I said nothing about regulation. There are other kinds of government intervention - patent and trademark laws are technically government intervention in the markets (for good or ill); professional licensing has many benefits but has long been abused by industry and labor to prevent competition and increase profits/wages, as well as doctors and pharma companies. The AMA was originally founded, and funded for the first decade or two, by the pharmaceutical industry. During that time the AMA went all out to make sure any non-drug and non-MD therapies were illegal. The present US farm subsidies and the ethanol-in-gasoline requirements are largely beneficial to Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill. At least 1/2 of OSHA laws are more closely related to protection of unions and industry monopolies than to actual safety.
As for the biological analogy - please do some research on complex adaptive systems and maybe take some econ classes. Just two examples, from econ 101: In a mature economy, the only thing that can improve the standard of living is technological advance. And technological advances very commonly drive tech bubbles, but in nearly all cases, 10 years after a bubble bursts, the value and economic activity in that segment of the economy is two to four times the peak of the bubble.
Big corporate, big government, big labor and big NGOs all love each other. That's the problem with all of the left/right arguments - left and right as presently defined are arguing about the wrong issues.
I'll just add that Reagan got suckered by the Dems later, when they insisted on a tax increase. Reagan signed off on the increase as part of a deal to cut spending 'later in the session', but somehow that never happened. In fact Congress increased spending by twice as much as the increased revenue that resulted from Laffer tax cuts.
Except for inflation, there is nothing that says that growth in GDP should result in the cost of government. If I had a company with revenues of X in 1999, and costs of Y in 1999, due to tech advances I should have growth in revenues while a reduction of costs by now - I should be able to run 2X or 3X on Y or less. Otherwise the market would eat my lunch.
One of the ongoing beliefs of the financial conservatives (since 1985 or thereabouts, after 40 years of despair in trying to get the government to cut back from the expansion before, during and after WWII) has been that if they can restrict taxes, _maybe_ that will force the issue and the government will have to cut back. Unfortunately that has not worked either.
It's interesting that most of the increases in size and intrusiveness of government has occurred during 'wars', and once expanded, it never goes back.
IIRC at any given time three of the carriers are in a two-year major overhaul where the boats are partially taken apart, lots of stuff is replaced, and new tech is added. I suspect the reactors are part of the major overhaul - new steam generators, etc.
I prefer to think of those as examples where the nation, in competition with other nations, pursues technological advances in the pursuit of a form of future national 'profit' - which did and does in fact occur.
I don't consider nations as being much different than corporations - they have some minor differences, but most large corporations operate internally as socialist organizations. When nations regulate, they are acting as governments. When nations borrow money, and otherwise operate within the economic system as opposed to regulating it, they are acting as corporations.
5: There are no monopolies. Again, without regulation, monopolies tend to form due to a number of factors and monopolies are capable of making it impossible to purchase a necessity in a way that benefits you.
I'll disagree with this one. Monopolies are almost always the result of a tilted playing field, that results from government intervention in one form or another, temporary shocks such as technological advance, or the violation of laws. Patents and copyrights are an interesting example.
I don't have time just now to get into this deeper, but in the long run, the natural (i.e. lowest error surface) distribution in a market follows some form of the inverse power law (see Pareto et al). Any other distribution requires an ever-increasing amount of effort (energy, power, money, legal manipulation) to maintain. Monopolies must rely on government support (often in the form of laws to protect) to maintain their monopoly - vis. RIAA, SOPA, PIPA, TDD, etc., etc. And the ultimate communist ideal is equivalent to a monoculture such as a wheat field, which requires an unending supply of fertilizers, plowing, pest controls and other interventions to maintain.
Note that in some economic ecosystems, just as in biological ecosystems, the environment may be best for a small number of behemoths such as the redwood forests or the Douglas Fir forests, where almost all of the biomass is tied up in a few large entities - so also some economic environments work that was as well. Others may be more akin to a rain forest or coral reef, where there are things growing on top of other things.
After the hoorah that another Dem candidate whose name I forget got in 1992 for just being seen in a boat with a woman, I was amazed that the Dems actually nominated Clinton, who already had been exposed as a philanderer, liar, etc. To me it exemplified their willingness to overlook almost any venality in the pursuit of their agenda. (Not to say the Rep team are different in that respect - to my mind this same question eliminates Gingrich from candidacy as well.) Several of the women who accused Clinton (and who later received settlement payments) did so regarding activities when he was Governor, and he was using the his security detail to help hide things from his wife and the press. As others have said, "If you lie to your wife, you'll lie to anybody." Or, as a very old book says, "If you can not be trusted in the small things, you can not be trusted in the big things."
Technically speaking, I don't think that fits the criteria of a memory leak. As I have always understood it, a memory leak is when a piece of memory has been allocated by the program, and then the program drops the reference to it without releasing it. This memory is then 'orphaned' and can't be found or used by any program.
In any case, I think you have accurately connected it to garbage collection and cache management, and it should be fixed if so. So your point still indeed stands.:)
good luck with that, running your own fiber all over the country. Interesting side note, but probably not relevant - the Sprint network was originally the SPC - Southern Pacific Communications company which started out as a set of microwave links along the railroad rights-of-way to support Southern Pacific Railway railroad operations, before the Internet existed. According to Wikipedia, when the long distance market was deregulated they started selling capacity to others, and one thing led to another. Also according to W, the SPRINT name was the winner of a contest for a new name appropriate to the new business when MCI bought the company: "Switched PRIvate Network Telecommunications".
It's worth noting that the Military also uses the public switched network for some things. In one sense, this may be advantageous if done right. If the secret messages are merely one amongst the literally billions of packets going through a fiber per second, they are harder to find than just tapping into the correct dedicated fiber that carries nothing but secret messages. And, since any physical manifestation (fiber) that is strung across thousands of miles of countryside, a dedicated fiber is going to be just as vulnerable (given the same level of message encryption) as the packets in the public network.
The military can't know in advance where it is going to need telecom capability, so it has to be able to ship data over the public network in such a way that it is secure even if intercepted. That's a tall order, but there's no choice. Having a physically separate physical wire just doesn't give you that much extra.
Only problem with this is that it still costs too much. I'm on an old plan, thinking of upgrading but I'm not sure I want to be locked into that cost level - IIRC $80/month?
I was just talking with a VZW rep last night. At present only about 2.5% of their customer base has 4G - so your question is definitely relevant. He also said VZW refuses to accept any more new models from manufacturers that are not 4G.
Re:Retrieving unsaved data
on
Tales of IT Idiocy
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Only distantly related, but... A long time ago I was writing code on a Perq workstation. The editor had a nice feature - it maintained a transcript of every change, and you could replay it. This became very useful once when I was working madly under deadline, and failed to save the file for... wait for it... 36 hours (yes, it was an all-nighter and then some). And the machine crashed - actually I think the power got cut. But with the transcript feature I was able to replay the entire 36 hour editing session, watching myself do my editing. It was rather fun, actually. Of course it was much faster than the original - I think it took an hour or so. And I was redeemed from my stupidity.
I loved the transcript feature - it was useful any time the machine or the program crashed, as it could restore everything up to the last disk write that succeeded. You could also pause and continue, so if you went off on a dead-end, you could replay up to the point where you started going the wrong way and stop, step backwards or forwards to the point where you had something worth keeping, and then save or start editing at that point.
I think it would be great for any text editor to do this.
But the point is that aircraft should be self-contained and should not rely on other aircraft to perform jamming for them.
Actually, no. The jamming aircraft is a huge source of radio signals - the opposite of stealth. The jamming aircraft needs to be well out of range, because it's like a huge light bulb at radio frequencies.
The article stated it would increase Apple's costs by 25% to pay American wages (somewhat blithely, I might add, I doubt it is that slick).
Actually I think it just said it would increase the 'cost of goods sold' by 25%.
The key components of cost generally include:
Parts, raw materials and supplies used,
Labor, including associated costs such as payroll taxes and benefits, and
Overhead of the business allocable to production.
Which is somewhat less than total costs - it does not include cost of sales (typically from 30% to 50% of revenue), administration outside of production, etc. It includes only part of overhead. So, bottom line, it would be somewhat less than 25% of total costs. I hesitate to guess just how much - it might be as low as 10% or less, of what Apple receives from the wholesaler or distributor, and an even smaller part of the price on the shelf.
That great time after the war was a historical anomaly. Look at the country before that - it was not at all like that. After the war we were the only nation on earth whose industrial infrastructure had not been destroyed, and the only one that had any money. And we had a huge expansion of industry here for the war, and all those factories were going to need customers. So we set up the Marshall Plan, and lent money to nations to rebuild - but they had to spend the money on US goods. So companies like Caterpillar had an instant worldwide market. This resulted in about a 5X multiplier on the money the government gave away, generating very good tax receipts to pay for it. This could best be described as a postwar bubble. And unfortunately we got used to those good times, and got to thinking that was 'normal'.
Unfortunately, the true 'normal' is something much closer to the Depression.
too late. "He who has the gold makes the rules". And, "The borrower is slave to the lender." At this point, any attempt by the US to enforce much of anything beyond a bit of food safety will quickly result in the Chinese deciding they'd rather not lend us any more money, and that 40% of US government spending that they are supporting by buying all those bonds goes away. Then you'll see the US government really, really cut budgets in a hurry.
Economists are already talking about how China may well control the future negotiations over a new worldwide monetary agreement to replace the existing floating rate system (that was based on using the US dollar as the reference currency). And it will probably look a lot more like a centrally planned system than we are used to. The US dollar was the reference currency because we were the world's biggest lender. Now, we're the world's biggest debtor.
I came up with a great idea about 25 years ago - a new political party, whose objective is to achieve the promise of the Industrial Revolution. That promise was that with automation the machines would do all the work and we could all live like kings. Now with robotics we are getting closer to being able to achieve that vision. The flip side of that is that there are no jobs.
So, the solution of my new Technical Party is to make unemployment the goal, not the problem! Let us make the objective to reduce our required working life to zero over the next 50 years! Someday, when we finish our 20 years of schooling (because we want to go to school, not because we have to). Then we are drafted to work for, say, five or 10 years. Then we retire to paint, make robotic art, do tai chi, or whatever. Sure, some folks will decide to go for the 'career' slot, just like some of the military used to do when we had a military draft - most folks went in for the minimum, but a few stayed.
Slashdot Mirror
You have to distinguish between internal and external.
Sheesh. It was a hypothetical example, exaggerated for simplicity.
I said nothing about regulation. There are other kinds of government intervention - patent and trademark laws are technically government intervention in the markets (for good or ill); professional licensing has many benefits but has long been abused by industry and labor to prevent competition and increase profits/wages, as well as doctors and pharma companies. The AMA was originally founded, and funded for the first decade or two, by the pharmaceutical industry. During that time the AMA went all out to make sure any non-drug and non-MD therapies were illegal. The present US farm subsidies and the ethanol-in-gasoline requirements are largely beneficial to Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill. At least 1/2 of OSHA laws are more closely related to protection of unions and industry monopolies than to actual safety.
As for the biological analogy - please do some research on complex adaptive systems and maybe take some econ classes. Just two examples, from econ 101: In a mature economy, the only thing that can improve the standard of living is technological advance. And technological advances very commonly drive tech bubbles, but in nearly all cases, 10 years after a bubble bursts, the value and economic activity in that segment of the economy is two to four times the peak of the bubble.
Big corporate, big government, big labor and big NGOs all love each other. That's the problem with all of the left/right arguments - left and right as presently defined are arguing about the wrong issues.
I'll just add that Reagan got suckered by the Dems later, when they insisted on a tax increase. Reagan signed off on the increase as part of a deal to cut spending 'later in the session', but somehow that never happened. In fact Congress increased spending by twice as much as the increased revenue that resulted from Laffer tax cuts.
Illinois does seem to be proving true the aphorism, "Every politician should be limited to two terms - one in office, one in prison." :D
Except for inflation, there is nothing that says that growth in GDP should result in the cost of government. If I had a company with revenues of X in 1999, and costs of Y in 1999, due to tech advances I should have growth in revenues while a reduction of costs by now - I should be able to run 2X or 3X on Y or less. Otherwise the market would eat my lunch.
One of the ongoing beliefs of the financial conservatives (since 1985 or thereabouts, after 40 years of despair in trying to get the government to cut back from the expansion before, during and after WWII) has been that if they can restrict taxes, _maybe_ that will force the issue and the government will have to cut back. Unfortunately that has not worked either.
It's interesting that most of the increases in size and intrusiveness of government has occurred during 'wars', and once expanded, it never goes back.
IIRC at any given time three of the carriers are in a two-year major overhaul where the boats are partially taken apart, lots of stuff is replaced, and new tech is added. I suspect the reactors are part of the major overhaul - new steam generators, etc.
I prefer to think of those as examples where the nation, in competition with other nations, pursues technological advances in the pursuit of a form of future national 'profit' - which did and does in fact occur.
I don't consider nations as being much different than corporations - they have some minor differences, but most large corporations operate internally as socialist organizations. When nations regulate, they are acting as governments. When nations borrow money, and otherwise operate within the economic system as opposed to regulating it, they are acting as corporations.
5: There are no monopolies. Again, without regulation, monopolies tend to form due to a number of factors and monopolies are capable of making it impossible to purchase a necessity in a way that benefits you.
I'll disagree with this one. Monopolies are almost always the result of a tilted playing field, that results from government intervention in one form or another, temporary shocks such as technological advance, or the violation of laws. Patents and copyrights are an interesting example.
I don't have time just now to get into this deeper, but in the long run, the natural (i.e. lowest error surface) distribution in a market follows some form of the inverse power law (see Pareto et al). Any other distribution requires an ever-increasing amount of effort (energy, power, money, legal manipulation) to maintain. Monopolies must rely on government support (often in the form of laws to protect) to maintain their monopoly - vis. RIAA, SOPA, PIPA, TDD, etc., etc. And the ultimate communist ideal is equivalent to a monoculture such as a wheat field, which requires an unending supply of fertilizers, plowing, pest controls and other interventions to maintain.
Note that in some economic ecosystems, just as in biological ecosystems, the environment may be best for a small number of behemoths such as the redwood forests or the Douglas Fir forests, where almost all of the biomass is tied up in a few large entities - so also some economic environments work that was as well. Others may be more akin to a rain forest or coral reef, where there are things growing on top of other things.
After the hoorah that another Dem candidate whose name I forget got in 1992 for just being seen in a boat with a woman, I was amazed that the Dems actually nominated Clinton, who already had been exposed as a philanderer, liar, etc. To me it exemplified their willingness to overlook almost any venality in the pursuit of their agenda. (Not to say the Rep team are different in that respect - to my mind this same question eliminates Gingrich from candidacy as well.) Several of the women who accused Clinton (and who later received settlement payments) did so regarding activities when he was Governor, and he was using the his security detail to help hide things from his wife and the press. As others have said, "If you lie to your wife, you'll lie to anybody." Or, as a very old book says, "If you can not be trusted in the small things, you can not be trusted in the big things."
Nooo - don't look at their nighties!! that's so embarrassing! :P I hear their favorites have little pictures of ESR and RMS dueling with liitle swords.
Technically speaking, I don't think that fits the criteria of a memory leak. As I have always understood it, a memory leak is when a piece of memory has been allocated by the program, and then the program drops the reference to it without releasing it. This memory is then 'orphaned' and can't be found or used by any program.
In any case, I think you have accurately connected it to garbage collection and cache management, and it should be fixed if so. So your point still indeed stands. :)
good luck with that, running your own fiber all over the country. Interesting side note, but probably not relevant - the Sprint network was originally the SPC - Southern Pacific Communications company which started out as a set of microwave links along the railroad rights-of-way to support Southern Pacific Railway railroad operations, before the Internet existed. According to Wikipedia, when the long distance market was deregulated they started selling capacity to others, and one thing led to another. Also according to W, the SPRINT name was the winner of a contest for a new name appropriate to the new business when MCI bought the company: "Switched PRIvate Network Telecommunications".
It's worth noting that the Military also uses the public switched network for some things. In one sense, this may be advantageous if done right. If the secret messages are merely one amongst the literally billions of packets going through a fiber per second, they are harder to find than just tapping into the correct dedicated fiber that carries nothing but secret messages. And, since any physical manifestation (fiber) that is strung across thousands of miles of countryside, a dedicated fiber is going to be just as vulnerable (given the same level of message encryption) as the packets in the public network.
The military can't know in advance where it is going to need telecom capability, so it has to be able to ship data over the public network in such a way that it is secure even if intercepted. That's a tall order, but there's no choice. Having a physically separate physical wire just doesn't give you that much extra.
Only problem with this is that it still costs too much. I'm on an old plan, thinking of upgrading but I'm not sure I want to be locked into that cost level - IIRC $80/month?
Hmm. only about 1118481 per day (30 day month) ... why, that's less than 13 messages per second! How will I live? Oh, noooooss!
I was just talking with a VZW rep last night. At present only about 2.5% of their customer base has 4G - so your question is definitely relevant. He also said VZW refuses to accept any more new models from manufacturers that are not 4G.
Only distantly related, but ... A long time ago I was writing code on a Perq workstation. The editor had a nice feature - it maintained a transcript of every change, and you could replay it. This became very useful once when I was working madly under deadline, and failed to save the file for ... wait for it ... 36 hours (yes, it was an all-nighter and then some). And the machine crashed - actually I think the power got cut. But with the transcript feature I was able to replay the entire 36 hour editing session, watching myself do my editing. It was rather fun, actually. Of course it was much faster than the original - I think it took an hour or so. And I was redeemed from my stupidity.
I loved the transcript feature - it was useful any time the machine or the program crashed, as it could restore everything up to the last disk write that succeeded. You could also pause and continue, so if you went off on a dead-end, you could replay up to the point where you started going the wrong way and stop, step backwards or forwards to the point where you had something worth keeping, and then save or start editing at that point.
I think it would be great for any text editor to do this.
But the point is that aircraft should be self-contained and should not rely on other aircraft to perform jamming for them.
Actually, no. The jamming aircraft is a huge source of radio signals - the opposite of stealth. The jamming aircraft needs to be well out of range, because it's like a huge light bulb at radio frequencies.
The article stated it would increase Apple's costs by 25% to pay American wages (somewhat blithely, I might add, I doubt it is that slick).
Actually I think it just said it would increase the 'cost of goods sold' by 25%.
The key components of cost generally include:
Parts, raw materials and supplies used,
Labor, including associated costs such as payroll taxes and benefits, and
Overhead of the business allocable to production.
Which is somewhat less than total costs - it does not include cost of sales (typically from 30% to 50% of revenue), administration outside of production, etc. It includes only part of overhead. So, bottom line, it would be somewhat less than 25% of total costs. I hesitate to guess just how much - it might be as low as 10% or less, of what Apple receives from the wholesaler or distributor, and an even smaller part of the price on the shelf.
That great time after the war was a historical anomaly. Look at the country before that - it was not at all like that. After the war we were the only nation on earth whose industrial infrastructure had not been destroyed, and the only one that had any money. And we had a huge expansion of industry here for the war, and all those factories were going to need customers. So we set up the Marshall Plan, and lent money to nations to rebuild - but they had to spend the money on US goods. So companies like Caterpillar had an instant worldwide market. This resulted in about a 5X multiplier on the money the government gave away, generating very good tax receipts to pay for it. This could best be described as a postwar bubble. And unfortunately we got used to those good times, and got to thinking that was 'normal'.
Unfortunately, the true 'normal' is something much closer to the Depression.
too late. "He who has the gold makes the rules". And, "The borrower is slave to the lender." At this point, any attempt by the US to enforce much of anything beyond a bit of food safety will quickly result in the Chinese deciding they'd rather not lend us any more money, and that 40% of US government spending that they are supporting by buying all those bonds goes away. Then you'll see the US government really, really cut budgets in a hurry.
Economists are already talking about how China may well control the future negotiations over a new worldwide monetary agreement to replace the existing floating rate system (that was based on using the US dollar as the reference currency). And it will probably look a lot more like a centrally planned system than we are used to. The US dollar was the reference currency because we were the world's biggest lender. Now, we're the world's biggest debtor.
I came up with a great idea about 25 years ago - a new political party, whose objective is to achieve the promise of the Industrial Revolution. That promise was that with automation the machines would do all the work and we could all live like kings. Now with robotics we are getting closer to being able to achieve that vision. The flip side of that is that there are no jobs.
So, the solution of my new Technical Party is to make unemployment the goal, not the problem! Let us make the objective to reduce our required working life to zero over the next 50 years! Someday, when we finish our 20 years of schooling (because we want to go to school, not because we have to). Then we are drafted to work for, say, five or 10 years. Then we retire to paint, make robotic art, do tai chi, or whatever. Sure, some folks will decide to go for the 'career' slot, just like some of the military used to do when we had a military draft - most folks went in for the minimum, but a few stayed.
Let the robots do all the work!! :D
+1 :D