Also non-functional street lights are out of the question. A city council can't simply pick where it wants to react promptly. There is no valid excuse for broken streetlights whatsoever.
In the UK councils are deliberately turning street lights off, either between midnight and 5am, or all night, to save on the electricity bills.
The Chinese government may not be a leader in human rights, but nor are they close to Hussein.
No, they just occupy other 1000 year old countries like Tibet and claim they're just waiting to be "freed" by the PRK. Oh, and there was that thing in Tianamen Square.
What, the big TVs saying "PEACE" and "TRANQUILITY" and music playing, or the metal detectors on the way in?
In all three of your examples I have the same question, What happens to your data? None of your scenarios seem to take that into account.
In the official corporate way, it's lost. In the local way, it's lost.
However data consists of 1) Emails and other onliney things 2) Archive footage that can be downloaded back from base 3) Locally shot video at 35mbit or 50mbit, which doesn't work in a cloud, or audio at 2-3 mbit which equally doesn't work with the cloud when you've got a 200kbit link at $10/minute.
You see, we aren't an it business, "the cloud", whatever that means, is an IT solution for an IT technology.
Cloud is the only answer that can make decent sense except if everything is in the cloud (and I assume you do everything via browser so nothing is stored locally, yes I have seen that you have a complex software stack installed so this isn't the case, playing devil's advocate here) you don't need anything more than a dumb terminal
With the capability to edit and store hours of HD material and create short packages? With the CPU power to compress that to get the 5 minute piece back in a few hours? With the resilience to work in a patchy network environment? Sorry but IT droids with their yearly sales forecasts and powerpoint slides may be happy with a dumb terminal, but I don't work in the IT business.
BBC most categorically does not do real news reporting.
It does, but it's hard to find it out. The BBC journalists, especially those abroad, know a hell of a lot about their areas of expertise. By the time it's been filtered down to a 2 minute package on the six (if you're lucky), with some live 2-ways, that's all lost.
You occasionally find some decent journalism online in the features, and on newsnight, but most of the mainstream bbc stuff if regurgitating the same old stuff -- a correspondent in Seoul is great, but when something TV-worthy hits (say the shelling of that south korean island), then between radio 4, 5, news24, bbc world, national news, online, world service, they dont have time to get a coffee, let alone go and find out what's happening outside the studio.
The fact that half the correspondents are stringers, and paid per phone in. They need to milk the few occasions they get on air for all it's worth, and spend the rest of the year making the contacts and knowing the area.
Better than, I'm supposed to use this dingly dangly to do work, but the tools I'm allowed to use don't quite do what I need. If I could just use this app I could increase productivity, but IT has the system so locked down that to even think about using a different app is grounds for termination.
Fortunately my management structure realises IT is there for people that use a selection of a few specific applications, and those of us with "unusual" requirements are better opting out.
A wise IT dept allows users to add additional tools, but with the caveat that the only fix available is a system wipe and restore to original configuration. The Users are responsible for keeping their data backed up.
Official IT policy at my company is to use leased laptops (at $3k a pop), which run a complex stack of software that reduces the machine to a painfully slow mess.
When it breaks you have to take it back to the office. In the UK, then wait for a couple of weeks while some idiot prods it, before wiping it and handing it back (without fixing the original problem)
Management in one area have now rolled out 300 mac laptops for one their department, 13, 15 or 17". If it breaks, you boot from a small usb drive and restore from scratch. If the machine dies, you take it to an apple store. If it's stolen, you buy a new one.
Apart from those, are there actually open source projects that can compete with proprietary counterparts? Especially on less popular niches like industry products or games (even though games is a popular niche, but there still isn't any good open source games or game engines).
ffmpeg and vlc, I can't think of any propriety program that can dream of competing.
I actually hope that North Korea is stupid enough to attempt an invasion of South Korea.
We can't really excuse going in there and "liberating" North Korea from what is one of the most oppressive dictatorships in the world. If they attack one of our major allies, however, they will get (at most) a couple of miles into South Korean territory before the US shows up and wrecks their shit. Then, of course, we'd go into the country and dismantle their entire military (one way or another). From there we'd probably set up elections (monitored by the UN) and actually help the people recover.
Make it like jury duty. Select leaders at random. Maybe have a test for specialized positions, or a general civics exam.
I'm not sure I believe in this myself, but it would have advantages over the current system.
In the UK there are very powerful, unelected, civil servants that run the country (see Yes Minister for an exagerated example). I assume the same happens in the U.S.
I genuinely believe most new politicians (at least the UK) have principles. I might not agree with them of course. After a few years on the job they're brow-beaten, same as in any large organisation. They're allowed to make the occasional grand gesture for PR purposes, but generally the ship keeps steering the course with noone at the helm.
Well, hallelujah! The answer at last! It's such a shame the TSA hasn't consulted with you this whole time. We could have saved a lot of money trying to scan for explosives that can take down a plane without having to go to the cockpit.
You wanted to prevent another "9/11", I assume you mean the hijacking and flying of jet airplanes loaded with a lot of fuel into buildings on September 11th 2001?
You can solve this by locking the cockpit door.
If you've now changed what you want to prevent, that's fine, but that's also the problem behind an ill-defined agency like the TSA
What the flying fuck are you talking about? Who said anything about being scared, besides you? I'm talking about trying to prevent another 9/11 attack.
Because the media industry primary goal is to produce videos that are not to be broadcasted on the web? Yeah television is the probably media of the future.
I have an editor in Syria that's shot some local footage, and wants to incorporate some library material, before feeding it back to base.
Once in base it's reversions for various outlets (childrens news). A few graphics are then added.
The editor is on a 192kbit bgan, and has a 5 minute package to send back, sending uncompressed video around the place just won't work.
How do I get this footage back in 1) A high quality 2) A decent time
But I need to be able to change that footage later, which tends to mean bringing it back to an iframe format.
Eventually the media goes onto the web for a few thousand people to watch, and is compressed to h264 at 1mbit and looks crap. It's also broadcast to 200m people having gone through various devices as SDI (or HD-SDI) and looks a bit better.
I control both the sending end in Syria, and the receiving end in base. I can use H264, VP8, mjpeg, DV25, DNXhd or whatever I want. Unfortunately h264 is the best solution.
Suppose they had to throw 4 out of every 5 GTX chip away, and each one cost $100 to make, then each good GTX would cost $500 on average. The yield is thus 20%.
If instead, they can sell those 4 bad chips as lower-spec products, each chip costs $100. The yield is now 100%.
But what if the availability of those $100 chips reduces demand for the $500 ones? You could end up selling the 4x$100 ones, but can't shift the $500 one.
Look at airlines. They fly a plane from London to New York, it has 200 economy seats, 50 business seats.
Economy sell for $500. Business for $2000.
After everyone's on board, the cabin crew notice that Business class only has 30 people in (economy has 150 people). They hold an auction to upgrade economy travellers, and remaining 20 seats go for $200 each.
On the face of if, the cabin crew have just raised an extra $4,000 for their airline.
however
On the next flight the business is empty. Economy has 180 people in. The cabin crew do the same auction, and this time seats go for $250 each. Wonderful, they've now made $12,500, at least on the surface.
The problem is, the people that would normally spend $2,000 on a business ticket will buy economy for $500 and pay for the upgrade ($250)
The first flight would have made 30*2000 + 150*500 = $135,000 The upgrades would have bumped that up to $139,000
However the effect of the upgrades caused the second flight to be economy class only. The flight makes 180*500 + 50*250 upgrades, or $102,500.
Sometimes it's worth throwing away stock, or seats, to protect your market.
Because a private company would never be caught doing something like this. Nope. They are all completely above any kind of corruption.
Unlike the DMV, a private company can't force you to use their services. Nor can they push a unique identifier on you which is then used as an id by numerous different databases.
I wonder how many Americans have a driving license. I wonder how many have a facebook account.
Nuclear power is the best intermediate solution. It's a finite resource, so the best we can do is to use it to buy some time until we develop effective renewable alternatives.
The sun is also finite. In fact the universe will die one day somehow. Ultimately we only really care about the next 100-1000 years
Slashdot Mirror
We should decrease their budget by n, where n is their 2011 budget.
n+$400k surely
Also non-functional street lights are out of the question. A city council can't simply pick where it wants to react promptly. There is no valid excuse for broken streetlights whatsoever.
In the UK councils are deliberately turning street lights off, either between midnight and 5am, or all night, to save on the electricity bills.
I have photographed the Green Bank Radiotelescope a few times, that place is *massive*, pictures don't do it justice, I mean it's really friggin' big.
You think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's peanuts compared to the GBR?
This better not be another damn Russian spy job
The Chinese government may not be a leader in human rights, but nor are they close to Hussein.
No, they just occupy other 1000 year old countries like Tibet and claim they're just waiting to be "freed" by the PRK. Oh, and there was that thing in Tianamen Square.
What, the big TVs saying "PEACE" and "TRANQUILITY" and music playing, or the metal detectors on the way in?
In all three of your examples I have the same question, What happens to your data? None of your scenarios seem to take that into account.
In the official corporate way, it's lost. In the local way, it's lost.
However data consists of
1) Emails and other onliney things
2) Archive footage that can be downloaded back from base
3) Locally shot video at 35mbit or 50mbit, which doesn't work in a cloud, or audio at 2-3 mbit which equally doesn't work with the cloud when you've got a 200kbit link at $10/minute.
You see, we aren't an it business, "the cloud", whatever that means, is an IT solution for an IT technology.
Cloud is the only answer that can make decent sense except if everything is in the cloud (and I assume you do everything via browser so nothing is stored locally, yes I have seen that you have a complex software stack installed so this isn't the case, playing devil's advocate here) you don't need anything more than a dumb terminal
With the capability to edit and store hours of HD material and create short packages? With the CPU power to compress that to get the 5 minute piece back in a few hours? With the resilience to work in a patchy network environment? Sorry but IT droids with their yearly sales forecasts and powerpoint slides may be happy with a dumb terminal, but I don't work in the IT business.
BBC most categorically does not do real news reporting.
It does, but it's hard to find it out. The BBC journalists, especially those abroad, know a hell of a lot about their areas of expertise. By the time it's been filtered down to a 2 minute package on the six (if you're lucky), with some live 2-ways, that's all lost.
You occasionally find some decent journalism online in the features, and on newsnight, but most of the mainstream bbc stuff if regurgitating the same old stuff -- a correspondent in Seoul is great, but when something TV-worthy hits (say the shelling of that south korean island), then between radio 4, 5, news24, bbc world, national news, online, world service, they dont have time to get a coffee, let alone go and find out what's happening outside the studio.
The fact that half the correspondents are stringers, and paid per phone in. They need to milk the few occasions they get on air for all it's worth, and spend the rest of the year making the contacts and knowing the area.
Better than, I'm supposed to use this dingly dangly to do work, but the tools I'm allowed to use don't quite do what I need. If I could just use this app I could increase productivity, but IT has the system so locked down that to even think about using a different app is grounds for termination.
Fortunately my management structure realises IT is there for people that use a selection of a few specific applications, and those of us with "unusual" requirements are better opting out.
A wise IT dept allows users to add additional tools, but with the caveat that the only fix available is a system wipe and restore to original configuration. The Users are responsible for keeping their data backed up.
Official IT policy at my company is to use leased laptops (at $3k a pop), which run a complex stack of software that reduces the machine to a painfully slow mess.
When it breaks you have to take it back to the office. In the UK, then wait for a couple of weeks while some idiot prods it, before wiping it and handing it back (without fixing the original problem)
Management in one area have now rolled out 300 mac laptops for one their department, 13, 15 or 17". If it breaks, you boot from a small usb drive and restore from scratch. If the machine dies, you take it to an apple store. If it's stolen, you buy a new one.
The person assigned to do the background investigation asked for my passphrase. I gave it to them.
And you failed the test. I hope.
Crusades were done in the name of Christianity. Gulags were in the name of communism, not atheism.
None of which were consistent with the actual content of Christianity.
No true scotsman?
Apart from those, are there actually open source projects that can compete with proprietary counterparts? Especially on less popular niches like industry products or games (even though games is a popular niche, but there still isn't any good open source games or game engines).
ffmpeg and vlc, I can't think of any propriety program that can dream of competing.
You're not supposed to buy the whole thing! You pick a favorite doctor, buy that doctor's seasons, and simply pretend the rest don't exist!
My collection's pretty dismal -- Christopher "Lots of planets have a north" Eccleston is the best.
That said, the Paul McGann fans would have even less!
I actually hope that North Korea is stupid enough to attempt an invasion of South Korea.
We can't really excuse going in there and "liberating" North Korea from what is one of the most oppressive dictatorships in the world. If they attack one of our major allies, however, they will get (at most) a couple of miles into South Korean territory before the US shows up and wrecks their shit. Then, of course, we'd go into the country and dismantle their entire military (one way or another). From there we'd probably set up elections (monitored by the UN) and actually help the people recover.
Third time lucky?
Make it like jury duty. Select leaders at random. Maybe have a test for specialized positions, or a general civics exam.
I'm not sure I believe in this myself, but it would have advantages over the current system.
In the UK there are very powerful, unelected, civil servants that run the country (see Yes Minister for an exagerated example). I assume the same happens in the U.S.
I genuinely believe most new politicians (at least the UK) have principles. I might not agree with them of course. After a few years on the job they're brow-beaten, same as in any large organisation. They're allowed to make the occasional grand gesture for PR purposes, but generally the ship keeps steering the course with noone at the helm.
Well, hallelujah! The answer at last! It's such a shame the TSA hasn't consulted with you this whole time. We could have saved a lot of money trying to scan for explosives that can take down a plane without having to go to the cockpit.
You wanted to prevent another "9/11", I assume you mean the hijacking and flying of jet airplanes loaded with a lot of fuel into buildings on September 11th 2001?
You can solve this by locking the cockpit door.
If you've now changed what you want to prevent, that's fine, but that's also the problem behind an ill-defined agency like the TSA
What the flying fuck are you talking about? Who said anything about being scared, besides you? I'm talking about trying to prevent another 9/11 attack.
Lock the cockpit door, job done.
Because the media industry primary goal is to produce videos that are not to be broadcasted on the web? Yeah television is the probably media of the future.
I have an editor in Syria that's shot some local footage, and wants to incorporate some library material, before feeding it back to base.
Once in base it's reversions for various outlets (childrens news). A few graphics are then added.
The editor is on a 192kbit bgan, and has a 5 minute package to send back, sending uncompressed video around the place just won't work.
How do I get this footage back in
1) A high quality
2) A decent time
But I need to be able to change that footage later, which tends to mean bringing it back to an iframe format.
Eventually the media goes onto the web for a few thousand people to watch, and is compressed to h264 at 1mbit and looks crap. It's also broadcast to 200m people having gone through various devices as SDI (or HD-SDI) and looks a bit better.
I control both the sending end in Syria, and the receiving end in base. I can use H264, VP8, mjpeg, DV25, DNXhd or whatever I want. Unfortunately h264 is the best solution.
I guess I should have elaborated that ER = United Russia, Putin's party.
sorry for self reply
Ahh, I was confused, I thought you meant Queen Elizabeth!
This.
Twitter: Yawn. It's millions of idiots blathering on senselessly.
The collective noun for users of Twitter is "twits"
Name a single bombing that the target knew about and let happen (besides industrial mining and the likes).
9/11 ? :D
Suppose they had to throw 4 out of every 5 GTX chip away, and each one cost $100 to make, then each good GTX would cost $500 on average. The yield is thus 20%.
If instead, they can sell those 4 bad chips as lower-spec products, each chip costs $100. The yield is now 100%.
But what if the availability of those $100 chips reduces demand for the $500 ones? You could end up selling the 4x$100 ones, but can't shift the $500 one.
Look at airlines. They fly a plane from London to New York, it has 200 economy seats, 50 business seats.
Economy sell for $500. Business for $2000.
After everyone's on board, the cabin crew notice that Business class only has 30 people in (economy has 150 people). They hold an auction to upgrade economy travellers, and remaining 20 seats go for $200 each.
On the face of if, the cabin crew have just raised an extra $4,000 for their airline.
however
On the next flight the business is empty. Economy has 180 people in. The cabin crew do the same auction, and this time seats go for $250 each. Wonderful, they've now made $12,500, at least on the surface.
The problem is, the people that would normally spend $2,000 on a business ticket will buy economy for $500 and pay for the upgrade ($250)
The first flight would have made 30*2000 + 150*500 = $135,000
The upgrades would have bumped that up to $139,000
However the effect of the upgrades caused the second flight to be economy class only. The flight makes 180*500 + 50*250 upgrades, or $102,500.
Sometimes it's worth throwing away stock, or seats, to protect your market.
Because a private company would never be caught doing something like this. Nope. They are all completely above any kind of corruption.
Unlike the DMV, a private company can't force you to use their services. Nor can they push a unique identifier on you which is then used as an id by numerous different databases.
I wonder how many Americans have a driving license.
I wonder how many have a facebook account.
You don't need to have either.
What about us brain-dead slobs?
http://www.tsa.gov/join/index.shtm
Nuclear power is the best intermediate solution. It's a finite resource, so the best we can do is to use it to buy some time until we develop effective renewable alternatives.
The sun is also finite. In fact the universe will die one day somehow. Ultimately we only really care about the next 100-1000 years