ut if you want to extract gold (or anything else) from seawater, you would probably start with the effluent brine from a desalination plant. That way it is already partially concentrated, and may already be pumped up above sea level so you could use gravity to move it through your extraction mechanism.
You could also find a natural salt flat left over from an ancient sea. These things exist of course, and they are mined... for salt. Even with all the water extracted, it's still not economical to separate the gold.
And then no one can ever challenge their constitutionality again.
Well, there's the Dred Scott decision; but the process of challenging that one killed 600,000 Americans.
Less difficult challenges were "Buck vs. Bell" which IIRC was the one that allowed states to sterilize people against their will and was the source of the infamous "3 generations of imbeciles are enough" quote.
I'm sure there are plenty of other cases; but the bottom line is that SCOTUS ruling one way doesn't etch things in stone. You know what they say, Freedom isn't Free. Sometimes you have to die, fill the jails, lose all your money, etc; and if you're lucky you'll live to see your grandchildren get their God given rights back from those who stole them.
How do you explain the Mythbusters results with their dimpled car?
I've heard that aside from aesthetics, the manufacturers won't do it because it could weaken the structure of the car. I bet it ruins your paint job to have water and ice settle in the dimples too. It's still an interesting idea though.
I haven't pulled up charts for other countries. The US is said to be more religious then European countries though, so I wager that the charts for Europe show even less attendance.
The Catholic church is like Microsoft in this regard. Even if the next 10 revs are worthless, they've got a lot of inertia, a lot of people that are used to it, and a tremendous pile of cash. They won't go away anytime soon; but they have become less relevant.
That's bizarre. I've been through a couple closings, and they always involved down payment checks for 10s of thousands. Slicing and dicing the payment into several checks like that actually sounds more suspicious to me.
I'm not sure why you got modded down, because your answer is somewhat thought provoking and not trollish at all.
You reminded me of a situation I saw involving monitoring networks. The solution to the data overload there was a "roll your own" database and AFAIK it could not be querried with a full set of SQL commands; but was faster and able to handle our data better than off-the-shelf Open Source solutions. This was years before I heard the term "big data". We may have been moving in that direction without knowing it, and now that I think about it I can see how what is now called BD might be more common than I thought...
My takeaway from the article is that the definition of BD is a moving target as the capability of hardware grows.
If "traditional" approaches to data fail to scale, why not just start with BD methods in the first place? In that case, BD is a meaningless term as it simply becomes "a better way of handling data". OTOH, if there's a high technical hurdle between "traditional" and BD methods, then you have an incentive to stay traditional until you're confronted with the problem. Therein lies the crux of my concern, namely, "how much demand is there in the market for these skills?".
If BD methods are simply going to replace "traditional" and the learning curve isn't too steep then the answers is obvious: you should study BD methods if you want to have anything to do with data.
OTOH, if the learning curve is steep and only a handfull of organizations have these problems, then the answer is: "Only a few thousand people on the planet need these skills. Wait until you're in a situation where you need to ramp up on it".
If you don't need it now, may be the answer is to learn just enough so that you won't be lost in the future--kind of like learning a few phrases of a foreign language. OTOH, it could be like when I was graduating high school and these guys asked me if I wanted to take a PL/1 course with them. I reasoned (correctly) that I would never have a need for it.
Now at this point I can hear the "you prefer ignorance?" rebuttals. I've dealt with this before. We all have to triage technologies. Selective ignorance isn't a fault--it's a skill.
How many people on the planet actually manage "Big Data"? Isn't that the kind of thing that happens as a happy accident when your humble web site becomes the next FaceBubbleSpace? You can't plan for that.
Sure, there are other places where it happens--large corporations, governments, maybe some academic studies.
Really though, I have a hard time imagining that there are really a lot of people who deal with BD. Does anybody have numbers on it? What's the definition, anyway? Is Slashdot's archive BD?
Castle Bravo and they weren't even trying to do that. It was supposed to be 4-6 megatons but somebody forgot to carry the two, metaphorically speaking. There was some reaction they didn't anticipate. Remember--no supercomputer simulations back in those days. This also has to make you think when some nuclear scientist says, "we don't expect $technology to do $damage".
As a result of the US test, some poor fisherman that thought they were in the safe zone were not.
The USSR has us beat with Tsar Bomba of course; but that was a very impractical weapon. They intentionally decreased it form 100 megaton to 50 megaton because they figured the plane wouldn't be able to fly away in time. Now imagine that the Soviets had gone for the full 100 megaton shot, and miscalculated like the Americans...
You're missing the guy's point. In the Bay Area you'll have a rainy day in the Winter. The morning after that rain you can do several things:
1. Short drive to the coast, maybe an hour. Spectacular surfing, or just general viewing of amazing coastal views. Temperature -- 50 F, 60F, sunny. Usually pleasant enough if you wear a sweater and a hat, sometimes even a bit balmy if high pressure builds in afterwords.
2. Several hours to Tahoe area. Amazing snow, every bit as snowy as Buffalo. Amazing ski resorts to go with that. Good idea to wait until after it stops because the traffic will be ferocious; but they do a pretty good job keeping it clear.
3. Short drive or public transit to stuff in San Francisco. High culture, restaurants, sporting events. You name it. If you're into sports, Winter or Summer your team actually has a chance of going all the way. A very good chance. Two world series in 3 years, W00t! OK, that's not Winter; but I digress...
Same day in Buffalo: If you can dig yourself out, you can ski... I think.
In some places in the US they have installed countdown timers for the pedestrians. Sometimes this is visible from the road and you can use it to guess green time. It's extremely unlikely that you will lose your green while a parallel crosswalk counter is counting down. It's possible, but not guaranteed that you will lose your green when it hits zero.
Don't you realize that it'll warm the Earth? In 10,000 years San Francisco Valley would become a bay, and we wouldn't be able to walk to the Farallon Hills any more. We'll have a helluva time getting back to Asia if we decide we don't like it here. It'll be the end of the world as we know it. A complete and utter disaster.
Sadly, their metric is "how many tickets did you close."
Fond memories of working dial-up support back in the day. We actually had a guy who responded to that metric by answering a few dozen calls like this: "Sorry sir/mam, your internet is broken. Click.". He did not hide this from the manager, and said, "How's my call time stat now?". Such was the hiring climate and relationship at this point, that he was not fired. The managers relented on metrics... somewhat. They were always on your case about "make busy times", and I had to become adept at finishing data entry for the last call while engaging in pleasantries with the next one! It was one of the most challenging under-paid jobs I ever had.
Don't mod parent down. Parent is most glorious first post ever. Dear Leader has cleverly disguised as "Anonymous Coward" and controls most of Slashdot. All hail!
This is why I actually received some junkmail in the late 90s. I used my actual address but my name was "Ihate Webforms". It was a bit too obvious I guess. They purged it fairly quickly.
There's always the more subtle approach of misspelling your own name, especially when the company claims "we don't sell your information". Then a month later... there it is. The wrong name.
BTW, I've been on the other end of this as a temp worker. Post-cards filled out by teenagers as pranks actually brightened our day. Sadly, I suspect there are fewer humans in the loop now, and some fairly sophisticated algorithms. I haven't seen too many data entry jobs listed lately. OCR must work well enough now. They can probably kill the misspelling trick by cross-referencing a number of databases.
The problem with this is MAD may work when you have to take an active step to trigger it, it doesn't work as well when you have to have to jointly avoid it,
The original MAD worked because as Sting sang, "the Russians love their children too". Unlike the Russians, Congressmen of both parties hate their children. It's the children that will pay for this.
I was fortunate to live in the 80s. The introduction of home PCs (Personal Computers, not IBM compatibles) was all we needed. We all tried to write games, and some of us got really good at it.
Flash forward, and it's all just a big grind. Why would anybody want to code now? It's all just a bunch of web-enabled surveillance apps written in HTML/JavaScript/scripting language spaghetti. We've hit a bad patch in technology. It happens every once in a while. Remember 16 bit computing, segmented addresses, DOS memory hacks? That was another bad spot in technology. None of the novelty of 8-bit, none of the ease of 32-bit, the worst of both worlds.
If you want to bring in a new batch of coders, it has to be disruptive technology. These $billionaires won't bring in the next batch. In fact, the next batch is what they fear.
Nope. The CEO of IBM did not do a big media push in the late 70s and early 80s to get guys like me interested in coding.
That would have looked better if my browser had "turn slide show into one page" and "automatically unpaginate pages without forcing you to hunt for printer icon". On the other end of that spectrum we need, "turn disk thrashing page archives and continuous scrollers into paginated pages". Seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
Scrolling Trolling is about as much fun as Strolling Bowling. I can't believe the Slashdot devs can't fix this.
ut if you want to extract gold (or anything else) from seawater, you would probably start with the effluent brine from a desalination plant. That way it is already partially concentrated, and may already be pumped up above sea level so you could use gravity to move it through your extraction mechanism.
You could also find a natural salt flat left over from an ancient sea. These things exist of course, and they are mined... for salt. Even with all the water extracted, it's still not economical to separate the gold.
And then no one can ever challenge their constitutionality again.
Well, there's the Dred Scott decision; but the process of challenging that one killed 600,000 Americans.
Less difficult challenges were "Buck vs. Bell" which IIRC was the one that allowed states to sterilize people against their will and was the source of the infamous "3 generations of imbeciles are enough" quote.
I'm sure there are plenty of other cases; but the bottom line is that SCOTUS ruling one way doesn't etch things in stone. You know what they say, Freedom isn't Free. Sometimes you have to die, fill the jails, lose all your money, etc; and if you're lucky you'll live to see your grandchildren get their God given rights back from those who stole them.
How do you explain the Mythbusters results with their dimpled car?
I've heard that aside from aesthetics, the manufacturers won't do it because it could weaken the structure of the car. I bet it ruins your paint job to have water and ice settle in the dimples too. It's still an interesting idea though.
Awesome! Now golf-ball dimple it. I really want to know what that would do, or if it would be superfluous given all the other mods.
Atheists are walking of course, while shamans, mystics and various other new age religions are on the bus
Well people could choose to stop with the religion thing in response.
That's what Catholics are doing in the US.
I haven't pulled up charts for other countries. The US is said to be more religious then European countries though, so I wager that the charts for Europe show even less attendance.
The Catholic church is like Microsoft in this regard. Even if the next 10 revs are worthless, they've got a lot of inertia, a lot of people that are used to it, and a tremendous pile of cash. They won't go away anytime soon; but they have become less relevant.
That's bizarre. I've been through a couple closings, and they always involved down payment checks for 10s of thousands. Slicing and dicing the payment into several checks like that actually sounds more suspicious to me.
I'm not sure why you got modded down, because your answer is somewhat thought provoking and not trollish at all.
You reminded me of a situation I saw involving monitoring networks. The solution to the data overload there was a "roll your own" database and AFAIK it could not be querried with a full set of SQL commands; but was faster and able to handle our data better than off-the-shelf Open Source solutions. This was years before I heard the term "big data". We may have been moving in that direction without knowing it, and now that I think about it I can see how what is now called BD might be more common than I thought...
My takeaway from the article is that the definition of BD is a moving target as the capability of hardware grows.
If "traditional" approaches to data fail to scale, why not just start with BD methods in the first place? In that case, BD is a meaningless term as it simply becomes "a better way of handling data". OTOH, if there's a high technical hurdle between "traditional" and BD methods, then you have an incentive to stay traditional until you're confronted with the problem. Therein lies the crux of my concern, namely, "how much demand is there in the market for these skills?".
If BD methods are simply going to replace "traditional" and the learning curve isn't too steep then the answers is obvious: you should study BD methods if you want to have anything to do with data.
OTOH, if the learning curve is steep and only a handfull of organizations have these problems, then the answer is: "Only a few thousand people on the planet need these skills. Wait until you're in a situation where you need to ramp up on it".
If you don't need it now, may be the answer is to learn just enough so that you won't be lost in the future--kind of like learning a few phrases of a foreign language. OTOH, it could be like when I was graduating high school and these guys asked me if I wanted to take a PL/1 course with them. I reasoned (correctly) that I would never have a need for it.
Now at this point I can hear the "you prefer ignorance?" rebuttals. I've dealt with this before. We all have to triage technologies. Selective ignorance isn't a fault--it's a skill.
How many people on the planet actually manage "Big Data"? Isn't that the kind of thing that happens as a happy accident when your humble web site becomes the next FaceBubbleSpace? You can't plan for that.
Sure, there are other places where it happens--large corporations, governments, maybe some academic studies.
Really though, I have a hard time imagining that there are really a lot of people who deal with BD. Does anybody have numbers on it? What's the definition, anyway? Is Slashdot's archive BD?
Castle Bravo and they weren't even trying to do that. It was supposed to be 4-6 megatons but somebody forgot to carry the two, metaphorically speaking. There was some reaction they didn't anticipate. Remember--no supercomputer simulations back in those days. This also has to make you think when some nuclear scientist says, "we don't expect $technology to do $damage".
As a result of the US test, some poor fisherman that thought they were in the safe zone were not.
The USSR has us beat with Tsar Bomba of course; but that was a very impractical weapon. They intentionally decreased it form 100 megaton to 50 megaton because they figured the plane wouldn't be able to fly away in time. Now imagine that the Soviets had gone for the full 100 megaton shot, and miscalculated like the Americans...
You're missing the guy's point. In the Bay Area you'll have a rainy day in the Winter. The morning after that rain you can do several things:
1. Short drive to the coast, maybe an hour. Spectacular surfing, or just general viewing of amazing coastal views. Temperature -- 50 F, 60F, sunny. Usually pleasant enough if you wear a sweater and a hat, sometimes even a bit balmy if high pressure builds in afterwords.
2. Several hours to Tahoe area. Amazing snow, every bit as snowy as Buffalo. Amazing ski resorts to go with that. Good idea to wait until after it stops because the traffic will be ferocious; but they do a pretty good job keeping it clear.
3. Short drive or public transit to stuff in San Francisco. High culture, restaurants, sporting events. You name it. If you're into sports, Winter or Summer your team actually has a chance of going all the way. A very good chance. Two world series in 3 years, W00t! OK, that's not Winter; but I digress...
Same day in Buffalo: If you can dig yourself out, you can ski... I think.
In some places in the US they have installed countdown timers for the pedestrians. Sometimes this is visible from the road and you can use it to guess green time. It's extremely unlikely that you will lose your green while a parallel crosswalk counter is counting down. It's possible, but not guaranteed that you will lose your green when it hits zero.
if you get the chance to see the wildebeest migration, go; it's magnificent
I can't afford to go to Africa. I have to settle for watching people stand in line at the Apple store.
Aren't GUIDs free, and ubiquitous on Microsoft platforms, what... 20 years ago?
Don't you realize that it'll warm the Earth? In 10,000 years San Francisco Valley would become a bay, and we wouldn't be able to walk to the Farallon Hills any more. We'll have a helluva time getting back to Asia if we decide we don't like it here. It'll be the end of the world as we know it. A complete and utter disaster.
Only the Chinese had cast iron in the second century BCE.
Not so fast
Sadly, their metric is "how many tickets did you close."
Fond memories of working dial-up support back in the day. We actually had a guy who responded to that metric by answering a few dozen calls like this: "Sorry sir/mam, your internet is broken. Click.". He did not hide this from the manager, and said, "How's my call time stat now?". Such was the hiring climate and relationship at this point, that he was not fired. The managers relented on metrics... somewhat. They were always on your case about "make busy times", and I had to become adept at finishing data entry for the last call while engaging in pleasantries with the next one! It was one of the most challenging under-paid jobs I ever had.
Don't mod parent down. Parent is most glorious first post ever. Dear Leader has cleverly disguised as "Anonymous Coward" and controls most of Slashdot. All hail!
This is why I actually received some junkmail in the late 90s. I used my actual address but my name was "Ihate Webforms". It was a bit too obvious I guess. They purged it fairly quickly.
There's always the more subtle approach of misspelling your own name, especially when the company claims "we don't sell your information". Then a month later... there it is. The wrong name.
BTW, I've been on the other end of this as a temp worker. Post-cards filled out by teenagers as pranks actually brightened our day. Sadly, I suspect there are fewer humans in the loop now, and some fairly sophisticated algorithms. I haven't seen too many data entry jobs listed lately. OCR must work well enough now. They can probably kill the misspelling trick by cross-referencing a number of databases.
The problem with this is MAD may work when you have to take an active step to trigger it, it doesn't work as well when you have to have to jointly avoid it,
The original MAD worked because as Sting sang, "the Russians love their children too". Unlike the Russians, Congressmen of both parties hate their children. It's the children that will pay for this.
I'll have to write a parser for that first sentence. :)
I was fortunate to live in the 80s. The introduction of home PCs (Personal Computers, not IBM compatibles) was all we needed. We all tried to write games, and some of us got really good at it.
Flash forward, and it's all just a big grind. Why would anybody want to code now? It's all just a bunch of web-enabled surveillance apps written in HTML/JavaScript/scripting language spaghetti. We've hit a bad patch in technology. It happens every once in a while. Remember 16 bit computing, segmented addresses, DOS memory hacks? That was another bad spot in technology. None of the novelty of 8-bit, none of the ease of 32-bit, the worst of both worlds.
If you want to bring in a new batch of coders, it has to be disruptive technology. These $billionaires won't bring in the next batch. In fact, the next batch is what they fear.
Nope. The CEO of IBM did not do a big media push in the late 70s and early 80s to get guys like me interested in coding.
That would have looked better if my browser had "turn slide show into one page" and "automatically unpaginate pages without forcing you to hunt for printer icon". On the other end of that spectrum we need, "turn disk thrashing page archives and continuous scrollers into paginated pages". Seriously.