What is this "real journalism"? Watergate seems like the best example of "real journalism", but that was a leak. Leakers can blog it themselves now, no middleman is required.
A dying print media will make it harder for professional journalists to expose things, it makes it easier for amateurs to get the word out. PR articles will still get sent out as well (by aggregators, not editors).
Tracing things though public records won't happen as much now, which is sad since public records are a lot more accessible these days.
Is the increase in dissemination of insider information worth more than the decrease in paid professionals weeding through publicly available data? I honestly don't know.
Hydro, geothermal, solar arrays in deserts, and nuclear can produce energy-intensive materials. They don't work everywhere, but aluminium, ammonia, steel, etc. can be produced where there is cheap green energy.
It will be a gradual transition though, because refineries are big investments, and they won't just be mothballed to save a few panda bears.
New dirty assets won't be built as much (because of the legislative risk), so green replacements will fill the gaps left by old assets retiring.
Sadly, they are not on the road all on their own. And as much as I won't miss them if they drive into a ravine while watching TV, I'm a bit less happy if they're driving in the oncoming lane on the same road I'm driving (or more likely, in my lane while they are fiddling with the controls).
(Kind of like I'm fine with them being superuser on their own system, but what do you do when they need to have modify rights to a network drive which also contains my work)
So it's more like a shared DOS system, where everyone is a superuser, and they can all FORMAT C?
African-Americans are more likely to have lower education levels (due to high crime rates in their schools, which is caused by the vicious cycle of poverty, racism, and non-blacks fleeing black schools which causes the schools to ghettoize). I bet people with low education levels are more likely to be racist.
Hispanics and Asian-Americans had no reason to discriminate for McCain and Obama, but they might vote for a Hispanic or Asian-American candidate.
Or maybe African-Americans feel that race is an issue, because they feel they have been discriminated against more?
I've lived in other countries and I have to say I don't think those other countries hold a candle to the U.S. when it comes to treating diseases, illnesses, or injuries; however, they do in some cases have better health care "systems" with a greater focus on prevention.
Even if the other countries do manage to do it with fewer costs and a better system, I don't have faith that whatever emerges out of say, the latest health care reform push will actually end up costing us less and be better even if it ends up being full-blown social medicine, do you?
That's the problem. The US treats *everything*, even if "wait and see" is the best decision. That's the profit motive at work - more medicine for the patients. But more medicine usually makes you sicker.
It wouldn't be a problem if patients were smart enough to treat themselves, but then they would be doctors.
Illegal drugs are made by TERRORISTS and ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS. They are often sold, on the street, by STREET GANGS. By REGULATING the trade of these substances, we TAKE JOBS AWAY from HARD WORKING AMERICANS, and LET THE BAD GUYS WIN.
The cost of preventing illegal drug imports, and the lost revenue from the taxes that could be applied to these if they were legal leads to HIGHER TAXES, and LESS MONEY FOR SCHOOLS.
Bad companies need a great CEO, to turn them around. Good companies just need a decent CEO, to not mess things up completely. If the CEO is steering too much, something in the company is wrong.
As long as Apple keeps a good, tech savvy CEO with high standards, it should stay on track.
Keep in mind, there is plenty of scope to reduce demand as well (better insulation, fluro bulbs, etc).
Plus, I don't think that gas and coal is going to go away too soon. New investement might be cut (something like 50% of the cost of coal power is the infrastructure, and so the risk of higher taxes makes it a poor investement), but that doesn't mean that existing generators will be shut off in the next 10 years.
It's likely that the old generators will be gradually EOLed, and the replacements will be greener (and more sustainable) than fossil.
256GB is pretty much all you will ever need, at least as the OS drive. At least until Skynet comes online.
I'm on a 60GB laptop, and no-where near hitting the limits. Ripping a few movies and songs (legally, I'm sure) would hit 100GB, but after that it's diminishing returns. Do you really want to load 50 DVD worth of data onto your drive?
Media is an exception, and it can grow to fill the space it's on, but media should be on a ZFS based file server, or in the cloud, or something. You don't want 1.5 GB of sentimental photos (or a very carefully selected... digital art... collection) all going down because your disk crapped out.
So does every fricking application on the planet. 3D graphics? Patented. One click to buy? Patented. What's the bet that Microsoft has patents on half the Linux kernal?
Can't they just do what every other free software project does, and just ignore the bloody things?
Microsoft might sue, but they will probably just laugh. Nobody is going to re-implement the entire.net framework (including all the quirks of Microsoft's database layer, file system behavior, etc). Just look at the difficulties in getting data out of MySQL and PostGres in a sane way! Once you target a specific platform (i.e. the entire Microsoft stack) it's very hard to replicate.
Shouldn't patents be non-obvious, but easy to implement for a skilled professional in the field?
I though that XML web services were pretty obvious (given XML-RPC, SOAP, and every other web framework on the planet), but the difficulty in creating such a framework would be in the implementation.
But that's not Stuff That Matters, so yeah, let's talk about Microsoft's stupid patent applications because that's News For Nerds.
Intellectual property is a serious point of discussion. China's monopoly on tea and silk caused empires to rise and fall.
If patents go to far, they can completely destroy the incentive people have to innovate, as all their innovations will be reliant on other patented processes. If Yahoo had owned a patent on internet search, then Google would never have had a chance to monetize Pagerank. But Yahoo would never have gotten so far, because previous companies would have patented the technology Yahoo used.
The medieval guilds arrested a lot of development, by guarding their secret knowledge. The Masons were not powerful because of their political connections, they had political connections because they simply knew how to build stone buildings. Sure, they had earned that knowledge from previous Masons, but the process of knowledge transfer was so opaque that corruption and inefficiencies were bound to creep in.
The printing press destroyed the monopolies of the guilds, because their knowledge could be cheaply and efficiently disseminated. Open source, the FSF, Wikipedia and other open movements are furthering this movement.
But patents are a way for the establishment to fight back, and try to create an environment in which they can reap more profits than a free market would allow.
Y'know, I've earned a lot of Slashdot Karma up to now, and I'm ready to spend it all for this. I can always earn more. Maybe that's what slashdot Karma is really for.
Fark isn't where I get my news any more than slashdot is - they are two of many aggregators I use to ensure I get the widest exposure, and then I filter using neurons.
It's would be harder to get a high publication count as a non-professional, but if you did an interesting experiment it should be reasonably easy to publish. But publication count should only be an issue if you are in the ivory tower to begin with.
This whole "meta-lessons" strikes me as a bit of a cop-out. A good teacher might occasional do a big "meta-lesson" drill in a constrained lad session. Get 30 people to fuck up a 3 hour lab, then tell them what they did wrong.
Getting 30 people to fuck up a semester of work, in the hopes that they "learn a lesson about teamwork" is outright incompetence.
Overbearing managers? If I recall correctly the estimated probability of failure seemed to lose an order of magnitude every time it went up a level of management.
It also depends on the personalities. Some programmers are too egocentric to be useful in pair programming. They aren't too good in other contexts either though.
Pair programming is good for coding and software design (if you have a UI cases design), but crap for "UI, and model design by prototyping". If you want production code, you should use pair programming, design reviews, and code reviews. If you want to hack up a protoype (which you then refactor into a proper design, using pair programming, design reviews, and code reviews), then one person can be more creative than 2.
Of course, some managers don't believe that development is a creative process, and think that they are the designers, but that's another problem.
Nuclear power stations are driven to improve safety, not to cut costs. Nuclear power will always be crippled by over-regulation and excessive conservatism, because the risks are just too high if things go pear (or mushroom) shaped.
Wind generator manufactures can be a lot more aggressive in cost cutting, because the consequences are a lot less severe.
In the long run, wind generators will drop in price a lot quicker.
Slashdot Mirror
What is this "real journalism"? Watergate seems like the best example of "real journalism", but that was a leak. Leakers can blog it themselves now, no middleman is required.
A dying print media will make it harder for professional journalists to expose things, it makes it easier for amateurs to get the word out. PR articles will still get sent out as well (by aggregators, not editors).
Tracing things though public records won't happen as much now, which is sad since public records are a lot more accessible these days.
Is the increase in dissemination of insider information worth more than the decrease in paid professionals weeding through publicly available data? I honestly don't know.
Hydro, geothermal, solar arrays in deserts, and nuclear can produce energy-intensive materials. They don't work everywhere, but aluminium, ammonia, steel, etc. can be produced where there is cheap green energy.
It will be a gradual transition though, because refineries are big investments, and they won't just be mothballed to save a few panda bears.
New dirty assets won't be built as much (because of the legislative risk), so green replacements will fill the gaps left by old assets retiring.
Sadly, they are not on the road all on their own. And as much as I won't miss them if they drive into a ravine while watching TV, I'm a bit less happy if they're driving in the oncoming lane on the same road I'm driving (or more likely, in my lane while they are fiddling with the controls).
(Kind of like I'm fine with them being superuser on their own system, but what do you do when they need to have modify rights to a network drive which also contains my work)
So it's more like a shared DOS system, where everyone is a superuser, and they can all FORMAT C?
African-Americans are more likely to have lower education levels (due to high crime rates in their schools, which is caused by the vicious cycle of poverty, racism, and non-blacks fleeing black schools which causes the schools to ghettoize). I bet people with low education levels are more likely to be racist.
Hispanics and Asian-Americans had no reason to discriminate for McCain and Obama, but they might vote for a Hispanic or Asian-American candidate.
Or maybe African-Americans feel that race is an issue, because they feel they have been discriminated against more?
I've lived in other countries and I have to say I don't think those other countries hold a candle to the U.S. when it comes to treating diseases, illnesses, or injuries; however, they do in some cases have better health care "systems" with a greater focus on prevention.
Even if the other countries do manage to do it with fewer costs and a better system, I don't have faith that whatever emerges out of say, the latest health care reform push will actually end up costing us less and be better even if it ends up being full-blown social medicine, do you?
That's the problem. The US treats *everything*, even if "wait and see" is the best decision. That's the profit motive at work - more medicine for the patients. But more medicine usually makes you sicker.
It wouldn't be a problem if patients were smart enough to treat themselves, but then they would be doctors.
Information asymmetry messes up markets.
Pot seems to be correlated with metal illness. People who are a bit unstable to start with seem to go completely off the rails.
Still ... alcohol seems to be correlated with violence, and tobacco is crazily addictive and bad for your heart and lungs.
As far as I know, tea and coffee are fairly safe.
Try not to make it so logical.
Illegal drugs are made by TERRORISTS and ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS. They are often sold, on the street, by STREET GANGS. By REGULATING the trade of these substances, we TAKE JOBS AWAY from HARD WORKING AMERICANS, and LET THE BAD GUYS WIN.
The cost of preventing illegal drug imports, and the lost revenue from the taxes that could be applied to these if they were legal leads to HIGHER TAXES, and LESS MONEY FOR SCHOOLS.
The #1 reason for American doctors PUSHING circumcision is that they get YOU to pay extra.
#2 is that Americans generally don't even question it.
It's sad, but I expect that is probably the case.
Bad companies need a great CEO, to turn them around. Good companies just need a decent CEO, to not mess things up completely. If the CEO is steering too much, something in the company is wrong.
As long as Apple keeps a good, tech savvy CEO with high standards, it should stay on track.
Keep in mind, there is plenty of scope to reduce demand as well (better insulation, fluro bulbs, etc).
Plus, I don't think that gas and coal is going to go away too soon. New investement might be cut (something like 50% of the cost of coal power is the infrastructure, and so the risk of higher taxes makes it a poor investement), but that doesn't mean that existing generators will be shut off in the next 10 years.
It's likely that the old generators will be gradually EOLed, and the replacements will be greener (and more sustainable) than fossil.
256GB is pretty much all you will ever need, at least as the OS drive. At least until Skynet comes online.
I'm on a 60GB laptop, and no-where near hitting the limits. Ripping a few movies and songs (legally, I'm sure) would hit 100GB, but after that it's diminishing returns. Do you really want to load 50 DVD worth of data onto your drive?
Media is an exception, and it can grow to fill the space it's on, but media should be on a ZFS based file server, or in the cloud, or something. You don't want 1.5 GB of sentimental photos (or a very carefully selected ... digital art ... collection) all going down because your disk crapped out.
Yes, Mono probably has "patents" against it.
So does every fricking application on the planet. 3D graphics? Patented. One click to buy? Patented. What's the bet that Microsoft has patents on half the Linux kernal?
Can't they just do what every other free software project does, and just ignore the bloody things?
Microsoft might sue, but they will probably just laugh. Nobody is going to re-implement the entire .net framework (including all the quirks of Microsoft's database layer, file system behavior, etc). Just look at the difficulties in getting data out of MySQL and PostGres in a sane way! Once you target a specific platform (i.e. the entire Microsoft stack) it's very hard to replicate.
Shouldn't patents be non-obvious, but easy to implement for a skilled professional in the field?
I though that XML web services were pretty obvious (given XML-RPC, SOAP, and every other web framework on the planet), but the difficulty in creating such a framework would be in the implementation.
Perhaps they helped attract mates?
In other news... there's a revolution going on in Iran and it's turned violent.
But that's not Stuff That Matters, so yeah, let's talk about Microsoft's stupid patent applications because that's News For Nerds.
Intellectual property is a serious point of discussion. China's monopoly on tea and silk caused empires to rise and fall.
If patents go to far, they can completely destroy the incentive people have to innovate, as all their innovations will be reliant on other patented processes. If Yahoo had owned a patent on internet search, then Google would never have had a chance to monetize Pagerank. But Yahoo would never have gotten so far, because previous companies would have patented the technology Yahoo used.
The medieval guilds arrested a lot of development, by guarding their secret knowledge. The Masons were not powerful because of their political connections, they had political connections because they simply knew how to build stone buildings. Sure, they had earned that knowledge from previous Masons, but the process of knowledge transfer was so opaque that corruption and inefficiencies were bound to creep in.
The printing press destroyed the monopolies of the guilds, because their knowledge could be cheaply and efficiently disseminated. Open source, the FSF, Wikipedia and other open movements are furthering this movement.
But patents are a way for the establishment to fight back, and try to create an environment in which they can reap more profits than a free market would allow.
So yes, it is Stuff That Matters.
Microsoft's innovation is that it allows you to give reasons for rating, right? Perhaps it runs of slashcode.
Y'know, I've earned a lot of Slashdot Karma up to now, and I'm ready to spend it all for this. I can always earn more. Maybe that's what slashdot Karma is really for.
Fark isn't where I get my news any more than slashdot is - they are two of many aggregators I use to ensure I get the widest exposure, and then I filter using neurons.
Here's Informed Comment's spin. Here is a nice pic. YouTube has a lot of videos.
Another cool pic
At least nobody says that the CIA stole this one.
It's would be harder to get a high publication count as a non-professional, but if you did an interesting experiment it should be reasonably easy to publish. But publication count should only be an issue if you are in the ivory tower to begin with.
This whole "meta-lessons" strikes me as a bit of a cop-out. A good teacher might occasional do a big "meta-lesson" drill in a constrained lad session. Get 30 people to fuck up a 3 hour lab, then tell them what they did wrong.
Getting 30 people to fuck up a semester of work, in the hopes that they "learn a lesson about teamwork" is outright incompetence.
Overbearing managers? If I recall correctly the estimated probability of failure seemed to lose an order of magnitude every time it went up a level of management.
It also depends on the personalities. Some programmers are too egocentric to be useful in pair programming. They aren't too good in other contexts either though.
Pair programming is good for coding and software design (if you have a UI cases design), but crap for "UI, and model design by prototyping". If you want production code, you should use pair programming, design reviews, and code reviews. If you want to hack up a protoype (which you then refactor into a proper design, using pair programming, design reviews, and code reviews), then one person can be more creative than 2.
Of course, some managers don't believe that development is a creative process, and think that they are the designers, but that's another problem.
It's ok. Economics *rarely* affects the real world.
I though 13 was an unlucky number. Didn't Apollo 13 end in a bad way?
Nuclear power stations are driven to improve safety, not to cut costs. Nuclear power will always be crippled by over-regulation and excessive conservatism, because the risks are just too high if things go pear (or mushroom) shaped.
Wind generator manufactures can be a lot more aggressive in cost cutting, because the consequences are a lot less severe.
In the long run, wind generators will drop in price a lot quicker.