So if dancing pigs is as much of a support cost for companies as you claim it is,
How much of a support cost did I claim it was? I don't recall putting an actual value on anything. I only pointed out that a benefit exists. Whether that benefit makes the lock-everything-down strategy worth pursuing or not (for a given product) would depend very much on who the product's target-market it is and what the product is used for.
Wind power is a joke regardless of how you look at it. It's more environmentally disruptive than yesterday's technology and doesn't scale nearly as well
One interesting thing about Wind Power that is demonstrated by your Google Maps link is that once the windmills are built, the land around and between them is guaranteed to be left largely undeveloped for the lifetime of the site. That is to say, people won't build houses or businesses there, and not much else can be built there either since it would disrupt the wind flow that the turbines depend on.
Given that, the construction of windmills at a site might actually be an environmental plus(*), since it keeps creeping suburbia away and leaves 95%+ of the area unaffected..
(*) okay, an environmental lesser-of-two-evils, anyway. The environmental ideal would be no human presence on the land at all, but that's often not an option.
I wonder if the greenies would complain if instead we put up a billboard.
Yes, and they'd be right to do so. A wind turbine may disturb a pristine landscape, but on the other hand it's also helping transition us away from our dependence on fossil fuels, so there is a compensating environmental benefit.
A billboard, on the other hand, despoils the landscape and has no compensating environmental benefit. From an environmental perspective, it's a total loss.
(of course if you'd like to have both your pristine landscapes and your wind turbines, than placing the wind turbines several miles off-shore might be the best-of-both-worlds solution to pursue. There's lots of wind there, and very few tourists)
Is the solar install base REALLY going to be able to accommodate a 15-30,000% (fifteen to thirty THOUSAND percent) increase in deployment?
Note solar alone, but renewable sources will at some point have to take over the entire load, because non-renewables, by definition, will not be economically viable at some point.
Should the power companies be FORCED to just eat the fees of hooking up and stabilizing a power source that's only producing cheap power during periods where demand is lowest?
Sure -- they can use some of the money they save by not having to build and maintain more peaking plants, because residential solar will now handle that issue for them.
I've never been able to figure out why they execute people with drug combinations at all -- if the goal is a quick, humane, unembarrassing death, why not just flood the execution chamber with nitrogen or some other inert gas? By all accounts, dying of nitrogen suffocation is quick, reliable, and painless -- you don't even feel like you're suffocating, since that feeling is brought on by a buildup of CO2 rather than by a lack of oxygen. Instead, you just pass out.
For applications, a developer signs up with Apple (for $99/year) and part of what they get out of that is a private key that allows them to sign their applications. I don't know if the signing system for drivers is similar, but I don't see any reason why it couldn't be.
Can the owner of a Mac choose which code signing certificate authorities to trust? If not, how does that inability benefit the computer's users?
It benefits the user by allowing Apple to (largely) ensure that signed code on the user's machine is code that was written by a developer that isn't a known malware source. If the user could choose a different certificate authority, then every "see the dancing pigs for free" malware app could just instruct the user to choose SuperL33TChineseCertificatAuthority as a trusted certificate authority, and we'd be back to square one.
tl;dr taking the 'whom to trust" decision out of the user's hands means it is impossible for the user to screw that decision up.
Why pay more for Apple to preinstall an SSD for you when you can buy the SAME BRAND if not identical model number they use and install it for usually HALF the cost or less than what they charge for the upgrade? Answer THAT.
So that if the Mac ever stops working, I can tell my Mom to just take it to the Apple store and they will fix it for her.
If the Mac contains a 3rd-party drive and it breaks, the Apple store will likely hand it right back to her and say "we can't support 3rd-party products". (At least, that's what happened last time I tried to save money by putting 3rd-party RAM into her Mac Mini) Then I will have to fly out and fix it myself, or temporarily remove the 3rd-party drive and replace it with the original Apple-supplied one, before the Mac can be made operational again.
It's worth something extra to keep the system entirely-Apple-supplied, so that there's no quibbling about who is responsible to fix what when something goes wrong. How much extra depends on how much your time is worth.
If anything is "obvious" here, it is that this is the propaganda equivalent of a False Flag attack. My guess is CIA/Mossad.
But surely the CIA/Mossad would be clever enough to realize that Anonanonaon would quickly figure out their False Flag strategy and expose them on Slashdot, so they'd know better than to try it... meaning that the only remaining explanation is that Russia put out the fake photo as a False False Flag attack, to make the CIA/Mossad look bad!
This is why you never go in against a Russian when death is on the line!
I can't think of anyone else who abandons their own work so frequently and after its actually launched on the public, too.
I can think of one... Apple. Try bringing your $6,000+ quad-Xeon cheese-grater Mac Pro into an Apple Store for support -- the "geniuses" will all gather round to look at the fascinating museum piece, before they tell you that they can't help you with your "legacy Mac".:^P
google makes me laugh. a bunch of children who think they can engineer products. lol.
No doubt that explains why they are such a tiny company that nobody has ever heard of, with such a minuscule user base. Do I detect some sour grapes?
The point is that if you are unable to derive a good (predictive) model for a function (weather in this case), then you have no hope of modeling the integral of that function (climate)./quote.
My point is that the above is simply not true -- for example, despite the fact that at the quantum level events are happening randomly and unpredictably all the time, we are nevertheless able to use Newton's and Einstein's laws to predict the future positions of planets and spaceships with amazing accuracy.
In a similar fashion, climate scientists can predict long-term climate trends with much better accuracy than the weatherman can predict the weather, precisely because all the little random events average each other out over a large enough sample size.
And many people, incl. many here, want them on all the time, no exceptions, to prevent exactly that.
Of course, a dishonest police officer can always find something to cover the camera with, or "accidentally" put it on backwards, or "forget" to charge the battery, or any number of other subtle or not-so-subtle bits of sabotage.
The real endgame arrives only when both the police officer and any person (s)he comes in contact with are both recording video. In that case both parties will have an incentive to record everything, since otherwise only the other party will have (possibly selective/edited) video evidence to provide.
Climate is nothing more or less than the integral of weather.
Sure, in the same way that everyday mechanical physics is nothing more or less than the integral of quantum mechanics.
The statement is technically true, but also quite misleading, in that in both cases knowing something about the behavior at one scale isn't going to give you much intuition about how things behave at the other.
Now, with the rise of ISIS, a newly expansionist Russia, and the spectra of a waking dragon, the US officer core is saying weather is our biggest threat.
Ignoring the "spectra of a waking dragon" (whatever the hell that is), and fact that you don't appear to understand the difference between 'weather' and 'climate' -- can you point to the place in the report where it says that "climate change is our biggest threat"?
I suspect you cannot, and the reason you cannot is because you pulled that claim out of your ass.
Is that parody or is that news? I cannot believe that one-sided, war-mongering, short-sighted propaganda piece is called 'News'.
Personally I'm in great anticipation of the upcoming flag day, when some particularly onerous climate-change related events (e.g. the permanent evacuation of Miami, or perhaps just food shortages due to widespread crop failures) occur, and Fox News shifts seamlessly from denying the existence of global warming to blaming the Democrats for not having done enough to prevent it. Good times.
"[Superscalar architectures] translate the architectural instruction encodings into something more akin to a static single assignment form (ironically, the compiler spends a lot of effort translating from such a form into a finite-register encoding)
Which makes me wonder, would it (in principle) be worth designing a chip with an ISA that is based explicitly on single-assignment-form, thereby avoiding both the need for transformations by the compiler and (more importantly) transformations by the CPU at run-time?
Is Joe Average disbelieving AGW because he's a moron or because he's drawing the entirely correct conclusion that agreeing it's true would have negative consequences for him?
I think that is likely what many Joe Averages are doing... but it seems to me that the negative consequences of denying AGW are likely going to be more severe than the negative consequences of agreeing with it (in the same way that the negative consequences of pretending you don't have cancer are more severe than those of getting it treated ASAP).
For those of us who don't know, or those of us who aren't in the states if this is a USA thing, what's a "buy-here-pay-here" dealer? How is it different from any other dealer?
They specialize in selling cars to people who can't really afford them. Their customers are considered high risk and can't get credit elsewhere, so they charge high interest rates. When said people fall behind on their payments, they repossess the cars and sell them again to someone else. It's not uncommon for a dealer to sell the same used car 5 or 6 times. It's a fairly dodgy business model.
I do not have enough time left in my life to turn around and learn the skills I'd need to actually verify what scientist have told me, nor the money to buy the equipment.
Demonstrating that your mind is the product of your physical brain's functioning is not particularly difficult. You don't even need even any lab equipment. A popular experiment (which anyone can perform, and many do) is to introduce a dose of CH3CH2OH into your brain, and then observe the resulting changes in your mind's behavior. If the mind and the brain were two separate mechanisms, mental changes like those would not occur in response to the introduction of a chemical.
Hard to see what extras a person gets with proprietary software. Or what is nor fixed or fixed later.
If a piece of software has had lots of development and testing done on it by very talented individuals, the user gets to enjoy better-designed, higher-quality software.
In some (but not all) cases, the proprietary nature of the software supplies the money necessary to pay those talented programmers and testers to spend the extra time necessary to really develop/debug/polish the software's quality.
Open source software sometimes gets that extra attention too, but since it's often written by self-directed volunteers, the extra-mile polishing often happens only to the parts of the software that software developers find interesting. Hence Linux's great kernel, but mediocre [relative to OS/X] GUI.
Does being proprietary make software more secure? Unlikely -- but security is not the only yardstick by which software is judged.
Really, the story here is that the malware was signed by a valid certificate. This basically means the certificate system is worthless
I think "worthless" is a bit too strong of a characterization. Now that the company's certificate is known to be compromised, Apple invalidates their certificate, and all malware that is signed with that certificate will no longer run on any Internet-connected Mac. That's not ideal, but it's a lot better than not having any mechanism to stop known malware.
If there is a more effective security mechanism that Apple ought to be using instead, I'd be interested in hearing about it.
I find it hilarious that someone can believe in a vast conspiracy of gamers to kill these women
A more accurate description would be that a small group of people are trying to silence these women. ("Conspiring" may or may not be applicable, since it's not clear whether they are acting in concert with each other, or why they would need to)
Basically you have a bunch of entitled man-children who don't think that these women should be able to criticise them or "their" favorite topics, and so they are trying to intimidate the women into shutting up.
It doesn't matter one bit what the women allegedly did to "deserve it" -- In a just world, these law-breaking cowards would be exposed, named, shamed, and prosecuted. Hopefully some of them will be. Impunity is repugnant.
Slashdot Mirror
So if dancing pigs is as much of a support cost for companies as you claim it is,
How much of a support cost did I claim it was? I don't recall putting an actual value on anything. I only pointed out that a benefit exists. Whether that benefit makes the lock-everything-down strategy worth pursuing or not (for a given product) would depend very much on who the product's target-market it is and what the product is used for.
Wind power is a joke regardless of how you look at it. It's more environmentally disruptive than yesterday's technology and doesn't scale nearly as well
One interesting thing about Wind Power that is demonstrated by your Google Maps link is that once the windmills are built, the land around and between them is guaranteed to be left largely undeveloped for the lifetime of the site. That is to say, people won't build houses or businesses there, and not much else can be built there either since it would disrupt the wind flow that the turbines depend on.
Given that, the construction of windmills at a site might actually be an environmental plus(*), since it keeps creeping suburbia away and leaves 95%+ of the area unaffected..
(*) okay, an environmental lesser-of-two-evils, anyway. The environmental ideal would be no human presence on the land at all, but that's often not an option.
I wonder if the greenies would complain if instead we put up a billboard.
Yes, and they'd be right to do so. A wind turbine may disturb a pristine landscape, but on the other hand it's also helping transition us away from our dependence on fossil fuels, so there is a compensating environmental benefit.
A billboard, on the other hand, despoils the landscape and has no compensating environmental benefit. From an environmental perspective, it's a total loss.
(of course if you'd like to have both your pristine landscapes and your wind turbines, than placing the wind turbines several miles off-shore might be the best-of-both-worlds solution to pursue. There's lots of wind there, and very few tourists)
Is the solar install base REALLY going to be able to accommodate a 15-30,000% (fifteen to thirty THOUSAND percent) increase in deployment?
Note solar alone, but renewable sources will at some point have to take over the entire load, because non-renewables, by definition, will not be economically viable at some point.
The only question is when.
Should the power companies be FORCED to just eat the fees of hooking up and stabilizing a power source that's only producing cheap power during periods where demand is lowest?
Sure -- they can use some of the money they save by not having to build and maintain more peaking plants, because residential solar will now handle that issue for them.
I've never been able to figure out why they execute people with drug combinations at all -- if the goal is a quick, humane, unembarrassing death, why not just flood the execution chamber with nitrogen or some other inert gas? By all accounts, dying of nitrogen suffocation is quick, reliable, and painless -- you don't even feel like you're suffocating, since that feeling is brought on by a buildup of CO2 rather than by a lack of oxygen. Instead, you just pass out.
By whom?
For applications, a developer signs up with Apple (for $99/year) and part of what they get out of that is a private key that allows them to sign their applications. I don't know if the signing system for drivers is similar, but I don't see any reason why it couldn't be.
Can the owner of a Mac choose which code signing certificate authorities to trust? If not, how does that inability benefit the computer's users?
It benefits the user by allowing Apple to (largely) ensure that signed code on the user's machine is code that was written by a developer that isn't a known malware source. If the user could choose a different certificate authority, then every "see the dancing pigs for free" malware app could just instruct the user to choose SuperL33TChineseCertificatAuthority as a trusted certificate authority, and we'd be back to square one.
tl;dr taking the 'whom to trust" decision out of the user's hands means it is impossible for the user to screw that decision up.
Why pay more for Apple to preinstall an SSD for you when you can buy the SAME BRAND if not identical model number they use and install it for usually HALF the cost or less than what they charge for the upgrade? Answer THAT.
So that if the Mac ever stops working, I can tell my Mom to just take it to the Apple store and they will fix it for her.
If the Mac contains a 3rd-party drive and it breaks, the Apple store will likely hand it right back to her and say "we can't support 3rd-party products". (At least, that's what happened last time I tried to save money by putting 3rd-party RAM into her Mac Mini) Then I will have to fly out and fix it myself, or temporarily remove the 3rd-party drive and replace it with the original Apple-supplied one, before the Mac can be made operational again.
It's worth something extra to keep the system entirely-Apple-supplied, so that there's no quibbling about who is responsible to fix what when something goes wrong. How much extra depends on how much your time is worth.
If anything is "obvious" here, it is that this is the propaganda equivalent of a False Flag attack. My guess is CIA/Mossad.
But surely the CIA/Mossad would be clever enough to realize that Anonanonaon would quickly figure out their False Flag strategy and expose them on Slashdot, so they'd know better than to try it... meaning that the only remaining explanation is that Russia put out the fake photo as a False False Flag attack, to make the CIA/Mossad look bad!
This is why you never go in against a Russian when death is on the line!
Sure it's been used for stuff, but it hasn't helped us crack nuclear fusion for instance, one of its often hyped goals.
Speak for yourself, bucko. ;)
I can't think of anyone else who abandons their own work so frequently and after its actually launched on the public, too.
I can think of one... Apple. Try bringing your $6,000+ quad-Xeon cheese-grater Mac Pro into an Apple Store for support -- the "geniuses" will all gather round to look at the fascinating museum piece, before they tell you that they can't help you with your "legacy Mac". :^P
google makes me laugh. a bunch of children who think they can engineer products. lol.
No doubt that explains why they are such a tiny company that nobody has ever heard of, with such a minuscule user base. Do I detect some sour grapes?
The point is that if you are unable to derive a good (predictive) model for a function (weather in this case), then you have no hope of modeling the integral of that function (climate)./quote.
My point is that the above is simply not true -- for example, despite the fact that at the quantum level events are happening randomly and unpredictably all the time, we are nevertheless able to use Newton's and Einstein's laws to predict the future positions of planets and spaceships with amazing accuracy.
In a similar fashion, climate scientists can predict long-term climate trends with much better accuracy than the weatherman can predict the weather, precisely because all the little random events average each other out over a large enough sample size.
And many people, incl. many here, want them on all the time, no exceptions, to prevent exactly that.
Of course, a dishonest police officer can always find something to cover the camera with, or "accidentally" put it on backwards, or "forget" to charge the battery, or any number of other subtle or not-so-subtle bits of sabotage.
The real endgame arrives only when both the police officer and any person (s)he comes in contact with are both recording video. In that case both parties will have an incentive to record everything, since otherwise only the other party will have (possibly selective/edited) video evidence to provide.
Climate is nothing more or less than the integral of weather.
Sure, in the same way that everyday mechanical physics is nothing more or less than the integral of quantum mechanics.
The statement is technically true, but also quite misleading, in that in both cases knowing something about the behavior at one scale isn't going to give you much intuition about how things behave at the other.
Now, with the rise of ISIS, a newly expansionist Russia, and the spectra of a waking dragon, the US officer core is saying weather is our biggest threat.
Ignoring the "spectra of a waking dragon" (whatever the hell that is), and fact that you don't appear to understand the difference between 'weather' and 'climate' -- can you point to the place in the report where it says that "climate change is our biggest threat"?
I suspect you cannot, and the reason you cannot is because you pulled that claim out of your ass.
Is that parody or is that news? I cannot believe that one-sided, war-mongering, short-sighted propaganda piece is called 'News'.
Personally I'm in great anticipation of the upcoming flag day, when some particularly onerous climate-change related events (e.g. the permanent evacuation of Miami, or perhaps just food shortages due to widespread crop failures) occur, and Fox News shifts seamlessly from denying the existence of global warming to blaming the Democrats for not having done enough to prevent it. Good times.
"[Superscalar architectures] translate the architectural instruction encodings into something more akin to a static single assignment form (ironically, the compiler spends a lot of effort translating from such a form into a finite-register encoding)
Which makes me wonder, would it (in principle) be worth designing a chip with an ISA that is based explicitly on single-assignment-form, thereby avoiding both the need for transformations by the compiler and (more importantly) transformations by the CPU at run-time?
Is Joe Average disbelieving AGW because he's a moron or because he's drawing the entirely correct conclusion that agreeing it's true would have negative consequences for him?
I think that is likely what many Joe Averages are doing ... but it seems to me that the negative consequences of denying AGW are likely going to be more severe than the negative consequences of agreeing with it (in the same way that the negative consequences of pretending you don't have cancer are more severe than those of getting it treated ASAP).
i.e. I think Joe Average is fooling himself.
For those of us who don't know, or those of us who aren't in the states if this is a USA thing, what's a "buy-here-pay-here" dealer?
How is it different from any other dealer?
They specialize in selling cars to people who can't really afford them. Their customers are considered high risk and can't get credit elsewhere, so they charge high interest rates. When said people fall behind on their payments, they repossess the cars and sell them again to someone else. It's not uncommon for a dealer to sell the same used car 5 or 6 times. It's a fairly dodgy business model.
Most people want Sarkeesian silenced like they wanted Jack Thompson silenced. An annoyance that is louder than it has any reason to be.
There's nothing wrong with wishing someone would shut up. There's not even anything wrong with saying so publicly.
There's everything wrong with sending someone death threats and/or rape threats.
If you can't grasp that distinction, then there's probably nothing more I can say that would benefit either of us.
I do not have enough time left in my life to turn around and learn the skills I'd need to actually verify what scientist have told me, nor the money to buy the equipment.
Demonstrating that your mind is the product of your physical brain's functioning is not particularly difficult. You don't even need even any lab equipment. A popular experiment (which anyone can perform, and many do) is to introduce a dose of CH3CH2OH into your brain, and then observe the resulting changes in your mind's behavior. If the mind and the brain were two separate mechanisms, mental changes like those would not occur in response to the introduction of a chemical.
Hard to see what extras a person gets with proprietary software. Or what is nor fixed or fixed later.
If a piece of software has had lots of development and testing done on it by very talented individuals, the user gets to enjoy better-designed, higher-quality software.
In some (but not all) cases, the proprietary nature of the software supplies the money necessary to pay those talented programmers and testers to spend the extra time necessary to really develop/debug/polish the software's quality.
Open source software sometimes gets that extra attention too, but since it's often written by self-directed volunteers, the extra-mile polishing often happens only to the parts of the software that software developers find interesting. Hence Linux's great kernel, but mediocre [relative to OS/X] GUI.
Does being proprietary make software more secure? Unlikely -- but security is not the only yardstick by which software is judged.
Really, the story here is that the malware was signed by a valid certificate. This basically means the certificate system is worthless
I think "worthless" is a bit too strong of a characterization. Now that the company's certificate is known to be compromised, Apple invalidates their certificate, and all malware that is signed with that certificate will no longer run on any Internet-connected Mac. That's not ideal, but it's a lot better than not having any mechanism to stop known malware.
If there is a more effective security mechanism that Apple ought to be using instead, I'd be interested in hearing about it.
I find it hilarious that someone can believe in a vast conspiracy of gamers to kill these women
A more accurate description would be that a small group of people are trying to silence these women. ("Conspiring" may or may not be applicable, since it's not clear whether they are acting in concert with each other, or why they would need to)
Basically you have a bunch of entitled man-children who don't think that these women should be able to criticise them or "their" favorite topics, and so they are trying to intimidate the women into shutting up.
It doesn't matter one bit what the women allegedly did to "deserve it" -- In a just world, these law-breaking cowards would be exposed, named, shamed, and prosecuted. Hopefully some of them will be. Impunity is repugnant.
She got death threats because the trolls knew she was a good target.
Can you provide a list of circumstances where death threats are acceptable behavior? Because to my knowledge, there aren't any.