After 400 years of being mocked as financial luddites, we bible thumpers that said charging of interest was a sin, have in fact been vindicated...
seriously... has the thought ever occurred to you that there may be a growing minority of Americans that basically borrowed a ton of money with no intention of paying it back whatsoever? You can cry predatory lending all you want, but lets not forget that this is also the class of people that has by far almost all the murders exclusively in its demographic.
I mean, if a guy goes and rings up 50k in credit card debt and lives in a house for free for two years until the bank takes it, whose really the victim? How am I victim if I got to take other people's money and not ever pay it back? Sounds to me more like I got a lot of free stuff.
My mom attended a litigation support conference where NSA actually claimed to be able to read a drive's contents after SEVENTEEN zero overwrites. Who are they though... just another multibillion dollar spy agency affiliated with the very guys that actually invented computers...
Is that contract manufacturers supposedly offer efficiencies because they don't have to listen to Dell's marketing considerations. It would seem to me, then, that Dell's marketing considerations would need to change and all this really is is a low wage subsidy of a fundamentally flawed business.
I'm really sick of MBA's getting American companies out of manufacturing because they lack the engineering knowledge and are too lazy to make it work. If there a company really well led by an MBA? I mean, President Bush has an MBA... look how well he's done.
You know, we keep talking about solid state as its better because there are no moving parts, and less wear, but chips and circuits have plenty of moving electrons and go through a lot of thermal stress. I know that for a lot of applications a circuit can seem to be more reliable, but do we really have a sufficient experience to make such a sweeping statement that in fact solid state is more -reliable- than a mechanical system? There are some steam trains out there that are running and are over 100 years old... do we really think that a CPU or a RAM or a motherboard can live that long?
The problem with natural gas is that there's not enough of it. The biggest reason for the rise in electric tariffs in the early part of the 2000's was largely because everyone built natural gas power plants, and, they more or less used up all the natural gas. Now you want to go and build natural gas cars... good luck getting natural gas. Proposed terminals for importing LNG all along the east coast have been killed left and right, there's not enough domestic supply in the lower 48 and the uber pipeline from Alaska faces a storm of environmental protests.
That is your first mistake. Time worked != work accomplished. You can work "all the time" and literally get nothing done, while someone working only 40 hours a week gets more done than the person who warms the chair longer.
You can, but generally speaking, if you get into a groove and are writing code continuously on a cool project, you can do an awful lot more in a 15 hour day than someone marking time.
Surely it was less efficient. And yet, you hear about IT people from that time staying in their jobs for decades, loving what they do, etc. N
We stayed at the office late. I used to stay at work until 1 in the morning in my twenties and leave just in time to catch last call at the pub and go home. Now I just do it from home. It's easier.
Part of the culture comes from the belief that in the 1980s we were not working hard enough to compete with the rest of the world. We talk about working 60 hours a week in the USA but in some parts of the world they are working all the time and they are pulling ahead of us. So people in IT, sensing the wealth and opportunity, sorta got it into their culture that Americans need to work that much too, and I think where the disconnect is, is that, we pulled out to such an early tech lead world wide that we thought we'd actually not have to work as much or could let up in the pace and slow down to smell the roses, but that is not the case.
It's pretty simple actually. Who do you get to cut your lawn? The guy that cuts the lawn and leaves, or the guy that cuts the lawn, bags the mulch and does the leaves and trims? You opt for the latter. Look at how many Obama stickers are on the backs of Toyotas... even globalisms self appointed victims are just as much as perps as the corporations they hate.
The thing is, you aren't going to be able to tell the rest of the world not to work 60 hours a week. They are going to do it because IT is a pretty cushy job and it beats the heck out of waiting for a monsoon in India. They want the work and they are going to offer their services aggressively and we have to compete for the work that is out there, both in their market or in ours. Even if we did, say, ban Indian outsourcing, we would only delay the inevitable destruction of industries that rely on IT, in favor of those countries who do not ban outsourcing - sorta like, how Bush's attempted steel tariffs wound up screwing Detroit.
I'm a white, Republican American and I'm in favor of H1-B immigration as it raises the overall American experience.
My experience with unions is that they culturally favor the least capable workers at the expense of the most... unions are about, people who "put in the most time" are the ones that should get the most pay... even when they are honestly run, and I think they aren't. I just unions as a stupid and useless voice for collective action in IT and we are being babies.
You know, those of us who complain about working conditions need to take a look at those around us who don't sit in an air conditioned office and type stuff into a box. Go walk into a car plant or a coal mine, and you'll see what jobs do suck.
We're spoiled, and we're lazy, and that's why people are finding people that can do our jobs cheaper than we can, and our jobs are -easy-, which is why everyone in the world with half a brain wants one.
I think as a rule, if you just educate people that free sites that take personal information are in the business of selling that information, the public would get the drift.
No. Read section 2.7 [ucar.edu], which summarizes pretty much every peer-reviewed paper published on the subject. Not even close. I mean, seriously -- did it never occur to you that maybe, just maybe, we have observatories and satellites studying in detail essentially every thing the sun does, in addition to all kinds of long-term proxy data?
Yeah yeah, studying what. Our sensors are primitive, our understanding of physics limited, our ability to model complexity is weak, and yet, you claim to understand exactly how a giant nuclear explosion is going to effect the earth in every possible way?
Why, it's only this year that they have discovered that there's some sort of quantum coupling between the earth and the sun such that solar output seems to alter decay rates of some materials, and it's only been this year that they discovered a giant electrical conduit between the earth and the sun. But that's just year. I bet we don't know 10% of what we think we know about the -only- source of energy in our solar system.
Hah! We are now well overdue for solar cycle 24 and haven't had a sunspot for a month. Our theory is simple. If there are no sunspots, the planet cools, otherwise, it gets warmer. Fancy that, the planet has actually cooled somewhat this year, despite the increases in CO2.
Google Chrome is so good, it may actually make me delete my Linux partition to load up Vista. If the standard notion of a client u/i was alive before, it is surely dead now. Chrome is a game changer and this release of a web browser may well exceed the impact of the original Netscape...
Oh yes...nothing...except for compounds which are detrimental to human health in quantities of parts-per-million or parts-per-billion
If the environmental movement was genuinely concerned about the impact of a parts per billion contamination of manmade chemicals, then the birth control pill should have been banned a long time ago because of the Canadian study that shows that trace amounts of popular pills alters birthrates of animals in lakes.
The thing is, you can't look at any single variable in isolation. Man and Earth form a single system, and so, you have to make decisions weighted towards what is in the best interests of mankind with respect to that system. Yes, we want to reduce pollution, but also, we want to provide people with electricity, heat, and power to fuel a happy life for everyone on the planet. So, China pollutes more, and will pollute more, but, at the same time, you have another billion humans which are being elevated from subsistence living to a level approaching that of the USA middle class and likely within the next 50 years. I'd call that a win win for everyone. Poverty always kills more people than pollution does.
I'm using Chrome right now and I find it to be easily the fastest browser I've ever used. Slashdot's Javascript is slow on my machine but that compiler Chrome has seems to make even this plodding page load up almost instantly.
Suddenly, the thought of Google challenging MS-Office with JavaScript makes a great deal of sense.
Here we go again, 10 billion POUNDS. I would say that I just farted, injecting nearly 10 gatrillion nano-ounces into the precious atmosphere.
But let's put 10 billion POUNDS into perspective. That's 20 million tons, or, roughly 2E7 / 5000 teratons or 2E7 / 5E15 or really 0.0000005% of the atmosphere.
If only mother nature were cooperative... Well, before Newton discovered gravity, you could still get killed by a falling rock.
Sadly, just because we don't know have a cause for why less sunspots might cool the planet doesn't categorically rule it out. The only intellectual discipline that can have the rigor of a mathematical proof, is well, mathematical proofs, and after that, the universe is decidedly less cooperative. All you can really say is, based on what we know, sunspots probably shouldn't be changing the climate, but if it turns out that they do, then what we know changes...
You do know that axial tilt is the main cause of the seasons on Earth rather than the eccentricity of its orbit?
Grumpy.
God, can people on slashdot ever see the forest for the trees? i mean, this whole board is filled with tree counters and tree branch counters and not a one of you can actually ever see the forest!
sigh.
don't you think, if the earth's orbit carried it out past mars, that maybe, just maybe, the orbit would take precedence over the tilt of the earth when determining "seasons"? That the axial tilt matters more than the eccentricity says that the earth's orbit isn't very eccentric.
And just tried to have a bunch of objects follow nearly circular orbits? Those orbits don't grow on trees, for sure.
It's almost amazing that we have so many planets in our solar system with nearly circular orbits. I would think that, if your orbit is too elliptical, it would make life much more difficult to form.
If the earth's winter took it out past mars and the summer in towards mercury, our oceans would boil and then rain down on us again and freeze, every year. That would suck, for sure.
In a conventional war, the USA would most likely make fairly short work of Russia. The problem is that Russia and the USA both possess rather large nuclear arsenals.
First off, tax revenues have actually increased, believe it or not, as, the issue with the economy is not a slowdown per say, but a shift towards the commodities sector. So, as a whole, the USA is actually doing reasonably well given its misadventures, its just that people that run investment banks and the IT that sucks off their teets are taking a beating, but, commodities are doing really well and manufacturing is surging due to growing exports. It's a red state economy - where services get reduced in value and smokestack industries command a premium.
Secondly, there's no comparing the Russian economy to the American economy. Yeah, Russia is doing ok because of its oil exports, but those exports are actually declining and meanwhile the USA is building up its manufacturing, is investing in all sorts of alternative energies, leads in computing and is competitive in a lot of other industries, and, while we're at, happens to have a military alliance with its only serious high tech economic competitors - namely, the EU. So, even if you doubt the American ability to innovate, there's 500 million Europeans over in NATO that might feel motivated to arm themselves somewhat if the Russians invaded Poland or Germany.
Now, the USA's military is actually pretty organized. When you think about it, the USA is doing a pretty remarkable job in Iraq and Afghanistan considering it is occupying the entire region with a force only 7 times the size of NYPD.
The thing is, as much as everyone talks about how the Army is overstretched, the Navy and Air Force aren't doing anything, and they become a lot more important in a war with Russia. While they've been fighting the war, the Navy is also researching upgrades to Rail guns, is designing a new class of aircraft carrier, is building a new class of nuclear submarine, has deployed and tested an anti-satellite and anti-ballistic missile capability to its surface fleet, has just finished a significant aircraft upgrade procurement, and is embarking on a second one. If anyone thinks the F-18 SuperHornet is just a patch to the Hornet.. woops.
Similarly, the USAF now has deployed its first fighter wing of F-22s, is building UAVs like crazy, is working on the F-35, is improving its air to air missile capability...
And, even though in the middle of a war, and perhaps spurred on by it, the US Army is actually researching and deploying next generation battle rifles, technologies to find snipers, look for IEDs, rolling out more mine resistant vehicles, improving the capabilities of its armoured troop transport, upgrading its capabilities to deal with wounded soldiers...
The bottom line is, if the Russians did want to try something conventional against a NATO country, at this point, NATO would completely fuck the Russians up.
Basic research isn't going to give anyone any competetive advantages either. In order for science to work, people have to build on each others work.
Sure it will. If you have a corporate culture that has basic research and knows how things really work, there's going to be a much higher degree of success in building out a newer product simply because your basic research has lowered the risk of doing something new for commercial exploitation.
I think the problem should be solved the other way. Nationalize the pharmaceutical industry, and you won't have the corrupting effects of profit on our health system
But then you'd have no desire to actually accomplish anything. Why work if there's no point to it.
I think you could build a house as strong as a tree can be, if you wanted to pay for it. Instead of a concrete slab covering the ground with a few straps holding the house to the slab, you could have a deeply rooted system in the ground and it would be pretty sturdy. Skyscrapers do this.
Slashdot Mirror
After 400 years of being mocked as financial luddites, we bible thumpers that said charging of interest was a sin, have in fact been vindicated...
seriously... has the thought ever occurred to you that there may be a growing minority of Americans that basically borrowed a ton of money with no intention of paying it back whatsoever? You can cry predatory lending all you want, but lets not forget that this is also the class of people that has by far almost all the murders exclusively in its demographic.
I mean, if a guy goes and rings up 50k in credit card debt and lives in a house for free for two years until the bank takes it, whose really the victim? How am I victim if I got to take other people's money and not ever pay it back? Sounds to me more like I got a lot of free stuff.
If you could build purely mechanical computers that could function decently, they would of course be resistant to EMP.
My mom attended a litigation support conference where NSA actually claimed to be able to read a drive's contents after SEVENTEEN zero overwrites. Who are they though... just another multibillion dollar spy agency affiliated with the very guys that actually invented computers...
Wow, I sank Google! :-)
Is that contract manufacturers supposedly offer efficiencies because they don't have to listen to Dell's marketing considerations. It would seem to me, then, that Dell's marketing considerations would need to change and all this really is is a low wage subsidy of a fundamentally flawed business.
I'm really sick of MBA's getting American companies out of manufacturing because they lack the engineering knowledge and are too lazy to make it work. If there a company really well led by an MBA? I mean, President Bush has an MBA... look how well he's done.
You know, we keep talking about solid state as its better because there are no moving parts, and less wear, but chips and circuits have plenty of moving electrons and go through a lot of thermal stress. I know that for a lot of applications a circuit can seem to be more reliable, but do we really have a sufficient experience to make such a sweeping statement that in fact solid state is more -reliable- than a mechanical system? There are some steam trains out there that are running and are over 100 years old... do we really think that a CPU or a RAM or a motherboard can live that long?
The problem with natural gas is that there's not enough of it. The biggest reason for the rise in electric tariffs in the early part of the 2000's was largely because everyone built natural gas power plants, and, they more or less used up all the natural gas. Now you want to go and build natural gas cars... good luck getting natural gas. Proposed terminals for importing LNG all along the east coast have been killed left and right, there's not enough domestic supply in the lower 48 and the uber pipeline from Alaska faces a storm of environmental protests.
That is your first mistake. Time worked != work accomplished. You can work "all the time" and literally get nothing done, while someone working only 40 hours a week gets more done than the person who warms the chair longer.
You can, but generally speaking, if you get into a groove and are writing code continuously on a cool project, you can do an awful lot more in a 15 hour day than someone marking time.
Surely it was less efficient. And yet, you hear about IT people from that time staying in their jobs for decades, loving what they do, etc. N
We stayed at the office late. I used to stay at work until 1 in the morning in my twenties and leave just in time to catch last call at the pub and go home. Now I just do it from home. It's easier.
Part of the culture comes from the belief that in the 1980s we were not working hard enough to compete with the rest of the world. We talk about working 60 hours a week in the USA but in some parts of the world they are working all the time and they are pulling ahead of us. So people in IT, sensing the wealth and opportunity, sorta got it into their culture that Americans need to work that much too, and I think where the disconnect is, is that, we pulled out to such an early tech lead world wide that we thought we'd actually not have to work as much or could let up in the pace and slow down to smell the roses, but that is not the case.
It's pretty simple actually. Who do you get to cut your lawn? The guy that cuts the lawn and leaves, or the guy that cuts the lawn, bags the mulch and does the leaves and trims? You opt for the latter. Look at how many Obama stickers are on the backs of Toyotas... even globalisms self appointed victims are just as much as perps as the corporations they hate.
The thing is, you aren't going to be able to tell the rest of the world not to work 60 hours a week. They are going to do it because IT is a pretty cushy job and it beats the heck out of waiting for a monsoon in India. They want the work and they are going to offer their services aggressively and we have to compete for the work that is out there, both in their market or in ours. Even if we did, say, ban Indian outsourcing, we would only delay the inevitable destruction of industries that rely on IT, in favor of those countries who do not ban outsourcing - sorta like, how Bush's attempted steel tariffs wound up screwing Detroit.
I'm a white, Republican American and I'm in favor of H1-B immigration as it raises the overall American experience.
My experience with unions is that they culturally favor the least capable workers at the expense of the most... unions are about, people who "put in the most time" are the ones that should get the most pay... even when they are honestly run, and I think they aren't. I just unions as a stupid and useless voice for collective action in IT and we are being babies.
You know, those of us who complain about working conditions need to take a look at those around us who don't sit in an air conditioned office and type stuff into a box. Go walk into a car plant or a coal mine, and you'll see what jobs do suck.
We're spoiled, and we're lazy, and that's why people are finding people that can do our jobs cheaper than we can, and our jobs are -easy-, which is why everyone in the world with half a brain wants one.
I think as a rule, if you just educate people that free sites that take personal information are in the business of selling that information, the public would get the drift.
And plz don't embarrass yourself further by trying to claim it all came from the sun as well...
Tinkerbell, it did all come from the sun. Fossil fuels are stored solar energy. Duh.
No. Read section 2.7 [ucar.edu], which summarizes pretty much every peer-reviewed paper published on the subject. Not even close. I mean, seriously -- did it never occur to you that maybe, just maybe, we have observatories and satellites studying in detail essentially every thing the sun does, in addition to all kinds of long-term proxy data?
Yeah yeah, studying what. Our sensors are primitive, our understanding of physics limited, our ability to model complexity is weak, and yet, you claim to understand exactly how a giant nuclear explosion is going to effect the earth in every possible way?
Why, it's only this year that they have discovered that there's some sort of quantum coupling between the earth and the sun such that solar output seems to alter decay rates of some materials, and it's only been this year that they discovered a giant electrical conduit between the earth and the sun. But that's just year. I bet we don't know 10% of what we think we know about the -only- source of energy in our solar system.
Hah! We are now well overdue for solar cycle 24 and haven't had a sunspot for a month. Our theory is simple. If there are no sunspots, the planet cools, otherwise, it gets warmer. Fancy that, the planet has actually cooled somewhat this year, despite the increases in CO2.
Google Chrome is so good, it may actually make me delete my Linux partition to load up Vista. If the standard notion of a client u/i was alive before, it is surely dead now. Chrome is a game changer and this release of a web browser may well exceed the impact of the original Netscape...
It's remarkable, how fast it is.
Oh yes...nothing...except for compounds which are detrimental to human health in quantities of parts-per-million or parts-per-billion
If the environmental movement was genuinely concerned about the impact of a parts per billion contamination of manmade chemicals, then the birth control pill should have been banned a long time ago because of the Canadian study that shows that trace amounts of popular pills alters birthrates of animals in lakes.
The thing is, you can't look at any single variable in isolation. Man and Earth form a single system, and so, you have to make decisions weighted towards what is in the best interests of mankind with respect to that system. Yes, we want to reduce pollution, but also, we want to provide people with electricity, heat, and power to fuel a happy life for everyone on the planet. So, China pollutes more, and will pollute more, but, at the same time, you have another billion humans which are being elevated from subsistence living to a level approaching that of the USA middle class and likely within the next 50 years. I'd call that a win win for everyone. Poverty always kills more people than pollution does.
I'm using Chrome right now and I find it to be easily the fastest browser I've ever used. Slashdot's Javascript is slow on my machine but that compiler Chrome has seems to make even this plodding page load up almost instantly.
Suddenly, the thought of Google challenging MS-Office with JavaScript makes a great deal of sense.
Here we go again, 10 billion POUNDS. I would say that I just farted, injecting nearly 10 gatrillion nano-ounces into the precious atmosphere.
But let's put 10 billion POUNDS into perspective. That's 20 million tons, or, roughly 2E7 / 5000 teratons or 2E7 / 5E15 or really 0.0000005% of the atmosphere.
It's NOTHING.
I think the phrase "maverick billionaire" is so absurd that it doesn't even qualify as a cliche.
If only mother nature were cooperative... Well, before Newton discovered gravity, you could still get killed by a falling rock.
Sadly, just because we don't know have a cause for why less sunspots might cool the planet doesn't categorically rule it out. The only intellectual discipline that can have the rigor of a mathematical proof, is well, mathematical proofs, and after that, the universe is decidedly less cooperative. All you can really say is, based on what we know, sunspots probably shouldn't be changing the climate, but if it turns out that they do, then what we know changes...
You do know that axial tilt is the main cause of the seasons on Earth rather than the eccentricity of its orbit?
Grumpy.
God, can people on slashdot ever see the forest for the trees? i mean, this whole board is filled with tree counters and tree branch counters and not a one of you can actually ever see the forest!
sigh.
don't you think, if the earth's orbit carried it out past mars, that maybe, just maybe, the orbit would take precedence over the tilt of the earth when determining "seasons"? That the axial tilt matters more than the eccentricity says that the earth's orbit isn't very eccentric.
THINK!
And just tried to have a bunch of objects follow nearly circular orbits? Those orbits don't grow on trees, for sure.
It's almost amazing that we have so many planets in our solar system with nearly circular orbits. I would think that, if your orbit is too elliptical, it would make life much more difficult to form.
If the earth's winter took it out past mars and the summer in towards mercury, our oceans would boil and then rain down on us again and freeze, every year. That would suck, for sure.
In a conventional war, the USA would most likely make fairly short work of Russia. The problem is that Russia and the USA both possess rather large nuclear arsenals.
First off, tax revenues have actually increased, believe it or not, as, the issue with the economy is not a slowdown per say, but a shift towards the commodities sector. So, as a whole, the USA is actually doing reasonably well given its misadventures, its just that people that run investment banks and the IT that sucks off their teets are taking a beating, but, commodities are doing really well and manufacturing is surging due to growing exports. It's a red state economy - where services get reduced in value and smokestack industries command a premium.
Secondly, there's no comparing the Russian economy to the American economy. Yeah, Russia is doing ok because of its oil exports, but those exports are actually declining and meanwhile the USA is building up its manufacturing, is investing in all sorts of alternative energies, leads in computing and is competitive in a lot of other industries, and, while we're at, happens to have a military alliance with its only serious high tech economic competitors - namely, the EU. So, even if you doubt the American ability to innovate, there's 500 million Europeans over in NATO that might feel motivated to arm themselves somewhat if the Russians invaded Poland or Germany.
Now, the USA's military is actually pretty organized. When you think about it, the USA is doing a pretty remarkable job in Iraq and Afghanistan considering it is occupying the entire region with a force only 7 times the size of NYPD.
The thing is, as much as everyone talks about how the Army is overstretched, the Navy and Air Force aren't doing anything, and they become a lot more important in a war with Russia. While they've been fighting the war, the Navy is also researching upgrades to Rail guns, is designing a new class of aircraft carrier, is building a new class of nuclear submarine, has deployed and tested an anti-satellite and anti-ballistic missile capability to its surface fleet, has just finished a significant aircraft upgrade procurement, and is embarking on a second one. If anyone thinks the F-18 SuperHornet is just a patch to the Hornet.. woops.
Similarly, the USAF now has deployed its first fighter wing of F-22s, is building UAVs like crazy, is working on the F-35, is improving its air to air missile capability...
And, even though in the middle of a war, and perhaps spurred on by it, the US Army is actually researching and deploying next generation battle rifles, technologies to find snipers, look for IEDs, rolling out more mine resistant vehicles, improving the capabilities of its armoured troop transport, upgrading its capabilities to deal with wounded soldiers...
The bottom line is, if the Russians did want to try something conventional against a NATO country, at this point, NATO would completely fuck the Russians up.
Basic research isn't going to give anyone any competetive advantages either. In order for science to work, people have to build on each others work.
Sure it will. If you have a corporate culture that has basic research and knows how things really work, there's going to be a much higher degree of success in building out a newer product simply because your basic research has lowered the risk of doing something new for commercial exploitation.
I think the problem should be solved the other way. Nationalize the pharmaceutical industry, and you won't have the corrupting effects of profit on our health system
But then you'd have no desire to actually accomplish anything. Why work if there's no point to it.
I think you could build a house as strong as a tree can be, if you wanted to pay for it. Instead of a concrete slab covering the ground with a few straps holding the house to the slab, you could have a deeply rooted system in the ground and it would be pretty sturdy. Skyscrapers do this.