They're talking about $25M. While that would more than max out my credit cards, compare it to the $65B that Sandy cost. That's just one storm. So they're proposing to spend 0.04% of the cleanup cost of Sandy on a shinier new computer that hopefully will give them better forecasts. I say it's worth the gamble.
I enjoy making fun of libertarians as much as the next non-libertarian, but this is not libertarian thinking of even the most extreme variety. It's Nazi thinking, plain and simple. Yes, I've just demonstrated Godwin's law, but in this case it's appropriate.
If you live somewhere that nature has decided is no longer going to be habitable by humans
Where in the country isn't there such a potential? I think it's ridiculous to put buildings in very low lying areas, often a few feet above sea level, but entire parts of the country? I went through Sandy without a scratch to my house on Long Island. I wasn't dumb enough to buy in a low lying area, but otherwise it was mostly luck. Even aside from that the damage to the infrastructure wasn't fun. There are limits to what you can do to live in areas that aren't subject to any natural disasters.
But they do get tired. Not sure about a hurricane, but I know that at least some types of seals (whatever's in the San Diego area anyway) head out to sea when there is a storm, presumably so they don't get bashed into the beaches or the rocks. Afterwards they're very tired (ever try swimming 24 hours through a storm?) and go up on the beach to rest. At times like that you'll see loads of them, much more than usual.
You're confusing peak and sustained performance. According to the link you provided the latest European system has 70 Tflops sustained performance, but 1.5 Pflops peak. According to this article the ratings given for the American systems are peak, so the European system is much more powerful than the current US system.
No, that article is drumming up controversy that doesn't really exist. From TFA:
Only 19 percent of U.S. meteorologists saw human influences as the sole driver of climate change in a 2011 survey.
I'm surprised it isn't 0%. The vast majority of climate scientists don't believe human influence is the sole cause either. Considering how much the climate has changed w/o human intervention, it's ridiculous. One of the difficulties of convincing people of AGW is that it's superimposed on a natural warming trend (emergence from the little ice age and beyond).
For a lot of WWII the Feds (mostly) had to fight to get some employers and other unions to let in female and black workers.
You're right - I forgot about those cases. It was probably easier when the feds could tell anyone who wouldn't hire 'em that they were impeding the war effort.
Okay, I wasn't considering "retirees" (though in the real world it's hard to distinguish between true voluntary retirements and involuntary ones). Nevertheless your "I realize it isn't exactly realistic" means we agree on the likely reality.
It was cheap farmland which was a fraction of the cost of nearbye San Francisco and New York/New Jersey.
Back in the 50's and 60's there was still plenty of farmland waiting to be turned into suburban housing and office tracts in NJ, Long Island, Rockland County (just north of NYC - not sure if Westchester was still cheap), etc., not to mention many other areas of the country, so I don't really buy the "cheap farmland" as an explanation, other than to explain why it's not in an expensive city.
And C is so much different? COBOL may be 54 years old, but C is not exactly a kid at 44. Sure we've had updated versions and C++, but so has COBOL (COBOL 2002 is OO). BTW, I've loved C since I first started using it, and I'm not sure I'd even recognize COBOL if it fell on me (not just a figure of speech if you're using big card decks), but just saying.
Old programming languages never die (at least once entrenched), but this zombie effect wasn't appreciated when COBOL was first spec'd, because HLL's hadn't been around long enough. The fact that in 1959 COBOL was supposed to be just the first of three successive language definitions is instructive. From Wikipedia:
it was decided to set up three committees: short, intermediate and long range (the last one was never actually formed). It was the Short Range Committee, chaired by Joseph Wegstein of the US National Bureau of Standards, that during the following months created a description of the first version of COBOL. The committee was formed to recommend a short range approach to a common business language. The committee was made up of members representing six computer manufacturers and three government agencies.... The intermediate-range committee was formed but never became operational. In the end a sub-committee of the Short Range Committee developed the specifications of the COBOL language.
Get off of my lawn, sonny. If it was good enough for Grace Hopper, it's good enough for me. BTW, do you want to get paid next month, or should I put a bug fix into that code I wrote 40 years ago?
Or you could just put two 2.5 V supercaps in series, and get a 5 V cap with twice the volume, but half the total capacitance, so the same energy density in the end (minus slightly more space used for structure), but the voltage you wanted.
True! You have to play some voltage balancing tricks so that capacitance and leakage mismatches don't cause wildly different voltages across different caps, but just a look that the Wikipedia article shows you can get stacks up to 125V. Presumably there are practical limitations to higher voltages. I also wonder if the voltage balancing tricks (shunt resistors are a simple one) create too much leakage current for long term storage.
I can get someone to work for less than half in Fargo and in Texas.
Cheaper, yes. Half? No. BTW North Dakota is in the midst of an oil boom.
Old timers will tell you Silicon Valley started because it was dirt cheap land, wages, lower taxes, than the more popular New York City and New Jersey of IBM, GE, and Bell Labs of the 1960s high tech hub.
How far back are you going? I can tell you that at least as far back as the 70's SV was expensive, and I doubt it was ever that cheap, at least not after the gold rush.
BTW, NYC proper was never much of a tech hub, at least not post-WWII. It was Northern NJ, Long Island, and the northern suburbs of NYC and a little further (largely IBM up there).
I do get a laugh out of people debating why SV is where it is. Success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan. Sure Stanford is a good university, but it's hardly unique in that respect. HP was a good innovative company, but it also was not unique. The only explanation I've heard that is unique is that when Bill Shockley founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, he chose to do it in Mountain View, because his ailing mother lived in Palo Alto (it's nice to know that there was somebody that Shockley wasn't a complete bastard to). People reject this for two reasons. First, they don't like the idea of happenstance instead of something more predictable and explainable. Second, nobody wants to admit that a blatant racist and all-around bastard like Shockley is the guy that was responsible for Silicon Valley.
Not here. According to the sound bite statistics that are available without paying $175, the size of the workforce increased by 1.1% while wages fell 2%. Admittedly the source and exact definition of these stats is unclear, but frankly I wouldn't bet on your explanation.
A logical conclusion? Supported by what logic? The act that you describe is quite illegal and is not covered by the Citizen's United decision.
It's a reductio ad absurdum of the court's emphasis on the "money is speech" consideration to the exclusion of almost any other consideration.
And have no doubt that the court is very zealous in its legislating from the bench along these lines. The original complaint in Citizen's United was reasonable and I could see a decision for the plaintiff. But the "conservative" majority, which supposedly believes in ruling on narrow grounds where possible, supposedly opposes judicial activism, and violated the principle that courts only hear complaints brought before them, basically told the plaintiff to go back and present a case on much broader grounds so they could rule in its favor. Even if you agree with the decision, procedurally it was crooked as hell.
I'm also not convinced that anyone else who was running for election would have done much better from the same starting point, including either of the parties currently in coalition in the UK if they had won outright.
What do you think of UK austerity? Serious question - as an American I don't pretend to have great knowledge of UK politics and economics.
By what definition is the recession continuing? While, the job market has not recovered, I do believe we have been experiencing economic growth.
By the technical definition of recession (IIRC two or more quarters of decreasing GDP) we haven't been in a recession in quite some time. But the colloquial definition is "the economy sucks". That would include a weak job market.
1. "you wouldn't be unemployed if you were any good."
2."If you got the skills then you can get a job." What if you do have the skills but have been out of work? Then back to #1.
It is very telling how employers who claim that they can't find "qualified" people never state exactly what qualifications they are looking for. They just make vague statements about "not having skills". That's the same as saying as giving a product review and just saying "it sucks".
Aren't prejudices wonderful? My favorite examples of how a tight labor market can force employers to overlook their prejudices are the World Wars. In WWI factories started hiring black people, and in WWII they added women. Neither group could get the time of day before that, and as you may have heard, they did just fine providing labor for the Arsenal of Democracy (historical note: we won both wars).
Last time I checked, California was only 1 of 50 states. While the most populous state, 88% of Americans live elsewhere. Admittedly it does have a disproportionately high number of "high tech" workers. However, if the higher employee compensation that results from state or local (e.g. Silicon Valley) demand for such people (and the high cost of living in such areas) is a problem, then businesses are free to locate elsewhere in the country, or at least open branch facilities there.
Bottom line: what's you point in mentioning an isolated statistic that anyone can read on Tech America's summary page?
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They're talking about $25M. While that would more than max out my credit cards, compare it to the $65B that Sandy cost. That's just one storm. So they're proposing to spend 0.04% of the cleanup cost of Sandy on a shinier new computer that hopefully will give them better forecasts. I say it's worth the gamble.
So what do they use in practice?
Stuff that is a better fit for hands on?
The Internet is the greatest thing for Do-It-Yourselfers since power tools were invented.
I just hate that learning part.
Don't worry. Tomorrow on Slashdot: knowledge implants (not sure if it'll be electrical, laser or virus).
Give Libertarians an inch ....
I enjoy making fun of libertarians as much as the next non-libertarian, but this is not libertarian thinking of even the most extreme variety. It's Nazi thinking, plain and simple. Yes, I've just demonstrated Godwin's law, but in this case it's appropriate.
If you live somewhere that nature has decided is no longer going to be habitable by humans
Where in the country isn't there such a potential? I think it's ridiculous to put buildings in very low lying areas, often a few feet above sea level, but entire parts of the country? I went through Sandy without a scratch to my house on Long Island. I wasn't dumb enough to buy in a low lying area, but otherwise it was mostly luck. Even aside from that the damage to the infrastructure wasn't fun. There are limits to what you can do to live in areas that aren't subject to any natural disasters.
P.S. Where do you live?
But they do get tired. Not sure about a hurricane, but I know that at least some types of seals (whatever's in the San Diego area anyway) head out to sea when there is a storm, presumably so they don't get bashed into the beaches or the rocks. Afterwards they're very tired (ever try swimming 24 hours through a storm?) and go up on the beach to rest. At times like that you'll see loads of them, much more than usual.
You're confusing peak and sustained performance. According to the link you provided the latest European system has 70 Tflops sustained performance, but 1.5 Pflops peak. According to this article the ratings given for the American systems are peak, so the European system is much more powerful than the current US system.
Only 19 percent of U.S. meteorologists saw human influences as the sole driver of climate change in a 2011 survey.
I'm surprised it isn't 0%. The vast majority of climate scientists don't believe human influence is the sole cause either. Considering how much the climate has changed w/o human intervention, it's ridiculous. One of the difficulties of convincing people of AGW is that it's superimposed on a natural warming trend (emergence from the little ice age and beyond).
"Because a key tactic in class warfare is the 0.01% getting the government to do their bidding."
And to simultaneously extow the virtues of the "self made man" (or woman, as may be).
Quiet, peasant! Only those who've mastered doublethink may tell the American people what they should think.
For a lot of WWII the Feds (mostly) had to fight to get some employers and other unions to let in female and black workers.
You're right - I forgot about those cases. It was probably easier when the feds could tell anyone who wouldn't hire 'em that they were impeding the war effort.
Okay, I wasn't considering "retirees" (though in the real world it's hard to distinguish between true voluntary retirements and involuntary ones). Nevertheless your "I realize it isn't exactly realistic" means we agree on the likely reality.
COBOL is for real men. I can see how it would scare off all the kids who don't know real computing before that newfangled MS-DOS.
COBOL is for wimps. Real mean write machine code.
It was cheap farmland which was a fraction of the cost of nearbye San Francisco and New York/New Jersey.
Back in the 50's and 60's there was still plenty of farmland waiting to be turned into suburban housing and office tracts in NJ, Long Island, Rockland County (just north of NYC - not sure if Westchester was still cheap), etc., not to mention many other areas of the country, so I don't really buy the "cheap farmland" as an explanation, other than to explain why it's not in an expensive city.
The damned thing's immortal.
And C is so much different? COBOL may be 54 years old, but C is not exactly a kid at 44. Sure we've had updated versions and C++, but so has COBOL (COBOL 2002 is OO). BTW, I've loved C since I first started using it, and I'm not sure I'd even recognize COBOL if it fell on me (not just a figure of speech if you're using big card decks), but just saying.
Old programming languages never die (at least once entrenched), but this zombie effect wasn't appreciated when COBOL was first spec'd, because HLL's hadn't been around long enough. The fact that in 1959 COBOL was supposed to be just the first of three successive language definitions is instructive. From Wikipedia:
it was decided to set up three committees: short, intermediate and long range (the last one was never actually formed). It was the Short Range Committee, chaired by Joseph Wegstein of the US National Bureau of Standards, that during the following months created a description of the first version of COBOL. The committee was formed to recommend a short range approach to a common business language. The committee was made up of members representing six computer manufacturers and three government agencies. ... The intermediate-range committee was formed but never became operational. In the end a sub-committee of the Short Range Committee developed the specifications of the COBOL language.
Not to mention a mean developer age of 73...
Get off of my lawn, sonny. If it was good enough for Grace Hopper, it's good enough for me. BTW, do you want to get paid next month, or should I put a bug fix into that code I wrote 40 years ago?
Or you could just put two 2.5 V supercaps in series, and get a 5 V cap with twice the volume, but half the total capacitance, so the same energy density in the end (minus slightly more space used for structure), but the voltage you wanted.
True! You have to play some voltage balancing tricks so that capacitance and leakage mismatches don't cause wildly different voltages across different caps, but just a look that the Wikipedia article shows you can get stacks up to 125V. Presumably there are practical limitations to higher voltages. I also wonder if the voltage balancing tricks (shunt resistors are a simple one) create too much leakage current for long term storage.
I can get someone to work for less than half in Fargo and in Texas.
Cheaper, yes. Half? No. BTW North Dakota is in the midst of an oil boom.
Old timers will tell you Silicon Valley started because it was dirt cheap land, wages, lower taxes, than the more popular New York City and New Jersey of IBM, GE, and Bell Labs of the 1960s high tech hub.
How far back are you going? I can tell you that at least as far back as the 70's SV was expensive, and I doubt it was ever that cheap, at least not after the gold rush.
BTW, NYC proper was never much of a tech hub, at least not post-WWII. It was Northern NJ, Long Island, and the northern suburbs of NYC and a little further (largely IBM up there).
I do get a laugh out of people debating why SV is where it is. Success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan. Sure Stanford is a good university, but it's hardly unique in that respect. HP was a good innovative company, but it also was not unique. The only explanation I've heard that is unique is that when Bill Shockley founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, he chose to do it in Mountain View, because his ailing mother lived in Palo Alto (it's nice to know that there was somebody that Shockley wasn't a complete bastard to). People reject this for two reasons. First, they don't like the idea of happenstance instead of something more predictable and explainable. Second, nobody wants to admit that a blatant racist and all-around bastard like Shockley is the guy that was responsible for Silicon Valley.
The math works
Not here. According to the sound bite statistics that are available without paying $175, the size of the workforce increased by 1.1% while wages fell 2%. Admittedly the source and exact definition of these stats is unclear, but frankly I wouldn't bet on your explanation.
Sounds like the UK (and Sweden IIRC) did the right thing in not switching to the Euro.
A logical conclusion? Supported by what logic? The act that you describe is quite illegal and is not covered by the Citizen's United decision.
It's a reductio ad absurdum of the court's emphasis on the "money is speech" consideration to the exclusion of almost any other consideration.
And have no doubt that the court is very zealous in its legislating from the bench along these lines. The original complaint in Citizen's United was reasonable and I could see a decision for the plaintiff. But the "conservative" majority, which supposedly believes in ruling on narrow grounds where possible, supposedly opposes judicial activism, and violated the principle that courts only hear complaints brought before them, basically told the plaintiff to go back and present a case on much broader grounds so they could rule in its favor. Even if you agree with the decision, procedurally it was crooked as hell.
I'm also not convinced that anyone else who was running for election would have done much better from the same starting point, including either of the parties currently in coalition in the UK if they had won outright.
What do you think of UK austerity? Serious question - as an American I don't pretend to have great knowledge of UK politics and economics.
By what definition is the recession continuing? While, the job market has not recovered, I do believe we have been experiencing economic growth.
By the technical definition of recession (IIRC two or more quarters of decreasing GDP) we haven't been in a recession in quite some time. But the colloquial definition is "the economy sucks". That would include a weak job market.
Because the attitudes are:
1. "you wouldn't be unemployed if you were any good." 2 ."If you got the skills then you can get a job." What if you do have the skills but have been out of work? Then back to #1.
It is very telling how employers who claim that they can't find "qualified" people never state exactly what qualifications they are looking for. They just make vague statements about "not having skills". That's the same as saying as giving a product review and just saying "it sucks".
Aren't prejudices wonderful? My favorite examples of how a tight labor market can force employers to overlook their prejudices are the World Wars. In WWI factories started hiring black people, and in WWII they added women. Neither group could get the time of day before that, and as you may have heard, they did just fine providing labor for the Arsenal of Democracy (historical note: we won both wars).
Last time I checked, California was only 1 of 50 states. While the most populous state, 88% of Americans live elsewhere. Admittedly it does have a disproportionately high number of "high tech" workers. However, if the higher employee compensation that results from state or local (e.g. Silicon Valley) demand for such people (and the high cost of living in such areas) is a problem, then businesses are free to locate elsewhere in the country, or at least open branch facilities there.
Bottom line: what's you point in mentioning an isolated statistic that anyone can read on Tech America's summary page?