I don't think the issue is how big were their costs but why they paid $4B. The article makes it sound like they just felt bad for the company and decided to give them the $4B. But obviously it is some under the table payment for something rather substantial as $4B is like the yearly revenue of a giant multinational company. It is not something that a company can just afford to give away or even write into a contract as a "if things don't work out" clause.
Merger deals almost always include a play-or-pay clause because all the discovery, legal work, etc has real costs to the target company... it prevents non-serious bidders or those who would bid to shake confidence in the company then back out. It also covers stuff like customer/employee impact (people leaving in anticipation of the merger) and any proprietary information the acquirer might have picked up during the due diligence process.
Well the issue is that you can't have loans in bitcoin because it's design guarantees long-term deflation (regardless of the short term fluctuations). So any loan would have to have a negative interest rate, otherwise that seemingly low 1% loan is really a massive 40% when the deflation is factored in.
It also means the best investment strategy is always to sit on your bitcoin. That's free and the value continuously increases. Those with all the coin will continue to have all the coin forever. Yes inflation is a hidden tax... but one that hits the wealthy much harder and forces them to put their money to some sort of productive use (or watch its value evaporate).
If you want to argue that loans and investment are terrible evils and deserve to be eradicated then you are certainly free to make that argument.
Well T-mobile would be more expensive; they don't have enough spectrum and Deutsche Telekom has left them starved for capital funding for a while so the network isn't in great shape either.
Sprint might be a better fit either as an investment (since Sprint needs the cash for Network Vision) or as a wholesale customer (since Sprint is already doing that). As a wholesale customer they don't have to worry about any legal questions or other complaints and Sprint could get a nice up-front cash payment that would eliminate the need to go to the market for more debt. Unlike T-mobile, Sprint owns 800Mhz spectrum (the valuable building-penetrating kind) and 1900Mhz spectrum so they should be able to do well *if* they can survive their cash needs during the next two-three years it takes to build out their nationwide LTE network. Also unlike T-mobile they are a tier-1 internet backbone provider with significant fiber overland and undersea (though they don't have the benefit of last-mile lines line ATT/Verizon do for backhaul) but once they have the traffic dumped on their fiber they don't pay for transit or peering of that traffic. IIRC ATT (?!) and the cable companies have been bidding to run fiber to the Sprint cell tower sites and that deployment is underway.
Google doesn't say anything because Android is a loss-leader for them to drive search revenues. They don't make much money off Android directly do from their point of view it isn't their problem.
Things may change with their purchase of Motorola but I suspect that they will have some difficulties here. If they use Motorola to bring out a lot of successful devices, they will piss off their OEMs. If they aren't successful then that's just more wasted money when they can let the OEMs eat the R&D and risks, all to drive search revenue to Google.
They appear to claim that injecting a nickel powder with hydrogen gas under high pressure forces hydrogen into situations where the nickel will capture a proton, turning into an unstable copper isotope, which will beta decay back to nickel emitting a positron which annihilates with an electron, producing heat energy.
As far as I know there is no known theoretical basis for such a reaction. Even if you could squeeze the hydrogen into really tight spaces in a heated crystal structure then cool it to get atomic forces to squeeze the hydrogen to an insane degree, you still won't come close to enough force to get proton capture. And the heat levels they are talking about aren't going to get there either.
History is littered with crackpots who believed their own nonsense and fakers who drummed up hype to get investor's money (or just coast for a few years while drawing a paycheck and not having to get a real job). I predict more of the same in this case.
The majority of infections are (in order): JRE, Acrobat Reader, Flash, and a minority are actual browser exploits and/or Quicktime exploits. No word on the versions but I expect that they are all well-known and long-patched holes.
Part of the reason I run with Java disabled, Flashblock installed, etc.
Nah, they will move the lawyer jobs to India, then to China, then to some island country....
Whoops, it is already happening. Doctors on India are viewing your x-rays and diagnosing your issues. (I know this to be true because I helped set it up.) But anyways, just look at low paying unskilled jobs now.... robots did not take over like the article seems to indicate, nope... instead they went to China, where you work in a building and rent a refrigerator box in another from the same company you work for. It is still cheaper than robots.
This is only true while labor is really cheap. There are a huge number of goods you can make in the US or China at basically the same cost but in China you pay pennies to manual laborers, in the US you program robots to do it. That is happening in China right now as Foxconn is investing in robots due to rises in Chinese labor rates.
Granted there are some new jobs overseeing the robots, programming them, etc but overall the number of warm bodies required per unit of economic output will continue to go down over time.
We will eventually need to shift to a shorter work-week for the same relative pay or we'll need to find new areas for expansion in space. The alternative is to jump back to feudalism prior to the black death when labor was cheap and most people worked as serfs barely scratching out a living. I would point out that the black death brought about a huge increase in labor mobility as there weren't enough hands to till the fields; people migrated (including illegally) to work for new lords that offered better benefits and pay. I really hope we can avoid that fate this time around (massive death via war or disease required to change the status quo).
The history of the Internet and examples like IPv6, HTTP, SMTP, etc have shown us over and over that "good enough" + evolution trumps replace almost every time.
The path forward is clear: improve JavaScript, extend it, improve HTML, and keep on trucking. Neither will ever be replaced on a wide scale, only evolved.
The reason we don't already have worldwide IPv6 deployment is they redesigned IP instead of just extending the addresses.
I might point out that FDA rejection of thalidomide saved thousands of children from being born as flipper babies.
There have been strong calls for informed participation in clinical trials, especially for terminally ill patients. The FDA has been very responsive as far as I am aware.
I suggest not operating on rumor or whatever Fox News is peddling and check the facts for yourself. It isn't difficult.
You are confusing correlation with causation. What you say is true if rich people kept their money as cash under their beds or in a safe. The reality is that money is put in banks, which lend the money to businesses which produce stuff and hence create economic growth. This results in an increase in consumption (because there is more to consume). You believe that it is consumption that causes economic growth, when in fact it is the opposite.
Not strictly true... there are cycles both of business and income distribution.
When businesses are seeking investment but there is little capital to go around, cutting taxes on the wealthy will stimulate the economy because that frees up money to be lent, which in turn builds factories, which employ people, etc. In those situations it is not a lack of customers with money in their pockets that is the problem. As more production comes on-line and prices fall, consumers will spend their money buying more goods for lower prices per good.
When there is global glut of capital chasing any kind of return whatsoever (as we had in the run up to the crisis and still have today), additional investment either ends up earning paltry sums financing government debt or other extremely safe investments OR it ends up chasing risky investments without an appropriate rate of return. In this scenario, businesses refuse to invest even at 0% interest rates because they see weak demand. This becomes a self-reinforcing cycle where everyone attempts to pay off their debts at the same time and refuses to spend. We have a huge capacity overhang in most sectors today... we are capable of producing far more than we are consuming so there is little need for capital anyway.
Given our high unemployment and low core inflation rates, workers won't be making much additional money anytime soon. They'll continue to struggle to repay debt. This means depressed consumer spending (which drives 70% of our economy) for the foreseeable future. Workers have little-to-no money to save or invest and zero bargaining power to increase wages. Productivity increases result in layoffs as businesses can't increase profits via sales so they seek to cut costs. The end result is that wealth continues to slowly accumulate to the top.
One possible response is to shift the tax burden off the low and middle income earners and onto the wealthy. That gives the low and middle class instant increases in buying power, which will immediately be used to pay off debt or purchase goods. The other option is massive government deficit spending to goose the economy.
Any system that relies on users to know what is or isn't good is doomed to failure. Users don't check the address bar and don't know about certificates, nor should they.
All too often their machines are 0wned already by malware and spyware, probably because they saw some cute puzzle game and just kept clicking OK at that damn dialog box getting in the way of playing my game!!!
Don't forget that one customer is not equivalent to another. The iPhone carries with it a premium data plan, resulting in higher revenue for the network operator.
Both T-Mobile and Sprint have admitted publicly (via their CEO's statements) that they are losing these high-value *profitable* customers due to the iPhone. There is little to dispute here. If their CEO admits that publicly I'd wager he/she is far better informed than any slashdot commenters.
I'd also point out that iPhone customers buy more apps and the iPad is literally 90%+ of the tablet market right now. The iOS platforms are also far more standardized than Android so hardware support is easier *and* Apple handles a lot more of the billing aspect so no need to handle refunds or deal with installation headaches (or store fragmentation). So as a developer the choice is easy: develop for iOS first, then port to other platforms if you get around to it. That is the same self-reinforcing cycle we saw leading Windows to market dominance (then illegal activity to leverage that into a monopoly).
Apple is leveraging their domination of component markets (like flash) and vast cash hordes to buy manufacturing capacity, supply guarantees, etc. Whether that will turn into a monopoly or not is TBD but it certainly means you'd have a difficult time competing with them as everyone who tried to build a tablet found out the hard way.
On a personal note, I left Sprint after being a customer for almost 10 years to get an iPhone, and I'm one of those high-dollar plan customers with multiple lines. I'd rather be a Sprint customer and I hope they get the iPhone 5.... but as long as they don't, I will be forced to stick with ATT or Verizon.
A second personal note: I hope Android keeps improving and moving forward because it will keep Apple honest and innovating. And to those who love their Android devices, great. I'm glad you are happy and feel free to keep on trucking... but I love my iOS devices and I love not having to install a virus scanner on my phone and I'm willing to give up some control to have that one less hassle.
Just wanted to point out that this does *not* depend on mod_deflate or mod_gzip. That makes the problem worse, but it is the fact that Apache sets up a lot of internal data structures to handle the "metadata" of the multi-part request. Even with compression disabled, you can still easily overload the server with comparatively fewer requests because you're asking Apache to setup thousands and thousands of multi-part buckets for each single HTTP request. It doesn't take very many requests to bring everything to a standstill.
A quick summary: A client can use byte range requests that are overlapping and/or duplicated to use a single small request to overload the server. eg: 0-,0-,0- would request the entire contents of the file three times. YMMV but this has to do with how Apache handles the multipart responses consuming memory and isn't an actual bandwidth DoS.
Unfortunately there are legit reasons for allowing out-of-order ranges and multiple ranges, such as a PDF reader requesting the header, then skipping to the end of the file for the index, then using ranges to request specific pages. Another example was a streaming movie skipping forward by grabbing byte ranges to look for i-frames without downloading the entire file.
So the fix discussion centers on when to ignore a range request, when can you merge ranges, can you re-order them, can you reject overlapping ranges and how much do they need to overlap, etc. The consensus seems to be that first you merge adjacent ranges, then if too many ranges are left OR too many duplicated bytes are requested then the request skips the multi-part handling and just does a straight up 200 OK stream of the whole file or throws back a 416 (can't satisfy multipart request).
This post is obviously a racist troll but I'll bite and respond seriously:
The research has shown that there is not a statistically significant difference between intelligence or physical ability among races, when you control for social, economic, and other factors.
We also know from research that lack of adequate nutrition during the first few years of life permanently reduces that person's intellect and abilities, a deficit from which they will never recover.
Perhaps being poor is a difficult self-perpetuating cycle that takes an extraordinary amount of effort to break (and the luck not to experience too many significant setbacks, eg: parent that starts smoking crack, bad economy that results in cuts to scholarships or to the local school budgets, etc)
First of all the claim that no nuclear reactions are going on must be false for this to work at all, otherwise this is just another perpetual motion machine.
Second, what do they mean by "heat pulses"? The only way I can see this working is if the laser manages to knock some particles loose, generate a few antiparticles, or momentarily compresses a small area of the thorium causing a non-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. If you could cause a small reaction you could certainly get some heat out of it but it would definitely be a nuclear reaction converting mass into energy.
This smells like a scam and I will assume it to be one until proof is offered.
Re:It'll never make it through FDA trials
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
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· Score: 2
People who work at drug companies die of cancer. Or have relatives, wives, husbands, and children that die of cancer.
If you think they would honestly ignore a potential cure, you're insane. The money is immaterial... you can just charge $50,000 for the one-time cure shot if you develop it.
The idea that there is some sort of massive conspiracy to only research lifestyle drugs is just pure idiocy. Indeed the example people love to throw around - Viagra - was designed as a heart medication. The ED effects were an accidental side-effect but one they happily exploited.
There is a lot of complain about with "big pharma" but there is no conspiracy. The #1 problem is the fact that we allow drug marketing... that was a huge mistake (thanks de-regulating republicans!) But you know what? "big pharma" has bought out most of the major supplement makers so your "homeopathy" hocus-pocus placebo is made by the same companies. Enjoy.
That's not correct. Under normal circumstances this would be the case but in the current environment with the private sector desperately trying to de-lever, money is being taken out of circulation at an alarming rate. Banks are just piling the excess reserves into Fed accounts, cutting off the money multiplier.
Banks aren't constrained by their reserves; they make loans to willing creditworthy borrowers first, then they settle up their reserves after the fact, borrowing from the Fed if necessary... ergo interest rates are linked to Fed policy. In other words banks create money out of nothing whenever their is demand. The Fed regulates that demand by changing the interest rate. Unfortunately the Fed is up against the zero bound right now so they can't push interest rates as low as they'd like to.
Ultimately, that's why there isn't much inflation right now and why there won't be for some time. The proof is in the pudding - the inflation hawks have been crying about it since 2009 and we have yet to see anything other than energy prices make much of a move (and they've come back down). Core inflation is negligible. Wages are flat. The "bond vigilantes" are apparently asleep at the wheel too because the US is paying less than 3% to borrow right now - historically low rates (we should be financing a nationwide broadband rollout, highway improvement, etc programs since we can finance all that useful infrastructure at ridiculously low rates).
Frankly I hope they do the platinum coin trick and I hope it does spark a little bit of inflation... that would help ease the private sector debt burden tremendously, especially in an environment of flat wages and high unemployment. It would avoid mass bankruptcies/defaults and yet another collapse of the financial system. It would also avoid a Japan-style lost decade, where everyone just lumbers along under crushing debt loads.
I believe the software was open source so you can still use it... they just won't be doing the legwork of writing the semantic mapping code when patches require it, or pre-certifying the other patches via the subscription service.
There is nothing stopping RedHat from hiring someone to do this work on their end and offering their own subscription service.
To say that I am scared of X is to open one's self up to argument, facts, rationality, or even to ridicule.
To say that X will frighten Y (where Y is a person or group seemingly deserving or in need of protection) makes one out to be a generous altruistic person. It also prevents any attempt at arguing the position because Y's behavior and beliefs can be whatever you want them to be in order to win the argument.
The NYT wouldn't dream of just shoving printed copies of the paper out the door without checking the plates, checking registration/color alignment, etc. Yet that same attention to detail is nowhere to be found when it comes to their digital app.
I'm just one guy writing small iOS apps in his spare time and I sure as hell don't release an update until I've installed in on every device I own and handed a beta to anyone I can wrangle into testing. Then when it goes live I immediately download and run it just to make sure everything is working.
The first rule of software: don't annoy your users. The second rule of software: all crashes annoy your users. The third rule of software: anything (eg updates) that goes from working to non-working really annoys your users.
Since when has ICANN given a single thought to what is good for the internet, what makes sense, or what the users of the internet want? This is all about money... they intend to charge huge $$$ for your own TLD. I'm sure they will award themselves big fat bonuses for being so innovative.
The problem is I can't think of anything better to replace ICANN; Giving the UN control over the internet is certain to be worse. Letting idiots with no idea how the internet works vote on its architecture is equally as awful. As soon as national governments get involved, you have their ridiculous petty disputes and nationalism injecting themselves into every issue (go read up on why MS had to disable the timezone map in Windows... India threatened to kick them out of the country because one or two pixels weren't properly highlighted due to conflicting claims over a certain region.)
It's cool that somebody got this working. That said, looking at this sort of things further enforces my belief that we're all barking up the wrong tree by going with JS+html as client side development environment of the future. Compared to a Silverlight solution, the JS player is 3.5 times larger (535kb vs 154kb), uses about 3.6 times as much CPU power (25% vs 7%), and has to have significant modifications to work in multiple browsers. Not really progress.
I certainly agree and if I were going to deploy a website or do a project for a customer today, I wouldn't even think about using this kind of stuff. However Moore's law combined with the compsci work on making dynamic languages fast will eventually make JS a valid contender. I'm glad to see people out there pushing the boundaries of what can be done in JS, which will certainly drive further performance improvements and perhaps even future extensions to the language.
It's a bit funny... designing a UI in HTML+CSS+JS is definitely a huge step backwards compared to almost any GUI library, but it turns out that the only way to get a bunch of humans with competing priorities to agree on a cross-platform widely supported project like this is to start really small and simple, solve a huge need, then ramp the project up as it reaches wide deployment. When you think about it, getting various vendors, open source projects, working committees, standards organizations, developers (paid, hobbyist, etc), and end-users to all agree to adopt one single piece of technology is almost impossible by definition (image trying to get everyone to agree on CSS+JS+AJAX in HTML v2). The fact that HTML+CSS+JS is so widely adopted is an amazing feat of technological and social engineering. I can only think of a handful of human endeavors that have ever come close to this eg: cell phones, electricity, fire, the wheel, etc.
It also amuses me that one private company's embrace-extend (Microsoft with the first AJAX implementation to make a more Outlook-style interface for Exchange web on IE) led open-source groups to turn embrace-extend around and create a new web standard. I think that must say something about accidental innovation being necessary for any standard to do something revolutionary, as well as the pent-up demand for a true cross-platform UI standard with backwards-compatibility and built-in abilities to run across the network.
>> File revisions >Dropbox, subversion, time machine, snapshots - it is just that we have more solutions now than back in the days, and you have to pick one.
The problem is that support isn't universal. When the OS supports it at a lower level it becomes transparent to applications. When you really think about it, most applications would benefit from a more source-control-like file metaphor. Undo/redo should be available even after you close the app, reboot, and load the document again. Redo should be able to create branches. It is just really difficult to do because our OSes, filesystems, languages, toolkits, etc don't help us attempt to support this in any form but baby steps are being taken... stuff like Time Machine and Previous Versions, etc.
>> Creating a new empty file and then writing it did not make the file visible to other processes until the file was closed and committed. >Semantics - UNIX still does it that way (if you want to), Windows does not, mostly because it does not have inodes.
Actually not true - Vista/Win7 support Transactional NTFS which gives you integrated filesystem transactions. Changes to a file or folder in the transaction aren't visible until the transaction is committed and you can specify that your read transaction doesn't see changes once it begins so you get a consistent view of the FS. These transactions can participate in the DTC so you can commit database and filesystem ops in one transaction if you wish.
>> Rings of protection >Called sandboxes nowadays. Yes, a number of systems had a more elegant implementation, including OS/360 and I believe Plan 9. The x86 architecture just does not make this easy, and that is indeed something worth lamenting.
That's true to some degree... none of the OSes use the hardware context switching mechanism for various reasons, so they all use software even to swtich between processes/threads. In theory x86 is supposed to support this in hardware but no one uses it. Of course Singularity proved that a 100% software approach can work (everything runs in kernel mode) so long as you make some fundamental assumptions about what kind of code can be loaded (so the OS can verify it at install/run time).
>> Safe, fast languages >Pascal was and still is safe, as is LISP. But those languages are safe because they miss important element such as pointers. Java is also reasonably safe, because it only has references, no pointers.
Pointers don't necessarily have to be dangerous... we just don't bother to store information about the data structure as a guaranteed x-sized header at the start of every data structure for performance and memory usage reasons. If every data structure was self-describing, you could verify (whether in software or with hardware assist) that the data access you wanted to perform was valid and wasn't stepping on random bits of memory. This is effectively what the CLR and JVM do - performing array bounds checks, making sure that reference really is to a string and not an int, etc.
There are a number of terrible decisions in C that have effectively condemned us to fight the same battles over and over (buffer overflows anyone?) and influenced most languages and software that came after.
Long ago, I worked as an IT admin for a grocery company that owned it's own bakery, ice cream, drink, etc plant. The "industrial control systems" I saw in use were the worst engineered pieces of junk I've ever encountered. I am talking unpatched Windows 95 systems running a crappy VB 4 UI, that talked to a poorly written VxD to control the ice cream mixer, which was a massive piece of equipment that could easily kill someone standing too close to it.
I just got one of those TI $4 embedded development kits and while I applaud them for trying to draw in hobbyists and small companies, the SDK is a serious piece of crap. You might as well just write pure assembly... The C code is a mishmash of indecipherable macros and #defines that seriously look more like assembly than C. Forget about any kind of abstraction.
From what I hear from my friends (one of whom used to program for defense embedded systems), it is all like that. Terrible platforms, terrible code, security through obscurity (if that), etc.
The fact that stuxnet was able to exist? The fact that the video signals from some of our drones are broadcast unencrypted over the air? None of it is shocking in the least. It makes Microsoft IIS circa 1997 look positively secure and well-written by comparison.
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I don't think the issue is how big were their costs but why they paid $4B. The article makes it sound like they just felt bad for the company and decided to give them the $4B. But obviously it is some under the table payment for something rather substantial as $4B is like the yearly revenue of a giant multinational company.
It is not something that a company can just afford to give away or even write into a contract as a "if things don't work out" clause.
Merger deals almost always include a play-or-pay clause because all the discovery, legal work, etc has real costs to the target company... it prevents non-serious bidders or those who would bid to shake confidence in the company then back out. It also covers stuff like customer/employee impact (people leaving in anticipation of the merger) and any proprietary information the acquirer might have picked up during the due diligence process.
Well the issue is that you can't have loans in bitcoin because it's design guarantees long-term deflation (regardless of the short term fluctuations). So any loan would have to have a negative interest rate, otherwise that seemingly low 1% loan is really a massive 40% when the deflation is factored in.
It also means the best investment strategy is always to sit on your bitcoin. That's free and the value continuously increases. Those with all the coin will continue to have all the coin forever. Yes inflation is a hidden tax... but one that hits the wealthy much harder and forces them to put their money to some sort of productive use (or watch its value evaporate).
If you want to argue that loans and investment are terrible evils and deserve to be eradicated then you are certainly free to make that argument.
Well T-mobile would be more expensive; they don't have enough spectrum and Deutsche Telekom has left them starved for capital funding for a while so the network isn't in great shape either.
Sprint might be a better fit either as an investment (since Sprint needs the cash for Network Vision) or as a wholesale customer (since Sprint is already doing that). As a wholesale customer they don't have to worry about any legal questions or other complaints and Sprint could get a nice up-front cash payment that would eliminate the need to go to the market for more debt. Unlike T-mobile, Sprint owns 800Mhz spectrum (the valuable building-penetrating kind) and 1900Mhz spectrum so they should be able to do well *if* they can survive their cash needs during the next two-three years it takes to build out their nationwide LTE network. Also unlike T-mobile they are a tier-1 internet backbone provider with significant fiber overland and undersea (though they don't have the benefit of last-mile lines line ATT/Verizon do for backhaul) but once they have the traffic dumped on their fiber they don't pay for transit or peering of that traffic. IIRC ATT (?!) and the cable companies have been bidding to run fiber to the Sprint cell tower sites and that deployment is underway.
Google doesn't say anything because Android is a loss-leader for them to drive search revenues. They don't make much money off Android directly do from their point of view it isn't their problem.
Things may change with their purchase of Motorola but I suspect that they will have some difficulties here. If they use Motorola to bring out a lot of successful devices, they will piss off their OEMs. If they aren't successful then that's just more wasted money when they can let the OEMs eat the R&D and risks, all to drive search revenue to Google.
They appear to claim that injecting a nickel powder with hydrogen gas under high pressure forces hydrogen into situations where the nickel will capture a proton, turning into an unstable copper isotope, which will beta decay back to nickel emitting a positron which annihilates with an electron, producing heat energy.
As far as I know there is no known theoretical basis for such a reaction. Even if you could squeeze the hydrogen into really tight spaces in a heated crystal structure then cool it to get atomic forces to squeeze the hydrogen to an insane degree, you still won't come close to enough force to get proton capture. And the heat levels they are talking about aren't going to get there either.
History is littered with crackpots who believed their own nonsense and fakers who drummed up hype to get investor's money (or just coast for a few years while drawing a paycheck and not having to get a real job). I predict more of the same in this case.
TL;DR:
The majority of infections are (in order): JRE, Acrobat Reader, Flash, and a minority are actual browser exploits and/or Quicktime exploits. No word on the versions but I expect that they are all well-known and long-patched holes.
Part of the reason I run with Java disabled, Flashblock installed, etc.
Nah, they will move the lawyer jobs to India, then to China, then to some island country....
Whoops, it is already happening. Doctors on India are viewing your x-rays and diagnosing your issues. (I know this to be true because I helped set it up.)
But anyways, just look at low paying unskilled jobs now.... robots did not take over like the article seems to indicate, nope... instead they went to China, where you work in a building and rent a refrigerator box in another from the same company you work for. It is still cheaper than robots.
This is only true while labor is really cheap. There are a huge number of goods you can make in the US or China at basically the same cost but in China you pay pennies to manual laborers, in the US you program robots to do it. That is happening in China right now as Foxconn is investing in robots due to rises in Chinese labor rates.
Granted there are some new jobs overseeing the robots, programming them, etc but overall the number of warm bodies required per unit of economic output will continue to go down over time.
We will eventually need to shift to a shorter work-week for the same relative pay or we'll need to find new areas for expansion in space. The alternative is to jump back to feudalism prior to the black death when labor was cheap and most people worked as serfs barely scratching out a living. I would point out that the black death brought about a huge increase in labor mobility as there weren't enough hands to till the fields; people migrated (including illegally) to work for new lords that offered better benefits and pay. I really hope we can avoid that fate this time around (massive death via war or disease required to change the status quo).
The history of the Internet and examples like IPv6, HTTP, SMTP, etc have shown us over and over that "good enough" + evolution trumps replace almost every time.
The path forward is clear: improve JavaScript, extend it, improve HTML, and keep on trucking. Neither will ever be replaced on a wide scale, only evolved.
The reason we don't already have worldwide IPv6 deployment is they redesigned IP instead of just extending the addresses.
I might point out that FDA rejection of thalidomide saved thousands of children from being born as flipper babies.
There have been strong calls for informed participation in clinical trials, especially for terminally ill patients. The FDA has been very responsive as far as I am aware.
I suggest not operating on rumor or whatever Fox News is peddling and check the facts for yourself. It isn't difficult.
You are confusing correlation with causation. What you say is true if rich people kept their money as cash under their beds or in a safe.
The reality is that money is put in banks, which lend the money to businesses which produce stuff and hence create economic growth. This results in an increase in consumption (because there is more to consume). You believe that it is consumption that causes economic growth, when in fact it is the opposite.
Not strictly true... there are cycles both of business and income distribution.
When businesses are seeking investment but there is little capital to go around, cutting taxes on the wealthy will stimulate the economy because that frees up money to be lent, which in turn builds factories, which employ people, etc. In those situations it is not a lack of customers with money in their pockets that is the problem. As more production comes on-line and prices fall, consumers will spend their money buying more goods for lower prices per good.
When there is global glut of capital chasing any kind of return whatsoever (as we had in the run up to the crisis and still have today), additional investment either ends up earning paltry sums financing government debt or other extremely safe investments OR it ends up chasing risky investments without an appropriate rate of return. In this scenario, businesses refuse to invest even at 0% interest rates because they see weak demand. This becomes a self-reinforcing cycle where everyone attempts to pay off their debts at the same time and refuses to spend. We have a huge capacity overhang in most sectors today... we are capable of producing far more than we are consuming so there is little need for capital anyway.
Given our high unemployment and low core inflation rates, workers won't be making much additional money anytime soon. They'll continue to struggle to repay debt. This means depressed consumer spending (which drives 70% of our economy) for the foreseeable future. Workers have little-to-no money to save or invest and zero bargaining power to increase wages. Productivity increases result in layoffs as businesses can't increase profits via sales so they seek to cut costs. The end result is that wealth continues to slowly accumulate to the top.
One possible response is to shift the tax burden off the low and middle income earners and onto the wealthy. That gives the low and middle class instant increases in buying power, which will immediately be used to pay off debt or purchase goods. The other option is massive government deficit spending to goose the economy.
Any system that relies on users to know what is or isn't good is doomed to failure. Users don't check the address bar and don't know about certificates, nor should they.
All too often their machines are 0wned already by malware and spyware, probably because they saw some cute puzzle game and just kept clicking OK at that damn dialog box getting in the way of playing my game!!!
Don't forget that one customer is not equivalent to another. The iPhone carries with it a premium data plan, resulting in higher revenue for the network operator.
Both T-Mobile and Sprint have admitted publicly (via their CEO's statements) that they are losing these high-value *profitable* customers due to the iPhone. There is little to dispute here. If their CEO admits that publicly I'd wager he/she is far better informed than any slashdot commenters.
I'd also point out that iPhone customers buy more apps and the iPad is literally 90%+ of the tablet market right now. The iOS platforms are also far more standardized than Android so hardware support is easier *and* Apple handles a lot more of the billing aspect so no need to handle refunds or deal with installation headaches (or store fragmentation). So as a developer the choice is easy: develop for iOS first, then port to other platforms if you get around to it. That is the same self-reinforcing cycle we saw leading Windows to market dominance (then illegal activity to leverage that into a monopoly).
Apple is leveraging their domination of component markets (like flash) and vast cash hordes to buy manufacturing capacity, supply guarantees, etc. Whether that will turn into a monopoly or not is TBD but it certainly means you'd have a difficult time competing with them as everyone who tried to build a tablet found out the hard way.
On a personal note, I left Sprint after being a customer for almost 10 years to get an iPhone, and I'm one of those high-dollar plan customers with multiple lines. I'd rather be a Sprint customer and I hope they get the iPhone 5.... but as long as they don't, I will be forced to stick with ATT or Verizon.
A second personal note: I hope Android keeps improving and moving forward because it will keep Apple honest and innovating. And to those who love their Android devices, great. I'm glad you are happy and feel free to keep on trucking... but I love my iOS devices and I love not having to install a virus scanner on my phone and I'm willing to give up some control to have that one less hassle.
Just wanted to point out that this does *not* depend on mod_deflate or mod_gzip. That makes the problem worse, but it is the fact that Apache sets up a lot of internal data structures to handle the "metadata" of the multi-part request. Even with compression disabled, you can still easily overload the server with comparatively fewer requests because you're asking Apache to setup thousands and thousands of multi-part buckets for each single HTTP request. It doesn't take very many requests to bring everything to a standstill.
A quick summary: A client can use byte range requests that are overlapping and/or duplicated to use a single small request to overload the server. eg: 0-,0-,0- would request the entire contents of the file three times. YMMV but this has to do with how Apache handles the multipart responses consuming memory and isn't an actual bandwidth DoS.
Unfortunately there are legit reasons for allowing out-of-order ranges and multiple ranges, such as a PDF reader requesting the header, then skipping to the end of the file for the index, then using ranges to request specific pages. Another example was a streaming movie skipping forward by grabbing byte ranges to look for i-frames without downloading the entire file.
So the fix discussion centers on when to ignore a range request, when can you merge ranges, can you re-order them, can you reject overlapping ranges and how much do they need to overlap, etc. The consensus seems to be that first you merge adjacent ranges, then if too many ranges are left OR too many duplicated bytes are requested then the request skips the multi-part handling and just does a straight up 200 OK stream of the whole file or throws back a 416 (can't satisfy multipart request).
This post is obviously a racist troll but I'll bite and respond seriously:
The research has shown that there is not a statistically significant difference between intelligence or physical ability among races, when you control for social, economic, and other factors.
We also know from research that lack of adequate nutrition during the first few years of life permanently reduces that person's intellect and abilities, a deficit from which they will never recover.
Perhaps being poor is a difficult self-perpetuating cycle that takes an extraordinary amount of effort to break (and the luck not to experience too many significant setbacks, eg: parent that starts smoking crack, bad economy that results in cuts to scholarships or to the local school budgets, etc)
First of all the claim that no nuclear reactions are going on must be false for this to work at all, otherwise this is just another perpetual motion machine.
Second, what do they mean by "heat pulses"? The only way I can see this working is if the laser manages to knock some particles loose, generate a few antiparticles, or momentarily compresses a small area of the thorium causing a non-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. If you could cause a small reaction you could certainly get some heat out of it but it would definitely be a nuclear reaction converting mass into energy.
This smells like a scam and I will assume it to be one until proof is offered.
People who work at drug companies die of cancer. Or have relatives, wives, husbands, and children that die of cancer.
If you think they would honestly ignore a potential cure, you're insane. The money is immaterial... you can just charge $50,000 for the one-time cure shot if you develop it.
The idea that there is some sort of massive conspiracy to only research lifestyle drugs is just pure idiocy. Indeed the example people love to throw around - Viagra - was designed as a heart medication. The ED effects were an accidental side-effect but one they happily exploited.
There is a lot of complain about with "big pharma" but there is no conspiracy. The #1 problem is the fact that we allow drug marketing... that was a huge mistake (thanks de-regulating republicans!) But you know what? "big pharma" has bought out most of the major supplement makers so your "homeopathy" hocus-pocus placebo is made by the same companies. Enjoy.
inflation
That's not correct. Under normal circumstances this would be the case but in the current environment with the private sector desperately trying to de-lever, money is being taken out of circulation at an alarming rate. Banks are just piling the excess reserves into Fed accounts, cutting off the money multiplier.
Banks aren't constrained by their reserves; they make loans to willing creditworthy borrowers first, then they settle up their reserves after the fact, borrowing from the Fed if necessary... ergo interest rates are linked to Fed policy. In other words banks create money out of nothing whenever their is demand. The Fed regulates that demand by changing the interest rate. Unfortunately the Fed is up against the zero bound right now so they can't push interest rates as low as they'd like to.
Ultimately, that's why there isn't much inflation right now and why there won't be for some time. The proof is in the pudding - the inflation hawks have been crying about it since 2009 and we have yet to see anything other than energy prices make much of a move (and they've come back down). Core inflation is negligible. Wages are flat. The "bond vigilantes" are apparently asleep at the wheel too because the US is paying less than 3% to borrow right now - historically low rates (we should be financing a nationwide broadband rollout, highway improvement, etc programs since we can finance all that useful infrastructure at ridiculously low rates).
Frankly I hope they do the platinum coin trick and I hope it does spark a little bit of inflation... that would help ease the private sector debt burden tremendously, especially in an environment of flat wages and high unemployment. It would avoid mass bankruptcies/defaults and yet another collapse of the financial system. It would also avoid a Japan-style lost decade, where everyone just lumbers along under crushing debt loads.
I believe the software was open source so you can still use it... they just won't be doing the legwork of writing the semantic mapping code when patches require it, or pre-certifying the other patches via the subscription service.
There is nothing stopping RedHat from hiring someone to do this work on their end and offering their own subscription service.
To say that I am scared of X is to open one's self up to argument, facts, rationality, or even to ridicule.
To say that X will frighten Y (where Y is a person or group seemingly deserving or in need of protection) makes one out to be a generous altruistic person. It also prevents any attempt at arguing the position because Y's behavior and beliefs can be whatever you want them to be in order to win the argument.
The NYT wouldn't dream of just shoving printed copies of the paper out the door without checking the plates, checking registration/color alignment, etc. Yet that same attention to detail is nowhere to be found when it comes to their digital app.
I'm just one guy writing small iOS apps in his spare time and I sure as hell don't release an update until I've installed in on every device I own and handed a beta to anyone I can wrangle into testing. Then when it goes live I immediately download and run it just to make sure everything is working.
The first rule of software: don't annoy your users.
The second rule of software: all crashes annoy your users.
The third rule of software: anything (eg updates) that goes from working to non-working really annoys your users.
Since when has ICANN given a single thought to what is good for the internet, what makes sense, or what the users of the internet want? This is all about money... they intend to charge huge $$$ for your own TLD. I'm sure they will award themselves big fat bonuses for being so innovative.
The problem is I can't think of anything better to replace ICANN; Giving the UN control over the internet is certain to be worse. Letting idiots with no idea how the internet works vote on its architecture is equally as awful. As soon as national governments get involved, you have their ridiculous petty disputes and nationalism injecting themselves into every issue (go read up on why MS had to disable the timezone map in Windows... India threatened to kick them out of the country because one or two pixels weren't properly highlighted due to conflicting claims over a certain region.)
It's cool that somebody got this working. That said, looking at this sort of things further enforces my belief that we're all barking up the wrong tree by going with JS+html as client side development environment of the future. Compared to a Silverlight solution, the JS player is 3.5 times larger (535kb vs 154kb), uses about 3.6 times as much CPU power (25% vs 7%), and has to have significant modifications to work in multiple browsers. Not really progress.
I certainly agree and if I were going to deploy a website or do a project for a customer today, I wouldn't even think about using this kind of stuff. However Moore's law combined with the compsci work on making dynamic languages fast will eventually make JS a valid contender. I'm glad to see people out there pushing the boundaries of what can be done in JS, which will certainly drive further performance improvements and perhaps even future extensions to the language.
It's a bit funny... designing a UI in HTML+CSS+JS is definitely a huge step backwards compared to almost any GUI library, but it turns out that the only way to get a bunch of humans with competing priorities to agree on a cross-platform widely supported project like this is to start really small and simple, solve a huge need, then ramp the project up as it reaches wide deployment. When you think about it, getting various vendors, open source projects, working committees, standards organizations, developers (paid, hobbyist, etc), and end-users to all agree to adopt one single piece of technology is almost impossible by definition (image trying to get everyone to agree on CSS+JS+AJAX in HTML v2). The fact that HTML+CSS+JS is so widely adopted is an amazing feat of technological and social engineering. I can only think of a handful of human endeavors that have ever come close to this eg: cell phones, electricity, fire, the wheel, etc.
It also amuses me that one private company's embrace-extend (Microsoft with the first AJAX implementation to make a more Outlook-style interface for Exchange web on IE) led open-source groups to turn embrace-extend around and create a new web standard. I think that must say something about accidental innovation being necessary for any standard to do something revolutionary, as well as the pent-up demand for a true cross-platform UI standard with backwards-compatibility and built-in abilities to run across the network.
>> File revisions
>Dropbox, subversion, time machine, snapshots - it is just that we have more solutions now than back in the days, and you have to pick one.
The problem is that support isn't universal. When the OS supports it at a lower level it becomes transparent to applications. When you really think about it, most applications would benefit from a more source-control-like file metaphor. Undo/redo should be available even after you close the app, reboot, and load the document again. Redo should be able to create branches. It is just really difficult to do because our OSes, filesystems, languages, toolkits, etc don't help us attempt to support this in any form but baby steps are being taken... stuff like Time Machine and Previous Versions, etc.
>> Creating a new empty file and then writing it did not make the file visible to other processes until the file was closed and committed.
>Semantics - UNIX still does it that way (if you want to), Windows does not, mostly because it does not have inodes.
Actually not true - Vista/Win7 support Transactional NTFS which gives you integrated filesystem transactions. Changes to a file or folder in the transaction aren't visible until the transaction is committed and you can specify that your read transaction doesn't see changes once it begins so you get a consistent view of the FS. These transactions can participate in the DTC so you can commit database and filesystem ops in one transaction if you wish.
>> Rings of protection
>Called sandboxes nowadays. Yes, a number of systems had a more elegant implementation, including OS/360 and I believe Plan 9. The x86 architecture just does not make this easy, and that is indeed something worth lamenting.
That's true to some degree... none of the OSes use the hardware context switching mechanism for various reasons, so they all use software even to swtich between processes/threads. In theory x86 is supposed to support this in hardware but no one uses it. Of course Singularity proved that a 100% software approach can work (everything runs in kernel mode) so long as you make some fundamental assumptions about what kind of code can be loaded (so the OS can verify it at install/run time).
>> Safe, fast languages
>Pascal was and still is safe, as is LISP. But those languages are safe because they miss important element such as pointers. Java is also reasonably safe, because it only has references, no pointers.
Pointers don't necessarily have to be dangerous... we just don't bother to store information about the data structure as a guaranteed x-sized header at the start of every data structure for performance and memory usage reasons. If every data structure was self-describing, you could verify (whether in software or with hardware assist) that the data access you wanted to perform was valid and wasn't stepping on random bits of memory. This is effectively what the CLR and JVM do - performing array bounds checks, making sure that reference really is to a string and not an int, etc.
There are a number of terrible decisions in C that have effectively condemned us to fight the same battles over and over (buffer overflows anyone?) and influenced most languages and software that came after.
Long ago, I worked as an IT admin for a grocery company that owned it's own bakery, ice cream, drink, etc plant. The "industrial control systems" I saw in use were the worst engineered pieces of junk I've ever encountered. I am talking unpatched Windows 95 systems running a crappy VB 4 UI, that talked to a poorly written VxD to control the ice cream mixer, which was a massive piece of equipment that could easily kill someone standing too close to it.
I just got one of those TI $4 embedded development kits and while I applaud them for trying to draw in hobbyists and small companies, the SDK is a serious piece of crap. You might as well just write pure assembly... The C code is a mishmash of indecipherable macros and #defines that seriously look more like assembly than C. Forget about any kind of abstraction.
From what I hear from my friends (one of whom used to program for defense embedded systems), it is all like that. Terrible platforms, terrible code, security through obscurity (if that), etc.
The fact that stuxnet was able to exist? The fact that the video signals from some of our drones are broadcast unencrypted over the air? None of it is shocking in the least. It makes Microsoft IIS circa 1997 look positively secure and well-written by comparison.