Came here to call you a pedant and point out that some of us like iphones because we already have too many other avenues for puttering; sometimes it's nice just to have a phone. Ok, a phone plus games and twitter and gps and media and email and.... but I'm ok that my 4s is NOT where I focus my hackerly urges. I don't have time for all the projects queued up in my home office (or as my wife calls it, that "damn mountain of electronics"). Lost my orig. comment trying to grok why slashcode was ignoring my html tags (my ul's and li's didn't yield bullets!!!) so you don't get a list this time.
I promise, it isn't fear or wanting Apple to be my mommy...
Actually, enterprise issues regarding data synchronization quickly make get problematic.
Have just watched a migration from private mail servers to cloud-based email. Months in, it quickly became apparent that a few short days or even a few weeks of pain associated with migrating users cold turkey (and then importing requested data from Notes once it had become static) would have been astronomically less cost and pain compared to wiring the connector and having two frameworks alive (and borking the sync in weird mediocre ways) simultaneously for months. Keep in mind, 'just migrating email' ends up meaning email plus antispam plus accounts plus calendars plus messages plus archives plus attachment storage plus service accounts (and changing hardcoded email addresses in code) plus security plus distro lists... etc, etc etc.
It can be straightforward (but not trivial) to export static data from SQL or another known framework and migrate it into similar frameworks. And it's not much harder to translate (like SQL into non-relational (NoSQL or similar) frameworks): Understand the data, design to the new constraints and advantages, plan migration, do a trial of the migration, then cycle thru again with more or all (depending on how well the first migration went).
Doing so on data that remains alive and breathing gets damned hard fast. Even if there are migration tools, are they ok with transactional data changes? If one side of the migration fails, do both frameworks get messages to cancel the transactions? What about record deletion? How is that synchronized? Given that the new cloud vendor may have few customers (insert tiny #) customers, does a well-tested connector exist between your old and new data stores? What about all in-house apps using the data? Are there mobile apps or custom code or ERP connections to your data server? What about data structure changes between the two: nothing maps perfectly.
Ugly. Just Ugly.
And that's a planned migration. Now think of going the other way. As TFA hints at, we all can write the headline and article now for going the other direction the day some cloud provider implodes: Company Widgetcorp declared bankruptcy today. Their tragic fall from stalwart Rusell-2000 midcap manufacturer to receivership happened unexpectedly: Their cloud-based XXX provider shut off servers without warning less than 60 days ago, and Widgetcorp was never able to recover critical processes and data.
I LOL'd. A friend from up here in the wild west of USA that now lives in Brisbane constantly reminds me of this: we have Grizzly bears (Yey us, we win on large omnivores), a couple kinds of biting flies, mosquitoes (but no malaria), hobo spiders and rattlesnakes (who rattle to warn you away; some call them the gentlemen of the desert). You have god knows how many distinct species of dangerous snakes, spiders, flies, lizards, sting rays, crocodiles, various invertebrate seaborne killers, bugs, spiders, and I'm guessing the occasional dingo and tazmanian devil.
Which reminds me -- we have wolverines. A very few at best. That are reclusive. So reclusive that many don't believe they still exist in the lower 48.
OTOH, they've got a billion customers with authenticated accounts. They could implement mobile purchasing, federated identity (communicate with your friend via any/all contacts they have in FB: no more address books and phone numbers!).
P/E is useful. But there are a substantial number of companies with high P/E's. AT&T, Red Hat, Amazon (is far over 100).
As for unrealistic market caps for someone making pennies per customer: Pepsico has a similar net worth and they're a 2nd tier sugar-water retailer with a much more expensive delivery infrastructure.
I watched the last 8 mins of trade and **SAW** the huge buys (didn't know who was making them at the time). Something's sour here, indeed.
Having said that, either you're engaging in pureplay sophistry or your understanding of how stocks prices, market cap, and profit interact are pretty damn weak. Handwavy bullshit everywhere.
Market cap is useful. Personally, I only care once I see P/E, which is a Share Price vs. Profit ratio. Newbie rule is that high P/E's (above 10-20) are signs of inflated stocks. Right now, stuff I buy has values like 12, 17, 11, 48, and 7. Seeing n/a or - makes an investor's job harder, since it means 'we lost money last year'.
Applying just this rule, here's what we get: I was considering Red Hat (RHT - hate 'em, but they're 'executing' a profitable business better than Ubuntu or Suse), but dropped that idea because they've got a P/E of 71. Eew, Fsck That. Everyone else already is overpaying a 'but they'll grow' premium for RHT; so much so that RHT has to about triple in size to be worth my investing in a company I can't stand. OTOH, I overruled disdain and bought MSFT at a P/E of 11.
From there, what you can do to find an economic edge is limitless. Stock trading's possibilities for seeking an edge via statistics and predictive models is the proverbial "elephants all the way down".
Back to FB's value: Let me take your 2nd 'graf and say the truth vs. your spin: The conditions under which FB would really be worth $100B are that someone buys all shares available at the asking price associated with $100B, and/or if FB has profitability and business growth that fit such a share price. The first one's getting some serious propping up by institutional investors. That's spooky as fsck.
So, let's look at Facebook's P/E: 88.xx -- (whistles/) Huh. That's pretty damn steep. It really is analogous to AOL-TimeWarner's albatross pricing. Or a bunch of dot-coms. But it's also close to RHT at 71. And freakin' AT&T is selling at a P/E of 48.
Again, what's Facebook worth? Well, a good question is: Between RHT, T (AT&T) and FB (all overvalued according to P/E) : which one's going to do a better job of carving new income streams and profitabilities out of the next 3 years? And if FB deflates to 30 bucks a share, would you change your opinion if it was more profitable per share than T and RHT? If we shrink FB shares to make a P/E of 12, we get '
No conclusions offered -- I'm just watching the show. Full disclosure: I own some MSFT and T, but no FB or RHT. My brother bought some FB, though. When I started writing this, I would have said 'dumbass brother'. Given the ways I could monetize a billion users without even touching their personal information... hmm.
Re:Easy to do...when you've no gas reserves
on
Vermont Bans Fracking
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· Score: 3, Informative
I'm not a geologist, but the quantity of slate and shale I saw hiking the green mountains makes me doubt there's nothing there.
And going at the question another way, the Dakotas were hardly hotbeds of petrol -- natural gas and shale oil projects are huge employers in NoDak right now. Idaho's never been good for coal or petroleum, but gas is interesting enough to someone with deep pockets to cause preliminary drilling near Payette (if memory serves). And Idaho saw LOTS of legislative fury as the state preemptively denied counties/towns any control over fracking. Yep, politicians that never shut up about local control all lined up and voted to completely deny any local control on fracking chemicals or processes.
Something stinks, and I'm betting it's energy-extractive industry working fast and quiet before revealing their hand.
You keep saying 'will' and 'would'; I think you meant 'could', 'might' and 'hypothetically but unlikely'.
In order: system costs: stagnant incomes over the last 30 years are a greater risk to who can afford what than the depreciated cost of autonomous tech. What you're complaining about here is akin to thinking cars became unaffordable due to OnStar. Visit any used car lot with cars under $2000 and you'll see an increasing number have airbags, even though the **replacement** cost of a couple airbags is $1400-1800. Besides, at some point in automotive autonomy, about half of my 'pick up kids', 'take kid to soccer practice', 'pay X for something my kid signed up for' PITA's that waste a few hours of my household's adult time become the seriously sweet: "tell car to get/deliver X". For people just scraping by while working 2-3 crappy jobs, that could be amazingly helpful. Especially in the 80% of america where public transit (or even bike/pedestrian-friendly paths) don't exist. Ditto for seniors with failing senses. Ditto for long family trips: parents are too tired from work to drive HOURS to a family party over the weekend, but if dad or mom can doze in the pDriverseat and we just wake up in Sheboygan.... SWEET!
Authorized Roads: I'm pretty sure that nobody's even remotely to a point where your car gets to overrule you. If we get there, maybe I'm ok with being able to ban dumbass kids from leaving ruts across my fields in spring.
Roadmap Updates: First, from a sensor perspective: it can't just be GIS/GPS data -- that alone doesn't let a car drive safely. And given how quickly reality stops resembling GIS/GPS, there's little chance a car will ever be able to consider GIS/GPS as a primary decision source. Detours (especially crisis-caliber-but-geophysically-tiny ones, like some temporary asphalt laid to let cars avoid a huge hole excavated in a roadway) and hackers and overrides FTW.
Since considering these is a good idea, here are some others:
THIS! They're both utopian extremes that never quite pan out. Humanity is a paradox of greed, laziness, industry and goodness overall, run roughshod by anyone able to find gameable advantage.
Libertarians have a wide range of desires for power. FTFY.
Meanwhile, the power- and money-hungry will not share, the sociopathic will not resist the urge to shit in the sandbox, and so on. As naive as socialism is, libertarianism pretends that everyone will behave ethically without regulations. All those regulations libertarians hate? Yeah, they each pretty much trace back to someone pissin' in the pool **BECAUSE THEY COULD**. We don't make that s''t up.
Now, when you find an unneeded law, shout and I'll be your wingman. If you want us to throw entire chunks of the regulatory codebook into a dustbin because they're byzantine and push for actions contrary to what society wants, again, I WILL BE THERE WITH YOU. But that means designing taxes that are simple and progressive, not a flat tax. That means making a social safety net that makes people WANT to do better, without punishing the weak or unlucky. We can debate subsidies to guide economic development -- I'm cool with you and I disagreeing about my WANTING us to collectively solve big problems and you hoping the free market finds economic value.
But you're wrong on regulations. The leash isn't about me, it's about sharing the same space fearlessly: I don't want to endure a world where someone else's mad dog doesn't have to have a leash.
Astroturfing is creating a grassroots appearance when no such grassroots movement existed previously. Money doesn't have to change hands as directly as you hint at, and certainly not 'if you're compensated for broadcasting a statement'.
Here's the difference: Astroturfing is also the term for when a well-funded interested party creates and funds a 'think tank' or 'activist group' that has the unstated mission of forwarding their goal. The astroturfing group can recruit people that share an interest, track membership, fund gatherings, push information to assist their membership, and promote spokespeople without giving any of these people money. Every person that appears on behalf of that position has their activist efforts easier due to all these little helpful moments, but can be completely unaware that they're 'funded'.
A mob that splits the work and cost among many members to lighten the load, and lacks deep pockets behind the scenes is a 'grassroots' organization.
An org with deep-pockets supporters lightening the load is astroturfing.
Having (insert celebrity) call attention to your case isn't astroturfing.
Having (insert celebrity or wealthy benefactor) provide substantial direct funding is astroturfing.
There are many shades of grey between these two, but I'd venture that a key detail is whether wealthy benefactor(s) want to use grassroots' perceived lack of economic motive to hide an existing economic motive, and/or to hide their financial backing.
Sorry this went long; am interested in the topic-- I'm willing to concede this was written ad hoc, so other views / opinions are welcome.
I just occasionally see 2nd-order astroturfing firms (for lack of a better term) out there that do as I've described: surround themselves with unpaid teammates and pretend like they're so good at all the hassles of a campaign because of supporters or great karma, rather than the cash that funds all the background efforts that otherwise would take considerably more volunteer supporters.
Every image or video I've seen on this hack has 2 rooms with lights on: White lights, right edge just below the midpoint, separated horizontally by 1 and vertically by 2.
Other rooms occasionally are illuminated, but **always** these two are on. I know this is esoteric, but what's up with that? Anything special about those rooms/windows?
Thirded. Mount either so front/back are on the left and right sides (plan so your cables all go up the same side!) or with the back on top (both because airflow goes front to back and so you have easy/well-lit access to all the ports - on one wallmounted system I even mounted a cheap mirror at a 45deg angle so I could see the status LEDs from anywhere in the room)
I did buy one of the shallow hinged racks: it holds a patch panel in my office (aka, the termination point for my in-house network). Everything else in that room is patch-corded or mounted on the wall.
As for bandwidth, I trunked two existing houses and helped a relative run cat5e in a third new one with 5e/gig double-run to each interesting room, and regret all the extra planning and cabling for my own 2nd time: I'm using 6 of 20 wires trunked out: 2 media frontends, 2 wifi units at opposite ends of the ranch-style house, my office and a fileshare. Everything else (ipad/android/webos, phones, toys, laptops) is usually untethered (i.e., running on wifi) unless something with an ethernet port screams a need for gig or a hard wire. And I have a couple cheap 5port gig switches for lan parties, guests and project-oriented bandwidth needs.
Look at that list again: my wifi to my ISP connections, a cluster of machines in my office that rarely eat external data at more than wifi-capable levels, and **3** boxes that talk among themselves on gig speeds. I've got 23 reservations in my DHCP registry (plus a handful of dedicated IP's) and I'm Nowhere Near needing 2 strands per room.
Both of my residential rewires weren't trivial, but it was because I was trunking wire into existing homes. The third one was so freakin painless I'd say "whatever" and run stuff everywhere just for giggles. So in a new house: Buy a $150 spool of shielded cat5e, run two strands everywhere because selfwiring uncovered walls is fast and stinkin' cheap.
Crosstalk in shielded twisted pair vs 60cycle AC should be almost a nonissue, but the rule of thumb I was told was 2' separation from power wherever possible and have your power/data wires pass each other as perpendicularly as possible. Avoid tight corners or accidentally crimping/damaging wires mid-strand. If someone else does the install, make that a requirement in the installation and inspect religiously.
Oh, and I weighed how much data can scream through a gigabit pipe, the quality under mp4 codecs, and copper vs. fiber and opted to not spend $2 per foot, but check this composite cabling out: http://www.broadbandutopia.com/composite.html
If Chipzilla has decided to drop the hammer and specify where teeny motherboards Shall put their screw holes, great; but that would be about the only new aspect of all this...
Great comment; and this one sentence's 4+ levels of LOL. You nailed many of the ironies from TFA and in Intel's design, but left one unmentioned -- Intel and the article seem to be overreaching for a comparison to sip some of the attention from: a nonprofit project by a few academics in the UK. The zillion-dollar-marketing-machine you call Chipzilla is playing me-too against a handful of folks who created RasPi because nobody'd answer their calls for such a device. Talk about PWNed.
Wow. I think we need a new category of political thought. State-atarian, perhaps. How else can one say it is libertarian to simply move a decision from Federal to State control. Control, regardless of granularity (or bureaucratic burdens of 50x as many regulatory agencies), is still control. Further, state-level control loses economies of scale: everyone gets screwed by the lack of regulatory uniformity and the cost of learning how to comply with 50 disparate regulatory agencies per regulatory category (god help you if your work involves half a dozen different compliance mechanisms like environmental, consumer product safety, banking/finance, etc). As for state control, the near-century between the end of the civil war and federal enforcement of minority civil rights in the south is a damned solid counterargument to ceding such power to states. The only certainty (and in my impression the **GOAL**) of dropping regs to the state level is arbitrage: someone will let megacorps screw them more easily than if federal regs held the entire nation to one standard.
As for Paul's stance, I don't get the charm: his libertarianism is just as naive and flawed as pure-play communism or unregulated capitalism. Hell, every hacker knows that stuff built on ideals are like will-o-wisps, and easily hacked.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not anti-Libertarian. I like it. But I also like socialized things like cops, freeways, and social security. The best ideas come out of the tug of war between libertarianism and socialism and capitalism. Keep all three ideals in your hip pocket as reference and guidance, but keep a copy of Machiavelli and the Art of War, too. Balance their ideals and mechanisms to reach your goals.
Regulations are akin to infosec 'defense in depth' -- they're countermeasures to combat rogues who simply seek to game any simplistic, idealized system. When they get crufty, don't be afraid to refactor (this is what the US **SUCKS** at, IMHO). But please don't pretend that the flaw isn't the cruft itself, but the presence of an ideal you loathe. YOUR idealizations won't survive alone. None do. They'll either be gamed (and that makes them unfair) or they'll need enforcement and balance mechanisms. In other words, they'll need regulations. But (to repeat myself) be vigilant to keep regulations simple and sane. A good regulation mechanism would be a well-designed no-deductions progressive tax simple enough to be autocomputed off paystubs, property records, or whatever. A crappy regulation mechanism is the current US tax code. Or state/local/county sales taxes -- due to the very complexity that the AnonCoward parent advocates by pushing policy down from federal to state levels.
TL/DR: fed vs. state regulation isn't a libertarian issue. Ideals never actually work ideally. And most of our (US's) problems aren't ideological: they're cruft and an unwillingness to refactor crufty legal code. And don't ever implicitly trust an idealist -- always look behind the curtain and try to understand what can go wrong.
We're not bad at government... you've just been spoonfed that claim by a vast conservative Wurlitzer for decades. That, plus corporation-oriented boondoggles like gutting regulatory agencies (FCC, EPA, IRS, SEC) and selling rather than administering public infrastructure (auctioning cellphone frequencies!) have hampered government into a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts: they suck because we underfund them, so we cut funding so they suck worse.
Didn't used to be that way. But as we get more conservative, circumstances worsen.
Only if you know their IMEI code. Most likely even they don't have it.
Nor would a person who just had their phone stolen...? And if the system only takes kill orders from providers, how hard will it be to pwn AT&T's braindead support people into submitting a kill order? Who'll police them to prevent AT&T from almost-bricking your phone for cancelling service?
Police states should abandon all pretenses of being anything but police states. There are too many simple people that don't know a duck even if it's quacking in front of them so long as it's wearing a little badge that says "republic".
So, not to get all shades of grey on you, but... uh... (looks around)... are WE a police state?
You'll have to speak up, I can't hear you over all this quackish squawking.
Wow. A WSJ article on dictionaries, data mining and the birth and death of words... but somehow at this moment, this story is tagged:
SCIENCE DARKMATTER EVOLUTION
Worst. Tags. Ever!!!!
Since the 3 terms appear in the story, this smells like a deeply-ironic case of a data-mining algorithm story having epic amounts of keyword-detection fail. Maybe someone can scrounge up a physicist (or if ONLY slashdot knew where to get in touch with a few computer jocks) to fix their code.
Relativity has a body of proof behind it. One strange result MIGHT invalidate it, but it's more likely that were these results valid that we would've had a clue that this *could* happen before it happened. The right way to approach it is to assume relativity -- which has evidence backing it up, experimental and theoretical -- is correct, and that there was some experimental error, something systemic.
Hey guys, this result doesn't agree with what we expected and believe true based on math and experiment. What did we do wrong?
Likely, something was done wrong.
In the unlikely case that nothing was done wrong and the results are reproducible, well.. THEN you start questioning relativity.
Bravo. Brilliantly put.
ObAsimov: The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka” but “That's funny...” —Isaac Asimov (1920–1992)
I used to love slashdot because it was common to have (computer, internet and geek hobby) stories done just this way; I keep hoping such a site will arise from the post-slashdot/post-reddit/post-fark/post-twitter ashes. Such a site truly would be 'news for nerds, stuff that matters', as opposed to 'lab breaks speed-of-light' and 'deals another blow' sensationalism even slashdot falls for.
Slashdot Mirror
Ratfucker slashcode just ate my comment.
Came here to call you a pedant and point out that some of us like iphones because we already have too many other avenues for puttering; sometimes it's nice just to have a phone. Ok, a phone plus games and twitter and gps and media and email and.... but I'm ok that my 4s is NOT where I focus my hackerly urges. I don't have time for all the projects queued up in my home office (or as my wife calls it, that "damn mountain of electronics"). Lost my orig. comment trying to grok why slashcode was ignoring my html tags (my ul's and li's didn't yield bullets!!!) so you don't get a list this time.
I promise, it isn't fear or wanting Apple to be my mommy...
We've finally found step 2 for the underwear gnomes:
1) Steal underwear
2) Make crazy amounts of money via an undisclosed job.
3) Profit!
Actually, enterprise issues regarding data synchronization quickly make get problematic.
Have just watched a migration from private mail servers to cloud-based email. Months in, it quickly became apparent that a few short days or even a few weeks of pain associated with migrating users cold turkey (and then importing requested data from Notes once it had become static) would have been astronomically less cost and pain compared to wiring the connector and having two frameworks alive (and borking the sync in weird mediocre ways) simultaneously for months. Keep in mind, 'just migrating email' ends up meaning email plus antispam plus accounts plus calendars plus messages plus archives plus attachment storage plus service accounts (and changing hardcoded email addresses in code) plus security plus distro lists... etc, etc etc.
It can be straightforward (but not trivial) to export static data from SQL or another known framework and migrate it into similar frameworks. And it's not much harder to translate (like SQL into non-relational (NoSQL or similar) frameworks): Understand the data, design to the new constraints and advantages, plan migration, do a trial of the migration, then cycle thru again with more or all (depending on how well the first migration went).
Doing so on data that remains alive and breathing gets damned hard fast. Even if there are migration tools, are they ok with transactional data changes? If one side of the migration fails, do both frameworks get messages to cancel the transactions? What about record deletion? How is that synchronized? Given that the new cloud vendor may have few customers (insert tiny #) customers, does a well-tested connector exist between your old and new data stores? What about all in-house apps using the data? Are there mobile apps or custom code or ERP connections to your data server? What about data structure changes between the two: nothing maps perfectly.
Ugly. Just Ugly.
And that's a planned migration. Now think of going the other way. As TFA hints at, we all can write the headline and article now for going the other direction the day some cloud provider implodes: Company Widgetcorp declared bankruptcy today. Their tragic fall from stalwart Rusell-2000 midcap manufacturer to receivership happened unexpectedly: Their cloud-based XXX provider shut off servers without warning less than 60 days ago, and Widgetcorp was never able to recover critical processes and data.
I LOL'd. A friend from up here in the wild west of USA that now lives in Brisbane constantly reminds me of this: we have Grizzly bears (Yey us, we win on large omnivores), a couple kinds of biting flies, mosquitoes (but no malaria), hobo spiders and rattlesnakes (who rattle to warn you away; some call them the gentlemen of the desert). You have god knows how many distinct species of dangerous snakes, spiders, flies, lizards, sting rays, crocodiles, various invertebrate seaborne killers, bugs, spiders, and I'm guessing the occasional dingo and tazmanian devil.
Which reminds me -- we have wolverines. A very few at best. That are reclusive. So reclusive that many don't believe they still exist in the lower 48.
Oops, meant to say Pepsi was 2nd in their market, not 2nd tier. Bad fingers.
Maybe.
OTOH, they've got a billion customers with authenticated accounts. They could implement mobile purchasing, federated identity (communicate with your friend via any/all contacts they have in FB: no more address books and phone numbers!).
P/E is useful. But there are a substantial number of companies with high P/E's. AT&T, Red Hat, Amazon (is far over 100).
As for unrealistic market caps for someone making pennies per customer: Pepsico has a similar net worth and they're a 2nd tier sugar-water retailer with a much more expensive delivery infrastructure.
Maybe.
I watched the last 8 mins of trade and **SAW** the huge buys (didn't know who was making them at the time). Something's sour here, indeed.
Having said that, either you're engaging in pureplay sophistry or your understanding of how stocks prices, market cap, and profit interact are pretty damn weak. Handwavy bullshit everywhere.
Market cap is useful. Personally, I only care once I see P/E, which is a Share Price vs. Profit ratio. Newbie rule is that high P/E's (above 10-20) are signs of inflated stocks. Right now, stuff I buy has values like 12, 17, 11, 48, and 7. Seeing n/a or - makes an investor's job harder, since it means 'we lost money last year'.
Applying just this rule, here's what we get: I was considering Red Hat (RHT - hate 'em, but they're 'executing' a profitable business better than Ubuntu or Suse), but dropped that idea because they've got a P/E of 71. Eew, Fsck That. Everyone else already is overpaying a 'but they'll grow' premium for RHT; so much so that RHT has to about triple in size to be worth my investing in a company I can't stand. OTOH, I overruled disdain and bought MSFT at a P/E of 11.
From there, what you can do to find an economic edge is limitless. Stock trading's possibilities for seeking an edge via statistics and predictive models is the proverbial "elephants all the way down".
Back to FB's value: Let me take your 2nd 'graf and say the truth vs. your spin: The conditions under which FB would really be worth $100B are that someone buys all shares available at the asking price associated with $100B, and/or if FB has profitability and business growth that fit such a share price. The first one's getting some serious propping up by institutional investors. That's spooky as fsck.
So, let's look at Facebook's P/E: 88.xx -- (whistles /) Huh. That's pretty damn steep. It really is analogous to AOL-TimeWarner's albatross pricing. Or a bunch of dot-coms. But it's also close to RHT at 71. And freakin' AT&T is selling at a P/E of 48.
Again, what's Facebook worth? Well, a good question is: Between RHT, T (AT&T) and FB (all overvalued according to P/E) : which one's going to do a better job of carving new income streams and profitabilities out of the next 3 years? And if FB deflates to 30 bucks a share, would you change your opinion if it was more profitable per share than T and RHT? If we shrink FB shares to make a P/E of 12, we get '
No conclusions offered -- I'm just watching the show. Full disclosure: I own some MSFT and T, but no FB or RHT. My brother bought some FB, though. When I started writing this, I would have said 'dumbass brother'. Given the ways I could monetize a billion users without even touching their personal information... hmm.
I'm not a geologist, but the quantity of slate and shale I saw hiking the green mountains makes me doubt there's nothing there.
And going at the question another way, the Dakotas were hardly hotbeds of petrol -- natural gas and shale oil projects are huge employers in NoDak right now. Idaho's never been good for coal or petroleum, but gas is interesting enough to someone with deep pockets to cause preliminary drilling near Payette (if memory serves). And Idaho saw LOTS of legislative fury as the state preemptively denied counties/towns any control over fracking. Yep, politicians that never shut up about local control all lined up and voted to completely deny any local control on fracking chemicals or processes.
Something stinks, and I'm betting it's energy-extractive industry working fast and quiet before revealing their hand.
Looking forward to those cornfed seabass; YUM.
You keep saying 'will' and 'would'; I think you meant 'could', 'might' and 'hypothetically but unlikely'.
In order: system costs: stagnant incomes over the last 30 years are a greater risk to who can afford what than the depreciated cost of autonomous tech. What you're complaining about here is akin to thinking cars became unaffordable due to OnStar. Visit any used car lot with cars under $2000 and you'll see an increasing number have airbags, even though the **replacement** cost of a couple airbags is $1400-1800. Besides, at some point in automotive autonomy, about half of my 'pick up kids', 'take kid to soccer practice', 'pay X for something my kid signed up for' PITA's that waste a few hours of my household's adult time become the seriously sweet: "tell car to get/deliver X". For people just scraping by while working 2-3 crappy jobs, that could be amazingly helpful. Especially in the 80% of america where public transit (or even bike/pedestrian-friendly paths) don't exist. Ditto for seniors with failing senses. Ditto for long family trips: parents are too tired from work to drive HOURS to a family party over the weekend, but if dad or mom can doze in the pDriverseat and we just wake up in Sheboygan.... SWEET!
Authorized Roads: I'm pretty sure that nobody's even remotely to a point where your car gets to overrule you. If we get there, maybe I'm ok with being able to ban dumbass kids from leaving ruts across my fields in spring.
Roadmap Updates: First, from a sensor perspective: it can't just be GIS/GPS data -- that alone doesn't let a car drive safely. And given how quickly reality stops resembling GIS/GPS, there's little chance a car will ever be able to consider GIS/GPS as a primary decision source. Detours (especially crisis-caliber-but-geophysically-tiny ones, like some temporary asphalt laid to let cars avoid a huge hole excavated in a roadway) and hackers and overrides FTW.
Since considering these is a good idea, here are some others:
Waste / Carbon Dioxide / Peak Oil / Global Warming: Removing the opportunity cost of having to drive a car might dramatically increase miles driven annually, since the car might evolve from dumb tool into a much busier courier.
Elasticity of Traffic Demand: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
Other paradoxes of tweaking the ease of driving: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs-Thomson_paradox , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess'_paradox
Your 4th from last word is spelled correctly... but for a moment my mind went "no, PHISH." ... I've been doing this too long.
THIS! They're both utopian extremes that never quite pan out. Humanity is a paradox of greed, laziness, industry and goodness overall, run roughshod by anyone able to find gameable advantage.
Libertarians have a wide range of desires for power. FTFY.
Meanwhile, the power- and money-hungry will not share, the sociopathic will not resist the urge to shit in the sandbox, and so on. As naive as socialism is, libertarianism pretends that everyone will behave ethically without regulations. All those regulations libertarians hate? Yeah, they each pretty much trace back to someone pissin' in the pool **BECAUSE THEY COULD**. We don't make that s''t up.
Now, when you find an unneeded law, shout and I'll be your wingman. If you want us to throw entire chunks of the regulatory codebook into a dustbin because they're byzantine and push for actions contrary to what society wants, again, I WILL BE THERE WITH YOU. But that means designing taxes that are simple and progressive, not a flat tax. That means making a social safety net that makes people WANT to do better, without punishing the weak or unlucky. We can debate subsidies to guide economic development -- I'm cool with you and I disagreeing about my WANTING us to collectively solve big problems and you hoping the free market finds economic value.
But you're wrong on regulations. The leash isn't about me, it's about sharing the same space fearlessly: I don't want to endure a world where someone else's mad dog doesn't have to have a leash.
Astroturfing is creating a grassroots appearance when no such grassroots movement existed previously. Money doesn't have to change hands as directly as you hint at, and certainly not 'if you're compensated for broadcasting a statement'.
Here's the difference: Astroturfing is also the term for when a well-funded interested party creates and funds a 'think tank' or 'activist group' that has the unstated mission of forwarding their goal. The astroturfing group can recruit people that share an interest, track membership, fund gatherings, push information to assist their membership, and promote spokespeople without giving any of these people money. Every person that appears on behalf of that position has their activist efforts easier due to all these little helpful moments, but can be completely unaware that they're 'funded'.
A mob that splits the work and cost among many members to lighten the load, and lacks deep pockets behind the scenes is a 'grassroots' organization.
An org with deep-pockets supporters lightening the load is astroturfing.
Having (insert celebrity) call attention to your case isn't astroturfing.
Having (insert celebrity or wealthy benefactor) provide substantial direct funding is astroturfing.
There are many shades of grey between these two, but I'd venture that a key detail is whether wealthy benefactor(s) want to use grassroots' perceived lack of economic motive to hide an existing economic motive, and/or to hide their financial backing.
Sorry this went long; am interested in the topic-- I'm willing to concede this was written ad hoc, so other views / opinions are welcome.
I just occasionally see 2nd-order astroturfing firms (for lack of a better term) out there that do as I've described: surround themselves with unpaid teammates and pretend like they're so good at all the hassles of a campaign because of supporters or great karma, rather than the cash that funds all the background efforts that otherwise would take considerably more volunteer supporters.
Yeah, it's gonna be pretty hard to 'quarter troops' in a website, webfarm, hard drive... maybe in a colo cage!?
Every image or video I've seen on this hack has 2 rooms with lights on: White lights, right edge just below the midpoint, separated horizontally by 1 and vertically by 2.
Other rooms occasionally are illuminated, but **always** these two are on. I know this is esoteric, but what's up with that? Anything special about those rooms/windows?
Thirded. Mount either so front/back are on the left and right sides (plan so your cables all go up the same side!) or with the back on top (both because airflow goes front to back and so you have easy/well-lit access to all the ports - on one wallmounted system I even mounted a cheap mirror at a 45deg angle so I could see the status LEDs from anywhere in the room)
I did buy one of the shallow hinged racks: it holds a patch panel in my office (aka, the termination point for my in-house network). Everything else in that room is patch-corded or mounted on the wall.
As for bandwidth, I trunked two existing houses and helped a relative run cat5e in a third new one with 5e/gig double-run to each interesting room, and regret all the extra planning and cabling for my own 2nd time: I'm using 6 of 20 wires trunked out: 2 media frontends, 2 wifi units at opposite ends of the ranch-style house, my office and a fileshare. Everything else (ipad/android/webos, phones, toys, laptops) is usually untethered (i.e., running on wifi) unless something with an ethernet port screams a need for gig or a hard wire. And I have a couple cheap 5port gig switches for lan parties, guests and project-oriented bandwidth needs.
Look at that list again: my wifi to my ISP connections, a cluster of machines in my office that rarely eat external data at more than wifi-capable levels, and **3** boxes that talk among themselves on gig speeds. I've got 23 reservations in my DHCP registry (plus a handful of dedicated IP's) and I'm Nowhere Near needing 2 strands per room.
Both of my residential rewires weren't trivial, but it was because I was trunking wire into existing homes. The third one was so freakin painless I'd say "whatever" and run stuff everywhere just for giggles. So in a new house: Buy a $150 spool of shielded cat5e, run two strands everywhere because selfwiring uncovered walls is fast and stinkin' cheap.
Crosstalk in shielded twisted pair vs 60cycle AC should be almost a nonissue, but the rule of thumb I was told was 2' separation from power wherever possible and have your power/data wires pass each other as perpendicularly as possible. Avoid tight corners or accidentally crimping/damaging wires mid-strand. If someone else does the install, make that a requirement in the installation and inspect religiously.
Oh, and I weighed how much data can scream through a gigabit pipe, the quality under mp4 codecs, and copper vs. fiber and opted to not spend $2 per foot, but check this composite cabling out: http://www.broadbandutopia.com/composite.html
Great comment; and this one sentence's 4+ levels of LOL. You nailed many of the ironies from TFA and in Intel's design, but left one unmentioned -- Intel and the article seem to be overreaching for a comparison to sip some of the attention from: a nonprofit project by a few academics in the UK. The zillion-dollar-marketing-machine you call Chipzilla is playing me-too against a handful of folks who created RasPi because nobody'd answer their calls for such a device. Talk about PWNed.
This. Hell, my first reaction when I read that the staff doesn't use the app was thinking they don't eat their own dogfood?! They're doomed..
Use your app. Find a friend that fits the niche and watch them use the app. Do SOMETHING, or run away.
Wow. I think we need a new category of political thought. State-atarian, perhaps. How else can one say it is libertarian to simply move a decision from Federal to State control. Control, regardless of granularity (or bureaucratic burdens of 50x as many regulatory agencies), is still control. Further, state-level control loses economies of scale: everyone gets screwed by the lack of regulatory uniformity and the cost of learning how to comply with 50 disparate regulatory agencies per regulatory category (god help you if your work involves half a dozen different compliance mechanisms like environmental, consumer product safety, banking/finance, etc). As for state control, the near-century between the end of the civil war and federal enforcement of minority civil rights in the south is a damned solid counterargument to ceding such power to states. The only certainty (and in my impression the **GOAL**) of dropping regs to the state level is arbitrage: someone will let megacorps screw them more easily than if federal regs held the entire nation to one standard.
As for Paul's stance, I don't get the charm: his libertarianism is just as naive and flawed as pure-play communism or unregulated capitalism. Hell, every hacker knows that stuff built on ideals are like will-o-wisps, and easily hacked.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not anti-Libertarian. I like it. But I also like socialized things like cops, freeways, and social security. The best ideas come out of the tug of war between libertarianism and socialism and capitalism. Keep all three ideals in your hip pocket as reference and guidance, but keep a copy of Machiavelli and the Art of War, too. Balance their ideals and mechanisms to reach your goals.
Regulations are akin to infosec 'defense in depth' -- they're countermeasures to combat rogues who simply seek to game any simplistic, idealized system. When they get crufty, don't be afraid to refactor (this is what the US **SUCKS** at, IMHO). But please don't pretend that the flaw isn't the cruft itself, but the presence of an ideal you loathe. YOUR idealizations won't survive alone. None do. They'll either be gamed (and that makes them unfair) or they'll need enforcement and balance mechanisms. In other words, they'll need regulations. But (to repeat myself) be vigilant to keep regulations simple and sane. A good regulation mechanism would be a well-designed no-deductions progressive tax simple enough to be autocomputed off paystubs, property records, or whatever. A crappy regulation mechanism is the current US tax code. Or state/local/county sales taxes -- due to the very complexity that the AnonCoward parent advocates by pushing policy down from federal to state levels.
TL/DR: fed vs. state regulation isn't a libertarian issue. Ideals never actually work ideally. And most of our (US's) problems aren't ideological: they're cruft and an unwillingness to refactor crufty legal code. And don't ever implicitly trust an idealist -- always look behind the curtain and try to understand what can go wrong.
We're not bad at government... you've just been spoonfed that claim by a vast conservative Wurlitzer for decades. That, plus corporation-oriented boondoggles like gutting regulatory agencies (FCC, EPA, IRS, SEC) and selling rather than administering public infrastructure (auctioning cellphone frequencies!) have hampered government into a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts: they suck because we underfund them, so we cut funding so they suck worse.
Didn't used to be that way. But as we get more conservative, circumstances worsen.
Nor would a person who just had their phone stolen...? And if the system only takes kill orders from providers, how hard will it be to pwn AT&T's braindead support people into submitting a kill order? Who'll police them to prevent AT&T from almost-bricking your phone for cancelling service?
Devil's always in the details...
So, not to get all shades of grey on you, but... uh... (looks around)... are WE a police state?
You'll have to speak up, I can't hear you over all this quackish squawking.
Wow. A WSJ article on dictionaries, data mining and the birth and death of words... but somehow at this moment, this story is tagged:
SCIENCE
DARKMATTER
EVOLUTION
Worst. Tags. Ever!!!!
Since the 3 terms appear in the story, this smells like a deeply-ironic case of a data-mining algorithm story having epic amounts of keyword-detection fail. Maybe someone can scrounge up a physicist (or if ONLY slashdot knew where to get in touch with a few computer jocks) to fix their code.
Relativity has a body of proof behind it. One strange result MIGHT invalidate it, but it's more likely that were these results valid that we would've had a clue that this *could* happen before it happened. The right way to approach it is to assume relativity -- which has evidence backing it up, experimental and theoretical -- is correct, and that there was some experimental error, something systemic.
Hey guys, this result doesn't agree with what we expected and believe true based on math and experiment. What did we do wrong?
Likely, something was done wrong.
In the unlikely case that nothing was done wrong and the results are reproducible, well.. THEN you start questioning relativity.
Bravo. Brilliantly put.
ObAsimov:
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka” but “That's funny...” —Isaac Asimov (1920–1992)
I used to love slashdot because it was common to have (computer, internet and geek hobby) stories done just this way; I keep hoping such a site will arise from the post-slashdot/post-reddit/post-fark/post-twitter ashes. Such a site truly would be 'news for nerds, stuff that matters', as opposed to 'lab breaks speed-of-light' and 'deals another blow' sensationalism even slashdot falls for.