More specifically, Orwell was a Socialist who hated Fascism, but saw that unless people were very careful, Socialism could lead to a totalitarianism indistinguishable from the totalitarianism of Fascism. He was warning in both 1984 and Animal Farm: be careful lest what I advocate (Socialism) become what I hate (Fascism).
Precisely. Having seen first-hand the infighting and internecine propaganda between socialist groups in the Spanish Civil War (Socialists, Marxists, Communists, Trotskyites, Anarcho-Syndicalists and so on) and the degeneration of Socialism in the Soviet Union, particularly post-war, he knew that Socialism could begin with the best intentions and end up - to mangle a phrase of the day - objectively Fascist.
And, as history has shown us, that is indeed what tends to happen.
1984 was written in 1947-48, when the Soviet Union was busily suppressing any kind of freedom in Eastern Europe. Orwell wasn't prescient, merely observant.
And I'd tell you what SCORPION STARE is a cover for, but then I'd have to kill you. And myself. In triplicate, with the blue copy to HR and the pink copy to accounting and...
If you systematically screw your employees, the good ones go elsewhere. Your competitors will cheerfully hire them, leaving you with the ones who don't have the skills or initiative to find a better job. Then your company stagnates, and eventually collapses. This doesn't serve the employees, the company, the customers, the CEO, or the shareholders.
That doesn't mean that this doesn't happen, of course. What it means is that a bad employer is necessarily a bad CEO.
Yeah, where are people like Satyendra Nath Bose (as in "Bose-Einstein condensate", Sin-Itiro Tomonaga (shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Richard Feynmann for QED), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (as in the Chandrasekhar limit) or Chen Ning Yang (Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on parity non-conservation)?
We run dozens of Intel E-series and M-series SSDs in production, as well as a few ioDrives. We have had E-series drives simply drop dead with no warning. None of the M-series have died so far, but then we only use them for sequential-write/random-read applications, so the stress is much lower.
Of course, Jones neatly answers his own question there - that's the very best reason to make your data available. Is he so incurious that he doesn't even want to know if he's made a mistake?
You can be sure I will. Unfortunately there are other issues at stake that trump internet access.
Issues on which Labor has a sound position? Name one.
I doubt that the Liberals would be significantly better; however, I doubt that they'd be significantly worse. And they won't be Labor, which is a big plus.
That's a big part of it. Twitter is based on large numbers of very low value transactions. People often point to telco billing and airline reservation systems, but they simply aren't comparable. The first difference is in value, just as you say - a telco or an airline can afford mainframes or clusters of high-end servers; Twitter can't.
I do not think that anyone has ever said that you can not scale a SQL server to handle a Twitter like load.
The second difference, however, is the scaling issues inherent in the social networking model, where every user has a different view of the data based on their relationships with other users, and they expect that view to be updated every few seconds. There's nothing remotely similar in billing or booking systems. The transaction rate may be similar, but the number and cost of the queries of those systems is trivial compared to social networking.
I've built telco billing systems. I've built social networking systems. There are no special scaling issues in billing systems, just lots of data. Social networking, however, carries with it some seriously intractable scaling problems, and Twitter's model is probably the worst of all.
You can't fix this with RDBMSes. Been there. Migrated off that as fast as possible.
Sorry, no, loads like Twitter's are absolute poison to RDBMSes. It doesn't matter how much money you pour down that rathole, it's not going to deliver. You can sustain the write load, that's not so much of an issue - less than 100 million records a day at the moment - but the read load is completely impossible.
The solution is left as an exercise for the reader.
If they're over 40 and good at what they do, senior technical people are a huge asset. They can spot the disaster before it happens, or cut through the complex requirements and identify what it is the customer really needs before you waste six months of development time. Because they've seen it before.
They also tend to be tired and kind of grumpy, because they've seen it before, but a savvy manager will cling to these folk for dear life.
I bought an HP Color LaserJet 1600 a couple of years ago. It's built like a tank, works flawlessly, has yet to exhaust its initial toner cartridges, and cost me $133. They still make good stuff, if you buy the right model.
1. No. I object to any government filtering the Internet in any way. I also object to the lie that the proposed filter only blocks illegal material.
2. Yes, the blacklist is almost certain to be leaked. No, this is not any kind of excuse for infringing upon the human rights of all Australians.
3. If the rule of law is ineffective, if everyone breaks the law, then everyone is a criminal, and everyone is under threat of random prosecution - or persecution - making the people the enemy of the state. The way you reach that kind of dystopia is through passing bad laws. This is a bad law. It's a very bad law.
It's when people start objecting to it on a moralistic, human-rights basis that my brain starts turning to porridge.
I think you have cause and effect reversed there.
You object to the filter blocking information on euthanasia. You should object to it on that basis, because the government has no right to criminalise such discussions. The thing is, the government has no right to criminalise any discussion, only actions.
Freedom of speech is the guarantor of all other freedoms, and that's why it must always be defended against petty tyrants like Kevin Rudd and Stephen Conroy.
Slashdot Mirror
Says we should skip atoms and go directly to cospatial nudged quanta.
Precisely. Having seen first-hand the infighting and internecine propaganda between socialist groups in the Spanish Civil War (Socialists, Marxists, Communists, Trotskyites, Anarcho-Syndicalists and so on) and the degeneration of Socialism in the Soviet Union, particularly post-war, he knew that Socialism could begin with the best intentions and end up - to mangle a phrase of the day - objectively Fascist.
And, as history has shown us, that is indeed what tends to happen.
1984 was written in 1947-48, when the Soviet Union was busily suppressing any kind of freedom in Eastern Europe. Orwell wasn't prescient, merely observant.
When cats are outlawed, only outlaws will have cats. Also, internet access.
And I'd tell you what SCORPION STARE is a cover for, but then I'd have to kill you. And myself. In triplicate, with the blue copy to HR and the pink copy to accounting and...
They took a document programming language and stripped out all the programming features to make a document description format.
And then they added a programming language.
No. That's stupid.
If you systematically screw your employees, the good ones go elsewhere. Your competitors will cheerfully hire them, leaving you with the ones who don't have the skills or initiative to find a better job. Then your company stagnates, and eventually collapses. This doesn't serve the employees, the company, the customers, the CEO, or the shareholders.
That doesn't mean that this doesn't happen, of course. What it means is that a bad employer is necessarily a bad CEO.
Doesn't have to be photo id; if you pay for it by credit card that's good enough.
But I agree that the law is oppressive and needs to be repealed.
Yeah, where are people like Satyendra Nath Bose (as in "Bose-Einstein condensate", Sin-Itiro Tomonaga (shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Richard Feynmann for QED), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (as in the Chandrasekhar limit) or Chen Ning Yang (Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on parity non-conservation)?
Oh, wait...
AMD are selling six-core dual-socket CPUs for $200 now. They're not quite as fast as the Xeon 5500/5600, but the price/performance is awesome.
We run dozens of Intel E-series and M-series SSDs in production, as well as a few ioDrives. We have had E-series drives simply drop dead with no warning. None of the M-series have died so far, but then we only use them for sequential-write/random-read applications, so the stress is much lower.
On the other hand, this means that Facebook users have a life expectancy of over 300 years.
Learn Python. (Ruby is good too.)
If anyone suggests you learn PHP, punch them in the face.
Doesn't rhyme and the meter is all over the place. I give it a 4.
We know that. Scientists are people.
Of course, Jones neatly answers his own question there - that's the very best reason to make your data available. Is he so incurious that he doesn't even want to know if he's made a mistake?
Issues on which Labor has a sound position? Name one.
I doubt that the Liberals would be significantly better; however, I doubt that they'd be significantly worse. And they won't be Labor, which is a big plus.
Speaking as a secular centre-right capitalist, my hierachy is Food Poisoning > Liberals > Nationals > Malaria > Democrats > Polio > Greens > Anthrax Leprosy Pi > Labor > Ebola-AIDS-Justin-Bieber-Remix > Family First.
So we agree on one thing. On the other hand, I'd sooner eat salmonella-infested eggs raw than see any of the major parties win the next election.
That's a big part of it. Twitter is based on large numbers of very low value transactions. People often point to telco billing and airline reservation systems, but they simply aren't comparable. The first difference is in value, just as you say - a telco or an airline can afford mainframes or clusters of high-end servers; Twitter can't.
The second difference, however, is the scaling issues inherent in the social networking model, where every user has a different view of the data based on their relationships with other users, and they expect that view to be updated every few seconds. There's nothing remotely similar in billing or booking systems. The transaction rate may be similar, but the number and cost of the queries of those systems is trivial compared to social networking.
Sorry, no, you're just wrong.
I've built telco billing systems. I've built social networking systems. There are no special scaling issues in billing systems, just lots of data. Social networking, however, carries with it some seriously intractable scaling problems, and Twitter's model is probably the worst of all.
You can't fix this with RDBMSes. Been there. Migrated off that as fast as possible.
Ahahahahaha!! Nice one.
Wait, you were serious?
Sorry, no, loads like Twitter's are absolute poison to RDBMSes. It doesn't matter how much money you pour down that rathole, it's not going to deliver. You can sustain the write load, that's not so much of an issue - less than 100 million records a day at the moment - but the read load is completely impossible.
The solution is left as an exercise for the reader.
If they're over 40 and good at what they do, senior technical people are a huge asset. They can spot the disaster before it happens, or cut through the complex requirements and identify what it is the customer really needs before you waste six months of development time. Because they've seen it before.
They also tend to be tired and kind of grumpy, because they've seen it before, but a savvy manager will cling to these folk for dear life.
If you can express your opinion in 140 characters, it's almost certainly something I don't need to know, don't want to know, or already know.
Twitter and Facebook are self-reinforcing noise distribution networks.
I bought an HP Color LaserJet 1600 a couple of years ago. It's built like a tank, works flawlessly, has yet to exhaust its initial toner cartridges, and cost me $133. They still make good stuff, if you buy the right model.
This changes nothing. The numbers remain the same; the timescale for photosynthesis is not comparable to that for neural activity.
Hameroff/Penrose quantum consciousness remains impossible (as well as unscientific, unnecessary and useless).
1. No. I object to any government filtering the Internet in any way. I also object to the lie that the proposed filter only blocks illegal material.
2. Yes, the blacklist is almost certain to be leaked. No, this is not any kind of excuse for infringing upon the human rights of all Australians.
3. If the rule of law is ineffective, if everyone breaks the law, then everyone is a criminal, and everyone is under threat of random prosecution - or persecution - making the people the enemy of the state. The way you reach that kind of dystopia is through passing bad laws. This is a bad law. It's a very bad law.
I think you have cause and effect reversed there.
You object to the filter blocking information on euthanasia. You should object to it on that basis, because the government has no right to criminalise such discussions. The thing is, the government has no right to criminalise any discussion, only actions.
Freedom of speech is the guarantor of all other freedoms, and that's why it must always be defended against petty tyrants like Kevin Rudd and Stephen Conroy.