IIRC, the Mumbai bombings were executed by terrorist operatives who swam to shore from dinghies in scuba gear in order to enter the country illegally. But yes, it does just sound like an excuse for sharks with lasers.
A cartel is a formal (explicit) agreement among competing firms. It is a formal organization of producers that agree to coordinate prices, marketing, and production.[1] Cartels usually occur in an oligopolistic industry, where there is a small number of sellers and usually involve homogeneous products. Cartel members may agree on such matters as price fixing, total industry output, market shares, allocation of customers, allocation of territories, bid rigging, establishment of common sales agencies, and the division of profits or combination of these. The aim of such collusion (also called the cartel agreement) is to increase individual members' profits by reducing competition.
The DPL does not fit the generally accepted definition of a cartel because the companies involved are not doing so to reduce competition--they are in fact doing so to encourage competition by preventing the monopolization of ideas by a few patent holders.
In practice, it is quite literally a legal alliance in the same way NATO is a military alliance--if one member is sued, the other members counter-sue to deter the attacker. But all the actions taken are legal, with the intention of upholding the law and protecting the free market.
So I will grant you that, in this implementation, it does look a little like a cartel, but companies outside the group only get penalized when they try to engage in anti-competitive practices themselves (suing instead of licensing). The only other way to achieve the same effect would be to legislatively limit infringement damages to back-royalties, but this would be very difficult to achieve given patent troll lobbying efforts. The DPL seeks to achieve the same result without resorting to legislation.
The only thing it could possibly mean is a reserve of *coders* ready to jump at any problem or bug that arises. Oh wait, that's called the NSA. Just need to give them more resources and jurisdiction to fix any code anywhere in the government. That'd work great:
Setting: Nondescript cubicle farm full of people working an eating donuts.
Cubicle farm is suddenly stormed by a SWAT team with M16s and tablet PCs.
Team leader: "Everybody freeze! Hands off the keyboards! We've detected a buffer overrun condition! Move, move, move!"
Guys with tablets rush to the PCs and networking closet and start typing like mad. Soldiers round up all the people into the middle of the room.
A five-star general walks into the room.
General: "What's going on here?"
Team leader: "Sir! We're neutralizing a threat in the PR office happy-hour scheduling system. We should be finished soon."
General: "Good. I'll want a full report when this is over. We need to catch the idiot who's responsible for this."
A soldier escorts an intern with hands behind his head to the leader.
Soldier: "This guy did it. We found non-compliant source code on his machine."
Team leader: "Good work, sergeant. Hand him off to headquarters at 1300."
General: "Glad to see that was taken care of quickly."
Team leader: "All in a day's work, sir."
Even if we try not to let it show irl,/. is where we geniuses come to vent all our pent-up superiority complexes. Thus, to all the other superiority-complexed geniuses, we appear to be idiots. It's really pretty funny to watch in action, when you think about it like that. [goes back to laughing at all the idiots who think they're so smart.]
If the universe is expanding, but energy is conserved, then the energy density of the universe is approaching zero and there will be no perceivable energy! But that theory is as full of holes as yours is.
Definitely more efficient than, say, an aluminum foundry that uses as much electricity as a small town but only produces as much spam as the boss's botnet-drone laptop can manage.
For that matter, they could start betting on where the next government scandal is going to come from based on work-time searches for pr0n. There are so many possibilities when you start abusing your customer privacy agreements!
If you're a physicist using MATLAB, then you are (a) using floating point arithmetic, not huge integers and (b) more likely to be using Mathematica than MATLAB in the first place. Huge integers are more useful in computer science, doing encryption and data processing and such, than in physical simulations. Says the EE/Physics guy with no background in CS.
Sure, you could have it show "right turn" and "left turn" arrows and distance remaining in a heads-up display, but augmented-reality overlays are way too dangerous with today's inaccurate map and position data--what if your "yellow brick road" goes through a ditch or a stopped truck?
In fact, it could be deduced from your post that fusion is *simply* xx dollars away at any given time. Few things cannot be sped up with more money, but everything can be slowed down with less money, so money really is the most important part of the equation.
More important, of course, but less dramatic and less likely to get any funding at all. When was the last time you got the green light on a project you told your boss would take $10 billion, period, or it won't work at all?
Sorry, GP was right, he specified $ per month and you calculated $ per year. But whatever. You are right, nobody really knows who's paying for what because nobody is paying for half of it anyways.
What you really want to be talking about is a different Windows 7 feature called ReadyDrive, which actually does what the author is talking about. Basically, the system heuristically determines what files are used most often/during boot and the BIOS read- and write-caches them to the flash in the ReadyDrive. I bought a Thinkpad with a "4GB Intel TurboBoost Memory" chip and it made a noticeable difference in boot time when I enabled it as a ReadyDrive.
I also found that when Windows (rarely) crashed, it would take a lot longer to start up, possibly because it had to rebuild the flash cache.
I have since disabled the turbo memory after getting a real SSD--and still faster boot times. A 60GB drive holds Win7, programs and critical data, and I swapped out the optical drive for the old mechanical disk, where it stays 90% of the time and holds my video and crap, reducing write cycles on the SSD. Sometimes I transfer videos to the SSD when I'm watching them in the car so the motion doesn't interfere with playback--it's a very convenient combination.
Problem is there aren't any parking orbits within range of the spacecraft. Those darn moons keep dragging you out of them. That's why they spent two years figuring out how to stay in orbit after as many "drags" as possible--and use them to our advantage. But you still can't stay in orbit indefinitely without any fuel, not at the low altitude Cassini is at now.
I agree that there could be just as many bugs in algorithmic laws as there are in legalese-written laws--but the hope is that less obfuscation would make them more obvious. Point taken on the comments, though. The lawyers will always find something a way to ruin it for us. [/obligatory lawyer bashing]
So? With "perfect markets" we would be able to reward the innovators instead of the sheisters, avoid meglomaniac corporations and generally know what the hell was going on. If we spent less time making money off people's misunderstandings and more time actually creating value, maybe we as a society wouldn't be running ourselves into such a huge financial, cultural, intellectual, and political hole in the ground.
I hope that wasn't a sarcasm parade I just rained on, but figured I'd bite anyways.
Yes! Wouldn't be great if understanding *every* law was as simple as downloading a program from congress.gov? Or better yet, if Congress passed a law containing python code and the lawyers translated it into English just to confuse each other with.
Couldn't they just add a customs fee per item, based on the type of media? Then they would make it really expensive to transport obsolete media like that--or even ban it outright.
I agree with your post. I did not mean to imply such a blanket statement, merely to qualify the GP's statement. I agree that many situations require unspoken context to avoid misunderstandings, but I also believe that in technical fields, at least, misunderstandings can just as easily arise from unspoken communication (especially when dealing with less-than-socially-adept geeks like myself, excuse the stereotype).
However, there are other reasons IM is useful in certain fields, like I tried to point out. Some problems are suited to being solved in a meeting, but others are not, and IM conversations can solve some of those problems much quicker and easier than a meeting. Like you said, it's all about making the meetings appropriate and effective.
I don't know about you, but I often do edit my IMs before I send them, especially when they are technical or possibly confusing. That's why I like IMs--I am a natural writer and frequently find it easier to organize my thoughts in writing than speaking. But again, this is not true for everyone, so I still have to go to meetings to explain myself.
However, the GP is right, if you can't communicate well, it doesn't matter what medium you're using--it's not going to be pretty.
Bottom line is some meetings are absolutely necessary, but IM and email, when used effectively, can increase efficiency and should not be ruled out. And under all of this lies the fact that there is no cure, technological or otherwise, for bad managers and bad communication skills.
P.S. I long ago learned to well-edit my/. posts or face grammar- and fact-checking ridicule. For example, I spent about 10 minutes writing and editing this post. Slashdot has helped me hone my sound-byte writing skills enough that I recently got a letter published in a major newspaper that read very much like one of my slashdot posts.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, the Mumbai bombings were executed by terrorist operatives who swam to shore from dinghies in scuba gear in order to enter the country illegally. But yes, it does just sound like an excuse for sharks with lasers.
From Wikipedia:
A cartel is a formal (explicit) agreement among competing firms. It is a formal organization of producers that agree to coordinate prices, marketing, and production.[1] Cartels usually occur in an oligopolistic industry, where there is a small number of sellers and usually involve homogeneous products. Cartel members may agree on such matters as price fixing, total industry output, market shares, allocation of customers, allocation of territories, bid rigging, establishment of common sales agencies, and the division of profits or combination of these. The aim of such collusion (also called the cartel agreement) is to increase individual members' profits by reducing competition.
The DPL does not fit the generally accepted definition of a cartel because the companies involved are not doing so to reduce competition--they are in fact doing so to encourage competition by preventing the monopolization of ideas by a few patent holders.
In practice, it is quite literally a legal alliance in the same way NATO is a military alliance--if one member is sued, the other members counter-sue to deter the attacker. But all the actions taken are legal, with the intention of upholding the law and protecting the free market.
So I will grant you that, in this implementation, it does look a little like a cartel, but companies outside the group only get penalized when they try to engage in anti-competitive practices themselves (suing instead of licensing). The only other way to achieve the same effect would be to legislatively limit infringement damages to back-royalties, but this would be very difficult to achieve given patent troll lobbying efforts. The DPL seeks to achieve the same result without resorting to legislation.
Yeah...except it hasn't actually ended yet. Will Obama veto a budget with irrationally-mandated Constellation spending? Only time will tell.
The only thing it could possibly mean is a reserve of *coders* ready to jump at any problem or bug that arises. Oh wait, that's called the NSA. Just need to give them more resources and jurisdiction to fix any code anywhere in the government. That'd work great:
Setting: Nondescript cubicle farm full of people working an eating donuts.
Cubicle farm is suddenly stormed by a SWAT team with M16s and tablet PCs.
Team leader: "Everybody freeze! Hands off the keyboards! We've detected a buffer overrun condition! Move, move, move!"
Guys with tablets rush to the PCs and networking closet and start typing like mad. Soldiers round up all the people into the middle of the room.
A five-star general walks into the room.
General: "What's going on here?"
Team leader: "Sir! We're neutralizing a threat in the PR office happy-hour scheduling system. We should be finished soon."
General: "Good. I'll want a full report when this is over. We need to catch the idiot who's responsible for this."
A soldier escorts an intern with hands behind his head to the leader.
Soldier: "This guy did it. We found non-compliant source code on his machine."
Team leader: "Good work, sergeant. Hand him off to headquarters at 1300."
General: "Glad to see that was taken care of quickly."
Team leader: "All in a day's work, sir."
You don't put the nuke *in the hole*, you put it in a strategic place to cause an earthquake to close the hole. It is a "surgical strike" after all.
And in such a fight, who do we cheer for?
The one who realizes that they shouldn't be fighting.
Even if we try not to let it show irl, /. is where we geniuses come to vent all our pent-up superiority complexes. Thus, to all the other superiority-complexed geniuses, we appear to be idiots. It's really pretty funny to watch in action, when you think about it like that. [goes back to laughing at all the idiots who think they're so smart.]
If the universe is expanding, but energy is conserved, then the energy density of the universe is approaching zero and there will be no perceivable energy! But that theory is as full of holes as yours is.
Definitely more efficient than, say, an aluminum foundry that uses as much electricity as a small town but only produces as much spam as the boss's botnet-drone laptop can manage.
For that matter, they could start betting on where the next government scandal is going to come from based on work-time searches for pr0n. There are so many possibilities when you start abusing your customer privacy agreements!
If you're a physicist using MATLAB, then you are (a) using floating point arithmetic, not huge integers and (b) more likely to be using Mathematica than MATLAB in the first place. Huge integers are more useful in computer science, doing encryption and data processing and such, than in physical simulations. Says the EE/Physics guy with no background in CS.
One of many sources: http://www.homesteadingtoday.com/archive/index.php/t-215823.html
If this were twitter you could have just linked it. :P
Sure, you could have it show "right turn" and "left turn" arrows and distance remaining in a heads-up display, but augmented-reality overlays are way too dangerous with today's inaccurate map and position data--what if your "yellow brick road" goes through a ditch or a stopped truck?
Those scientists are such cheap bastards! Let's see them try that on an infrared photon in a FAIR fight!
In fact, it could be deduced from your post that fusion is *simply* xx dollars away at any given time. Few things cannot be sped up with more money, but everything can be slowed down with less money, so money really is the most important part of the equation.
More important, of course, but less dramatic and less likely to get any funding at all. When was the last time you got the green light on a project you told your boss would take $10 billion, period, or it won't work at all?
Sorry, GP was right, he specified $ per month and you calculated $ per year. But whatever. You are right, nobody really knows who's paying for what because nobody is paying for half of it anyways.
What you really want to be talking about is a different Windows 7 feature called ReadyDrive, which actually does what the author is talking about. Basically, the system heuristically determines what files are used most often/during boot and the BIOS read- and write-caches them to the flash in the ReadyDrive. I bought a Thinkpad with a "4GB Intel TurboBoost Memory" chip and it made a noticeable difference in boot time when I enabled it as a ReadyDrive.
I also found that when Windows (rarely) crashed, it would take a lot longer to start up, possibly because it had to rebuild the flash cache.
I have since disabled the turbo memory after getting a real SSD--and still faster boot times. A 60GB drive holds Win7, programs and critical data, and I swapped out the optical drive for the old mechanical disk, where it stays 90% of the time and holds my video and crap, reducing write cycles on the SSD. Sometimes I transfer videos to the SSD when I'm watching them in the car so the motion doesn't interfere with playback--it's a very convenient combination.
Problem is there aren't any parking orbits within range of the spacecraft. Those darn moons keep dragging you out of them. That's why they spent two years figuring out how to stay in orbit after as many "drags" as possible--and use them to our advantage. But you still can't stay in orbit indefinitely without any fuel, not at the low altitude Cassini is at now.
No self-respecting Apple would be caught with a Leek in broad daylight.
I agree that there could be just as many bugs in algorithmic laws as there are in legalese-written laws--but the hope is that less obfuscation would make them more obvious. Point taken on the comments, though. The lawyers will always find something a way to ruin it for us. [/obligatory lawyer bashing]
So? With "perfect markets" we would be able to reward the innovators instead of the sheisters, avoid meglomaniac corporations and generally know what the hell was going on. If we spent less time making money off people's misunderstandings and more time actually creating value, maybe we as a society wouldn't be running ourselves into such a huge financial, cultural, intellectual, and political hole in the ground.
I hope that wasn't a sarcasm parade I just rained on, but figured I'd bite anyways.
Yes! Wouldn't be great if understanding *every* law was as simple as downloading a program from congress.gov? Or better yet, if Congress passed a law containing python code and the lawyers translated it into English just to confuse each other with.
no, but i did after reading your post. and it made sense, too.
Couldn't they just add a customs fee per item, based on the type of media? Then they would make it really expensive to transport obsolete media like that--or even ban it outright.
I agree with your post. I did not mean to imply such a blanket statement, merely to qualify the GP's statement. I agree that many situations require unspoken context to avoid misunderstandings, but I also believe that in technical fields, at least, misunderstandings can just as easily arise from unspoken communication (especially when dealing with less-than-socially-adept geeks like myself, excuse the stereotype).
However, there are other reasons IM is useful in certain fields, like I tried to point out. Some problems are suited to being solved in a meeting, but others are not, and IM conversations can solve some of those problems much quicker and easier than a meeting. Like you said, it's all about making the meetings appropriate and effective.
I don't know about you, but I often do edit my IMs before I send them, especially when they are technical or possibly confusing. That's why I like IMs--I am a natural writer and frequently find it easier to organize my thoughts in writing than speaking. But again, this is not true for everyone, so I still have to go to meetings to explain myself.
However, the GP is right, if you can't communicate well, it doesn't matter what medium you're using--it's not going to be pretty.
Bottom line is some meetings are absolutely necessary, but IM and email, when used effectively, can increase efficiency and should not be ruled out. And under all of this lies the fact that there is no cure, technological or otherwise, for bad managers and bad communication skills.
P.S. I long ago learned to well-edit my /. posts or face grammar- and fact-checking ridicule. For example, I spent about 10 minutes writing and editing this post. Slashdot has helped me hone my sound-byte writing skills enough that I recently got a letter published in a major newspaper that read very much like one of my slashdot posts.