Amen, brother.
My take is that the "bad N word" is now more of a slur on the people who used it, than the people targeted by it.
And that makes removing it suspect in some ways -- could it be we don't want to admit where we came from?
Diversity is GOOD -- coming at things from different directions in an honest way is a great way to find truth quicker.
To the extent there are differences, and my work in a mixed race jazz band pointed some up, they are good and compliment one another. A lot of the differences turned into one race helping the other get it right in life. It was good all around -- it went both ways.
Justification is easy to invent, it writes itself. Everyone already knows how to use XXX! No, they don't really, and if taking 10 minutes or even a whole day to lean something new is that expensive or difficult, should we not question why they have jobs at all then? We never do, though.
For medium skill sets, I've had the interesting experience of recently hiring a new secretary to do some work here, and set her up with (of course) a linux box, OO, all that. Taught her how to use even a PCB layout software in a couple days, amazing. But what really kicked my butt, was after a day or two, she comes up with "I like this, what version of windows is it, I've never seen anything work so smoothly before".
Yeah, big learning curve. Now, she's smart, to be sure. Shouldn't everyone commanding a really good paycheck be? If you're too dumb to move from one thing to another, why can't 5 of you be replaced by one smart person. As a small businessman, I think like that, because if I don't make money, none of us eat - I don't have the bernake's printing presses, you know. But in the long run, neither will they, you can only take that game so far.
Gotta dump these folks who think they are entitled to getting paid for not having to think and learn. Hiring is tough right now. It's not that you don't get applications (gawd, you get buried). It's that no on worth hiring applies, and it just costs money to sort all the junk CVs and figure out why this or that loser got laid off their last job -- because as a business owner (and we all know this) -- your business is your people, you take care of the best or you fail. If you are forced to cut, you never cut the good people.....
If that offends some currently out of jobs, I'm sorry, but not that sorry. Too many of you have shown up here looking for work, and turning out to know only a tiny fraction of what they claimed, and when tried, unable to do as they claim, and/or do it so slowly I may as well do it myself. You may think you're entitled, but no, you just got a good ride for awhile -- doesn't mean you deserve it in return for nothing out of you forever, the times don't permit that for any business that's going to STAY in business.
I've been giving similar ideas quite a lot of thought over the last few decades, and I have to admit I can't think of a good way to get from here to say, the Star Trek world -- with or without major disruption along the way. Obviously with the tech we have or soon will, one could contemplate all the worlds (physical) needs being cranked out with little or no human labor at all -- including getting it to you.
Before any arch capitalists start drooling, the poor guy who built that world would suddenly find himself with no paying customers. No need for jobs, ergo, no jobs. No jobs, no one has money under the current system of things (which is the only one that's ever worked, even "command economies" have always had capitalist black markets that made them go -- then they collapsed).
But being the capitalist who gets the closest first looks like paying, so here we are toying around and bumping off the edges of that world, forever denied entry....I just can't think of a good way (or truly, any way that works) to get there from here, and I'm smart and have thought about it, as I said, for over a decade.
Everytime I think I come up with a solution, it turns out to require some basic change in human nature; health care, so called, has many of the same issues in different forms. Why does everyone in this country have to cost about a quarter million in care bucks at the last few months (if they have insurance) and why do we let the debate say "health care == insurance" when the very reason treatment is so expensive is because it can be charged high for -- because of insurance, else everyone would default on that low value proposition. Why should a repairman of humans make many times what a repairman of home appliances, autos, stereos, anything else -- those other guys have to guarantee their work, physicians and nurses don't. (sorry about the OT, but this IS slashdot)
At any rate, myself and several other smart people have been discussing both problems for some years, in an adversarial brainstorming fashion (we are all pros at that) and no one has come up with any idea that can't be torn to ribbons in minutes by some other smart person. This is a real problem! Very few other things have slowed any of these people down, ever, nothing like this. If anyone, anyone has a solution to those issues that doesn't require a change to what history tells us is pretty immutable human nature to work, I'd personally love to hear about it.
Diablo, you get it, but it seems no one else does. You could make a computer comparable to one a few years back, say, with incredible battery life, but no one does. Marketing, and to some extent, the idiocy of customers who bought into that marketing. I find for example that with decent code, an old pentium 3 is just fine, and nowadays you could make a very low power consumption machine with equivalent computational power, such that batteries would last quite awhile.
But it wouldn't allow people to believe that since they had the shinest, newest, hottest thing, it would increase their chances of getting laid, so only people who actually give a crap about the functionality and usefulness for other than jacking off kinds of things would ever buy it, and due to sociological realities, that's a tiny fraction of the people with money in their pockets.
It is inevitable that wireless is going to eat some power, and just turning it off when not in use doesn't solve it all, as when a link is lost, any real protocol has to spend some time, and therefore power, getting connected again with a few messages back and forth, to eliminate issues with more than one user in the same bandwidth. It doesn't necessarily take more power at higher frequencies (theoretically), actually there's more noise to overcome at lower frequencies in the limit -- atmospherics etc. Comparing high to higher, well, the issues are different as we are talking absorption coefficients in building materials etc. It's bandwidth that takes power to get good enough SNR, this is real basic information theory, and yes, I'm a signal processing engineer (now retired). With directional antennas, wow, you can really cut power down (20 db not uncommon, 100::1 for those of you who don't have much clue) but then, talk about the "holding it right" issues!
I in fact have some specially built p3 tualitin systems that don't need fans, draw about 9 whole watts for the CPU, and maybe 20 for the box, and this is years-old tech. I still use them and will bemoan their loss when they finally die. One could do far better now, of course, but the real issue is -- can you make money selling them. Most people are too stupid to realize the value of something that "just works" in this way -- never having to worry about low battery in this case. Or buying new ones all the time when the ones you had reach their cycle lifetime limits.
Part of it is also ignorant designers, usually ones with little experience. I have a Dell laptop from back in the day which makes a good example. They put in gonzo CPU, gonzo graphics (for the time), it was thick and heavy, and would roast your goodies, you really couldn't use it on your lap, and battery life was terrible. Despite all that, it was dog-slow. Why? Slow memory, and very slow disk, to "save power". That's simple ignorance on the part of the designer. A design that could get things done quick and then power down when not doing much would have made a lot more sense, even then, and I custom built some non-pc type systems for miltary use back in the day that did just that. It turned out to be cheaper per mip to go ahead and use the quick stuff, and just turn it off when not needed because the way we did it (all static ram for example) there was no time penalty for coming back out of sleep. Zero. Compared to the CMOS of the day, it kicked totally because when you really needed it, it really had the stuff. The rest of the time, it drew diddly power, just like CMOS.
Sad to say, even in that day, the army was more intelligent than today's brainwashed consumer? Ow, that stings.
Of course, bloatware like windows didn't exist then, and we predated color on most home computers quite a bit by using a tiny sony color TV as the monitor, and our own graphics generator. We didn't know what we were "missing" I suppose.
Agree -- it's not worth that much. Question is, and we can't know yet, is Goldman going to be short it while/when/if they pull in enough other investors...
I online trade all day every day these days, and now it's software that's the hobby. One of the better pieces of advice I ever got from a broker, back when I had one (online now, all the way) was "watch Goldman". Don't buy them, and sure don't listen to what they say -- watch them. You can make money riding the moves they make when they manipulate markets. Lots. And it cuts down their profits if you do it right, which always feels special.
That's what I do anyway. I hope FB goes public so I can short it too. It's only a matter of time before some of the privacy issues take them down a notch. I know younger people seem not to care now -- but they'll reach a place of being denied a job or credit due to it, and get tired of targeted marketing, and that turkey is going down...
If the code you're writing is for internal use only, you don't have to publish your source and changes.
That sounds like FUD and isn't what GPL is about. If you're selling software that contains GPL stuff, well then, that's another issue. GPL only kicks in if you distribute the code. If you merely use it, that's another story.
One company I developed for used a Linux opsys for a video surveillance system on COTS hardware. They didn't change the GPL code (no need it worked fine as is), just added applications, which they didn't have to make available under GPL. I got paid, no one has complained, where's the beef?
Someone seems to have either bought into the idea the GPL is utterly viral, or is trying to perpetuate FUD here.
Back when I was doing one of the first VOIP solutions (this one mostly for LAN use) we dreamed up something like Skype, that would work in similar fashion. The big advantage is that it could be done by any reasonably large group of users and no phone company at all need be involved -- no charge to anyone, no control over anyone by some big monolithic corp. It could still be done, and I wonder why no one in the open source area has managed?
Critical mass issue; selling the first phone is a bear -- who you gonna call? Once going, a completely free open source solution would keep going just fine I'd think. I'd suppose the main problems would be with security, outside actors diddling supernodes to break it, as some companies would have a large interest in not having it as a competitor? Not sure how you'd handle those issues.
That would take actual legwork, you know, doing what we pay them for, rather than sitting around eating donuts or watching pron at work.
Someone would have to actually read the spam, pretend to be a customer, spend a little money, watch where it goes, and generally do basic cop work, which is a fair PITA.
Too many people have been too affected by TV cop performance. In truth, there aren't any super-detectives that always find the guy, most cops are content to come and clean up after some major crime has happened, and most perps just get away with whatever.
There is no Columbo, no Kojak, no Jack Bauer, no CSI -- that's all fantasy. Maybe that's good, maybe not. Most departments are run by politics, and jurisdiction here is a real hairy issue. Probably the feds ought to take a little time off the "war on this and that" and do some real war on things that actually matter, rather than things that get press -- and in this case they might be surprised how much positive press they'd get were they effective. It probably looks too much like whack-a-mole to them at this point, because even though it costs everyone money, it only costs any one entity "some" but not huge money as a fraction of operating costs. I'd bet a bunch of these companies are actually pretty small outfits that move around a lot. I mean, how much setup does it take to be a pusher of fake sex drugs? One guy with an idea and a box of fake pills in mom's basement? Things like that are hard to catch up with, and seem like too-small busts to make some cop get a promotion, even though setting an example with a few might cool their jets nicely. It's how the IRS works for example -- a few really public busts, a few threats of audits, and everyone lays down and pays taxes out of fear.
I guess the patent has finally run out on the original, which I played with in the early '70s for some military EE work I was doing then for a beltway bandit. Just a big bunch of shift registers moving magnetic "bubbles" or "domains" round and round. The thing had a (for the time) decent capacity and storage capability, for example, you could get just about floppy drive performance out of a chip (and some other parts to make all the clocks)....It was of course still far slower than the ram of the time.
To this old fart, it looks the same, just a different way to fab the thing. But hey what do I know?
One thing I do know. Current scientists aren't very well educated on what has gone before. About a year ago I saw the "breakthrough" development of a "plasma transistor" that I also had in a 1950's book on my shelf....happens pretty frequently these days. These guys are so specialized they don't even know the history of their own fields anymore, much less a broad history.
Reminds me of Hari Seldon and "the galactic empire is crumbling" to be frank. Not even up to Heinlein standards!
No, I don't think it's on purpose (though one could hope) -- but I think that may be the result of this if they push it hard enough.
At some point it becomes a kind of national issue, when a troll comes out of the woodwork and basically says "all your work for the last couple decades is mine".
At some point the powers that be can't let it happen even if technically/legally it's true in some odd way. Think of the implied surprise wealth transfer by legal force this implies if taken to the limit -- bigger than most whole large companies (including MS).
As we say in stock trading, bears do well, bulls do well, pigs get slaughtered. Whether PA and interval are seriously trying to own the internet or not, it sure looks like waking the system up and pointing some serious flaws in it, which one could hope lead to improvements. Maybe a vain hope, dunno.
Has been covering this one. Allen's Interval has patented things that absolutely everyone has been using for decades, if not longer, and this may just help with the fight against software patents generally, as virtually no one is untouched -- he's only sued less the half the relevant world so far -- big media is a possible target for some of his claims as well. GoodLuckWithThat, they are even feared by lawmakers. Let's hope they go all out so this stupid mess can be ended.
Here's the groklaw current link.
Agreed, it's what myself and many others have been doing for years. Too many people don't or can't do that. Hard to drive across an ocean for example. But if more people simply refused that crap altogether (and maybe wrote some letters to tell them about it) it would help for sure.
Notice how TSA quietly turned all that crap off during the Thanksgiving holiday because a lot of people were going to make noise about it?
Even demand a gratuitous grope? Would that not have been the time it was needed most? Kinda says it all, doesn't it -- and no planes blew up.
Any terrorist smart enough to be scary would just attack something else -- even the queue for airline security, but with some imagination there are much better and easier targets. Heck, you only have to read some Tom Clancy for a few ideas there. But evidently these guys pride themselves on being locked into the 7th century or thereabouts. Lucky for us. The IRA was a lot more dangerous.
In my case, about nil I'd pop the wrong guy (or even more likely, anyone at all), as I am well trained and win competitions and suchlike.
I help teach the CCW course in my area (SW Virginia) along with a couple of even more professionals (ex cops). We really take people through it to make sure they're someone we'd not be afraid of having a gun around us. Perhaps this works best in small towns, dunno. When I went down to the courthouse to get mine, they looked me over very closely, checked a lot of records, took their time about it (took a couple weeks), and even asked the Sheriff if he thought there'd be any problems. Again, small town, everyone knows everyone and their business, and I'd had acquittance of most of the cops -- no crimes but that doesn't mean they haven't thought of me as a customer a time or two -- you know, pulling me over for driving my 200 mpg go kart on the roads in protest of the laws preventing that being legal at a time gas was $4 a gallon, busting down my door because anyone rich and young in the boonies who doesn't have an obvious job (telecommuting!) MUST be making meth, stuff like that. They were really disappointed to find my chem lab only makes high explosives (and yes, that's legal with the right paperwork). They then sent the BATF to make sure, and we were all friendly once we met, no issues at all -- the extreme opposite of the "ruby ridge" deal.
The issue of "pressurized" is simply silly. Real life isn't like the movies at all, as I demo on my private firing range with HE -- no ball of flames, things don't explode when hit by a bullet like on TV (except for melons and water jugs with rifle bullets), and so on.
Most airplanes aren't all that pressurized as anyone with an ear condition knows when they fly. And they are pretty resilient. It'd be a bummer to blow out a window, but not life threatening for anyone, much worse has happened without injury due to normal failures. Scared people, but all landed safely. Something like a.38 would almost not penetrate the skin of a jetliner at all. Sure, a rifle would to right through a plane and out the other side, but we're not talking about those. You're not going to conceal a.44 mag very easily, after all, and it's too heavy to carry comfortably anyway.
In fact, one of the things we do to "calm the jets" of our trainees is to set up the following demo. Take a 2x4 and lay it on the ground long direction away from the shooter. Tie about 6 helium balloons to it, mark one of the middle ones, all the same height. They wave around in the wind. Your job is to draw and shoot just the marked one, you're not allowed to sit there with a gun out and aim and wait (like on TV - in real life you don't pull a gun and then talk, you shoot, or you don't pull it out, think that through for a moment -- the other guy suddenly may decide he's got nothing to lose, and that makes him more dangerous yet). Almost no one but we instructors can do that -- and we can't always do it. It's the most sobering exercise we could come up with, and reasonably realistic for a hostage situation. We don't fail people for not being able to do that, understand -- but if they don't realize from that they shouldn't try it with live people, and make it obvious to us they realize that, we DO fail them and no permit is forthcoming -- they'd have to get the training elsewhere.
Most people don't need much training to realize when something really, truly, hinky is going down. What we find is that we take more care with the prospective licensee to make sure *they* aren't going to be a problem themselves. Again, small town. Gun shops around here are the same way -- no one will sell you a gun if you don't "seem ok", they'll always have some excuse why they can't.
Which is why most crime guns have been stolen at some point in their life.
Most of us gun guys take it very seriously and don't want some "loose cannon" asshat to spoil it for us, it's more self policing than most people would assume at first. Especi
Just let those of us who are court approved to carry concealed weapons do so. There'd be a few responsible, armed citizens on every plane.
A lot more than you might think, because CCW holders are, guess what, carrying concealed so you don't notice how many there are.
Problem solved, cost nearly zero. Already trained in detecting "hinky" behavior, and proven time and time again to be less likely to commit armed violence (or any other sort) than the average citizen. Truth, like it or not. Where I live, (which is actually a pretty liberal place) you get quite an inspection of life history and checked for being alright in general before you get that license. Much better scrutiny than some minimum wage punk working for TSA ever gets.
The part of Israel's security we ought to copy -- there if you shoot a terrorist, you're a hero. Here, you're a homicidal manic in need of jail time (at least).
Why can't we just man up and take care of this ourselves? We'd do a better job than they do, that's been proven as well.
See John Lott's "More guns, less crime" for many examples. We simply make it too dangerous to be a terrorist. Works great on crime, when a potential crook realizes he might not face our namby-pamby legal system, but instead face judge, jury, and executioner all at once, and be dead in one second.
Kinda takes the fun out of crime. Too lousy a risk/reward ratio.
There is next to no crime where I live, out in the boonies -- and practically everyone is armed, it's just part of the culture of farming and hunting. Coincidence? We have crooks living around here, we know who they are, but they're smart enough to go to gun free zones to ply their trade....
Funny thing about that. Darwin takes care of any who don't pay attention to that one.
That I canceled my charter subscription to BYTE when they kept dissing my PDP-8 machines in favor of that little 8 bit piece of crap.
Which is now wider and still a piece of crap, just a fast one. Other machines can actually be fun to program in assembler. Ever tried on an intel box?
Sigh.
How many times PER DAY of us hearing about how destructive our government is of the value WE create is it going to take before we stand up and toss the doggone bums out? And I don't mean like last time when we just voted out incumbents -- the stupid other party then decided they'd been given a "mandate" when in truth, we didn't vote for them, but against the other losers.
Remember who pays for it all? This isn't incompetence, it's negative, not merely zero, competence.
What choice is it when we only get to pick one loser or another, chosen by one of the two heads of the same monster? That's not a representative government anymore, not even close.
No, just evil people who grab and increase their power over us because we are dumb enough to let them.
We've even let them destroy the language -- liberal used to mean something a lot more like "libertarian" and "conservative" used to mean, you know, look before you leap, spend less than you make, stuff like that. Or even "not all change is for the better, so examine it first before deciding".
I'm a conservative. No one represents me in government, no one.
No one in government represents any of my neighbors either, not all of whom are "conservative".
You can even be a (real) conservative and realize that families are important and should be encouraged -- even ones headed up by married gays. Gheesh, how did those idiots let themselves be hijacked by the radicals? (which applies to either left or right as far as I can tell, just different radicals involved -- sometimes)
Why did we let them get to this point, where now there is no way to just vote the bastards out? Some choice we get at the polls -- people selected by the "two heads of the same monster" are our "choice".
This is indistinguishable from a police/fascist state no matter who is in power now.
Yep, that's precisely the case. In this case it seems the "right" is completely in the thrall of the telecoms who see non neutrality as a way to increase their profits. As if they didn't already charge both ends of the 'net for the same bits -- they charge one guy to put them on there, and the other guy for getting them already.
Which I understand is partly why we get to pay about 4x for cel phone service than our brothers in europe do.
I see it as their own fault if they didn't charge enough in the first place, and personally, they should be very fearful of being hit with common carrier status -- bits is bits, after all, whether it's voice, slashdot, video, or email.
This could be a deliberate distraction from the idea of that fate, which is even more scary to them than mere neutrality.
IMO, people who carry bits shouldn't be allowed to also own content. Imagine what the music world would be like if the RIAA owned the airwaves. Oh, wait...
Like here. I've been off the grid for decades -- that "wait for the cheap and more efficient PV panels" thing was always promoted by the opponents of solar, not the fans, and thanks, 30 year old panels in my systems may as well be new given how they perform. I run computer networks, a machine shop, and 4 buildings on my campus this way, use mostly CCFL, a few leds mainly nightlights, and even some halogens for when I need really good color rendering.
The biggie is refrigeration, here, there, everywhere -- everything else you can decide not to turn on if it's a bad energy day. Doesn't hurt to keep the freezer in the unheated outbuilding in the shade...
See my site, linked below, there's some pix of my system with some other systems soon to be featured under the alt energy forum.
What's happening in the third world is what I call "leapfrogging" -- they're going to skip entire expensive steps in energy development. Good for them!
They will also be skipping the control a monopoly power company (aptly named for more than one meaning of the word power) over themselves.
Double good. I'm not particularly a greenie, though it works out that I'm much more green than most of them (heat off my own woodlot too for example) -- for me it was the power and control issue that got me going, and heck, if a world class engineer can't pull it off, then who?
Funny thing, you know who makes just about the best panels for the money (taking TCO into account, panels that only live a couple years need not apply) -- Solarex, who is owned by, you guessed it, BP of all people. They know the music is going to stop, so they are reserving a chair. That tells you more than their astroturfing about endless oil, no such thing as global warming etc -- follow the money....
No, it's not all going to Japan, just some. A lot of the Japanese companies are going to use this stuff *here* and might as well, because many of them manufacture little things like cars, um, here to sell to us. Molycorp is going mine-to-magnet right here, and that's where the value added is. I'm glad of it, having bought quite a lot of their stock when it was priced about half what it is today...yum. (I trade for a living, and this has been one of the good trades this year).
RE mining has been an environmental problem for a long time. For whatever reason, the RE ores always seem to have a lot of thorium in them also -- there's your radioactive issue, and why we don't just refine and use that too, I'm clueless, as the price of uranium is also doing well (and I own stock in that too that is also doing well). As the Indians know, it's part of a useful fuel cycle as it can be bred into fissile fuel just like U238 can be. The other issue with RE's is that most of them are so chemically similar that they can be real tough to get apart into the individual RE metals. GM and others have done some work on making pretty good magnets with "what you get" rather than what you'd have in a perfect world, slightly reduced performance compared to perfect, but far lower costs at a few stages of the process.
At the instant of this writing, MCP is up 10.2% *in one day* which is about a usual annual return from the stock markets. REMX, an ETF that tracks RE's is only up 0.87%. No guts, no glory. I don't know about the other bucks for sure, but the profits trading on MCP are going to this redneck engineer American to be spent here. I'm sure like any news driven stock, that it will either go back down, or flounder around awhile before going up again. That's why I call myself a trader -- I don't invest, I trade, and know when the heck to get out and put the money back into first bank of mattress....
Copper is doing pretty well these days too, some due to manipulation, but in general we're finding out that Malthus was right, just in the wrong century. Won't be many decades before old landfills become a "mineral rights" issue. We really do live in a finite place.
Yes, parent forgets that if printing were traceable, the English would have found and "offed" our founding fathers and we'd still be a colony of slaves to the empire.
I mean, I worry not about pedophiles or counterfeiters -- I'd consider them nice targets for my firing range, but sure, bust them and never let them out.
But what about other issues? Like the major one the parent didn't imagine?
Giving the government the ability to nip any demonstration or movement in the bud, using selective enforcement of trash laws means instant dictatorship. Does parent really believe that those guys wouldn't do that, after already passing us the best laws money stolen from us could buy? Puleeese.
Our fine government has decided that it's OK for them to buy data that it is illegal for them to collect themselves, from people like all the vendors or banking institutions and others you do business with. This will be supported to the hilt by our fine government so they can buy this new data on you too, and then selectively enforce things on anybody they don't like because of what they say about our fine government.
In the state I live in, for example, oral sex is a felony even between man and wife (old law meant to prosecute gays in parks, but they didn't make the distinction in law) is a felony and anyone on the street without $200 CASH (no, your plastic doesn't count) and ID (only certain things count) is at least a misdemeanor. They obviously don't enforce these much, it's a handy catch-all for a cop who is sure there's something wrong and needs to arrest you to find out what else he can get on you. In fact, there are an endless list of such laws.
Now imagine a government afraid that their country will overthrow them, or merely riot in the streets, as in Greece or France, when the people figure out what a screwing they've gotten, and who wants to remain in power at any cost.
Bingo -- perfect answer, your device makes you guilty of just about any of these trash laws, on demand, and we simply jail you for that before any demonstration or "movement" can get to critical mass.....
This will not only be allowed, at some point it will be mandated, watch and see. Lucky, no one really needs these fancy bits of tech, they are just candy for anyone who grew up before anyone had them, and most people using them instead of having a life just look silly to us. So get off my lawn.
Have you ever actually tried to eat the grade of corn used for corn ethanol? I thought not, but believe me, don't try it, you won't be able to, it's a grade lower than that used for silage/cattle feed. It's grown on land too marginal for real human crops and tastes. There are plenty of things wrong with corn ethanol other than "it's taking food", because that's simply untrue in the extreme -- it's only grown because of a subsidy that makes it worth it for farmers to grow marginal grades on marginal lands, and they'd not grow it at all otherwise, because they can't get enough money to make profit on food-grade corn in the same conditions.
In fact, the NRA went ballistic about this one, as all this land that used to be available for nature conservation and hunting uses -- unused until a subsidy made it worthwhile, was plowed and planted in this crap corn for ethanol.
Check ya fax man. There's plenty of truth against corn ethanol, why not use the right facts instead of the bullcrap?
I'll think of the children for you, no worries.
For some problems, it's not just noodling out a solution. Sometimes (think hard realtime stuff) you just can't complete the top-down without knowing something of the performance from the bottom up side -- and if you trust the books or the model in your head, you're setting yourself up for disappointment. Do you really think that anything utterly cool, fast, well written still contains most of the code originally written? Maybe it's all that other 70% or more of the code you want to be able to type fast -- the stuff that tells you how to do the rest, where you learn how the libs work, where you learn how it all interacts. Once you know all that, more often than not, typing the final program is not an issue much.
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My take is that the "bad N word" is now more of a slur on the people who used it, than the people targeted by it. And that makes removing it suspect in some ways -- could it be we don't want to admit where we came from? Diversity is GOOD -- coming at things from different directions in an honest way is a great way to find truth quicker.
To the extent there are differences, and my work in a mixed race jazz band pointed some up, they are good and compliment one another. A lot of the differences turned into one race helping the other get it right in life. It was good all around -- it went both ways.
For medium skill sets, I've had the interesting experience of recently hiring a new secretary to do some work here, and set her up with (of course) a linux box, OO, all that. Taught her how to use even a PCB layout software in a couple days, amazing. But what really kicked my butt, was after a day or two, she comes up with "I like this, what version of windows is it, I've never seen anything work so smoothly before".
Yeah, big learning curve. Now, she's smart, to be sure. Shouldn't everyone commanding a really good paycheck be? If you're too dumb to move from one thing to another, why can't 5 of you be replaced by one smart person. As a small businessman, I think like that, because if I don't make money, none of us eat - I don't have the bernake's printing presses, you know. But in the long run, neither will they, you can only take that game so far. Gotta dump these folks who think they are entitled to getting paid for not having to think and learn. Hiring is tough right now. It's not that you don't get applications (gawd, you get buried). It's that no on worth hiring applies, and it just costs money to sort all the junk CVs and figure out why this or that loser got laid off their last job -- because as a business owner (and we all know this) -- your business is your people, you take care of the best or you fail. If you are forced to cut, you never cut the good people.....
If that offends some currently out of jobs, I'm sorry, but not that sorry. Too many of you have shown up here looking for work, and turning out to know only a tiny fraction of what they claimed, and when tried, unable to do as they claim, and/or do it so slowly I may as well do it myself. You may think you're entitled, but no, you just got a good ride for awhile -- doesn't mean you deserve it in return for nothing out of you forever, the times don't permit that for any business that's going to STAY in business.
It worked for SCO, oh, wait....
Before any arch capitalists start drooling, the poor guy who built that world would suddenly find himself with no paying customers. No need for jobs, ergo, no jobs. No jobs, no one has money under the current system of things (which is the only one that's ever worked, even "command economies" have always had capitalist black markets that made them go -- then they collapsed).
But being the capitalist who gets the closest first looks like paying, so here we are toying around and bumping off the edges of that world, forever denied entry....I just can't think of a good way (or truly, any way that works) to get there from here, and I'm smart and have thought about it, as I said, for over a decade.
Everytime I think I come up with a solution, it turns out to require some basic change in human nature; health care, so called, has many of the same issues in different forms. Why does everyone in this country have to cost about a quarter million in care bucks at the last few months (if they have insurance) and why do we let the debate say "health care == insurance" when the very reason treatment is so expensive is because it can be charged high for -- because of insurance, else everyone would default on that low value proposition. Why should a repairman of humans make many times what a repairman of home appliances, autos, stereos, anything else -- those other guys have to guarantee their work, physicians and nurses don't. (sorry about the OT, but this IS slashdot)
At any rate, myself and several other smart people have been discussing both problems for some years, in an adversarial brainstorming fashion (we are all pros at that) and no one has come up with any idea that can't be torn to ribbons in minutes by some other smart person. This is a real problem! Very few other things have slowed any of these people down, ever, nothing like this. If anyone, anyone has a solution to those issues that doesn't require a change to what history tells us is pretty immutable human nature to work, I'd personally love to hear about it.
But it wouldn't allow people to believe that since they had the shinest, newest, hottest thing, it would increase their chances of getting laid, so only people who actually give a crap about the functionality and usefulness for other than jacking off kinds of things would ever buy it, and due to sociological realities, that's a tiny fraction of the people with money in their pockets.
It is inevitable that wireless is going to eat some power, and just turning it off when not in use doesn't solve it all, as when a link is lost, any real protocol has to spend some time, and therefore power, getting connected again with a few messages back and forth, to eliminate issues with more than one user in the same bandwidth. It doesn't necessarily take more power at higher frequencies (theoretically), actually there's more noise to overcome at lower frequencies in the limit -- atmospherics etc. Comparing high to higher, well, the issues are different as we are talking absorption coefficients in building materials etc. It's bandwidth that takes power to get good enough SNR, this is real basic information theory, and yes, I'm a signal processing engineer (now retired). With directional antennas, wow, you can really cut power down (20 db not uncommon, 100::1 for those of you who don't have much clue) but then, talk about the "holding it right" issues!
I in fact have some specially built p3 tualitin systems that don't need fans, draw about 9 whole watts for the CPU, and maybe 20 for the box, and this is years-old tech. I still use them and will bemoan their loss when they finally die. One could do far better now, of course, but the real issue is -- can you make money selling them. Most people are too stupid to realize the value of something that "just works" in this way -- never having to worry about low battery in this case. Or buying new ones all the time when the ones you had reach their cycle lifetime limits.
Part of it is also ignorant designers, usually ones with little experience. I have a Dell laptop from back in the day which makes a good example. They put in gonzo CPU, gonzo graphics (for the time), it was thick and heavy, and would roast your goodies, you really couldn't use it on your lap, and battery life was terrible. Despite all that, it was dog-slow. Why? Slow memory, and very slow disk, to "save power". That's simple ignorance on the part of the designer. A design that could get things done quick and then power down when not doing much would have made a lot more sense, even then, and I custom built some non-pc type systems for miltary use back in the day that did just that. It turned out to be cheaper per mip to go ahead and use the quick stuff, and just turn it off when not needed because the way we did it (all static ram for example) there was no time penalty for coming back out of sleep. Zero. Compared to the CMOS of the day, it kicked totally because when you really needed it, it really had the stuff. The rest of the time, it drew diddly power, just like CMOS. Sad to say, even in that day, the army was more intelligent than today's brainwashed consumer? Ow, that stings.
Of course, bloatware like windows didn't exist then, and we predated color on most home computers quite a bit by using a tiny sony color TV as the monitor, and our own graphics generator. We didn't know what we were "missing" I suppose.
I online trade all day every day these days, and now it's software that's the hobby. One of the better pieces of advice I ever got from a broker, back when I had one (online now, all the way) was "watch Goldman". Don't buy them, and sure don't listen to what they say -- watch them. You can make money riding the moves they make when they manipulate markets. Lots. And it cuts down their profits if you do it right, which always feels special.
That's what I do anyway. I hope FB goes public so I can short it too. It's only a matter of time before some of the privacy issues take them down a notch. I know younger people seem not to care now -- but they'll reach a place of being denied a job or credit due to it, and get tired of targeted marketing, and that turkey is going down...
One company I developed for used a Linux opsys for a video surveillance system on COTS hardware. They didn't change the GPL code (no need it worked fine as is), just added applications, which they didn't have to make available under GPL. I got paid, no one has complained, where's the beef?
Someone seems to have either bought into the idea the GPL is utterly viral, or is trying to perpetuate FUD here.
Back when I was doing one of the first VOIP solutions (this one mostly for LAN use) we dreamed up something like Skype, that would work in similar fashion. The big advantage is that it could be done by any reasonably large group of users and no phone company at all need be involved -- no charge to anyone, no control over anyone by some big monolithic corp. It could still be done, and I wonder why no one in the open source area has managed? Critical mass issue; selling the first phone is a bear -- who you gonna call? Once going, a completely free open source solution would keep going just fine I'd think. I'd suppose the main problems would be with security, outside actors diddling supernodes to break it, as some companies would have a large interest in not having it as a competitor? Not sure how you'd handle those issues.
Too many people have been too affected by TV cop performance. In truth, there aren't any super-detectives that always find the guy, most cops are content to come and clean up after some major crime has happened, and most perps just get away with whatever.
There is no Columbo, no Kojak, no Jack Bauer, no CSI -- that's all fantasy. Maybe that's good, maybe not. Most departments are run by politics, and jurisdiction here is a real hairy issue. Probably the feds ought to take a little time off the "war on this and that" and do some real war on things that actually matter, rather than things that get press -- and in this case they might be surprised how much positive press they'd get were they effective. It probably looks too much like whack-a-mole to them at this point, because even though it costs everyone money, it only costs any one entity "some" but not huge money as a fraction of operating costs. I'd bet a bunch of these companies are actually pretty small outfits that move around a lot. I mean, how much setup does it take to be a pusher of fake sex drugs? One guy with an idea and a box of fake pills in mom's basement? Things like that are hard to catch up with, and seem like too-small busts to make some cop get a promotion, even though setting an example with a few might cool their jets nicely. It's how the IRS works for example -- a few really public busts, a few threats of audits, and everyone lays down and pays taxes out of fear.
To this old fart, it looks the same, just a different way to fab the thing. But hey what do I know?
One thing I do know. Current scientists aren't very well educated on what has gone before. About a year ago I saw the "breakthrough" development of a "plasma transistor" that I also had in a 1950's book on my shelf....happens pretty frequently these days. These guys are so specialized they don't even know the history of their own fields anymore, much less a broad history.
Reminds me of Hari Seldon and "the galactic empire is crumbling" to be frank. Not even up to Heinlein standards!
At some point the powers that be can't let it happen even if technically/legally it's true in some odd way. Think of the implied surprise wealth transfer by legal force this implies if taken to the limit -- bigger than most whole large companies (including MS).
As we say in stock trading, bears do well, bulls do well, pigs get slaughtered. Whether PA and interval are seriously trying to own the internet or not, it sure looks like waking the system up and pointing some serious flaws in it, which one could hope lead to improvements. Maybe a vain hope, dunno.
Has been covering this one. Allen's Interval has patented things that absolutely everyone has been using for decades, if not longer, and this may just help with the fight against software patents generally, as virtually no one is untouched -- he's only sued less the half the relevant world so far -- big media is a possible target for some of his claims as well. GoodLuckWithThat, they are even feared by lawmakers. Let's hope they go all out so this stupid mess can be ended. Here's the groklaw current link.
Notice how TSA quietly turned all that crap off during the Thanksgiving holiday because a lot of people were going to make noise about it? Even demand a gratuitous grope? Would that not have been the time it was needed most? Kinda says it all, doesn't it -- and no planes blew up.
Any terrorist smart enough to be scary would just attack something else -- even the queue for airline security, but with some imagination there are much better and easier targets. Heck, you only have to read some Tom Clancy for a few ideas there. But evidently these guys pride themselves on being locked into the 7th century or thereabouts. Lucky for us. The IRA was a lot more dangerous.
I help teach the CCW course in my area (SW Virginia) along with a couple of even more professionals (ex cops). We really take people through it to make sure they're someone we'd not be afraid of having a gun around us. Perhaps this works best in small towns, dunno. When I went down to the courthouse to get mine, they looked me over very closely, checked a lot of records, took their time about it (took a couple weeks), and even asked the Sheriff if he thought there'd be any problems. Again, small town, everyone knows everyone and their business, and I'd had acquittance of most of the cops -- no crimes but that doesn't mean they haven't thought of me as a customer a time or two -- you know, pulling me over for driving my 200 mpg go kart on the roads in protest of the laws preventing that being legal at a time gas was $4 a gallon, busting down my door because anyone rich and young in the boonies who doesn't have an obvious job (telecommuting!) MUST be making meth, stuff like that. They were really disappointed to find my chem lab only makes high explosives (and yes, that's legal with the right paperwork). They then sent the BATF to make sure, and we were all friendly once we met, no issues at all -- the extreme opposite of the "ruby ridge" deal.
The issue of "pressurized" is simply silly. Real life isn't like the movies at all, as I demo on my private firing range with HE -- no ball of flames, things don't explode when hit by a bullet like on TV (except for melons and water jugs with rifle bullets), and so on. Most airplanes aren't all that pressurized as anyone with an ear condition knows when they fly. And they are pretty resilient. It'd be a bummer to blow out a window, but not life threatening for anyone, much worse has happened without injury due to normal failures. Scared people, but all landed safely. Something like a .38 would almost not penetrate the skin of a jetliner at all. Sure, a rifle would to right through a plane and out the other side, but we're not talking about those. You're not going to conceal a .44 mag very easily, after all, and it's too heavy to carry comfortably anyway.
In fact, one of the things we do to "calm the jets" of our trainees is to set up the following demo. Take a 2x4 and lay it on the ground long direction away from the shooter. Tie about 6 helium balloons to it, mark one of the middle ones, all the same height. They wave around in the wind. Your job is to draw and shoot just the marked one, you're not allowed to sit there with a gun out and aim and wait (like on TV - in real life you don't pull a gun and then talk, you shoot, or you don't pull it out, think that through for a moment -- the other guy suddenly may decide he's got nothing to lose, and that makes him more dangerous yet). Almost no one but we instructors can do that -- and we can't always do it. It's the most sobering exercise we could come up with, and reasonably realistic for a hostage situation. We don't fail people for not being able to do that, understand -- but if they don't realize from that they shouldn't try it with live people, and make it obvious to us they realize that, we DO fail them and no permit is forthcoming -- they'd have to get the training elsewhere.
Most people don't need much training to realize when something really, truly, hinky is going down. What we find is that we take more care with the prospective licensee to make sure *they* aren't going to be a problem themselves. Again, small town. Gun shops around here are the same way -- no one will sell you a gun if you don't "seem ok", they'll always have some excuse why they can't. Which is why most crime guns have been stolen at some point in their life.
Most of us gun guys take it very seriously and don't want some "loose cannon" asshat to spoil it for us, it's more self policing than most people would assume at first. Especi
The part of Israel's security we ought to copy -- there if you shoot a terrorist, you're a hero. Here, you're a homicidal manic in need of jail time (at least).
Why can't we just man up and take care of this ourselves? We'd do a better job than they do, that's been proven as well. See John Lott's "More guns, less crime" for many examples. We simply make it too dangerous to be a terrorist. Works great on crime, when a potential crook realizes he might not face our namby-pamby legal system, but instead face judge, jury, and executioner all at once, and be dead in one second. Kinda takes the fun out of crime. Too lousy a risk/reward ratio.
There is next to no crime where I live, out in the boonies -- and practically everyone is armed, it's just part of the culture of farming and hunting. Coincidence? We have crooks living around here, we know who they are, but they're smart enough to go to gun free zones to ply their trade....
Funny thing about that. Darwin takes care of any who don't pay attention to that one.
That I canceled my charter subscription to BYTE when they kept dissing my PDP-8 machines in favor of that little 8 bit piece of crap.
Which is now wider and still a piece of crap, just a fast one. Other machines can actually be fun to program in assembler. Ever tried on an intel box?
Sigh.
What choice is it when we only get to pick one loser or another, chosen by one of the two heads of the same monster? That's not a representative government anymore, not even close.
I'm a conservative. No one represents me in government, no one.
No one in government represents any of my neighbors either, not all of whom are "conservative".
You can even be a (real) conservative and realize that families are important and should be encouraged -- even ones headed up by married gays. Gheesh, how did those idiots let themselves be hijacked by the radicals? (which applies to either left or right as far as I can tell, just different radicals involved -- sometimes)
Why did we let them get to this point, where now there is no way to just vote the bastards out? Some choice we get at the polls -- people selected by the "two heads of the same monster" are our "choice".
This is indistinguishable from a police/fascist state no matter who is in power now.
Which I understand is partly why we get to pay about 4x for cel phone service than our brothers in europe do.
I see it as their own fault if they didn't charge enough in the first place, and personally, they should be very fearful of being hit with common carrier status -- bits is bits, after all, whether it's voice, slashdot, video, or email.
This could be a deliberate distraction from the idea of that fate, which is even more scary to them than mere neutrality.
IMO, people who carry bits shouldn't be allowed to also own content. Imagine what the music world would be like if the RIAA owned the airwaves. Oh, wait...
See my site, linked below, there's some pix of my system with some other systems soon to be featured under the alt energy forum. What's happening in the third world is what I call "leapfrogging" -- they're going to skip entire expensive steps in energy development. Good for them! They will also be skipping the control a monopoly power company (aptly named for more than one meaning of the word power) over themselves. Double good. I'm not particularly a greenie, though it works out that I'm much more green than most of them (heat off my own woodlot too for example) -- for me it was the power and control issue that got me going, and heck, if a world class engineer can't pull it off, then who?
Funny thing, you know who makes just about the best panels for the money (taking TCO into account, panels that only live a couple years need not apply) -- Solarex, who is owned by, you guessed it, BP of all people. They know the music is going to stop, so they are reserving a chair. That tells you more than their astroturfing about endless oil, no such thing as global warming etc -- follow the money....
RE mining has been an environmental problem for a long time. For whatever reason, the RE ores always seem to have a lot of thorium in them also -- there's your radioactive issue, and why we don't just refine and use that too, I'm clueless, as the price of uranium is also doing well (and I own stock in that too that is also doing well). As the Indians know, it's part of a useful fuel cycle as it can be bred into fissile fuel just like U238 can be. The other issue with RE's is that most of them are so chemically similar that they can be real tough to get apart into the individual RE metals. GM and others have done some work on making pretty good magnets with "what you get" rather than what you'd have in a perfect world, slightly reduced performance compared to perfect, but far lower costs at a few stages of the process.
At the instant of this writing, MCP is up 10.2% *in one day* which is about a usual annual return from the stock markets. REMX, an ETF that tracks RE's is only up 0.87%. No guts, no glory. I don't know about the other bucks for sure, but the profits trading on MCP are going to this redneck engineer American to be spent here. I'm sure like any news driven stock, that it will either go back down, or flounder around awhile before going up again. That's why I call myself a trader -- I don't invest, I trade, and know when the heck to get out and put the money back into first bank of mattress....
Copper is doing pretty well these days too, some due to manipulation, but in general we're finding out that Malthus was right, just in the wrong century. Won't be many decades before old landfills become a "mineral rights" issue. We really do live in a finite place.
But what about other issues? Like the major one the parent didn't imagine? Giving the government the ability to nip any demonstration or movement in the bud, using selective enforcement of trash laws means instant dictatorship. Does parent really believe that those guys wouldn't do that, after already passing us the best laws money stolen from us could buy? Puleeese.
Doh!
In the state I live in, for example, oral sex is a felony even between man and wife (old law meant to prosecute gays in parks, but they didn't make the distinction in law) is a felony and anyone on the street without $200 CASH (no, your plastic doesn't count) and ID (only certain things count) is at least a misdemeanor. They obviously don't enforce these much, it's a handy catch-all for a cop who is sure there's something wrong and needs to arrest you to find out what else he can get on you. In fact, there are an endless list of such laws.
Now imagine a government afraid that their country will overthrow them, or merely riot in the streets, as in Greece or France, when the people figure out what a screwing they've gotten, and who wants to remain in power at any cost.
Bingo -- perfect answer, your device makes you guilty of just about any of these trash laws, on demand, and we simply jail you for that before any demonstration or "movement" can get to critical mass.....
This will not only be allowed, at some point it will be mandated, watch and see. Lucky, no one really needs these fancy bits of tech, they are just candy for anyone who grew up before anyone had them, and most people using them instead of having a life just look silly to us. So get off my lawn.
In fact, the NRA went ballistic about this one, as all this land that used to be available for nature conservation and hunting uses -- unused until a subsidy made it worthwhile, was plowed and planted in this crap corn for ethanol.
Check ya fax man. There's plenty of truth against corn ethanol, why not use the right facts instead of the bullcrap? I'll think of the children for you, no worries.
For some problems, it's not just noodling out a solution. Sometimes (think hard realtime stuff) you just can't complete the top-down without knowing something of the performance from the bottom up side -- and if you trust the books or the model in your head, you're setting yourself up for disappointment. Do you really think that anything utterly cool, fast, well written still contains most of the code originally written? Maybe it's all that other 70% or more of the code you want to be able to type fast -- the stuff that tells you how to do the rest, where you learn how the libs work, where you learn how it all interacts. Once you know all that, more often than not, typing the final program is not an issue much.