I think this has a LOT more to do with the the price of oil, subprime and the liquidity problems at investment banks than automation. I think investors are real worried about a 1929/1987-style market collapse and will dump anything they think is crapping out in a New York minute.
Plus, the airline industry as a whole has been in the shitter forever and $100+ barrels of oil don't help, so the story itself has a certain plausibility to it that "GE declares bankruptcy" doesn't. But I think general jitter on the markets explains a lot more than automation problems does.
A guy I know works at a Volvo dealership. He said they got ahold of a Honda Insight and found out the batteries were shot. Apparently the book value on the car was the same as the price to replace the batteries.
I was kind of surprised that they weren't warrantied (the current trend seems to be for manufacturers to "mask" battery issues by offering warranties not seen on other components), but I didn't argue the point since these guys know their business.
The end result was that the car was really only worthwhile to someone willing to invest in the batteries, which made me wonder if we're going to see in 10 years or whatever a bunch of hybrids with no real economic value because their battery systems are shot, even though the vehicle itself (were it an ordinary gas car) would have value.
The later versions (IIRC, development stopped a couple of years ago) would integrate with Nero and burn the ISO more or less automatically, but you would need two drives to make it purely automatic and not include a swap-in-the-blank step.
But it is about a simple as it can get, and at least to my eyes, the discs I've backed up really look about as good as the originals, at least on my 42" Grand Wega using a cheap up-converting DVD player. Serious videophiles I'm sure would object, but I've got too many other things to worry about to notice the difference.
Doesn't this eventually lead to the contract manufacturer refusing to build Dell's designs [and does Dell even design their own laptops?] because the designs don't fit into the manufacturer's efficiency models?
Somehow this seems like it will eventually turn Dell into a company just reselling whatever laptop designs/models the manufacturer can make the most efficiently.
As for Dell's intellectual property? I'm sure it can be protected by their manufacturer, provided they sign a long-term deal and help the local party boss with whatever his needs are.
I thought this *was* the gimmick -- a given state claims copyright on the state laws laws, rules & statues and then sells a license to these to some legal publisher like Thomson/West or LexisNexis, either for cash money, free services or whatever. A handy agreement that makes a buck or two, gains some free access and helps protect a nice little monopoly for West/Lexis.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they had a special law passed to claim only commercial for-profit copyright, and bestow 'free' status to legal work, citizen reference, etc just to avoid challenges to the "we copyright our laws" claim.
I know a guy who runs a small business, maybe 6 mostly part-time employees. As long as I've known him, he's taken maybe $100 out of the till, pretty much every day, for over 20 years. That's at least $600,000 over a 20 year period. If his business was even half-way successful (its always been about a break-even proposition), I'm sure he could have doubled or tripled that number, easily.
I'm torn on the morality of the issue; he's evading taxes that ultimately cost me more money, but he also buys good health insurance for his employees, even those working 20 hours a week, thus possibly saving me even more money if they don't get sick.
Don't they SELL Ralph Lauren paint there? That might have something to do with it.
You should take it to a paint store like Sherwin Williams where they sell their own brand, or at least cut off all the identifying information that shows its a Ralph Lauren color.
At the very worst, buy the smallest quantity, put some on a hunk of wood or sheetrock and then take it in to a paint store and have them match the actual paint.
Wind & Solar to Hydrogen always made sense to me, since H2 allowed the power to be moved geographically and simply & economically stored. H2 provides a side benefit as a motor fuel for vehicles that will likely not be run off grid electric power (earth-moving equipment, ships, etc).
In fact, they should build another couple of nuclear power plants in the Southwest to desalinate sea water and generate hydrogen. It would add a lot of new energy and solve the water problem.
Do they want us to all have bad credit?
on
Zero Day Threat
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It seems to me that the entire credit complex is designed to make sure that very few people have good credit and that it is trivially easy to lower a person's credit rating so that the cost of borrowing is increased. Even on the surface the system seems rigged -- credit bureaus get paid for access to their records by the very people who loan money out, thus they have a financial incentive to make sure that their ratings are as low as possible so as to maximize the profits of those loaning out the money.
I say this because it seems like every time I turn around there is some new attempt to evaluate (and ultimately lower) the credit score of people. The first one that comes to mind is the slight reduction every time you *apply* for credit, even if you don't take it. The second (which I believe was rebuffed here in MN) was the attempt to use driving records to help set credit ratings.
And now its identity theft, where the onus is on the consumer to use a complex and difficult system to "repair" their credit ratings which countless stories would indicate is nearly impossible to do, even a decade later.
In some ways its like the grade on a curve vs. straight percentage debate -- the credit industry seems to want to grade us on a curve, regardless of how many of us score 95% on the test, thus minimizing the pool of people who are eligible for the best interest rates.
Should government authorities be the ones making that decision?
To the extent that the government has the job of enforcing the truth in advertising laws, yes, they should be making that decision.
The navel-gazing questions about "What is the internet?" and other techno-philosophical issues probably shouldn't be made by the government, at least not as laws or restrictions. But to the extent that "we" (the more-or-less civilized world) are a society of laws, sometimes those questions will have to be answered -- even if unsatisfactorily -- in order for the legal/governance system to work.
I'll admit to being biased myself -- I think advertising is generally too misleading and given too wide of a berth to make claims that sound like factual claims but in reality are too murky to have their truthfulness tested.
So they can have a standard of living that isn't hand-to-mouth? It's really fucking hard to make ends meet at a level that doesn't feel suspiciously like poverty or society-dropout-cult-membership without both spouses working.
There's also both spouses who have paid dearly for post-secondary education and want to put it to use so that they add some meaning and value to their life outside of childcare and homemaking.
I know a lot of people, usually women but some men too, who would love a part-time job that would enable them to do a lot more childcare, but we have a labor market that is quite hostile to part-time employment at meaningful wages.
I don't know where the idea came from that having children was some bad economic choice made by self-absorbed assholes who want to suck up more resources at the expense of all the "smart" people who decided that children were a bad idea. But clearly its seen that way by many people, and the labor market largely reinforces this.
Toxic atmosphere, high populations, no energy supplies, war and/or political instability/lawlessness -- 3-4 generations down the road its probably going to be about the only viable living option.
I could see it as some kind of military outpost or megabase. An institutional design with dorm-style accommodations, a food service, and larger, shared spaces makes much more sense than impossibly small private apartments with their own bath, kitchen, etc, and shared space allows for a lot greater economies of scale.
The downside is you'd have to put up with a pretty all-encompassing political and social system since you'd be living like an ant more or less.
I know you weren't thinking of multiple sockets, but multiple cores, but I was carrying the entire thing forward so that you'd increase the overall core count to make it viable as a multiplatform VM host.
A multi-socket setup like that would be kind of interesting, especially if the translation engines were software programmable at boot (or, better, switchable as needed) and it came coupled with a nice bare-metal hypervisor. You could have the equivalent of VMWare ESX, with multiple *platform* VMs, not just multiple OS VMs.
I'm sure some aspects of hardware virtualization would slow it down a lot, but perhaps not enough to cripple it entirely.
The difference is that Andersen's corruption was caught and punished. Despite ultimately winning the case against them, they are finished as a business entity. A superior outcome would have been the jailing of their principals, but we'll have to settle for the business being defunct.
The corruption of a totalitarian government like China or Russia is almost never punished, except possibly in the arena of world opinion, and only when it is decisively proven.
I second this, but I would only permanently whitelist sites you absolutely need to out of convenience or trust; everything else I temporarily whitelist on an as-needed basis, and I find that unless I'm shopping or something there are number of sites I don't need javscript to run for basic use. I figure with SQL injection attacks and other random maliciousness, even "trusted" web sites can be compromised and this keeps my exposure to a minimum.
The only feature I wish it had, though, was some kind of per-tab or per-site whitelist inheritance. Some sites, like Newegg, use Akamai for shopping cart processing. Allowing Newegg doesn't in turn allow URLs for Akamai, which I understand, but it means I have to wait until the checkout blows up, THEN temporarily allow Akamai to finish a purchase.
If there was some other way to "Temporarily allow all referred linked from foo.com" or "Allow all as long as address bar is foo.com" or something that would allow other sites' javascript to run, so long as I "stayed" on the page I was on.
Isn't it just amazing the number of people that are on 2-3 different anti-depressants at the same time who still have the gall to complain about other people's drug habits?
As a gun enthusiast myself and someone acquainted with a fair number of police officers, I will tell you that the average police officer doesn't have all that much interest in guns, either. Most cops shoot just enough to qualify (which doesn't involve much!) and don't know much about guns at all, including their own service weapons.
Generally speaking, though, you're right -- police officers tend to be blue collar (or light-blue-collar junior college types) and not terribly interested in making subtle distinctions.
But at the same time, having done ride-alongs and gotten to know some of them well enough, its easy to see why. There is a certain percentage of the population willing to believe that cops are always wrong and that crime is actually the rational response of the oppressed, the police bureaucracy in most larger departments is viciously political, and their job is entirely thankless.
My guess is its much deeper -- they get to operate against Western targets, but both kick back to Putin's favorite charity and are answerable to the FSB on an as-needed basis.
And it might even be that the whole thing is an FSB black op. Its not too hard to believe that Putin's figured out that it only makes sense to "control" crime by turning it into a kind of side business for the FSB. It's not like the CIA and the American Italian mafia didn't get involved in joint operations vis-a-vis Castro and drug running.
I would agree that spam has stayed the same or spiked somewhat, but its also possible that use of criminal networks in pursuit of Russian foreign policy still may weaken those networks in the short term.
Slashdot Mirror
Its not just checksum offloading, its the extra bytes making up the frame multiplied by many thousands of unnecessary frames.
Nobody wants smaller MTUs, but with 1 and 10 gigabit ethernet, they sure as hell want larger ones.
It can be yellow vs. brown, brown vs. black, etc.
In Fiji, the Fijians and Indians hate each other, in LA its the Mexicans and the Blacks, etc.
Racism is just a convenient shorthand for cultural dislike.
I think this has a LOT more to do with the the price of oil, subprime and the liquidity problems at investment banks than automation. I think investors are real worried about a 1929/1987-style market collapse and will dump anything they think is crapping out in a New York minute.
Plus, the airline industry as a whole has been in the shitter forever and $100+ barrels of oil don't help, so the story itself has a certain plausibility to it that "GE declares bankruptcy" doesn't. But I think general jitter on the markets explains a lot more than automation problems does.
Of course, but the odds of a 10 year old Honda or Toyota blowing its engine are small. My 10 year old Accord runs fine.
But its pretty much axiomatic that a hybrid's batteries will crap out, even if the rest of the car is otherwise serviceable.
A guy I know works at a Volvo dealership. He said they got ahold of a Honda Insight and found out the batteries were shot. Apparently the book value on the car was the same as the price to replace the batteries.
I was kind of surprised that they weren't warrantied (the current trend seems to be for manufacturers to "mask" battery issues by offering warranties not seen on other components), but I didn't argue the point since these guys know their business.
The end result was that the car was really only worthwhile to someone willing to invest in the batteries, which made me wonder if we're going to see in 10 years or whatever a bunch of hybrids with no real economic value because their battery systems are shot, even though the vehicle itself (were it an ordinary gas car) would have value.
The later versions (IIRC, development stopped a couple of years ago) would integrate with Nero and burn the ISO more or less automatically, but you would need two drives to make it purely automatic and not include a swap-in-the-blank step.
But it is about a simple as it can get, and at least to my eyes, the discs I've backed up really look about as good as the originals, at least on my 42" Grand Wega using a cheap up-converting DVD player. Serious videophiles I'm sure would object, but I've got too many other things to worry about to notice the difference.
Doesn't this eventually lead to the contract manufacturer refusing to build Dell's designs [and does Dell even design their own laptops?] because the designs don't fit into the manufacturer's efficiency models?
Somehow this seems like it will eventually turn Dell into a company just reselling whatever laptop designs/models the manufacturer can make the most efficiently.
As for Dell's intellectual property? I'm sure it can be protected by their manufacturer, provided they sign a long-term deal and help the local party boss with whatever his needs are.
I thought this *was* the gimmick -- a given state claims copyright on the state laws laws, rules & statues and then sells a license to these to some legal publisher like Thomson/West or LexisNexis, either for cash money, free services or whatever. A handy agreement that makes a buck or two, gains some free access and helps protect a nice little monopoly for West/Lexis.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they had a special law passed to claim only commercial for-profit copyright, and bestow 'free' status to legal work, citizen reference, etc just to avoid challenges to the "we copyright our laws" claim.
What's a "small percentage of greed"?
I know a guy who runs a small business, maybe 6 mostly part-time employees. As long as I've known him, he's taken maybe $100 out of the till, pretty much every day, for over 20 years. That's at least $600,000 over a 20 year period. If his business was even half-way successful (its always been about a break-even proposition), I'm sure he could have doubled or tripled that number, easily.
I'm torn on the morality of the issue; he's evading taxes that ultimately cost me more money, but he also buys good health insurance for his employees, even those working 20 hours a week, thus possibly saving me even more money if they don't get sick.
Don't they SELL Ralph Lauren paint there? That might have something to do with it.
You should take it to a paint store like Sherwin Williams where they sell their own brand, or at least cut off all the identifying information that shows its a Ralph Lauren color.
At the very worst, buy the smallest quantity, put some on a hunk of wood or sheetrock and then take it in to a paint store and have them match the actual paint.
Wind & Solar to Hydrogen always made sense to me, since H2 allowed the power to be moved geographically and simply & economically stored. H2 provides a side benefit as a motor fuel for vehicles that will likely not be run off grid electric power (earth-moving equipment, ships, etc).
In fact, they should build another couple of nuclear power plants in the Southwest to desalinate sea water and generate hydrogen. It would add a lot of new energy and solve the water problem.
It seems to me that the entire credit complex is designed to make sure that very few people have good credit and that it is trivially easy to lower a person's credit rating so that the cost of borrowing is increased. Even on the surface the system seems rigged -- credit bureaus get paid for access to their records by the very people who loan money out, thus they have a financial incentive to make sure that their ratings are as low as possible so as to maximize the profits of those loaning out the money.
I say this because it seems like every time I turn around there is some new attempt to evaluate (and ultimately lower) the credit score of people. The first one that comes to mind is the slight reduction every time you *apply* for credit, even if you don't take it. The second (which I believe was rebuffed here in MN) was the attempt to use driving records to help set credit ratings.
And now its identity theft, where the onus is on the consumer to use a complex and difficult system to "repair" their credit ratings which countless stories would indicate is nearly impossible to do, even a decade later.
In some ways its like the grade on a curve vs. straight percentage debate -- the credit industry seems to want to grade us on a curve, regardless of how many of us score 95% on the test, thus minimizing the pool of people who are eligible for the best interest rates.
Should government authorities be the ones making that decision?
To the extent that the government has the job of enforcing the truth in advertising laws, yes, they should be making that decision.
The navel-gazing questions about "What is the internet?" and other techno-philosophical issues probably shouldn't be made by the government, at least not as laws or restrictions. But to the extent that "we" (the more-or-less civilized world) are a society of laws, sometimes those questions will have to be answered -- even if unsatisfactorily -- in order for the legal/governance system to work.
I'll admit to being biased myself -- I think advertising is generally too misleading and given too wide of a berth to make claims that sound like factual claims but in reality are too murky to have their truthfulness tested.
So they can have a standard of living that isn't hand-to-mouth? It's really fucking hard to make ends meet at a level that doesn't feel suspiciously like poverty or society-dropout-cult-membership without both spouses working.
There's also both spouses who have paid dearly for post-secondary education and want to put it to use so that they add some meaning and value to their life outside of childcare and homemaking.
I know a lot of people, usually women but some men too, who would love a part-time job that would enable them to do a lot more childcare, but we have a labor market that is quite hostile to part-time employment at meaningful wages.
I don't know where the idea came from that having children was some bad economic choice made by self-absorbed assholes who want to suck up more resources at the expense of all the "smart" people who decided that children were a bad idea. But clearly its seen that way by many people, and the labor market largely reinforces this.
Toxic atmosphere, high populations, no energy supplies, war and/or political instability/lawlessness -- 3-4 generations down the road its probably going to be about the only viable living option.
I could see it as some kind of military outpost or megabase. An institutional design with dorm-style accommodations, a food service, and larger, shared spaces makes much more sense than impossibly small private apartments with their own bath, kitchen, etc, and shared space allows for a lot greater economies of scale.
The downside is you'd have to put up with a pretty all-encompassing political and social system since you'd be living like an ant more or less.
I know you weren't thinking of multiple sockets, but multiple cores, but I was carrying the entire thing forward so that you'd increase the overall core count to make it viable as a multiplatform VM host.
A multi-socket setup like that would be kind of interesting, especially if the translation engines were software programmable at boot (or, better, switchable as needed) and it came coupled with a nice bare-metal hypervisor. You could have the equivalent of VMWare ESX, with multiple *platform* VMs, not just multiple OS VMs.
I'm sure some aspects of hardware virtualization would slow it down a lot, but perhaps not enough to cripple it entirely.
The difference is that Andersen's corruption was caught and punished. Despite ultimately winning the case against them, they are finished as a business entity. A superior outcome would have been the jailing of their principals, but we'll have to settle for the business being defunct.
The corruption of a totalitarian government like China or Russia is almost never punished, except possibly in the arena of world opinion, and only when it is decisively proven.
I second this, but I would only permanently whitelist sites you absolutely need to out of convenience or trust; everything else I temporarily whitelist on an as-needed basis, and I find that unless I'm shopping or something there are number of sites I don't need javscript to run for basic use. I figure with SQL injection attacks and other random maliciousness, even "trusted" web sites can be compromised and this keeps my exposure to a minimum.
The only feature I wish it had, though, was some kind of per-tab or per-site whitelist inheritance. Some sites, like Newegg, use Akamai for shopping cart processing. Allowing Newegg doesn't in turn allow URLs for Akamai, which I understand, but it means I have to wait until the checkout blows up, THEN temporarily allow Akamai to finish a purchase.
If there was some other way to "Temporarily allow all referred linked from foo.com" or "Allow all as long as address bar is foo.com" or something that would allow other sites' javascript to run, so long as I "stayed" on the page I was on.
Isn't it just amazing the number of people that are on 2-3 different anti-depressants at the same time who still have the gall to complain about other people's drug habits?
So just give them a shitload of Lexapro or Prozac or whatever the physician-approved don't care medicine is this week.
As a gun enthusiast myself and someone acquainted with a fair number of police officers, I will tell you that the average police officer doesn't have all that much interest in guns, either. Most cops shoot just enough to qualify (which doesn't involve much!) and don't know much about guns at all, including their own service weapons.
Generally speaking, though, you're right -- police officers tend to be blue collar (or light-blue-collar junior college types) and not terribly interested in making subtle distinctions.
But at the same time, having done ride-alongs and gotten to know some of them well enough, its easy to see why. There is a certain percentage of the population willing to believe that cops are always wrong and that crime is actually the rational response of the oppressed, the police bureaucracy in most larger departments is viciously political, and their job is entirely thankless.
My guess is its much deeper -- they get to operate against Western targets, but both kick back to Putin's favorite charity and are answerable to the FSB on an as-needed basis.
And it might even be that the whole thing is an FSB black op. Its not too hard to believe that Putin's figured out that it only makes sense to "control" crime by turning it into a kind of side business for the FSB. It's not like the CIA and the American Italian mafia didn't get involved in joint operations vis-a-vis Castro and drug running.
I would agree that spam has stayed the same or spiked somewhat, but its also possible that use of criminal networks in pursuit of Russian foreign policy still may weaken those networks in the short term.