*grin* Yeah okay. I admit it, using that word was trollish.
What I meant was, high unemployment seems epidemic in states where the interests of big bussiness and the wealthy few are prioritised higher, at the cost of the interests of the average person.
It's a continuum, offcourse, a "more-less" scale, not a "black-white" scale, and the best policy is certainly not at either of the extremes.
It's interesting to me, by the way, that you consider "socialist" a swear-word on a similar level to "fascist", I'd have thought you'd want to drag out communist for that.
And yes, I do think USA has swung *much* too far in a direction that benefits the few, at the cost of the many. Have a look at your GINI-index compared to that of any other wealthy nation.
It's not a terribly -good- NAS, mind you, and you do need disks for it, but you need tapes for the tape-library too. But you're right, since tapes are cheaper than disk, I should've included the price of disk. 3TB disks are $150 each, so that ups the total price to about $1500.
This still compares very favourably to $9508, we're still talking factor-of-6 difference in price here, and that is without considering the cost of tape (while cheap, it's not -free-)
You may have VHS-tapes that are a quarter century old. Unless they where kept "online" and actively searched, seeked, read and written continually over that period, that has nothing to do with my question.
My point is that at the global scale, you're talking about yesterdays problem. The best guess according to current evidence is that world-population will stabilise within the next generation or two at a level less than twice the current population.
Yes that's a lot of people, but demographic changes are slow, and stopping the trend much sooner would require either killing huge numbers of existing humans (atleast a billion or two to even make a noticeable difference), or else *radically* cut birth-numbers *immediately*. Or deliberately stop life-expectancy from rising, most practically possible by limiting basic healthcare to the poorest as much as possible to have more of them die earlier.
Do you really think either of those can be done without inflicting larger suffering than what will be caused by the crowding at 10-15 billion compared to todays 7 ? There are significant drawbacks at having having *very* few children for a few decades too, drawbacks like ending up with a huge old population and few young.
In short, your "cure" is orders of magnitude worse than the problem. I'm not saying it's not a problem, and we really -should- work to make sure the yellow scenario in this graph happens, rather than the red scenario: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World-Population-1800-2100.png
If we can manage that though (and it sure does seem like it), then this problem is "solved", in the sense that peaking at 9 billion in 2070, is something we can deal with, with less suffering than would be induced by any more radical solution.
While true you miss the point. I was arguing that it's *not* impossible to check a billion-nutplate-delivery in a practical manner, and infact that it's *easier* to do so than it is to check a 3-gadget-delivery.
Slight imperfections in sampling can be compensated by increasing the sample-count, and in any case it probably does not matter.
If 10% of the nutplates are fake, and you sample 100 of them randomly, the odds of non-detection are 1:38000 even if fake nutplates are *free* (they're not) you'd save 10% on the shipment 1:38000 and have the entire shipment rejected 37999:38000 so cheating is obviously not going to be worth it.
But if sampling is decidedly non-random, let's say for example, that choosing of the correct crate *is* random, but the top-half of the crate is samples 3 times as often as the bottom-half, then the odds of successfully cheating by putting in 10% fakes in the bottom-half of the crates, rise to 1:33 which still makes it wildly unprofitable to cheat.
Infact, even if there is a part of the crates that are only sampled 1:10 as often as the rest of the crates, and all the fakes are reliably placed here, you've still got only 1:3 chance in successfully sneaking in a 10% fake delivery. A 1:3 chance of saving 10% with a 2:3 chance of rejection, is *still* not worth it.
Your point stands if your sampling is completely broken - if there's some fraction that isn't sampled at all. But it's just not *that* hard to pick a sample in a way that is/reasonably/ random.
You can also make it less tempting to cheat by upping the penalty. Having one shipment rejected costs them something. Losing the DoD as a customer for a period, hurts *more*. And it's not unreasonable to say: If you ship me fake shit, I won't buy from you again, atleast not this year.
You say that as a joke; but reality is that the way you respond depends *heavily* on the employment-situation. An interview is for two purposes. One is for the employer to figure out if they'd like to hire you, and the other is for you to figure out if you'd like to work there.
The answer to the second is a given only if unemployment is high and/or there are low demand for people with your skillset. This will tend to be the case in fascist states offcourse since employers like having employees be easily and cheaply replacable.
If someone tried pulling such a trick here (Stavanger, Norway) I'd just stand up and leave. "I don't think this job is the right one for me. I wish you luck in your search for another candidate." That's easy to do, offcourse, when sending 10 job-applications results in ~5 interviews and ~3 job-offers.
If I really needed the job, and the question was clearly illegal, I'd just lie, with perfectly good conscience. If they don't feel bound to act in good faith towards me, why should I act nicely towards them ?
What's the lifespan of tape, if you keep it online and randomly seeking and searching 24x7x365 ?
HDDs that are operated like tapes; "connect - dump data onto them - disconnect and store, repeat monthly" on the average have excellent lifetimes. I've done that for the last decade, with around 100 HDDs, and only twice has a drive died on me. Much more often, I've retired old HDDs because it's just not worth it to use a 150GB HDD when one with ten times the capacity cost $100.
Offcourse random crashes will happen, but that is true of tape too. That's why you never have only *one* backup.
Was there more or less famine and war at the time when earth had half the population it has now ? Shouldn't there have been much less, if your theory is correct ?
Overpopulation is a problem in some places, and the birth-rate is still somewhat too high globally, but it's improved a lot.
This shows fertility has fallen from ~5 to 2.5, it needs to be 1.9 or some such for stability. (slightly under 2, to compensate for average lifespan going up)
You don't have to. To the contrary, checking becomes *easier* when you order a larger quantity of an item.
If you've received a million nutplates, pick 100 of them randomly, and check them thoroughly. Reject the entire shipment if any of those 100 are counterfeit.
If more than 1% of the nutplates are fake, you'd be likely to detect it, and if more than 10% of the plates are fakes, you'd be virtually guaranteed to detect it. Thus when all 100 check out as genuine, it's unlikely that there's more than a few percent fakes, tops.
At that point, it's probably not worth it to the supplier to fake the delivery. Yes they can put in 1% fakes and 99% reals, and hope that it's not detected (their odds of this are about even).
But having 50:50 odds of getting away with 1% fraud while 50% of the time your entire shipment is rejected, just isn't profitable.
In contrast, it's hard to do reasonable checking when you order a *low* count of some part, say 3.
Statistical sampling *works*. You really -can- test the quality of a million-gallon-delivery of whatever by picking a few random samples, and test those.
Perhaps. I think the bigger risk is that they'll break apart when faced with a controversial issue where there's no obvious way to derive a solution from their primary platform.
In essence, the pirate party sticks together well when discussing copyright, patents, privacy, censorship, public-data and related fields that tie in well with one of these.
But what is their opinion on socialized healthcare ? On emission-standards ? On immigration ? On speed-limits ? On care for the elderly ?
I agree with nearly everything in their program, but the most glaring thing to me on reading it, was all the major issues they say -nothing- about. I strongly suspect that their members disagree violently on many of these issues.
I'm in favour of scandinavian-style democratic socialism, and agree with the pirate-party-program. Meanwhile I see other people that are of the american libertarian variety that *also* agree with the pirate-party-program. What are the odds we'll agree on those things that aren't in the program =
Who owns and controls which information under which rules, *is* a major issue in the information-age.
It's not only, or even primarily, about copying of entertainment. Who owns and controls, and under which rules:
Computers. Personal information. Inventions. Knowledge. Art.
This ties in with education, with corruption, with medicine, with an awful lot of very important issues pretty much all over the map.
It doesn't cover the -entire- map, but as "single" issues go, this one is a biggie, I'm not at all convinced that the "green" issue is any bigger, or cover more of the map.
In our case (Norway) because we want a progressive tax. That is, you pay a higher fraction of your income in tax if you are rich than you do if you are poor.
For example, I pay about 33% in taxes, which is high, but that happens because I gross about $100K, if my salary was half that, my tax-rate would be significantly lower.
Before you jump to "my god how expensive" consider what's included in taxes here. Taxes is the *only* deduction, and includes lots of things you pay extra for in other countries such as universal healthcare, unemployment insurance, free education at all levels, retirement-benefits and so on.
That's not true. There's a checksum on our SSNs, and the checksum is constructed in such a way that the two most common mistakes in entering SSNs (double one digit, forget another, and transpose two digits) always results in a invalid SSN.
But yes, it's still possible to hit someone elses SSN by accident, but it takes more than one digit wrong. (it takes multiple wrong digits in such a way that the new SSN happens to pass the checksum-test, *and* match an actually used SSN)
The government sends you a form for filing taxes, the form is pre-filled with those values that have already been reported by other entities, but next to every one of these values there is a field for correcting the value if it is somehow wrong. (this happens if, for example, you've got private debts, or if your employer makes a mistake in reporting)
You thus get a pre-filled form, but you should nevertheless check that the values on the form look correct before filing it.
And yes, the form also contains calculations on taxes, thus it says: "assuming we got it correct, here's what your tax will be", but that part, offcourse, will change if you add or change anything on the form.
They are allowed *knowing* them. But they are not allowed making hiring-decisions based on them. This puts them in an awkward position if they actively seek access to this information (say by asking).
The purpose of an interview is to figure out if a person should be hired or not. Why ask about something on an interview if the answer is *not* going to have influence on your decision ? The assumption is going to be that they asked because they *did* care about the answer. (that's the most straightforward reason for asking, afterall).
They can claim they where just trying to be social, chit-chat to ease tensions, and that the answer as such didn't matter. But there's any number of *non*-protected topics you can chit-chat about. So why pick a sensitive topic ? That seems at a minimum terribly unprofessional.
That all said, the only sensible answer to such a request is to refuse. Clearly and loudly. "That is completely unreasonable, I am not going to comply with that." A job is important, but it's not worth accepting unlimited bullshit.
Even 150ms is *truly* epical suckage. I wonder why the US infrastructure is commonly so poor ?
Yes, USA is large, thus if you ping some server on the other side of it, say 2500 miles away, then lightspeed will actually add ~15ms, but that's no excuse for these numbers.
I get ~10ms to servers located in my part of Norway, and ~30ms to servers located at the other end of Norway (i.e. 1500 miles away), and that seems more sane to me.
300ms is nuts to a test-server located at the same isp. It's an order of magnitude more than it should be.
Better antennas is equivalent to a lower noise-floor, so yes, better antennas do genuinely allow you to transmit more data, especially if they are directional since that then also raises the effective transmit-power. (what matters is the power/noise ratio)
This might help, but it doesn't expel Shannon-Hartley. They don't get "inifinite channels" in finite bandwith. Not unless each channel has infinitely low capacity, anyway.
The average American passenger-car on the road in 2009 (newest year I could find data for, feel free to point me to newer data) managed 23.8 mpg. That sucks.
The average for *new* vehicles in that year (2009) was better at 33 mpg.
Thus there's been some improvement, and *some* of the reputation of American gaz-guzzlers are undoubtedly based on old cliches.
At the same time, the average fuel-economy for new cars sold in EU in 2010 was 43 mpg. This is still substantially better than the 33mpg that was average in USA one year previously. (I doubt that one year made much of a difference.)
Actually, the theory goes that there isn't "a lot more" of normal matter around, just that there was a -tiny- imbalance in the creation of matter/antimatter such that perhaps 49% was antimatter and 51% was matter.
After the annihilation completed, we where left with 2% matter surplus, and that's what the universe today consists of.
Kinda mindblowing that even the universe, huge as it is, contains only a tiny fraction of the particles that went into the big bang. "big" really is an understatement.
But not "we" as in "a large fraction of humanity".
Going from the typical multics-hardware to a modern smartphone is a fairly significant change. How many order of magnitude improvement is that in performance, size, weight and cost ?
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt that, unless you add more constraints. Optimum in what sense ? Speed ? Durability ? Range ? Load-capacity ? Fuel-efficiency ? Price ?
*grin* Yeah okay. I admit it, using that word was trollish.
What I meant was, high unemployment seems epidemic in states where the interests of big bussiness and the wealthy few are prioritised higher, at the cost of the interests of the average person.
It's a continuum, offcourse, a "more-less" scale, not a "black-white" scale, and the best policy is certainly not at either of the extremes.
It's interesting to me, by the way, that you consider "socialist" a swear-word on a similar level to "fascist", I'd have thought you'd want to drag out communist for that.
And yes, I do think USA has swung *much* too far in a direction that benefits the few, at the cost of the many. Have a look at your GINI-index compared to that of any other wealthy nation.
Here:
http://compu-america.com/ds1511-ds1511-nas-5bay-scsi-raid-hot-swap-ads-rsync-ftp-nfs-nvr-stor.html
It's not a terribly -good- NAS, mind you, and you do need disks for it, but you need tapes for the tape-library too. But you're right, since tapes are cheaper than disk, I should've included the price of disk. 3TB disks are $150 each, so that ups the total price to about $1500.
This still compares very favourably to $9508, we're still talking factor-of-6 difference in price here, and that is without considering the cost of tape (while cheap, it's not -free-)
This completely fails to answer my question.
You may have VHS-tapes that are a quarter century old. Unless they where kept "online" and actively searched, seeked, read and written continually over that period, that has nothing to do with my question.
My point is that at the global scale, you're talking about yesterdays problem. The best guess according to current evidence is that world-population will stabilise within the next generation or two at a level less than twice the current population.
Yes that's a lot of people, but demographic changes are slow, and stopping the trend much sooner would require either killing huge numbers of existing humans (atleast a billion or two to even make a noticeable difference), or else *radically* cut birth-numbers *immediately*. Or deliberately stop life-expectancy from rising, most practically possible by limiting basic healthcare to the poorest as much as possible to have more of them die earlier.
Do you really think either of those can be done without inflicting larger suffering than what will be caused by the crowding at 10-15 billion compared to todays 7 ? There are significant drawbacks at having having *very* few children for a few decades too, drawbacks like ending up with a huge old population and few young.
In short, your "cure" is orders of magnitude worse than the problem. I'm not saying it's not a problem, and we really -should- work to make sure the yellow scenario in this graph happens, rather than the red scenario:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World-Population-1800-2100.png
If we can manage that though (and it sure does seem like it), then this problem is "solved", in the sense that peaking at 9 billion in 2070, is something we can deal with, with less suffering than would be induced by any more radical solution.
While true you miss the point. I was arguing that it's *not* impossible to check a billion-nutplate-delivery in a practical manner, and infact that it's *easier* to do so than it is to check a 3-gadget-delivery.
Slight imperfections in sampling can be compensated by increasing the sample-count, and in any case it probably does not matter.
If 10% of the nutplates are fake, and you sample 100 of them randomly, the odds of non-detection are 1:38000 even if fake nutplates are *free* (they're not) you'd save 10% on the shipment 1:38000 and have the entire shipment rejected 37999:38000 so cheating is obviously not going to be worth it.
But if sampling is decidedly non-random, let's say for example, that choosing of the correct crate *is* random, but the top-half of the crate is samples 3 times as often as the bottom-half, then the odds of successfully cheating by putting in 10% fakes in the bottom-half of the crates, rise to 1:33 which still makes it wildly unprofitable to cheat.
Infact, even if there is a part of the crates that are only sampled 1:10 as often as the rest of the crates, and all the fakes are reliably placed here, you've still got only 1:3 chance in successfully sneaking in a 10% fake delivery. A 1:3 chance of saving 10% with a 2:3 chance of rejection, is *still* not worth it.
Your point stands if your sampling is completely broken - if there's some fraction that isn't sampled at all. But it's just not *that* hard to pick a sample in a way that is /reasonably/ random.
You can also make it less tempting to cheat by upping the penalty. Having one shipment rejected costs them something. Losing the DoD as a customer for a period, hurts *more*. And it's not unreasonable to say: If you ship me fake shit, I won't buy from you again, atleast not this year.
You say that as a joke; but reality is that the way you respond depends *heavily* on the employment-situation. An interview is for two purposes. One is for the employer to figure out if they'd like to hire you, and the other is for you to figure out if you'd like to work there.
The answer to the second is a given only if unemployment is high and/or there are low demand for people with your skillset. This will tend to be the case in fascist states offcourse since employers like having employees be easily and cheaply replacable.
If someone tried pulling such a trick here (Stavanger, Norway) I'd just stand up and leave. "I don't think this job is the right one for me. I wish you luck in your search for another candidate." That's easy to do, offcourse, when sending 10 job-applications results in ~5 interviews and ~3 job-offers.
If I really needed the job, and the question was clearly illegal, I'd just lie, with perfectly good conscience. If they don't feel bound to act in good faith towards me, why should I act nicely towards them ?
Yes. And it costs $9508 for the 17.6 TB version, that seems to be the most bang for the buck.
Meanwhile, a 15 TB NAS-storage-solution with HDDs cost $759. That's more than an order of magnitude less.
What's the lifespan of tape, if you keep it online and randomly seeking and searching 24x7x365 ?
HDDs that are operated like tapes; "connect - dump data onto them - disconnect and store, repeat monthly" on the average have excellent lifetimes. I've done that for the last decade, with around 100 HDDs, and only twice has a drive died on me. Much more often, I've retired old HDDs because it's just not worth it to use a 150GB HDD when one with ten times the capacity cost $100.
Offcourse random crashes will happen, but that is true of tape too. That's why you never have only *one* backup.
Was there more or less famine and war at the time when earth had half the population it has now ? Shouldn't there have been much less, if your theory is correct ?
Overpopulation is a problem in some places, and the birth-rate is still somewhat too high globally, but it's improved a lot.
http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&tdim=true&dl=en&hl=en&q=global+fertility+rate+trend
This shows fertility has fallen from ~5 to 2.5, it needs to be 1.9 or some such for stability. (slightly under 2, to compensate for average lifespan going up)
You don't have to. To the contrary, checking becomes *easier* when you order a larger quantity of an item.
If you've received a million nutplates, pick 100 of them randomly, and check them thoroughly. Reject the entire shipment if any of those 100 are counterfeit.
If more than 1% of the nutplates are fake, you'd be likely to detect it, and if more than 10% of the plates are fakes, you'd be virtually guaranteed to detect it. Thus when all 100 check out as genuine, it's unlikely that there's more than a few percent fakes, tops.
At that point, it's probably not worth it to the supplier to fake the delivery. Yes they can put in 1% fakes and 99% reals, and hope that it's not detected (their odds of this are about even).
But having 50:50 odds of getting away with 1% fraud while 50% of the time your entire shipment is rejected, just isn't profitable.
In contrast, it's hard to do reasonable checking when you order a *low* count of some part, say 3.
Statistical sampling *works*. You really -can- test the quality of a million-gallon-delivery of whatever by picking a few random samples, and test those.
Perhaps. I think the bigger risk is that they'll break apart when faced with a controversial issue where there's no obvious way to derive a solution from their primary platform.
In essence, the pirate party sticks together well when discussing copyright, patents, privacy, censorship, public-data and related fields that tie in well with one of these.
But what is their opinion on socialized healthcare ? On emission-standards ? On immigration ? On speed-limits ? On care for the elderly ?
I agree with nearly everything in their program, but the most glaring thing to me on reading it, was all the major issues they say -nothing- about. I strongly suspect that their members disagree violently on many of these issues.
I'm in favour of scandinavian-style democratic socialism, and agree with the pirate-party-program. Meanwhile I see other people that are of the american libertarian variety that *also* agree with the pirate-party-program. What are the odds we'll agree on those things that aren't in the program =
Who owns and controls which information under which rules, *is* a major issue in the information-age.
It's not only, or even primarily, about copying of entertainment. Who owns and controls, and under which rules:
Computers. Personal information. Inventions. Knowledge. Art.
This ties in with education, with corruption, with medicine, with an awful lot of very important issues pretty much all over the map.
It doesn't cover the -entire- map, but as "single" issues go, this one is a biggie, I'm not at all convinced that the "green" issue is any bigger, or cover more of the map.
In our case (Norway) because we want a progressive tax. That is, you pay a higher fraction of your income in tax if you are rich than you do if you are poor.
For example, I pay about 33% in taxes, which is high, but that happens because I gross about $100K, if my salary was half that, my tax-rate would be significantly lower.
Before you jump to "my god how expensive" consider what's included in taxes here. Taxes is the *only* deduction, and includes lots of things you pay extra for in other countries such as universal healthcare, unemployment insurance, free education at all levels, retirement-benefits and so on.
That's not true. There's a checksum on our SSNs, and the checksum is constructed in such a way that the two most common mistakes in entering SSNs (double one digit, forget another, and transpose two digits) always results in a invalid SSN.
But yes, it's still possible to hit someone elses SSN by accident, but it takes more than one digit wrong. (it takes multiple wrong digits in such a way that the new SSN happens to pass the checksum-test, *and* match an actually used SSN)
That's not entirely true. What happens is this:
The government sends you a form for filing taxes, the form is pre-filled with those values that have already been reported by other entities, but next to every one of these values there is a field for correcting the value if it is somehow wrong. (this happens if, for example, you've got private debts, or if your employer makes a mistake in reporting)
You thus get a pre-filled form, but you should nevertheless check that the values on the form look correct before filing it.
And yes, the form also contains calculations on taxes, thus it says: "assuming we got it correct, here's what your tax will be", but that part, offcourse, will change if you add or change anything on the form.
It doesn't matter very much. Wikipedia gives lots of references to primary and secondary sources for most of their articles.
Thus you cannot cite wikipedia as a source -- but you *can* in most cases cite the same sources they are sourcing.
Yeah, sometimes their sources suck, in those cases you're out of luck and need to do your own damn research.
True. But many of us *can* afford attorneys, but would still prefer to keep that cash for other purposes.
They are allowed *knowing* them. But they are not allowed making hiring-decisions based on them. This puts them in an awkward position if they actively seek access to this information (say by asking).
The purpose of an interview is to figure out if a person should be hired or not. Why ask about something on an interview if the answer is *not* going to have influence on your decision ? The assumption is going to be that they asked because they *did* care about the answer. (that's the most straightforward reason for asking, afterall).
They can claim they where just trying to be social, chit-chat to ease tensions, and that the answer as such didn't matter. But there's any number of *non*-protected topics you can chit-chat about. So why pick a sensitive topic ? That seems at a minimum terribly unprofessional.
That all said, the only sensible answer to such a request is to refuse. Clearly and loudly. "That is completely unreasonable, I am not going to comply with that." A job is important, but it's not worth accepting unlimited bullshit.
Even 150ms is *truly* epical suckage. I wonder why the US infrastructure is commonly so poor ?
Yes, USA is large, thus if you ping some server on the other side of it, say 2500 miles away, then lightspeed will actually add ~15ms, but that's no excuse for these numbers.
I get ~10ms to servers located in my part of Norway, and ~30ms to servers located at the other end of Norway (i.e. 1500 miles away), and that seems more sane to me.
300ms is nuts to a test-server located at the same isp. It's an order of magnitude more than it should be.
Better antennas is equivalent to a lower noise-floor, so yes, better antennas do genuinely allow you to transmit more data, especially if they are directional since that then also raises the effective transmit-power. (what matters is the power/noise ratio)
This might help, but it doesn't expel Shannon-Hartley. They don't get "inifinite channels" in finite bandwith. Not unless each channel has infinitely low capacity, anyway.
The average American passenger-car on the road in 2009 (newest year I could find data for, feel free to point me to newer data) managed 23.8 mpg. That sucks.
The average for *new* vehicles in that year (2009) was better at 33 mpg.
Thus there's been some improvement, and *some* of the reputation of American gaz-guzzlers are undoubtedly based on old cliches.
At the same time, the average fuel-economy for new cars sold in EU in 2010 was 43 mpg. This is still substantially better than the 33mpg that was average in USA one year previously. (I doubt that one year made much of a difference.)
Actually, the theory goes that there isn't "a lot more" of normal matter around, just that there was a -tiny- imbalance in the creation of matter/antimatter such that perhaps 49% was antimatter and 51% was matter.
After the annihilation completed, we where left with 2% matter surplus, and that's what the universe today consists of.
Kinda mindblowing that even the universe, huge as it is, contains only a tiny fraction of the particles that went into the big bang. "big" really is an understatement.
"We" as in "machines of this type existed" yes.
But not "we" as in "a large fraction of humanity".
Going from the typical multics-hardware to a modern smartphone is a fairly significant change. How many order of magnitude improvement is that in performance, size, weight and cost ?