An anonymous reader adds news that Google's Chrome browser is nearing 10% market share.
Seems nobody's commenting on the browser stats. That XP is in a slow decline and Win7 on the rise is simply natural, it's clearly better than Vista and XP is getting long in the tooth. Chrome took another 0.72% of the market last month, and NetApplications is on the low side of things. StatCounter now says 14.85%, up 1.5% in the last month. At that rate, they'd overtake Firefox within the year. Firefox is holding steady and IE loses, in fact in Europe it now says Firefox is the dominant web browser with 38.11% over IEs 37.52%. Recently I've been seeing Chrome ads all over place and clearly it is working taking users from IE that Firefox never reached. That is much more likely to have an impact on the future than the slow decline of XP.
Windows Server only supports 4 sockets and up to 32GB RAM unless you pay for the Enterprise version and we are currently physically limited to 4-6 real cores (12 with HT) per CPU. For a workstation in the scientific or engineering field it is quite feasible to have a 4-socket system and more than 32GB of RAM SuperMicro makes quite a few of them in tower version. The complaint is that there is a limit based on the license you buy. This is really annoying that people can't use $OS_of_choice and have to use a Server OS for their applications purely because the licensing won't allow it.
Well, boo-fscking-hoo. The rest of us are happy you're forced onto a server/enterprise edition so that the 99.99% of the market don't have to pay for the 0.01% you want. I'm sure they'd offer a "workstatation" edition with no limits and no possibility of CALs if there was really a need for it. You may have noticed there's no such thing as a workstation CPU either, there's desktop CPUs and server CPUs - and to get anything like you want you will need server CPUs in a server mobo that take server RAM w/ECC - in short your machine looks just like a server, except it doesn't have clients. All the validation and shit Microsoft have to do is shared with servers, not desktops. So why should you not e paying a server price? If you want to say it's a licensing choice not a technical choice, I say technically your needs are like a server so it makes perfect sense you and they pay the same.
When has Intel ever lowered prices without needing to?
Intel will act rather aggressively to deny AMD any high margin CPUs if they can, they know keeping AMD cash starved is the best guarantee for their continued dominance while Intel has plenty markets to get their margins. Intel is way ahead of the game at this point, they know AMD has some launches soon and for one they empty the market of people looking for a new CPU soon and second they make sure that instead of praising reviews and reports that AMD force Intel to price cuts they instead get "too little, too late" reviews. This is the first volley, I expect another volley after the AMD launches with new $500-1000 processors just to rub in their performance dominance and get another round of positive reviews. Intel has AMD way backed up into the "value" corner, they're not getting out that easily...
Hint: Dropping $300 on every processor generation Intel makes is a waste of money. If you got that much to spend, buy a more expensive CPU and keep it a generation or two longer. It not like it goes broke just because it's not the newest toy anymore, you know.
So in order of why is this is mostly irrelevant to the market: 1) The majority is laptops now (since 2008) and nobody upgrades the CPU there 2) Most people will get their desktop from an OEM and never upgrade 3) If you assume a new Intel will require a new mobo, you buy accordingly
Ok, so maybe you made a smart upgrade investment. Hurray, you belong to 1% of the market. Intel is still laughing all the way to the bank...
One thing that is highly questionable is if the basic income would stay so basic. At least here in Norway, when you add up the people on all forms of benefits including retirement benefits and the public sector they're almost 50% of the voting population. Over the next years the wave of elderly means a majority will be getting their money from the government. On the short term that means the more they give to themselves, the richer they will get. At least until the private sector gives up funding everyone else and the economy collapses.
Still, what is true of physical products (that extensive testing on top of proper design and good manufacturing practices) may not be true of software. I.e. the question is: is laborious and careful design and implementation with minimal testing more or less expensive than quicker, laxer design and coding and a strong test/correction feedback process? I'm not sure the answer is clear-cut. As a (former) programmer, I can see argument for both approaches.
Didn't you just answer your own question: extensive testing on top of proper design and good manufacturing practices
For the first I'll just quote Knuth: "I have only proved it correct, not tried it." And if you send piles of shit to testing/QA and expect them to be the impenetrable barrier between you and the customer, you're equally deluded.
I've found that for anything that should last a while and be stable, there should be a test case. It's so easy to subtly break something. However, I've found writing a proper test suite that deals with databases, network communication+++ and not just the application itself is pretty hard.
Then design wise, the thing to do would be for every problem found, see what can be re-factored and improved right there and then, and do it immediately (with test cases to prevent regression).
Well, in my experience it goes like this: You're looking to refactor the code because the code already is quirky. Some 99% of the time, that's just because it's sloppy coding, poor structure and logic or it is simply undefined or irrelevant, the corner cases are never reached, the function is always called with data of the correct format and so on. Then in 1% of the cases, the application depends on this quirky behavior and all in all works correctly - or at least works - until you clean the code. If you have to assume that everything that is there should be there, you end up with code almost as bad as what you started with. This is the problem trying to reverse engineer the intended behavior from existing code.
That is why you have to find some kind of border where you have pretty solid control on all the ways this code is called, it can be a module or a group of classes. Then you preserve the exterior while you build a new and clean interior, where you can safely remove the quirks because you're sure nothing depends on them. The kind of "micro-refactoring" that you seem to suggest he could do along with bug-squashing just doesn't have much effect in my experience. You need to have a certain scale to it before you get any real clean-up effect in the middle.
Except that during the series they found there had been earlier tests that had killed just the birds, before the global flash forward. Not that I'd try applying logic to that series, the time flash is one thing but basic things like a any form of wave that acts exactly the same at ground zero as it does halfway around the earth? The science was at a Doctor Who level, just with less comedy and more thriller.
I think you're throwing up a bit of a false dichotomy here, I want to see the numbers compared to other airlines but it doesn't necessarily follow that I will buy from the lowest bidder. It's not as if they drop being on price comparison sites and I stop paying attention to what the market price is. The question is more if these comparison sites are charging too much for the service since all the information is already online and easily available, to me it sounds like a rather low cost operation that apparently still charges quite a bundle for any sale they make. To me it sounds more like a service that'd should just skim a little ad revenue for putting it all on one page.
It looks like a lot of the studies that suffer from this effect are concerned with people and their behavior. Personally I don't think its a matter of whether the science is hard or soft
No, that pretty much the entire problem. We are never the same people, me and you are not the same people as Bill and Bob. If you do a chemistry experiment, you can be fairly sure it's repeatable everywhere for all time and in particular if you keep sampling the same solution you're pretty sure to get the exact same answer within the accuracy of your measurement device. In the soft sciences, just drawing from the same pool of people again can produce different results. And in the end the significance is only proven for that exact group, not any other socioeconomic-cultural-environmental-nutritional-temporal effect.
Just to take a silly example, imagine we do a study on the length of skirts. We can do it with every bit of scientific rigor as we want, but as we move from worker class to middle class, different cultural heritage, different climate, different age periods you can be pretty damn sure the truth changes. And if you go back and try doing the same experiment but the correlation is no longer there, it can have been just a coincidence or it can simply have been a fashion that's now over. A lot of things are fads, things people a few years older or a few years younger didn't have or do but were none the less true.
To take a classic, let's try applying this to the Hawthorne effect.which is "a form of reactivity whereby subjects improve or modify an aspect of their behavior being experimentally measured simply in response to the fact that they are being studied, not in response to any particular experimental manipulation." For example back then (1930s) people had a different relation to authorities, would a flower power child react the same way? Probably not. Could it be that they were more afraid it would really be used for performance reviews and promotions, not science? Absolutely. May the work environment have changed with automation so people know timed measurements are less important? Sure.
All of that could contribute to that a worker back then was nervous, felt this could be a test and consciously or unconsciously performed better just as effect of being observed. While a person today may not feel the same respect and nervousness and confidently believe that this is for actual science and will have no effect on your future career with the company. So they relax and just work normally and *poof* the observed effect is gone even if the experiment is recreated pretty much exactly. All soft science is shooting at a moving target, we're not converging on a truth we're observing ourselves and trying to update the map to match the ever changing terrain.
Probably unsuitable for people working in transportation, medical, law enforcement, power generation. How do these people ensure their wake-up on odd schedules, different changing locations with harsh consequences for ever being a minute late?
RAIAC - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Alarm Clocks. Seriously, I used to use two alarm clocks - one regular and one nasty "you're about to oversleep, go directly to work, do not pass go, do not collect $200" alarm that's only slightly less annoying than the fire alarm. On normal days I'd just switch off that one after getting up, it was just backup. This was not so much due to technical failure but because the first clock was easy to turn off if you just intended to snooze, at least if you're dead tired and just want five more minutes. Also because if I first oversleep, I tend to oversleep a lot not like just one hour. With the iFail I had gone down to one since I could have two different schedules with different alarm clocks, as it should always have enough battery but I'll have to revise that policy for DST changes, year changes, leap years and whatever else corner case they didn't test.
I do recall seeing a police detective interviewed, saying something along the lines of what you said: Criminals are greedy, so they're stupid, so they're usually quite easy to catch. People smart enough to get away with crime are smart enough to now that it's usually not worth doing.
Well, the cops got a pretty big sample bias - their idea of the average criminal is the average criminal they catch. And by case volume it's even more skewed by the deadbeats who don't do much except petty crime. Smart probably doesn't just involve avoiding the cops, it probably also involves picking the crimes that are worth doing, it'd be stupid to assume smart people commit the same stupid crimes as stupid people.
There's a McDonalds (almost) everywhere because when you've been eating some crazy shit your taste buds or stomach can't handle or your kids are threatening to stage a revolt if they don't get any western food then you go there. Been there, done that, there's only so many days of rice in a row I can handle and that thing I got when I tried ordering a pizza at the local restaurant wasn't a pizza. And because some people seem to want to go to a foreign country and have it just like home except the climate is better. If you want to experience something different you can you just have to seek it.
1. People moving to laptops, desktops aren't that big anymore 2. A lot of research and focus going into SSDs 3. Increased use of streaming services 4. Higher bandwidth means you rather delete and redownload later
Obviously there's a lot of people that still need a lot of storage space, but having a single 3 TB drive over 2x1.5 TB drives is just not that important, if you need a bunch of them you're looking at $/TB not how many drives there are. I built myself a very plain "server" using a big gaming case, a PSU and mobo with many SATA connections and it got room and connectors for 10 drives. Right now it has a bunch of various disks from 250 GB to 1.5 TB so it's only 6-7 TB total but fully loaded I could now have 30 TB in it, which is massive overkill even for my packrat habits. Of course in the long run it would be nice to have 10+ TB drives but my willingness to pay a price premium for a slightly bigger disk is very low. I'd rather just add one more 2 TB disk than an expensive 3 TB disk.
You support free trade but you insist their trade be restricted. Personally I'm against free trade. It never made sense when it was first proposed and it's brought a lot of grief to the first world. It's one thing having free trade with countries like Canada and the US or even much of Europe and North America where the economies are similar. Merging with a third world country means the first world country has to drop their standard of living to compete.
Well, one of the key theorems in trade is that it's beneficial to exchange goods as long as there's a relative difference in productivitiy, regardless if one country is superior to another in every way. That is, if we can produce good A much faster than China and good B a tiny bit faster than China, we should specialize in producing A and export that while importing B for a net gain compared to producing B ourselves while China does the opposite. As such it's not unreasonable that rich countries have trade with poor countries.
When you add unemployment it starts being complicated because the above assumes both countries are maximizing their production. Unemployed people aren't productive which means China is better off producing both goods rather than importing from the US as long as they aren't capacity limited, while the US is now hooked on cheap imports and can't produce them domestically at a competitive price. So you get a trade imbalance, in theory some of this could still be balanced as China buys other things from other countries for US dollars but in practise it doesn't work out.
However, one thing that people seem to think which is wrong is that China is not particularly interested in a US downfall, at least not short term. They're more interested in picking the crown jewels by saying "Um yeah cheap labor we got that, decent tech level we got that, what exactly do you have that we'd really need to get from the outside?" Rare earth minerals or oil resources could be good examples of that. Specific pieces of technology they don't have. Basically it's about sniping the valuables while the US is spending their huans filling up the Wal-Marts.
Bah, getting hit with a lawsuit tells nothing of the real story, I was part of a consulting project once where they at least considered it. My most vivid moment from that project was a fairly critical workshop I held, the topic was well announced, the entire core team of the customer was present and if they at any time needed assistance it was their task to call inn additional resources. At the first semi-hard question of the workshop their project lead said they didn't have the competence present to decide that now. I seriously just wanted to just abort the whole workshop right then and there, like seriously? wtf? There was almost ten people around the table and if you can't even decide this one, how the hell are we going to get anything done? Even get through the day? As expected essentially nothing got decided, extra meetings were scheduled, the project mostly stalled as they ran in circles and demanded extra workshops to explain things we've already explained but they still couldn't decide on and eventually the project was killed from upon high as it was way over budget.
Of course they wanted to nail us to the wall to recover some of that money but I think they just looked at the mass of documentation we had they had failed their end of the contract and decided to let it go. To make a car analogy consultants are a bit like taxi drivers, if you can't really make up your mind on where you're going we're happy to drive you around as long as the meter is running. You can't just at the end say "oh we started at A and ended at B, that's way too much for that distance" when in the beginning you just had a general direction and couldn't decide if we were at the right place or not and asked us to just drive around looking for it. If we're to do a good job, we need the requirements up front not one by one as we fail them. If you ask me to drive you to a good restaurant, telling me in front of the steakhouse that you wanted a sushi place (or vice versa) is too damn late. We know the tools we're implementing, but you're supposed to know the business you're in. Sometimes I really got them impression they wanted us to learn them how to do their job too...
Which, at its heart, is a fundamental violation of basic constitutional rights. The right of freedom of movement means nothing if it is restricted to only certain means of travel.
With an extreme enough interpretation of that, the government couldn't stop any vechicle unfit for the road. Or if you just decided to bike on the freeway or drive your tank taking both lanes. Otherwise you might simply argue that the rules are a violation to your chosen means of travel. I think this one falls in the cracks between rights and insanity, you may have the right of free speech but probably not to hold a morning speech blocking a critical highway a few hours during the morning rush. I hardly think the right of free movement can be extended to driving drunk, as long as the test is specific to an unlawful condition you can't compare this to a general search. Driving with a blood alcohol level above X is illegal, this test will check you blood alcohol level and nothing else. But then I've seen the US give all sorts of silly drive tests, so I guess the laws are different there because here it'd be completely irrelevant if you can hit your nose or not. A quick breath and if you're clean off you go, it's actually faster than whatever the US is doing..
Apparently "god" does it in "heaven". Which is one of the reasons I don't accept such stories; I find it difficult to believe that even an omnipotent being would simultaneously be able to please a group of democrats and a group of republicans.
You seem to assume democrats and/or republicans go to heaven. There's an easier explaination...
Uhhh...it would seem to me that, if we are going the roman numeral route, MM means 2000 and not 1000x1000.
You would be right. The financial industry has chosen a different definition though, it's sorta like the k = 1024 vs k = 1000 debate in IT. You can argue as much as you want, but to an economist MM = 1,000,000.
We never did get universal buy-in for the project, and it ended up dieing ( although, to be fair, the vendor didn't help things much ).
You had a stupid vendor then. Smart vendors are just as much in on how difficult the switch-over process in government is. What it usually means is that the entry ticket is cheap (not the first shot is free, but close) but everything after that, especially things they didn't demand a quote for in the RFQ is big bucks. Nothing is impossible in IT - though sometimes a vendor will spectacularly fail to deliver - it's just a matter of how much it'll cost. Inevitably almost all business start with "use standard" and end with "standard isn't good enough" in my experience.
Like you say, the deck is wildly stacked against her when it goes to court and she's pretty much been on her worst behavior inside and outside of court. But even if you came into court accused of theft and said "If I want something I just take it so fuck you all" and gave the jury the finger there'd be limits. Thomas-Rasset has shown that for copyright infringement there's practically no limit, they can just pick a penalty far beyond the life earnings of most people for being a minor non-commercial file sharer and being an ass about it. It's as if jaywalking carried a penalty of $20 - life, depending on what the jury feels like. So no, even if she's been asking for it I would say she got far, far more than any sane justice system should deal out.
I also think it's fairly obvious that the civil system is here clearly being used as a private penal system, where the damanges can not in any way be justified as actual or statutory damages. Statutory damages are supposed to be an alternative if actual damages are hard to estimate, not as a way to punish people much, much harder than any actual harm. Granted there's a long history of awarding up to triple damages - or more if the base is extremely small which $750 is not - which is which is why the one judge felt 3x$18,000 = $54,000 was the constitutional maximum. The remaining million and change can really only be considered to be a fine - payable to the music companies. It's a great end run around much of the legal system, it's a way to punish people without giving them all the benefits of the criminal justice system. As long as corporations and government are good buddies, you can consider it a form government kickbacks that just goes directly from your wallet instead of through the government.
Given that you can (theoretically) choose among the best and brightest of more than 200 million people, it might not be too much to ask for a candidate to have been at least in the top 5 or 10% in his classroom -- in order for them to understand the issues at least.
Maybe if 90-95% in the class room don't understand the issues, that is your problem - it certainly seems like it would making democracy difficult. I think the point is that as an executive you are getting executive summaries, you're not looking at the mass of raw data spotting the patterns and connections with your superior intellect. You are more setting the overall strategy, and everyone that's read a strategy document knows it's quite well rounded and not an exact science. And you're delegating, so it's not like you'll be the one executing the strategy which means it's very important that you communicate well what and how you will do. And not to mention why you're doing it for motivation, inspiration, support and best execution. Those things don't come very naturally from academia, I know many academics who'd be brilliant in a white coat in the corner of a research lab but very poor leaders.
As for political experience that is perhaps a necessary skill but quite frankly political broilers that have been raised only on ideology sometimes have very little attachment to reality. Particularly here in Norway on the left side we have socialists that have never been neither workers nor capitalists, they're just idealists and ideologists that have read about how it ought to work. Granted, she was leader of the youth party and not the whole party but when you want "equal pay for work" - not "equal pay for equal work" mind you, people asked - then it's obvious you've never had a non-political job in your life. So while I'm not saying I agree with the GP I too would generally be skeptical to someone that's never done anything but academics and politics. But then people only have so many years and you can spend very many of the in the "real world" learning very little except how to do boring menial labor.
Considering he was probably handed the worst situation a president has started with since the Great Depression, I think he's still doing decent. I think people want a bit more from him than is humanly possibly even for the POTUS.
Slashdot Mirror
An anonymous reader adds news that Google's Chrome browser is nearing 10% market share.
Seems nobody's commenting on the browser stats. That XP is in a slow decline and Win7 on the rise is simply natural, it's clearly better than Vista and XP is getting long in the tooth. Chrome took another 0.72% of the market last month, and NetApplications is on the low side of things. StatCounter now says 14.85%, up 1.5% in the last month. At that rate, they'd overtake Firefox within the year. Firefox is holding steady and IE loses, in fact in Europe it now says Firefox is the dominant web browser with 38.11% over IEs 37.52%. Recently I've been seeing Chrome ads all over place and clearly it is working taking users from IE that Firefox never reached. That is much more likely to have an impact on the future than the slow decline of XP.
Windows Server only supports 4 sockets and up to 32GB RAM unless you pay for the Enterprise version and we are currently physically limited to 4-6 real cores (12 with HT) per CPU. For a workstation in the scientific or engineering field it is quite feasible to have a 4-socket system and more than 32GB of RAM SuperMicro makes quite a few of them in tower version. The complaint is that there is a limit based on the license you buy. This is really annoying that people can't use $OS_of_choice and have to use a Server OS for their applications purely because the licensing won't allow it.
Well, boo-fscking-hoo. The rest of us are happy you're forced onto a server/enterprise edition so that the 99.99% of the market don't have to pay for the 0.01% you want. I'm sure they'd offer a "workstatation" edition with no limits and no possibility of CALs if there was really a need for it. You may have noticed there's no such thing as a workstation CPU either, there's desktop CPUs and server CPUs - and to get anything like you want you will need server CPUs in a server mobo that take server RAM w/ECC - in short your machine looks just like a server, except it doesn't have clients. All the validation and shit Microsoft have to do is shared with servers, not desktops. So why should you not e paying a server price? If you want to say it's a licensing choice not a technical choice, I say technically your needs are like a server so it makes perfect sense you and they pay the same.
*mumbles something about lawyers being full of hot air, thereby reducing terminal velocity to a survivable speed*
Oh, I'm sure we could arrange something.
When has Intel ever lowered prices without needing to?
Intel will act rather aggressively to deny AMD any high margin CPUs if they can, they know keeping AMD cash starved is the best guarantee for their continued dominance while Intel has plenty markets to get their margins. Intel is way ahead of the game at this point, they know AMD has some launches soon and for one they empty the market of people looking for a new CPU soon and second they make sure that instead of praising reviews and reports that AMD force Intel to price cuts they instead get "too little, too late" reviews. This is the first volley, I expect another volley after the AMD launches with new $500-1000 processors just to rub in their performance dominance and get another round of positive reviews. Intel has AMD way backed up into the "value" corner, they're not getting out that easily...
Hint: Dropping $300 on every processor generation Intel makes is a waste of money. If you got that much to spend, buy a more expensive CPU and keep it a generation or two longer. It not like it goes broke just because it's not the newest toy anymore, you know.
So in order of why is this is mostly irrelevant to the market:
1) The majority is laptops now (since 2008) and nobody upgrades the CPU there
2) Most people will get their desktop from an OEM and never upgrade
3) If you assume a new Intel will require a new mobo, you buy accordingly
Ok, so maybe you made a smart upgrade investment. Hurray, you belong to 1% of the market. Intel is still laughing all the way to the bank...
One thing that is highly questionable is if the basic income would stay so basic. At least here in Norway, when you add up the people on all forms of benefits including retirement benefits and the public sector they're almost 50% of the voting population. Over the next years the wave of elderly means a majority will be getting their money from the government. On the short term that means the more they give to themselves, the richer they will get. At least until the private sector gives up funding everyone else and the economy collapses.
Still, what is true of physical products (that extensive testing on top of proper design and good manufacturing practices) may not be true of software. I.e. the question is: is laborious and careful design and implementation with minimal testing more or less expensive than quicker, laxer design and coding and a strong test/correction feedback process? I'm not sure the answer is clear-cut. As a (former) programmer, I can see argument for both approaches.
Didn't you just answer your own question: extensive testing on top of proper design and good manufacturing practices
For the first I'll just quote Knuth: "I have only proved it correct, not tried it." And if you send piles of shit to testing/QA and expect them to be the impenetrable barrier between you and the customer, you're equally deluded.
I've found that for anything that should last a while and be stable, there should be a test case. It's so easy to subtly break something. However, I've found writing a proper test suite that deals with databases, network communication+++ and not just the application itself is pretty hard.
Then design wise, the thing to do would be for every problem found, see what can be re-factored and improved right there and then, and do it immediately (with test cases to prevent regression).
Well, in my experience it goes like this: You're looking to refactor the code because the code already is quirky. Some 99% of the time, that's just because it's sloppy coding, poor structure and logic or it is simply undefined or irrelevant, the corner cases are never reached, the function is always called with data of the correct format and so on. Then in 1% of the cases, the application depends on this quirky behavior and all in all works correctly - or at least works - until you clean the code. If you have to assume that everything that is there should be there, you end up with code almost as bad as what you started with. This is the problem trying to reverse engineer the intended behavior from existing code.
That is why you have to find some kind of border where you have pretty solid control on all the ways this code is called, it can be a module or a group of classes. Then you preserve the exterior while you build a new and clean interior, where you can safely remove the quirks because you're sure nothing depends on them. The kind of "micro-refactoring" that you seem to suggest he could do along with bug-squashing just doesn't have much effect in my experience. You need to have a certain scale to it before you get any real clean-up effect in the middle.
Except that during the series they found there had been earlier tests that had killed just the birds, before the global flash forward. Not that I'd try applying logic to that series, the time flash is one thing but basic things like a any form of wave that acts exactly the same at ground zero as it does halfway around the earth? The science was at a Doctor Who level, just with less comedy and more thriller.
I think you're throwing up a bit of a false dichotomy here, I want to see the numbers compared to other airlines but it doesn't necessarily follow that I will buy from the lowest bidder. It's not as if they drop being on price comparison sites and I stop paying attention to what the market price is. The question is more if these comparison sites are charging too much for the service since all the information is already online and easily available, to me it sounds like a rather low cost operation that apparently still charges quite a bundle for any sale they make. To me it sounds more like a service that'd should just skim a little ad revenue for putting it all on one page.
In the case of food, it's yours once you touch it. That is SOP for EVERY food handling service. Contamination is a no-no.
They may not be able to sell it to someone else, but I'm quite sure they can dispose of it so that you don't get it for free.
It looks like a lot of the studies that suffer from this effect are concerned with people and their behavior. Personally I don't think its a matter of whether the science is hard or soft
No, that pretty much the entire problem. We are never the same people, me and you are not the same people as Bill and Bob. If you do a chemistry experiment, you can be fairly sure it's repeatable everywhere for all time and in particular if you keep sampling the same solution you're pretty sure to get the exact same answer within the accuracy of your measurement device. In the soft sciences, just drawing from the same pool of people again can produce different results. And in the end the significance is only proven for that exact group, not any other socioeconomic-cultural-environmental-nutritional-temporal effect.
Just to take a silly example, imagine we do a study on the length of skirts. We can do it with every bit of scientific rigor as we want, but as we move from worker class to middle class, different cultural heritage, different climate, different age periods you can be pretty damn sure the truth changes. And if you go back and try doing the same experiment but the correlation is no longer there, it can have been just a coincidence or it can simply have been a fashion that's now over. A lot of things are fads, things people a few years older or a few years younger didn't have or do but were none the less true.
To take a classic, let's try applying this to the Hawthorne effect.which is "a form of reactivity whereby subjects improve or modify an aspect of their behavior being experimentally measured simply in response to the fact that they are being studied, not in response to any particular experimental manipulation." For example back then (1930s) people had a different relation to authorities, would a flower power child react the same way? Probably not. Could it be that they were more afraid it would really be used for performance reviews and promotions, not science? Absolutely. May the work environment have changed with automation so people know timed measurements are less important? Sure.
All of that could contribute to that a worker back then was nervous, felt this could be a test and consciously or unconsciously performed better just as effect of being observed. While a person today may not feel the same respect and nervousness and confidently believe that this is for actual science and will have no effect on your future career with the company. So they relax and just work normally and *poof* the observed effect is gone even if the experiment is recreated pretty much exactly. All soft science is shooting at a moving target, we're not converging on a truth we're observing ourselves and trying to update the map to match the ever changing terrain.
Probably unsuitable for people working in transportation, medical, law enforcement, power generation. How do these people ensure their wake-up on odd schedules, different changing locations with harsh consequences for ever being a minute late?
RAIAC - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Alarm Clocks. Seriously, I used to use two alarm clocks - one regular and one nasty "you're about to oversleep, go directly to work, do not pass go, do not collect $200" alarm that's only slightly less annoying than the fire alarm. On normal days I'd just switch off that one after getting up, it was just backup. This was not so much due to technical failure but because the first clock was easy to turn off if you just intended to snooze, at least if you're dead tired and just want five more minutes. Also because if I first oversleep, I tend to oversleep a lot not like just one hour. With the iFail I had gone down to one since I could have two different schedules with different alarm clocks, as it should always have enough battery but I'll have to revise that policy for DST changes, year changes, leap years and whatever else corner case they didn't test.
I do recall seeing a police detective interviewed, saying something along the lines of what you said: Criminals are greedy, so they're stupid, so they're usually quite easy to catch. People smart enough to get away with crime are smart enough to now that it's usually not worth doing.
Well, the cops got a pretty big sample bias - their idea of the average criminal is the average criminal they catch. And by case volume it's even more skewed by the deadbeats who don't do much except petty crime. Smart probably doesn't just involve avoiding the cops, it probably also involves picking the crimes that are worth doing, it'd be stupid to assume smart people commit the same stupid crimes as stupid people.
There's a McDonalds (almost) everywhere because when you've been eating some crazy shit your taste buds or stomach can't handle or your kids are threatening to stage a revolt if they don't get any western food then you go there. Been there, done that, there's only so many days of rice in a row I can handle and that thing I got when I tried ordering a pizza at the local restaurant wasn't a pizza. And because some people seem to want to go to a foreign country and have it just like home except the climate is better. If you want to experience something different you can you just have to seek it.
I think there's many reasons:
1. People moving to laptops, desktops aren't that big anymore
2. A lot of research and focus going into SSDs
3. Increased use of streaming services
4. Higher bandwidth means you rather delete and redownload later
Obviously there's a lot of people that still need a lot of storage space, but having a single 3 TB drive over 2x1.5 TB drives is just not that important, if you need a bunch of them you're looking at $/TB not how many drives there are. I built myself a very plain "server" using a big gaming case, a PSU and mobo with many SATA connections and it got room and connectors for 10 drives. Right now it has a bunch of various disks from 250 GB to 1.5 TB so it's only 6-7 TB total but fully loaded I could now have 30 TB in it, which is massive overkill even for my packrat habits. Of course in the long run it would be nice to have 10+ TB drives but my willingness to pay a price premium for a slightly bigger disk is very low. I'd rather just add one more 2 TB disk than an expensive 3 TB disk.
You support free trade but you insist their trade be restricted. Personally I'm against free trade. It never made sense when it was first proposed and it's brought a lot of grief to the first world. It's one thing having free trade with countries like Canada and the US or even much of Europe and North America where the economies are similar. Merging with a third world country means the first world country has to drop their standard of living to compete.
Well, one of the key theorems in trade is that it's beneficial to exchange goods as long as there's a relative difference in productivitiy, regardless if one country is superior to another in every way. That is, if we can produce good A much faster than China and good B a tiny bit faster than China, we should specialize in producing A and export that while importing B for a net gain compared to producing B ourselves while China does the opposite. As such it's not unreasonable that rich countries have trade with poor countries.
When you add unemployment it starts being complicated because the above assumes both countries are maximizing their production. Unemployed people aren't productive which means China is better off producing both goods rather than importing from the US as long as they aren't capacity limited, while the US is now hooked on cheap imports and can't produce them domestically at a competitive price. So you get a trade imbalance, in theory some of this could still be balanced as China buys other things from other countries for US dollars but in practise it doesn't work out.
However, one thing that people seem to think which is wrong is that China is not particularly interested in a US downfall, at least not short term. They're more interested in picking the crown jewels by saying "Um yeah cheap labor we got that, decent tech level we got that, what exactly do you have that we'd really need to get from the outside?" Rare earth minerals or oil resources could be good examples of that. Specific pieces of technology they don't have. Basically it's about sniping the valuables while the US is spending their huans filling up the Wal-Marts.
Bah, getting hit with a lawsuit tells nothing of the real story, I was part of a consulting project once where they at least considered it. My most vivid moment from that project was a fairly critical workshop I held, the topic was well announced, the entire core team of the customer was present and if they at any time needed assistance it was their task to call inn additional resources. At the first semi-hard question of the workshop their project lead said they didn't have the competence present to decide that now. I seriously just wanted to just abort the whole workshop right then and there, like seriously? wtf? There was almost ten people around the table and if you can't even decide this one, how the hell are we going to get anything done? Even get through the day? As expected essentially nothing got decided, extra meetings were scheduled, the project mostly stalled as they ran in circles and demanded extra workshops to explain things we've already explained but they still couldn't decide on and eventually the project was killed from upon high as it was way over budget.
Of course they wanted to nail us to the wall to recover some of that money but I think they just looked at the mass of documentation we had they had failed their end of the contract and decided to let it go. To make a car analogy consultants are a bit like taxi drivers, if you can't really make up your mind on where you're going we're happy to drive you around as long as the meter is running. You can't just at the end say "oh we started at A and ended at B, that's way too much for that distance" when in the beginning you just had a general direction and couldn't decide if we were at the right place or not and asked us to just drive around looking for it. If we're to do a good job, we need the requirements up front not one by one as we fail them. If you ask me to drive you to a good restaurant, telling me in front of the steakhouse that you wanted a sushi place (or vice versa) is too damn late. We know the tools we're implementing, but you're supposed to know the business you're in. Sometimes I really got them impression they wanted us to learn them how to do their job too...
Which, at its heart, is a fundamental violation of basic constitutional rights. The right of freedom of movement means nothing if it is restricted to only certain means of travel.
With an extreme enough interpretation of that, the government couldn't stop any vechicle unfit for the road. Or if you just decided to bike on the freeway or drive your tank taking both lanes. Otherwise you might simply argue that the rules are a violation to your chosen means of travel. I think this one falls in the cracks between rights and insanity, you may have the right of free speech but probably not to hold a morning speech blocking a critical highway a few hours during the morning rush. I hardly think the right of free movement can be extended to driving drunk, as long as the test is specific to an unlawful condition you can't compare this to a general search. Driving with a blood alcohol level above X is illegal, this test will check you blood alcohol level and nothing else. But then I've seen the US give all sorts of silly drive tests, so I guess the laws are different there because here it'd be completely irrelevant if you can hit your nose or not. A quick breath and if you're clean off you go, it's actually faster than whatever the US is doing..
Apparently "god" does it in "heaven". Which is one of the reasons I don't accept such stories; I find it difficult to believe that even an omnipotent being would simultaneously be able to please a group of democrats and a group of republicans.
You seem to assume democrats and/or republicans go to heaven. There's an easier explaination...
Uhhh...it would seem to me that, if we are going the roman numeral route, MM means 2000 and not 1000x1000.
You would be right. The financial industry has chosen a different definition though, it's sorta like the k = 1024 vs k = 1000 debate in IT. You can argue as much as you want, but to an economist MM = 1,000,000.
We never did get universal buy-in for the project, and it ended up dieing ( although, to be fair, the vendor didn't help things much ).
You had a stupid vendor then. Smart vendors are just as much in on how difficult the switch-over process in government is. What it usually means is that the entry ticket is cheap (not the first shot is free, but close) but everything after that, especially things they didn't demand a quote for in the RFQ is big bucks. Nothing is impossible in IT - though sometimes a vendor will spectacularly fail to deliver - it's just a matter of how much it'll cost. Inevitably almost all business start with "use standard" and end with "standard isn't good enough" in my experience.
Thomas-Rasset got what she asked for.
Like you say, the deck is wildly stacked against her when it goes to court and she's pretty much been on her worst behavior inside and outside of court. But even if you came into court accused of theft and said "If I want something I just take it so fuck you all" and gave the jury the finger there'd be limits. Thomas-Rasset has shown that for copyright infringement there's practically no limit, they can just pick a penalty far beyond the life earnings of most people for being a minor non-commercial file sharer and being an ass about it. It's as if jaywalking carried a penalty of $20 - life, depending on what the jury feels like. So no, even if she's been asking for it I would say she got far, far more than any sane justice system should deal out.
I also think it's fairly obvious that the civil system is here clearly being used as a private penal system, where the damanges can not in any way be justified as actual or statutory damages. Statutory damages are supposed to be an alternative if actual damages are hard to estimate, not as a way to punish people much, much harder than any actual harm. Granted there's a long history of awarding up to triple damages - or more if the base is extremely small which $750 is not - which is which is why the one judge felt 3x$18,000 = $54,000 was the constitutional maximum. The remaining million and change can really only be considered to be a fine - payable to the music companies. It's a great end run around much of the legal system, it's a way to punish people without giving them all the benefits of the criminal justice system. As long as corporations and government are good buddies, you can consider it a form government kickbacks that just goes directly from your wallet instead of through the government.
Try taking a public poll, if you were offered the Presidency would you take it? I bet most people wouldn't mind the complaining one bit.
Given that you can (theoretically) choose among the best and brightest of more than 200 million people, it might not be too much to ask for a candidate to have been at least in the top 5 or 10% in his classroom -- in order for them to understand the issues at least.
Maybe if 90-95% in the class room don't understand the issues, that is your problem - it certainly seems like it would making democracy difficult. I think the point is that as an executive you are getting executive summaries, you're not looking at the mass of raw data spotting the patterns and connections with your superior intellect. You are more setting the overall strategy, and everyone that's read a strategy document knows it's quite well rounded and not an exact science. And you're delegating, so it's not like you'll be the one executing the strategy which means it's very important that you communicate well what and how you will do. And not to mention why you're doing it for motivation, inspiration, support and best execution. Those things don't come very naturally from academia, I know many academics who'd be brilliant in a white coat in the corner of a research lab but very poor leaders.
As for political experience that is perhaps a necessary skill but quite frankly political broilers that have been raised only on ideology sometimes have very little attachment to reality. Particularly here in Norway on the left side we have socialists that have never been neither workers nor capitalists, they're just idealists and ideologists that have read about how it ought to work. Granted, she was leader of the youth party and not the whole party but when you want "equal pay for work" - not "equal pay for equal work" mind you, people asked - then it's obvious you've never had a non-political job in your life. So while I'm not saying I agree with the GP I too would generally be skeptical to someone that's never done anything but academics and politics. But then people only have so many years and you can spend very many of the in the "real world" learning very little except how to do boring menial labor.
Considering he was probably handed the worst situation a president has started with since the Great Depression, I think he's still doing decent. I think people want a bit more from him than is humanly possibly even for the POTUS.