The main reason, from my own experience, first in many years in the industry, then a few years back in school, is that most US women just don't like it, and don't think it's worth doing. I have literally never worked in a shop where the females were not treated with more respect and appreciation, and inclusiveness, than most of their male counterparts. (I'm sure they exist but I've never seen it.)
Most recently I was talking to the (female) head of the CS department at a largish public University. She told me that there was a grand total of 0 female US citizens in the graduate CS program, while about 1/4 or 1/3 of the foreign students were female.
The big difference was that the foreign students were there because they knew that for them, having this degree would be the difference between living life as a professional, vs. the entire family being or remaining dirt poor with no job prospects. In some cases the student was being funded by the collected pennies of an entire village, with the expectation that once they got through and started making money, they would be able to help the village and sponsor another student or two. Folks in the rest of the world know that a 'hard science' or 'hard engineering' job is the key to future prosperity.
The vast majority of US students (including me, long ago) go to college to be 'fulfilled' and 'take something interesting' - we have a hugely optimistic expectation that life will be OK regardless.
At the same Uni perhaps 1/3 of the CS instructors in CS, and at least 1/2 of the instructors in the math department were female.
And finally, my own niece, having finished high school with a 4.0 average and planning to get dual degrees in engineering and something else (I forget) and become an astronaut, took one term of college-level engineering courses and hated it. She is now going for a psych degree and no astronautics. (Sigh.)
From my (limited) reading over the last few days, blu-ray uses a different encryption system, not CSS. So if that ruling cites CSS specifically, it would not necessarily apply.
Also from a purely practical viewpoint, it is my understanding that the keys on any blu-ray player can be revoked at any time, so any off-the-shelf player can be effectively 'bricked' at any time, and an open-source device would depend on volunteers to continue cracking new codes into the far distant future. So it seems to me that while the ruling _might_ apply or a similar ruling made WRT BRD, from a purely practical point of view the PITA remains.
That could be - the Samsung player in particular was a huge PITA. It pissed me off enough that it was worth it to make a statement to the retailers. I actually already have a system that I've installed MythTV on, with the idea that I'd gradually set up a home theatre system. If I decide to get back into 3D and BR I will probably just get a BR drive for that system and rip the disc. If I keep the actual disc that seems to me to be fair use, but of course present law (DMCA, etc.) has muddled that up so it's probably a felony to rip the disc for my own use. Also it would be a PITA to have to rip everything to the server before I watch it. So it will be a while.
I assume that the PS3 and OPPO also require you to sit through the warnings...
IMHO, if I can't play it without excessive hassles, it's defective.
It's worth noting that a DVD that I purchased in India ('Lagaan' - set in British colonial times in India, interesting movie) plays fine on my old DVD player, but not on any blu-ray player that I've found yet.
I still don't want to spend time staring at stupid, redundant FBI warnings just to watch a frigging TV show. The whole situation is a classic one of 'honest people pay the price for the very small number who do bad things - and a bunch of crazed MBAs with nothing better to do'. The relatively small number of folks who rip and torrent the show aren't watching the warnings - only those who legitimately buy and play the actual disc. I don't know what bootleg discs are like - no experience on that score.
Funny you should mention blu-ray. I just bought a blu-ray player and the Firefly blu-ray discs (full series plus the movie). The player and the discs were such a PITA to use that I returned everything as defective. The fact that the player also skipped when playing regular DVDs was bad, and the ridiculously bad user interface and slow load times, and hopelessly slow and useless 'web interface'.
But the fact that one has to sit through (feels like) 10 minutes of WARNING COPYING IS EVIL messages at the start, and another 10 minutes of WARNING COPYING IS EVIL at the end OF EACH EPISODE, IN FOUR DIFFERENT LANGUAGES was beyond the pale. AFAI am concerned, this ridiculous waste of my time constitutes a defective product. So, no more blu-ray for me, and $200 of lost sales for the vendors - not to mention that Samsung will have to repackage the player for resale.
For perspective, had I kept the blu-ray it's likely I would have spent $300 over the next year on videos. And I need a big screen TV, preferably with passive 3D (I happen to like 3D). So that's a total of about $1500 in lost sales - sorry folks, get your act together. Until I can watch a 3D blu-ray movie on a device of MY choosing, _at least_ as easily as I can watch a DVD now (preferably easier), my money will stay home.
I had read the various complaints from/.ers and others about the problems with blu-ray, and now I have experienced them first hand. I'm no pirate - the only videos I've downloaded have been from archive.org, and authorized ones. But I was sorely tempted to buy a blu-ray drive for my desktop (which I was going to set up with MythTV anyway) and rip the Firefly discs. I would have even kept them, if I could watch the stupid things without so much hassle. They've actually made watching a movie in your own home a bigger hassle than driving to the theatre (in my case a 40 minute drive, and paid parking to boot).
I wonder if a class action suit against the media companies regarding the lack of usability and lack of fair use would succeed.
In any case, this UEFI thing appears to be the first step in destroying the personal computing device market and turning it into a monopolist's dream, following the blu-ray debacle. If all else fails, I'll just spend the time on my sailboat, and exude feelings of pity for young whippersnappers who are growing up with no alternative to being 'sharecroppers' for the media.
Not yet. It will remain hidden for a while, but you can't print money at that rate and not have it show up in inflation. People and institutions are getting paid without producing anything. That is the definitive cause of inflation. I'm not saying it's new, just that we've entered a new phase where the second order effects are becoming significant - the rate must increase at a faster and faster rate to prevent collapse. This is the classic symptom of the inflationary spiral, starting to exceed the system's ability to damp itself.
There are lots of academic papers and popular articles and even books, showing the both the official 'core inflation' and CPI numbers are completely divorced from reality and have been for years. It's an ongoing topic of frustration and derision for many economists.
Just as a somewhat-related example (not rigorous, just indicative) showing the long term discrepancies, look at the average price of cars 1970 to today. In 1968 a Volkswagen Beetle was $1800 base price. Today the VW 'New Beetle' (essentially the same car) starts at $18995, ten times as much. (One can argue about features, but it's a reasonable comparison). That works out to about 8% inflation over the last 40 years. Knock of 25% of that for vaunted new capabilities, safety, whatever, that's 6%, still more than twice the official rate. The price of many goods has remained the same - I can buy jeans at Walmart today for about the same price as Levi's in 1970 - but that's a false example, as it depends on the _temporary_ distortion of wage scales around the world. When (not if) the worker in Thailand has the same standard of living as the US worker, those jeans will be well over $100 in the US.
Similarly, the cost of electronics has dropped precipitously - but that is the result of technical advancement, which (again Econ 101) is the _sole_ method of improving the standard of living in a modern economy.
Even more simply - the wages of carpenters and software engineers (for example) have both risen by a factor of 5 to 10, while the actual standard of living for people in those jobs has remained the same or dropped in that same period. Q.E.D. that is inflation - again closer to 8% than to the 2% or 3% promulgated by the government. For people in less skilled positions things are much more dire - and contrary to some politicians' propaganda and excuse making, this is not due to corporate raiders or evil capitalists - any more than sharks are the cause of tsunamis.
Another of my favorite aphorisms that I came up with:D - The ultimate "Revenge of the Nerds" is that they grow up to be engineers and build the world everyone else has to live in!:D
I might add that, as of a month or so ago (last time I checked), the following items were true - from memory, so I I may be a bit off: 1. The US Government spending is now over 40% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). 2. 40% of that spending is borrowed money 3. 60% of that borrowing is being lent by the Federal Reserve, as the world's appetite for US government debt is no longer enough to swallow it all. 4. The Federal Reserve is essentially printing money by loaning this imaginary money to the US.
This means that.6*.4*.4 = 9.6% of the GDP is pure inflationary money-printing. (Actually my memory says that the number is more than 12% but I don't know which of the above is incorrect. If 60% of spending is borrowed, rather than 40%, then that would be about right. I'm too lazy to go back and look up the numbers again.)
IOW, our economy is now being inflated at 12% per year (I'm going with the number I recollect). Be prepared to pay a LOT more for goods in the near future. (I would just add that minor items such as the cost of fuel and housing are not included in the Consumer Price Index, and a lot of other factors are fudged. So the CPI is basically imaginary, like the Unemployment numbers, which don't include anyone who has used up their unemployment benefits or just gave up looking.)
But the bailout required the relatively unregulated investment banks to become commercial banks, members of FDIC, and accept regulation. The Federal Reserve does act as lender of last resort for commercial banks (who do have to be members of FDIC), but had no authorization to lend money to investment banks. I think that's what he was talking about.
I'm actually working on a project related to this topic. For general info, one can look up every bank, bank holding company, saving and loan company, credit union etc., with any business in the US, at Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council's (FFIEC). You can see who owns who, who bought who, etc.
The Council is a formal interagency body empowered to prescribe uniform principles, standards, and report forms for the federal examination of financial institutions by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (FRB), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and to make recommendations to promote uniformity in the supervision of financial institutions. In 2006, the State Liaison Committee (SLC) was added to the Council as a voting member. The SLC includes representatives from the Conference of State Bank Supervisors (CSBS), the American Council of State Savings Supervisors (ACSSS), and the National Association of State Credit Union Supervisors (NASCUS).
Methinks the only way we geeks can survive the world out there is to turn ourselves into the baddest kind of critters - even more badder than the critters of Wall Street, critters in the Capital Hill and/or the White House
I think that's a) impossible, as it requires a denial of what makes one a geek; b) destructive, as it requires one to become what one hates. I have a relative, who always talks about how much more successful she might have been if she had become a lying, thieving charlatan like some of those she's dealt with in the past, and made her life more difficult. But that would have required her to become someone she isn't, and wouldn't have wanted to be.
I would just say the following: I never read Nietzche, but from my understanding Nietzche asserted that there were two types of people, masters and slaves. Masters (at least as far as those who adopted and distorted the ideas of Nietzche and Weber after WWI, to a great extent leading to WWII) were basically what we would now call sociopaths or psychopaths - capable of lying, cheating, enslaving and murder to achieve the ideal world. Slaves, in their view, were the other 90% of the world.
And, in at least one sense this was and is true. A few people (at much higher percentages in higher leadership positions, according to recent research) are that type of 'master', and many, many people - probably the great majority IMHO - just want to not think, not worry, just do what they are told and watch sports on TV. (Yes, I'm generalizing).
But IMHO there is a third group, that Nietzche never talked about to my (poor) knowledge - I'll call them creatives. These are the explorers, the artists, the engineers, the 'geeks' of all stripes - and about 1/2 of the entrpreneurs. The creatives don't want to be masters, and refuse to be slaves. They will always be the disruptors, will never be accepted by either of the other groups, and will always be a thorn in the side to the 'system'. And I will assert that they are the ones that largely prevent the 'masters' from taking over completely - as long as information and movement are free, and the system can continue to expand. (Thus my promotion of commercial space development - the ultimate 'free frontier', that never ends. Not to digress TOO far.)
And can we please now get back to important things like arguing about whether C is a low level language?
OK, just for you.:D Here goes:
Of course it is a low level language. It was described (by Ritchie, if memory serves - in any case one of the authors/designers) as "a structured PDP-11 macro assembler". I would argue that, by definition, any 'assembler' is a low-level language. I would go farther - any language in which the primary semantics and syntax of the language is closely aligned with the physical movements of data through memory, and operations upon that data, is a low level language - freely admitting that this assertion is a bit of hand-waving, but still has some relevance to the meaning. In other words, if almost everything in the language has to do with loading and, storing single bits or rectangular arrays of data, and arithmetic and logical operations on that data, it's a low level language. (I'm trying - probably badly - to elicit an analogy from the language to the machine operations that are executed as a result.)
By contrast, as one of the early designers of SQL discovered at IBM in the early-mid 1970s noted, "We found that a single sentence of SQL could result in 250,000 machine instructions being executed - that explained why it was so slow." Another primary characteristic of SQL is that one can not easily say by inspecting the code just where in a computer's memory a particular data item is stored. (That particular criterion has been greatly complicated by the rather amazing manipulations of cacheing, threading, multiprocessing and so forth, that used to be part of the operating system (and written in low-level language), and are now in hardware and essentially written in a hardware description language, which is a kind of descendant of C.
So, will that do? I am out of popcorn but I'm on the way to the store. I'll bring some back!:)
IIRC there are roughly twice as many trees in USA today as there were at the American Revolution.
From my own past, the park-like environment of the Willamette Valley, with large green grassy areas alternating with tree-ful forest areas is in part the result of thousands of years of Native Americans using fire to terraform the area and increase the quantity of game/food animals. Over that time the valley's ecosystem adapted to the process. It's probably worth noting that the ecosystem in that area, until just about the time of the arrival of what we call Native Americans, had been the kind found just south of the border of the mile-high ice pack that extended down to near the Columbia River, so rapid change was in order in any case.
One of the great mysteries of life to me is why people watch shopping channels or buy the crap they sell keeping them in business. Consumerism has achieved its ultimate goal when people actually sit and watch channels that are nothing but ads. The pinnacle of this phenomenon is I recently saw a shopping channel purportedly selling houses in Florida. Pretty much the last thing anyone should be doing is buying real-estate sight unseen on a shopping channel using an auction that is guaranteed to be rigged.
At least they are not advertising Nigerian bank deposits!:P (yet.)
That's odd. I would think that it would be more beneficial for Viacom to expand their online presence, with advertising of course. But I never watch either of those so makes no diff to me.
I live in central Massachusetts, about an hour drive from Boston and 1/2 hour from Providence. Using a $40 amplified digital antenna from Walmart I get most of the Boston channels and most of the Providence channels, including two spanish channels, a home shopping channel, and some other stuff I forget - a total of about 15 channels - or I did until I got tired of watching crap and never re-installed the setup when I moved. Having recently watched cable in a hotel, I have re-confirmed that watching TV via cable, antenna or whatnot is a huge waste of time - it's all crap, and irritating to boot. But that setup might work great for you - IIRC the Willamette Valley is pretty flat going north-south so little in the way of hills to block the signal, and the distances are equivalent. It actually worked pretty well.
Now I just have cable internet, and I have a cable phone but I've never plugged a phone into it. They gave me free installation and a discount to include phone. If I get an alarm system the cable phone would be useful.
Point of history - I just read the history of 'Association Football'. Turns out originally there were several forms of 'football' played at different schools in England. Several of them got together to normalize the rules. The resulting ruleset, which was the original version of 'Association Football' and changed the ball shape to be round instead of egg-shaped, was considered too wussy for some. Some schools took their ball and went home, calling their version 'Rugby football'. Until those rules came out, 'footballs' were not round in any version of the game. And, of course, American and Australian football descended from Rugby football, which is undoubtedly closest to the original football games. So what most people in the world consider 'football' was the new 'odd' version. And the term 'soccer' was a contraction of sorts from 'Association Football'. All this happened in England (not yet called 'UK') before it became popular in other countries.
Therefore, Rugby, American and Australian football have at least the same, if not more, justification for using the word football versus those other folks who play with a round ball that flies too easily and every time two players come within a foot of each other, one of them falls down crying.
The problem we have in the US with high speed trains is our rail system is beat to crap by freight trains, meaning our trains can't go very fast. Other countries tend to use new and separate facilities for passenger and freight. Even Amtrak is starting to gear up for high speed rail [inhabitat.com], but it is dependent on private railroads for track. But laying new track, or improving existing track is far cheaper than building tubes all over the country.
Yet another example of how politics can ruin anything. In order to get the law creating Amtrak through, the politicians agreed to allow the railroads to continue to prioritize their profitable freight over Amtrak. Amtrak trains, except in a few cases, get the lowest priority of anything on the track. And Amtrak has no ability to improve track so their trains can go faster. In many areas they are restricted to 20 MPH due to track conditions, hills, urban conflict, etc.
The right way to do it would have been to nationalize the railbeds (buy them from the railroads) and let the railroads, now stripped to their essential function, compete on service and price. This could have been done back when the railroads were all going bankrupt. Now it's too late. Governments are reasonably good at maintaining infrastructure, businesses are generally better at service, so it would have been a productive arrangement, similar to both airlines vs. airports and trucks vs. highways.
It's worth noting that several recent airports (Dallas/Fort Worth, Montreal, Dulles) each took more land area than a four-lane freeway going between those Dallas and NYC.
Well, in fairness, the Big Dig is not a good example considering that 2/3 of the money probably ended up in the hands of criminal syndicates of one sort or another. Also, it was built underground below the water table, and required a tunnel six or eight lanes wide - probably an order of magnitude or two more difficult and expensive than a train-size tunnel.
By comparison the City of Portland, Oregon recently completed the 'Big Pipe' projects, digging about 10 miles of tunnel up to 160 feet underground (and under a river) to handle storm runoff. They used 14-foot diameter boring machines and did the whole project for $1.5 billion, which is about $150 million per mile. That cost included all the pumping stations and other costs, not just boring the hole. (See also West Side CSO Tunnel.)
So the cost of drilling a train tunnel, which would fit nicely in a 14 foot diameter tunnel, should be of the same order. Adding maglev or whatnot to make trains actually go would be additional, of course. At $150 million per mile, the 400 miles from SF to LA could be drilled for $60 billion. But you actually need three tunnels - one each way plus a service tunnel (like the Chunnel between UK and France), so call it $180 billion.
I dunno - considering the level of catastrophe that happens to vehicles going 4000 miles through air when a paint chip strikes them, making a vehicle that operates a minuscule fraction of a millimeter from walls going by at that speed without turning into molten slag seems pretty difficult. I can argue that it _might_ be possible to extend our present knowledge and technology to build a 550 MPH (800 KMH?) vehicle that could survive most minor events - I would think that making derailment impossible would be one useful approach. But at 4000 MPH even a bump a millimeter high - anywhere on the hundreds of miles of wall - would be beyond fatal as any minor removal of material would cause the removed material to propagate and become a storm of removed material.
I will note that many stores still have very useful vacuum-based paperwork distribution systems to ship receipts or something from checkstands to the central office. So vacuum systems do work - I just think 4000 MPH is beyond fantasy.
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I only use a few magic constants. :)
I like to use ZERO = 0x01 and ONE = 0x00.
The main reason, from my own experience, first in many years in the industry, then a few years back in school, is that most US women just don't like it, and don't think it's worth doing. I have literally never worked in a shop where the females were not treated with more respect and appreciation, and inclusiveness, than most of their male counterparts. (I'm sure they exist but I've never seen it.)
Most recently I was talking to the (female) head of the CS department at a largish public University. She told me that there was a grand total of 0 female US citizens in the graduate CS program, while about 1/4 or 1/3 of the foreign students were female.
The big difference was that the foreign students were there because they knew that for them, having this degree would be the difference between living life as a professional, vs. the entire family being or remaining dirt poor with no job prospects. In some cases the student was being funded by the collected pennies of an entire village, with the expectation that once they got through and started making money, they would be able to help the village and sponsor another student or two. Folks in the rest of the world know that a 'hard science' or 'hard engineering' job is the key to future prosperity.
The vast majority of US students (including me, long ago) go to college to be 'fulfilled' and 'take something interesting' - we have a hugely optimistic expectation that life will be OK regardless.
At the same Uni perhaps 1/3 of the CS instructors in CS, and at least 1/2 of the instructors in the math department were female.
And finally, my own niece, having finished high school with a 4.0 average and planning to get dual degrees in engineering and something else (I forget) and become an astronaut, took one term of college-level engineering courses and hated it. She is now going for a psych degree and no astronautics. (Sigh.)
From my (limited) reading over the last few days, blu-ray uses a different encryption system, not CSS. So if that ruling cites CSS specifically, it would not necessarily apply.
Also from a purely practical viewpoint, it is my understanding that the keys on any blu-ray player can be revoked at any time, so any off-the-shelf player can be effectively 'bricked' at any time, and an open-source device would depend on volunteers to continue cracking new codes into the far distant future. So it seems to me that while the ruling _might_ apply or a similar ruling made WRT BRD, from a purely practical point of view the PITA remains.
Am I correct?
That could be - the Samsung player in particular was a huge PITA. It pissed me off enough that it was worth it to make a statement to the retailers. I actually already have a system that I've installed MythTV on, with the idea that I'd gradually set up a home theatre system. If I decide to get back into 3D and BR I will probably just get a BR drive for that system and rip the disc. If I keep the actual disc that seems to me to be fair use, but of course present law (DMCA, etc.) has muddled that up so it's probably a felony to rip the disc for my own use. Also it would be a PITA to have to rip everything to the server before I watch it. So it will be a while.
I assume that the PS3 and OPPO also require you to sit through the warnings...
IMHO, if I can't play it without excessive hassles, it's defective.
It's worth noting that a DVD that I purchased in India ('Lagaan' - set in British colonial times in India, interesting movie) plays fine on my old DVD player, but not on any blu-ray player that I've found yet.
I still don't want to spend time staring at stupid, redundant FBI warnings just to watch a frigging TV show. The whole situation is a classic one of 'honest people pay the price for the very small number who do bad things - and a bunch of crazed MBAs with nothing better to do'. The relatively small number of folks who rip and torrent the show aren't watching the warnings - only those who legitimately buy and play the actual disc. I don't know what bootleg discs are like - no experience on that score.
From my reading, yes there is, that works *most* of the time. I haven't tried it though.
Funny you should mention blu-ray. I just bought a blu-ray player and the Firefly blu-ray discs (full series plus the movie). The player and the discs were such a PITA to use that I returned everything as defective. The fact that the player also skipped when playing regular DVDs was bad, and the ridiculously bad user interface and slow load times, and hopelessly slow and useless 'web interface'.
But the fact that one has to sit through (feels like) 10 minutes of WARNING COPYING IS EVIL messages at the start, and another 10 minutes of WARNING COPYING IS EVIL at the end OF EACH EPISODE, IN FOUR DIFFERENT LANGUAGES was beyond the pale. AFAI am concerned, this ridiculous waste of my time constitutes a defective product. So, no more blu-ray for me, and $200 of lost sales for the vendors - not to mention that Samsung will have to repackage the player for resale.
For perspective, had I kept the blu-ray it's likely I would have spent $300 over the next year on videos. And I need a big screen TV, preferably with passive 3D (I happen to like 3D). So that's a total of about $1500 in lost sales - sorry folks, get your act together. Until I can watch a 3D blu-ray movie on a device of MY choosing, _at least_ as easily as I can watch a DVD now (preferably easier), my money will stay home.
I had read the various complaints from /.ers and others about the problems with blu-ray, and now I have experienced them first hand. I'm no pirate - the only videos I've downloaded have been from archive.org, and authorized ones. But I was sorely tempted to buy a blu-ray drive for my desktop (which I was going to set up with MythTV anyway) and rip the Firefly discs. I would have even kept them, if I could watch the stupid things without so much hassle. They've actually made watching a movie in your own home a bigger hassle than driving to the theatre (in my case a 40 minute drive, and paid parking to boot).
I wonder if a class action suit against the media companies regarding the lack of usability and lack of fair use would succeed.
In any case, this UEFI thing appears to be the first step in destroying the personal computing device market and turning it into a monopolist's dream, following the blu-ray debacle. If all else fails, I'll just spend the time on my sailboat, and exude feelings of pity for young whippersnappers who are growing up with no alternative to being 'sharecroppers' for the media.
Not yet. It will remain hidden for a while, but you can't print money at that rate and not have it show up in inflation. People and institutions are getting paid without producing anything. That is the definitive cause of inflation. I'm not saying it's new, just that we've entered a new phase where the second order effects are becoming significant - the rate must increase at a faster and faster rate to prevent collapse. This is the classic symptom of the inflationary spiral, starting to exceed the system's ability to damp itself.
There are lots of academic papers and popular articles and even books, showing the both the official 'core inflation' and CPI numbers are completely divorced from reality and have been for years. It's an ongoing topic of frustration and derision for many economists.
Just as a somewhat-related example (not rigorous, just indicative) showing the long term discrepancies, look at the average price of cars 1970 to today. In 1968 a Volkswagen Beetle was $1800 base price. Today the VW 'New Beetle' (essentially the same car) starts at $18995, ten times as much. (One can argue about features, but it's a reasonable comparison). That works out to about 8% inflation over the last 40 years. Knock of 25% of that for vaunted new capabilities, safety, whatever, that's 6%, still more than twice the official rate. The price of many goods has remained the same - I can buy jeans at Walmart today for about the same price as Levi's in 1970 - but that's a false example, as it depends on the _temporary_ distortion of wage scales around the world. When (not if) the worker in Thailand has the same standard of living as the US worker, those jeans will be well over $100 in the US.
Similarly, the cost of electronics has dropped precipitously - but that is the result of technical advancement, which (again Econ 101) is the _sole_ method of improving the standard of living in a modern economy.
Even more simply - the wages of carpenters and software engineers (for example) have both risen by a factor of 5 to 10, while the actual standard of living for people in those jobs has remained the same or dropped in that same period. Q.E.D. that is inflation - again closer to 8% than to the 2% or 3% promulgated by the government. For people in less skilled positions things are much more dire - and contrary to some politicians' propaganda and excuse making, this is not due to corporate raiders or evil capitalists - any more than sharks are the cause of tsunamis.
Another of my favorite aphorisms that I came up with :D - The ultimate "Revenge of the Nerds" is that they grow up to be engineers and build the world everyone else has to live in! :D
Actually I thought Goldman was part of the Rothschild empire. I'm not sure though.
I might add that, as of a month or so ago (last time I checked), the following items were true - from memory, so I I may be a bit off:
1. The US Government spending is now over 40% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
2. 40% of that spending is borrowed money
3. 60% of that borrowing is being lent by the Federal Reserve, as the world's appetite for US government debt is no longer enough to swallow it all.
4. The Federal Reserve is essentially printing money by loaning this imaginary money to the US.
This means that .6*.4*.4 = 9.6% of the GDP is pure inflationary money-printing. (Actually my memory says that the number is more than 12% but I don't know which of the above is incorrect. If 60% of spending is borrowed, rather than 40%, then that would be about right. I'm too lazy to go back and look up the numbers again.)
IOW, our economy is now being inflated at 12% per year (I'm going with the number I recollect). Be prepared to pay a LOT more for goods in the near future. (I would just add that minor items such as the cost of fuel and housing are not included in the Consumer Price Index, and a lot of other factors are fudged. So the CPI is basically imaginary, like the Unemployment numbers, which don't include anyone who has used up their unemployment benefits or just gave up looking.)
But the bailout required the relatively unregulated investment banks to become commercial banks, members of FDIC, and accept regulation. The Federal Reserve does act as lender of last resort for commercial banks (who do have to be members of FDIC), but had no authorization to lend money to investment banks. I think that's what he was talking about.
I'm actually working on a project related to this topic. For general info, one can look up every bank, bank holding company, saving and loan company, credit union etc., with any business in the US, at Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council's (FFIEC). You can see who owns who, who bought who, etc.
The Council is a formal interagency body empowered to prescribe uniform principles, standards, and report forms for the federal examination of financial institutions by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (FRB), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and to make recommendations to promote uniformity in the supervision of financial institutions. In 2006, the State Liaison Committee (SLC) was added to the Council as a voting member. The SLC includes representatives from the Conference of State Bank Supervisors (CSBS), the American Council of State Savings Supervisors (ACSSS), and the National Association of State Credit Union Supervisors (NASCUS).
Methinks the only way we geeks can survive the world out there is to turn ourselves into the baddest kind of critters - even more badder than the critters of Wall Street, critters in the Capital Hill and/or the White House
I think that's a) impossible, as it requires a denial of what makes one a geek; b) destructive, as it requires one to become what one hates. I have a relative, who always talks about how much more successful she might have been if she had become a lying, thieving charlatan like some of those she's dealt with in the past, and made her life more difficult. But that would have required her to become someone she isn't, and wouldn't have wanted to be.
I would just say the following: I never read Nietzche, but from my understanding Nietzche asserted that there were two types of people, masters and slaves. Masters (at least as far as those who adopted and distorted the ideas of Nietzche and Weber after WWI, to a great extent leading to WWII) were basically what we would now call sociopaths or psychopaths - capable of lying, cheating, enslaving and murder to achieve the ideal world. Slaves, in their view, were the other 90% of the world.
And, in at least one sense this was and is true. A few people (at much higher percentages in higher leadership positions, according to recent research) are that type of 'master', and many, many people - probably the great majority IMHO - just want to not think, not worry, just do what they are told and watch sports on TV. (Yes, I'm generalizing).
But IMHO there is a third group, that Nietzche never talked about to my (poor) knowledge - I'll call them creatives. These are the explorers, the artists, the engineers, the 'geeks' of all stripes - and about 1/2 of the entrpreneurs. The creatives don't want to be masters, and refuse to be slaves. They will always be the disruptors, will never be accepted by either of the other groups, and will always be a thorn in the side to the 'system'. And I will assert that they are the ones that largely prevent the 'masters' from taking over completely - as long as information and movement are free, and the system can continue to expand. (Thus my promotion of commercial space development - the ultimate 'free frontier', that never ends. Not to digress TOO far.)
If it had higher density than water, it would sink, and not sail at all. All boats must have lower density than the medium on which they sail.
And can we please now get back to important things like arguing about whether C is a low level language?
OK, just for you. :D Here goes:
Of course it is a low level language. It was described (by Ritchie, if memory serves - in any case one of the authors/designers) as "a structured PDP-11 macro assembler". I would argue that, by definition, any 'assembler' is a low-level language. I would go farther - any language in which the primary semantics and syntax of the language is closely aligned with the physical movements of data through memory, and operations upon that data, is a low level language - freely admitting that this assertion is a bit of hand-waving, but still has some relevance to the meaning. In other words, if almost everything in the language has to do with loading and, storing single bits or rectangular arrays of data, and arithmetic and logical operations on that data, it's a low level language. (I'm trying - probably badly - to elicit an analogy from the language to the machine operations that are executed as a result.)
By contrast, as one of the early designers of SQL discovered at IBM in the early-mid 1970s noted, "We found that a single sentence of SQL could result in 250,000 machine instructions being executed - that explained why it was so slow." Another primary characteristic of SQL is that one can not easily say by inspecting the code just where in a computer's memory a particular data item is stored. (That particular criterion has been greatly complicated by the rather amazing manipulations of cacheing, threading, multiprocessing and so forth, that used to be part of the operating system (and written in low-level language), and are now in hardware and essentially written in a hardware description language, which is a kind of descendant of C.
So, will that do? I am out of popcorn but I'm on the way to the store. I'll bring some back! :)
IIRC there are roughly twice as many trees in USA today as there were at the American Revolution.
From my own past, the park-like environment of the Willamette Valley, with large green grassy areas alternating with tree-ful forest areas is in part the result of thousands of years of Native Americans using fire to terraform the area and increase the quantity of game/food animals. Over that time the valley's ecosystem adapted to the process. It's probably worth noting that the ecosystem in that area, until just about the time of the arrival of what we call Native Americans, had been the kind found just south of the border of the mile-high ice pack that extended down to near the Columbia River, so rapid change was in order in any case.
why, that's soshalizm!
No, it's not. I don't have to buy cable, and I don't. (But if they did offer a la carte, I might.)
One of the great mysteries of life to me is why people watch shopping channels or buy the crap they sell keeping them in business. Consumerism has achieved its ultimate goal when people actually sit and watch channels that are nothing but ads. The pinnacle of this phenomenon is I recently saw a shopping channel purportedly selling houses in Florida. Pretty much the last thing anyone should be doing is buying real-estate sight unseen on a shopping channel using an auction that is guaranteed to be rigged.
At least they are not advertising Nigerian bank deposits! :P (yet.)
That's odd. I would think that it would be more beneficial for Viacom to expand their online presence, with advertising of course. But I never watch either of those so makes no diff to me.
I live in central Massachusetts, about an hour drive from Boston and 1/2 hour from Providence. Using a $40 amplified digital antenna from Walmart I get most of the Boston channels and most of the Providence channels, including two spanish channels, a home shopping channel, and some other stuff I forget - a total of about 15 channels - or I did until I got tired of watching crap and never re-installed the setup when I moved. Having recently watched cable in a hotel, I have re-confirmed that watching TV via cable, antenna or whatnot is a huge waste of time - it's all crap, and irritating to boot. But that setup might work great for you - IIRC the Willamette Valley is pretty flat going north-south so little in the way of hills to block the signal, and the distances are equivalent. It actually worked pretty well.
Now I just have cable internet, and I have a cable phone but I've never plugged a phone into it. They gave me free installation and a discount to include phone. If I get an alarm system the cable phone would be useful.
Point of history - I just read the history of 'Association Football'. Turns out originally there were several forms of 'football' played at different schools in England. Several of them got together to normalize the rules. The resulting ruleset, which was the original version of 'Association Football' and changed the ball shape to be round instead of egg-shaped, was considered too wussy for some. Some schools took their ball and went home, calling their version 'Rugby football'. Until those rules came out, 'footballs' were not round in any version of the game. And, of course, American and Australian football descended from Rugby football, which is undoubtedly closest to the original football games. So what most people in the world consider 'football' was the new 'odd' version. And the term 'soccer' was a contraction of sorts from 'Association Football'. All this happened in England (not yet called 'UK') before it became popular in other countries.
Therefore, Rugby, American and Australian football have at least the same, if not more, justification for using the word football versus those other folks who play with a round ball that flies too easily and every time two players come within a foot of each other, one of them falls down crying.
The problem we have in the US with high speed trains is our rail system is beat to crap by freight trains, meaning our trains can't go very fast. Other countries tend to use new and separate facilities for passenger and freight. Even Amtrak is starting to gear up for high speed rail [inhabitat.com], but it is dependent on private railroads for track. But laying new track, or improving existing track is far cheaper than building tubes all over the country.
Yet another example of how politics can ruin anything. In order to get the law creating Amtrak through, the politicians agreed to allow the railroads to continue to prioritize their profitable freight over Amtrak. Amtrak trains, except in a few cases, get the lowest priority of anything on the track. And Amtrak has no ability to improve track so their trains can go faster. In many areas they are restricted to 20 MPH due to track conditions, hills, urban conflict, etc.
The right way to do it would have been to nationalize the railbeds (buy them from the railroads) and let the railroads, now stripped to their essential function, compete on service and price. This could have been done back when the railroads were all going bankrupt. Now it's too late. Governments are reasonably good at maintaining infrastructure, businesses are generally better at service, so it would have been a productive arrangement, similar to both airlines vs. airports and trucks vs. highways.
It's worth noting that several recent airports (Dallas/Fort Worth, Montreal, Dulles) each took more land area than a four-lane freeway going between those Dallas and NYC.
Well, in fairness, the Big Dig is not a good example considering that 2/3 of the money probably ended up in the hands of criminal syndicates of one sort or another. Also, it was built underground below the water table, and required a tunnel six or eight lanes wide - probably an order of magnitude or two more difficult and expensive than a train-size tunnel.
By comparison the City of Portland, Oregon recently completed the 'Big Pipe' projects, digging about 10 miles of tunnel up to 160 feet underground (and under a river) to handle storm runoff. They used 14-foot diameter boring machines and did the whole project for $1.5 billion, which is about $150 million per mile. That cost included all the pumping stations and other costs, not just boring the hole. (See also West Side CSO Tunnel.)
So the cost of drilling a train tunnel, which would fit nicely in a 14 foot diameter tunnel, should be of the same order. Adding maglev or whatnot to make trains actually go would be additional, of course. At $150 million per mile, the 400 miles from SF to LA could be drilled for $60 billion. But you actually need three tunnels - one each way plus a service tunnel (like the Chunnel between UK and France), so call it $180 billion.
I dunno - considering the level of catastrophe that happens to vehicles going 4000 miles through air when a paint chip strikes them, making a vehicle that operates a minuscule fraction of a millimeter from walls going by at that speed without turning into molten slag seems pretty difficult. I can argue that it _might_ be possible to extend our present knowledge and technology to build a 550 MPH (800 KMH?) vehicle that could survive most minor events - I would think that making derailment impossible would be one useful approach. But at 4000 MPH even a bump a millimeter high - anywhere on the hundreds of miles of wall - would be beyond fatal as any minor removal of material would cause the removed material to propagate and become a storm of removed material.
I will note that many stores still have very useful vacuum-based paperwork distribution systems to ship receipts or something from checkstands to the central office. So vacuum systems do work - I just think 4000 MPH is beyond fantasy.
... or invented floppy boots! (to put the back legs in)
- from a very, very old joke. :)