So, if four people were stabbed, would you want fewer knives in this country? No, I am not being sarcastic. In England, they have "sane" gun laws, but now they are cracking down on knife ownership. You can't make this stuff up!
Gracious me, that sounds like an Orwellian nightmare. You should definitely keep this one at the top of your talking points, as ordinary people will undoubtedly share your horror at the thought of living in a society that tries to minimize the number randos carrying deadly weapons.
I'll say it again:
Eventually, there'll be too many people with a personal stake in this for you to beat.
I learned about this when my mom texted me to let me know that she and my dad were both safe, her being out of town, dad being at home and hearing but not thinking much about the sirens down the way. My nephew's school was still on lockdown (despite it being miles away, better safe than sorry, I suppose.)
My parents live right near this place. They ride their bikes past it regularly. Middleton ain't a big place.
I can't decide if I'm relieved, livid, or just numb to it. Probably a bit of all three.
All you folks who get red in the face at the thought that maybe, just maybe, we could stand to have fewer guns in this country:
Eventually, there'll be too many people with a personal stake in this for you to beat.
Even if you decide to 'exercise your second amendment rights.'
I think a big part of it is how the rest of society keeps showering bonkers amounts of adulation and money on them. Why try to be a better person if it seems like everybody loves you? Heck, you probably are the better person, and all these SJW whiners who say otherwise are a) jealous of your awesomeness and b) can't comprehend the very unique and not-at-all-applicable-to-any-other-industry-out-there challenges and pressures of the tech world.
I'd imagine medicine faces similar pressures–I'm thinking particularly about the 'rockstar' surgical positions–and I know that science has similar issues, but neither of these disciplines seems to suffer from nearly the same degree of fandom as the tech world does...
The entire point of advertising is to reach those groups most likely to respond to your product.
There was a time in living memory where this argument would have applied perfectly to job postings for doctors, lawyers, accountants, and scientists. Advertising has long been used to define and amplify what you should be doing with your life based on your demographic peculiarities–regardless of what you actually want to do or are capable of doing.
you can't even acknowledge a difference between right and wrong, good or evil.
Let me try: it is fundamentally wrong that the number of women in computing has plummeted even as the number of women in other major technical professions–including law, accounting, medicine, and scientific research–has approached parity. Women are excluded from programming not because they can't do the job–they're excluded because the community is comfortable prioritizing our abusive, "brutally honest" Mamet-esque dick-swinging over professionalism. That's evil.
It's like we're trying to unmake ourselves.
You're exactly right! We are trying to unmake ourselves, if by "ourselves" you mean "society's long-standing tradition of blithely excluding entire swaths of people from consideration for professional roles based on wholly unrelated things like gender, race, or sexual orientation."
That is a good thing that society should do. We should want to fix this, not wallow in it.
Maybe instead of trying to find ways to make for-profit healthcare marginally less of a roiling tire fire for Americans, we should instead nationalize healthcare, like the rest of the civilized world.
There are no "unsung heroes" in this White House. This is an escape hatch for the people who followed power for power's sake: "oh, sure, I was really fighting the good fight inside the White House, so you should be thanking me!"
Think there's a real problem here? Think the President is unfit for office? Then get to work on 25th Amendment proceedings if you're in a position to do so, or if not, resign and tell all of this to Congress. Don't stage a mini-coup and call it heroism. That's bull.
It's no secret the President is unfit for this office. It hasn't ever been a secret. This staffer, and their allies? They're complicit in everything. This is just a weak-ass attempt to make themselves look good.
The bigger you are, the more it costs. If you're a popular service, you're likely running many, many servers doing many, many things across a broad geographic area. You've carefully implemented your infrastructure to balance cost, stability, reliability, and performance. Adding just one new feature can completely upend this calculus. If you're running multiple server farms in multiple data centers, this gets expensive quickly.
You can't afford "aw shucks oopsie woos". Whoops! Your new feature caused some unexpected behavior for 15% of all users, resulting in 18 hours of downtime! If you're a small web operation, you're sending out a lighthearted email apologizing for the inconvenience and promising to do better. Maybe you're even offering a week's worth of free service. If you're a major player, you're in the world news. Your enterprise customers are screaming at you--or worse, they're not screaming at you and are looking for your replacement. You're working on figuring out just how much this will impact the bottom line, because if you're going to need to cut back somewhere, you want to know that as early as possible. Mess up hard enough, and you're looking at a subpoena from your governmental bodies of choice.
You can't afford to annoy your users. Ooooh, we've all had that time when we rolled out an awesome new feature and the user response ranged from "meh" to "change it back right now you gibbering twits." That's never fun, is it? Gotta roll back to yesterday's configuration, apologize, and try to figure out how to move forward. If you're a major player, "rolling back" may be nigh impossible, and if you've already reconfigured your infrastructure to accommodate your new feature, that's money already spent (and worse, your new configuration may even be sub-optimal in the absence of said new feature.) You're basically looking at the same outcome as the previous point, perhaps minus the subpoenas and plus a bit more global mockery on social media.
Messing up will cost you users, and those users are unlikely to return. If you're small, this can be weathered, and is almost expected. There are way more fish in the sea, and you if can iron things out, you've still got plenty of room to grow. If you're big, everyone already knows about you and what you do. You've got a lot smaller pool of "new" people to bring on compared to the people you've already reached. Big companies that mess up need to work to retain unhappy customers, because there aren't that many fish in the sea who haven't already heard of them.
I really don't have any idea from the submission what it is you're looking for. What is it you want for kids that's different from what you'd want for adult users? Give us some idea of your objectives.
I mean, there are entire fields of study (and industry) that have long been dedicated to understanding and catering to the educational needs of young learners, and there are more plain-English summaries of "what makes kids different from adults when it comes to learning" than I can list here.
At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, children are not simply tiny grownups. What works best for an adult will rarely be what works best for a child, no matter what you're talking about. You can just throw whatever adults would use at them, and some kids will do just fine with that, but it won't be nearly as effective as a system that's been designed specifically with young users in mind.
If you're willing to drop a few bucks on a Raspberry Pi, Kano is an impressive project, acting as both kid-friendly desktop environment and programming education tool. Lots of built-in coding tutorials, a "learn how to use the shell" game, and a code-oriented version of Minecraft, to boot.
Moving forward, I'd like to see browser makers offer the same kind of "click to allow" functionality for this sort of policy change that they currently have for Flash content.
So long as it isn't a security risk, there's little reason to not provide the user with an easy way to override this sort of quality-of-life policy change.
Should we talk about how much energy is wasted building and maintaining heavily fortified bank buildings that warehouse large stacks of colorful paper? Or why the US is still minting fucking pennies?
Oh, hey, I agree! Minting pennies is stupid, and we should stop doing it! Paper money is also pretty limited in its utility, and we should try to find ways to minimize it! We could probably find lots of ways to make fiat currency more energy efficient overall, and we should!
We can find and implement these efficiencies this without causing the collapse of the entire currency. We can find ways to make classical fiat money more energy efficient. Energy costs are not intrinsic to the value of fiat currency. All it takes is political will--tough, sure, but far from impossible.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is defined by energy cost. We literally can not make Bitcoin more energy efficient.
Bitcoin is designed to require maximal energy usage. So long as the energy cost of mining a block is lower than the value of that block, it's worth it to spend the energy. So long as the number of nodes increases, the energy cost per transaction will increase. So long as the length of the blockchain increases, the energy cost per transaction will increase.
In other words: so long as Bitcoin continues to be a viable currency, its energy costs will only increase.
The only way to make Bitcoin more energy efficient is to fork it to a model that doesn't tie value to energy costs. Good luck convincing the world of Bitcoin to do that. You'd have an easier time killing the quarter, let alone the penny.
Who cares? Let the energy costs adjust and fix it naturally. As for storage, you don't need to store the whole blockchain as a mere user.
Lots of people care, sexconker. There's every reason to not want to spend huge amounts of power generation on something that is, for all intents and purposes, an intangible speculative investment used by a very small number of people.
Generating all this energy has real-world consequences. It create huge amounts of real-world physical waste. It creates huge amounts of real-world air pollution. Worse, it does all this by design: there's no way to make Bitcoin more energy efficient, as every gain in energy efficiency increases the total value of a mining operation.
* Every time a block is found, both the real-world energy cost and the value of finding the next block increase. * So long as the real-world energy cost can be made lower than the expected value of finding that next block, an extant Bitcoin mining operation will burn as hard as it can.
* Take mining out of the equation, and you're still burning an increasing amount of energy with each new transaction, as it needs to be added to the ever-growing blockchain and verified on an ever-growing number of nodes. Yes, this can be fixed with changes to how Bitcoin works, but good luck making that fork happen.
* So long as Bitcoin remains as valuable and popular as it is, its real-world energy costs will continue to grow--exponentially. If it keeps getting more popular, that energy cost curve steepens.
The only way that energy use drops is if the value of Bitcoin drops sufficiently that major-scale mining operations shut down. When that happens, the whole stupid game comes to a crashing halt, because let's be honest: the only reason the substantial majority of Bitcoin users are still into Bitcoin is because they got digital-gold-rush rich. Full stop.
So just waiting for energy costs to adjust is really a bad way to deal with this situation. That could take two, five, ten years. How much bona-fide, real-world damage could Bitcoin do in that time?
That a nifty thought experiment from 2008 now uses a measurable and rapidly increasing percentage of global energy output should be cause enough for geekdom to feel ashamed of itself.
That the end result of this energy use is ensuring we can maintain FSM-knows-how-many simultaneous copies of a rapidly-growing 167 GB file for the purposes of maintaining a fraud-rife, impractical-to-use, and highly volatile digital currency should have us cowering in our basements and refusing to ever show our faces in polite society again.
This is a perfect example the classic Prisoner's Dilemma problem, except instead of two prisoners there's only one prisoner, and if the prisoner chooses to delete the offensive joke nothing happens to him, and if he chooses to restore the offensive joke he's being an ass because he doesn't like the kind of person who finds it offensive
This isn't about Amazon's business practices. This is about Donald Trump attacking the Washington Post, a news outlet that reports true but unflattering things about the President.
I mean, come on. There is literally no question why Trump has chosen Amazon as one of his favorite bugbears. Trump's well-known "disdain" for Jeff Bezos and WaPo is the lede, not an aside buried under the fold.
Trump is going after an entire corporation simply because a part of it has the sheer temerity to say things about him that he doesn't like.
Look, I'm unconvinced that Guccifer 2.0 is a GRU agent, and it's going to take a lot more than two-bit analysis of easily forged logs to convince me of this.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have work to do. Apparently some people out there still don't believe that Hillary Clinton was running a child-sex-slave ring in the basements of multiple pizza parlours nationwide, and I've got to set them straight.
So I read the linked article, and I couldn't help but notice that the only thing joining the tax law and Apple's bonuses was temporal proximity. The author conspicuously chooses to use words like "after" and "following the introduction of," assiduously avoiding the more concrete "because of." The author also doesn't attribute anything the company actually stated to the tax law, citing instead some phoney-baloney hogwash about "confidence in Apple’s future."
Slashdot Mirror
These two yutzes cause a crash on the freeway and they don't even bother to stop and check if the other people are injured?
They don't even bother reporting the crash to the authorities, they just driiive on back to HQ and hush it up?
"Former Top Waymo Engineer Altered Code To Go On Forbidden Routes" is not the headline I would have chosen for this story, folks.
So, if four people were stabbed, would you want fewer knives in this country? No, I am not being sarcastic. In England, they have "sane" gun laws, but now they are cracking down on knife ownership. You can't make this stuff up!
Gracious me, that sounds like an Orwellian nightmare. You should definitely keep this one at the top of your talking points, as ordinary people will undoubtedly share your horror at the thought of living in a society that tries to minimize the number randos carrying deadly weapons.
I'll say it again:
Eventually, there'll be too many people with a personal stake in this for you to beat.
I learned about this when my mom texted me to let me know that she and my dad were both safe, her being out of town, dad being at home and hearing but not thinking much about the sirens down the way. My nephew's school was still on lockdown (despite it being miles away, better safe than sorry, I suppose.)
My parents live right near this place. They ride their bikes past it regularly. Middleton ain't a big place.
I can't decide if I'm relieved, livid, or just numb to it. Probably a bit of all three.
All you folks who get red in the face at the thought that maybe, just maybe, we could stand to have fewer guns in this country:
Eventually, there'll be too many people with a personal stake in this for you to beat.
Even if you decide to 'exercise your second amendment rights.'
I think a big part of it is how the rest of society keeps showering bonkers amounts of adulation and money on them. Why try to be a better person if it seems like everybody loves you? Heck, you probably are the better person, and all these SJW whiners who say otherwise are a) jealous of your awesomeness and b) can't comprehend the very unique and not-at-all-applicable-to-any-other-industry-out-there challenges and pressures of the tech world.
I'd imagine medicine faces similar pressures–I'm thinking particularly about the 'rockstar' surgical positions–and I know that science has similar issues, but neither of these disciplines seems to suffer from nearly the same degree of fandom as the tech world does...
I've had a personal epiphany
oh yeah and there may possibly also be a story about me and this subject coming out in a major publication in a few days too
The entire point of advertising is to reach those groups most likely to respond to your product.
There was a time in living memory where this argument would have applied perfectly to job postings for doctors, lawyers, accountants, and scientists. Advertising has long been used to define and amplify what you should be doing with your life based on your demographic peculiarities–regardless of what you actually want to do or are capable of doing.
you can't even acknowledge a difference between right and wrong, good or evil.
Let me try: it is fundamentally wrong that the number of women in computing has plummeted even as the number of women in other major technical professions–including law, accounting, medicine, and scientific research–has approached parity. Women are excluded from programming not because they can't do the job–they're excluded because the community is comfortable prioritizing our abusive, "brutally honest" Mamet-esque dick-swinging over professionalism. That's evil.
It's like we're trying to unmake ourselves.
You're exactly right! We are trying to unmake ourselves, if by "ourselves" you mean "society's long-standing tradition of blithely excluding entire swaths of people from consideration for professional roles based on wholly unrelated things like gender, race, or sexual orientation."
That is a good thing that society should do. We should want to fix this, not wallow in it.
This is great. Now other people in need can benefit from Bezos' magnanimity, just like his warehouse employees do.
It has a whole zero syllables more than "Galaxy Note 9"
Great job Apple
This is exactly how for-profit industries work.
Maybe instead of trying to find ways to make for-profit healthcare marginally less of a roiling tire fire for Americans, we should instead nationalize healthcare, like the rest of the civilized world.
:|
Whoever wrote this is a coward.
There are no "unsung heroes" in this White House. This is an escape hatch for the people who followed power for power's sake: "oh, sure, I was really fighting the good fight inside the White House, so you should be thanking me!"
Think there's a real problem here? Think the President is unfit for office? Then get to work on 25th Amendment proceedings if you're in a position to do so, or if not, resign and tell all of this to Congress. Don't stage a mini-coup and call it heroism. That's bull.
It's no secret the President is unfit for this office. It hasn't ever been a secret. This staffer, and their allies? They're complicit in everything. This is just a weak-ass attempt to make themselves look good.
It's amazing how remorseful companies are when they get caught doing something silly :|
Here's a thought:
Fix it before you release it to the public and you won't have to apologize and tarnish your reputation.
...so basically, for any sufficiently complex venture involving human beings, never release it to the public.
The bigger you are, the more it costs. If you're a popular service, you're likely running many, many servers doing many, many things across a broad geographic area. You've carefully implemented your infrastructure to balance cost, stability, reliability, and performance. Adding just one new feature can completely upend this calculus. If you're running multiple server farms in multiple data centers, this gets expensive quickly.
You can't afford "aw shucks oopsie woos". Whoops! Your new feature caused some unexpected behavior for 15% of all users, resulting in 18 hours of downtime! If you're a small web operation, you're sending out a lighthearted email apologizing for the inconvenience and promising to do better. Maybe you're even offering a week's worth of free service. If you're a major player, you're in the world news. Your enterprise customers are screaming at you--or worse, they're not screaming at you and are looking for your replacement. You're working on figuring out just how much this will impact the bottom line, because if you're going to need to cut back somewhere, you want to know that as early as possible. Mess up hard enough, and you're looking at a subpoena from your governmental bodies of choice.
You can't afford to annoy your users. Ooooh, we've all had that time when we rolled out an awesome new feature and the user response ranged from "meh" to "change it back right now you gibbering twits." That's never fun, is it? Gotta roll back to yesterday's configuration, apologize, and try to figure out how to move forward. If you're a major player, "rolling back" may be nigh impossible, and if you've already reconfigured your infrastructure to accommodate your new feature, that's money already spent (and worse, your new configuration may even be sub-optimal in the absence of said new feature.) You're basically looking at the same outcome as the previous point, perhaps minus the subpoenas and plus a bit more global mockery on social media.
Messing up will cost you users, and those users are unlikely to return. If you're small, this can be weathered, and is almost expected. There are way more fish in the sea, and you if can iron things out, you've still got plenty of room to grow. If you're big, everyone already knows about you and what you do. You've got a lot smaller pool of "new" people to bring on compared to the people you've already reached. Big companies that mess up need to work to retain unhappy customers, because there aren't that many fish in the sea who haven't already heard of them.
I really don't have any idea from the submission what it is you're looking for. What is it you want for kids that's different from what you'd want for adult users? Give us some idea of your objectives.
I mean, there are entire fields of study (and industry) that have long been dedicated to understanding and catering to the educational needs of young learners, and there are more plain-English summaries of "what makes kids different from adults when it comes to learning" than I can list here.
At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, children are not simply tiny grownups. What works best for an adult will rarely be what works best for a child, no matter what you're talking about. You can just throw whatever adults would use at them, and some kids will do just fine with that, but it won't be nearly as effective as a system that's been designed specifically with young users in mind.
If you're willing to drop a few bucks on a Raspberry Pi, Kano is an impressive project, acting as both kid-friendly desktop environment and programming education tool. Lots of built-in coding tutorials, a "learn how to use the shell" game, and a code-oriented version of Minecraft, to boot.
http://developers.kano.me/downloads/
Moving forward, I'd like to see browser makers offer the same kind of "click to allow" functionality for this sort of policy change that they currently have for Flash content.
So long as it isn't a security risk, there's little reason to not provide the user with an easy way to override this sort of quality-of-life policy change.
Should we talk about how much energy is wasted building and maintaining heavily fortified bank buildings that warehouse large stacks of colorful paper? Or why the US is still minting fucking pennies?
Oh, hey, I agree! Minting pennies is stupid, and we should stop doing it! Paper money is also pretty limited in its utility, and we should try to find ways to minimize it! We could probably find lots of ways to make fiat currency more energy efficient overall, and we should!
We can find and implement these efficiencies this without causing the collapse of the entire currency. We can find ways to make classical fiat money more energy efficient. Energy costs are not intrinsic to the value of fiat currency. All it takes is political will--tough, sure, but far from impossible.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is defined by energy cost. We literally can not make Bitcoin more energy efficient.
Bitcoin is designed to require maximal energy usage. So long as the energy cost of mining a block is lower than the value of that block, it's worth it to spend the energy. So long as the number of nodes increases, the energy cost per transaction will increase. So long as the length of the blockchain increases, the energy cost per transaction will increase.
In other words: so long as Bitcoin continues to be a viable currency, its energy costs will only increase.
The only way to make Bitcoin more energy efficient is to fork it to a model that doesn't tie value to energy costs. Good luck convincing the world of Bitcoin to do that. You'd have an easier time killing the quarter, let alone the penny.
Who cares? Let the energy costs adjust and fix it naturally. As for storage, you don't need to store the whole blockchain as a mere user.
Lots of people care, sexconker. There's every reason to not want to spend huge amounts of power generation on something that is, for all intents and purposes, an intangible speculative investment used by a very small number of people.
Generating all this energy has real-world consequences. It create huge amounts of real-world physical waste. It creates huge amounts of real-world air pollution. Worse, it does all this by design: there's no way to make Bitcoin more energy efficient, as every gain in energy efficiency increases the total value of a mining operation.
* Every time a block is found, both the real-world energy cost and the value of finding the next block increase.
* So long as the real-world energy cost can be made lower than the expected value of finding that next block, an extant Bitcoin mining operation will burn as hard as it can.
* Take mining out of the equation, and you're still burning an increasing amount of energy with each new transaction, as it needs to be added to the ever-growing blockchain and verified on an ever-growing number of nodes. Yes, this can be fixed with changes to how Bitcoin works, but good luck making that fork happen.
* So long as Bitcoin remains as valuable and popular as it is, its real-world energy costs will continue to grow--exponentially. If it keeps getting more popular, that energy cost curve steepens.
The only way that energy use drops is if the value of Bitcoin drops sufficiently that major-scale mining operations shut down. When that happens, the whole stupid game comes to a crashing halt, because let's be honest: the only reason the substantial majority of Bitcoin users are still into Bitcoin is because they got digital-gold-rush rich. Full stop.
So just waiting for energy costs to adjust is really a bad way to deal with this situation. That could take two, five, ten years. How much bona-fide, real-world damage could Bitcoin do in that time?
That a nifty thought experiment from 2008 now uses a measurable and rapidly increasing percentage of global energy output should be cause enough for geekdom to feel ashamed of itself.
That the end result of this energy use is ensuring we can maintain FSM-knows-how-many simultaneous copies of a rapidly-growing 167 GB file for the purposes of maintaining a fraud-rife, impractical-to-use, and highly volatile digital currency should have us cowering in our basements and refusing to ever show our faces in polite society again.
wait
This is a perfect example the classic Prisoner's Dilemma problem, except instead of two prisoners there's only one prisoner, and if the prisoner chooses to delete the offensive joke nothing happens to him, and if he chooses to restore the offensive joke he's being an ass because he doesn't like the kind of person who finds it offensive
This isn't about Amazon's business practices. This is about Donald Trump attacking the Washington Post, a news outlet that reports true but unflattering things about the President.
I mean, come on. There is literally no question why Trump has chosen Amazon as one of his favorite bugbears. Trump's well-known "disdain" for Jeff Bezos and WaPo is the lede, not an aside buried under the fold.
Trump is going after an entire corporation simply because a part of it has the sheer temerity to say things about him that he doesn't like.
Look, I'm unconvinced that Guccifer 2.0 is a GRU agent, and it's going to take a lot more than two-bit analysis of easily forged logs to convince me of this.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have work to do. Apparently some people out there still don't believe that Hillary Clinton was running a child-sex-slave ring in the basements of multiple pizza parlours nationwide, and I've got to set them straight.
We're hiring the best and brightest to come join the best team ever assembled in the history of teams. Benefits include:
Stop pretending the President has plans beyond self-enrichment. He doesn't.
This chin-stroking, head-scratching credulity was tired a year ago.
So I read the linked article, and I couldn't help but notice that the only thing joining the tax law and Apple's bonuses was temporal proximity. The author conspicuously chooses to use words like "after" and "following the introduction of," assiduously avoiding the more concrete "because of." The author also doesn't attribute anything the company actually stated to the tax law, citing instead some phoney-baloney hogwash about "confidence in Apple’s future."
In fact, if you read the text of the email sent by Tim Cook to Apple employees, you don't see mention of tax policy anywhere--which is weird, seeing as Bloomberg puts "New Tax Law" right in the headline.
It's almost as if Bloomberg.com were blowing smoke up our collective asses and calling it an invigorating Goop.com vapor colonic.
The first rule of Bitcoin is: never trust anyone anywhere ever
The second rule of Bitcoin is: keep telling yourself you're not the mark