I run anywhere from 30 to 150 tabs open at a time. I'd say a nice average would be around 60 tabs.
I really cannot think of a reasonable workflow where that would make sense but I'm not trying to judge. As long as you are aware that you are doing something that almost nobody else does or even thinks is a good idea then go for it. Could be useful as a stress test I guess. I've been using Firefox (and Mozilla and Netscape before that) for a long long time and I've never seen behavior like what you describe but then I never thought it was a good idea to have 150 tabs open at once either.
My question would be, what have you done to isolate the problem? Are you sure it has anything to do with the number of browser tabs or is that merely coincidental? Are specific websites causing the problem? If something has changed is that something in Firefox or is it something in how the data is being served? You seem to be blaming Firefox but it isn't clear from your description that Firefox is the unquestionable source of the problem. It certainly should be on the list of possibilities but it isn't certain.
When you have lots of tabs open (and I open hundreds of tabs)
Ummm, why? No disrespect intended at all but aside from stress testing the performance limits of the software I really can't imagine a reason why you would want to do that. The overhead of managing that many tabs would be far greater than any benefit. You certainly cannot actually use that many tabs for any genuinely productive purpose.
It should never take longer than 30 seconds and and 100% CPU to open a tab (like when you have 200 tabs open and 1800 tabs unloaded/hibernating).
Please explain to me any vaguely reasonable use case where you could possibly need that many tabs active. I promise to keep an open mind but I seriously cannot think of any reason I'd ever want to do that. I'm pretty sure I've never opened more than 20-30 tabs at once and I rarely open more than ten or so in normal usage.
I dare not keep the Firefox browser current, and I'm using a plug-in that I depend on and is only available for Firefox. I don't keep the browser current because, even though I doubled the memory the laptop had when I got it (to the maximum that the old MB would support), and also replaced the minimal hard drive with a significantly larger hard drive
Why not virtualize this system instance? Then you don't have to worry about updating it or hardware failures. I have a piece of legacy software at my work we still need but that I've largely virtualized because for arcane reasons I cannot install it on new computers. Then I can give it as much RAM as I want. Works pretty well if your hardware is vaguely modern.
I have to say though that I've been using Firefox since before it was called Firefox and I've never had problems like what you describe. I'm on the latest version and it runs roughly as well as any other browser including Chrome and IE and Safari. I prefer Firefox mostly for personal workflow reasons but the others work fine too. I tend to avoid Safari on Windows an IE obviously isn't available outside of Windows so I tend to avoid it when possible.
I saw a shooner race on youtube on one of the lakes.
There are sailing races all the time on the Great Lakes. I have a friend who has been racing on the great lakes for decades. I did a little bit back when I was a wee lad on Lake Erie. Good fun.
Well, I don't know if I prefer fresh water over the sea.
Well, you can drink the freshwater and there aren't any sharks to worry about.:-)
Ann Arbor is nice, rings a bell.
Lots of tech companies there taking advantage of the University of Michigan graduates including Google. The half-serious joke is that the barristas all have PhDs in that town. Lots of tech companies, research groups and startups. Plus a neat town to live in. Good food, interesting people, lots of neat events. A little too obsessed with the football team 8 weekends in the fall but otherwise very cool. Check out Zingerman's Deli if you ever visit - one of the best deli's in the whole USA. No joke.
Well, I would prefer to crew such a ship:) working on my sailing education.
I rode a tallship earlier this year. They have week+ long excursions where you can crew the ship and sail along several of the Great Lakes. Pretty cool stuff.
Michigan, hm, have to visit it once, to sail on the lake of course:)
Which one?:-) Lakes Michigan, Huron, Erie or Superior are all options. About 3200 miles of coastline in all, all freshwater. Michigan is a great place to vacation. You should check out Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore which has 400 foot high sand dunes overlooking Lake Michigan and is close to a lot of very nice tourist friendly towns like Traverse City. Lots of wineries, cherry and apple orchards, festivals, great restaurants, etc. There are Tall Ships you can ride (or crew!) near Saginaw Bay. If you like it really rural go to Isle Royale up on Lake Superior or any number of places in the Upper Peninsula. Plus down south there are pro sports, college sports, college towns (Ann Arbor is really cool), casinos if you like that sort of thing, and more.
Where do you live that you can/do host a whole team? How big is such a team actually?
Michigan. I hosted about 8 riders for a week which is fairly normal for a low end pro team. They were in between races. Mostly they take care of themselves so it's just a matter of having enough space for everyone to sleep. Our house is relatively large so we had the space. They brought some air mattresses and we had some spare beds. We prepared a few meals for them just because we wanted to be supportive. Most pro cyclists don't get paid terribly well ($10-20K/year is nothing unusual) and most have side jobs to make ends meet. Cycling is a team sport so any prize money gets divided up among the riders. Only a lucky few make it to the pro-tour teams where the real money is. Frankly there are easier ways to make a living.
Companies will pay $100K for top talent if they cannot get it elsewhere for less. Companies care about the productivity in relation to the cost. Companies want value for money. If they can get the most value for money by paying one guy very handsomely then they will do that. The question is what you are doing to bring value to the table?
Want to improve the k-12 education? stop building near NFL like football stadiums and bring back music, art and other creative type classes. Stop forcing everyone to be either a Jock or a STEM student.
I coach a high school team so I get to see the budget allocated to athletics. Athletic budgets in virtually all high schools account for somewhere between 0.7% and 1.6% of the school budget depending on the particular school. There are some outliers but those numbers account for something like 98%+ of schools. Nobody is forced to play sports and very few play after high school. It's an extracurricular activity just like the marching band. There certainly are no "NFL like" stadiums in any high school I am aware of. Most athletic budgets are heavily supplemented by fundraising by booster clubs because the budgets are so low. Some colleges have a nice little side business in sports but art budgets aren't being slashed to pay for them.
Furthermore relatively few students go into STEM fields out of the total population. The entire market for STEM jobs in the US is generally held to be something like 7-14 million depending on who you believe. Clearly nobody is forcing anyone to go into STEM fields though there certainly are good reasons to encourage students to consider careers in those fields. Nothing wrong with art and other creative classes but if you want to maximize economic output you're going to find that STEM results in a vastly bigger payback. Why would you discourage that? Emphasizing STEM can in the long run result in more money for art classes.
Want to improve k-12 education? It's a lot more challenging than cutting athletic budgets and stopping encouraging people to go into STEM in favor of finger painting class.
All these parties want to make coding an "unskilled" job - not as in making it require any less skill, but as in not requiring any higher education.
I think you may not comprehend what "unskilled labor" really means. I run a company that does assembly work. I hire unskilled labor all the time. These are people who have essentially no marketable talents aside from their ability to follow very basic instructions. This does not remotely describe anyone who writes code for a living. Unskilled labor is essentially a meat robot and they do not get to use their brain much at all.
Unless they find some way to greatly automate coding far beyond what is currently possible, coding will remain skilled labor for the foreseeable future and you'll be able to make a reasonable living at it in some form or fashion. Yeah you'll have to compete like the rest of us but I suspect most good programmers can handle that. The market for code is becoming global so you have to provide value for money for what it is you do. If some guy in India can replicate what you do for $10/hour then what you do probably was of questionable value to begin with. Most programmers I've seen provide considerably more value than that.
This will make one of the few jobs that still pays decently (coding work in a select few US cities) dirt cheap,
"One of the few jobs that still pays decently"? There are lots of jobs that pay decently. Just because you don't know how to do them doesn't mean they don't exist. Without even getting out of engineering you'll find that engineering in general pays rather well and most engineering does not involve writing code. That's without even bringing accounting, finance, sales, etc into the mix. The average and median wages in the US are among the highest in the world and you think there are no decent paying jobs out there? Hell, even poor people in the US are comparatively well off compared with many places. The number of people making decent wages from programming is a tiny fraction of the good paying jobs out there. The notion that there are only a few jobs that pay decently left is not supported by the evidence.
And I can assure you: the guys riding Tour de France are eating pizza but mainly they eat pasta!
A bit here and there but as I said before it's not a staple of their diet, particularly while racing. My father is as I type this on the staff for a pro cycling team in one of the major tours so I get steady reports about what they eat during stage races. I've hosted a continental pro cycling team at my house for a week and yes I've taken them out for pizza among other things. I know exactly what they eat and how much. (it's a LOT) Yeah they'll eat pizza but generally it's a lot of pasta, cereal, fruit, protein (mostly chicken but others too), eggs, pastries, plus enough sugar to feed a flock of hummingbirds. Pies of various sorts are pretty popular with the european guys. Nutella, honey, nut butters, jelly/jam, on breads. Subway is pretty popular among fast food places. Lots of energy bars and goo and energy drinks while riding. They're fairly omnivorous but very carb heavy for obvious reasons. Since pizza is not especially carb heavy, as Cookie Monster would say - it is a sometimes food. During the big tours the teams will typically have a chef prepare their food. The amount they need to eat to keep their bodies fueled is actually so much that it is hard to do. They need calorically dense food per unit volume.
FYI hosting a team of pro cyclists is like trying to feed a swarm of locusts. You wouldn't believe how much they eat.
no, I was making an extreme example to make a point and some people have a very hard time dealing with arguments made with a sledgehammer.
Using an irrelevant example to hammer home a point isn't really a very good persuasion tactic. Yeah if we could all work out for hours a day that would be great. Problem is that the real world has other constraints that make maintaining a healthy weight difficult. Your basic point (exercise more) is a good one. You don't need hyperbole to make it.
The point I made is that exercise can make a 12 thousand calorie diet of pizza healthy.
Healthy? Not so much. Just because you can burn the calories doesn't mean that pizza magically becomes health food. The proportions and composition of the food matters for health. I assure you that the guys riding the Tour De France who burn 7-10000 calories per day aren't eating pizza as a diet staple.
Does that mean you can just eat chocolate cake all day? Probably not, there isn't enough in chocolate cake to keep a man alive. But assuming it had all the vitamins and minerals... you could live on it just fine for your whole life so long as you exercised properly.
Live? Probably. Healthfully? Probably not. Odd are you would end up with all sorts of not so fun physical problems.
It goes back to that stupid super size me documentary where the fool sat there, over ate at mc donalds, and didn't exercise. Shockingly he got fat. Never mind he would have gotten fat eating practically anything else like that.
You are aware that others have attempted to replicate his "findings" without success. Basically that "documentary" was a bunch of made up bullshit as far as we can tell. If using an irrelevant example is bad, using a false example is worse.
Simply eat what your body needs... beyond that, exercise. That is why people are getting fat. Not because they're eating too much but because they're not doing anything.
That's not nearly as easy as you so casually make it sound.
Look at what Michael Phelps ate. Something like three pizzas a day or something. And he was in great health at the time. Won Olympic gold medals and everything.
Michael Phelps is a professional athlete who worked out at a high intensity for 3-6 hours every day. I assure you that no one reading this is doing workouts anywhere close to what he did because it is not our job. You could not find an example which is less similar to the life most people have or want to have. I had a coach in college who was an Olympic gold medalist. I've seen what it takes up close and I'm pretty sure you haven't. It's not glamorous and it is very draining both physically and mentally. Guys like that can eat that much because they are burning 4-5000 calories per day. Nobody with a desk job is likely to be able to do that. Most people who would even try would burn out very quickly. Pretty much nobody is going to do it without a carrot like an Olympic medal sitting out there to motivate.
Years ago I was a division 1 college athlete so I've actually done workouts like what Mr. Phelps did and guess what? I don't have the time or the motivation to work out like that anymore. Most people have no appreciation for how hard it is because they only see game day from the comfort of their couch. When you get past about 30-35 years old the body doesn't recover like it used to and frankly your desire to go out and torture yourself diminishes significantly. Work out more? Love to except I have a job, a family, community responsibilities, and at my age the amount I can do isn't what it once was because stuff breaks on me. He'll I even actually coach the sport I played in college at the high school level and I can't find time to work out much. I'm supposed to pile on 3+ hours of exercise a night on top of a full time job and other commitments and still get any sleep? If you can do it my hat is off to you but I haven't met many people who can.
Eat less, exercise more? Yeah that's the core of it but it is NOT easy.
Why do people that read a legitimate news story always try to assume something is advertising.
Because there is a large number of the tinfoil hat crowd here. Unfortunately they aren't always wrong. There are sometimes stories that really are just PR in disguise. I've certainly seen a few of them slip through here on slashdot. I agree that this particular instance probably isn't PR but I can see that it might be hard to be sure.
If everyone blocked ads, many quality web sites would likely cease to exist, including Slashdot. Just because you can block, doesn't mean you should.
It also doesn't mean that I have some obligation to watch the ads, particularly given the privacy baggage that tends to come with them. I come to slashdot to read the content, not to watch ads or let companies track my every move. Your bad business model is not my problem. If I value what you have then I will pay for it. I pay for several magazines as well as subscriptions to several online media services I find valuable to me. Frankly most online ad services are invasive to the point of being creepy as hell. Why on earth would I support that in any way? Advertising companies are generally invasive and seem to have no clue about when they've crossed the line. If they had any ethical compass I might be more lenient but I regularly see interviews with people involved in the online ad industry and they regard website viewers like a rancher views a side of beef. No respect whatsoever.
The internet is no different than any other media, where ads pay the bills to keep the lights on and people employed to serve up news, reviews and other content you enjoy every day, essentially for free.
Media funds through ads because it is easy but it is hardly the only means available. If you want to take advantage of the easy money don't be shocked when you get pushback. Newspapers are shriveling up because they built a business model based on a distribution monopoly and easy advertising dollars. Now that the distribution monopoly is broken by the internet their business model no longer allows monopoly profits. Your business is no different and if your business model is based on people being dumb enough to not block advertising that has a blatant disregard for privacy then I have no sympathy for you.
And good sites (like Slashdot and HotHardware) know how to separate church and state, where advertising does not affect editorial opinion.
The problem is that it sometimes is hard to tell the difference. Given that fact I would be a fool not to take control of my own privacy given that I have the means.
There is only one reason for the government to step in: make it easier for smaller ISPs to start shop.
So you don't think the government should step in if the big guys are abusing their monopoly? You don't think the voters in a municipality should be allowed to decide for themselves if they want the government to establish broadband services for their own use? I know it's a popular meme to presume that governments are nothing but incompetent but the reality is that sometimes the government is the best way to get something done. If the existing ISPs find it not worthwhile to serve a population I see no credible argument why the local government couldn't fill that role if the taxpayers want them to. Might not be economically ideal but sometimes perfect is the enemy of good enough.
I'd love to start a small ISP in my area, but it is practically impossible.
Out of curiosity, why? It's a pretty tough way to make a buck. The margins in being an ISP are pretty thin unless you are able to obtain some form of monopoly. If there is any competition the margins plummet but costs don't. Huge fixed costs, lots of customer service, maintenance, etc. Maybe it's your passion but I've started a number of businesses and that is a seriously difficult business to get into. I can introduce you to several people who have actually tried to start an ISP and failed in spite of being well funded.
unlike every other kind of engineer, software engineers rarely encounter the boundaries of their knowledge
I'm not so sure about this. I agree about the arrogance but I think a more accurate statement might be that software engineers too often fail to recognize when they encounter the boundaries of their knowledge. I think they bump into those limits all the time and go merrily on their way past them. We've all seen software that was clearly developed by someone who clearly never actually had to use it to do the job it was designed for. I was staring at a piece of accounting software today that clearly was designed by someone who has never actually worked as an accountant. Either work flow was not a primary consideration or the programmer badly misunderstood how accountants go about their daily business. As you say, the consequences of their decisions are so far removed from their incentives and feedback that they have no real appreciation of how their work affects others.
3 secs should be just enough to click the "more information" link.
You apparently have never bothered to click the "more information" link. It is a pretty good approximation of useless unless you click several layers deep and shouldn't be necessary in the first place. A short description of what the patch actually is intended to do would not kill Microsoft. I shouldn't have to go hunting for that information if I want it. Yes I know how to find out what the patch is for but Microsoft has made it needlessly hard.
Put bluntly, I shouldn't have to click ANY links to see a summary of what a patch is supposed to do.
Most programmers and software engineers have the limitations you mention because consumers don't want to pay for the high quality software we want to build for them.
I would lend more credence to this statement if most software engineers actually had any actual experience designing and implementing high reliability software. Most unfortunately have very little clue what that actually means or how to do it for real. They like the idea (it's a good idea!) but have zero experience or training in the implementation techniques required. You are correct that there is an economic component to the problem but that doesn't appear to be the core problem. Even when we take money out of the equation altogether with open source software, we STILL don't see software developers using the formal engineering techniques that would result in the most reliable software. I think this is in large part because most of them have no idea whatsoever how actually develop like this. Most software is designed by trial and error because that is the only way most developers know how to do it. They still code like they did when they were a teenager in mom's basement because no one showed them a better way.
For what it's worth, this problem isn't unique to software engineers. I'm not a programmer and I see similar problems with electrical and mechanical engineers on a daily basis. Trial and error is easy to understand and quick and generally works whereas formal engineering is much harder.
When software is used in places where it has to work the first time, we'll be more than happy to adapt to the new set of circumstances.
Maybe but I doubt it. I really don't see developers genuinely pushing for more reliable development techniques in the real world. They talk about them in a "wouldn't that be nice" sort of way but they don't really try to make them happen.
Your fears are not rational. Self driving cars and robotic surgeons are tested for thousands of hours, under live conditions.
Among the other parts of my job I run a Quality Assurance department for my company and I've worked in QA for several years. It doesn't matter how much you test something if the process for designing and building the product was inadequate. QA testing is like the goalie on a hockey team - necessary but even the best goalie is going to fail if the team in front of him can't play defense. Good quality comes from good designs which are rationally and systematically well executed. Testing is a part of the equation but the correlation between hours of testing and the ultimate quality of a product is a weak one.
I had LASIK eye surgery done by a robot. I trusted it far more than I would a human surgeon.
And you looked up the hard evidence to back up this assumption for that specific procedure? (you may have - not trying to be rude) I've had LASIK as well and while I agree that it is absolutely possible for a robot to help a surgeon do a better job, I wouldn't trust it more simply because it was a robot. Furthermore there is a difference between an autonomous robot and a robotic assistive device. Most "robotic surgery" is with devices that assist and (hopefully) improve the capability of the surgeon doing the work but it is still a surgeon operating on you at the end of the day. He's just using a fancy tool to help him be a bit steadier.
Getting rocket software right is difficult precisely because there is no way to do a live test.
Umm, yes there is. It's called "doing a live test". They're often expensive but they very often are possible. We did lots of them in the early days of the space program. Companies still do them to this day. They might choose not to for economic reasons but that doesn't mean they cannot be done.
Absolute truth. Women as a group tend to be more emotionally mature, and apt to avoid senseless conflict.
I've been on the board of a non-profit which whose members are predominately women, usually middle aged women. I also run a company where about 3/4 of the employees are women. Furthermore I grew up in a household where I was the only male most of the time. I can assure you that women are as a group absolutely not more (or less) emotionally mature than men and if anything women are more likely to engage in senseless conflict. HOW they fight is very different. More passive-aggressive, backbiting, alliance building, etc. It's like watching some crappy reality vote-the-other-guy-off-the-island show. In some ways women's conflict tactics are even nastier than the ones men typically employ. Guys might actually try to beat the crap out of each other (physically or verbally) but women will try to exile each other from social groups.
Anyone who thinks women's average level of maturity is higher than men's has either been watching too many sitcoms or never been around actual women for any meaningful period of time. Women tend to react to conflict differently but that doesn't mean they are any more mature about it. Men are no better but they aren't any worse either.
A by-product is something that you produce while making something else. What do Amazon and Google make that produces storage?
A by-product is formally defined as "'output from a joint production process that is minor in quantity and/or net realizable value when compared to the main products". The search and retail services that Google and Amazon respectively provide require a lot of computers and these computers invariably have an excess of hard drive capacity even if they are using storage area networks or similar. (storage is purchased as a step function so there always is some amount of excess capacity even if very small) This means that their primary product (search and retail) generates storage as a by-product. Offering storage related services is a way to recapture some of the value of this excess storage which would otherwise merely be a cost.
Do you mean to say that they need massive amounts of storage in the first place? That doesn't mean it's free.
Nobody said it was free and by-products aren't free either though they can be very very cheap sometimes. They simply aren't as valuable in the marketplace as the primary product. From an accounting standpoint it is a sunk cost - the money has already been spent for a separate purpose and any (rational) decision making about what to do with the asset going forward should not factor into the equation.
Excess capacity for any company on any product can be normally be sold very cheaply. This is how foreign companies can sometimes sell products for what seems like ludicrously low prices even without government subsidies and why accusations of dumping are hard to prove. Once the fixed costs of the product have been recovered, anything the company can sell it for after that is pure profit. They basically can sell it for as low as their variable cost without losing money. Google's variable cost on a unit of data storage is extremely low - probably no more than a few cents per megabyte if not less. It's not free but it's pretty close. A great example of excess capacity with a low cost is text messaging for cell phones. The cost to AT&T to send you a text message is very very very low because the mechanism to send the message simply rides on some gear that has to be there anyway for a separate purpose. Once the decision to put the cell tower in is made, text messages are almost pure profit even though technically they could be considered a by-product. (now their market value is high enough that by-product might not be an accurate description anymore though...)
It may well be that Google and Amazon can maintain storage cheaper than most people, because they do have a lot of it. Google, for example, has put a great deal of research into how to have tremendous amounts of mass storage as inexpensively as possible.
I'm a cost accountant and what you said here is 100% correct. They are able to achieve economies of scale that few others can match.
That takes advantage of economies of scale, and has nothing to do with by-products.
You are conflating two accounting issues that are properly separate. Google gets storage very cheaply on a per-megabyte basis because they buy huge amounts of it and have cost effective infrastructure to make use of it. They end up with large excess amounts of it because of the nature of their primary business (not data storage) which effectively makes it a by-product to Google. From an accounting standpoint this is no different than how oil refineries generate natural gas as a by-product when refining oil into gasoline. They would have to have the storage whether or not they went into the data storage business. By going into the data storage business they are attempting to get market value for that by-product rather than simply writing it down as waste. Either way that excess capacity is a by-product. Calling Google's excess data storage capacity a by-product is logically correct.
Sure they are. I assure you that the priest who is fully supported by his congregation is taxed on his "earnings". A housewife still has to file and is responsible for the taxes on the spouses income even if they had no role in actually earning it. All those people still pay sales, use, gasoline, excise, etc taxes. It's essentially impossible to not be a taxpayer on some level.
I'm not familiar with the device, but the engineer in me want's to believe that no one would design a system with such an obvious weakness.
I run a company that makes wiring harnesses and I am an engineer (as well as an accountant) myself. I assure you that there are a LOT of idiots who would would design such a stupid system. I get to deal with some of them on a semi-regular basis.
We like to pretend here on slashdot that engineers are universally good at their job and always do quality work but I have several file cabinets full of evidence 10 feet from where I sit that proves that too many engineers are monumentally incompetent idiots. On a daily basis I see drawings that are incomplete, incorrect, badly designed, occasionally dangerous, specify incompatible or needlessly expensive parts, difficult or impossible to read, sloppy, cannot be manufactured and even just plain incoherent. I have seen precisely 7 product drawings (out of hundreds) in the last 5 years where I could build the product detailed on the print without asking even a single question or correcting some error. This is quite simply bad engineering by people who aren't very good at their jobs.
The fun part of engineering is figuring out a clever solution to a problem. The harder and less fun part of engineering (but probably the more important part) is documenting the solution in such a way that others can understand and replicate your solution and adjust/debug it if necessary. People who can write good quality work instructions are a shocking rarity even among very smart people. A lot of engineers will take easy shortcuts even when it results in a worse and more expensive product in the long run.
Last time I checked, the government doesn't earn money.
Not even remotely true. Governments are perfectly capable of earning money when they choose to. Governments can and do own things and can behave very much like private businesses if they want to. In China and Egypt and Russia (and many more) have huge swaths of the private economy are outright owned by the government. The fact that the US government generally refrains from trying to make a profit and behaving like a private enterprise doesn't mean they cannot or do not. For a time in the very recent past the US government literally owned GM and Chrysler which means the US government was for a time in the automobile manufacturing business.
Not to mention that a government can literally "print" money if they want to. The Federal Reserve technically makes a profit every year though that doesn't really mean much in reality.
Taxpayers do.
Some do and some do not. People who stay home to raise children often do not earn any money. Religious leaders are often supported by tithes or donations earned by others. Elected officials and judges are typically supported by taxpayers.
Wouldn't the Air BnB customer feedback system take care of hosts who were "bad actors"?
Not necessarily and only after the fact. A hotel chain has a reputation to maintain and generally they are operating as ongoing concerns. AirBnB users (both guests and renters) are under no such long term pressures.
It seems the government is only concerned about the bad actors from the standpoint of violation of their tax and monopoly preservation regulations.
I think that is overly cynical. The government and its elected officials generally do care that the people under their care are safe and happy, even if their ultimate motivation is just to get re-elected rather than some deep level of humanity. And a government being concerned about attempts to circumvent their powers of taxation shouldn't be terribly surprising. Taxing travelers is a great way to bring money into the area from outside without having to tax the people that elect them. Shouldn't shock anyone that such an easy taxation target would be valued highly by government officials who want to get re-elected.
If a housing unit is safe for rental for the long term, it should be safe for short term guests so I doubt that there are any genuine safety concerns.
That is true but not really relevant. If someone is considering a long term stay, chances are they are going to look the place over in person before any money changes hands. Not so with a short term hotel-style stay where you will be in and out in a short amount of time. I'm not saying AirBnB is a bad thing but what you are saying is a false equivalency in most cases. There are some serious issues to think about here is all I'm saying.
I've used Airbnb and never had a shady experience.
So clearly we can extrapolate from your experience that no one ever has had or will have a problem... [/sarcasm]
Look, most people probably will never have a problem because most people are decent law abiding sorts. Those aren't who we are worried about. It's the few really bad ones that hurt, steal from or defraud or otherwise harm someone. If your experiences have been great, that is wonderful but that doesn't mean it isn't worth worrying about both for the visitor and the host. If you want to take the risks involved in using a service like AirBnB I have no problem with that but that doesn't mean there aren't some very important public health and safety considerations to address.
Proper use of terminology is important in science and engineering.
When we get to any actual science or engineering then I will pretend to care. Until then it really is not important in a forum like slashdot to anyone but a few overly pedantic people who don't know when to pick their battles. Just because people here generally care about science and engineering doesn't mean we can't deal with a little obvious imprecision in a description of a shape. No one will be negatively affected by the fact that it isn't truly a torus and most of us are well aware that it isn't actually a torus by the proper defintion. It's like pointing out that the Saint Louis Arch is actually a catenary instead of a parabola as is commonly assumed. Interesting but ultimately not genuinely important 99.999999999% of the time.
Slashdot Mirror
I run anywhere from 30 to 150 tabs open at a time. I'd say a nice average would be around 60 tabs.
I really cannot think of a reasonable workflow where that would make sense but I'm not trying to judge. As long as you are aware that you are doing something that almost nobody else does or even thinks is a good idea then go for it. Could be useful as a stress test I guess. I've been using Firefox (and Mozilla and Netscape before that) for a long long time and I've never seen behavior like what you describe but then I never thought it was a good idea to have 150 tabs open at once either.
My question would be, what have you done to isolate the problem? Are you sure it has anything to do with the number of browser tabs or is that merely coincidental? Are specific websites causing the problem? If something has changed is that something in Firefox or is it something in how the data is being served? You seem to be blaming Firefox but it isn't clear from your description that Firefox is the unquestionable source of the problem. It certainly should be on the list of possibilities but it isn't certain.
When you have lots of tabs open (and I open hundreds of tabs)
Ummm, why? No disrespect intended at all but aside from stress testing the performance limits of the software I really can't imagine a reason why you would want to do that. The overhead of managing that many tabs would be far greater than any benefit. You certainly cannot actually use that many tabs for any genuinely productive purpose.
It should never take longer than 30 seconds and and 100% CPU to open a tab (like when you have 200 tabs open and 1800 tabs unloaded/hibernating).
Please explain to me any vaguely reasonable use case where you could possibly need that many tabs active. I promise to keep an open mind but I seriously cannot think of any reason I'd ever want to do that. I'm pretty sure I've never opened more than 20-30 tabs at once and I rarely open more than ten or so in normal usage.
I dare not keep the Firefox browser current, and I'm using a plug-in that I depend on and is only available for Firefox. I don't keep the browser current because, even though I doubled the memory the laptop had when I got it (to the maximum that the old MB would support), and also replaced the minimal hard drive with a significantly larger hard drive
Why not virtualize this system instance? Then you don't have to worry about updating it or hardware failures. I have a piece of legacy software at my work we still need but that I've largely virtualized because for arcane reasons I cannot install it on new computers. Then I can give it as much RAM as I want. Works pretty well if your hardware is vaguely modern.
I have to say though that I've been using Firefox since before it was called Firefox and I've never had problems like what you describe. I'm on the latest version and it runs roughly as well as any other browser including Chrome and IE and Safari. I prefer Firefox mostly for personal workflow reasons but the others work fine too. I tend to avoid Safari on Windows an IE obviously isn't available outside of Windows so I tend to avoid it when possible.
I saw a shooner race on youtube on one of the lakes.
There are sailing races all the time on the Great Lakes. I have a friend who has been racing on the great lakes for decades. I did a little bit back when I was a wee lad on Lake Erie. Good fun.
Well, I don't know if I prefer fresh water over the sea.
Well, you can drink the freshwater and there aren't any sharks to worry about. :-)
Ann Arbor is nice, rings a bell.
Lots of tech companies there taking advantage of the University of Michigan graduates including Google. The half-serious joke is that the barristas all have PhDs in that town. Lots of tech companies, research groups and startups. Plus a neat town to live in. Good food, interesting people, lots of neat events. A little too obsessed with the football team 8 weekends in the fall but otherwise very cool. Check out Zingerman's Deli if you ever visit - one of the best deli's in the whole USA. No joke.
Well, I would prefer to crew such a ship :) working on my sailing education.
I rode a tallship earlier this year. They have week+ long excursions where you can crew the ship and sail along several of the Great Lakes. Pretty cool stuff.
Michigan, hm, have to visit it once, to sail on the lake of course :)
Which one? :-) Lakes Michigan, Huron, Erie or Superior are all options. About 3200 miles of coastline in all, all freshwater. Michigan is a great place to vacation. You should check out Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore which has 400 foot high sand dunes overlooking Lake Michigan and is close to a lot of very nice tourist friendly towns like Traverse City. Lots of wineries, cherry and apple orchards, festivals, great restaurants, etc. There are Tall Ships you can ride (or crew!) near Saginaw Bay. If you like it really rural go to Isle Royale up on Lake Superior or any number of places in the Upper Peninsula. Plus down south there are pro sports, college sports, college towns (Ann Arbor is really cool), casinos if you like that sort of thing, and more.
Where do you live that you can/do host a whole team? How big is such a team actually?
Michigan. I hosted about 8 riders for a week which is fairly normal for a low end pro team. They were in between races. Mostly they take care of themselves so it's just a matter of having enough space for everyone to sleep. Our house is relatively large so we had the space. They brought some air mattresses and we had some spare beds. We prepared a few meals for them just because we wanted to be supportive. Most pro cyclists don't get paid terribly well ($10-20K/year is nothing unusual) and most have side jobs to make ends meet. Cycling is a team sport so any prize money gets divided up among the riders. Only a lucky few make it to the pro-tour teams where the real money is. Frankly there are easier ways to make a living.
Companies dont like to pay $100k+ for top talent
Companies will pay $100K for top talent if they cannot get it elsewhere for less. Companies care about the productivity in relation to the cost. Companies want value for money. If they can get the most value for money by paying one guy very handsomely then they will do that. The question is what you are doing to bring value to the table?
Want to improve the k-12 education? stop building near NFL like football stadiums and bring back music, art and other creative type classes. Stop forcing everyone to be either a Jock or a STEM student.
I coach a high school team so I get to see the budget allocated to athletics. Athletic budgets in virtually all high schools account for somewhere between 0.7% and 1.6% of the school budget depending on the particular school. There are some outliers but those numbers account for something like 98%+ of schools. Nobody is forced to play sports and very few play after high school. It's an extracurricular activity just like the marching band. There certainly are no "NFL like" stadiums in any high school I am aware of. Most athletic budgets are heavily supplemented by fundraising by booster clubs because the budgets are so low. Some colleges have a nice little side business in sports but art budgets aren't being slashed to pay for them.
Furthermore relatively few students go into STEM fields out of the total population. The entire market for STEM jobs in the US is generally held to be something like 7-14 million depending on who you believe. Clearly nobody is forcing anyone to go into STEM fields though there certainly are good reasons to encourage students to consider careers in those fields. Nothing wrong with art and other creative classes but if you want to maximize economic output you're going to find that STEM results in a vastly bigger payback. Why would you discourage that? Emphasizing STEM can in the long run result in more money for art classes.
Want to improve k-12 education? It's a lot more challenging than cutting athletic budgets and stopping encouraging people to go into STEM in favor of finger painting class.
All these parties want to make coding an "unskilled" job - not as in making it require any less skill, but as in not requiring any higher education.
I think you may not comprehend what "unskilled labor" really means. I run a company that does assembly work. I hire unskilled labor all the time. These are people who have essentially no marketable talents aside from their ability to follow very basic instructions. This does not remotely describe anyone who writes code for a living. Unskilled labor is essentially a meat robot and they do not get to use their brain much at all.
Unless they find some way to greatly automate coding far beyond what is currently possible, coding will remain skilled labor for the foreseeable future and you'll be able to make a reasonable living at it in some form or fashion. Yeah you'll have to compete like the rest of us but I suspect most good programmers can handle that. The market for code is becoming global so you have to provide value for money for what it is you do. If some guy in India can replicate what you do for $10/hour then what you do probably was of questionable value to begin with. Most programmers I've seen provide considerably more value than that.
This will make one of the few jobs that still pays decently (coding work in a select few US cities) dirt cheap,
"One of the few jobs that still pays decently"? There are lots of jobs that pay decently. Just because you don't know how to do them doesn't mean they don't exist. Without even getting out of engineering you'll find that engineering in general pays rather well and most engineering does not involve writing code. That's without even bringing accounting, finance, sales, etc into the mix. The average and median wages in the US are among the highest in the world and you think there are no decent paying jobs out there? Hell, even poor people in the US are comparatively well off compared with many places. The number of people making decent wages from programming is a tiny fraction of the good paying jobs out there. The notion that there are only a few jobs that pay decently left is not supported by the evidence.
And I can assure you: the guys riding Tour de France are eating pizza but mainly they eat pasta!
A bit here and there but as I said before it's not a staple of their diet, particularly while racing. My father is as I type this on the staff for a pro cycling team in one of the major tours so I get steady reports about what they eat during stage races. I've hosted a continental pro cycling team at my house for a week and yes I've taken them out for pizza among other things. I know exactly what they eat and how much. (it's a LOT) Yeah they'll eat pizza but generally it's a lot of pasta, cereal, fruit, protein (mostly chicken but others too), eggs, pastries, plus enough sugar to feed a flock of hummingbirds. Pies of various sorts are pretty popular with the european guys. Nutella, honey, nut butters, jelly/jam, on breads. Subway is pretty popular among fast food places. Lots of energy bars and goo and energy drinks while riding. They're fairly omnivorous but very carb heavy for obvious reasons. Since pizza is not especially carb heavy, as Cookie Monster would say - it is a sometimes food. During the big tours the teams will typically have a chef prepare their food. The amount they need to eat to keep their bodies fueled is actually so much that it is hard to do. They need calorically dense food per unit volume.
FYI hosting a team of pro cyclists is like trying to feed a swarm of locusts. You wouldn't believe how much they eat.
no, I was making an extreme example to make a point and some people have a very hard time dealing with arguments made with a sledgehammer.
Using an irrelevant example to hammer home a point isn't really a very good persuasion tactic. Yeah if we could all work out for hours a day that would be great. Problem is that the real world has other constraints that make maintaining a healthy weight difficult. Your basic point (exercise more) is a good one. You don't need hyperbole to make it.
The point I made is that exercise can make a 12 thousand calorie diet of pizza healthy.
Healthy? Not so much. Just because you can burn the calories doesn't mean that pizza magically becomes health food. The proportions and composition of the food matters for health. I assure you that the guys riding the Tour De France who burn 7-10000 calories per day aren't eating pizza as a diet staple.
Does that mean you can just eat chocolate cake all day? Probably not, there isn't enough in chocolate cake to keep a man alive. But assuming it had all the vitamins and minerals... you could live on it just fine for your whole life so long as you exercised properly.
Live? Probably. Healthfully? Probably not. Odd are you would end up with all sorts of not so fun physical problems.
It goes back to that stupid super size me documentary where the fool sat there, over ate at mc donalds, and didn't exercise. Shockingly he got fat. Never mind he would have gotten fat eating practically anything else like that.
You are aware that others have attempted to replicate his "findings" without success. Basically that "documentary" was a bunch of made up bullshit as far as we can tell. If using an irrelevant example is bad, using a false example is worse.
Simply eat what your body needs... beyond that, exercise. That is why people are getting fat. Not because they're eating too much but because they're not doing anything.
That's not nearly as easy as you so casually make it sound.
Look at what Michael Phelps ate. Something like three pizzas a day or something. And he was in great health at the time. Won Olympic gold medals and everything.
Michael Phelps is a professional athlete who worked out at a high intensity for 3-6 hours every day. I assure you that no one reading this is doing workouts anywhere close to what he did because it is not our job. You could not find an example which is less similar to the life most people have or want to have. I had a coach in college who was an Olympic gold medalist. I've seen what it takes up close and I'm pretty sure you haven't. It's not glamorous and it is very draining both physically and mentally. Guys like that can eat that much because they are burning 4-5000 calories per day. Nobody with a desk job is likely to be able to do that. Most people who would even try would burn out very quickly. Pretty much nobody is going to do it without a carrot like an Olympic medal sitting out there to motivate.
Years ago I was a division 1 college athlete so I've actually done workouts like what Mr. Phelps did and guess what? I don't have the time or the motivation to work out like that anymore. Most people have no appreciation for how hard it is because they only see game day from the comfort of their couch. When you get past about 30-35 years old the body doesn't recover like it used to and frankly your desire to go out and torture yourself diminishes significantly. Work out more? Love to except I have a job, a family, community responsibilities, and at my age the amount I can do isn't what it once was because stuff breaks on me. He'll I even actually coach the sport I played in college at the high school level and I can't find time to work out much. I'm supposed to pile on 3+ hours of exercise a night on top of a full time job and other commitments and still get any sleep? If you can do it my hat is off to you but I haven't met many people who can.
Eat less, exercise more? Yeah that's the core of it but it is NOT easy.
Why do people that read a legitimate news story always try to assume something is advertising.
Because there is a large number of the tinfoil hat crowd here. Unfortunately they aren't always wrong. There are sometimes stories that really are just PR in disguise. I've certainly seen a few of them slip through here on slashdot. I agree that this particular instance probably isn't PR but I can see that it might be hard to be sure.
If everyone blocked ads, many quality web sites would likely cease to exist, including Slashdot. Just because you can block, doesn't mean you should.
It also doesn't mean that I have some obligation to watch the ads, particularly given the privacy baggage that tends to come with them. I come to slashdot to read the content, not to watch ads or let companies track my every move. Your bad business model is not my problem. If I value what you have then I will pay for it. I pay for several magazines as well as subscriptions to several online media services I find valuable to me. Frankly most online ad services are invasive to the point of being creepy as hell. Why on earth would I support that in any way? Advertising companies are generally invasive and seem to have no clue about when they've crossed the line. If they had any ethical compass I might be more lenient but I regularly see interviews with people involved in the online ad industry and they regard website viewers like a rancher views a side of beef. No respect whatsoever.
The internet is no different than any other media, where ads pay the bills to keep the lights on and people employed to serve up news, reviews and other content you enjoy every day, essentially for free.
Media funds through ads because it is easy but it is hardly the only means available. If you want to take advantage of the easy money don't be shocked when you get pushback. Newspapers are shriveling up because they built a business model based on a distribution monopoly and easy advertising dollars. Now that the distribution monopoly is broken by the internet their business model no longer allows monopoly profits. Your business is no different and if your business model is based on people being dumb enough to not block advertising that has a blatant disregard for privacy then I have no sympathy for you.
And good sites (like Slashdot and HotHardware) know how to separate church and state, where advertising does not affect editorial opinion.
The problem is that it sometimes is hard to tell the difference. Given that fact I would be a fool not to take control of my own privacy given that I have the means.
There is only one reason for the government to step in: make it easier for smaller ISPs to start shop.
So you don't think the government should step in if the big guys are abusing their monopoly? You don't think the voters in a municipality should be allowed to decide for themselves if they want the government to establish broadband services for their own use? I know it's a popular meme to presume that governments are nothing but incompetent but the reality is that sometimes the government is the best way to get something done. If the existing ISPs find it not worthwhile to serve a population I see no credible argument why the local government couldn't fill that role if the taxpayers want them to. Might not be economically ideal but sometimes perfect is the enemy of good enough.
I'd love to start a small ISP in my area, but it is practically impossible.
Out of curiosity, why? It's a pretty tough way to make a buck. The margins in being an ISP are pretty thin unless you are able to obtain some form of monopoly. If there is any competition the margins plummet but costs don't. Huge fixed costs, lots of customer service, maintenance, etc. Maybe it's your passion but I've started a number of businesses and that is a seriously difficult business to get into. I can introduce you to several people who have actually tried to start an ISP and failed in spite of being well funded.
unlike every other kind of engineer, software engineers rarely encounter the boundaries of their knowledge
I'm not so sure about this. I agree about the arrogance but I think a more accurate statement might be that software engineers too often fail to recognize when they encounter the boundaries of their knowledge. I think they bump into those limits all the time and go merrily on their way past them. We've all seen software that was clearly developed by someone who clearly never actually had to use it to do the job it was designed for. I was staring at a piece of accounting software today that clearly was designed by someone who has never actually worked as an accountant. Either work flow was not a primary consideration or the programmer badly misunderstood how accountants go about their daily business. As you say, the consequences of their decisions are so far removed from their incentives and feedback that they have no real appreciation of how their work affects others.
3 secs should be just enough to click the "more information" link.
You apparently have never bothered to click the "more information" link. It is a pretty good approximation of useless unless you click several layers deep and shouldn't be necessary in the first place. A short description of what the patch actually is intended to do would not kill Microsoft. I shouldn't have to go hunting for that information if I want it. Yes I know how to find out what the patch is for but Microsoft has made it needlessly hard.
Put bluntly, I shouldn't have to click ANY links to see a summary of what a patch is supposed to do.
Most programmers and software engineers have the limitations you mention because consumers don't want to pay for the high quality software we want to build for them.
I would lend more credence to this statement if most software engineers actually had any actual experience designing and implementing high reliability software. Most unfortunately have very little clue what that actually means or how to do it for real. They like the idea (it's a good idea!) but have zero experience or training in the implementation techniques required. You are correct that there is an economic component to the problem but that doesn't appear to be the core problem. Even when we take money out of the equation altogether with open source software, we STILL don't see software developers using the formal engineering techniques that would result in the most reliable software. I think this is in large part because most of them have no idea whatsoever how actually develop like this. Most software is designed by trial and error because that is the only way most developers know how to do it. They still code like they did when they were a teenager in mom's basement because no one showed them a better way.
For what it's worth, this problem isn't unique to software engineers. I'm not a programmer and I see similar problems with electrical and mechanical engineers on a daily basis. Trial and error is easy to understand and quick and generally works whereas formal engineering is much harder.
When software is used in places where it has to work the first time, we'll be more than happy to adapt to the new set of circumstances.
Maybe but I doubt it. I really don't see developers genuinely pushing for more reliable development techniques in the real world. They talk about them in a "wouldn't that be nice" sort of way but they don't really try to make them happen.
Your fears are not rational. Self driving cars and robotic surgeons are tested for thousands of hours, under live conditions.
Among the other parts of my job I run a Quality Assurance department for my company and I've worked in QA for several years. It doesn't matter how much you test something if the process for designing and building the product was inadequate. QA testing is like the goalie on a hockey team - necessary but even the best goalie is going to fail if the team in front of him can't play defense. Good quality comes from good designs which are rationally and systematically well executed. Testing is a part of the equation but the correlation between hours of testing and the ultimate quality of a product is a weak one.
I had LASIK eye surgery done by a robot. I trusted it far more than I would a human surgeon.
And you looked up the hard evidence to back up this assumption for that specific procedure? (you may have - not trying to be rude) I've had LASIK as well and while I agree that it is absolutely possible for a robot to help a surgeon do a better job, I wouldn't trust it more simply because it was a robot. Furthermore there is a difference between an autonomous robot and a robotic assistive device. Most "robotic surgery" is with devices that assist and (hopefully) improve the capability of the surgeon doing the work but it is still a surgeon operating on you at the end of the day. He's just using a fancy tool to help him be a bit steadier.
Getting rocket software right is difficult precisely because there is no way to do a live test.
Umm, yes there is. It's called "doing a live test". They're often expensive but they very often are possible. We did lots of them in the early days of the space program. Companies still do them to this day. They might choose not to for economic reasons but that doesn't mean they cannot be done.
Absolute truth. Women as a group tend to be more emotionally mature, and apt to avoid senseless conflict.
I've been on the board of a non-profit which whose members are predominately women, usually middle aged women. I also run a company where about 3/4 of the employees are women. Furthermore I grew up in a household where I was the only male most of the time. I can assure you that women are as a group absolutely not more (or less) emotionally mature than men and if anything women are more likely to engage in senseless conflict. HOW they fight is very different. More passive-aggressive, backbiting, alliance building, etc. It's like watching some crappy reality vote-the-other-guy-off-the-island show. In some ways women's conflict tactics are even nastier than the ones men typically employ. Guys might actually try to beat the crap out of each other (physically or verbally) but women will try to exile each other from social groups.
Anyone who thinks women's average level of maturity is higher than men's has either been watching too many sitcoms or never been around actual women for any meaningful period of time. Women tend to react to conflict differently but that doesn't mean they are any more mature about it. Men are no better but they aren't any worse either.
A by-product is something that you produce while making something else. What do Amazon and Google make that produces storage?
A by-product is formally defined as "'output from a joint production process that is minor in quantity and/or net realizable value when compared to the main products". The search and retail services that Google and Amazon respectively provide require a lot of computers and these computers invariably have an excess of hard drive capacity even if they are using storage area networks or similar. (storage is purchased as a step function so there always is some amount of excess capacity even if very small) This means that their primary product (search and retail) generates storage as a by-product. Offering storage related services is a way to recapture some of the value of this excess storage which would otherwise merely be a cost.
Do you mean to say that they need massive amounts of storage in the first place? That doesn't mean it's free.
Nobody said it was free and by-products aren't free either though they can be very very cheap sometimes. They simply aren't as valuable in the marketplace as the primary product. From an accounting standpoint it is a sunk cost - the money has already been spent for a separate purpose and any (rational) decision making about what to do with the asset going forward should not factor into the equation.
Excess capacity for any company on any product can be normally be sold very cheaply. This is how foreign companies can sometimes sell products for what seems like ludicrously low prices even without government subsidies and why accusations of dumping are hard to prove. Once the fixed costs of the product have been recovered, anything the company can sell it for after that is pure profit. They basically can sell it for as low as their variable cost without losing money. Google's variable cost on a unit of data storage is extremely low - probably no more than a few cents per megabyte if not less. It's not free but it's pretty close. A great example of excess capacity with a low cost is text messaging for cell phones. The cost to AT&T to send you a text message is very very very low because the mechanism to send the message simply rides on some gear that has to be there anyway for a separate purpose. Once the decision to put the cell tower in is made, text messages are almost pure profit even though technically they could be considered a by-product. (now their market value is high enough that by-product might not be an accurate description anymore though...)
It may well be that Google and Amazon can maintain storage cheaper than most people, because they do have a lot of it. Google, for example, has put a great deal of research into how to have tremendous amounts of mass storage as inexpensively as possible.
I'm a cost accountant and what you said here is 100% correct. They are able to achieve economies of scale that few others can match.
That takes advantage of economies of scale, and has nothing to do with by-products.
You are conflating two accounting issues that are properly separate. Google gets storage very cheaply on a per-megabyte basis because they buy huge amounts of it and have cost effective infrastructure to make use of it. They end up with large excess amounts of it because of the nature of their primary business (not data storage) which effectively makes it a by-product to Google. From an accounting standpoint this is no different than how oil refineries generate natural gas as a by-product when refining oil into gasoline. They would have to have the storage whether or not they went into the data storage business. By going into the data storage business they are attempting to get market value for that by-product rather than simply writing it down as waste. Either way that excess capacity is a by-product. Calling Google's excess data storage capacity a by-product is logically correct.
Then they aren't taxpayers, are they?
Sure they are. I assure you that the priest who is fully supported by his congregation is taxed on his "earnings". A housewife still has to file and is responsible for the taxes on the spouses income even if they had no role in actually earning it. All those people still pay sales, use, gasoline, excise, etc taxes. It's essentially impossible to not be a taxpayer on some level.
I'm not familiar with the device, but the engineer in me want's to believe that no one would design a system with such an obvious weakness.
I run a company that makes wiring harnesses and I am an engineer (as well as an accountant) myself. I assure you that there are a LOT of idiots who would would design such a stupid system. I get to deal with some of them on a semi-regular basis.
We like to pretend here on slashdot that engineers are universally good at their job and always do quality work but I have several file cabinets full of evidence 10 feet from where I sit that proves that too many engineers are monumentally incompetent idiots. On a daily basis I see drawings that are incomplete, incorrect, badly designed, occasionally dangerous, specify incompatible or needlessly expensive parts, difficult or impossible to read, sloppy, cannot be manufactured and even just plain incoherent. I have seen precisely 7 product drawings (out of hundreds) in the last 5 years where I could build the product detailed on the print without asking even a single question or correcting some error. This is quite simply bad engineering by people who aren't very good at their jobs.
The fun part of engineering is figuring out a clever solution to a problem. The harder and less fun part of engineering (but probably the more important part) is documenting the solution in such a way that others can understand and replicate your solution and adjust/debug it if necessary. People who can write good quality work instructions are a shocking rarity even among very smart people. A lot of engineers will take easy shortcuts even when it results in a worse and more expensive product in the long run.
Last time I checked, the government doesn't earn money.
Not even remotely true. Governments are perfectly capable of earning money when they choose to. Governments can and do own things and can behave very much like private businesses if they want to. In China and Egypt and Russia (and many more) have huge swaths of the private economy are outright owned by the government. The fact that the US government generally refrains from trying to make a profit and behaving like a private enterprise doesn't mean they cannot or do not. For a time in the very recent past the US government literally owned GM and Chrysler which means the US government was for a time in the automobile manufacturing business.
Not to mention that a government can literally "print" money if they want to. The Federal Reserve technically makes a profit every year though that doesn't really mean much in reality.
Taxpayers do.
Some do and some do not. People who stay home to raise children often do not earn any money. Religious leaders are often supported by tithes or donations earned by others. Elected officials and judges are typically supported by taxpayers.
Wouldn't the Air BnB customer feedback system take care of hosts who were "bad actors"?
Not necessarily and only after the fact. A hotel chain has a reputation to maintain and generally they are operating as ongoing concerns. AirBnB users (both guests and renters) are under no such long term pressures.
It seems the government is only concerned about the bad actors from the standpoint of violation of their tax and monopoly preservation regulations.
I think that is overly cynical. The government and its elected officials generally do care that the people under their care are safe and happy, even if their ultimate motivation is just to get re-elected rather than some deep level of humanity. And a government being concerned about attempts to circumvent their powers of taxation shouldn't be terribly surprising. Taxing travelers is a great way to bring money into the area from outside without having to tax the people that elect them. Shouldn't shock anyone that such an easy taxation target would be valued highly by government officials who want to get re-elected.
If a housing unit is safe for rental for the long term, it should be safe for short term guests so I doubt that there are any genuine safety concerns.
That is true but not really relevant. If someone is considering a long term stay, chances are they are going to look the place over in person before any money changes hands. Not so with a short term hotel-style stay where you will be in and out in a short amount of time. I'm not saying AirBnB is a bad thing but what you are saying is a false equivalency in most cases. There are some serious issues to think about here is all I'm saying.
I've used Airbnb and never had a shady experience.
So clearly we can extrapolate from your experience that no one ever has had or will have a problem... [/sarcasm]
Look, most people probably will never have a problem because most people are decent law abiding sorts. Those aren't who we are worried about. It's the few really bad ones that hurt, steal from or defraud or otherwise harm someone. If your experiences have been great, that is wonderful but that doesn't mean it isn't worth worrying about both for the visitor and the host. If you want to take the risks involved in using a service like AirBnB I have no problem with that but that doesn't mean there aren't some very important public health and safety considerations to address.
Proper use of terminology is important in science and engineering.
When we get to any actual science or engineering then I will pretend to care. Until then it really is not important in a forum like slashdot to anyone but a few overly pedantic people who don't know when to pick their battles. Just because people here generally care about science and engineering doesn't mean we can't deal with a little obvious imprecision in a description of a shape. No one will be negatively affected by the fact that it isn't truly a torus and most of us are well aware that it isn't actually a torus by the proper defintion. It's like pointing out that the Saint Louis Arch is actually a catenary instead of a parabola as is commonly assumed. Interesting but ultimately not genuinely important 99.999999999% of the time.