Some managers prefer to rule by fear. Unrealistic schedules allow them to arbitrarily assign blame; because everyone is behind schedule on paper, no one can effectively defend themselves to charges of slacking.
I think everyone is missing the obvious: the mirror tactic might conceivably have some value, even if it is useless as a "heat ray".
Fire and ships and war were not new. The Greeks knew plenty about how deadly burning mixtures of liquids could be against a ship, and how to effectively employ such weapons against a ship one or two hundred feet away is really no mystery.
If the story has any truth to it, the real advantage would be to harass the eyes of the archers on the ship, thereby allowing the archers of Syracuse to calmly and accurately rain death upon the nearest ships. What that would really boil down to is that the Roman soldiers would have a hell of a time fighting the fires, while crawling on their bellies ducking arrows, their own archers already all dead.
A minor heat ray effect might plausibly help stoke the otherwise existing fires on board, even if insufficient to cause spontaneous ignition. Black sails would be a plus here.
Unless you have true secondary systems on hand, you must know that you can actually restore your data all back into your key systems, in some reasonable time frame.
How many weeks can your business actually survive while holding its breath?
That's the bizarre thing - why did it take 36 hours to get an answer and why didn't the definitive answer come from a definitive source?
It is not bizarre at all. Quite the opposite.
When asked if it was a missile or military test, the navy & air force were able to reply immediately and accurately "no". And they were also able to state immediately and accurately that there was nothing unusual at that time, which translates into "nothing but the normal commercial and military flights".
But they do not have any experts twiddling their thumbs, waiting for the "it really really looked like a missile, kinda" phone call, to pore through the flight logs and extrapolate based on the misinterpretations inherent to the original query.
If someone had asked for all records on candidate flying aircraft in that optical direction in the first place, and then done actual thinking, the matter could have trivially been resolved in mere hours. But the news fold and (most) of the blogosphere obsessed over missiles, rather than investigate and eliminate all plausible mundane phenomena.
I would note that yesterday afternoon a poster here on/. mentioned that misinterpreted high altitude contrails are regularly perceived as missile trails. It is not because anyone is stupid here, they certainly do look "like" a missile trails, to my eye as well. Those comments did not rise above excited voices singing other theories, here or elsewhere on the internet.
Forget both lines. How about: "Let's stop throwing money away."
We are already paying into a giant money sink. Most European nations offer very comparable quality health care to all their citizens (and even all non-citizens in some cases) for roughly *half* what we are collectively paying in the USA.
If we could some how emulate their successes, we would save 5% or 6% or 7% of our GNP. No, I am not kidding.
*You* are showing a lot of faith that what we have right now is surely cheaper than reasonable "socialized" alternatives, in spite of extremely strong circumstantial evidence to the contrary. Is the status quo such an amazing success that we really need to keep our eyes closed?
That would be the ideal approach, yes. I would speculate a motion to dismiss has already been filed and it is somewhere deep within the judge's in-box, to be considered later. In the mean time, the subpoena has been granted, as such things usually are.
As HP has conceded that is the subsidiary committed theft, what is left is to ascertain economic damages. So what exactly is Apotheker going to testify about circa 2011 that it was not obvious that he should divulge back in 2008 or 2009 or early 2010? Nothing. At this point, the opinion of the CEO at the time means nothing when stacked up next to the business guesstimates of the dueling bean counters.
While HP's conduct may not be the most admirable, I basically agree with their stance -- allowing Apotheker to duck the subpoena may seem distastefully passive-aggressive, but the CEO has a fiduciary duty to the stock holders of a large multinational.
My personal opinion is that the judicial system has been taken over by lawyers and is run for the benefit of lawyers. IMHO the judge probably granted a silly subpoena because judges are in the habit of giving lawyers whatever they want in terms of more testimony, more paperwork, more vaguely related evidence, and more billable hours, regardless of what common sense would suggest.
This is just a gambit on Oracle's part to drag Apotheker's name through the mud. Maybe the man deserves this. Maybe he doesn't. I do not see why I should care.
"Oracle had ample opportunity to question Leo during his sworn deposition in October 2008 and chose not to include him as a live trial witness until he was named CEO of HP," an HP spokesperson said in a statement. "Given Leo's limited knowledge of and role in the matter, Oracle's last-minute effort to require him to appear live at trial is no more than an effort to harass him and interfere with his duties and responsibilities as HP's CEO."
Of course, HP may be pulling the wool over our eyes. But if it was not obvious in 2008 and 2009 that live testimony would be likely necessary, then it is difficult to believe that he is so important to the suit here in late 2010.
Nonsense politics these days are not all that different from politics in the Good Old Days (or the Bad Old Days).
The underlying problem you are complaining about is created by the voters themselves. The voters very consistently reward politicians who offer easy answers over tough choices, and then throw tantrums when the politicians mysteriously fail to deliver.
Yours is but another variant of tantrum; wrapping it an assertion of high standards does not change this underlying truth.
This is hardly a new phenomenon. Although perhaps modern media helps accentuate to some degree.
The world just doesn't work like that, Hydrocarbons won't vanish overnight. They just get more and more expensive, and as the expense climbs, people come up with solutions.
The English burned up all their wood, then found coal, then found oil, and that is how things work.
On one hand, yes, genuine catastrophes are rare. And I happen to be in the camp that hydrocarbons are not rare, they are just getting more and more expensive, in both direct extraction costs and environmental costs
On the other hand, your real life example sucks. The Brits burn up wood, found coal, and then discovered that oil was plentiful if they kept the Persians under their thumb AND made a deal with Sauds who are tied directly to Islamists who want to turn the clock back one thousand years.
Gee, what could possibly go wrong with a game plan like that?
Our present oil economies are indirectly subsidized by seven hundred billion dollars of US defense spending every year. That is not sustainable model. And the coming multi-polar world will make it less sustainable still.
And finally, I would note that the Anasazi and Rapa Nui were blossoming cultures right until wandered over the cliff. Present prosperity does not necessarily indicate resilience when the world changes.
Please mod clarkn0va's comment up. The real irony is that EEE has proven a barrier to modernization of technology "including those put forward by Microsoft itself". Building an idiosyncratic product on purpose is a gamble with many potential future downsides.
Won't happen. While better computers help to some degree and building better models helps even more, weather is fundamentally a chaotic system. There is a hard upper limit based on the quantity and accuracy of the data. An exponential increase in overall quality of data yields a linear increase in the quality of the prediction.
To make up some numbers to illustrate the point...So if we have 10^4 weather stations to have 48 hours of good accuracy, it might take 10^5 weather stations to achieve 60 hours of good accuracy, assuming that you have all the computing power you could possible want in the first place.
As someone with a couple physics degree, I find this stuff both exciting and confusing. Exciting because delving into such fundamental physics is creating some beautiful results. Confused because either something is wrong with my understanding of quantum mechanics (unlikely), or we are being snowed with pie-in-the-sky promises, in order to secure funding.
Entanglement for secure channels of communication I believe. Quantum "computing" in the sense we usually think of computing looks phony.
Sure, such a quantum computer, if built, could process, say, 10^50 quantum inputs simultaneously. But where does one get the 10^50 inputs? Each input is a delicate quantum-entangled state. Do I pull my 10^50 helium-cooled quantum state composition machines out of my closet? It is a promise which is can only be employed by leprechauns and unicorns.
The bottom line is, as stated by the article, quantum computers would useless for most everyday computations. Which things a quantum computer could actually be used for is clear as mud.
I would welcome a link to a technical article that is grounded in reality, proving me wrong.
The details matter, like whether it is embedded within glass, frex.
By your definition, a pacemaker contains even more material that is too dangerous to be put within a human body.
Sodium and chlorine are both viciously corrosive to organic material in quantity when applied in pure form. Yet you cannot live without them.
The other factor often carefully "forgotten" is that the poorer pay significant taxes other than federal income tax. In fact, these other taxes are often regressive. If one considers SSI a tax, then the skew is even more in favor of the wealthy.
When all taxes are factored in (fed income, state income, SSI, real estate, sales tax, vehicle registration) I am paying ~30% of my income to the government through various avenues. I am not complaining about that. But I cannot help but notice that the people complaining the loudest about taxes are usually paying at a significantly lower rate than I am.
Re:Israel is an interesting exercise in Game Theor
on
Gambling On Bacteria
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· Score: 1
DeadCatX2's assessment of Likud may be a misleading assessment, but it is not misleading because of any of the reasons you put forth. Some members of the Likud Party may well benefit from greater conflict without necessarily being part of some nefarious plot against Palestinian rights in general. Maybe they are. Maybe they are not.
But wandering off into allusions about how certain Palestinian groups happen to be worse does not logically argue against the truth of the charge against Likud. In fact, it could reasonably be interpreted as an endorsement of the claim Likud is guilty as charged (but guilt you think is fair to simply ignore for other reasons).
It has been downhill since the printing press and those vulgar non-clergy dared attempt to understand the Bible without the proper oversight of the Church.
Yes, a grand bluff on the scale of Calais in WWII will always be difficult to pull off. But this stuff is extremely valuable and effective as simple decoys to make effective targeting more difficult.
Even if you fail to fool the enemy about the disposition of your armored vehicles, you can vastly improve the survivability of your expensive hardware against smart weapons.
Consider the Gulf I and Gulf II wars. How well would have the USAF's tank hunting worked out if every Iraqi tank had three decoys parked nearby? Consider Hezbollah missile launchers, Syrian tanks, Iranian radar stations and missile launchers, etc. All mobile systems become 3X or 4X or 5X as hard to kill for pocket change.
Speaking of deluded, what exactly does any of your assertions have to do with hiring?
A growing, profitable business should not care about modest changes to tax rates or gov't debt, as long as inflation and interest rates are reasonable. This is a great time to poach talent from the competition.
However, owners cash cows with no prospects of growth and no interest in hiring new workers care a lot about tax rates.
The very people with the most incentive to care about tax rates are the least likely to hire. And the ones in a position to hire care little about taxes.
These ARE the same people that have made no bones about wanting to commit genocide against all Jews
We have strong circumstantial evidence that your characterization is incorrect.
Iran still includes a modest populace of Jews, even if most have left since 1979. But if they really wanted to make "no bones" about their intentions, we would expect the Jewish population in Iran today to be approximately zero.
My understanding is that Catholicism is actually agnostic on the question of whether an early term fetuses possess souls. Their position is that such are a form of life that should be honored and cherished, as per the will of God.
Back in the days where California ranked top 5 in expenditures per student, the school systems were generally considered to be bested only by NYC. Now that the Golden State spends bottom 5 per student (in a state where cost of living can be very high), we get bottom 5 results.
Now there are constant calls that teachers need to be held accountable.
I am far from a fan of the teachers unions; in cases, they do contribute to some of the problems. However what data we have on non-union school districts is that they get worse results on average than unionized districts. Also there is no evidence that private schools accomplish more for the buck than public schools.
I personally know about half a dozen people who once taught in public schools, including my wife, who have left due to poor pay combined with poor working conditions. I can say that while my wife despised the particular teacher union, top of her list would be to hold *parents* and *students* to a high standard of conduct.
It will always be easier to blame teachers and teachers' unions for the problems then fix anything. But until there is a commitment to improve working conditions, of which pay is merely one important element, it can be guaranteed that the unions will have a stranglehold on the supply of teachers. And even if a pitched battle were won against these unions, it would not change anything -- the best teaching talent will see the writing on the wall and leave.
What does it say about our society if a group we need to integrate is so isolated it's developing an incompatible dialect?
I get your drift, but by putting this this way, you are making it sound worse than it is. This is not a new development but simply a practical step in coping with the world as it actually exists (and has for some time).
Law enforcement having a few experts on hand to check that a transcription is actually accurate is a very good thing.
To answer that ambiguity, Christians worked very hard to build up the sin of "Onanism" in ways that are only tenuously related to the events described in the Old Testament.
IME, most "director's cuts" or "special editions" are significantly inferior to the original theater release. A good movie is not just a bunch of "cool stuff" strung together.
In this case...by NOT showing a lightsaber being built, the audience is left wondering whether Luke actually has the mojo to pull off his rather mysterious and audacious rescue. Showing the lightsaber would tip off the audience, while also slowing down the movie.
Slashdot Mirror
Some managers prefer to rule by fear. Unrealistic schedules allow them to arbitrarily assign blame; because everyone is behind schedule on paper, no one can effectively defend themselves to charges of slacking.
I think everyone is missing the obvious: the mirror tactic might conceivably have some value, even if it is useless as a "heat ray".
Fire and ships and war were not new. The Greeks knew plenty about how deadly burning mixtures of liquids could be against a ship, and how to effectively employ such weapons against a ship one or two hundred feet away is really no mystery.
If the story has any truth to it, the real advantage would be to harass the eyes of the archers on the ship, thereby allowing the archers of Syracuse to calmly and accurately rain death upon the nearest ships. What that would really boil down to is that the Roman soldiers would have a hell of a time fighting the fires, while crawling on their bellies ducking arrows, their own archers already all dead.
A minor heat ray effect might plausibly help stoke the otherwise existing fires on board, even if insufficient to cause spontaneous ignition. Black sails would be a plus here.
Please mod parent up.
Unless you have true secondary systems on hand, you must know that you can actually restore your data all back into your key systems, in some reasonable time frame.
How many weeks can your business actually survive while holding its breath?
That's the bizarre thing - why did it take 36 hours to get an answer and why didn't the definitive answer come from a definitive source?
It is not bizarre at all. Quite the opposite.
When asked if it was a missile or military test, the navy & air force were able to reply immediately and accurately "no". And they were also able to state immediately and accurately that there was nothing unusual at that time, which translates into "nothing but the normal commercial and military flights".
But they do not have any experts twiddling their thumbs, waiting for the "it really really looked like a missile, kinda" phone call, to pore through the flight logs and extrapolate based on the misinterpretations inherent to the original query.
If someone had asked for all records on candidate flying aircraft in that optical direction in the first place, and then done actual thinking, the matter could have trivially been resolved in mere hours. But the news fold and (most) of the blogosphere obsessed over missiles, rather than investigate and eliminate all plausible mundane phenomena.
I would note that yesterday afternoon a poster here on /. mentioned that misinterpreted high altitude contrails are regularly perceived as missile trails. It is not because anyone is stupid here, they certainly do look "like" a missile trails, to my eye as well. Those comments did not rise above excited voices singing other theories, here or elsewhere on the internet.
Forget both lines. How about: "Let's stop throwing money away."
We are already paying into a giant money sink. Most European nations offer very comparable quality health care to all their citizens (and even all non-citizens in some cases) for roughly *half* what we are collectively paying in the USA.
If we could some how emulate their successes, we would save 5% or 6% or 7% of our GNP. No, I am not kidding.
*You* are showing a lot of faith that what we have right now is surely cheaper than reasonable "socialized" alternatives, in spite of extremely strong circumstantial evidence to the contrary. Is the status quo such an amazing success that we really need to keep our eyes closed?
That would be the ideal approach, yes. I would speculate a motion to dismiss has already been filed and it is somewhere deep within the judge's in-box, to be considered later. In the mean time, the subpoena has been granted, as such things usually are.
As HP has conceded that is the subsidiary committed theft, what is left is to ascertain economic damages. So what exactly is Apotheker going to testify about circa 2011 that it was not obvious that he should divulge back in 2008 or 2009 or early 2010? Nothing. At this point, the opinion of the CEO at the time means nothing when stacked up next to the business guesstimates of the dueling bean counters.
While HP's conduct may not be the most admirable, I basically agree with their stance -- allowing Apotheker to duck the subpoena may seem distastefully passive-aggressive, but the CEO has a fiduciary duty to the stock holders of a large multinational.
My personal opinion is that the judicial system has been taken over by lawyers and is run for the benefit of lawyers. IMHO the judge probably granted a silly subpoena because judges are in the habit of giving lawyers whatever they want in terms of more testimony, more paperwork, more vaguely related evidence, and more billable hours, regardless of what common sense would suggest.
This is just a gambit on Oracle's part to drag Apotheker's name through the mud. Maybe the man deserves this. Maybe he doesn't. I do not see why I should care.
"Oracle had ample opportunity to question Leo during his sworn deposition in October 2008 and chose not to include him as a live trial witness until he was named CEO of HP," an HP spokesperson said in a statement. "Given Leo's limited knowledge of and role in the matter, Oracle's last-minute effort to require him to appear live at trial is no more than an effort to harass him and interfere with his duties and responsibilities as HP's CEO."
Of course, HP may be pulling the wool over our eyes. But if it was not obvious in 2008 and 2009 that live testimony would be likely necessary, then it is difficult to believe that he is so important to the suit here in late 2010.
Nonsense politics these days are not all that different from politics in the Good Old Days (or the Bad Old Days).
The underlying problem you are complaining about is created by the voters themselves. The voters very consistently reward politicians who offer easy answers over tough choices, and then throw tantrums when the politicians mysteriously fail to deliver.
Yours is but another variant of tantrum; wrapping it an assertion of high standards does not change this underlying truth.
This is hardly a new phenomenon. Although perhaps modern media helps accentuate to some degree.
The world just doesn't work like that, Hydrocarbons won't vanish overnight. They just get more and more expensive, and as the expense climbs, people come up with solutions.
The English burned up all their wood, then found coal, then found oil, and that is how things work.
On one hand, yes, genuine catastrophes are rare. And I happen to be in the camp that hydrocarbons are not rare, they are just getting more and more expensive, in both direct extraction costs and environmental costs
On the other hand, your real life example sucks. The Brits burn up wood, found coal, and then discovered that oil was plentiful if they kept the Persians under their thumb AND made a deal with Sauds who are tied directly to Islamists who want to turn the clock back one thousand years.
Gee, what could possibly go wrong with a game plan like that?
Our present oil economies are indirectly subsidized by seven hundred billion dollars of US defense spending every year. That is not sustainable model. And the coming multi-polar world will make it less sustainable still.
And finally, I would note that the Anasazi and Rapa Nui were blossoming cultures right until wandered over the cliff. Present prosperity does not necessarily indicate resilience when the world changes.
Please mod clarkn0va's comment up. The real irony is that EEE has proven a barrier to modernization of technology "including those put forward by Microsoft itself". Building an idiosyncratic product on purpose is a gamble with many potential future downsides.
To make up some numbers to illustrate the point...So if we have 10^4 weather stations to have 48 hours of good accuracy, it might take 10^5 weather stations to achieve 60 hours of good accuracy, assuming that you have all the computing power you could possible want in the first place.
Entanglement for secure channels of communication I believe. Quantum "computing" in the sense we usually think of computing looks phony.
Sure, such a quantum computer, if built, could process, say, 10^50 quantum inputs simultaneously. But where does one get the 10^50 inputs? Each input is a delicate quantum-entangled state. Do I pull my 10^50 helium-cooled quantum state composition machines out of my closet? It is a promise which is can only be employed by leprechauns and unicorns.
The bottom line is, as stated by the article, quantum computers would useless for most everyday computations. Which things a quantum computer could actually be used for is clear as mud.
I would welcome a link to a technical article that is grounded in reality, proving me wrong.
The details matter, like whether it is embedded within glass, frex. By your definition, a pacemaker contains even more material that is too dangerous to be put within a human body. Sodium and chlorine are both viciously corrosive to organic material in quantity when applied in pure form. Yet you cannot live without them.
When all taxes are factored in (fed income, state income, SSI, real estate, sales tax, vehicle registration) I am paying ~30% of my income to the government through various avenues. I am not complaining about that. But I cannot help but notice that the people complaining the loudest about taxes are usually paying at a significantly lower rate than I am.
DeadCatX2's assessment of Likud may be a misleading assessment, but it is not misleading because of any of the reasons you put forth. Some members of the Likud Party may well benefit from greater conflict without necessarily being part of some nefarious plot against Palestinian rights in general. Maybe they are. Maybe they are not.
But wandering off into allusions about how certain Palestinian groups happen to be worse does not logically argue against the truth of the charge against Likud. In fact, it could reasonably be interpreted as an endorsement of the claim Likud is guilty as charged (but guilt you think is fair to simply ignore for other reasons).
It has been downhill since the printing press and those vulgar non-clergy dared attempt to understand the Bible without the proper oversight of the Church.
Yes, a grand bluff on the scale of Calais in WWII will always be difficult to pull off. But this stuff is extremely valuable and effective as simple decoys to make effective targeting more difficult. Even if you fail to fool the enemy about the disposition of your armored vehicles, you can vastly improve the survivability of your expensive hardware against smart weapons. Consider the Gulf I and Gulf II wars. How well would have the USAF's tank hunting worked out if every Iraqi tank had three decoys parked nearby? Consider Hezbollah missile launchers, Syrian tanks, Iranian radar stations and missile launchers, etc. All mobile systems become 3X or 4X or 5X as hard to kill for pocket change.
Speaking of deluded, what exactly does any of your assertions have to do with hiring? A growing, profitable business should not care about modest changes to tax rates or gov't debt, as long as inflation and interest rates are reasonable. This is a great time to poach talent from the competition. However, owners cash cows with no prospects of growth and no interest in hiring new workers care a lot about tax rates. The very people with the most incentive to care about tax rates are the least likely to hire. And the ones in a position to hire care little about taxes.
These ARE the same people that have made no bones about wanting to commit genocide against all Jews
We have strong circumstantial evidence that your characterization is incorrect. Iran still includes a modest populace of Jews, even if most have left since 1979. But if they really wanted to make "no bones" about their intentions, we would expect the Jewish population in Iran today to be approximately zero.
My understanding is that Catholicism is actually agnostic on the question of whether an early term fetuses possess souls. Their position is that such are a form of life that should be honored and cherished, as per the will of God.
Accountability should be a two-way street.
Now there are constant calls that teachers need to be held accountable.
I am far from a fan of the teachers unions; in cases, they do contribute to some of the problems. However what data we have on non-union school districts is that they get worse results on average than unionized districts. Also there is no evidence that private schools accomplish more for the buck than public schools.
I personally know about half a dozen people who once taught in public schools, including my wife, who have left due to poor pay combined with poor working conditions. I can say that while my wife despised the particular teacher union, top of her list would be to hold *parents* and *students* to a high standard of conduct.
It will always be easier to blame teachers and teachers' unions for the problems then fix anything. But until there is a commitment to improve working conditions, of which pay is merely one important element, it can be guaranteed that the unions will have a stranglehold on the supply of teachers. And even if a pitched battle were won against these unions, it would not change anything -- the best teaching talent will see the writing on the wall and leave.
What does it say about our society if a group we need to integrate is so isolated it's developing an incompatible dialect?
I get your drift, but by putting this this way, you are making it sound worse than it is. This is not a new development but simply a practical step in coping with the world as it actually exists (and has for some time).
Law enforcement having a few experts on hand to check that a transcription is actually accurate is a very good thing.
To answer that ambiguity, Christians worked very hard to build up the sin of "Onanism" in ways that are only tenuously related to the events described in the Old Testament.
In this case...by NOT showing a lightsaber being built, the audience is left wondering whether Luke actually has the mojo to pull off his rather mysterious and audacious rescue. Showing the lightsaber would tip off the audience, while also slowing down the movie.