Like most things, it depends. At a certain size (and not that big) there's little doubt that adding an IT department increases efficiency by letting people specialize (the product makers can focus on production and not spend 3 hours trying to fix a PC problem IT could fix in 5 min). IT can definitely make things more efficient thus allow greater production with less inputs (time/money/material) but that always depends on inefficiencies being there that need to be solved. Adding IT manpower to solve preexisting efficiencies and thus boost production makes sense. Deciding that the artificial creation of a problem is good because it requires you to hire more IT is not so good because it's not just a direct relationship between IT manpower and economic production.
It's like firemen, having tons of fireman in town and a fire-stations on every block is great and all, but what would REALLY be good for the town is less fires.
I was wondering why it took longer to start up my hadoop cluster this morning on EC2, but it still beats the living hell out of buying and configuring large numbers of machines for short term testing.
after a tornado took the power out that powers the power station.
Does not compute. Once it's running why can't a power station use it's own power.
Because you tend to want to have power available to cool nuclear fuel even if you decide to stop producing power for whatever reason (maintenance, mechanical failure, tornado, earthquake, tsunami, nazi zombi attack)
his is potentially good for the economy, because corporations across America will soon be forced to update the operating systems and IT departments may need to hire new techs for installations.
This is just another version of breaking windows (*sigh* just re-read this, the glass kind) being "good" for the economy because it caused people to buy windows and pay window repairmen. The "good" for the economy would be found instead in people switching to more efficient software, having less system downtime, and more security resulting in less spam/viruses wasting resources. But the simple forced switching causing companies to hire IT workers is not good for the economy.
Don't get me wrong, IT workers are important for a company, but you need to understand that all they do is lose a company money. Like HR, they usually don't produce product, they are on overhead. A good IT person can "save" a company huge sums of money by being efficient and lowering overhead and downtime company wide, but increasing IT budget is always a loss unless that increase is recouped by their ability to increase efficiencies elsewhere.
Probably the same way they built simulators for Space missions before they went to space? I'd also guess that the software can probably be given updates as new things are discovered and changes to the planes are made.
Not that I think the F-35 is a good decision, but the ability of the United States to project power has been based on their military technology (especially air-force) having a FAR better then "even match" ratio.
I was under the impression there has been numerous monitoring of all the iPhones input/output to try to figure out why it was using up users' data plans even when not in use by them.
Yea, after the first half of the blurb I was really hoping that they had developed some sort of "Just World" system for multiplayer where after $X n00b tube kills a player's gun misfires and the grenade somehow goes off in the chamber.
This disaster wouldn't have been nearly as bad if they had simply let the fuel rods melt instead of blasting the region with steam, xenon, and iodine. Speaking of which: why in the hell is steam vented to the atmosphere and not run through a condenser?
Here's an idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrostatic_precipitator Use corona discharge to clean the steam before it even gets to the fucking condensor!
I'm living on the goddamn planet of the apes. I didn't even go to college and I have better ideas on how to manage this shit than PhDs. What the fuck is wrong with the world?
Maybe if you HAD gone to college you might see the difficulty in attaching the input feed of a condenser unit onto a collapsed and burning pile of radioactive rubble that's pouring steam out of every orifice? Or the danger in allowing nuclear fuel to melt through the bottom of the containment vessel/structure unopposed. Or if you're talking about before the accident, perhaps if you had gone to high school and learned how to Google BWR designs you'd see they do have a condenser after the steam turbines in the internal loop. But no, why bother to to do even precursory research to gain an understanding of the problem and situation when you can just arrogantly assume you live in a world of apes and all them college boys don't know what they're doing.
It's less of a summary and more of a copy/paste straight from the article. The weird comma after the first word comes from the fact that they didn't copy/paste the whole sentence, probably mistaking the word Titan for the start of the sentence because it has a capital letter and just happened to break into a new-line of the article. The full sentence is:
Saturn's largest moon, Titan, has been a particular focus of attention because of its dense, complex atmosphere, its weather and its lakes and oceans.
Too much money riding on it. Corporations will win. Always
Aren't ISPs corporations too?
I think that was part of his point. Duh.
I don't think you're thinking things through. How would implementing costly filtering and being held accountable for doing it well and not pissing your customers off and losing them by doing so, ever be a win for an ISP? A win for them is to NOT be forced to do content filtering which is in direct opposition to the goals of companies that have money riding on content filtering being required.
$168 million sounds like a serious investment, until you consider that this thing is projected to cost $1.37 *billion*.
You a Chemist? I don't know what the hell kinds of buckets you use but mine tend to carry more than 9 drops;)
168 mil / 1.37 billion = a little more than 12%. I'd consider 12% of my salary or budget a pretty significant investment, and if I was taking a test I'd consider a question worth 12% of the grade worth a pretty significant investment in doing well on it.
Yea, that'd require some sort of new testament or prophet or something that would spawn a whole new class of religion, and we all know that's never happened.
So in 1000 years people will falsely credit the USA Government with the invention of the light bulb? What a shame when credit for all inventions, discoveries and accomplishments goes to whatever government had authority over the actual inventor. Why can't you wrap your mind around the fact that individuals are the source of all ideas. A government has no wisdom of it's own. It's wisdom comes from from the individuals who make it up.
No, but they might credit it and the USSR with the start of space exploration, putting a man on the moon, and so on. Sure, it's a large group of individuals that contributed to this, but that's exactly what a government is. You're argument is basically "That group of individuals has no wisdom of it's own, it's wisdom comes from the sum of individuals in the group" which is just pedantic.
Also those millions of uniformed service members, including those in war zones, won't get paid until congress agrees to some form of budget or continuing resolution. It's generally not a good idea, in any form of government, to not pay your large standing army while asking them to continue to fight. Do that long enough and they'll solve "what needs to be cut" from your budget real quick.
Oh sure, and while we're at it we can train regular riflemen by tying tax-evaders and shoplifters to posts downrange. Also land mines? Really? Why don't we skip the generational middleman and just start cutting off limbs of random kids that go hiking today.
"significantly" in the statistical sense that we can find any correlation between radiation and increased cancer occurrence, not the laymen's sense of "greatly". Also keep in mind that's a YEARLY dose linked with cancer and I think we're talking about an hourly dose of 100 mSv there so you are certainly correct that it is quite a serious amount indeed.
I think it's a tad unreasonable to expect an extremely capable software program that can give you skills you can make money from as well as use produce work you can profit off of to be priced $30-$40 LESS then you're run of the mill video game release. If you're just a programmer "changing some icons" then gimp or other free alternatives should suite you just fine. You're argument is akin to saying you're going to keep stealing Wüsthof steak knives until they cost $1 because you're just using them to spread butter anyways.
Look up "Afghanistan pipeline" and you'll see what we're doing there. We are securing the route for a pair of pipelines, one oil the other natural gas, so the corps will have a way to route it through to India and the sea. pipelines are a hell of a lot cheaper for the corps, and less likely to get jacked, so what if some Americans die for it right?
>
Seems like a bit of a catch-22. Any sort of industry or build-up of Afghanistan is going to immediately be attributed to the US going to war there for "corporate interests" and the other option is leveling the place and leaving them to suffer without infrastructure or economy which doesn't exactly make us look or smell like roses either. I think pointing to pipelines and resources discovered later whose rights the Afghan government sold to non American firms is a sad attempt to post-justify the war with your preconceived notions of corporations running everything. The fact of the matter is the American people were pissed off after 9/11, and ready to fuck anyone up that seemed like they were a part of it. I know I was, and the near unanimous approval of our congress and high public approval ratings for the war would seem to agree.
How exactly do you see it going down in your mind? The corporations collaborated to plan 9/11? Or while the country was getting hit with jetliners Bush decided to meet with some evil conglomerate of corporations that used the opportunity to pick a target for war based on a ten-year plan to start building a pipeline so their oil trucks don't get jacked but is instead running in a giant vulnerable pipe in a country full of militants with RPGs? Sounds like a plan.
Tons killing machines and none for Fukushima. Well done.
First of all, I don't see why killing machines would help at Fukushima, but did you seriously miss both the Slashdot story about USAF drones taking hi-res pictures for the Japanese and the fact that we sent a ton of radiation hardened robots to assist? I mean, do you even think before you bash the US or do you just imagine whatever is the worse possible case and then just go with it absent of any real fact or understanding?
There's a damn good reason cancer hasn't been cured yet (or a cure has not been made public). Treating cancer is FAR more profitable than curing it ever will be.
This assumes zero self-interest for the person or company that finds and creates the cure first. For them, it will be insanely profitable. For the world-wide industry as a whole, not as much. And if this person or company has zero self-interest in profits why would they be swayed more by maintaining the profits of a hundreds of other people/companies they don't care about rather than saving the lives of millions? It would be like not wanting to become Henry Ford yourself because you'd upend the vast world-wide profits in raising and selling horses, saddles and stagecoaches.
Did you even read the article in your second link? first of all, this is the THIRD sentence:
Judge Keegan took the case as an opportunity to reinforce his previous judgment that the Arizona law governing freeway speed cameras is unconstitutional.
So he's reinforcing a judgment he made earlier instead of flip flopping because it's someone "important". Second of all, it states the prosecutor IS flip-flopping from publicly refusing to prosecute jail-able offenses based solely upon the accusations of a machine that has been wrong in several cases, to ordering the arrest of the GOP director at his place of work an entire MONTH after the machine caught him. The entire article reads as Judge continues ruling how he always has, prosecutor reverses publicly announced policies and treats defendant differently when he realizes he's GOP director.
Slashdot Mirror
Like most things, it depends. At a certain size (and not that big) there's little doubt that adding an IT department increases efficiency by letting people specialize (the product makers can focus on production and not spend 3 hours trying to fix a PC problem IT could fix in 5 min). IT can definitely make things more efficient thus allow greater production with less inputs (time/money/material) but that always depends on inefficiencies being there that need to be solved. Adding IT manpower to solve preexisting efficiencies and thus boost production makes sense. Deciding that the artificial creation of a problem is good because it requires you to hire more IT is not so good because it's not just a direct relationship between IT manpower and economic production.
It's like firemen, having tons of fireman in town and a fire-stations on every block is great and all, but what would REALLY be good for the town is less fires.
I was wondering why it took longer to start up my hadoop cluster this morning on EC2, but it still beats the living hell out of buying and configuring large numbers of machines for short term testing.
after a tornado took the power out that powers the power station.
Does not compute. Once it's running why can't a power station use it's own power.
Because you tend to want to have power available to cool nuclear fuel even if you decide to stop producing power for whatever reason (maintenance, mechanical failure, tornado, earthquake, tsunami, nazi zombi attack)
his is potentially good for the economy, because corporations across America will soon be forced to update the operating systems and IT departments may need to hire new techs for installations.
This is just another version of breaking windows (*sigh* just re-read this, the glass kind) being "good" for the economy because it caused people to buy windows and pay window repairmen. The "good" for the economy would be found instead in people switching to more efficient software, having less system downtime, and more security resulting in less spam/viruses wasting resources. But the simple forced switching causing companies to hire IT workers is not good for the economy.
Don't get me wrong, IT workers are important for a company, but you need to understand that all they do is lose a company money. Like HR, they usually don't produce product, they are on overhead. A good IT person can "save" a company huge sums of money by being efficient and lowering overhead and downtime company wide, but increasing IT budget is always a loss unless that increase is recouped by their ability to increase efficiencies elsewhere.
Probably the same way they built simulators for Space missions before they went to space? I'd also guess that the software can probably be given updates as new things are discovered and changes to the planes are made.
Not that I think the F-35 is a good decision, but the ability of the United States to project power has been based on their military technology (especially air-force) having a FAR better then "even match" ratio.
I was under the impression there has been numerous monitoring of all the iPhones input/output to try to figure out why it was using up users' data plans even when not in use by them.
It's akin to your boss walking around the office and passing out candy bars for effort. Treating adults like little children is ridiculous.
Speak for yourself, if you know of a company where the bosses go around giving out Mountain Dew and candy bars sign me the fuck up ;)
Yea, after the first half of the blurb I was really hoping that they had developed some sort of "Just World" system for multiplayer where after $X n00b tube kills a player's gun misfires and the grenade somehow goes off in the chamber.
This disaster wouldn't have been nearly as bad if they had simply let the fuel rods melt instead of blasting the region with steam, xenon, and iodine. Speaking of which: why in the hell is steam vented to the atmosphere and not run through a condenser? Here's an idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrostatic_precipitator Use corona discharge to clean the steam before it even gets to the fucking condensor! I'm living on the goddamn planet of the apes. I didn't even go to college and I have better ideas on how to manage this shit than PhDs. What the fuck is wrong with the world?
Maybe if you HAD gone to college you might see the difficulty in attaching the input feed of a condenser unit onto a collapsed and burning pile of radioactive rubble that's pouring steam out of every orifice? Or the danger in allowing nuclear fuel to melt through the bottom of the containment vessel/structure unopposed. Or if you're talking about before the accident, perhaps if you had gone to high school and learned how to Google BWR designs you'd see they do have a condenser after the steam turbines in the internal loop. But no, why bother to to do even precursory research to gain an understanding of the problem and situation when you can just arrogantly assume you live in a world of apes and all them college boys don't know what they're doing.
Saturn's largest moon, Titan, has been a particular focus of attention because of its dense, complex atmosphere, its weather and its lakes and oceans.
Federal Tax filing date is April 18th this year, not the 15th.
Too much money riding on it. Corporations will win. Always
Aren't ISPs corporations too?
I think that was part of his point. Duh.
I don't think you're thinking things through. How would implementing costly filtering and being held accountable for doing it well and not pissing your customers off and losing them by doing so, ever be a win for an ISP? A win for them is to NOT be forced to do content filtering which is in direct opposition to the goals of companies that have money riding on content filtering being required.
This video was uploaded in January, and it's on slashdot NOW?
You mean people didn't IMMEDIATELY take notice of a video posted by a Czech student for his phd thesis? Good God, who's manning the internet?!?!
$168 million sounds like a serious investment, until you consider that this thing is projected to cost $1.37 *billion*.
You a Chemist? I don't know what the hell kinds of buckets you use but mine tend to carry more than 9 drops ;)
168 mil / 1.37 billion = a little more than 12%. I'd consider 12% of my salary or budget a pretty significant investment, and if I was taking a test I'd consider a question worth 12% of the grade worth a pretty significant investment in doing well on it.
Yea, that'd require some sort of new testament or prophet or something that would spawn a whole new class of religion, and we all know that's never happened.
So in 1000 years people will falsely credit the USA Government with the invention of the light bulb? What a shame when credit for all inventions, discoveries and accomplishments goes to whatever government had authority over the actual inventor. Why can't you wrap your mind around the fact that individuals are the source of all ideas. A government has no wisdom of it's own. It's wisdom comes from from the individuals who make it up.
No, but they might credit it and the USSR with the start of space exploration, putting a man on the moon, and so on. Sure, it's a large group of individuals that contributed to this, but that's exactly what a government is. You're argument is basically "That group of individuals has no wisdom of it's own, it's wisdom comes from the sum of individuals in the group" which is just pedantic.
Also those millions of uniformed service members, including those in war zones, won't get paid until congress agrees to some form of budget or continuing resolution. It's generally not a good idea, in any form of government, to not pay your large standing army while asking them to continue to fight. Do that long enough and they'll solve "what needs to be cut" from your budget real quick.
Oh sure, and while we're at it we can train regular riflemen by tying tax-evaders and shoplifters to posts downrange. Also land mines? Really? Why don't we skip the generational middleman and just start cutting off limbs of random kids that go hiking today.
"significantly" in the statistical sense that we can find any correlation between radiation and increased cancer occurrence, not the laymen's sense of "greatly". Also keep in mind that's a YEARLY dose linked with cancer and I think we're talking about an hourly dose of 100 mSv there so you are certainly correct that it is quite a serious amount indeed.
I think it's a tad unreasonable to expect an extremely capable software program that can give you skills you can make money from as well as use produce work you can profit off of to be priced $30-$40 LESS then you're run of the mill video game release. If you're just a programmer "changing some icons" then gimp or other free alternatives should suite you just fine. You're argument is akin to saying you're going to keep stealing Wüsthof steak knives until they cost $1 because you're just using them to spread butter anyways.
Look up "Afghanistan pipeline" and you'll see what we're doing there. We are securing the route for a pair of pipelines, one oil the other natural gas, so the corps will have a way to route it through to India and the sea. pipelines are a hell of a lot cheaper for the corps, and less likely to get jacked, so what if some Americans die for it right?
>
Seems like a bit of a catch-22. Any sort of industry or build-up of Afghanistan is going to immediately be attributed to the US going to war there for "corporate interests" and the other option is leveling the place and leaving them to suffer without infrastructure or economy which doesn't exactly make us look or smell like roses either. I think pointing to pipelines and resources discovered later whose rights the Afghan government sold to non American firms is a sad attempt to post-justify the war with your preconceived notions of corporations running everything. The fact of the matter is the American people were pissed off after 9/11, and ready to fuck anyone up that seemed like they were a part of it. I know I was, and the near unanimous approval of our congress and high public approval ratings for the war would seem to agree.
How exactly do you see it going down in your mind? The corporations collaborated to plan 9/11? Or while the country was getting hit with jetliners Bush decided to meet with some evil conglomerate of corporations that used the opportunity to pick a target for war based on a ten-year plan to start building a pipeline so their oil trucks don't get jacked but is instead running in a giant vulnerable pipe in a country full of militants with RPGs? Sounds like a plan.
Tons killing machines and none for Fukushima. Well done.
First of all, I don't see why killing machines would help at Fukushima, but did you seriously miss both the Slashdot story about USAF drones taking hi-res pictures for the Japanese and the fact that we sent a ton of radiation hardened robots to assist? I mean, do you even think before you bash the US or do you just imagine whatever is the worse possible case and then just go with it absent of any real fact or understanding?
There's a damn good reason cancer hasn't been cured yet (or a cure has not been made public). Treating cancer is FAR more profitable than curing it ever will be.
This assumes zero self-interest for the person or company that finds and creates the cure first. For them, it will be insanely profitable. For the world-wide industry as a whole, not as much. And if this person or company has zero self-interest in profits why would they be swayed more by maintaining the profits of a hundreds of other people/companies they don't care about rather than saving the lives of millions? It would be like not wanting to become Henry Ford yourself because you'd upend the vast world-wide profits in raising and selling horses, saddles and stagecoaches.
Did you even read the article in your second link? first of all, this is the THIRD sentence:
Judge Keegan took the case as an opportunity to reinforce his previous judgment that the Arizona law governing freeway speed cameras is unconstitutional.
So he's reinforcing a judgment he made earlier instead of flip flopping because it's someone "important". Second of all, it states the prosecutor IS flip-flopping from publicly refusing to prosecute jail-able offenses based solely upon the accusations of a machine that has been wrong in several cases, to ordering the arrest of the GOP director at his place of work an entire MONTH after the machine caught him. The entire article reads as Judge continues ruling how he always has, prosecutor reverses publicly announced policies and treats defendant differently when he realizes he's GOP director.