrorists.
If your country is a relatively safe place, it's rather silly to allow your citizens easy access to guns just in the hope that they could stop some terrorist.
If your country is an unsafe place, then maybe let the citizens have guns (many will probably get them anyway;) ), but it is a sign that the Government has failed badly in keeping people safe.
Would allowing citizens easy access to guns really reduce the number of deaths/injuries a year? I doubt it.
Doing it properly with a transfer switch makes it less likely for you to kill someone.
It's like if you're working on the propeller of a boat: 0) Make sure you have all the keys to start the boat in your pocket. 1) Put a big sticker over the keyhole explaining why the boat should not be started. 2) Try to make sure that other people know (and aren't drunk or something).
Because if stuff goes wrong, the water will be a bit redder than normal;).
As the number of people, innovation fields and patents go up, anything like the current patent system will fail and fail badly. Worse if you want/expect the pace of innovation to increase.
Personally I think we should just throw it all away and reward inventors with Innovation Prizes. Hindsight is always better. 10 years down the line you are more likely to know whether an invention was deserving or not. In contrast a patent examiner has a more limited time to decide to rubber stamp it or not.
You could have two classes of prizes - an "critics/expert prize" where the experts in the field award it, and a "users prize" where normal members of the public will vote to award such prizes.
This way you can reward both popular inventions, and ultrainnovative ones that the general public may not know about.
A bit like the Nebula and Hugo awards, but perhaps not in implementation.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. It looks like most people don't get it.
If Mr A gave Mr B billions of dollars of The Public's Money to play at a casino and both Mr A and Mr B got filthy rich when times were good, and when it blows up all that happens is Mr B loses his job and Mr A keeps his job by blaming Mr B or saying BS like "perfect storm/everyone was doing it".
Why then should Mr A and Mr B be doing things differently?
After all, in the following year, Mr A passes billions to Mr C who does pretty much the same thing as Mr B. And Mr B? He's hired by Mr D who wants Mr B to make him richer (just like he did for Mr A).
AFAIK, not long after LTCM blew up, its founder John Meriwether still managed to get hundreds of millions of dollars to start a hedge fund.
What I see are individuals making pretty rational decisions, those decisions sometimes just happen to be bad for a lot of other people. But why should those individuals care?
Their conscience should bother them? The last I checked the Economists leave the conscience stuff to "The Invisible Hand". People laugh at the religious, guess who really has even less of a clue on how things work? At least the religious have some idea about the "Invisible Hand" sort of stuff.
It's hilarious that you have all those people saying/writing stuff like "When Genius Failed".
That's like the sheep saying the wolves have failed just because the wolves dropped 95% of a billion sheep over a cliff, whilst "only" managing to stuff themselves to the brim with 1% of the billion sheep. I'm sure the wolves were a bit upset about the whole thing, but hey there are billions more sheep...
Yeah I see failure alright. Go figure where.
You want to reduce the risk of stuff blowing up, and how big they blow up? It has nothing to do with creating better financial models or better economic theories.
It has to do with making and enforcing rules like: if too many sheep die, we shoot and skin the wolves responsible. Simple as that.
All that transparency and regulation is worthless if at the end of the day the wolves get away.
"And then you can decide not to give them any more of your money. That's not an option with a government"
0) A far as I can see, the voters keep voting in Governments who happily take more of your money.
If you don't like it, take it up with the voters. Maybe they really want it that way, and it's only you who hates it. That's Democracy at work. Too bad.
1) In a democracy most people can vote (and perhaps even be candidates).
The last I checked the total number of voters who stayed home > the number of voters who voted for Obama or Bush.
If these bunch actually cared, they could have voted for someone else. If they all bothered, the parties would notice.
As it is those voters don't count, and effectively the two main US parties have 99% of the votes (go look it up) - so by the statistics they are doing the democracy thing right. If the voters don't like things, then they should be voting differently.
But the voters aren't, so the parties do not need to change at all. In fact they should not change or they may lose votes since the US voters are clearly split into three big groups - Democrats, Republicans and the "Stay Homers".
2) You are going to get a government anyway - unless you are living in an island on your own or something similar. So if you have any influence over who ends up in government, use it before it's too late.
The corporations are already using whatever influence they can over the government to hand YOUR money to them via bailouts, "incentives", tax reliefs, regulations etc. The corporations so far don't officially have a vote, but they appear to have more clue than the voters.
If voters keep voting in people who the corporations hand lots of money to, they will get exactly what they voted for.
3) Too many people are stupid and don't get it - it's not about big or small government. It's not quantity that counts. It's quality.
There is no big difference between having a small corrupt government that the big corrupt corporations can bribe (to be allowed to screw you), vs a big corrupt government that just screws you directly. Either way you are screwed.
Many people in high government positions are disabled one way or another.
For instance some have congenital absence of integrity or conscience.
A lot more than Apple or Linux.
;).
With Linux, you can't even be sure that your hardware which was working fine on 2.4.x will continue to work fine in 2.4.y.
In contrast I believe many viruses written in the 1990s will still run fine on Windows XP in 2008
You appear to have missed an important point - the hardware boots properly on at least one older 2.4 kernel.
The sort of people who intentionally stick with 2.4.x would really want their old hardware to continue working with 2.4.x.
They're not trying to upgrade to 2.6 only to find that 2.6 doesn't support their old hardware (which reasonable people would accept).
It's not confidence inspiring given it's already been about a month and there's no response from any developer. Not even a "WONTFIX".
It's perfectly fine to make assumptions, in fact it's part of designing stuff. You can't know everything in advance.
;) ) the designer was.
;) ).
You WILL have to make assumptions anyway - after all you aren't going to ask for 2 billion IP addresses for the hospital. Even if someone argues that in the future some applications may require machines to have thousands of IP addresses, but as a designer you are going to say "Even if that's the case, a hospital is unlikely to want that app, or by that time, the hospital and the world would have gone to IPv6".
How good the assumptions are, shows you how good (or lucky
It's perfectly reasonable to assume that most computers in the hospital should never need to have outsiders able to connect directly to them.
This may not be true for universities, but it is likely to be even more true for banks - only a very few ways in and out.
Many universities have an open campus, and outsiders can walk to any building and try to enter them, and the buildings themselves are designed with multiple entry points. Banks in contrast are desigend to have just a few entry points (that's why the crooks often make their own entry points
The objective can be satisfied if people do not use Volvo cars.
;).
That's not impossible to achieve.
Volvo could do a lot to help
Yeah, and when people stop buying Volvo cars, it becomes even more likely that no one would be killed or injured in a Volvo car.
What if he needs to drive to the train station first?
And udderly inspired he was.
;).
Q: How did the <insert target cultural/racial/whatever group here> man die whilst drinking milk?
A: The cow sat on him.
Sorry, couldn't resist milking it for what it's worth
Drive seek times are typically in the order of 1-10ms (depending on whether to adjacent track or full sweep), that means it's 100-1000Hz which at least overlaps human vocal range.
My memory may be off, but I recall reading that originally the decision for clippy to pop up was to be bayesian as well (not just the "figuring out what you were doing" bit).
But apparently it didn't pop up enough for some people in Microsoft, so they made it pop up more often...
To make breasts and nudity suitable for US audiences, you have to add some gore and violence.
Maybe they can edit the pictures and have the breasts appear severed or something more appropriate?
Judging from the US movie rating schemes, violence is more acceptable than nudity.
I'd rather be able to walk in public areas _every_day_ knowing that the very same people who can barely control their cars, don't have easy access to guns.
Better that, than to have access to guns just on the chance that one day I'd be caught in a hotel room with people outside about to kill me.
From my point of view, I'm more at risk from members of the public than from terrorists. If I can easily get a gun, it means they can easily get one too. Giving them guns would reduce my chances of survival far more. No thanks.
As for protection against criminals. People get robbed in my area quite often (it's hard to legally own a gun here). Yes it sucks, but so far most of the time they don't kill you - they don't have to. If more people had guns, the robbers would just start shooting first (already some robbers are doing the "slash them first" method). Then everyone would have to be on "super alert" mode all the time - so that the robbers don't shoot them first. You may think that's a great state to be in, but it's likely to be bad for most people's hearts.
Having to live "Hollywood Cowboy Style" is not my idea of progress and civilization. Might as well be living amongst wild dangerous animals in Africa.
If you think everyone should have guns, then by similar reasoning, every country should have nukes - so they can defend themselves against rogue nations that attack others without approval from the UN.
There might be other reasons to allow your citizens access to guns, but "killing terrorists" is not it.
;) ), but it is a sign that the Government has failed badly in keeping people safe.
In the Mumbai incident far fewer than a thousand were killed by the terrorists.
If your country is a relatively safe place, it's rather silly to allow your citizens easy access to guns just in the hope that they could stop some terrorist.
If your country is an unsafe place, then maybe let the citizens have guns (many will probably get them anyway
Would allowing citizens easy access to guns really reduce the number of deaths/injuries a year? I doubt it.
"Get over yourself. You aren't that different"
Uh but that's the big problem. If he was the only false positive then it works.
Lastly, it's pretty easy to put a bomb on a plane. I can think of plenty of ways.
For example: the plane doesn't have to a be a conventional airliner to cause big problems.
As for the other ways, go figure them out yourself if you're a terrorist.
That still allows a lot of room for mistakes.
;).
Doing it properly with a transfer switch makes it less likely for you to kill someone.
It's like if you're working on the propeller of a boat:
0) Make sure you have all the keys to start the boat in your pocket.
1) Put a big sticker over the keyhole explaining why the boat should not be started.
2) Try to make sure that other people know (and aren't drunk or something).
Because if stuff goes wrong, the water will be a bit redder than normal
The people running slashdot appear more interested in changing the "look and feel" than actually making it work properly.
Seems like they think it's a good idea to gradually turn the rest of Slashdot into "Idle".
But why is it a sex offense if the people peeing in bushes are actually concealing their genitals from view?
It's _peeing_. What's wrong with the people who came up with such laws? What kind of perverts are they?
If the pee touches property they don't own, fine them for littering or illegal dumping of waste.
Say I wear adult diapers, and somehow people find out that I'm peeing, does that mean I could be considered a sex offender too?
So what's the difference if I hide my genitals using bushes and pee, and people spot me doing it but not my "privates"?
Heck, IMO those who peek at (or even expose) people who try to conceal their peeing, are more likely to be sex offenders than those doing the peeing.
Can't you suspend/restore the game in vmware?
If you can, then the game can be paused.
1) I was on topic. You're the one taking it offtopic now.
2) It's not a logout link.
3) A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you too.
The patent system doesn't scale.
As the number of people, innovation fields and patents go up, anything like the current patent system will fail and fail badly. Worse if you want/expect the pace of innovation to increase.
Personally I think we should just throw it all away and reward inventors with Innovation Prizes. Hindsight is always better. 10 years down the line you are more likely to know whether an invention was deserving or not. In contrast a patent examiner has a more limited time to decide to rubber stamp it or not.
You could have two classes of prizes - an "critics/expert prize" where the experts in the field award it, and a "users prize" where normal members of the public will vote to award such prizes.
This way you can reward both popular inventions, and ultrainnovative ones that the general public may not know about.
A bit like the Nebula and Hugo awards, but perhaps not in implementation.
How about those vampire movies?
17 year old girl hooks up with 108 year old guy - who looks 17.
Not all violence leads to deaths. But if everybody stopped having sex there would be a lot fewer deaths in the world.
"However, the arrests are not necessarily a BAD thing"
Tell that to the kids who got arrested.
Protect the children by arresting them and exposing them to the "Wheels of Justice". Wonderful.