The US has a $4 trillion manufacturing sector. The need for engineers isn't going to go away at all. The need for specific types of engineers will fluctuate but there will always be jobs for engineers.
Accounting. Skilled trades. Nursing, or possibly MD. Lawyer. Maybe even an MBA if I can stomach having one in the family.
A MBA is a degree, not a profession. A cheap shot like that might get a laugh but it also makes you sound a bit ignorant. People get a MBA to learn how to manage a business but their primary professions vary wildly. People with MBA degrees work in finance, accounting, engineering, sales, marketing, IT and of course general management. It's not a single profession and never will be. People get the degree to learn certain skills that are outside the scope of their primary profession. Just because you are a smart engineer or a doctor or a lawyer doesn't mean you know the first thing about how to make a budget or to calculate a net present value or how to market your company. One way to learn these skills is through formal schooling and a MBA is one way to do that.
I don't understand why urban areas have to subsidize rural areas at the expense of our priorities.
Just because someone is living in a rural area doesn't mean what they are doing is unimportant. Farms serve an incredibly important purpose and necessarily are located in rural areas. Just because they are rural doesn't mean they don't need to communicate with the rest of the world. Or did you think all that food that arrives in your comfy urban dwelling got there by magic? Nothing wrong with living in a city but let's not pretend that those who live in a remote area are any less deserving.
Claiming that renters (there are renters outside the city, BTW) are paying property tax is also as dumb as claiming that when I take out a loan or use a credit card,
You got this one wrong. You have to examine the incidence of taxation. The property owner has to pay taxes but he pays this by passing the cost on to the people renting the property. The actual tax incidence is on the renters, not the landlord. The amount of the tax is irrelevant in this case in determining who is the one ultimately burdened with the tax even if the amount of the tax is just one penny.
For the same reason this is why gasoline taxes are fundamentally a regressive tax (hurts the poor more than the rich). The oil companies do not absorb the cost, they merely pass it along to their customers, more of whom are poor than are wealthy.
There is a cap on the SS tax because there's a cap on benefits.
That would be a more credible argument if they amount paid in equaled the amount paid out in benefits to each beneficiary. Most beneficiaries receive more in payments than they pay to social security. And let's be frank, there is a cap on SS tax because the wealthy are a powerful lobby and have undue influence when it comes to financial legislation. Your argument is just some sugar to help get rid of the icky taste of reality.
Start doing studies. It is simply not that expensive to run and maintain cable, not even in rural areas.
Where I live (semi-rural outskirts of a major metro) the labor to string cable costs $1/foot and burying cable costs $8/foot. (source is a comcast field engineer) My nearest neighbor lives 600 feet away and the length of the line between my house and then next one is about 1200 linear feet due to how the line is routed. For someone on a farm this could easily be 3000+ linear feet. So there is your $3000 right there without even getting into the cost of the wire itself, the switchgear, signal boosters, customer service, engineering and the rest.
Now I have no idea if the subsidies provided are appropriate to the actual cost but it is genuinely expensive to run cable to rural locations.
Does it provide a boost over simply carrying a USB stick in your keychain?
Very often yes. There are drawbacks to any storage system. There are times when a USB key is a great solution but they aren't the optimal solution in many circumstances.
Some of the problems with a USB stick: 1) Easily lost/destroyed/stolen/forgotten 2) Must be backed up or synchronized (online storage automatically serves this function) 3) Not usable with some devices (smartphone/tablet) 4) Requires me to carry a physical device 5) I don't always carry keys with me nor do I want to
Dropbox doesn't have encryption built-in, and this seems like a truly obvious feature. It's always been a mystery to me why they haven't implemented it.
Several reasons come immediately to mind. 1) Implementation Cost- implementation would cost a sizeable amount at the scale and reliability needed. 2) Support - if they encrypt everything they are creating the need to support (with attendant costs) the use of that encryption. Encryption is very difficult to make simple. If you don't believe me, try to explain public key encryption to your grandmother. 3) Demand - their service is popular without offering encryption so it's fair to question whether the marginal revenue increase is worth the extra cost. 4) Legal - Offering bulletproof encryption could cause them all sorts of legal headaches. Better to let third parties handle it. 5) Performance - encryption requires computing resources which could degrade the performance of their product unacceptably 6) Credibility - how can you ever be sure they do not have the encryption key and thus defeating the entire purpose of the encryption?
I'm sure I can come up with more. I'm not shocked at all that they haven't offered secure encryption - the business case for it is pretty weak.
I'm NOT going to pay DropBox hundreds of dollars a year just for the privilege of replacing my hard drive.
Nobody does that. What they do pay them a lot of money for is convenient access to the contents of their hard drive anywhere they happen to be standing. Without some sort of accessible online storage files located only on my hard drive at home may as well be located on the moon when I am at work. Online storage is one solution to that problem and pretty clearly one that a lot of people like. While online storage has its drawbacks, so does lugging around a storage device everywhere you go. Pick the poison that works for you.
If you don't need access to your files from anywhere with internet access then of course Dropbox and its competitors would be a waste of money. While I don't care at all about Dropbox specifically, what they offer is genuinely valuable to many people. For documents where I am unconcerned about security or privacy, it is a nice option to have. If I'm concerned about any of the drawbacks of their service, there are other solutions available.
Then what's the point of having the computer if all you're doing is printing reports with it?
You've never actually tried to type something on a typewriter have you? No one who has used both a word processor and a typewriter would possibly ask such a ridiculous question.
As with any technology, it should have something better to offer than what is existing, at a comparable cost. Or much better at higher cost
Surprisingly it often doesn't work that way. Read up on disruptive innovation, particularly the work of Clayton Christiansen. Many new technologies are worse (at first) in many ways than the things they ultimately replace. As you correctly point out there are some noteworthy drawbacks to services like Dropbox - privacy and security not the least among them. On the other hand it provides a major boost to efficiency and convenience to those who need access to the same documents in multiple physical locations. For many data needs the drawbacks of online storage are heavily outweighed by the advantages, even taking unit pricing into consideration.
So what you actually have is greater cost, plus security concerns... for a rather minor amount of convenience.
Minor to you perhaps. Huge to many others. Having a convenient way to have all your data available anytime you connect to the internet is not a "minor convenience". For many of us (including myself) it is hugely helpful. While I could not care less about Dropbox specifically, the service they offer is clearly something that many people are looking for. It's very popularity belies your argument that it doesn't provide much convenience.
Closed loop design is not a part of the Russian way, apparently.
Trust me when I say that is not remotely unique to the Russians. You wouldn't believe how poorly designed some of the products I deal with are. Virtually every drawing we get requires some amount of redesign because it either can't be built or will work badly. We had a customer that made heart lung machines who didn't even have an accurate bill of materials. I'm not talking just a little bit off either - they had NO idea what most of the part numbers were. We had to tell them the parts that were in their own product.
The design of the key and the tooling and processes used to produce it. Speaking generally you use behavior shaping constraints which prevent incorrect assembly. Proper design, interlocks, jigs and fixtures, automated tooling, and lots of other tools are used to eliminate mistakes.
Anything that relies on visual inspection by a human WILL eventually have an error. My company makes wire harnesses and every time we are forced to rely on a visual inspection process there inevitably are some errors. Most of the time the need for these visual inspection can be done away with with product design and in some cases some tooling. However many engineers can't be bothered to design for assembly or the cost of the mistake proofing is not justified by cost of an error.
That's the point of art. If it doesn't have a message, what's the point?
Beauty. Entertainment. Financial gain. Preserving a moment. Art does not have to have a message though it certainly can have one - good art frequently does. Sometimes the artist isn't trying to communicate any message but the viewer of the art may create their own "message" based on their own life experience. Sometimes a picture is just a picture to the person creating it. Frankly I think "artists" who think the only purpose to art is to communicate some sort of political pandering are rather tiresome and rarely very clever. This especially includes those who use their artistic fame to communicate some message outside of their art. They have every right to do it but it's usually pretty pathetic.
It should be possible, without a law degree, to deduct the laws of a society directly from common sense.
It should be possible but in practice it (unfortunately) is not. Our society is too complex and there are too many corner cases for any non-trivial problem to keep things simple. Furthermore you and I might very easily differ on what constitutes common sense and even if we do agree we could easily come to differing conclusions based on the exact same facts. I agree with you in principle but the real world just isn't as simple as you and I would like it to be. If you write a general rule trusting to "common sense" to fill in the details what you will end up with is a bunch of corner cases and people taking advantage of loopholes and causing problems until such time as the law is sufficiently clarified either through legal precedent or additional laws. The complexity will inevitably come.
The problem is that there is always going to be someone that calls any war or anything military illegitimate.
And those people have a right to be heard. Sometimes they are right. Even if they are not right they still have a right to be heard and to be able to judge the facts for themselves.
Also, surveillance is important even in times of peace.
Agreed but that does not mean that any surveillance for any reason by any party is automatically acceptable.
Since secrets are important to a government, regardless of your opinion, and since courts are public and have no current ability to hear cases where the matter is deemed secret by those charged, there is no oversight at all.
It does not matter what is important to the government. What matters is what is important to the people represented by that government. I care not a tiny bit if the restrictions on our government makes their job more difficult. My civil liberties are more important than their ability to do their job. In fact collectively our civil liberties are more important than their lives.
Your resistance to court oversight that can keep things that need to be secret secret,is supporting the status quo where government has virtually unlimited power because any abuses can simply be called "national security" and court oversight is completely avoided.
Court oversight without some reasonable way to make decisions known and thus accountable to the people is tyranny. While not every decision needs to be made public immediately, a secret organization reporting to a secret court making secret decisions which are kept secret indefinitely is completely unacceptable. While there are legitimate issues of security that need to be considered, they cannot be considered without any accountability to the people.
Sometimes but frequently laws are passed that contradict public opinion. We the public do not vote on every issue. Instead we elect agents to represent us but they do not have to represent the majority opinion and often do not. Furthermore if they did merely follow the majority opinion there would be numerous instances of injustice against groups in the minority. Sometimes what is right or what is necessary isn't always popular and sometimes not even legal. Ask Mr. Snowden.
The NSA is organizationally under the DoD but it is an independent organization that's almost entirely civilian.
Whether or not the NSA is staffed by civilians is irrelevant as to whether it is a part of the DoD. The DoD employs huge numbers of people who do not wear uniforms. If the Secretary of Defense issues and order to the NSA they will follow it. Hence they are a part of the DoD.
To say they are a military organization is really stretching the truth.
It isn't stretching the truth even a little bit. Their chain of command is military. Period. End of story.
You should know basic programming upon exiting high school.,
Programming has been a significant part of my job in years past. You have no idea what my background is.
So, what tool do you use to diff your spreadsheets? How do you ensure that there isn't a bug in a column of otherwise "identical" formulas?... blah blah
There are a multitude of ways to error check spreadsheets. RTFM. There also are plenty of tools to replicate formulas (or formatting or numbers). Furthermore you are inappropriately applying data modeling techniques that typically do not apply to what people need out of a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets aren't the right tool for every job but they are a great tool for many.
Spreadsheets provide a semblance of productivity and an illusion of efficiency.
Spoken well and truly like someone who doesn't do my job but thinks they know how to do it better than me. Seriously, you have no idea what you are talking about here. For what I use a spreadsheet for there simply is not a better tool available. If there were I would use that instead.
It's all too easy to fuck up if you're not careful, and unfortunately Excel by default doesn't come with policies that prevent you from fucking up.
The specific problems are different but there is NO programming tool that prevents mistakes.
That's one little reason why our financial industry is so fucked up. People trust Excel results, no questions asked.
No they don't and if you actually knew anything about the financial industry you would know that. You seem to have little idea what it is they are modeling and even less idea what level of precision is required for their models. People in finance use spreadsheets because they are GOOD ENOUGH for modeling the data they need. Many of them are perfectly capable of creating a database or using Matlab should the need arise but for their specific needs a spreadsheet is the best available tool for the job. Spreadsheets are easy to use, can provide a perfectly satisfactory tool for ad-hoc analysis (most of what they do), and they cost a reasonable amount of money.
Indeed. You really shouldn't need to have to get a gaming GPU to run a spreadsheet. Hopefully
If you are doing trivial calculations then you are probably right. However many of us do more with spreadsheets than making grocery lists. There are quite a few problems that benefit from parallel processing. Since the GPU is probably sitting mostly idle if you have a spreadsheet up, why not do something useful with it?
"Apple is planning to have its ARM processors manufactured by TSMC — a move that blogger Andy Patrizio thinks is a colossal mistake.
Why would Intel want to manufacture ARM processors? They might make some money in the short term but the real profits are in owning the intellectual property behind the design. Intel would basically be subsidizing their biggest competitor. It would be akin to asking Microsoft to start their own linux distro or like Apple switching to Android. It makes their product undifferentiated and kills their margins.
Intel always has the option to start making ARM processors in the future but they'd be pretty foolish to do it at this point.
Am I the only one that notices how crazy that sounds?
Why should it sound crazy? If you've got some parallel computations to make you'd be a fool not to use the GPU. There are many problems that could take advantage of the extra computing horsepower that are perfectly appropriate to do on a spreadsheet.
Thats not the issue. If your spreadsheet is SO larger that on a MODERN CPU, its slow... you're doing it wrong.
It is a relatively trivial matter to make calculations on a dataset slow regardless of the tool used. I work with datasets and related calculations all the time that would make for slow calculations if you hand coded them in assembler. The mere fact that it is slow in a spreadsheet as well has nothing inherently to do with it being worked on in a spreadsheet. Now if the spreadsheet can't handle 65K rows by 65K columns then it shouldn't offer that size table as an option. But most can handle datasets that size and larger without too much trouble. For rapid data modeling and ad-hoc analysis a spreadsheet can be pretty hard to beat.
When people go wrong using spreadsheets it's usually one of a few ways. The one I see the most is when they take what should be a prototype analysis and turn it into a production tool. If you need to put a bunch of buttons and other interface tools on a spreadsheet THEN you are doing it wrong. The second is when they try to take analyzed data involving more than 3 dimensions. While it can be done it rarely is a good idea. Another I see is if they try to have more than one person working on the spreadsheet. If the dataset is truly huge or you require multi-user access or you need to interface with other applications then by all means use something other than a spreadsheet.
If your spreadsheet needs a gpu to speed up calculations, you are probably misusing spreadsheets.
Or it just means that you have some pretty complicated calculations. More computing horsepower never hurts.
I know most accountants love the spreadsheet and they make insanely complicated things using spreadsheets pushing it far beyond what these are designed to do.
I happen to be an accountant as well as an engineer. What pray tell do you think spreadsheets were designed to do? (hint - it involves rapid data modeling) They aren't much use if the only problems you solve are toy problems. Plus they require relatively little training to use effectively. Someone can be trained to solve real world problems MUCH easier than with most other tools. Most of the problems I'm asked to solve are ad-hoc investigations into specific questions. I shouldn't need a four year degree on Comp-Sci to accomplish a bit of data modeling.
But if you have a spreadsheet that needs this much of cpu time to recompute, you should probably be using a full fledged data base with multiple precomputed indexing.
I use some rather complicated spreadsheets. A database would be of no advantage whatsoever for 99.9% of what I use a spreadsheet for. Furthermore a database would be a lot slower to develop, harder to update, and require significant user interface development. If I'm crunching sales data or generating financial projections a spreadsheet is almost always the easiest and most useful tool for the job.
Databases come into the picture when: A) other applications need to interface with the data, B) the dataset becomes truly enormous, or C) the number of dimensions in the data exceeds 2 to 3. Sometimes I use databases. Most of the time they would be a waste of money, brains and time. Frequently when I actually need a database I'll create a mock up of the tables and calculations on a spreadsheet first which lets me work out the structure much more easily.
While it is certainly possible to use a spreadsheet inappropriately, a spreadsheet should be able to handle a rather large amount of data and calculations before it chokes.
Isn't it interesting that "statist" national healthcare systems, pharmaceutical patent busting, publicly-funded medical research etc, has was, WAY better outcomes than the joke privatized hell that passes for a healthcare system in America?
In no small part those results are due to those state managed health care systems getting a free ride on the back of research conducted by US companies. 12 of the top 20 medical device companies are based in the US. The US spends about $140 billion on medical research each year (roughly half from industry, a third from government and the rest from various philanthropic organizations) and much of the rest of the world gets to avoid this cost. It's much easier and cheaper to wait for someone else to figure out the cure and then just copy it.
While I'm not going to defend the flaws in the US healthcare system (which you rightly point out are many), part of the reason is because the US is paying the much of the cost of all the research everyone else gets to enjoy.
Unless I'm mistaken, that's what they used to say about chemotherapy.
They still do. Chemotherapy is quite dangerous and even in the best cases is pretty brutal on the patient. I've had the misfortune to see several people close to me go through chemo and it is an awful treatment with no guarantee of success. In some cases the chemo itself can be lethal.
Slashdot Mirror
Worldwide? Maybe. In the US? Not so certain.
The US has a $4 trillion manufacturing sector. The need for engineers isn't going to go away at all. The need for specific types of engineers will fluctuate but there will always be jobs for engineers.
Accounting. Skilled trades. Nursing, or possibly MD. Lawyer. Maybe even an MBA if I can stomach having one in the family.
A MBA is a degree, not a profession. A cheap shot like that might get a laugh but it also makes you sound a bit ignorant. People get a MBA to learn how to manage a business but their primary professions vary wildly. People with MBA degrees work in finance, accounting, engineering, sales, marketing, IT and of course general management. It's not a single profession and never will be. People get the degree to learn certain skills that are outside the scope of their primary profession. Just because you are a smart engineer or a doctor or a lawyer doesn't mean you know the first thing about how to make a budget or to calculate a net present value or how to market your company. One way to learn these skills is through formal schooling and a MBA is one way to do that.
I don't understand why urban areas have to subsidize rural areas at the expense of our priorities.
Just because someone is living in a rural area doesn't mean what they are doing is unimportant. Farms serve an incredibly important purpose and necessarily are located in rural areas. Just because they are rural doesn't mean they don't need to communicate with the rest of the world. Or did you think all that food that arrives in your comfy urban dwelling got there by magic? Nothing wrong with living in a city but let's not pretend that those who live in a remote area are any less deserving.
Claiming that renters (there are renters outside the city, BTW) are paying property tax is also as dumb as claiming that when I take out a loan or use a credit card,
You got this one wrong. You have to examine the incidence of taxation. The property owner has to pay taxes but he pays this by passing the cost on to the people renting the property. The actual tax incidence is on the renters, not the landlord. The amount of the tax is irrelevant in this case in determining who is the one ultimately burdened with the tax even if the amount of the tax is just one penny.
For the same reason this is why gasoline taxes are fundamentally a regressive tax (hurts the poor more than the rich). The oil companies do not absorb the cost, they merely pass it along to their customers, more of whom are poor than are wealthy.
There is a cap on the SS tax because there's a cap on benefits.
That would be a more credible argument if they amount paid in equaled the amount paid out in benefits to each beneficiary. Most beneficiaries receive more in payments than they pay to social security. And let's be frank, there is a cap on SS tax because the wealthy are a powerful lobby and have undue influence when it comes to financial legislation. Your argument is just some sugar to help get rid of the icky taste of reality.
Start doing studies. It is simply not that expensive to run and maintain cable, not even in rural areas.
Where I live (semi-rural outskirts of a major metro) the labor to string cable costs $1/foot and burying cable costs $8/foot. (source is a comcast field engineer) My nearest neighbor lives 600 feet away and the length of the line between my house and then next one is about 1200 linear feet due to how the line is routed. For someone on a farm this could easily be 3000+ linear feet. So there is your $3000 right there without even getting into the cost of the wire itself, the switchgear, signal boosters, customer service, engineering and the rest.
Now I have no idea if the subsidies provided are appropriate to the actual cost but it is genuinely expensive to run cable to rural locations.
Does it provide a boost over simply carrying a USB stick in your keychain?
Very often yes. There are drawbacks to any storage system. There are times when a USB key is a great solution but they aren't the optimal solution in many circumstances.
Some of the problems with a USB stick:
1) Easily lost/destroyed/stolen/forgotten
2) Must be backed up or synchronized (online storage automatically serves this function)
3) Not usable with some devices (smartphone/tablet)
4) Requires me to carry a physical device
5) I don't always carry keys with me nor do I want to
Dropbox doesn't have encryption built-in, and this seems like a truly obvious feature. It's always been a mystery to me why they haven't implemented it.
Several reasons come immediately to mind.
1) Implementation Cost- implementation would cost a sizeable amount at the scale and reliability needed.
2) Support - if they encrypt everything they are creating the need to support (with attendant costs) the use of that encryption. Encryption is very difficult to make simple. If you don't believe me, try to explain public key encryption to your grandmother.
3) Demand - their service is popular without offering encryption so it's fair to question whether the marginal revenue increase is worth the extra cost.
4) Legal - Offering bulletproof encryption could cause them all sorts of legal headaches. Better to let third parties handle it.
5) Performance - encryption requires computing resources which could degrade the performance of their product unacceptably
6) Credibility - how can you ever be sure they do not have the encryption key and thus defeating the entire purpose of the encryption?
I'm sure I can come up with more. I'm not shocked at all that they haven't offered secure encryption - the business case for it is pretty weak.
I'm NOT going to pay DropBox hundreds of dollars a year just for the privilege of replacing my hard drive.
Nobody does that. What they do pay them a lot of money for is convenient access to the contents of their hard drive anywhere they happen to be standing. Without some sort of accessible online storage files located only on my hard drive at home may as well be located on the moon when I am at work. Online storage is one solution to that problem and pretty clearly one that a lot of people like. While online storage has its drawbacks, so does lugging around a storage device everywhere you go. Pick the poison that works for you.
If you don't need access to your files from anywhere with internet access then of course Dropbox and its competitors would be a waste of money. While I don't care at all about Dropbox specifically, what they offer is genuinely valuable to many people. For documents where I am unconcerned about security or privacy, it is a nice option to have. If I'm concerned about any of the drawbacks of their service, there are other solutions available.
Then what's the point of having the computer if all you're doing is printing reports with it?
You've never actually tried to type something on a typewriter have you? No one who has used both a word processor and a typewriter would possibly ask such a ridiculous question.
As with any technology, it should have something better to offer than what is existing, at a comparable cost. Or much better at higher cost
Surprisingly it often doesn't work that way. Read up on disruptive innovation, particularly the work of Clayton Christiansen. Many new technologies are worse (at first) in many ways than the things they ultimately replace. As you correctly point out there are some noteworthy drawbacks to services like Dropbox - privacy and security not the least among them. On the other hand it provides a major boost to efficiency and convenience to those who need access to the same documents in multiple physical locations. For many data needs the drawbacks of online storage are heavily outweighed by the advantages, even taking unit pricing into consideration.
So what you actually have is greater cost, plus security concerns... for a rather minor amount of convenience.
Minor to you perhaps. Huge to many others. Having a convenient way to have all your data available anytime you connect to the internet is not a "minor convenience". For many of us (including myself) it is hugely helpful. While I could not care less about Dropbox specifically, the service they offer is clearly something that many people are looking for. It's very popularity belies your argument that it doesn't provide much convenience.
To place a keylogger on a typewriter you need physical access to the typewriter... to place a keylogger on a computer you need the internet...
And if said computer is never connected to any networks how do you propose to install said keylogger?
Closed loop design is not a part of the Russian way, apparently.
Trust me when I say that is not remotely unique to the Russians. You wouldn't believe how poorly designed some of the products I deal with are. Virtually every drawing we get requires some amount of redesign because it either can't be built or will work badly. We had a customer that made heart lung machines who didn't even have an accurate bill of materials. I'm not talking just a little bit off either - they had NO idea what most of the part numbers were. We had to tell them the parts that were in their own product.
What stops the key from being installed wrongly?
The design of the key and the tooling and processes used to produce it. Speaking generally you use behavior shaping constraints which prevent incorrect assembly. Proper design, interlocks, jigs and fixtures, automated tooling, and lots of other tools are used to eliminate mistakes.
Anything that relies on visual inspection by a human WILL eventually have an error. My company makes wire harnesses and every time we are forced to rely on a visual inspection process there inevitably are some errors. Most of the time the need for these visual inspection can be done away with with product design and in some cases some tooling. However many engineers can't be bothered to design for assembly or the cost of the mistake proofing is not justified by cost of an error.
That's the point of art. If it doesn't have a message, what's the point?
Beauty. Entertainment. Financial gain. Preserving a moment. Art does not have to have a message though it certainly can have one - good art frequently does. Sometimes the artist isn't trying to communicate any message but the viewer of the art may create their own "message" based on their own life experience. Sometimes a picture is just a picture to the person creating it. Frankly I think "artists" who think the only purpose to art is to communicate some sort of political pandering are rather tiresome and rarely very clever. This especially includes those who use their artistic fame to communicate some message outside of their art. They have every right to do it but it's usually pretty pathetic.
It should be possible, without a law degree, to deduct the laws of a society directly from common sense.
It should be possible but in practice it (unfortunately) is not. Our society is too complex and there are too many corner cases for any non-trivial problem to keep things simple. Furthermore you and I might very easily differ on what constitutes common sense and even if we do agree we could easily come to differing conclusions based on the exact same facts. I agree with you in principle but the real world just isn't as simple as you and I would like it to be. If you write a general rule trusting to "common sense" to fill in the details what you will end up with is a bunch of corner cases and people taking advantage of loopholes and causing problems until such time as the law is sufficiently clarified either through legal precedent or additional laws. The complexity will inevitably come.
The problem is that there is always going to be someone that calls any war or anything military illegitimate.
And those people have a right to be heard. Sometimes they are right. Even if they are not right they still have a right to be heard and to be able to judge the facts for themselves.
Also, surveillance is important even in times of peace.
Agreed but that does not mean that any surveillance for any reason by any party is automatically acceptable.
Since secrets are important to a government, regardless of your opinion, and since courts are public and have no current ability to hear cases where the matter is deemed secret by those charged, there is no oversight at all.
It does not matter what is important to the government. What matters is what is important to the people represented by that government. I care not a tiny bit if the restrictions on our government makes their job more difficult. My civil liberties are more important than their ability to do their job. In fact collectively our civil liberties are more important than their lives.
Your resistance to court oversight that can keep things that need to be secret secret,is supporting the status quo where government has virtually unlimited power because any abuses can simply be called "national security" and court oversight is completely avoided.
Court oversight without some reasonable way to make decisions known and thus accountable to the people is tyranny. While not every decision needs to be made public immediately, a secret organization reporting to a secret court making secret decisions which are kept secret indefinitely is completely unacceptable. While there are legitimate issues of security that need to be considered, they cannot be considered without any accountability to the people.
Laws are passed based on public opinion
Sometimes but frequently laws are passed that contradict public opinion. We the public do not vote on every issue. Instead we elect agents to represent us but they do not have to represent the majority opinion and often do not. Furthermore if they did merely follow the majority opinion there would be numerous instances of injustice against groups in the minority. Sometimes what is right or what is necessary isn't always popular and sometimes not even legal. Ask Mr. Snowden.
The NSA is organizationally under the DoD but it is an independent organization that's almost entirely civilian.
Whether or not the NSA is staffed by civilians is irrelevant as to whether it is a part of the DoD. The DoD employs huge numbers of people who do not wear uniforms. If the Secretary of Defense issues and order to the NSA they will follow it. Hence they are a part of the DoD.
To say they are a military organization is really stretching the truth.
It isn't stretching the truth even a little bit. Their chain of command is military. Period. End of story.
You should know basic programming upon exiting high school.,
Programming has been a significant part of my job in years past. You have no idea what my background is.
So, what tool do you use to diff your spreadsheets? How do you ensure that there isn't a bug in a column of otherwise "identical" formulas?... blah blah
There are a multitude of ways to error check spreadsheets. RTFM. There also are plenty of tools to replicate formulas (or formatting or numbers). Furthermore you are inappropriately applying data modeling techniques that typically do not apply to what people need out of a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets aren't the right tool for every job but they are a great tool for many.
Spreadsheets provide a semblance of productivity and an illusion of efficiency.
Spoken well and truly like someone who doesn't do my job but thinks they know how to do it better than me. Seriously, you have no idea what you are talking about here. For what I use a spreadsheet for there simply is not a better tool available. If there were I would use that instead.
It's all too easy to fuck up if you're not careful, and unfortunately Excel by default doesn't come with policies that prevent you from fucking up.
The specific problems are different but there is NO programming tool that prevents mistakes.
That's one little reason why our financial industry is so fucked up. People trust Excel results, no questions asked.
No they don't and if you actually knew anything about the financial industry you would know that. You seem to have little idea what it is they are modeling and even less idea what level of precision is required for their models. People in finance use spreadsheets because they are GOOD ENOUGH for modeling the data they need. Many of them are perfectly capable of creating a database or using Matlab should the need arise but for their specific needs a spreadsheet is the best available tool for the job. Spreadsheets are easy to use, can provide a perfectly satisfactory tool for ad-hoc analysis (most of what they do), and they cost a reasonable amount of money.
Indeed. You really shouldn't need to have to get a gaming GPU to run a spreadsheet. Hopefully
If you are doing trivial calculations then you are probably right. However many of us do more with spreadsheets than making grocery lists. There are quite a few problems that benefit from parallel processing. Since the GPU is probably sitting mostly idle if you have a spreadsheet up, why not do something useful with it?
"Apple is planning to have its ARM processors manufactured by TSMC — a move that blogger Andy Patrizio thinks is a colossal mistake.
Why would Intel want to manufacture ARM processors? They might make some money in the short term but the real profits are in owning the intellectual property behind the design. Intel would basically be subsidizing their biggest competitor. It would be akin to asking Microsoft to start their own linux distro or like Apple switching to Android. It makes their product undifferentiated and kills their margins.
Intel always has the option to start making ARM processors in the future but they'd be pretty foolish to do it at this point.
Am I the only one that notices how crazy that sounds?
Why should it sound crazy? If you've got some parallel computations to make you'd be a fool not to use the GPU. There are many problems that could take advantage of the extra computing horsepower that are perfectly appropriate to do on a spreadsheet.
Thats not the issue. If your spreadsheet is SO larger that on a MODERN CPU, its slow ... you're doing it wrong.
It is a relatively trivial matter to make calculations on a dataset slow regardless of the tool used. I work with datasets and related calculations all the time that would make for slow calculations if you hand coded them in assembler. The mere fact that it is slow in a spreadsheet as well has nothing inherently to do with it being worked on in a spreadsheet. Now if the spreadsheet can't handle 65K rows by 65K columns then it shouldn't offer that size table as an option. But most can handle datasets that size and larger without too much trouble. For rapid data modeling and ad-hoc analysis a spreadsheet can be pretty hard to beat.
When people go wrong using spreadsheets it's usually one of a few ways. The one I see the most is when they take what should be a prototype analysis and turn it into a production tool. If you need to put a bunch of buttons and other interface tools on a spreadsheet THEN you are doing it wrong. The second is when they try to take analyzed data involving more than 3 dimensions. While it can be done it rarely is a good idea. Another I see is if they try to have more than one person working on the spreadsheet. If the dataset is truly huge or you require multi-user access or you need to interface with other applications then by all means use something other than a spreadsheet.
If your spreadsheet needs a gpu to speed up calculations, you are probably misusing spreadsheets.
Or it just means that you have some pretty complicated calculations. More computing horsepower never hurts.
I know most accountants love the spreadsheet and they make insanely complicated things using spreadsheets pushing it far beyond what these are designed to do.
I happen to be an accountant as well as an engineer. What pray tell do you think spreadsheets were designed to do? (hint - it involves rapid data modeling) They aren't much use if the only problems you solve are toy problems. Plus they require relatively little training to use effectively. Someone can be trained to solve real world problems MUCH easier than with most other tools. Most of the problems I'm asked to solve are ad-hoc investigations into specific questions. I shouldn't need a four year degree on Comp-Sci to accomplish a bit of data modeling.
But if you have a spreadsheet that needs this much of cpu time to recompute, you should probably be using a full fledged data base with multiple precomputed indexing.
I use some rather complicated spreadsheets. A database would be of no advantage whatsoever for 99.9% of what I use a spreadsheet for. Furthermore a database would be a lot slower to develop, harder to update, and require significant user interface development. If I'm crunching sales data or generating financial projections a spreadsheet is almost always the easiest and most useful tool for the job.
Databases come into the picture when: A) other applications need to interface with the data, B) the dataset becomes truly enormous, or C) the number of dimensions in the data exceeds 2 to 3. Sometimes I use databases. Most of the time they would be a waste of money, brains and time. Frequently when I actually need a database I'll create a mock up of the tables and calculations on a spreadsheet first which lets me work out the structure much more easily.
While it is certainly possible to use a spreadsheet inappropriately, a spreadsheet should be able to handle a rather large amount of data and calculations before it chokes.
Isn't it interesting that "statist" national healthcare systems, pharmaceutical patent busting, publicly-funded medical research etc, has was, WAY better outcomes than the joke privatized hell that passes for a healthcare system in America?
In no small part those results are due to those state managed health care systems getting a free ride on the back of research conducted by US companies. 12 of the top 20 medical device companies are based in the US. The US spends about $140 billion on medical research each year (roughly half from industry, a third from government and the rest from various philanthropic organizations) and much of the rest of the world gets to avoid this cost. It's much easier and cheaper to wait for someone else to figure out the cure and then just copy it.
While I'm not going to defend the flaws in the US healthcare system (which you rightly point out are many), part of the reason is because the US is paying the much of the cost of all the research everyone else gets to enjoy.
Unless I'm mistaken, that's what they used to say about chemotherapy.
They still do. Chemotherapy is quite dangerous and even in the best cases is pretty brutal on the patient. I've had the misfortune to see several people close to me go through chemo and it is an awful treatment with no guarantee of success. In some cases the chemo itself can be lethal.