It is going to get ugly, without a doubt. The sooner it is tackled, the less ugly it will be.
Slashing the budget during a recession with already-high unemployment is a GREAT way to drive us into a real depression. So yes, doing this soon is a TERRIBLE idea. It needs to wait until the economy is growing.
At which point we'll make some token efforts that will look good for a little while because the healthier economy will provide greater tax revenue... until the next downturn. It'll be just like the deficit reduction of the Clinton era, and do nothing to really fix the systemic problems. At the end of the day the federal government needs to dramatically slash expenditures or increase taxes -- or, probably, both.
Farms didn't save the US from the depression AT ALL. Roosevelt's government programs did...
There is a large and increasing number of economists who disagree, at least with respect to FDR's labor programs. There's a good argument to be made that the New Deal deepened and lengthened the depression. FDR's fiscal reforms were probably correct, and the labor programs did have the beneficial effect of building a lot of great infrastructure (though much of it not economically productive, e.g. national parks), but it seems likely that the private sector would have recovered much faster and unemployment would never have gotten as severe as it did without them.
There's also a counterargument, but it's based mostly on the psychology of economics, not economics itself. That is that while the New Deal's labor policies were bad for the economy they gave people hope, which increased spending and were therefore good for the economy. But the Keynesian notion that the federal spending directly helped to solve the problems is pretty much dead, and has been for decades.
Mainly, there should be a standard supported way of updating the OS on all devices.
Since that's dependent on handset manufacturers and carriers, both of whom have an incentive to get you to buy a new phone rather than upgrade your existing device, Google has come up with an alternative that mostly achieves the same result -- Nearly all important "OS" upgrades these days are actually updates to the application libraries, so old devices get the most important updates whether the OS is updated or not. This really started in earnest with 4.0, so people on pre-Ice Cream Sandwich devices are still lagging, but from that point on it matters a lot less whether you have the current OS.
Honestly, there is ZERO reason to force everyone to drive to one location for a conference except for the drinking and dining on the company dime afterwards.
I disagree. Strongly.
My company (Google) uses videoconferencing extensively; every conference room is a video conference room with high-quality screens and cameras, and every meeting that involves people in multiple sites is a video conference. The VC system (which is the same tech in Google Hangouts, er, Video Chats) integrates with the calendaring and room booking system so everything gets linked up automatically. Anyone can project their screen to the VC with a few keystrokes. The result is extremely productive, especially when combined with Google Docs.
However, I still fly to remote sites to meet physically with the teams I collaborate with, and do it on a regular basis. A couple of times per year to overseas locations, and at least quarterly to the nearer sites, and drinking and dining boondoggles have nothing to do with it (I abhor business dinners). Why, then? And why does the company gladly fund and even encourage these trips?
Because they're necessary. VC is great for exchanging information, but very bad for building personal relationships. Meeting someone in person, even if all you do is have exactly the same meeting you would have via VC, dramatically improves the working relationship -- even if it was good to begin with.
Why this is, I don't really know. I do notice that physical co-location reduces the formality of the interaction in subtle ways. I think part of it might be the unnoticeable but still present latency in VC communications. The lag may only be 30 ms, but I think that 30 ms matters in the spontaneity of interaction. I think most of it is probably just that people become more real to you when you shake their hand and smell their BO (or, hopefully, lack thereof). Whatever the basis, the fact is that it's hard to make a human connection with an image on a screen.
And, much as I hate it, a night or two out socializing and discussing things completely unrelated to work (bringing spouses along really helps to ensure that) does a great deal to cement those relationships.
Once you've made those human connections, VCs are great vehicles for communication. But until you have a sense of the people on the other end, VCs are inherently less effective even in the best of times, and when things become stressful and have the potential to become antagonistic, the human connections are what make collaboration possible.
There are a number of solar-powered homes in my area, which isn't a particularly warm climate (Colorado).
There are a lot of houses with solar collectors. There probably isn't one house anywhere in the state that is Solar Powered.
Check for a power meter or power lines running to the house before you make (or believe) ridiculous claims.
Bah. You have no idea what you're talking about.
First of all, a house can have power lines and still be solar powered. Many solar-powered homes use the grid as their storage facility. Most of them actually generate more power than they consume, net, but the grid tie is still very valuable.
Second, if you get out in the sticks (there are a lot of mountain homes), there are many houses which are not connected to the grid at all. Not that they wouldn't like to be able to use grid storage, but it's simply not available without paying tens of thousands of dollars to run lines out to them. These homes use large banks of batteries for storage.
with a secret signature that only the library knows for which crypto algorithm was used
Heh. Typical amateur security protocol design... can't even make it to the end of the second sentence of the description without handwaving some security through obscurity.
More importantly, your proposal addresses the part of the problem that isn't a problem -- the ciphers -- and ignores all of the rest, which is where the cracks show up: key management, protocol design, implementation quality and personnel. Much better to pick a small number of well-respected ciphers and then focus on all of the rest. You're still likely to fail against an adversary like the NSA, assuming they really care to put the effort in to read your mail, but you can make them work for it, and you can limit the amount of data they can get.
If you feel that you have to lie to Congress then either you need to be fired or the program that you're lying about needs to be shut down (or both).
I agree that if the director feels he has to lie, then those are appropriate responses. If he actually does lie, meaning he intentionally and knowingly deceives Congress, then he should be prosecuted for perjury.
The number of solar powered houses throughout the developed world has soared since this program was started eleven years ago.
Which is hogwash unless you think ONE demonstration home in a warm climate constitutes "soaring".
There are a number of solar-powered homes in my area, which isn't a particularly warm climate (Colorado). How much of that is due to the competition? Probably not a lot, but I'll bet it's had some effect, particularly on the homes that were designed from the outset to be solar-powered rather than just retrofitted with solar-heated water pipes and some PV arrays.
I don't have any hard numbers, but I'll bet there are a lot more solar-powered homes today than there were 11 years ago.
Move that house to Minnesota and live in it for a year then come back here and get up on your hind legs amd lecture us on the wonders of bubble wrap.
Why would I want to live in Minnesota? And if I did, I'd pick a house that's appropriate for the climate. The winner is designed for the climate of Austria, which isn't necessarily warm in winter, but a lot warmer than much of Minnesota. Which isn't to say you couldn't design a solar house that would be fine in Minnesota, this just isn't it.
The number of homes having a modest amount of solar collection (of one form or another) which is almost universally
insufficient to supply the needs of the home, while being prohibitively expensive at the same time has grown
I know slashdot tradition is to comment without reading TFA, but you should really give it a try in this case. Especially interesting are the teams' video presentations.
Don't get me wrong, that's not half bad, but it certainly doesn't qualify as solar powered.
The winning design produces more power than it consumes. If that doesn't qualify, what does?
No, you don't want round. The big problem with round is that it's perfectly symmetric. With a rectangle, or even a pentagon, there are distinct segments and directions to the building.
Add to that that everyone I know who's worked in or visited the Pentagon finds it to be extremely difficult to navigate, and most of them call it the worst office building they've worked in.
The problem is mostly documents that start out as Word docs, because that's the tool the original author has and knows, and then grow into something that requires other tools, but by then it's very difficult to transition.
It reminds me of the Pentagon. Circular instead of pentagonal, of course, but the proportions look very similar. I guess the Pentagon is almost a marvel of office design, it just needs to be rounded out a little more?
Maybe, if they got my clear, express consent by some means other than obscure fine print buried in a multi-page TOS.
In this case, they're getting your consent by putting a big blue notification bar on every single Google page you visit, until you click on it to see the terms, which are presented in a single page of clear English, with a nice three-bullet summary at the top, with a sub-bullet that gives you a direct link to the opt in/out.
Really, I don't know how it could have been made any clearer.
It only makes it unsellable to people who would bother to check such a registry in the first place... which are the same people who wouldn't have bought a bike they couldn't check or were able to find that it was stolen in the first place. It doesn't harm the seller in the least.
That's too strong. I think there are a fair number of people who would check a bike registry if it were available, and would be skeptical of a bike with its numbers filed off (and might only notice the numbers were removed if they were trying to look it up in a registry), but wouldn't think twice about buying a used bike in the absence of a way to check. Making checks generally more accurate and the capability more widely known would reduce the seller's potential market... which does harm the seller. Lower demand and prices will decline.
Plus, the stupid bike thieves will end up getting caught and prosecuted, which will probably lower the total number of bike thefts.
The challenge is in making it sufficiently universal to make it useful. Getting retailers on board is essential and advertising to raise public awareness would be really valuable. Perhaps retailers could distribute a flyer along with the bike.
Out of curiosity, would you be okay with Google using your publicly-published reviews and comments as endorsements in ads if you were paid a portion of the ad revenue?
Perhaps. It doesn't seem impossible to me that you could have the diamond allotrope, but on a sufficiently small scale that the result still behaves like a liquid. All of this is far beyond my knowledge, though.
I don't know about carbon, but I do know there are other materials that form liquid crystals; odds are you're staring at some right now. What does "liquid crystal" mean? It's a phase which is liquid at the macro scale, but with molecules that are oriented per the crystalline lattice structures at the micro scale. Since they're already oriented appropriately, cooling such a liquid to a solid state would probably cause to assume a crystalline form. I don't know if this would happen with carbon which has crystallized, then melted, but I suppose it's possible.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashing the budget during a recession with already-high unemployment is a GREAT way to drive us into a real depression. So yes, doing this soon is a TERRIBLE idea. It needs to wait until the economy is growing.
At which point we'll make some token efforts that will look good for a little while because the healthier economy will provide greater tax revenue... until the next downturn. It'll be just like the deficit reduction of the Clinton era, and do nothing to really fix the systemic problems. At the end of the day the federal government needs to dramatically slash expenditures or increase taxes -- or, probably, both.
Farms didn't save the US from the depression AT ALL. Roosevelt's government programs did...
There is a large and increasing number of economists who disagree, at least with respect to FDR's labor programs. There's a good argument to be made that the New Deal deepened and lengthened the depression. FDR's fiscal reforms were probably correct, and the labor programs did have the beneficial effect of building a lot of great infrastructure (though much of it not economically productive, e.g. national parks), but it seems likely that the private sector would have recovered much faster and unemployment would never have gotten as severe as it did without them.
There's also a counterargument, but it's based mostly on the psychology of economics, not economics itself. That is that while the New Deal's labor policies were bad for the economy they gave people hope, which increased spending and were therefore good for the economy. But the Keynesian notion that the federal spending directly helped to solve the problems is pretty much dead, and has been for decades.
The only option in the US has been paypal or chase quickpay.
You can now send money with Gmail.
That's a potential solution to a different problem.
Mainly, there should be a standard supported way of updating the OS on all devices.
Since that's dependent on handset manufacturers and carriers, both of whom have an incentive to get you to buy a new phone rather than upgrade your existing device, Google has come up with an alternative that mostly achieves the same result -- Nearly all important "OS" upgrades these days are actually updates to the application libraries, so old devices get the most important updates whether the OS is updated or not. This really started in earnest with 4.0, so people on pre-Ice Cream Sandwich devices are still lagging, but from that point on it matters a lot less whether you have the current OS.
+1 Funny
Do you have any evidence to the contrary? At all?
Sadly, they're not likely to reduce the amount of traffic sniffing.
Google Fiber doesn't sniff traffic.
Internet access is unconstainted IP packets. Both TCP and UDP and whatever other protocol you want.
Since pretty much all residental connections I know of block outgoing port 25
Google Fiber doesn't.
Honestly, there is ZERO reason to force everyone to drive to one location for a conference except for the drinking and dining on the company dime afterwards.
I disagree. Strongly.
My company (Google) uses videoconferencing extensively; every conference room is a video conference room with high-quality screens and cameras, and every meeting that involves people in multiple sites is a video conference. The VC system (which is the same tech in Google Hangouts, er, Video Chats) integrates with the calendaring and room booking system so everything gets linked up automatically. Anyone can project their screen to the VC with a few keystrokes. The result is extremely productive, especially when combined with Google Docs.
However, I still fly to remote sites to meet physically with the teams I collaborate with, and do it on a regular basis. A couple of times per year to overseas locations, and at least quarterly to the nearer sites, and drinking and dining boondoggles have nothing to do with it (I abhor business dinners). Why, then? And why does the company gladly fund and even encourage these trips?
Because they're necessary. VC is great for exchanging information, but very bad for building personal relationships. Meeting someone in person, even if all you do is have exactly the same meeting you would have via VC, dramatically improves the working relationship -- even if it was good to begin with.
Why this is, I don't really know. I do notice that physical co-location reduces the formality of the interaction in subtle ways. I think part of it might be the unnoticeable but still present latency in VC communications. The lag may only be 30 ms, but I think that 30 ms matters in the spontaneity of interaction. I think most of it is probably just that people become more real to you when you shake their hand and smell their BO (or, hopefully, lack thereof). Whatever the basis, the fact is that it's hard to make a human connection with an image on a screen.
And, much as I hate it, a night or two out socializing and discussing things completely unrelated to work (bringing spouses along really helps to ensure that) does a great deal to cement those relationships.
Once you've made those human connections, VCs are great vehicles for communication. But until you have a sense of the people on the other end, VCs are inherently less effective even in the best of times, and when things become stressful and have the potential to become antagonistic, the human connections are what make collaboration possible.
There are a number of solar-powered homes in my area, which isn't a particularly warm climate (Colorado).
There are a lot of houses with solar collectors. There probably isn't one house anywhere in the state that is Solar Powered. Check for a power meter or power lines running to the house before you make (or believe) ridiculous claims.
Bah. You have no idea what you're talking about.
First of all, a house can have power lines and still be solar powered. Many solar-powered homes use the grid as their storage facility. Most of them actually generate more power than they consume, net, but the grid tie is still very valuable.
Second, if you get out in the sticks (there are a lot of mountain homes), there are many houses which are not connected to the grid at all. Not that they wouldn't like to be able to use grid storage, but it's simply not available without paying tens of thousands of dollars to run lines out to them. These homes use large banks of batteries for storage.
with a secret signature that only the library knows for which crypto algorithm was used
Heh. Typical amateur security protocol design... can't even make it to the end of the second sentence of the description without handwaving some security through obscurity.
More importantly, your proposal addresses the part of the problem that isn't a problem -- the ciphers -- and ignores all of the rest, which is where the cracks show up: key management, protocol design, implementation quality and personnel. Much better to pick a small number of well-respected ciphers and then focus on all of the rest. You're still likely to fail against an adversary like the NSA, assuming they really care to put the effort in to read your mail, but you can make them work for it, and you can limit the amount of data they can get.
If you feel that you have to lie to Congress then either you need to be fired or the program that you're lying about needs to be shut down (or both).
I agree that if the director feels he has to lie, then those are appropriate responses. If he actually does lie, meaning he intentionally and knowingly deceives Congress, then he should be prosecuted for perjury.
The number of solar powered houses throughout the developed world has soared since this program was started eleven years ago.
Which is hogwash unless you think ONE demonstration home in a warm climate constitutes "soaring".
There are a number of solar-powered homes in my area, which isn't a particularly warm climate (Colorado). How much of that is due to the competition? Probably not a lot, but I'll bet it's had some effect, particularly on the homes that were designed from the outset to be solar-powered rather than just retrofitted with solar-heated water pipes and some PV arrays.
I don't have any hard numbers, but I'll bet there are a lot more solar-powered homes today than there were 11 years ago.
Move that house to Minnesota and live in it for a year then come back here and get up on your hind legs amd lecture us on the wonders of bubble wrap.
Why would I want to live in Minnesota? And if I did, I'd pick a house that's appropriate for the climate. The winner is designed for the climate of Austria, which isn't necessarily warm in winter, but a lot warmer than much of Minnesota. Which isn't to say you couldn't design a solar house that would be fine in Minnesota, this just isn't it.
The number of homes having a modest amount of solar collection (of one form or another) which is almost universally insufficient to supply the needs of the home, while being prohibitively expensive at the same time has grown
I know slashdot tradition is to comment without reading TFA, but you should really give it a try in this case. Especially interesting are the teams' video presentations.
Don't get me wrong, that's not half bad, but it certainly doesn't qualify as solar powered.
The winning design produces more power than it consumes. If that doesn't qualify, what does?
No, you don't want round. The big problem with round is that it's perfectly symmetric. With a rectangle, or even a pentagon, there are distinct segments and directions to the building.
Add to that that everyone I know who's worked in or visited the Pentagon finds it to be extremely difficult to navigate, and most of them call it the worst office building they've worked in.
I think Google has always tried to make them simple and readable. But they're also written by lawyers, which makes that difficult.
BTW, it's "Don't be evil", not "Do no evil". The latter is impossible.
The problem is mostly documents that start out as Word docs, because that's the tool the original author has and knows, and then grow into something that requires other tools, but by then it's very difficult to transition.
Latex makes beautiful documents and is unparalleled for mathematics, but it is beyond the pale for most mortals....
That's why the GP suggested LyX, rather than LaTeX. Duh.
So what if it looks like a tape reel?
It reminds me of the Pentagon. Circular instead of pentagonal, of course, but the proportions look very similar. I guess the Pentagon is almost a marvel of office design, it just needs to be rounded out a little more?
Maybe, if they got my clear, express consent by some means other than obscure fine print buried in a multi-page TOS.
In this case, they're getting your consent by putting a big blue notification bar on every single Google page you visit, until you click on it to see the terms, which are presented in a single page of clear English, with a nice three-bullet summary at the top, with a sub-bullet that gives you a direct link to the opt in/out.
Really, I don't know how it could have been made any clearer.
It only makes it unsellable to people who would bother to check such a registry in the first place... which are the same people who wouldn't have bought a bike they couldn't check or were able to find that it was stolen in the first place. It doesn't harm the seller in the least.
That's too strong. I think there are a fair number of people who would check a bike registry if it were available, and would be skeptical of a bike with its numbers filed off (and might only notice the numbers were removed if they were trying to look it up in a registry), but wouldn't think twice about buying a used bike in the absence of a way to check. Making checks generally more accurate and the capability more widely known would reduce the seller's potential market... which does harm the seller. Lower demand and prices will decline.
Plus, the stupid bike thieves will end up getting caught and prosecuted, which will probably lower the total number of bike thefts.
The challenge is in making it sufficiently universal to make it useful. Getting retailers on board is essential and advertising to raise public awareness would be really valuable. Perhaps retailers could distribute a flyer along with the bike.
Out of curiosity, would you be okay with Google using your publicly-published reviews and comments as endorsements in ads if you were paid a portion of the ad revenue?
"Liquid diamonds" would be free carbon atoms
Perhaps. It doesn't seem impossible to me that you could have the diamond allotrope, but on a sufficiently small scale that the result still behaves like a liquid. All of this is far beyond my knowledge, though.
Why do you use that crappy font? Makes what you have to say totally unreadable.
Hmm... troll, or idiot... I can't decide. Ah well, it's a distinction without a difference.
I don't know about carbon, but I do know there are other materials that form liquid crystals; odds are you're staring at some right now. What does "liquid crystal" mean? It's a phase which is liquid at the macro scale, but with molecules that are oriented per the crystalline lattice structures at the micro scale. Since they're already oriented appropriately, cooling such a liquid to a solid state would probably cause to assume a crystalline form. I don't know if this would happen with carbon which has crystallized, then melted, but I suppose it's possible.