harmless, no. Better than coal dust and the general crap spewed from factories 50 years ago, absolutely. Horse shit is overall pretty harmless. They're herbivores, so after a few days it becomes fertilizer. Not that you want to be chomping down fertilizer. The exhaust from leaded petrol cars was pretty nasty in quantity.
The transport catastrophe you speak of was only a big city problem. Even until the 1940's much of the world ran on horse power (including the infamously mechanized german army).
The root of the problem, much like every other problem, is that we were fine from a sustainability perspective when the population of the planet was in the 700 million - 1 billion range. Elephants powered work all through asia and some of africa, horses could move people around. Get up to 2 billion people, especially with modern sewage so you can support millions of people in a small city area and you compact all these horses and people. Get to 3 billion, 4 billion, and you simply need much better transport capacity to supply anywhere important. It's not so much horse shit that's the problem it's that you can't clean horse shit and move traffic fast enough, and remember cars and trucks easily move 10x as much material per unit space as a horse (if nothing else but by moving substantially faster). 75% of the population dying before they're 5 isn't desirable either. We just got better at keeping people alive faster than we got good at making birth control.
Of course eliminating the need for a huge number of horses freed up food for the population expanding.
depends on your perspective of problem. If we only had cows and horses, and no other sources of greenhouse gases, and 1/7th the population of people it wouldn't be a problem. If you tried to have horses for 7 billion people.. well.
Cows also produce a relatively large amount of methane compared to other animals.
Expensive is again relative. Expensive by 1900 standards and expensive by 2011 standards are not the same. Thorium alloys (as with most rare earths) require relatively high temperature equipment to extract.
Thorium is about $5000 per kilo atm, but that's because no one uses it, so no one extracts it, and still only $5/gram which would make it far cheaper than a tank of gas if you needed just 8 grams to replace even one fuel tank of petrol).
In many cases yes, it is. If you request it. Depends on the research, your relationship with the researcher and so on.
There are probably 40-50 graduate students from Chicom where I am, (In ontario Canada) and we have about 120 grad students... Just in computer science. Google can take the best and brightest all it wants, it doesn't get them all, a lot of them are chinese and will work on similar projects from the same starting points.
Building a driverless car is not a radical departure or great leap in technology from all of its constituent parts. Integrating that all together is of course a challenge, but there's been a lot of public research on the topic, it's just a matter of being the right persons student.
Of course chinese researchers in china don't have worry the same way google does about liability. What we don't know is how many driverless cars crashed and killed people in china. One google vehicle gets in one fender bender and it makes the front page of/. In some ways their way is going to probably be faster, real world data and all that. But well... causing accidents and the liability associated with is bad.
Or if you're going to use an SSD as a cache on a regular mobo. I'm not suggesting that's a great idea, but I've seen one MOBO like that already (a gigabit z68).
We did understand. Whether it was a 20% flex time project or dedicated team, they still put it out the door, with their marketing buzz and their brand behind it. You also recognize that educational tools are not exactly top tier product quality from a major company. If you use visual studio you're stuck trying to teach students actual visual studio, as used by real developers, if you use some learning tool you're getting a best effort. That's always the case.
3 month notice is nothing in the education business. 1 semester is 4 months, and you have to prep the course several months in advance (including factoring in the curriculum into all future course offerings, and figuring out where this will fit, if at all in terms of equivalences and so on). Usually you plan out two courses in succession, where one builds on the other. CS 101 and 102 sort of thing. If I had a course offering based on app inventor I'd be looking for something new at this point. Better to redo everything now than put it in students hands and have it die with the course (which is a big risk), that just makes students unhappy with us for teaching them useless shit. Unfortunately, from what I understand, some schools have already started the fall term in the US.
Premise 1: Google offered it. True. Premise 2: Google changed it's mind. Again, clearly true. Premise 3: How long has google kept major products in Labs? Picasa, gmail, calendar, wave etc? The point of a lab is to test out ideas and see if they're any good. If they are, keep them around. Educational resources from non education businesses are always going to be at the level of 'Labs" projects. There's nothing wrong with that particularly. Legalese is not brand perception. They are allowed to do whatever they want with their own product suite. This isn't a lawsuit claiming they are in breach of contract, this is a a reaction to shifting it outside the google family. So again, true. They regularly run major products with millions of users as 'labs' projects.
The point is to use the power of the Google brand to attract people to use it. The App Inventor Foundation isn't going to have the same ring to it with students, we'd be just as good trying to use Alice or Java or C++ because non techies have no F'in clue what any of those are to start. Saying "this is based on a great new project from Google" or "great new project from Apple" and they sit up and pay attention. I'm about an hour away from waterloo (home of RIM) and they gave us a bunch of tools to do a really interesting set of class projects on blackberries for senior CS students. The moment we told them we were using blackberries everyone groaned. They don't want something that sounds dead, even if all of the students involved have a much better chance of ever being employed by RIM than Apple or Google.
It is, it's just a much more fractured market without any central repository of data. Also, it's easier to pirate on the PC, so, for example in the last project I worked on, within a week over a 1/3rd of all running copies of the game were pirated.
Steam and GFWL both could have decent data, but neither of them has the big dog World of Warcraft, and while steam does some indi packs it's certainly not the whole marketplace.
Now if you want to talk about individual title sales sure, PC is thumped by 360 and PS3 for Call of Duty and so on. But that's very different than total gaming hours spent on a platform, and the MMO market is a huge chunk of gaming time.
But that's beside the point. I think everyone who's chimed in here, 1 device that does phone, music and some games is the way the market is moving. I cannot for the life of me figure out why the PSP2 (vita or some stupid name) is not going to be a phone right off the bat. Sony has vaguely understood how to blend markets in the past, DVD on the PS2, Blu ray on the PS3, PSP1 in a phone (although very late to the party on that one), but seriously it's just a freaking 4 core smartphone... without the phone.
Also, like the PC, I suspect android is kicking apple and nintendo in the games played area, because you can get decent emulators and Rom's for android pretty easily (including until recently several through official channels).
True. Although obviously Facebook has an algorithm to try and do this already (their "Find Friends" result, which they changed recently). It's a pretty weak algorithm though.
If this is true (open-sourcing the code) then no one has anything to complain about.
False
but it's better than just pulling the plug.
True.
Open source gives you the opportunity to make changes to software. It doesn't give you the ability, time, skills, or business relationships to do so. Google offered this up to build relationships with educators, and then said, 'sorry, nevermind'.
It is entirely possible that the non profit group being handed app inventor will actually produce a better product out of it. But part of the appeal is that it was Google offering it (which makes a lot of difference to people who aren't techies in the first place), and the idea that this product had the long legs of a major backer. I don't want to do up a course in a language that will be gone before the semester is over, let alone before next year, and then have to start again.
As a grad student. My supervisor isn't allowed to ask me to grade work for him, or prepare lecture material for him. Some of them do that, but we have a union that allows us to push back against it. I am paid as a teaching assistant as well (which is not guaranteed for all grad students), for that I am to work no more than 140 hours in a semester, and supposed to be roughly 10 hours per week. Part of being an instructor (which I have also done) is setting assignments that can be graded in the hours you have available to you. If you have 1 TA, yourself, and 25 students, don't set 100 page papers. I taught a graduate/4th year computer science course, so the TA needed to be trained up (that counts against his 140 hours), we had meetings he had office hours (all counts against his hours), and he took care of some stuff with IT (counts against his hours). In the end he had about 70 hours for marking. 5 assignments per student + an exam. So he had about half an hour per student per assignment to mark. That's neither good nor bad, it's just a matter of not setting material that cannot be graded that fast.
Professors are usually 40/40/20. 40% teaching, 40% research, 20% administration. Sometimes they are a bit more teaching or research. Of that teaching they usually do 4 or 5 courses, which then means they are supposed to be spending about 10% of their time on the one course you see them in. In practice it's more like 60/20/20 or 70/20/10 but depends on the department/school/personal ability etc.
We tried to use student numbers on papers at one point at a school I was at previously. Unfortunately it became pretty easy to tie a student number to a student, especially in a small class or lab.
You could come up with a unique ID for each submission, or if all submissions are done online you don't even need that, it's just a bin of assignments to grade with names removed (they still have a unique ID in the database it's just not exposed to markers).
Though I think with essays you get to know peoples style. I suppose it depends on the essay.
ya, rare earths are well... not rare. Some of them are rare in specific cases, but generally they aren't.
One can argue about the need for a certain production capacity being outside of china, simply because, but that is more of a security cost than anything else. and paying people to extract stuff from the ground that there isn't a market for (since demand is already met by china) is just going to waste a pile of money, whether that is worth it is another matter.
Since demand for rare earths is increasing there's a legitimate business interest in expanding production, but they would probably go with india or brazil rather than US production.
Not really. When I was in highschool anyway a lot of stuff I did, movies sports and gaming (that weren't school sponsored) had participants that were teachers, some where even our own teachers. Gasp. I know that the D&D club, had 3 or 4 teachers in it, and a spread of people from ages maybe 12 or 13 to mid 40's, including parents with kids.
As a university instructor I find befriending students on facebook enormously helpful. They don't check e-mail all that often (and, at this point, neither do I), and if they see you online they're comfortable enough to ask a quick question about whatever, where they wouldn't want to wait an hour for an e-mail reply.
Facebook, for all of it's faults, is just about connecting people. I lived about 3 houses away from one of my teachers, and my mother was a teacher, so on a daily basis I saw a lot of my teachers at home, I knew a lot of their phone numbers (or at least could call them easily enough, not that I needed to). So before facebook I was, by the standards of 15 years ago, reasonably well connected. Today facebook lets you talk to people, that's all. If you're a 25 year old teacher who goes drinking on Saturday and posts half naked pictures of yourself drunk, or like to post drunken ramblings probably befriending students isn't for you. But even then they will see some of your pictures inevitably. If you're a 15 year old kid drinking and smoking joints posting pictures of it on facebook, where a teacher might, even incidentally see it, you're in trouble (especially if the teacher is obliged by law to report it).
If you start to recognize, and accept facebook as a *public* way to facilitate communication you can use it effectively. If you treat it like it's supposed to be some private, secret space you're doing it wrong, and are begging for trouble, student or teacher.
geeze what country do you live in? All the people who I went to high school and university with that are doctors, and I'm 31 years old - so that's only 6 or 7 working years, are debt free by now. And we're in canada.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
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It's because it's not basic math. Personal finance and government finance have relatively little in common. Supposing they do fails to properly reflect the nature of economics.
The government, being as big as it is, can cause economic downturns by cutting spending, or raising the wrong taxes. The so called 'bush tax cuts' were entirely unnecessary and wasteful. That was, as was even noted at the time, a republican plot to force someone else (democrats) to cut spending down the road, it changed the terms of the debate a decade later, but was, at the time, entirely borrowed, without a second thought. Credit where credit is due, the tea party nutters weren't fond of this plan.
Then comes the economic downturn. Millions of people become unemployed, and shift on the ledger from paying taxes to collecting unemployment (paid by the government), and more and more businesses and people are making less money, so the pay less in taxes. Those same businesses are also spending less in the rest of the economy- so the economy is about to start a shrinking spiral. This is where personal finance, and government finance almost completely decouple. In this situation the government is in the best position to inject money into the system, create publicly valuable works that can be done by the unemployed. That gives the unemployed jobs, (albeit government jobs) and stops the economic bleeding spiral. The government also creates secure investments for people who cannot handle the risk of being in markets with that degree of uncertainty (and for people who don't want their money in banks who could go bankrupt).
As to what to do about debt. The government is again, very different than people. Government revenues increase on average every year with inflation, economic growth and population growth (obviously it's more subtle than that but close enough). Run a balanced budget for even a few years and the share of the debt plummets (at least in countries that have population growth, japan and europe have a harder time of it).
Cutting spending -> puts people out of work. Saves money, but adding more people to the unemployment rolls still costs the government money, and shrinks the economy. In 'decent' economic times cutting spending will expand the labour pool for the private sector and keep their costs down. In bad economic times you just expand the unemployed labour pool and depress the economy.
Raising/lowering taxes -> broadly raising taxes in an economic downturn is bad, people who already spend all of their income have less to spend, so you hurt overall demand etc.. In the US you have a growing wealth gap, so you should be able to tax one group without causing overall damage (doing that calculation isn't all that hard but isn't suitable for a/. post). Lowering taxes doesn't get you much. People who are poor enough to spend all their money don't benefit from tax breaks, and rich people sitting on piles of money don't need bigger piles of money. This of course depends very much on the exact numbers you're talking about. Under reagan when you had ~80% tax brackets you had other countries in the world with the same. Now that we're at 40-50% top tax brackets your competition for rich peoples tax money is pretty fierce.
Then you arrive at the underlying politics of it all. Both parties, although republicans are better at this, are trying to create an environment which forces the political choices they want to be made just down the road a few years. It's actually impressive grand strategy. If you cut taxes (but not spending) enough, eventually the deficits and debt start to overflow. You're on one hand filling your donors pockets, since they're the ones holding the debt and getting paid interest, and on the other forcing the other party to cut programmes and policies it values (which makes them look weak and incompetent to their own base, and disenfranchises their voters). The democrats are trying to create an environment where certain social programmes would b
Again, that's buying into the: we trade 100 dollars 1000x a day, 365 days a year.
It's a specialized knowledge field. It's tricky to get right, and it involves a lot of skills that stock brokers use. I'm sure one could argue John Carmack and his million + a year salary (or whatever he makes now, he said about a month ago he got a 100x pay increase at one point), is wasted on games. I'm a game developer, people complain at me that I should be doing something other than making games on a regular basis because I should be doing medical imaging or something that helps society or whatever. Hell half the people on/. probably run web servers that have relatively little value. Being able to design and implement HFT systems well should pay well if it makes a lot of money. That guy who made minecraft has like 30 million dollars now. See what I'm getting at? Make a product that does what it's supposed to well, and you get paid well for it. Write a program that finds places to make small amounts of money, you should be rewarded for how much money it makes. Make a game that sells well, you should, again, be rewarded for how many copies it sells.
I think HFT only really pays a lot of money because you can't afford to have people who screw up too much. The worst paid doctor still makes more money than I do because you have to actually be a doctor. HFT may not be medicine, but it's still a very specialized set of knowledge.
The guys making 100K-400k a year with PhD's doing medical imaging are doing alright for themselves too. And it's a much lower risk environment.
Credit swaps are not HFT. Please don't confuse the two.
HFT lets you execute existing trades faster. That's it. If the trades themselves are of dubiously valuable goods that doesn't make the ability to trade them any less genuine. It's probably faster to drive to macdonalds than to drive to a grocery store.
People used to get on camels and mules and tromp half way across the world to get silk from china to europe. Then they built ships that did the same thing, then trains, then big ships, and aircraft and so on. That's high frequency trading. Silk has virtually no value other than as a luxury (or parachute), but people still paid for it.
Facilitating connections between buyers and sellers of securities, normalizing prices between exchanges etc. are all *good* for the economy.
There's probably peak employment by sector. I don't think anyone really wants to be an assembly line worker. When we had a society of relatively poor, illiterate people who came off hard manual labour jobs on farms and into the cities good wages made up for it. But they sent their kids to school precisely so they didn't have to live through the same experience. It's an odd thing to think that your parents wanted a better life for you than they had, and that applies who whole generations of people. Millions of people who were trapped in their jobs, but hope their children don't have to do the same one - and yet a generation of children who want the products their parents hated making.
The problem I think is that society has tended to function on a small population of ideas, a larger but still small population of designers of implementations of ideas, and a large selection of people who build the designs. And there's not really room for 100 million people in the US all being engineers or scientists. But I have no idea what that means the labour market will end up like.
it's still cheaper to maintain the robots in china, and it's still easier to dodge environmental rules in china, and it's still growing like crazy and the main target market for what you're making in the next few years.
And the chinese don't have two political parties playing chicken with government spending over debt that could be easily raised, budgets that could be easily put on a path to remedy and so on.
Oh and in china you don't need to provide healthcare, and wouldn't want to anyway, since if your employees die due to disease you don't need to replace them and no one will do anything if you don't try to help.
The Weimar republic is a very different problem though, they have some similarities but the options for a solution are much different. Germany was burdened with absolutely massive debt it couldn't pay, had special rules governing how it could pay, and the people collecting money wouldn't take devalued marks. The US situation is very different, and far stupider. It can pay it's debt, it can borrow more money, and it can gently devalue it's debt.
The germans needed out of any debt they could dodge. Which was domestic debt. A german bond of 1000 marks was 1000 marks, regardless of the value of the currency. The US situation here is the same, 14 trillion dollars in debt is 14 trillion dollars, if the government starts passing out 14 trillion dollar bank notes by the truck load tomorrow the dollar implodes but the existing debt goes away. Where it differs is in the ability to pay existing debts, and the ability of foreign 'creditors' (in the case of germany it was the people collecting reparations) to demand payment in various ways, and lastly, and, i think most importantly, in the root cause of the lack of further credit.
The germans had to pay back a unit of value in reparations, and a percent of their economy. The french and british were crafty about this. They weren't taking Marks that could just be devalued to nothing (or even just devalued 20 or 30% or something). The US owes debt in a currency it controls. Balanced budgets and a steady tick of 2-3% inflation every year and within 4 or 5 years the situation starts to look a lot better for the US. For germany increasing exports, or really anything they could do to make more money would have just had it clawed away by French and British.
The germans couldn't pay the debt they had. This was a somewhat manufactured - but forcibly imposed, crisis, and I suppose the same could happen to the US, but it's no where near that point. The US was paying essentially 1 or 2% interest on it's short term debt, and 5 or 6% on long term securities. That is, on the scale of things, pretty cheap. I'm canadian, about 20 years ago when our debt crisis started to kind of hit the fan we were paying 8% interest on our debt on average, at the time the US was paying about 3%. Today the US pays about 3.1% (430 billion/year on 14.3 trillion) - and half of that to social security which is this odd debt- funding scheme (where they get guaranteed good interest rates in exchange for the whole social security trust fund being in US treasuries). The US has a lot of options for debt repayment, much of which could be in higher taxes. If the US starts to default, rich holders of US currency (i.e. people rich enough to hold government bonds, either directly or indirectly) are going to get screwed, and if they get taxed more they also get screwed, but at least if they just get taxed more the whole of their assets won't implode to nothing in value. Aristocrats have the right idea. Land and rents are a guaranteed source of income regardless of the value of currency. The US of course could also cut spending. One may not like the options, but you could simply cut federal spending a bunch, raise taxes, ride it out a bit until the economy heats up and so on. The moment the germans couldn't start to repay their debt, got occupied by the belgians and the french, the US isn't at risk of that (though it risks losing what are essentially it's colonies in Saudi, Iraq, Afghanistan, Taiwan, and south korea and a few others). The situation for the germans was forced on them by other countries - at the barrel of a gun, combined with their own stupidity (borrowing to fund the war in the first place for example). The tax burden in the US is very low, and raising it isn't going to cause a problem. The situation in the US is entirely because of its own stupidity (borrowing money to fight wars, refusing to raise taxes to cover the expenditures desired, unwillingness to borrow etc.) - and ones own stupidity is far easier to fix than someone elses guns occupying half your country. Th
The US system (and and a few others) have semi-public or outright private institutions that can conjure money. It doesn't really change anything though. They have to take into account the same factors as the government. Sure, they can, to some small degree cook the books and squeeze out some FOREX profit for themselves, but the same principles apply.
Seriously, what's the problem? If there's a difference in price between two exchanges those prices should balance out. If there's a difference in price between trading in different currencies, they should even out. This is just doing it quickly. The money was always there to be made, it's just in smaller increments now.
If you can, with the right data, specify an algorithm on which to base the buying of companies, then it is a problem best executed by machines rather than people. Your concept of "investing in ideas and well managed companies" is an entirely separate problem. If you want to invest 5 billion dollars in a company you don't go to your HFT stock broker and ask him to buy at right this nanosecond. You call up the CEO of the company, arrange the price, and have a press conference and news release about it. If you want to invest $5000 in a local company you can call a guy up and still do that. But if you notice a differential in price of 1 cent on 5000 shares between a stock exchange in Chicago vs new york, or a sell order and a buy order with a price difference of even 1 cent (or a fraction of a cent if you're into that sort of thing) you can buy up from the seller, and sell to the buyer, and make that fractional price difference. Both the buyer and seller got what they wanted, at the price they wanted, and you made up for the fact that one person was too lazy to check if there was a buy/sell at already on the market at the price they would accept. Building the tools to facilitate the transaction between those two has value, you made money on it. What's the problem?
Trying to move money rapidly carries inherent risk. Trying to move money at all carries the same risk (buy low, sell high, pick an 'well managed company" are all just exercises in guesswork based on public data and personal impressions), but it manifests differently. But the risk is in effect the same. If you buy a car from a manufacturer, to sell to dealerships you're banking on the car company not going bankrupt, if you buy airplanes to sell to airlines you're banking on al qaeda not crashing more planes into buildings tomorrow. Any item you want to sell is a liability as long as you hold it. If that's a share in a company or a bond in a company (both of which have value), or a more durable, or more perishable good. HFT is good in that it normalizes markets and injects short term liquidity into transactions.
It's bad in that just as quickly as it can put liquidity in, it can take it out if the algorithm cannot resolve viable strategies. To a long term (or at least longer term than 24 hours) investor these liquidity shifts don't matter much. No more than it should matter to you if the US government has 76 billion dollars in cash or 74 billion. It does however have the potential to create very odd short term spikes in data. I'm not sure they matter, on the whole, and the reason it is automated, and works well automated is that these are largely automatic things to worry about anyway. There's no reason the price of a share of GE should be different in New York or Chicago, if it is, eventually someone will buy low and sell high. If that happens at high frequency the gains are less, but the losses are less if there's a small price shift, so in the end it's better for everyone.
There are certainly places where HFT could be unfair - for example if HFT's are given access to data before others or the like. That is, to me, and implementation issue, not a concept issue. (Imagine trading where one trader can watch a conference live, and trade during that conference, whereas everyone else watches on TV, on a 30 millisecond delay. The trader watching live has a small advantage, but it shouldn't significantly change the overall outcome of the stock performance in relation to the conference).
Put another way. If you're a long term investor, HFT shouldn't effect you, at all. You can still, quite successfully, read quarterly and yearly reports and guess how valuable ideas are and how good m
Well for them it's different though. They are trying to wipe out the value of their debt (denominated in their own currency at least).
Think of it this way, the US owes about 14 trillion dollars. Most of that is in US dollars, but it owes some in Pounds, some in Yen etc. (In turn, those countries owe some of their debt in dollars). If you want to wipe out the value of the US debt, simply print a 14 trillion dollar bank note. You still owe the foreign currency amount, but if you have trade, foreign reserves or just small enough debt you sort of cope with it.
It does cause significant inflation. But no one has ever tried it for something so stupid as the situation the US is in today. In other countries if you cannot borrow money, or cannot afford to borrow money, then you start taking drastic measures like this. But getting a balanced budget back on track is not simple. In the case of the US there's the official budget (or spending bills that are essentially a budget), those still have be to paid for the fiscal year, and unless you can conjure 1.4 trillion dollars without causing inflation you're still on the hook for those same amounts. If you do cause inflation, and I'm not an expert on the US budget, but it might mean that the government still couldn't pay bills. Essentially if you're authorized 8 billion dollars for X, and within the year there's suddenly 20% inflation, well tough shit, I think you still only get 8 billion dollars, even though your costs have gone up 20% part way through the year.
Normally there's a constant hum of inflation, the population grows the government prints more money to try and match the population, but doesn't quite get it right. Making sure there is at least very slight inflation is preferable to even very slight deflation, as it constantly, slowly, chips away at the value of debt. So in effect governments everywhere are executing this plan in a very limited scope. But the US situation is a whole lot of screwed up. Causing inflation would gradually reduce the value of outstanding debts. But you still need to balance the budget. The US isn't doing that (well both parties are sort of talking about it, but neither of them is in a position to actually do it).
They could basically conjure up some money, but it would make the money they already have worth less. For a few days, the government churns through about 10 billion dollars a day it probably wouldn't be that big of a deal, investor confidence would be shot.
No matter what trying to print money doesn't solve the budget problem, and it's going to make it harder to borrow money when they are ready. It's bad all ways round.
Security is an odd thing. You can be right 99.99999% of the time, and prevent nearly every attack for years, and no one hears about it. But one guy breaks in and steals 25 files on his estranged wife and you have a 'systematic security failure'. Which leads to reviews and all sorts of changes in policies etc.
The war department, and the various related departments combine to directly employ millions of people, with millions (if not 10's of millions) more employed indirectly through contractors and so on. You're never going to be error free in that environment. It's also very hard to create and implement new policies rapidly for that many people, and because it's a government agency every time you write new rules you have to waste months begging for the paymasters in parliament or congress to both pay for it, and agree to let you do it at all. *IF* they agree to pay for it, it will come with strings attached. You can't build a new network security office in the Pentagon, it has to be in Wyoming, because the senator from Wyoming hasn't gotten his kickbacks or 're-election support' to his district yet, or some sort of nonsense like that. Big outfits necessarily want to talk to other big outfits, who, themselves have layers of bureaucracy, which adds even more fun.
Oh and on top of all of that, you have very important, very stupid people (political appointees), who don't know anything about your security procedures, claim themselves too important to be trained because they've been brought in as outsiders to be 'reformers' and IT is left scrambling to keep them connected. Along with keeping everyone else connected, while they're fighting wars, integrate with allied systems, make information open to people who need it, closed to people who don't and leaving a paper trail of accountability so that the GAO, auditor general, national audit office etc. can read everything, and find stuff to complain about. I don't envy any of the people trying to make all of this work, especially on 4 year election cycles when, by the time you get a project going you may find it cut just as you're ready to get it going properly.
Unfortunately the military doesn't have the ability to go to a black hat conference pick the 5 most promising security experts, slap 3 stars each on their sleeves and ask them to fix it. Most of the people who actually know stuff about security have no desire to go through the long road to leadership in the government, and by the time they can be pulled in from the private sector as political appointees they have no clue what's actually going on.
It was never intended to last very long. The first part was put up in 1998, and it will deorbit in 2020 or potentially 2028. Mir only lasted about 15 years, not all of that inhabited.
These things seem to be extremely expensive to maintain, and are somewhat narrow in what they can be used for. The original ISS plan envisioned it as a jumping off platform for other missions, which are now almost certainly not going to happen for the short term future. It's bloody expensive to keep going for any length of time, and I wouldn't be surprised if the modules that were put up 10 years ago are starting to show their age.
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harmless, no. Better than coal dust and the general crap spewed from factories 50 years ago, absolutely. Horse shit is overall pretty harmless. They're herbivores, so after a few days it becomes fertilizer. Not that you want to be chomping down fertilizer. The exhaust from leaded petrol cars was pretty nasty in quantity.
The transport catastrophe you speak of was only a big city problem. Even until the 1940's much of the world ran on horse power (including the infamously mechanized german army).
The root of the problem, much like every other problem, is that we were fine from a sustainability perspective when the population of the planet was in the 700 million - 1 billion range. Elephants powered work all through asia and some of africa, horses could move people around. Get up to 2 billion people, especially with modern sewage so you can support millions of people in a small city area and you compact all these horses and people. Get to 3 billion, 4 billion, and you simply need much better transport capacity to supply anywhere important. It's not so much horse shit that's the problem it's that you can't clean horse shit and move traffic fast enough, and remember cars and trucks easily move 10x as much material per unit space as a horse (if nothing else but by moving substantially faster). 75% of the population dying before they're 5 isn't desirable either. We just got better at keeping people alive faster than we got good at making birth control.
Of course eliminating the need for a huge number of horses freed up food for the population expanding.
depends on your perspective of problem. If we only had cows and horses, and no other sources of greenhouse gases, and 1/7th the population of people it wouldn't be a problem. If you tried to have horses for 7 billion people.. well.
Cows also produce a relatively large amount of methane compared to other animals.
Expensive is again relative. Expensive by 1900 standards and expensive by 2011 standards are not the same. Thorium alloys (as with most rare earths) require relatively high temperature equipment to extract.
Thorium is about $5000 per kilo atm, but that's because no one uses it, so no one extracts it, and still only $5/gram which would make it far cheaper than a tank of gas if you needed just 8 grams to replace even one fuel tank of petrol).
In many cases yes, it is. If you request it. Depends on the research, your relationship with the researcher and so on.
There are probably 40-50 graduate students from Chicom where I am, (In ontario Canada) and we have about 120 grad students... Just in computer science. Google can take the best and brightest all it wants, it doesn't get them all, a lot of them are chinese and will work on similar projects from the same starting points.
Building a driverless car is not a radical departure or great leap in technology from all of its constituent parts. Integrating that all together is of course a challenge, but there's been a lot of public research on the topic, it's just a matter of being the right persons student.
Of course chinese researchers in china don't have worry the same way google does about liability. What we don't know is how many driverless cars crashed and killed people in china. One google vehicle gets in one fender bender and it makes the front page of /. In some ways their way is going to probably be faster, real world data and all that. But well... causing accidents and the liability associated with is bad.
Or if you're going to use an SSD as a cache on a regular mobo. I'm not suggesting that's a great idea, but I've seen one MOBO like that already (a gigabit z68).
We did understand. Whether it was a 20% flex time project or dedicated team, they still put it out the door, with their marketing buzz and their brand behind it. You also recognize that educational tools are not exactly top tier product quality from a major company. If you use visual studio you're stuck trying to teach students actual visual studio, as used by real developers, if you use some learning tool you're getting a best effort. That's always the case.
3 month notice is nothing in the education business. 1 semester is 4 months, and you have to prep the course several months in advance (including factoring in the curriculum into all future course offerings, and figuring out where this will fit, if at all in terms of equivalences and so on). Usually you plan out two courses in succession, where one builds on the other. CS 101 and 102 sort of thing. If I had a course offering based on app inventor I'd be looking for something new at this point. Better to redo everything now than put it in students hands and have it die with the course (which is a big risk), that just makes students unhappy with us for teaching them useless shit. Unfortunately, from what I understand, some schools have already started the fall term in the US.
Premise 1: Google offered it. True.
Premise 2: Google changed it's mind. Again, clearly true.
Premise 3: How long has google kept major products in Labs? Picasa, gmail, calendar, wave etc? The point of a lab is to test out ideas and see if they're any good. If they are, keep them around. Educational resources from non education businesses are always going to be at the level of 'Labs" projects. There's nothing wrong with that particularly. Legalese is not brand perception. They are allowed to do whatever they want with their own product suite. This isn't a lawsuit claiming they are in breach of contract, this is a a reaction to shifting it outside the google family. So again, true. They regularly run major products with millions of users as 'labs' projects.
The point is to use the power of the Google brand to attract people to use it. The App Inventor Foundation isn't going to have the same ring to it with students, we'd be just as good trying to use Alice or Java or C++ because non techies have no F'in clue what any of those are to start. Saying "this is based on a great new project from Google" or "great new project from Apple" and they sit up and pay attention. I'm about an hour away from waterloo (home of RIM) and they gave us a bunch of tools to do a really interesting set of class projects on blackberries for senior CS students. The moment we told them we were using blackberries everyone groaned. They don't want something that sounds dead, even if all of the students involved have a much better chance of ever being employed by RIM than Apple or Google.
It is, it's just a much more fractured market without any central repository of data. Also, it's easier to pirate on the PC, so, for example in the last project I worked on, within a week over a 1/3rd of all running copies of the game were pirated.
Steam and GFWL both could have decent data, but neither of them has the big dog World of Warcraft, and while steam does some indi packs it's certainly not the whole marketplace.
Now if you want to talk about individual title sales sure, PC is thumped by 360 and PS3 for Call of Duty and so on. But that's very different than total gaming hours spent on a platform, and the MMO market is a huge chunk of gaming time.
But that's beside the point. I think everyone who's chimed in here, 1 device that does phone, music and some games is the way the market is moving. I cannot for the life of me figure out why the PSP2 (vita or some stupid name) is not going to be a phone right off the bat. Sony has vaguely understood how to blend markets in the past, DVD on the PS2, Blu ray on the PS3, PSP1 in a phone (although very late to the party on that one), but seriously it's just a freaking 4 core smartphone... without the phone.
Also, like the PC, I suspect android is kicking apple and nintendo in the games played area, because you can get decent emulators and Rom's for android pretty easily (including until recently several through official channels).
True. Although obviously Facebook has an algorithm to try and do this already (their "Find Friends" result, which they changed recently). It's a pretty weak algorithm though.
If this is true (open-sourcing the code) then no one has anything to complain about.
False
but it's better than just pulling the plug.
True.
Open source gives you the opportunity to make changes to software. It doesn't give you the ability, time, skills, or business relationships to do so. Google offered this up to build relationships with educators, and then said, 'sorry, nevermind'.
It is entirely possible that the non profit group being handed app inventor will actually produce a better product out of it. But part of the appeal is that it was Google offering it (which makes a lot of difference to people who aren't techies in the first place), and the idea that this product had the long legs of a major backer. I don't want to do up a course in a language that will be gone before the semester is over, let alone before next year, and then have to start again.
As a grad student. My supervisor isn't allowed to ask me to grade work for him, or prepare lecture material for him. Some of them do that, but we have a union that allows us to push back against it. I am paid as a teaching assistant as well (which is not guaranteed for all grad students), for that I am to work no more than 140 hours in a semester, and supposed to be roughly 10 hours per week. Part of being an instructor (which I have also done) is setting assignments that can be graded in the hours you have available to you. If you have 1 TA, yourself, and 25 students, don't set 100 page papers. I taught a graduate/4th year computer science course, so the TA needed to be trained up (that counts against his 140 hours), we had meetings he had office hours (all counts against his hours), and he took care of some stuff with IT (counts against his hours). In the end he had about 70 hours for marking. 5 assignments per student + an exam. So he had about half an hour per student per assignment to mark. That's neither good nor bad, it's just a matter of not setting material that cannot be graded that fast.
Professors are usually 40/40/20. 40% teaching, 40% research, 20% administration. Sometimes they are a bit more teaching or research. Of that teaching they usually do 4 or 5 courses, which then means they are supposed to be spending about 10% of their time on the one course you see them in. In practice it's more like 60/20/20 or 70/20/10 but depends on the department/school/personal ability etc.
We tried to use student numbers on papers at one point at a school I was at previously. Unfortunately it became pretty easy to tie a student number to a student, especially in a small class or lab.
You could come up with a unique ID for each submission, or if all submissions are done online you don't even need that, it's just a bin of assignments to grade with names removed (they still have a unique ID in the database it's just not exposed to markers).
Though I think with essays you get to know peoples style. I suppose it depends on the essay.
ya, rare earths are well... not rare. Some of them are rare in specific cases, but generally they aren't.
One can argue about the need for a certain production capacity being outside of china, simply because, but that is more of a security cost than anything else. and paying people to extract stuff from the ground that there isn't a market for (since demand is already met by china) is just going to waste a pile of money, whether that is worth it is another matter.
Since demand for rare earths is increasing there's a legitimate business interest in expanding production, but they would probably go with india or brazil rather than US production.
Not really. When I was in highschool anyway a lot of stuff I did, movies sports and gaming (that weren't school sponsored) had participants that were teachers, some where even our own teachers. Gasp. I know that the D&D club, had 3 or 4 teachers in it, and a spread of people from ages maybe 12 or 13 to mid 40's, including parents with kids.
As a university instructor I find befriending students on facebook enormously helpful. They don't check e-mail all that often (and, at this point, neither do I), and if they see you online they're comfortable enough to ask a quick question about whatever, where they wouldn't want to wait an hour for an e-mail reply.
Facebook, for all of it's faults, is just about connecting people. I lived about 3 houses away from one of my teachers, and my mother was a teacher, so on a daily basis I saw a lot of my teachers at home, I knew a lot of their phone numbers (or at least could call them easily enough, not that I needed to). So before facebook I was, by the standards of 15 years ago, reasonably well connected. Today facebook lets you talk to people, that's all. If you're a 25 year old teacher who goes drinking on Saturday and posts half naked pictures of yourself drunk, or like to post drunken ramblings probably befriending students isn't for you. But even then they will see some of your pictures inevitably. If you're a 15 year old kid drinking and smoking joints posting pictures of it on facebook, where a teacher might, even incidentally see it, you're in trouble (especially if the teacher is obliged by law to report it).
If you start to recognize, and accept facebook as a *public* way to facilitate communication you can use it effectively. If you treat it like it's supposed to be some private, secret space you're doing it wrong, and are begging for trouble, student or teacher.
geeze what country do you live in? All the people who I went to high school and university with that are doctors, and I'm 31 years old - so that's only 6 or 7 working years, are debt free by now. And we're in canada.
It's because it's not basic math. Personal finance and government finance have relatively little in common. Supposing they do fails to properly reflect the nature of economics.
The government, being as big as it is, can cause economic downturns by cutting spending, or raising the wrong taxes. The so called 'bush tax cuts' were entirely unnecessary and wasteful. That was, as was even noted at the time, a republican plot to force someone else (democrats) to cut spending down the road, it changed the terms of the debate a decade later, but was, at the time, entirely borrowed, without a second thought. Credit where credit is due, the tea party nutters weren't fond of this plan.
Then comes the economic downturn. Millions of people become unemployed, and shift on the ledger from paying taxes to collecting unemployment (paid by the government), and more and more businesses and people are making less money, so the pay less in taxes. Those same businesses are also spending less in the rest of the economy- so the economy is about to start a shrinking spiral. This is where personal finance, and government finance almost completely decouple. In this situation the government is in the best position to inject money into the system, create publicly valuable works that can be done by the unemployed. That gives the unemployed jobs, (albeit government jobs) and stops the economic bleeding spiral. The government also creates secure investments for people who cannot handle the risk of being in markets with that degree of uncertainty (and for people who don't want their money in banks who could go bankrupt).
As to what to do about debt. The government is again, very different than people. Government revenues increase on average every year with inflation, economic growth and population growth (obviously it's more subtle than that but close enough). Run a balanced budget for even a few years and the share of the debt plummets (at least in countries that have population growth, japan and europe have a harder time of it).
Cutting spending -> puts people out of work. Saves money, but adding more people to the unemployment rolls still costs the government money, and shrinks the economy. In 'decent' economic times cutting spending will expand the labour pool for the private sector and keep their costs down. In bad economic times you just expand the unemployed labour pool and depress the economy.
Raising/lowering taxes -> broadly raising taxes in an economic downturn is bad, people who already spend all of their income have less to spend, so you hurt overall demand etc.. In the US you have a growing wealth gap, so you should be able to tax one group without causing overall damage (doing that calculation isn't all that hard but isn't suitable for a /. post). Lowering taxes doesn't get you much. People who are poor enough to spend all their money don't benefit from tax breaks, and rich people sitting on piles of money don't need bigger piles of money. This of course depends very much on the exact numbers you're talking about. Under reagan when you had ~80% tax brackets you had other countries in the world with the same. Now that we're at 40-50% top tax brackets your competition for rich peoples tax money is pretty fierce.
Then you arrive at the underlying politics of it all. Both parties, although republicans are better at this, are trying to create an environment which forces the political choices they want to be made just down the road a few years. It's actually impressive grand strategy. If you cut taxes (but not spending) enough, eventually the deficits and debt start to overflow. You're on one hand filling your donors pockets, since they're the ones holding the debt and getting paid interest, and on the other forcing the other party to cut programmes and policies it values (which makes them look weak and incompetent to their own base, and disenfranchises their voters). The democrats are trying to create an environment where certain social programmes would b
Again, that's buying into the: we trade 100 dollars 1000x a day, 365 days a year.
It's a specialized knowledge field. It's tricky to get right, and it involves a lot of skills that stock brokers use. I'm sure one could argue John Carmack and his million + a year salary (or whatever he makes now, he said about a month ago he got a 100x pay increase at one point), is wasted on games. I'm a game developer, people complain at me that I should be doing something other than making games on a regular basis because I should be doing medical imaging or something that helps society or whatever. Hell half the people on /. probably run web servers that have relatively little value. Being able to design and implement HFT systems well should pay well if it makes a lot of money. That guy who made minecraft has like 30 million dollars now. See what I'm getting at? Make a product that does what it's supposed to well, and you get paid well for it. Write a program that finds places to make small amounts of money, you should be rewarded for how much money it makes. Make a game that sells well, you should, again, be rewarded for how many copies it sells.
I think HFT only really pays a lot of money because you can't afford to have people who screw up too much. The worst paid doctor still makes more money than I do because you have to actually be a doctor. HFT may not be medicine, but it's still a very specialized set of knowledge.
The guys making 100K-400k a year with PhD's doing medical imaging are doing alright for themselves too. And it's a much lower risk environment.
Credit swaps are not HFT. Please don't confuse the two.
HFT lets you execute existing trades faster. That's it. If the trades themselves are of dubiously valuable goods that doesn't make the ability to trade them any less genuine. It's probably faster to drive to macdonalds than to drive to a grocery store.
People used to get on camels and mules and tromp half way across the world to get silk from china to europe. Then they built ships that did the same thing, then trains, then big ships, and aircraft and so on. That's high frequency trading. Silk has virtually no value other than as a luxury (or parachute), but people still paid for it.
Facilitating connections between buyers and sellers of securities, normalizing prices between exchanges etc. are all *good* for the economy.
There's probably peak employment by sector. I don't think anyone really wants to be an assembly line worker. When we had a society of relatively poor, illiterate people who came off hard manual labour jobs on farms and into the cities good wages made up for it. But they sent their kids to school precisely so they didn't have to live through the same experience. It's an odd thing to think that your parents wanted a better life for you than they had, and that applies who whole generations of people. Millions of people who were trapped in their jobs, but hope their children don't have to do the same one - and yet a generation of children who want the products their parents hated making.
The problem I think is that society has tended to function on a small population of ideas, a larger but still small population of designers of implementations of ideas, and a large selection of people who build the designs. And there's not really room for 100 million people in the US all being engineers or scientists. But I have no idea what that means the labour market will end up like.
it's still cheaper to maintain the robots in china, and it's still easier to dodge environmental rules in china, and it's still growing like crazy and the main target market for what you're making in the next few years.
And the chinese don't have two political parties playing chicken with government spending over debt that could be easily raised, budgets that could be easily put on a path to remedy and so on.
Oh and in china you don't need to provide healthcare, and wouldn't want to anyway, since if your employees die due to disease you don't need to replace them and no one will do anything if you don't try to help.
The Weimar republic is a very different problem though, they have some similarities but the options for a solution are much different. Germany was burdened with absolutely massive debt it couldn't pay, had special rules governing how it could pay, and the people collecting money wouldn't take devalued marks. The US situation is very different, and far stupider. It can pay it's debt, it can borrow more money, and it can gently devalue it's debt.
The germans needed out of any debt they could dodge. Which was domestic debt. A german bond of 1000 marks was 1000 marks, regardless of the value of the currency. The US situation here is the same, 14 trillion dollars in debt is 14 trillion dollars, if the government starts passing out 14 trillion dollar bank notes by the truck load tomorrow the dollar implodes but the existing debt goes away. Where it differs is in the ability to pay existing debts, and the ability of foreign 'creditors' (in the case of germany it was the people collecting reparations) to demand payment in various ways, and lastly, and, i think most importantly, in the root cause of the lack of further credit.
The germans had to pay back a unit of value in reparations, and a percent of their economy. The french and british were crafty about this. They weren't taking Marks that could just be devalued to nothing (or even just devalued 20 or 30% or something). The US owes debt in a currency it controls. Balanced budgets and a steady tick of 2-3% inflation every year and within 4 or 5 years the situation starts to look a lot better for the US. For germany increasing exports, or really anything they could do to make more money would have just had it clawed away by French and British.
The germans couldn't pay the debt they had. This was a somewhat manufactured - but forcibly imposed, crisis, and I suppose the same could happen to the US, but it's no where near that point. The US was paying essentially 1 or 2% interest on it's short term debt, and 5 or 6% on long term securities. That is, on the scale of things, pretty cheap. I'm canadian, about 20 years ago when our debt crisis started to kind of hit the fan we were paying 8% interest on our debt on average, at the time the US was paying about 3%. Today the US pays about 3.1% (430 billion/year on 14.3 trillion) - and half of that to social security which is this odd debt- funding scheme (where they get guaranteed good interest rates in exchange for the whole social security trust fund being in US treasuries). The US has a lot of options for debt repayment, much of which could be in higher taxes. If the US starts to default, rich holders of US currency (i.e. people rich enough to hold government bonds, either directly or indirectly) are going to get screwed, and if they get taxed more they also get screwed, but at least if they just get taxed more the whole of their assets won't implode to nothing in value. Aristocrats have the right idea. Land and rents are a guaranteed source of income regardless of the value of currency. The US of course could also cut spending. One may not like the options, but you could simply cut federal spending a bunch, raise taxes, ride it out a bit until the economy heats up and so on. The moment the germans couldn't start to repay their debt, got occupied by the belgians and the french, the US isn't at risk of that (though it risks losing what are essentially it's colonies in Saudi, Iraq, Afghanistan, Taiwan, and south korea and a few others). The situation for the germans was forced on them by other countries - at the barrel of a gun, combined with their own stupidity (borrowing to fund the war in the first place for example). The tax burden in the US is very low, and raising it isn't going to cause a problem. The situation in the US is entirely because of its own stupidity (borrowing money to fight wars, refusing to raise taxes to cover the expenditures desired, unwillingness to borrow etc.) - and ones own stupidity is far easier to fix than someone elses guns occupying half your country. Th
The US system (and and a few others) have semi-public or outright private institutions that can conjure money. It doesn't really change anything though. They have to take into account the same factors as the government. Sure, they can, to some small degree cook the books and squeeze out some FOREX profit for themselves, but the same principles apply.
Why?
Seriously, what's the problem? If there's a difference in price between two exchanges those prices should balance out. If there's a difference in price between trading in different currencies, they should even out. This is just doing it quickly. The money was always there to be made, it's just in smaller increments now.
If you can, with the right data, specify an algorithm on which to base the buying of companies, then it is a problem best executed by machines rather than people. Your concept of "investing in ideas and well managed companies" is an entirely separate problem. If you want to invest 5 billion dollars in a company you don't go to your HFT stock broker and ask him to buy at right this nanosecond. You call up the CEO of the company, arrange the price, and have a press conference and news release about it. If you want to invest $5000 in a local company you can call a guy up and still do that. But if you notice a differential in price of 1 cent on 5000 shares between a stock exchange in Chicago vs new york, or a sell order and a buy order with a price difference of even 1 cent (or a fraction of a cent if you're into that sort of thing) you can buy up from the seller, and sell to the buyer, and make that fractional price difference. Both the buyer and seller got what they wanted, at the price they wanted, and you made up for the fact that one person was too lazy to check if there was a buy/sell at already on the market at the price they would accept. Building the tools to facilitate the transaction between those two has value, you made money on it. What's the problem?
Trying to move money rapidly carries inherent risk. Trying to move money at all carries the same risk (buy low, sell high, pick an 'well managed company" are all just exercises in guesswork based on public data and personal impressions), but it manifests differently. But the risk is in effect the same. If you buy a car from a manufacturer, to sell to dealerships you're banking on the car company not going bankrupt, if you buy airplanes to sell to airlines you're banking on al qaeda not crashing more planes into buildings tomorrow. Any item you want to sell is a liability as long as you hold it. If that's a share in a company or a bond in a company (both of which have value), or a more durable, or more perishable good. HFT is good in that it normalizes markets and injects short term liquidity into transactions.
It's bad in that just as quickly as it can put liquidity in, it can take it out if the algorithm cannot resolve viable strategies. To a long term (or at least longer term than 24 hours) investor these liquidity shifts don't matter much. No more than it should matter to you if the US government has 76 billion dollars in cash or 74 billion. It does however have the potential to create very odd short term spikes in data. I'm not sure they matter, on the whole, and the reason it is automated, and works well automated is that these are largely automatic things to worry about anyway. There's no reason the price of a share of GE should be different in New York or Chicago, if it is, eventually someone will buy low and sell high. If that happens at high frequency the gains are less, but the losses are less if there's a small price shift, so in the end it's better for everyone.
There are certainly places where HFT could be unfair - for example if HFT's are given access to data before others or the like. That is, to me, and implementation issue, not a concept issue. (Imagine trading where one trader can watch a conference live, and trade during that conference, whereas everyone else watches on TV, on a 30 millisecond delay. The trader watching live has a small advantage, but it shouldn't significantly change the overall outcome of the stock performance in relation to the conference).
Put another way. If you're a long term investor, HFT shouldn't effect you, at all. You can still, quite successfully, read quarterly and yearly reports and guess how valuable ideas are and how good m
Well for them it's different though. They are trying to wipe out the value of their debt (denominated in their own currency at least).
Think of it this way, the US owes about 14 trillion dollars. Most of that is in US dollars, but it owes some in Pounds, some in Yen etc. (In turn, those countries owe some of their debt in dollars). If you want to wipe out the value of the US debt, simply print a 14 trillion dollar bank note. You still owe the foreign currency amount, but if you have trade, foreign reserves or just small enough debt you sort of cope with it.
It does cause significant inflation. But no one has ever tried it for something so stupid as the situation the US is in today. In other countries if you cannot borrow money, or cannot afford to borrow money, then you start taking drastic measures like this. But getting a balanced budget back on track is not simple. In the case of the US there's the official budget (or spending bills that are essentially a budget), those still have be to paid for the fiscal year, and unless you can conjure 1.4 trillion dollars without causing inflation you're still on the hook for those same amounts. If you do cause inflation, and I'm not an expert on the US budget, but it might mean that the government still couldn't pay bills. Essentially if you're authorized 8 billion dollars for X, and within the year there's suddenly 20% inflation, well tough shit, I think you still only get 8 billion dollars, even though your costs have gone up 20% part way through the year.
Normally there's a constant hum of inflation, the population grows the government prints more money to try and match the population, but doesn't quite get it right. Making sure there is at least very slight inflation is preferable to even very slight deflation, as it constantly, slowly, chips away at the value of debt. So in effect governments everywhere are executing this plan in a very limited scope. But the US situation is a whole lot of screwed up. Causing inflation would gradually reduce the value of outstanding debts. But you still need to balance the budget. The US isn't doing that (well both parties are sort of talking about it, but neither of them is in a position to actually do it).
They could basically conjure up some money, but it would make the money they already have worth less. For a few days, the government churns through about 10 billion dollars a day it probably wouldn't be that big of a deal, investor confidence would be shot.
No matter what trying to print money doesn't solve the budget problem, and it's going to make it harder to borrow money when they are ready. It's bad all ways round.
Security is an odd thing. You can be right 99.99999% of the time, and prevent nearly every attack for years, and no one hears about it. But one guy breaks in and steals 25 files on his estranged wife and you have a 'systematic security failure'. Which leads to reviews and all sorts of changes in policies etc.
The war department, and the various related departments combine to directly employ millions of people, with millions (if not 10's of millions) more employed indirectly through contractors and so on. You're never going to be error free in that environment. It's also very hard to create and implement new policies rapidly for that many people, and because it's a government agency every time you write new rules you have to waste months begging for the paymasters in parliament or congress to both pay for it, and agree to let you do it at all. *IF* they agree to pay for it, it will come with strings attached. You can't build a new network security office in the Pentagon, it has to be in Wyoming, because the senator from Wyoming hasn't gotten his kickbacks or 're-election support' to his district yet, or some sort of nonsense like that. Big outfits necessarily want to talk to other big outfits, who, themselves have layers of bureaucracy, which adds even more fun.
Oh and on top of all of that, you have very important, very stupid people (political appointees), who don't know anything about your security procedures, claim themselves too important to be trained because they've been brought in as outsiders to be 'reformers' and IT is left scrambling to keep them connected. Along with keeping everyone else connected, while they're fighting wars, integrate with allied systems, make information open to people who need it, closed to people who don't and leaving a paper trail of accountability so that the GAO, auditor general, national audit office etc. can read everything, and find stuff to complain about. I don't envy any of the people trying to make all of this work, especially on 4 year election cycles when, by the time you get a project going you may find it cut just as you're ready to get it going properly.
Unfortunately the military doesn't have the ability to go to a black hat conference pick the 5 most promising security experts, slap 3 stars each on their sleeves and ask them to fix it. Most of the people who actually know stuff about security have no desire to go through the long road to leadership in the government, and by the time they can be pulled in from the private sector as political appointees they have no clue what's actually going on.
It was never intended to last very long. The first part was put up in 1998, and it will deorbit in 2020 or potentially 2028. Mir only lasted about 15 years, not all of that inhabited.
These things seem to be extremely expensive to maintain, and are somewhat narrow in what they can be used for. The original ISS plan envisioned it as a jumping off platform for other missions, which are now almost certainly not going to happen for the short term future. It's bloody expensive to keep going for any length of time, and I wouldn't be surprised if the modules that were put up 10 years ago are starting to show their age.