Maybe I phrased things incorrectly -- I meant to say that there hasn't been any nuclear accidents aboard US naval vessels.
Contrast that to the Soviets, who lost submarines and killed many sailors due to poorly engineered reactors and the incompetent engineers who controlled them.
You obviously don't know anything about the guy. Rickover basically made it mandatory that any officer in the line of command on a nuclear vessel was an expert in nuclear power plant engineering. He set incredibly high standards and sunk (to use a bad pun) the careers of many otherwise excellent officers who didn't cut the nuclear mustard.
There are critics of Rickover's program, particularly submariners in the Royal (UK) Navy, who recognize that good engineers don't necessarily make good naval commanders.
The point is that people like Rickover who are sticklers for details, have the balls to set and stick to high standards and survive in a large political organization like the US Navy come with certain quirks. At the end of the day results matter.
Keep in mind that many "great" public figures have quirks like this. Lyndon Johnson, who was unquestionably a political genius, conducted high level meetings from his bathroom throne and treated his loyal subordinates with a shocking level of disrespect. Abraham Lincoln's depression while president often kept him in bed. Henry Ford was a fascist.
EFS is pretty easy to break. Taliban and Al Queda types used it on all sorts of laptops in Afghanistan. According to to the papers, the feds were able to break the encryption within hours or minutes.
It saves your company public exposure and alot of expense in the event of a loss.
If you're a government agency, contractor or banking institution and you lose a laptop that may contain customer data, state & federal laws force you to publicly disclose the loss and be liable for damages.
However, if you can prove that the data is encrypted, you don't need to disclose the loss. The easiest way to ensure this is to simply encrypt the entire device. That way your organizations reputation is intact, and your liability is limited to the value of the laptop and any work.
Those statistics can be very misleading. Don't take them at face value.
TANF (ie what was AFDC) is notorious in many states for being nearly impossible to stay on for any length of time. The entire process is governed by a set of complex & arcane rules that few people really understand.
If a recipient is 15 minutes late for an appointment, their benefits may be cut off. Losing an ID card, paystub, utility bill or other documentation may result in benefit suspension or sitting around for 5-8 hours to straighten things out. The entire system is humiliating and arbritary.
The "transition" off of welfare that you talk about is similar to how unemployed people whose benefits expire are no longed considered "unemployed". They often give up on the system and many end up in prison for drugs or stealing and lose the kids.
If you do alot of work with Office, not just casual use, you'll find alot of "gotchas". Excel and Word have alot of quirks that make it easy to introduce errors into spreadsheets and documents.
You must be a student who hasn't been jaded yet. My guess is that this guy's boss's boss went to a conference and heard some consultant pine on about how amazing grid technology is. Then he read Oracle magazine on the flight home and read about how Oracle uses the grid to save civilization as we know it.
So the boss's boss told the boss "we're falling behind, use Grid technology"! And this poor bastard is stuck sticking square pegs in round holes.
It sounds like you need someone intimately familiar with the database who is not a developer, but can do things like create scripts to build your schema and populate it with useful test data... this person is usually called a DBA.
DBAs are usually viewed by devs as complete assholes, because they scream and holler at devs who make gratuitous changes to schemas and stored procedures. But a good DBA will make your database issues go away.
I didn't mean to suggest that, and I totally agree.
Wealthier people have the resources to compensate for isolation by purchasing things and amusing themselves with the many entertainment options available today.
That doesn't mean that they aren't miserable, but since their entire life is built around acquiring things to amuse themselves, they have a strong incentive to behave themselves. The poor have fewer options, which is why so many fall into the trap of substance abuse which leads them down the path to worse things like prostitution.
Its not an individual problem, its societies problem. There was a time when impovrished inner city neighborhoods were actually reasonably safe. At one time, most working poor people had intact families and there were functioning social systems in these communities.
Ever read stories about people growing up in Hell's Kitchen in the 1920's and 30's? That was a slum, but people made it and were able to get educations and work their way out of it.
Today, these communities are just groups of desperate individuals who don't give a damn about each other.
Channels on demand is a non-issue that doesn't really mean too much.
Right now, cable companies buy channels in "bundles", where production companies give away crappy channels (so they can get viewers and sell ads) by tying them to popular channels. For example, the cable company buys CNBC and is forced to also buy MS-NBC and Bravo.
That is how the cable company gets their markup that pays for their overhead and makes a profit.
With the ala-carte model, you would just be charged this markup directly. Regulatory requirements mandate that they carry local stations, CSPAN, etc. So you'll get that bill. Then they would have to charge you some $10/a channel for your ala-carte channels plus a bunch of junk fees. Since nobody would order MS-NBC, Discovery Health or G4, the providers would jack up the ala-carte rates and you'd still end up with a $100 cable bill, just with less channels.
The patent in the article is another story. You don't logically arrive at the solution this guy found, just by looking into the details of saw safety - there is something completely original there. While the guy seems to want to charge too much, adaption of his idea could constitute progress. (If it actually works in the field.)
That applies to software as well... you don't come up with new encryption algorithms by scratching your head and thinking about scrambling stuff -- it involves years of research. The problem with patents is that the inventor gets a monopoly on the idea. With the weight of government regulation behind him, an inventor can hold a whole industry hostage.
- The inventor wants to extort 8% of the price of each saw
- This opens the door for all sorts of product liability lawsuits
Its interesting that this idea gets universal acclaim, while software inventions covered by patent are almost universally reviled. The reason that you're hearing about this at all is that the inventory is a savvy patent attorney who is going to eventually use government regulation as a club to make a huge amount of money.
The product liability thing is a real issue as well -- you'll probably see some tools drastically increase in price, include onerous safety devices or disappear from the shelf entirely once the lawsuits start flooding in. Anyone who has purchased a gasoline can for their lawn mower in the last 2-5 years has seen this first hand... some anti-spill devices make it nearly impossible to pour gasoline, and cost double the price of their predessesors.
I'm not arguing in favor of making tools more dangerous. But the current system of torts and injury liability discourage safety innovation by sticking product manufacturers with the potential of massive costs.
The other problem is that the central artery was not designed to handle the traffic it did. There was supposed to be part of a network of highways that included a bypass. The bypass was never created because the central artery and pike extension to connect to it were so traumatic to the city it was impossible to move the plan further.
Not quite true.
Most of the big highway projects of the 50's and 60's were based on the work of Robert Moses on the Parkway & Expressway systems in New York City. Limited access highways represented "progress" and anyone opposed to them was an idiot. At that point, highway planners refused to acknowledge that highways actually generate traffic -- and adding a lane or a bypass will only add more capacity and more traffic.
People are starting to realize that highways are a one part of a transportation system... unfortunately the US has invested trillions in a highway system that has caused all sorts of social problems and will leave our children with billions of dollars of future costs. (The first wave of interstate overpasses are reaching the end of their service life)
A public works project in Massachusetts isn't going to be hiring companies that employ illegal aliens... they usually mandate that you use union labor paid at the "prevailing wage" set by the union. Nobody is going to pay a illegal $75/hr to do masonry work in Boston.
Engineers are less regulated and are more likely to be at fault in this case. The government doesn't employ as many career engineers as they did in the past, and most design work is contracted out to politically connected firms for whom quality isn't a big priority. There's a long line of engineering failures of highway bridges in many states fueled by inspection & design work being contracted (and sub-contracted) out.
Isn't it interesting that each example cited above is an example of groups that vote strongly Democratic.
You didn't include lists like "gun enthusiasts, stock traders, CEOs, and religious fundamentalists". This shows where your bias comes from.
Nice jump to conclusions... I've been a democrat all of my life. It's a "mathematical fact" that there aren't enough CEO's and stock traders to win a nationwide plurality. So you need to target the largest voting blocs heavily to win. If a purely popular election took place, the democratic candidate may have to reject less critical issues (think abortion, gay rights) to yield the most votes from traditional democratic ethnic and religious groups. (Think Catholics, African Americans and Hispanics)
You're trying to confuse the issue. Kennedy got more POPULAR vote than Nixon in 1960 by the way... by 100,000.
I'm not confusing the issue if you know anything about the 1960 election. It is widely acknowledged that there was alot of tampering with the election in Illinois, Texas and the Northeast. Thousands of dead democrats voted in Chicago and thousands of non-existent voters voted in alphabetical order in southern Texas border counties. Hundreds of thousands of fraudulent Kennedy votes were cast. That said, it didn't really matter since Kennedy took the electoral vote by such a wide margin.
In 2000, the will of the people... as a whole... was that Al Gore be President. He got 500,000 more votes than any other candidate. That fact is incontrovertible.
Your hatred of Clinton notwithstanding, more Americans wanted him to be president than any other candidate... both times.
I don't hate Clinton or Gore and said nothing about the 2000 election.
BUUUUUZZZT! You failed the critical thinking test!
In a country as large and diverse as the US, you need to hold 50 state elections to balance the interests. The electoral college has performed remarkably well, and has probably kept the union together by blunting the power of majority groups and large states. The Civil War reinforced this point by asserting that Federal power (not popular will) reigns supreme.
If you counted popular votes only, alot of bad political precedents will be set, like:
- Candidates campaign exclusively to certain demographic groups. For example, you could win an election by exclusively mobilizing women, african americans and labor.
- Candidates target specific metropolitian areas - New York/Boston/Washington corridor, Los Angeles & Atlanta.
- Candidates target specific professions - teachers, cops & health care workers
Political campaigns translate directly into patronage after the election. Disenfranchising states and empowering regional and specialized demographic groups will result in incredibly poor policy that would eventually break up the country. Do you want all of your tax dollars going to a few favored states? Or cities? Or ethnic groups?
The only reason this issue of the electoral college comes up at all is because the Democratic party can't put together a platform to get its various constituentcies to show up at the polls. The Republicans have a declining coalition of religious fundamentalists, plutocrats and southern bloc voters that have won lots of elections.
Note that you didn't hear an outcry about the electoral college when Clinton took the White House with 43% of the popular vote in 1992 or when Kennedy took the election with only 49.7% of the popular vote and 56% of the electoral college vote.
School isn't about teaching "social skills" -- and whatever skills it does teach have more to do with subjecting yourself to hierarchy or ganging up on those who don't conform.
Despite whatever the teacher unions claim, public schools are an expensive and abysmal failure. The fact that parents line up to send their kids to charter schools whenever they open is testimony to that.
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Maybe I phrased things incorrectly -- I meant to say that there hasn't been any nuclear accidents aboard US naval vessels.
Contrast that to the Soviets, who lost submarines and killed many sailors due to poorly engineered reactors and the incompetent engineers who controlled them.
You obviously don't know anything about the guy. Rickover basically made it mandatory that any officer in the line of command on a nuclear vessel was an expert in nuclear power plant engineering. He set incredibly high standards and sunk (to use a bad pun) the careers of many otherwise excellent officers who didn't cut the nuclear mustard.
There are critics of Rickover's program, particularly submariners in the Royal (UK) Navy, who recognize that good engineers don't necessarily make good naval commanders.
The point is that people like Rickover who are sticklers for details, have the balls to set and stick to high standards and survive in a large political organization like the US Navy come with certain quirks. At the end of the day results matter.
Keep in mind that many "great" public figures have quirks like this. Lyndon Johnson, who was unquestionably a political genius, conducted high level meetings from his bathroom throne and treated his loyal subordinates with a shocking level of disrespect. Abraham Lincoln's depression while president often kept him in bed. Henry Ford was a fascist.
There has never been a nuclear accident on a US Naval vessel -- largely because of that asshole.
EFS is pretty easy to break. Taliban and Al Queda types used it on all sorts of laptops in Afghanistan. According to to the papers, the feds were able to break the encryption within hours or minutes.
It saves your company public exposure and alot of expense in the event of a loss.
If you're a government agency, contractor or banking institution and you lose a laptop that may contain customer data, state & federal laws force you to publicly disclose the loss and be liable for damages.
However, if you can prove that the data is encrypted, you don't need to disclose the loss. The easiest way to ensure this is to simply encrypt the entire device. That way your organizations reputation is intact, and your liability is limited to the value of the laptop and any work.
Apple only has a few computer products and iMacs are probably like 40-60% of sales. Dell probably has something like 20 models.
So while Apple is a smaller manufacturer, they still achieve economies of scale (and high quality) by focusing on a narrow range of hardware.
Those statistics can be very misleading. Don't take them at face value.
TANF (ie what was AFDC) is notorious in many states for being nearly impossible to stay on for any length of time. The entire process is governed by a set of complex & arcane rules that few people really understand.
If a recipient is 15 minutes late for an appointment, their benefits may be cut off. Losing an ID card, paystub, utility bill or other documentation may result in benefit suspension or sitting around for 5-8 hours to straighten things out. The entire system is humiliating and arbritary.
The "transition" off of welfare that you talk about is similar to how unemployed people whose benefits expire are no longed considered "unemployed". They often give up on the system and many end up in prison for drugs or stealing and lose the kids.
People in the UK are happy because the average person can afford to do little other than drink.
If you do alot of work with Office, not just casual use, you'll find alot of "gotchas". Excel and Word have alot of quirks that make it easy to introduce errors into spreadsheets and documents.
That's a great non-compete for you, because its unenforcable in most states!
You must be a student who hasn't been jaded yet. My guess is that this guy's boss's boss went to a conference and heard some consultant pine on about how amazing grid technology is. Then he read Oracle magazine on the flight home and read about how Oracle uses the grid to save civilization as we know it.
So the boss's boss told the boss "we're falling behind, use Grid technology"! And this poor bastard is stuck sticking square pegs in round holes.
It sounds like you need someone intimately familiar with the database who is not a developer, but can do things like create scripts to build your schema and populate it with useful test data... this person is usually called a DBA.
DBAs are usually viewed by devs as complete assholes, because they scream and holler at devs who make gratuitous changes to schemas and stored procedures. But a good DBA will make your database issues go away.
I didn't mean to suggest that, and I totally agree.
Wealthier people have the resources to compensate for isolation by purchasing things and amusing themselves with the many entertainment options available today.
That doesn't mean that they aren't miserable, but since their entire life is built around acquiring things to amuse themselves, they have a strong incentive to behave themselves. The poor have fewer options, which is why so many fall into the trap of substance abuse which leads them down the path to worse things like prostitution.
I'm not saying that at all!
Its not an individual problem, its societies problem. There was a time when impovrished inner city neighborhoods were actually reasonably safe. At one time, most working poor people had intact families and there were functioning social systems in these communities.
Ever read stories about people growing up in Hell's Kitchen in the 1920's and 30's? That was a slum, but people made it and were able to get educations and work their way out of it.
Today, these communities are just groups of desperate individuals who don't give a damn about each other.
Your situation is exactly the problem.
Our society ignores social ills by denying that they exist and using tools to pretend that reality is something else.
Better yet... a Google Office Applicance that gets stored in my datacenter/office!
Channels on demand is a non-issue that doesn't really mean too much.
Right now, cable companies buy channels in "bundles", where production companies give away crappy channels (so they can get viewers and sell ads) by tying them to popular channels. For example, the cable company buys CNBC and is forced to also buy MS-NBC and Bravo.
That is how the cable company gets their markup that pays for their overhead and makes a profit.
With the ala-carte model, you would just be charged this markup directly. Regulatory requirements mandate that they carry local stations, CSPAN, etc. So you'll get that bill. Then they would have to charge you some $10/a channel for your ala-carte channels plus a bunch of junk fees. Since nobody would order MS-NBC, Discovery Health or G4, the providers would jack up the ala-carte rates and you'd still end up with a $100 cable bill, just with less channels.
That applies to software as well... you don't come up with new encryption algorithms by scratching your head and thinking about scrambling stuff -- it involves years of research. The problem with patents is that the inventor gets a monopoly on the idea. With the weight of government regulation behind him, an inventor can hold a whole industry hostage.
There are two problems with this invention:
- The inventor wants to extort 8% of the price of each saw
- This opens the door for all sorts of product liability lawsuits
Its interesting that this idea gets universal acclaim, while software inventions covered by patent are almost universally reviled. The reason that you're hearing about this at all is that the inventory is a savvy patent attorney who is going to eventually use government regulation as a club to make a huge amount of money.
The product liability thing is a real issue as well -- you'll probably see some tools drastically increase in price, include onerous safety devices or disappear from the shelf entirely once the lawsuits start flooding in. Anyone who has purchased a gasoline can for their lawn mower in the last 2-5 years has seen this first hand... some anti-spill devices make it nearly impossible to pour gasoline, and cost double the price of their predessesors.
I'm not arguing in favor of making tools more dangerous. But the current system of torts and injury liability discourage safety innovation by sticking product manufacturers with the potential of massive costs.
Would you prefer to get blown to bits by some wackjobs with explosives in a toothpaste tube?
Just don't fly, or fly and put your shampoo in your checked bag.
Not quite true.
Most of the big highway projects of the 50's and 60's were based on the work of Robert Moses on the Parkway & Expressway systems in New York City. Limited access highways represented "progress" and anyone opposed to them was an idiot. At that point, highway planners refused to acknowledge that highways actually generate traffic -- and adding a lane or a bypass will only add more capacity and more traffic.
People are starting to realize that highways are a one part of a transportation system... unfortunately the US has invested trillions in a highway system that has caused all sorts of social problems and will leave our children with billions of dollars of future costs. (The first wave of interstate overpasses are reaching the end of their service life)
You're pretty clueless.
A public works project in Massachusetts isn't going to be hiring companies that employ illegal aliens... they usually mandate that you use union labor paid at the "prevailing wage" set by the union. Nobody is going to pay a illegal $75/hr to do masonry work in Boston.
Engineers are less regulated and are more likely to be at fault in this case. The government doesn't employ as many career engineers as they did in the past, and most design work is contracted out to politically connected firms for whom quality isn't a big priority. There's a long line of engineering failures of highway bridges in many states fueled by inspection & design work being contracted (and sub-contracted) out.
Nice jump to conclusions... I've been a democrat all of my life. It's a "mathematical fact" that there aren't enough CEO's and stock traders to win a nationwide plurality. So you need to target the largest voting blocs heavily to win. If a purely popular election took place, the democratic candidate may have to reject less critical issues (think abortion, gay rights) to yield the most votes from traditional democratic ethnic and religious groups. (Think Catholics, African Americans and Hispanics)
I'm not confusing the issue if you know anything about the 1960 election. It is widely acknowledged that there was alot of tampering with the election in Illinois, Texas and the Northeast. Thousands of dead democrats voted in Chicago and thousands of non-existent voters voted in alphabetical order in southern Texas border counties. Hundreds of thousands of fraudulent Kennedy votes were cast. That said, it didn't really matter since Kennedy took the electoral vote by such a wide margin.
I don't hate Clinton or Gore and said nothing about the 2000 election.
BUUUUUZZZT! You failed the critical thinking test!
In a country as large and diverse as the US, you need to hold 50 state elections to balance the interests. The electoral college has performed remarkably well, and has probably kept the union together by blunting the power of majority groups and large states. The Civil War reinforced this point by asserting that Federal power (not popular will) reigns supreme.
If you counted popular votes only, alot of bad political precedents will be set, like:
- Candidates campaign exclusively to certain demographic groups. For example, you could win an election by exclusively mobilizing women, african americans and labor.
- Candidates target specific metropolitian areas - New York/Boston/Washington corridor, Los Angeles & Atlanta.
- Candidates target specific professions - teachers, cops & health care workers
Political campaigns translate directly into patronage after the election. Disenfranchising states and empowering regional and specialized demographic groups will result in incredibly poor policy that would eventually break up the country. Do you want all of your tax dollars going to a few favored states? Or cities? Or ethnic groups?
The only reason this issue of the electoral college comes up at all is because the Democratic party can't put together a platform to get its various constituentcies to show up at the polls. The Republicans have a declining coalition of religious fundamentalists, plutocrats and southern bloc voters that have won lots of elections.
Note that you didn't hear an outcry about the electoral college when Clinton took the White House with 43% of the popular vote in 1992 or when Kennedy took the election with only 49.7% of the popular vote and 56% of the electoral college vote.
School isn't about teaching "social skills" -- and whatever skills it does teach have more to do with subjecting yourself to hierarchy or ganging up on those who don't conform.
Despite whatever the teacher unions claim, public schools are an expensive and abysmal failure. The fact that parents line up to send their kids to charter schools whenever they open is testimony to that.