The rich benefit disproportionally from stability. Put it this way: How much happier is each segment of the population living here than any backwards place in the world with little police and poor sanitation?
The rich have everything to lose; they are usually making their money from large businesses that could suffer or fail entirely without police, without the sanitation necessary for cities, and without fairly stable government (taxes, property ownership/deeds, etc). If they lived in a place like that, a huge number of costs would appear--armed security guards, bribes, custom-built sanitation, etc. Oh, there would still be rich people, as indeed there are, but they'd almost certainly be terrified every day that organized crime may come knocking on their door and take away their money, their children, their goods, or their lives. Compared to that, taxes are a percentage of their income. Where would you live?
The middle-income (who are generally tradesmen) benefit a great deal, because they depend on people paying them fairly for their knowledge, their ability, or their goods, but they are not balanced on the edge of a knife. They aren't extremely obvious targets, but they'll probably deal with a certain number of criminals every year. They probably know how to, or have the resources to, acquire sanitation, but it's on a personal/familial scale, not distributed across an entire company's holdings. In general, they probably prefer to live wherever they were born, because they know the ins and outs of the place.
Poor people in first-world countries have to work every day, may hardly get breaks, are treated poorly, live in crappy housing, and if they're stuck with a knife, often there's not a lot that people will do. They have it better than poor people in third world countries, but how much better? Especially when they're taxed for the luxury of living in your country--which will be robbing them of purchasing power that they may desperately need?
Deficit: How much more is spent than earned. If you have any deficit--even one penny--debt increases. If you decrease your current deficit but are not yet in surplus, your debt still increases.
Debt: How much money is owed and not yet paid back. This is done* with government bonds; essentially, you give the government a loan, and they pay you back with interest, even if they have to take out more loans to do so. Technically, because of the interest rate on government bonds, the deficit grows larger along with the debt, which probably contributed to with the existence of a debt ceiling at all; it's not inconceivable to get into an out-of-control spiral that consumes the entire currency until it's essentially valueless.
Because we're approaching the debt ceiling at a not-exponential rate, they probably figure it's not betraying the purpose of the debt ceiling to raise it; it's there to prevent things from getting out of hand, but it does get in the way when there are budgets what that require the spending of money.
* I'm not an economist. I'm sure there are other kinds of government debt. I don't know much about them.
The reasons that marketing for world peace has failed? Much simpler... most other folks have their own ideas, and it usually involves advantages gained at your expense.
If it's happening generation after generation, it's not that they have their own ideas, it's that they trust those who came before.
Social change happens a lot, but it's hugely influenced by what's going on. It's why you can take emigrants from a divided and oft-warring continent, full of many disparate languages, settle on a far larger continent, and end up with 3 extremely large countries. If people were really as cruel and unsaveable as you seem to suggest, why did they unify under fair and representative governments (relatively speaking, at the very least) instead of splitting into dozens or hundreds of monarchies, each speaking different languages?
My personal belief is that world peace will be impossible until you can experiment with governance in a meaningful way--until you can do science to it. The various and miscellaneous ways and morays of governance are in fact incredibly complicated, and as a programmer I can say with clarity that finding the root cause of a procedural mistake can be next to impossible. If you could set up a nation to create a generation of supremely educated, wise, intelligent people--even if only 10% of the generation ended up like that, given the data you could gather along the way, the next generation could turn out differently, and then the next after that. Human beings are not mysteriously evil in some sort of cannot-be-accounted-for way. We learn and we trust, and those can be enough to create new evil every generation, if the world around us is set up for it.
I don't see why Facebook, or any company, should be required to participate in its own demise.
You're assuming they're giving up. If Facebook was a star sports player, and Google was the up-and-coming new kid, should Facebook refuse to talk about them in public, and abuse friends who do? I say no, they shouldn't--and it says something about them that they do.
If the star sports player was actually interested in the game itself, they would see a rival as an excuse to up their game. It gives them a chance to geek out about the sport. It gives them a chance to prove that they had that special something all along, and that they'll always be the best. They should stare in the face of the new kid, give em a smirk, and say, "Show me what you've got. No matter what it is, I'll beat it." That's competition.
But when a star player, or the company, isn't interested, why are they there? The fans come to cheer because they are interested in the sport. If the star is just lolling around and not taking anything seriously, why SHOULD they continue to be the star?
You might argue that it's business, and so they shouldn't gamble--but sports is big business, too. You might argue that any competition lowers their user base--but that's only fatal if they fall below some critical income level and become unsustainable, and that's harder to do with an ad-supported internet site. More important than either of those is, are they still trying? Are they going to keep fighting to the last breath, or would Zuck fold up the booth and go home as soon as it stopped being easy?
That's too specific a question; a better question is, how to we stop the law, law enforcement, and the justice system from being used in criminal ways, for criminal purposes, potentially by people who themselves have no criminal intent?
It's a question that isn't being asked nearly enough, especially by the government.
When you are sharing with a circle of friends, anyone who betrays trust can be found out, and then not trusted again. But in some ways, the "betrayal" of facebook is the obtuse settings; if a human being were as pedantic and unforgiving, you would consider them a huge jerk. UIs always have that problem; they're interacting intelligently, but they're not intelligent. Every time you scream at your computer because "it's being stupid", it's the same. In this case, though, a bad UI or malfunction can have serious repercussions on the rest of your life. Well, I suppose every time the computer crashed with a document unsaved, it could impact the rest of your life, but the point is, it affects how you relate to people, and some things can't be undone.
But since computers and online social networking are seen as part of the future, many people can't cut them out like they could a traitorous friend. And since FB is used by hundreds of millions, that makes all of those people ripe to be "betrayed," in the worst case. And unfortunately, the people behind it aren't really all that concerned.
I meant specifically the ones in the screenshot: Tippr, yipit, homerun, scoutmob. Looking at it again, I see Groupon and Living Social listed, which I have heard of.
To be honest, I think the article is 90%+ sleaze. They're insinuating that Google (the organization) is anti-competitive because they defaulted to promoting their own service, as part of a user-customizable feature, and one (let's not forget) that's actually very simple to correct.
Three things.
One, as I said, it can be changed. Downvote the google offers, upvote your mother.
Two, the thing about a lot of google's services is that they're algorithm-based. The funny thing about algorithms is a high rate of unintended consequences, for better or worse. If I understand correctly, the filter used to assign the important flag automatically is essentially a reverse application of the spam filter. There could be tons of places in the code or in their databases that causes this to get tweaked up. Even if it wasn't brought to light, it might have been "corrected" later either by accident or as part of a code review stemming from other efforts to not appear anti-competitive.
Three, again, it's algorithm-based, a lot like spam filters. Maybe it's just me, but I've never heard of any of those "competing services." Is it really that unlikely that their algorithm hasn't yet been flooded with "These services are Important" signals for those services?
replace "Grandma" with other "demographic generalization"'s like "women", "blacks", etc..
I'm pretty sure it wasn't a question of demographics. It was an allegory that they expected everyone to understand; even if you do not, yourself, have a grandma who is technologically ignorant, apathetic, or intolerant (or if you are yourself a grandma who is technologically savvy, depending on what your beef with the GP/GGGP is) you have certainly encountered at least one person who fits the description. They were using "Grandma" to stand in for that concept, because it is a common experience and thus makes a good allegory.
If you want to change that behavior (which is to say, assuming you aren't just trolling), you might want to come up with a better allegory, because the alternative is for them to keep rephrasing "Technologically ignorant/apathetic/intolerant" in various ways every time they have to communicate that idea, and that's both awkward linguistically and boring. Moreover, the listener easily associates an allegory or analogy with a situation (and therefore actions they have to take, or have taken), while it's more difficult with an abstract concept. That's why, for example, we use car analogies.
It's an amusing gimmick, but they don't seem to have solved the problems that have plagued scent delivery systems before: odors don't evaporate that quickly. Audio and video disappear the instant you stop creating them, but odors linger. That's a problem of the room, not the device.
Since this is discussed in relation to TV, yes, it's a problem with the device too. It's not merely a question of the scent lingering when you turn off the TV; if the scene changes or you switch channels and have two conflicting scents (A bakery and a war-torn battlefield) that hang in the air with equal weight--or even 2:1 or 3:1--it could easily ruin any sense of immersion you might have had.
It might be an interesting way to do marketing (imprinting a place with a custom scent), especially in a mall, convention hall, etc, but dynamic content is going to be problematic.
Even if gold isn't as well-stocked as I think, I maintain that it's in the wrong hands. The sort of people that will be stocking precious metals instead of spending money on necessities and consumer goods are the ones who probably won't be of value in an emergency--or if they are, they'll have to prove it.
To be honest, though, it will likely not even be thought of immediately. Most places in the first world already have a disaster-recovery chain of command, which will become de facto authority until something better comes along, and it will only be after a while that people worry about currency; unless the local governments can secure enough gold to make their own currency (which, honestly, seems unlikely), they might just use old currency (especially coins) at different valuations, or else they may go straight to barter with contracts enforced by local authorities for large sums. Gold would have to be a step up from that in terms of practicality, and I'm not sure it is.
In any case, whatever happened after the apocalypse would be another dark age, and it'd be a lot of struggling and fighting and things we can't even predict. More than likely, a million different scenarios will play out in cities and townships, so we could only really talk about it statistically.
What intrinsic value do precious metals have that makes them so valuable?
Scarcity and the fact that it's works well for 900,000,000 years... I'm guessing history puts more weight behind it. Plus history also shows how the fake money systems collapse... History is riddled with how Fiat Money systems fail over and over throughout time.
That's what makes them valuable as a currency, and especially what made them valuable as a currency when currency was new. Essentially, scarcity meant that you couldn't counterfeit coins, and that meant that value wasn't going to appear out of nowhere and ruin the economy as assholes made themselves rich without providing anything in trade.
To be honest, if the world ended tomorrow, gold wouldn't work as a currency because it CAN appear out of nowhere--there are such huge stocks of it worldwide that someone could be sitting on, or steal, so much gold that at any reasonable exchange rate, you could buy up enough food to starve small countries, without having done anything to earn that food (or more importantly, since it's a trade, without needing to use that food to produce more of value, by say, feeding farmers during a blight, so they can live to farm again). That's not what currency is for. Currency is a trade of value for value, which is why it's regulated by government--the same authority that provides the police to go after thieves, who regulate property ownership, who maintain military might, etc. The people who have gold today are not the ones who will be of value in the event of serious tumult. They don't farm, they don't manufacture (themselves/on the premises of their property), they don't maintain roads, health care, clean water, sewage, nothing. The people who have the most money are the people who are taking advantage of existing stability, and when that stability ends, so will their value. Any currency that might be used post-apocalypse will either be chosen with this in mind, or it will evolve naturally to take this into consideration. (For example, bottlecaps in Fallout. Rich people aren't going to stockpile them prior to destruction, they're ubiquitous, but limited in supply.)
So especially now, no, there really is no intrinsic value to gold, not if it's no longer suitable to be currency.
Do you honestly think there is anything else besides a strong central government that can stand up to mega-corps?
Rather, mega-corps are essentially strong central governments whose borders extend with product sales. The only main difference is that they outsource their judicial system and enforcement to national governments, and taxation to retailers.
Or at the very least, that's the world they seem to be trying to create...
Programmer time is more expensive than hardware time. If a less efficient language is easier to use, it makes business sense to use it to save money.
I honestly hate this idea. You write have to write a program once.
If you made a mistake, and the language you're using makes it difficult to track down that mistake, you may write that program many times over.
If you have a hotshot programmer on your team who thinks he's more clever than he is, no matter what language you're using, you may have to rewrite it again, or parts of it. The easier that is, the less of a loss it was to have made that hiring decision.
If your language of choice does not support certain features natively (concurrency, garbage collection, variable types, others come to mind), rewriting them from scratch or finding libraries, and training programmers to use them, becomes an additional cost. Anyone not already familiar with those libraries, or your own custom in-house libraries, is likely to make first-time mistakes on your dime. If this gets bad enough, you may have to write the program again.
Additionally, electricity is cheap, and you may not actually know when developing the program whether it will be used one time, ten times, ten thousand times, ten million times, or zero times, because that's up to management, the client, etc. If you get the functionality working acceptably in short order, and it becomes production, you may waste X money in additional power consumption, slow processing, etc. If you spend months getting the code to work, you might be asked to alter, rewrite, cancel, etc the project due to changed requirements... I'm sure there are people who are better at the horror stories than I am.
Clearly the best would be people who really, 100% know C or even, god willing, assembly, and can program as fast and well in that as lesser men could in java, perl, etc; people who have a treasury of libraries they're fully versed in that touches the heavens, and who know memory management and pointer arithmetic better than the CPU designers themselves. Good luck affording THAT. In the meantime, it's probably better to prototype in an easy language, and if time, money, and management agree, port the code to something faster. If time, money, and management don't agree, you still have a working program.
Now, you'd have a working program if you did it in C too. I hear you saying it. And if you, and everyone on your team, or who will join your team later are all good enough to deal with that, then yes, you are good enough, and you'll do fine. Were you to run a company, however, you may have to make this decision when it comes to hiring programmers: Do you want a quick mock-up in a sloppy language, or a sturdy, well-built machine that will take longer and requires better trained personnel? Because you'll choose each of those for different projects. And if you choose the former, even as a proponent of harder, better, faster, stronger code, you may be embarrassed to find you still have some of those quick and sloppy mock-up jobs in a production environment, because you didn't need anything more, and it would have cost you to redo them.
You know, there are like at least 2-3 points that would have actually help make your point if you had made them earlier, and actually fail to make a point now, because we're not talking about the same thing anymore.
The problem is *not* control of the aircraft, ie the failure is not the fly-by-wire control system, the problem is in the ground to aircraft signaling system that is indicating where the runway is
This, for instance, makes absolutely zero sense and makes you look like an idiot (I'm talking about landing in the clear on manual control, which has zero to do with the ILS knowing your position, which is what makes it a goddamn test in the first place) without your later statement:
they *require* computers making hundreds of microcorrections on control surfaces per second to maintain stable flight.
In fact, without that, your entire discussion seems completely off the rails, and unless I'm mistaken, you haven't made it before.
Now, my halfassed knowledge of physics and above-average knowledge of flight only halfway make this make sense. For one, maintaining stable flight in terms of roll seems like a legitimate consideration, but determining "down" and keeping the plane steady is not really that high tech of an operation, and it's not something you can't build a backup for. Maintaining stable flight in terms of pitch and yaw aren't, to my knowledge, significantly difficult without significant wind conditions, which again, we're talking about tests.
I've only suggested that your design suggestions lack merit.
From where I sit, you've been trying to throw out my entire argument because of quibbles over my design decisions. You can see how that alters the way I'm going to continue somewhat. For example, focusing on "non-computer hydraulics" when I just said I'm talking about redundant failsafes in general is silly. If I was actually an aircraft engineer, I would have said so; short of that, I have knowledge gaps, and I don't need to be bludgeoned over the head with them.
You can attempt to divert attention by referring to the anecdotal reports by flight crews all you want, but the motivation of this article was testing done in Boeing laboratories that does show modern devices exceeding safe emissions levels. The technically knowledgable people are starting to show concern and they are offering actual evidence.
Diverting attention means steering the conversation. I'm ranting, and following at least 3-4 different threads of conversation. If I were going to derail anything, I'd do it by omission (possibly on accident), not sleight of hand.
You can continue to talk about other things but this fact remains.
What I'm discussing first and foremost is policy, and I don't think I've deviated from the start. They've known this was potentially an issue for a decade or more. I think we (travelers) have all been acting under the assumption that switching phones, etc, off was a stopgap measure, but it's not being treated as such; they're treating it like a solution when it isn't. That's retarded as a policy if you think that it's important, and retarded as a policy if you think it isn't a concern at all. They should have been doing continuous testing, probably at the government level. If this is them coming out and saying, "We've been monitoring the situation and we think it's finally getting toward serious," then that would be one thing, but it doesn't sound like it. It sounds like, "Oh hey. Uh, I guess this might have been dangerous the whole time?"
You're treating the situation like it's one you can't do science to, and thereafter engineering upon. I'm sure you will say you're not doing that, but I've been beating you over the head with the statement, "We can test it," because your argument boils down to, "Let's just keep implementing a stopgap measure as a matter of policy, indefinitely. A
I've been checking in on Play This Thing on and off for years. A lot of what they find is very odd, very small, and often pointless, but it's more than worth a look.
They also bring out indie tabletop games (cards, board, etc) about once a week.
Uhh, do you know how instrument landings systems work? The problem is not the fly-by-wire nature of the aircraft, the problem is that the pilot can not see the runway and is relying on ground signals and onboard instruments to get him to the runway, perhaps even have the autopilot land. One area being investigated is if the emissions by onboard devices can degrade or otherwise introduce an error into those ground signals.
You do not test an ILS system by having no other way to land. You test it by pretending you need it, but being ready to land without it.
Fantasy, current designs do not offer that ability and it is not possible in some cases. Some modern fly-by-wire aircraft are in fact uncontrollable by human pilots.
You're quibbling. There are ways to make a secondary flight methods which are not going to be affected by RF of any reasonable intensity or frequency.
Why are you implying that safety margins are unnecessary, they exist for a good reason
One of those reasons is so that when a new, untested situation pops up, it will not have a high probability of causing disaster. Engineering to any other standard would be patently ridiculous.
Why are you assuming it was within the safety margin?
The lack of a mass, frothing, screaming panic by the engineers involved tips me off. Airlines may be less profitable than they were, but it's a huge industry that millions of people depend on for all their not-dying-a-flaming-death needs. If electronic devices were, all of a sudden, completely out of the safety margins, there would be a lot of very technically knowledgeable people who would be very scared about the implications. Instead, we have a f***ing press conference where they mention that some random-seeming problems that so far haven't caused much damage might be related to electronic radiation.
The technology exists, and methods exist, to actually find and shut off equipment were it actually a danger. The fact that they haven't implemented those procedures means the airlines don't ACTUALLY consider it a threat
That is a leap of faith.
In the legal system, yes. Because if the airlines actually consider it a dangerous and are not taking steps to stop the actual threats, unless I'm mistaken, that's criminal negligence at the very least.
2) I don't think you understand what I'm saying. There are runways out in the middle of the desert that you can make practice landings and takeoffs at all day, every day, for months. You can have a full complement of mock passengers in the back with phones on, off, or indifferent....
Fantasy, its not being done.
Actually, I'm quite certain that any aircraft that was designed recently, and therefore knows of the problem and has any RF shielding at all, goes through testing to check that shielding's efficacy. These sort of things actually happen a lot when you're trying to make something work, or when you have to deliver a fully functioning machine to someone.
That doesn't mean as much testing as should be done, is being done, but it can be, and that was part of my point.
That is exactly the issue to me. The fact that we have an extremely low probability but exceptionally high cost event paired with a trivial unnecessary benefit is the foundation of my opinion.
I have two main objections to this. One, you're saying that the design of the plane only vaguely factors into the situation, becoming a part of the "probability" of the event. Either there is, in fact, a vulnerability in the design, or not. You can argue that air flights should be halted, or electronics should be confiscated/turned off until that is determined if you like, but you can't suggest that the problem itself
Refitting a few out-of-service airliners into test beds isn't hundreds of millions of dollars worth of work--hundreds of thousands, perhaps, plus or minus for fuel and special equipment. Refitting an entire fleet with advanced shielding would, admittedly, be somewhere in the millions or more because you have to tear out the interior of the planes, possibly alter its structure, and then rebuild it to exacting standards.
As for who would be paying for the research, in order of likelihood: 1) The airline manufacturers. Believe it or not, they have to do testing anyway. You know, to make sure it doesn't crash. 2) Aircraft manufacturers, on military funding. The effects of RF on electronics is of consequence when you're transporting troops that use radio equipment. 3) The air force, on military funding. 4) FAA, assuming they can get budgeting for it.
Turning off an electronic device during landing is hardly comparable to the violent actions you describe. I think you deserve a nomination for silliest analogy of the year.:-)
In general, the policy of leaning on the safe side is a good thing. That's not at all the issue.
I'm aware of the irony of leaning on anecdotes for things I haven't seen myself, but flight attendants have a reputation for verbally assaulting passengers on the subject while remaining ignorant of the entire issue. For example, lambasting people for having a kindle in view, while anyone who silently puts their phone away without turning it off doesn't even get looked at.
The technology exists, and methods exist, to actually find and shut off equipment were it actually a danger. The fact that they haven't implemented those procedures means the airlines don't ACTUALLY consider it a threat. At the same time, they're training the flight attendants as though the devices were a legitimate and serious threat. They, not being actually educated on the subject, can only react with fear. Fear leads to hate, hate leads to the Dark Side.
Believe it or not, it's pretty well analogous. The people actually in the trenches are trusting this image that X is a monster. If that were actually true, they would have known long, long ago. They have encountered X without knowing it for ages. Literally, they have been in situations that are portrayed as worst-case, but they just treated them like normal situations, and it worked out. If there were noticeable differences when passenger electronics were on, it would have been EXCEPTIONALLY clear; similarly, if everyone on the other side of a national border (religious doctrine, etc) were hedonistic monsters, it would be so absolutely crystal clear that nobody in their right mind would say any different. These aren't the sort of questions you have to fudge the answers to.
Did you miss the part where a Boeing engineer who co-chaired a federal panel investigating personal devices on aircraft "took ABC News inside Boeing's electronic test chamber in Seattle, where engineers demonstrated the hidden signals from several electronic devices that were well over what Boeing considers the acceptable limit for aircraft equipment"?
1) If you know anything about aircraft engineering, or really any of the higher kinds of engineering, they set the acceptable limit well below the position where things can go wrong. There are many, many reasons for that. 2) I don't think you understand what I'm saying. There are runways out in the middle of the desert that you can make practice landings and takeoffs at all day, every day, for months. You can have a full complement of mock passengers in the back with phones on, off, or indifferent. You can even make a plane to fly by actual, non-computer hydraulics in case of emergencies. If you did that, there would be absolutely zero of this "demonstrated signals over the acceptable limit" bullshit. They would fly a demonstration and say, "Here's the point at which the controls stop working and the plane starts to crash," or "Here's the point at which the ILS goes wonky, which means that in inclement weather, there's a 100% chance of death." And then they'd actually land the plane anyway, because they're not relying on those systems to fly--they're the engineers that built the damn thing, not helpless children. 3) No, I didn't RTFA. So sue me, this is slashdot.
Actually, yes. How about something regarding consequences?
There are times in history, up to and including the present day, when appeal to consequences was used to justify aggressive war, invasion, and violence up to and including genocide, all because of anecdotal evidence that people of X nationality (or religion, etc) were monsters. In other words, a small number of criminals murdered, raped, or otherwise did what criminals of every nationality do, including their own, and yes, including yours and mine, which along with a suitable leap of logic ("Those X are all murderers and rapists") was used to justify killing people that looked vaguely similar or lived within a given territorial boundary.
The argument I just made is, of course, not strict logic, but the fact that the airline industry are of the same mindset is offensive. In both circumstances, you can find out the truth very, very easily, and yet they do not, and you are suggesting that they need not. Frankly, I think you should be ashamed, but then, that's just me.
When you trust a group of people to pick and choose your good and bad guys for you, and that group has no accountability...
The problem is, history has shown that given enough time, people will stop being held accountable even if their position is supposed to be. Presidents, congress, military, press, police, various kinds of management, etc. Unless an outside force or event (including a halfway decent person getting elected to the position and starting a legacy, though that doesn't necessarily stick) forces a new spate of being held accountable, it can go seriously downhill from there.
It is to be feared that otherwise decent nations, states, etc may be on this path.
The biggest thing I'd want feedback for is knowing where to put my finger, and that doesn't get helped at all with this, because it happens when the finger's already touching it, and in fact only when it's moving. Aside from that, help moving a text carat would be great, I suppose, but I don't see most of the rest being useful.
Now, what are the readers supposed to do? Just read?
A lot of people do anyway. And if a comment says it all or corrects a common misconception, maybe a lot less unintentional cruft will be produced. Not that there won't be trolls and spam and dumb comments, but some amount of it could be fixed with a little relevant information that's already been provided.
Slashdot Mirror
The rich benefit disproportionally from stability. Put it this way: How much happier is each segment of the population living here than any backwards place in the world with little police and poor sanitation?
The rich have everything to lose; they are usually making their money from large businesses that could suffer or fail entirely without police, without the sanitation necessary for cities, and without fairly stable government (taxes, property ownership/deeds, etc). If they lived in a place like that, a huge number of costs would appear--armed security guards, bribes, custom-built sanitation, etc. Oh, there would still be rich people, as indeed there are, but they'd almost certainly be terrified every day that organized crime may come knocking on their door and take away their money, their children, their goods, or their lives. Compared to that, taxes are a percentage of their income. Where would you live?
The middle-income (who are generally tradesmen) benefit a great deal, because they depend on people paying them fairly for their knowledge, their ability, or their goods, but they are not balanced on the edge of a knife. They aren't extremely obvious targets, but they'll probably deal with a certain number of criminals every year. They probably know how to, or have the resources to, acquire sanitation, but it's on a personal/familial scale, not distributed across an entire company's holdings. In general, they probably prefer to live wherever they were born, because they know the ins and outs of the place.
Poor people in first-world countries have to work every day, may hardly get breaks, are treated poorly, live in crappy housing, and if they're stuck with a knife, often there's not a lot that people will do. They have it better than poor people in third world countries, but how much better? Especially when they're taxed for the luxury of living in your country--which will be robbing them of purchasing power that they may desperately need?
The two words you're looking for are:
Deficit: How much more is spent than earned. If you have any deficit--even one penny--debt increases. If you decrease your current deficit but are not yet in surplus, your debt still increases.
Debt: How much money is owed and not yet paid back. This is done* with government bonds; essentially, you give the government a loan, and they pay you back with interest, even if they have to take out more loans to do so. Technically, because of the interest rate on government bonds, the deficit grows larger along with the debt, which probably contributed to with the existence of a debt ceiling at all; it's not inconceivable to get into an out-of-control spiral that consumes the entire currency until it's essentially valueless.
Because we're approaching the debt ceiling at a not-exponential rate, they probably figure it's not betraying the purpose of the debt ceiling to raise it; it's there to prevent things from getting out of hand, but it does get in the way when there are budgets what that require the spending of money.
* I'm not an economist. I'm sure there are other kinds of government debt. I don't know much about them.
The reasons that marketing for world peace has failed? Much simpler... most other folks have their own ideas, and it usually involves advantages gained at your expense.
If it's happening generation after generation, it's not that they have their own ideas, it's that they trust those who came before.
Social change happens a lot, but it's hugely influenced by what's going on. It's why you can take emigrants from a divided and oft-warring continent, full of many disparate languages, settle on a far larger continent, and end up with 3 extremely large countries. If people were really as cruel and unsaveable as you seem to suggest, why did they unify under fair and representative governments (relatively speaking, at the very least) instead of splitting into dozens or hundreds of monarchies, each speaking different languages?
My personal belief is that world peace will be impossible until you can experiment with governance in a meaningful way--until you can do science to it. The various and miscellaneous ways and morays of governance are in fact incredibly complicated, and as a programmer I can say with clarity that finding the root cause of a procedural mistake can be next to impossible. If you could set up a nation to create a generation of supremely educated, wise, intelligent people--even if only 10% of the generation ended up like that, given the data you could gather along the way, the next generation could turn out differently, and then the next after that. Human beings are not mysteriously evil in some sort of cannot-be-accounted-for way. We learn and we trust, and those can be enough to create new evil every generation, if the world around us is set up for it.
I don't see why Facebook, or any company, should be required to participate in its own demise.
You're assuming they're giving up. If Facebook was a star sports player, and Google was the up-and-coming new kid, should Facebook refuse to talk about them in public, and abuse friends who do? I say no, they shouldn't--and it says something about them that they do.
If the star sports player was actually interested in the game itself, they would see a rival as an excuse to up their game. It gives them a chance to geek out about the sport. It gives them a chance to prove that they had that special something all along, and that they'll always be the best. They should stare in the face of the new kid, give em a smirk, and say, "Show me what you've got. No matter what it is, I'll beat it." That's competition.
But when a star player, or the company, isn't interested, why are they there? The fans come to cheer because they are interested in the sport. If the star is just lolling around and not taking anything seriously, why SHOULD they continue to be the star?
You might argue that it's business, and so they shouldn't gamble--but sports is big business, too. You might argue that any competition lowers their user base--but that's only fatal if they fall below some critical income level and become unsustainable, and that's harder to do with an ad-supported internet site. More important than either of those is, are they still trying? Are they going to keep fighting to the last breath, or would Zuck fold up the booth and go home as soon as it stopped being easy?
That's too specific a question; a better question is, how to we stop the law, law enforcement, and the justice system from being used in criminal ways, for criminal purposes, potentially by people who themselves have no criminal intent?
It's a question that isn't being asked nearly enough, especially by the government.
I would phrase it more in terms of betrayal.
When you are sharing with a circle of friends, anyone who betrays trust can be found out, and then not trusted again. But in some ways, the "betrayal" of facebook is the obtuse settings; if a human being were as pedantic and unforgiving, you would consider them a huge jerk. UIs always have that problem; they're interacting intelligently, but they're not intelligent. Every time you scream at your computer because "it's being stupid", it's the same. In this case, though, a bad UI or malfunction can have serious repercussions on the rest of your life. Well, I suppose every time the computer crashed with a document unsaved, it could impact the rest of your life, but the point is, it affects how you relate to people, and some things can't be undone.
But since computers and online social networking are seen as part of the future, many people can't cut them out like they could a traitorous friend. And since FB is used by hundreds of millions, that makes all of those people ripe to be "betrayed," in the worst case. And unfortunately, the people behind it aren't really all that concerned.
I meant specifically the ones in the screenshot: Tippr, yipit, homerun, scoutmob. Looking at it again, I see Groupon and Living Social listed, which I have heard of.
To be honest, I think the article is 90%+ sleaze. They're insinuating that Google (the organization) is anti-competitive because they defaulted to promoting their own service, as part of a user-customizable feature, and one (let's not forget) that's actually very simple to correct.
Three things.
One, as I said, it can be changed. Downvote the google offers, upvote your mother.
Two, the thing about a lot of google's services is that they're algorithm-based. The funny thing about algorithms is a high rate of unintended consequences, for better or worse. If I understand correctly, the filter used to assign the important flag automatically is essentially a reverse application of the spam filter. There could be tons of places in the code or in their databases that causes this to get tweaked up. Even if it wasn't brought to light, it might have been "corrected" later either by accident or as part of a code review stemming from other efforts to not appear anti-competitive.
Three, again, it's algorithm-based, a lot like spam filters. Maybe it's just me, but I've never heard of any of those "competing services." Is it really that unlikely that their algorithm hasn't yet been flooded with "These services are Important" signals for those services?
replace "Grandma" with other "demographic generalization"'s like "women", "blacks", etc..
I'm pretty sure it wasn't a question of demographics. It was an allegory that they expected everyone to understand; even if you do not, yourself, have a grandma who is technologically ignorant, apathetic, or intolerant (or if you are yourself a grandma who is technologically savvy, depending on what your beef with the GP/GGGP is) you have certainly encountered at least one person who fits the description. They were using "Grandma" to stand in for that concept, because it is a common experience and thus makes a good allegory.
If you want to change that behavior (which is to say, assuming you aren't just trolling), you might want to come up with a better allegory, because the alternative is for them to keep rephrasing "Technologically ignorant/apathetic/intolerant" in various ways every time they have to communicate that idea, and that's both awkward linguistically and boring. Moreover, the listener easily associates an allegory or analogy with a situation (and therefore actions they have to take, or have taken), while it's more difficult with an abstract concept. That's why, for example, we use car analogies.
Or you could just be trolling.
It's an amusing gimmick, but they don't seem to have solved the problems that have plagued scent delivery systems before: odors don't evaporate that quickly. Audio and video disappear the instant you stop creating them, but odors linger. That's a problem of the room, not the device.
Since this is discussed in relation to TV, yes, it's a problem with the device too. It's not merely a question of the scent lingering when you turn off the TV; if the scene changes or you switch channels and have two conflicting scents (A bakery and a war-torn battlefield) that hang in the air with equal weight--or even 2:1 or 3:1--it could easily ruin any sense of immersion you might have had.
It might be an interesting way to do marketing (imprinting a place with a custom scent), especially in a mall, convention hall, etc, but dynamic content is going to be problematic.
Even if gold isn't as well-stocked as I think, I maintain that it's in the wrong hands. The sort of people that will be stocking precious metals instead of spending money on necessities and consumer goods are the ones who probably won't be of value in an emergency--or if they are, they'll have to prove it.
To be honest, though, it will likely not even be thought of immediately. Most places in the first world already have a disaster-recovery chain of command, which will become de facto authority until something better comes along, and it will only be after a while that people worry about currency; unless the local governments can secure enough gold to make their own currency (which, honestly, seems unlikely), they might just use old currency (especially coins) at different valuations, or else they may go straight to barter with contracts enforced by local authorities for large sums. Gold would have to be a step up from that in terms of practicality, and I'm not sure it is.
In any case, whatever happened after the apocalypse would be another dark age, and it'd be a lot of struggling and fighting and things we can't even predict. More than likely, a million different scenarios will play out in cities and townships, so we could only really talk about it statistically.
What intrinsic value do precious metals have that makes them so valuable?
Scarcity and the fact that it's works well for 900,000,000 years... I'm guessing history puts more weight behind it. Plus history also shows how the fake money systems collapse... History is riddled with how Fiat Money systems fail over and over throughout time.
That's what makes them valuable as a currency, and especially what made them valuable as a currency when currency was new. Essentially, scarcity meant that you couldn't counterfeit coins, and that meant that value wasn't going to appear out of nowhere and ruin the economy as assholes made themselves rich without providing anything in trade.
To be honest, if the world ended tomorrow, gold wouldn't work as a currency because it CAN appear out of nowhere--there are such huge stocks of it worldwide that someone could be sitting on, or steal, so much gold that at any reasonable exchange rate, you could buy up enough food to starve small countries, without having done anything to earn that food (or more importantly, since it's a trade, without needing to use that food to produce more of value, by say, feeding farmers during a blight, so they can live to farm again). That's not what currency is for. Currency is a trade of value for value, which is why it's regulated by government--the same authority that provides the police to go after thieves, who regulate property ownership, who maintain military might, etc. The people who have gold today are not the ones who will be of value in the event of serious tumult. They don't farm, they don't manufacture (themselves/on the premises of their property), they don't maintain roads, health care, clean water, sewage, nothing. The people who have the most money are the people who are taking advantage of existing stability, and when that stability ends, so will their value. Any currency that might be used post-apocalypse will either be chosen with this in mind, or it will evolve naturally to take this into consideration. (For example, bottlecaps in Fallout. Rich people aren't going to stockpile them prior to destruction, they're ubiquitous, but limited in supply.)
So especially now, no, there really is no intrinsic value to gold, not if it's no longer suitable to be currency.
Do you honestly think there is anything else besides a strong central government that can stand up to mega-corps?
Rather, mega-corps are essentially strong central governments whose borders extend with product sales. The only main difference is that they outsource their judicial system and enforcement to national governments, and taxation to retailers.
Or at the very least, that's the world they seem to be trying to create...
Programmer time is more expensive than hardware time. If a less efficient language is easier to use, it makes business sense to use it to save money.
I honestly hate this idea. You write have to write a program once.
If you made a mistake, and the language you're using makes it difficult to track down that mistake, you may write that program many times over.
If you have a hotshot programmer on your team who thinks he's more clever than he is, no matter what language you're using, you may have to rewrite it again, or parts of it. The easier that is, the less of a loss it was to have made that hiring decision.
If your language of choice does not support certain features natively (concurrency, garbage collection, variable types, others come to mind), rewriting them from scratch or finding libraries, and training programmers to use them, becomes an additional cost. Anyone not already familiar with those libraries, or your own custom in-house libraries, is likely to make first-time mistakes on your dime. If this gets bad enough, you may have to write the program again.
Additionally, electricity is cheap, and you may not actually know when developing the program whether it will be used one time, ten times, ten thousand times, ten million times, or zero times, because that's up to management, the client, etc. If you get the functionality working acceptably in short order, and it becomes production, you may waste X money in additional power consumption, slow processing, etc. If you spend months getting the code to work, you might be asked to alter, rewrite, cancel, etc the project due to changed requirements... I'm sure there are people who are better at the horror stories than I am.
Clearly the best would be people who really, 100% know C or even, god willing, assembly, and can program as fast and well in that as lesser men could in java, perl, etc; people who have a treasury of libraries they're fully versed in that touches the heavens, and who know memory management and pointer arithmetic better than the CPU designers themselves. Good luck affording THAT. In the meantime, it's probably better to prototype in an easy language, and if time, money, and management agree, port the code to something faster. If time, money, and management don't agree, you still have a working program.
Now, you'd have a working program if you did it in C too. I hear you saying it. And if you, and everyone on your team, or who will join your team later are all good enough to deal with that, then yes, you are good enough, and you'll do fine. Were you to run a company, however, you may have to make this decision when it comes to hiring programmers: Do you want a quick mock-up in a sloppy language, or a sturdy, well-built machine that will take longer and requires better trained personnel? Because you'll choose each of those for different projects. And if you choose the former, even as a proponent of harder, better, faster, stronger code, you may be embarrassed to find you still have some of those quick and sloppy mock-up jobs in a production environment, because you didn't need anything more, and it would have cost you to redo them.
You know, there are like at least 2-3 points that would have actually help make your point if you had made them earlier, and actually fail to make a point now, because we're not talking about the same thing anymore.
The problem is *not* control of the aircraft, ie the failure is not the fly-by-wire control system, the problem is in the ground to aircraft signaling system that is indicating where the runway is
This, for instance, makes absolutely zero sense and makes you look like an idiot (I'm talking about landing in the clear on manual control, which has zero to do with the ILS knowing your position, which is what makes it a goddamn test in the first place) without your later statement:
they *require* computers making hundreds of microcorrections on control surfaces per second to maintain stable flight.
In fact, without that, your entire discussion seems completely off the rails, and unless I'm mistaken, you haven't made it before.
Now, my halfassed knowledge of physics and above-average knowledge of flight only halfway make this make sense. For one, maintaining stable flight in terms of roll seems like a legitimate consideration, but determining "down" and keeping the plane steady is not really that high tech of an operation, and it's not something you can't build a backup for. Maintaining stable flight in terms of pitch and yaw aren't, to my knowledge, significantly difficult without significant wind conditions, which again, we're talking about tests.
I've only suggested that your design suggestions lack merit.
From where I sit, you've been trying to throw out my entire argument because of quibbles over my design decisions. You can see how that alters the way I'm going to continue somewhat. For example, focusing on "non-computer hydraulics" when I just said I'm talking about redundant failsafes in general is silly. If I was actually an aircraft engineer, I would have said so; short of that, I have knowledge gaps, and I don't need to be bludgeoned over the head with them.
You can attempt to divert attention by referring to the anecdotal reports by flight crews all you want, but the motivation of this article was testing done in Boeing laboratories that does show modern devices exceeding safe emissions levels. The technically knowledgable people are starting to show concern and they are offering actual evidence.
Diverting attention means steering the conversation. I'm ranting, and following at least 3-4 different threads of conversation. If I were going to derail anything, I'd do it by omission (possibly on accident), not sleight of hand.
You can continue to talk about other things but this fact remains.
What I'm discussing first and foremost is policy, and I don't think I've deviated from the start. They've known this was potentially an issue for a decade or more. I think we (travelers) have all been acting under the assumption that switching phones, etc, off was a stopgap measure, but it's not being treated as such; they're treating it like a solution when it isn't. That's retarded as a policy if you think that it's important, and retarded as a policy if you think it isn't a concern at all. They should have been doing continuous testing, probably at the government level. If this is them coming out and saying, "We've been monitoring the situation and we think it's finally getting toward serious," then that would be one thing, but it doesn't sound like it. It sounds like, "Oh hey. Uh, I guess this might have been dangerous the whole time?"
You're treating the situation like it's one you can't do science to, and thereafter engineering upon. I'm sure you will say you're not doing that, but I've been beating you over the head with the statement, "We can test it," because your argument boils down to, "Let's just keep implementing a stopgap measure as a matter of policy, indefinitely. A
They're gold-hearted criminals, without a silver of conscience. The coppers should show up in a tank and platinum all... show no mercury!
I've been checking in on Play This Thing on and off for years. A lot of what they find is very odd, very small, and often pointless, but it's more than worth a look.
They also bring out indie tabletop games (cards, board, etc) about once a week.
In order of silliness:
Uhh, do you know how instrument landings systems work? The problem is not the fly-by-wire nature of the aircraft, the problem is that the pilot can not see the runway and is relying on ground signals and onboard instruments to get him to the runway, perhaps even have the autopilot land. One area being investigated is if the emissions by onboard devices can degrade or otherwise introduce an error into those ground signals.
You do not test an ILS system by having no other way to land. You test it by pretending you need it, but being ready to land without it.
Fantasy, current designs do not offer that ability and it is not possible in some cases. Some modern fly-by-wire aircraft are in fact uncontrollable by human pilots.
You're quibbling. There are ways to make a secondary flight methods which are not going to be affected by RF of any reasonable intensity or frequency.
Why are you implying that safety margins are unnecessary, they exist for a good reason
One of those reasons is so that when a new, untested situation pops up, it will not have a high probability of causing disaster. Engineering to any other standard would be patently ridiculous.
Why are you assuming it was within the safety margin?
The lack of a mass, frothing, screaming panic by the engineers involved tips me off. Airlines may be less profitable than they were, but it's a huge industry that millions of people depend on for all their not-dying-a-flaming-death needs. If electronic devices were, all of a sudden, completely out of the safety margins, there would be a lot of very technically knowledgeable people who would be very scared about the implications. Instead, we have a f***ing press conference where they mention that some random-seeming problems that so far haven't caused much damage might be related to electronic radiation.
The technology exists, and methods exist, to actually find and shut off equipment were it actually a danger. The fact that they haven't implemented those procedures means the airlines don't ACTUALLY consider it a threat
That is a leap of faith.
In the legal system, yes. Because if the airlines actually consider it a dangerous and are not taking steps to stop the actual threats, unless I'm mistaken, that's criminal negligence at the very least.
2) I don't think you understand what I'm saying. There are runways out in the middle of the desert that you can make practice landings and takeoffs at all day, every day, for months. You can have a full complement of mock passengers in the back with phones on, off, or indifferent. ...
Fantasy, its not being done.
Actually, I'm quite certain that any aircraft that was designed recently, and therefore knows of the problem and has any RF shielding at all, goes through testing to check that shielding's efficacy. These sort of things actually happen a lot when you're trying to make something work, or when you have to deliver a fully functioning machine to someone.
That doesn't mean as much testing as should be done, is being done, but it can be, and that was part of my point.
That is exactly the issue to me. The fact that we have an extremely low probability but exceptionally high cost event paired with a trivial unnecessary benefit is the foundation of my opinion.
I have two main objections to this. One, you're saying that the design of the plane only vaguely factors into the situation, becoming a part of the "probability" of the event. Either there is, in fact, a vulnerability in the design, or not. You can argue that air flights should be halted, or electronics should be confiscated/turned off until that is determined if you like, but you can't suggest that the problem itself
Refitting a few out-of-service airliners into test beds isn't hundreds of millions of dollars worth of work--hundreds of thousands, perhaps, plus or minus for fuel and special equipment. Refitting an entire fleet with advanced shielding would, admittedly, be somewhere in the millions or more because you have to tear out the interior of the planes, possibly alter its structure, and then rebuild it to exacting standards.
As for who would be paying for the research, in order of likelihood:
1) The airline manufacturers. Believe it or not, they have to do testing anyway. You know, to make sure it doesn't crash.
2) Aircraft manufacturers, on military funding. The effects of RF on electronics is of consequence when you're transporting troops that use radio equipment.
3) The air force, on military funding.
4) FAA, assuming they can get budgeting for it.
Turning off an electronic device during landing is hardly comparable to the violent actions you describe. I think you deserve a nomination for silliest analogy of the year. :-)
In general, the policy of leaning on the safe side is a good thing. That's not at all the issue.
I'm aware of the irony of leaning on anecdotes for things I haven't seen myself, but flight attendants have a reputation for verbally assaulting passengers on the subject while remaining ignorant of the entire issue. For example, lambasting people for having a kindle in view, while anyone who silently puts their phone away without turning it off doesn't even get looked at.
The technology exists, and methods exist, to actually find and shut off equipment were it actually a danger. The fact that they haven't implemented those procedures means the airlines don't ACTUALLY consider it a threat. At the same time, they're training the flight attendants as though the devices were a legitimate and serious threat. They, not being actually educated on the subject, can only react with fear. Fear leads to hate, hate leads to the Dark Side.
Believe it or not, it's pretty well analogous. The people actually in the trenches are trusting this image that X is a monster. If that were actually true, they would have known long, long ago. They have encountered X without knowing it for ages. Literally, they have been in situations that are portrayed as worst-case, but they just treated them like normal situations, and it worked out. If there were noticeable differences when passenger electronics were on, it would have been EXCEPTIONALLY clear; similarly, if everyone on the other side of a national border (religious doctrine, etc) were hedonistic monsters, it would be so absolutely crystal clear that nobody in their right mind would say any different. These aren't the sort of questions you have to fudge the answers to.
Did you miss the part where a Boeing engineer who co-chaired a federal panel investigating personal devices on aircraft "took ABC News inside Boeing's electronic test chamber in Seattle, where engineers demonstrated the hidden signals from several electronic devices that were well over what Boeing considers the acceptable limit for aircraft equipment"?
1) If you know anything about aircraft engineering, or really any of the higher kinds of engineering, they set the acceptable limit well below the position where things can go wrong. There are many, many reasons for that.
2) I don't think you understand what I'm saying. There are runways out in the middle of the desert that you can make practice landings and takeoffs at all day, every day, for months. You can have a full complement of mock passengers in the back with phones on, off, or indifferent. You can even make a plane to fly by actual, non-computer hydraulics in case of emergencies. If you did that, there would be absolutely zero of this "demonstrated signals over the acceptable limit" bullshit. They would fly a demonstration and say, "Here's the point at which the controls stop working and the plane starts to crash," or "Here's the point at which the ILS goes wonky, which means that in inclement weather, there's a 100% chance of death." And then they'd actually land the plane anyway, because they're not relying on those systems to fly--they're the engineers that built the damn thing, not helpless children.
3) No, I didn't RTFA. So sue me, this is slashdot.
There is a growing body of anecdotal evidence
Need I say more?
Actually, yes. How about something regarding consequences?
There are times in history, up to and including the present day, when appeal to consequences was used to justify aggressive war, invasion, and violence up to and including genocide, all because of anecdotal evidence that people of X nationality (or religion, etc) were monsters. In other words, a small number of criminals murdered, raped, or otherwise did what criminals of every nationality do, including their own, and yes, including yours and mine, which along with a suitable leap of logic ("Those X are all murderers and rapists") was used to justify killing people that looked vaguely similar or lived within a given territorial boundary.
The argument I just made is, of course, not strict logic, but the fact that the airline industry are of the same mindset is offensive. In both circumstances, you can find out the truth very, very easily, and yet they do not, and you are suggesting that they need not. Frankly, I think you should be ashamed, but then, that's just me.
When you trust a group of people to pick and choose your good and bad guys for you, and that group has no accountability...
The problem is, history has shown that given enough time, people will stop being held accountable even if their position is supposed to be. Presidents, congress, military, press, police, various kinds of management, etc. Unless an outside force or event (including a halfway decent person getting elected to the position and starting a legacy, though that doesn't necessarily stick) forces a new spate of being held accountable, it can go seriously downhill from there.
It is to be feared that otherwise decent nations, states, etc may be on this path.
That's what it was. I immediately thought seismology was a harebrained cult, but I couldn't remember what I was confusing it with.
The biggest thing I'd want feedback for is knowing where to put my finger, and that doesn't get helped at all with this, because it happens when the finger's already touching it, and in fact only when it's moving. Aside from that, help moving a text carat would be great, I suppose, but I don't see most of the rest being useful.
Now, what are the readers supposed to do? Just read?
A lot of people do anyway. And if a comment says it all or corrects a common misconception, maybe a lot less unintentional cruft will be produced. Not that there won't be trolls and spam and dumb comments, but some amount of it could be fixed with a little relevant information that's already been provided.