The nature of capital investment: getting in early gives you high profit expectation, with high risk of spectacular failure. Getting in late when things have stabilized, gives lower risk with low expected return.
It's extremely unlikely this is true. Think about it...
He's a sysadmin at the NSA, which means he's supposed to be maintaining their servers -- not looking through classified materials. So if he were to report to his superiors about his concerns with any of these highly classified programs, he'd be admitting to looking at information he should never touch. If he did anyway, he would have been shit-canned immediately and investigated. So, it sounds like a complete pile of horseshit to me.
Either way, this kind of issues should roll uphill, not downhill. If the people in charge can let a Snowden slip, how many more have they let? How many more will they? Someone is trying to avoid their responsibility.
The fact that Snowden was able to get out with the info, suggests the thing is mismanaged. Why was he given access to all this super-classified information, and who's responsible? What was a contractor doing in a super-classified government organization anyway? What Snowden managed to prove, either from the leaked content, or from the fact that there was a leak, is that no one is watching the watchers.
It doesn't matter how you look at it, in the end, it's a complete management screw-up.
Here we go again, can't vote for them because they have no chance of winning.
You need to start voting for the third guy anyway, it's the only way to break the cycle. if no one votes the thirds guy, then no one thinks he has a chance. Enough people have to go first, and make it look possible.
The part where you're being played, is the part where they make you think that every election you fail to vote an established party, your country is DOOMED, forever. The best part is you keep falling for it every time.
The trick is not to have the new party to win (having a new party to assume total control is a bad idea), but to get them enough votes to scare the established parties to change how your voting works, so they get to keep a share of power relative to their share of votes, even if they would become the third party at the next election.
The Google workers who live in SF still pay their taxes in SF, right? I bet they also use local services quite a bit. Property price increase should be welcome to those currently living there, it's much better for them, and the economy as a whole, than prices going down. I admit that I don't fully understand the dynamics of the situation (I don't live in the U.S.), but most places would welcome wealthy neighbors.
If a point-to-point service makes an area so much more desirable, then maybe it was under-valued in the first place. I can't imagine the place being a slum, and then suddenly all googlers want to move there, because free commute.
There is a bigger problem behind all this: unequal wealth and/or income distribution. Fighting a point-to-point private commuting service is not going to fix that.
forget hacking: what's to stop an exchange from just closing and keeping all the BTC?
Income from tx fees that they will lose when they're out of business? I'd say running an exchange seems quite profitable even without a scam.
And without the exchange you used to run (esp. when you're the last one), you'll have a hard time converting your stolen BTC into something you can use.
True, just like a great time to buy BTC was during that brief window yesterday when they were trading for 100$.
I happened to be watching BTC-e on monday when the $102 dip happened. It was a result of someone (or more likely, someone's misbehaving bot) dumping about 6k BTC on the market, at once. It was back over $500 in about a minute.
Those few who had set ridiculously low bids (expecting crash due to expected MtGox bad news) or bots that didn't have a failsafe to just stop when something crazy happens, probably made a good profit on that dump.
Everyone and everything has an error rate. Software development is well known not to be a perfect process.
Building a wall (or a better analogy, designing the house the wall will be a part of) is no perfect process either.
I just recently thought about why software is so difficult, compared to physical engineering tasks. A big difference I found (aside from the obvious practicalities, such as lacking proper specification and resources) is lack of tolerance in how software is being built. When you're designing a supporting wall for a house, you calculate how much weight it needs to be able to carry. Then, you multiply that weight by a safety factor, adding tolerance. Similarly, when actually constructing the wall, the bricks don't need to be perfectly aligned, good enough is good enough, the final adjustment can be fixed with bit more or less mortar.
A lot of software is built with low tolerance. Part of it is cutting costs, part of it is just immaturity of the industry. There are already known good practises for increasing tolerance of software development process. Worried about buffer overflows? Use a language that makes them impossible. Data loss? Use a known good DB (and learn to use it) instead of inventing your own storage. Developers writing bad logic? Require proper testing and code reviews. All of the previous requested, but not happening? Bring in a competent project manager.
Then there's the whole other unique issue that software development faces, changing requirements. Construction workers will likely give you the finger, then go drink some beer and laugh about it, if you tell them that the garage they have built half-way actually needs to be a cathedral by the end of the month. In software, that's business as usual.
And then, every once in a while, walls collapse too. Sometimes they find someone who had not done his job properly, sometimes it's just written down as a sum of consequences.
I think the smart fridge thing is more interesting for inventory management at your local grocery store, than for an individual person. It would be worth a lot to them to be able to track when people are going to run out of specific items, so they can have the right amount of inventory at right time.
OTOH, almost every time I go grocery shopping, I buy something I wouldn't have needed yet, simply because I didn't remember if I had it or not and get one just in case. So being able to check your fridge contents while at the store might also be useful.
Btw. Before trying it, I thought the beta hate might be just nerd rage, but I'm starting to understand.
Counter-strategy: monitor your home with similar technology. Bonus points for automatically e-mailing the burglar's identity to the local law enforcement. Masked burglars walking around the neighborhood would look seriously suspicious to anyone with eyes.
No, it does not. It translates to "I know JavaScript rather well, but I also know several other languages", so I am capable of comparing things and seeing how many bad choices there are in JS language design.
However, when expressing such opinions on./, it has become customary to omit what languages the poster is comparing the subject language against. Surely that only happens because the poster's great programming knowledge makes him forget that not everyone has similarly vast amount of experience and therefore is able to draw the same conclusions without presenting any actual comparison.
I don't know if I'd want locked doors on the cockpit. What if the pilots become incapacitated like in the movie "Airplane!"? Imagine being a passenger on a plane that has become pilotless but nobody can do anything about it because the cockpit is barricaded.
Just what do you think anybody could really do?
Maybe you should watch the movie referenced by GP;-)
If there was widespread adoption of a guaranteed-deflation currency, an early adopter who was heavily invested could set up trust accounts where their ancestors would have growing spending power, without the money in the trust even being invested in anything. A future where the world is controlled by the grandchildren of the current rich, a class of aristocrats who don't have to work, but rule the world. And the more new economic activity happens, the higher percentage the old money controls! New wealth will always be worth less than the old wealth for the same activity.
Having a guaranteed-inflation currency around doens't seem to be doing much to prevent this: if you are wealthy, it's likely you were born wealthy. The problem is, that the currency we use, is just currency, it has no real use. And all the actually usable things, natural resources, have guaranteed deflation built in (assuming continuing population growth and no off-planet resource import). So owning natural resources is a bit like owning Bitcoin. It is always a good time to invest in gold.
I came here to post "yeah, because SNMP is the example of an easy way to make things talk to each other", but you were faster. I'd mod you up but you're already at +5.
I think plain old Maxwell's equations are sufficient for understanding cases two and three. For modern CPUs, I'm not sure, but I'd guess quantum effects have bigger influence than special relativity there.
Maybe these are two different groups of parents...
Quite likely. Similar to how there are parents who buy tobacco and/or alcohol to their underage kids, and parents who report the store for selling to kids (to the effect of the store losing their license to sell these substances) when their little princess manages to buy a bottle of vodka with an id borrowed from her older sister.
Look, it's quite simple: if your solution is to get people to use less power, you're fucked. People won't use less power unless they're entirely unable to do so. You need to work off that fact instead of trying to handwave it away.
That's why the GP said no more power plants allowed (not sure why he objects nuclear though). Prices go up, man becomes entirely unable.
Hopefully the fossils who want to burn fossils start to die off soon. It's time for new kind of thinking and the old folks just are not agile enough. Makes sense, they don't need to stick around for the consequences.
I live in a house that has 24 apartments. There are 5 garages at the ground floor, and parking places for 6 cars in front of the house. Can't see in the garages, but the outside parking is empty on a typical evening. Conclusion: people will stop using cars when they're unnecessary.
Gold mining is very risky. Selling shovels is mundane but presents a consistent, although lower profit. Those who want consistent profits aren't also the types who want a rollercoaster ride of high profit and high losses.
A well-balanced portfolio would include a bit of both.
So has ButterflyLabs actually managed to deliver some of those ASIC miners already? I figured it will be more profitable for them to keep any hardware they build...
The fact that California made this non enforcible means the state is dead last if I wanted to start a.com. How do I know employees wont steal my ideas?
If your great idea suddenly stops working when it is revealed to someone else, then it's fundamentally flawed. Anyone "stealing" it would still have to implement both the technical and business sides of it himself, unless he actually steals the implementations from you (in which case you have something to sue with). Just do it better, or lose the competition. Or have them sign an NDA with a nice big penalty.
So can someone explain to me how you can be convicted of both conspiring to do wire fraud AND for doing it? Doesn't the latter cancel out the former, or do you also get convicted of conspiracy to attempt a murder, attempted murder AND murder when you kill someone?
Conspire to murder person A, attempt to murder person B and actually murder person C. Someone else can take the wire fraud analogy.
But seriously, a TV with built-in video conference features might be useful, as long as they don't go and invent their own standard for it. I have been playing with the thought of setting up sort of "virtual windows" between separate office spaces, to allow a different, ad-hoc mode of communication between people at different locations.
Slashdot Mirror
The nature of capital investment: getting in early gives you high profit expectation, with high risk of spectacular failure. Getting in late when things have stabilized, gives lower risk with low expected return.
"Seriously, if this is true..."
It's extremely unlikely this is true. Think about it...
He's a sysadmin at the NSA, which means he's supposed to be maintaining their servers -- not looking through classified materials. So if he were to report to his superiors about his concerns with any of these highly classified programs, he'd be admitting to looking at information he should never touch. If he did anyway, he would have been shit-canned immediately and investigated. So, it sounds like a complete pile of horseshit to me.
Either way, this kind of issues should roll uphill, not downhill. If the people in charge can let a Snowden slip, how many more have they let? How many more will they? Someone is trying to avoid their responsibility.
The fact that Snowden was able to get out with the info, suggests the thing is mismanaged. Why was he given access to all this super-classified information, and who's responsible? What was a contractor doing in a super-classified government organization anyway? What Snowden managed to prove, either from the leaked content, or from the fact that there was a leak, is that no one is watching the watchers.
It doesn't matter how you look at it, in the end, it's a complete management screw-up.
Here we go again, can't vote for them because they have no chance of winning.
You need to start voting for the third guy anyway, it's the only way to break the cycle. if no one votes the thirds guy, then no one thinks he has a chance. Enough people have to go first, and make it look possible.
The part where you're being played, is the part where they make you think that every election you fail to vote an established party, your country is DOOMED, forever. The best part is you keep falling for it every time.
The trick is not to have the new party to win (having a new party to assume total control is a bad idea), but to get them enough votes to scare the established parties to change how your voting works, so they get to keep a share of power relative to their share of votes, even if they would become the third party at the next election.
The Google workers who live in SF still pay their taxes in SF, right? I bet they also use local services quite a bit. Property price increase should be welcome to those currently living there, it's much better for them, and the economy as a whole, than prices going down. I admit that I don't fully understand the dynamics of the situation (I don't live in the U.S.), but most places would welcome wealthy neighbors.
If a point-to-point service makes an area so much more desirable, then maybe it was under-valued in the first place. I can't imagine the place being a slum, and then suddenly all googlers want to move there, because free commute.
There is a bigger problem behind all this: unequal wealth and/or income distribution. Fighting a point-to-point private commuting service is not going to fix that.
can get away with the continuing destruction of the neighborhoods where there is affordable housing
If a bus line "destroys the neighborhood", you have bigger problems than the bus line.
forget hacking: what's to stop an exchange from just closing and keeping all the BTC?
Income from tx fees that they will lose when they're out of business? I'd say running an exchange seems quite profitable even without a scam.
And without the exchange you used to run (esp. when you're the last one), you'll have a hard time converting your stolen BTC into something you can use.
True, just like a great time to buy BTC was during that brief window yesterday when they were trading for 100$.
I happened to be watching BTC-e on monday when the $102 dip happened. It was a result of someone (or more likely, someone's misbehaving bot) dumping about 6k BTC on the market, at once. It was back over $500 in about a minute.
Those few who had set ridiculously low bids (expecting crash due to expected MtGox bad news) or bots that didn't have a failsafe to just stop when something crazy happens, probably made a good profit on that dump.
Everyone and everything has an error rate. Software development is well known not to be a perfect process.
Building a wall (or a better analogy, designing the house the wall will be a part of) is no perfect process either.
I just recently thought about why software is so difficult, compared to physical engineering tasks. A big difference I found (aside from the obvious practicalities, such as lacking proper specification and resources) is lack of tolerance in how software is being built. When you're designing a supporting wall for a house, you calculate how much weight it needs to be able to carry. Then, you multiply that weight by a safety factor, adding tolerance. Similarly, when actually constructing the wall, the bricks don't need to be perfectly aligned, good enough is good enough, the final adjustment can be fixed with bit more or less mortar.
A lot of software is built with low tolerance. Part of it is cutting costs, part of it is just immaturity of the industry. There are already known good practises for increasing tolerance of software development process. Worried about buffer overflows? Use a language that makes them impossible. Data loss? Use a known good DB (and learn to use it) instead of inventing your own storage. Developers writing bad logic? Require proper testing and code reviews. All of the previous requested, but not happening? Bring in a competent project manager.
Then there's the whole other unique issue that software development faces, changing requirements. Construction workers will likely give you the finger, then go drink some beer and laugh about it, if you tell them that the garage they have built half-way actually needs to be a cathedral by the end of the month. In software, that's business as usual.
And then, every once in a while, walls collapse too. Sometimes they find someone who had not done his job properly, sometimes it's just written down as a sum of consequences.
I think the smart fridge thing is more interesting for inventory management at your local grocery store, than for an individual person. It would be worth a lot to them to be able to track when people are going to run out of specific items, so they can have the right amount of inventory at right time.
OTOH, almost every time I go grocery shopping, I buy something I wouldn't have needed yet, simply because I didn't remember if I had it or not and get one just in case. So being able to check your fridge contents while at the store might also be useful.
Btw. Before trying it, I thought the beta hate might be just nerd rage, but I'm starting to understand.
Counter-strategy: monitor your home with similar technology. Bonus points for automatically e-mailing the burglar's identity to the local law enforcement. Masked burglars walking around the neighborhood would look seriously suspicious to anyone with eyes.
More significant half, I would expect.
No, it does not. It translates to "I know JavaScript rather well, but I also know several other languages", so I am capable of comparing things and seeing how many bad choices there are in JS language design.
However, when expressing such opinions on ./, it has become customary to omit what languages the poster is comparing the subject language against. Surely that only happens because the poster's great programming knowledge makes him forget that not everyone has similarly vast amount of experience and therefore is able to draw the same conclusions without presenting any actual comparison.
I don't know if I'd want locked doors on the cockpit. What if the pilots become incapacitated like in the movie "Airplane!"? Imagine being a passenger on a plane that has become pilotless but nobody can do anything about it because the cockpit is barricaded.
Just what do you think anybody could really do?
Maybe you should watch the movie referenced by GP ;-)
If there was widespread adoption of a guaranteed-deflation currency, an early adopter who was heavily invested could set up trust accounts where their ancestors would have growing spending power, without the money in the trust even being invested in anything. A future where the world is controlled by the grandchildren of the current rich, a class of aristocrats who don't have to work, but rule the world. And the more new economic activity happens, the higher percentage the old money controls! New wealth will always be worth less than the old wealth for the same activity.
Having a guaranteed-inflation currency around doens't seem to be doing much to prevent this: if you are wealthy, it's likely you were born wealthy. The problem is, that the currency we use, is just currency, it has no real use. And all the actually usable things, natural resources, have guaranteed deflation built in (assuming continuing population growth and no off-planet resource import). So owning natural resources is a bit like owning Bitcoin. It is always a good time to invest in gold.
I came here to post "yeah, because SNMP is the example of an easy way to make things talk to each other", but you were faster. I'd mod you up but you're already at +5.
I think plain old Maxwell's equations are sufficient for understanding cases two and three. For modern CPUs, I'm not sure, but I'd guess quantum effects have bigger influence than special relativity there.
Maybe these are two different groups of parents...
Quite likely. Similar to how there are parents who buy tobacco and/or alcohol to their underage kids, and parents who report the store for selling to kids (to the effect of the store losing their license to sell these substances) when their little princess manages to buy a bottle of vodka with an id borrowed from her older sister.
Look, it's quite simple: if your solution is to get people to use less power, you're fucked. People won't use less power unless they're entirely unable to do so. You need to work off that fact instead of trying to handwave it away.
That's why the GP said no more power plants allowed (not sure why he objects nuclear though). Prices go up, man becomes entirely unable.
Hopefully the fossils who want to burn fossils start to die off soon. It's time for new kind of thinking and the old folks just are not agile enough. Makes sense, they don't need to stick around for the consequences.
I live in a house that has 24 apartments. There are 5 garages at the ground floor, and parking places for 6 cars in front of the house. Can't see in the garages, but the outside parking is empty on a typical evening. Conclusion: people will stop using cars when they're unnecessary.
Those are exactly the countries in which I would expect to get a food poisoning as a tourist.
Gold mining is very risky. Selling shovels is mundane but presents a consistent, although lower profit. Those who want consistent profits aren't also the types who want a rollercoaster ride of high profit and high losses.
A well-balanced portfolio would include a bit of both.
I think I know that place. I tried to use the toilet there but I got a 418 - I'm a teapot. The last time I'm eating there...
So has ButterflyLabs actually managed to deliver some of those ASIC miners already? I figured it will be more profitable for them to keep any hardware they build...
The fact that California made this non enforcible means the state is dead last if I wanted to start a .com. How do I know employees wont steal my ideas?
If your great idea suddenly stops working when it is revealed to someone else, then it's fundamentally flawed. Anyone "stealing" it would still have to implement both the technical and business sides of it himself, unless he actually steals the implementations from you (in which case you have something to sue with). Just do it better, or lose the competition. Or have them sign an NDA with a nice big penalty.
So can someone explain to me how you can be convicted of both conspiring to do wire fraud AND for doing it? Doesn't the latter cancel out the former, or do you also get convicted of conspiracy to attempt a murder, attempted murder AND murder when you kill someone?
Conspire to murder person A, attempt to murder person B and actually murder person C. Someone else can take the wire fraud analogy.
Replying to undo an accident mod.
But seriously, a TV with built-in video conference features might be useful, as long as they don't go and invent their own standard for it. I have been playing with the thought of setting up sort of "virtual windows" between separate office spaces, to allow a different, ad-hoc mode of communication between people at different locations.