The National Defense Service Medal [wikipedia.org] is automatically handed out to everyone that enlists.
I'd expect you to at least know the meaning of the first medal you got. Everyone currently in the military has it, yes, but that's not automatic or even upon enlisting. It's only during a time of war. I think that should be recognized.
We don't know how many times the driver in the cars have had to intervene to prevent an accident, do we?
No, but do you know how many (minor, major, and fatal) collisions there are per mile driven?
I know there are around 2 fatalities per 100m miles driven, but I can't find rates for minor and major accidents. I suspect the vast majority of collisions are non-fatal, so a human driver probably has good odds of being in a collision by 700k.
Do you have any evidence that self-driving cars are unsafe, or that human intervention has been necessary?
And... so? None of this will happen until self-driving cars are in fact the safer alternative. At which point, great. Since when do you get to endanger others because you think it's fun?
Afraid I'll get a woosh for this, but I'll respond...
As I understand it, they already are safer. Thus far, no moving violations and no accidents (to my knowledge). Google's car was in an accident while it was being manually driven. Google is touting 700,000+ accident-free miles now.
I'm sure they do, but seriously... fuck the cabbies. Their lobbying is the reason most Californians can't take the train all the way to the airport. Stops just far enough way that you have to call a taxi.
It would be great to see somebody take that from them.
That may be true for philosophy and ethics, but not as much for political science. There's a decent-sized job market in campaign work, government (esp. urban planning), and security. Security isn't academia per se, but it is borderline since a lot of the work is at think tanks and similar institutions. I'd also argue it's a useful background for business, and multinationals seem to recognize that value.
I believe these are the main reasons Political Science tends to be at the top of the salary rankings for social sciences, along with Urban Planning and International Relations, which often fall under the P.S. department or major.
True in theory, but... honestly, how often are directors held accountable? At best, it's usually just a company-paid settlement with no admission of guilt.
I'm willing to bet some money that no CxO or board member will serve jail time or be fined more than 50% of their net worth, despite direct knowledge that their negligence caused deaths.
Ok look at what you just told me here. First you essentially deny that campaign contributors aren't getting a return on investment, and then you essentially say that ~1B of money towards negative adds was effectively wasted since there was no chance in him winning.
So clearly we need to revise the first amendment.
There is no contradiction, just nuance that I perhaps did not effectively convey. To get to 51%, you can either boost support for a candidate or reduce support for their rival.
Romney's campaign likely knew all of the following to be true: - With 100% turnout, Romney would never be able to achieve 51% - Effective negative ads increase turnout among the GOP base ("more important to vote so we can get that evil commie out of there!") - Effective negative ads may decrease overall turnout ("they both suck, why vote?") - Effective negative ads against an incumbent leader of a political party trickle down the ballot (you can turn Congressional elections by running against the President) - Romney had a non-zero chance of winning (despite my hyperbole)
Sure, Romney could have won. Possibly. But his loss does not mean those who donated to the cause got nothing out of donating. They improved their relationship with the GOP, gained key Congressional seats, reduced support for Obama, reduced Obama's success rate in implementing his policies, probably moved Obama to the right, and so forth.
As for ~$1B, sure, it's a WAG. But I was talking about total negative ad spending on that election from the right, not just the Romney campaign. I haven't seen a good source on the data, and it is a reasonable estimate.
And yes, Democrats use negative ads for most of the same reasons. Though Democrats tend to benefit from increased turnout and suffer from decreased confidence in government, so their calculus is slightly different.
This happened to a colleague, who most certainly followed all the instructions and made a dozen calls to Apple. Two weeks ago. Still can't get texts from iPhone users. This is squarely on Apple.
Let me guess, you're one of those admins who requires a 16+ character password with at least 2 lower, upper, special and numerics, changed every 30 days, and you get mad about "lusers" forgetting their passwords?
That's a nice logical-sounding rant and all, but at the end of the day you're telling me unions, corporations, and some very informed people spend billions of dollars every year without getting any return on their investment? Even though there is a giant mountain of evidence showing that lobbying has higher ROI than any other investment?
No amount of money could have convinced people to vote for Romney. He was a terrible, terrible candidate. But with ~$1B of negative ads, they probably dissuaded a lot of people from voting for Obama and many other Democrats (or made them less eager to do so). And you're ignoring the fact that Romney wouldn't have even been a contender if he didn't have vast financial support.
I'm not saying that the cloud is the right solution for everything but I would really like to see more data on how up-time for cloud based services compares to on premise solutions before jumping to any conclusions.
You're right to wonder that. Unfortunately, I can't exactly share my data, but I do have a pretty large [non-random] sample size. Companies that are too small to have dedicated, competent storage and mail server admins have far higher uptime with reputable cloud providers. So far around an order of magnitude.
For every "omg, AWS region was down for an hour!" slashdot story, I've seen at least two businesses lose data on poorly architected storage that was not properly backed up or maintained.
For every "omg, Gmail/Office365 was down for an hour!" story, I've seen a company down for a week because their in-house Exchange server died or suffer constant outages because they used a cheap hosted Exchange solution.
If you can't afford to do it right, with a DR site, on- and off-site backups, and physically redundant systems, managed by competent admins, you are probably better off with a major cloud service.
Most of the small businesses I have worked with have an "IT guy" who knows how to troubleshoot Windows and do a few other things. I haven't been in a sub-100 person shop that had qualified storage, networking, and system admins.
SMBs need to outsource for specialized IT expertise, whether to consultants or cloud providers.
I have heard talk of using thunderbolt or similar for server interconnects, allowing servers to become more modular. Picture a rack with a computer node (or two) connected to some storage nodes, connected to a GPU node, etc. through PCIe. My [limited] understanding is that you could essentially make one server out of a rack of gear, interconnected at a much lower level. It would theoretically be more easily made redundant or upgradable, but we'll have to see what gets developed.
I can definitely see a use for it in the server space. Aside from that, we are already using thunderbolt in media. You just can't do uncompressed 4K streams over USB.
Ahh thank you for the extra information, that does make sense. I actually want remote start for summers as well, but I've dealt with harsh winters in the past.
Called again this morning, ended up agreeing to fewer channels, no HD, no Showtime, for the same damned price I'd been paying the last 4 years. I'm thinking I'll spend tomorrow researching laws (I live in California) to see if that verbal contract is valid, and what my options are.
Did you agree to a contract of that rate for, say, 24 months that you can't cancel at any time? I doubt it, and hope not. You can almost always cancel without penalty.
I don't have U-verse, but I call my cable provider once a year asking cancel, then let them talk me out of it and offer me a better deal.
Experience gives detailed in depth knowledge, education gives general broad knowledge. Being too far on either end of the spectrum can cause some difficulties. I've had several cases in my career where very good senior engineers were baffled by a problem too far afield of their experience and education, when the answer is basic 2nd year CS material.
I agree on breadth vs. depth, but I think you're unfairly categorizing "education" as breadth. While undergrad is about broad knowledge, grad school is about specialized knowledge.
A CS undergrad at a good uni is going to be studying history, religion, politics, physical sciences, math, and a wide range of CS topics. A CS grad student is going to be focused on, say, machine learning, with more closely related courses. By the time they're doctoral candidates, they should have a very deep knowledge in one particular field combined with a broad knowledge of related fields... which should allow them to go multidisciplinary or work with people from other disciplines.
I suspect you know all of this and agree, but I wanted to bring it up just in case.
But they generally earn relatively high salaries compared to average and are hardly "oppressed" let alone enslaved.
I know some grad students who would beg to differ about being "enslaved".
Jokes aside, I think I agree more with globaljustin here. While I see your point and would not equate the two, there is a similarity in the humor. I'm sure there is a technical word for it...
many online stores operate on far narrower margins than 10%, apples only cost is hosting and processing transactions. They could make a large profit on under 3% margin.
3%? Apple is processing credit card payments. Do you have any idea what that costs?
LOL, no. LTO is normally about 1/3rd the $/GB of SATA drives and 1/5th the price of NL drives. As an example LTO5 tapes are currently around $20 each when bought in reasonable quantities and hold 1.5TB uncompressed for a cost of $.0133/GB, the cheapest 3TB SATA drive at Newegg right now is $105 for a cost of $.035/GB.
And the drive to read them? Tape is more expensive than disk up to about 50TB when you factor in all the costs.
That really depends on what kind of storage you're using. Sure, you can do a 100 TB SuperMicro piece of junk for $15k, filled with desktop drives on a cracked Windows server or FreeNAS. But if you want something reliable, you're going to pay a lot more than $0.035/GB.
On top of that, tape is far easier and cheaper to do off-site. Any quality solution will let you write out 2 copies of each tape so you can send one to Iron Mountain or similar. If you want off-site with disk, you need a second server, second network infrastructure, good links between the two, and good software. rsync is a wonderful tool, but it doesn't cut it for this.
So the smart murderers become judges while the dumb ones go to jail?
I could be wrong, but I think the judge used to be present for executions? I'd be curious about this, but I don't think it would actually deter anyone from using the death penalty. People can be pretty callous once they start judging people.
I've thought for a while now that the method of execution should be decided by the convicted.
That has the obvious benefit of making sure that the execution is as humane as possible, because the person with the most interest in making it humane is the one making the decision.
I endorsed this idea before I started opposing the death penalty. The problem I see is that this approach assumes the convict is sane or rational. I would guess that the average death row inmate has rather poor decision making skills (or, in Texas, has serious mental disabilities).
It's not humane just because someone chooses to be eaten by lions. I'm not even sure if it would be humane if they were laughing during.
Slashdot Mirror
The National Defense Service Medal [wikipedia.org] is automatically handed out to everyone that enlists.
I'd expect you to at least know the meaning of the first medal you got. Everyone currently in the military has it, yes, but that's not automatic or even upon enlisting. It's only during a time of war. I think that should be recognized.
We don't know how many times the driver in the cars have had to intervene to prevent an accident, do we?
No, but do you know how many (minor, major, and fatal) collisions there are per mile driven?
I know there are around 2 fatalities per 100m miles driven, but I can't find rates for minor and major accidents. I suspect the vast majority of collisions are non-fatal, so a human driver probably has good odds of being in a collision by 700k.
Do you have any evidence that self-driving cars are unsafe, or that human intervention has been necessary?
And... so? None of this will happen until self-driving cars are in fact the safer alternative. At which point, great. Since when do you get to endanger others because you think it's fun?
Afraid I'll get a woosh for this, but I'll respond...
As I understand it, they already are safer. Thus far, no moving violations and no accidents (to my knowledge). Google's car was in an accident while it was being manually driven. Google is touting 700,000+ accident-free miles now.
I'm sure they do, but seriously... fuck the cabbies. Their lobbying is the reason most Californians can't take the train all the way to the airport. Stops just far enough way that you have to call a taxi.
It would be great to see somebody take that from them.
That may be true for philosophy and ethics, but not as much for political science. There's a decent-sized job market in campaign work, government (esp. urban planning), and security. Security isn't academia per se, but it is borderline since a lot of the work is at think tanks and similar institutions. I'd also argue it's a useful background for business, and multinationals seem to recognize that value.
I believe these are the main reasons Political Science tends to be at the top of the salary rankings for social sciences, along with Urban Planning and International Relations, which often fall under the P.S. department or major.
Damnit. That's what I get for posting within 30 minutes of waking up.
In my defense, I do hear people seriously arguing that position.
... you really think China isn't doing the same with Huawei? As an added bonus, we know China will pass trade secrets to Chinese corporations.
So, nerds never get beaten up in school, then.
Back to figuring out What Is Wrong With Me ...
I know this is Slashdot and all, but the OP was talking about rape. Are you really equating the two?
True in theory, but... honestly, how often are directors held accountable? At best, it's usually just a company-paid settlement with no admission of guilt.
I'm willing to bet some money that no CxO or board member will serve jail time or be fined more than 50% of their net worth, despite direct knowledge that their negligence caused deaths.
Ok look at what you just told me here. First you essentially deny that campaign contributors aren't getting a return on investment, and then you essentially say that ~1B of money towards negative adds was effectively wasted since there was no chance in him winning.
So clearly we need to revise the first amendment.
There is no contradiction, just nuance that I perhaps did not effectively convey. To get to 51%, you can either boost support for a candidate or reduce support for their rival.
Romney's campaign likely knew all of the following to be true:
- With 100% turnout, Romney would never be able to achieve 51%
- Effective negative ads increase turnout among the GOP base ("more important to vote so we can get that evil commie out of there!")
- Effective negative ads may decrease overall turnout ("they both suck, why vote?")
- Effective negative ads against an incumbent leader of a political party trickle down the ballot (you can turn Congressional elections by running against the President)
- Romney had a non-zero chance of winning (despite my hyperbole)
Sure, Romney could have won. Possibly. But his loss does not mean those who donated to the cause got nothing out of donating. They improved their relationship with the GOP, gained key Congressional seats, reduced support for Obama, reduced Obama's success rate in implementing his policies, probably moved Obama to the right, and so forth.
As for ~$1B, sure, it's a WAG. But I was talking about total negative ad spending on that election from the right, not just the Romney campaign. I haven't seen a good source on the data, and it is a reasonable estimate.
And yes, Democrats use negative ads for most of the same reasons. Though Democrats tend to benefit from increased turnout and suffer from decreased confidence in government, so their calculus is slightly different.
This happened to a colleague, who most certainly followed all the instructions and made a dozen calls to Apple. Two weeks ago. Still can't get texts from iPhone users. This is squarely on Apple.
Let me guess, you're one of those admins who requires a 16+ character password with at least 2 lower, upper, special and numerics, changed every 30 days, and you get mad about "lusers" forgetting their passwords?
That's a nice logical-sounding rant and all, but at the end of the day you're telling me unions, corporations, and some very informed people spend billions of dollars every year without getting any return on their investment? Even though there is a giant mountain of evidence showing that lobbying has higher ROI than any other investment?
No amount of money could have convinced people to vote for Romney. He was a terrible, terrible candidate. But with ~$1B of negative ads, they probably dissuaded a lot of people from voting for Obama and many other Democrats (or made them less eager to do so). And you're ignoring the fact that Romney wouldn't have even been a contender if he didn't have vast financial support.
I'm not saying that the cloud is the right solution for everything but I would really like to see more data on how up-time for cloud based services compares to on premise solutions before jumping to any conclusions.
You're right to wonder that. Unfortunately, I can't exactly share my data, but I do have a pretty large [non-random] sample size. Companies that are too small to have dedicated, competent storage and mail server admins have far higher uptime with reputable cloud providers. So far around an order of magnitude.
For every "omg, AWS region was down for an hour!" slashdot story, I've seen at least two businesses lose data on poorly architected storage that was not properly backed up or maintained.
For every "omg, Gmail/Office365 was down for an hour!" story, I've seen a company down for a week because their in-house Exchange server died or suffer constant outages because they used a cheap hosted Exchange solution.
If you can't afford to do it right, with a DR site, on- and off-site backups, and physically redundant systems, managed by competent admins, you are probably better off with a major cloud service.
Most of the small businesses I have worked with have an "IT guy" who knows how to troubleshoot Windows and do a few other things. I haven't been in a sub-100 person shop that had qualified storage, networking, and system admins.
SMBs need to outsource for specialized IT expertise, whether to consultants or cloud providers.
I have heard talk of using thunderbolt or similar for server interconnects, allowing servers to become more modular. Picture a rack with a computer node (or two) connected to some storage nodes, connected to a GPU node, etc. through PCIe. My [limited] understanding is that you could essentially make one server out of a rack of gear, interconnected at a much lower level. It would theoretically be more easily made redundant or upgradable, but we'll have to see what gets developed.
I can definitely see a use for it in the server space. Aside from that, we are already using thunderbolt in media. You just can't do uncompressed 4K streams over USB.
Some group nobody has heard of, throttled the FCCs connection speed to a site they'll never visit.
We've heard of 'em now, haven't we?? (Nice attempt to focus on the messenger instead of the message, by the way...)
It's relevant. "Type44Q's Blog Throttles FCC" is rather different from "Google Throttles FCC".
Ahh thank you for the extra information, that does make sense. I actually want remote start for summers as well, but I've dealt with harsh winters in the past.
Called again this morning, ended up agreeing to fewer channels, no HD, no Showtime, for the same damned price I'd been paying the last 4 years.
I'm thinking I'll spend tomorrow researching laws (I live in California) to see if that verbal contract is valid, and what my options are.
Did you agree to a contract of that rate for, say, 24 months that you can't cancel at any time? I doubt it, and hope not. You can almost always cancel without penalty.
I don't have U-verse, but I call my cable provider once a year asking cancel, then let them talk me out of it and offer me a better deal.
Experience gives detailed in depth knowledge, education gives general broad knowledge. Being too far on either end of the spectrum can cause some difficulties. I've had several cases in my career where very good senior engineers were baffled by a problem too far afield of their experience and education, when the answer is basic 2nd year CS material.
I agree on breadth vs. depth, but I think you're unfairly categorizing "education" as breadth. While undergrad is about broad knowledge, grad school is about specialized knowledge.
A CS undergrad at a good uni is going to be studying history, religion, politics, physical sciences, math, and a wide range of CS topics. A CS grad student is going to be focused on, say, machine learning, with more closely related courses. By the time they're doctoral candidates, they should have a very deep knowledge in one particular field combined with a broad knowledge of related fields... which should allow them to go multidisciplinary or work with people from other disciplines.
I suspect you know all of this and agree, but I wanted to bring it up just in case.
But they generally earn relatively high salaries compared to average and are hardly "oppressed" let alone enslaved.
I know some grad students who would beg to differ about being "enslaved".
Jokes aside, I think I agree more with globaljustin here. While I see your point and would not equate the two, there is a similarity in the humor. I'm sure there is a technical word for it...
... it really doesn't have any sort of remote start capability? I don't understand why anyone in the midwest would want one.
many online stores operate on far narrower margins than 10%, apples only cost is hosting and processing transactions. They could make a large profit on under 3% margin.
3%? Apple is processing credit card payments. Do you have any idea what that costs?
LOL, no. LTO is normally about 1/3rd the $/GB of SATA drives and 1/5th the price of NL drives. As an example LTO5 tapes are currently around $20 each when bought in reasonable quantities and hold 1.5TB uncompressed for a cost of $.0133/GB, the cheapest 3TB SATA drive at Newegg right now is $105 for a cost of $.035/GB.
And the drive to read them? Tape is more expensive than disk up to about 50TB when you factor in all the costs.
That really depends on what kind of storage you're using. Sure, you can do a 100 TB SuperMicro piece of junk for $15k, filled with desktop drives on a cracked Windows server or FreeNAS. But if you want something reliable, you're going to pay a lot more than $0.035/GB.
On top of that, tape is far easier and cheaper to do off-site. Any quality solution will let you write out 2 copies of each tape so you can send one to Iron Mountain or similar. If you want off-site with disk, you need a second server, second network infrastructure, good links between the two, and good software. rsync is a wonderful tool, but it doesn't cut it for this.
So the smart murderers become judges while the dumb ones go to jail?
I could be wrong, but I think the judge used to be present for executions? I'd be curious about this, but I don't think it would actually deter anyone from using the death penalty. People can be pretty callous once they start judging people.
I've thought for a while now that the method of execution should be decided by the convicted.
That has the obvious benefit of making sure that the execution is as humane as possible, because the person with the most interest in making it humane is the one making the decision.
I endorsed this idea before I started opposing the death penalty. The problem I see is that this approach assumes the convict is sane or rational. I would guess that the average death row inmate has rather poor decision making skills (or, in Texas, has serious mental disabilities).
It's not humane just because someone chooses to be eaten by lions. I'm not even sure if it would be humane if they were laughing during.