There was a time 300 years ago when food was over 50% of a median person's spending. For 250 years the price of food dropped but now it only makes up a small portion of the basket because I can only eat so much. Housing on the edge of a city hasn't gone up faster than inflation and if we define the cost of housing in terms of distance to the edge of the urban area it isn't going up that fast. One other point about housing in North America is that the amount of space per person has increased significantly. So outside of urban cores, the cost per square foot may not have kept up with inflation.
Cars - The car that is in the basket of goods today is a far better car than the one 30 years ago. It is more reliable, will last longer, pollutes less, has air conditioning, is far safer, gets more gas mileage, etc.,br>
There has always be some part of the basket of goods that the consumer uses that drops in price. This won't lead to deflation over all though because I can only have so many TVs, computers and Spotify accounts. Maybe initially the drop in price will cause me to buy more of these goods but in the long run the portion of my spending on them will decrease and I will spend more on something else that has probably gone up in price.
On exception to this is anything that rapidly decrease energy or transportation costs. Then we could have deflation - no canals, rail roads and internal combustion engines did not rapidly decrease transportation costs, they took many decades. Nuclear almost gave us cheap power in the late 60s but the environmentalists killed that (and saved the coal industry).
And all three are exploited, making 100k-150K salaries. The best developer I ever met started at what is now a very large and well know company as a high school student. 20 years later the company has 5000 engineers. If it was a choice between him and 200 random engineers at the company, management wouldn't even debate it, everyone knows he's the smartest person they ever met. The frustrating part is in all three cases management knows they have people that are worth over a million a year and that these people are responsible for a significant part of the companies profit but they still treat these people worse than their average employee.
The peace prize is awarded to someone who is alive and who has the potential to work towards peace. Gandi can't be awarded it posthumously because he can't campaign for peace anymore. The award goes to people like Yassir Arafat in the hope that giving them publicity that they will be able to accomplish more. Sometimes it doesn't work but for people like Juan Manuel Santos negotiating with the FARC in Columbia maybe it did.
Our brains are as large as they are so we can lie, cheat and persuade other humans and so we can throw things. If I want throw a rock and hit something it requires a degree of precision and coordination between my muscles that normally can't be done with nerve cells. The way our nerves work creates to much jitter. To solve this, we have orders of magnitude more nerves controlling our muscles than other mammals, so that the average transmission speed of signals in our nerves much more constant and predictable.
Playing chess, doing calculus or memorizing Pi to 100 digits has no advantage on the plains of Africa. But lying to a woman so I can sleep with is a really good advantage. Although for a woman, being able to figure out if I'm lying or being able to lie to me might be useful. So we get into a mental chess match each trying to outsmart the other and the winner is the one who thinks the most moves ahead.
The net result is we have a lot of excess brain capacity and excess communication pathways for doing almost everything.
Security is only an expense for them. Losing data they have on people doesn't affect their business. Hell the data only needs to be accurate 90% of the time for them to make a profit. Don't be surprised by this. Equifax is acting completely rationally. If you really cared maybe we should have an organization that is run by the public to do things that can't efficiently by private companies because their motivations don't align with how they are paid. I suggest we give this organization a cool name like "government".
CPU mining has a return of between 1 and essentially 0% depending on the currency and the price of electricity. Best case scenario, you leave you web browser open for two days, you consume $1 of extra electricity and the web site gets $0.01. Unless the browser could leverage your GPU, you live in Quebec (cheap electricity) and it's winter so you are heating your house with the GPU, this is never going to make sense.
The true circle constant that we should be using is circumference/radius. It would make so many things easier. Defining a circle by diameter doesn't even make sense as there are lots of shapes that can have the same diameter where as a radius uniquely defines a circle.
I lose faith in slashdot readers sometime. The study said nothing about X or Y chromosomes or that men had more mutations than women. It said fathers as they age pass on more mutations to BOTH their sons and daughters than mothers.
You read the short summary incorrectly. They never said men have more mutations they said men pass on more mutations to their children, both to sons and daughters. Other than in their sperm men don't have more mutations than women.
It isn't their core business keeping your information safe. You are the product not the customer. They sell your credit rating to banks and lenders. Keeping your information safe makes them no money and is in general an inconvenience. Allowing you to see your credit score and point out mistakes in it is a major expense with very little up side. So really, as a for profit company, why would they waste anything more than the bare minimum of resources on it? They definitely won't devote any key or intelligent employees.
Based on American law Equifax is acting completely rationally and in their best interests. Everyone here can save their fake indignation. If you are upset about it have your politicians change the rules.
This was not a fight about whether DRM was good or bad, it wasn't about whether it should be used or not either - It already exists and is being used. It wasn't even a debate about whether it should be standardized, you really can't stop a group of people from agreeing to agree on how to do things. The only possible debate was whether the DRM standard would be part of W3C.
Now the W3C could decided they hate DRM and not put it in their standard but then the web browsers are going to standardize it on their own outside of the W3C. This definitely weakens the W3C but it also goes against what W3C stands for. They are supposed to be the place for people to put web standards together. Just because the EFF doesn't agree with DRM, shouldn't allow them to stop the web browser makers from agreeing to the standard and making it a W3C standard.
I'm an embedded programmer with 20 years experience and self employed. I bill $175/hr and I'm drowning in work. The closest the tool has is designer with C and assembly which pays $120K/year. Maybe the sample size is they had is too small. I do wish everyone would share their salaries more so we don't all get screwed.
For sites I don't care about. Most people have 3 good passwords, 1 for email, 1 for banking and one they reuse everywhere. Most people use shit passwords for work because the work password rules encourage poor passwords. Sites that actually care about security will use a single sign on service like gmail or facebook.
There are just cheap employers looking to under pay for a skill and to lazy to value it correctly. IT is hard and it really isn't that interesting to most executives. They see the accountants every day, they can see their value and more importantly evaluate their value. Sales is easy to evaluate. How many executives actually use the companies own products? That is almost the bare minimum to know what the engineers are doing and I bet less than 10% of execs do it.
Imagine you have a container with a wall in the middle. There is a door that can be opened or closed. There is a person who can open or close that door to let individual gas particles through. Now suppose he opens or closes this door such that all the fast moving particles are moved to the left side of the container and all the slow to the right. It turns out that this person can do this without consuming any energy so long as he remembers how he did it in such a way that it can be reversed. The minimum energy required for him to forget how to reverse this opening and closing is the amount of energy a Carnot engine could produce using the hot and cold sides of the container. Basically, calculating is free, forgetting is what consumes energy.
He lied filling out the Trade Mark application. If he then used it to shake down companies for more than $5,000 ($10,000 if in Toronto), the RCMP will investigate it. (RCMP = Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Canada's national police force)
In Canada we can do the same thing but the post office never tells you about it. If you have a supermail box here ask your delivery person or stick a note on your box and say you don't want unsolicited mail. They then put a little red sticker on your box.
Yes, Jupiter is on the opposite side of the sun from us. That is why you would see it if you looked towards the sun. Today if you looked at the sun and then looked 15 degrees east you would see Jupiter (or wait till the sun sets and look 15 degrees above the horizon).
Information has a cost and this is the main reason today for unemployment. This is similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... .
I want to hire some one to do X. I want to pay the minimum possible but still get a good employee. Also I don't know how good an employee is and I (hate firing/can't fire/or incur cost with each hire). This is the asymmetry. The employee knows his value but I don't. I might pay $100K for a good worker but I'll only pay $40K for a poor one. If I offer the median $70K I only get candidates that are worth between $70K and $40K. So then I chose the median of that $55K....and eventually I'm down to $40 and not able to hire anyone.
Employees are also sticky. An employer might be willing to pay $25 for picking tobacco or some other seasonal work but no one is going to quit even a $15/hr part job and move to the middle of no where for that. Even an unemployed person won't do it because they give up the opportunity to get a steady job (and they might lose some benefits (hey maybe we need a basic income))
Some employers are either clueless or collectively keeping wages down in some industries or regions. They then use the open positions as an excuse to get seasonal immigrant labour or H1-B type visas.
A solution could be: more transparency about wages (make wages public), less regulation on employee rights but more enforcement of them and a reduction to H1-B and migrant employment.
I've help some smarter vendors with this in the past but I would guess that the vast majority are still using a checksum. It makes the verification easy and most companies are not organized enough to keep track of the cards that don't have money on them.
What if the NSA wants to make an exploit but needs help of anti-virus and network security vendors to keep the exploit secret. It is one thing to build something that works today and is undetectable it is quite another to make it undetectable 10 years from now when someone reboots a compromised VMware image and a traffic monitoring equipment starts inspecting the traffic out of the virtual machine. Does this mean Kaspersky is the only vendor not tainted by the NSA?
I never worry that a Russian company is going to steal my ideas and compete against me for actual paying customers. Chinese or American companies I worry about. Getting fucked by a stupid American patent is something I definitely worry about and thanks to the NSA and now CIA I'm very concerned about made in the USA or even passed reasonably close to the USA. If Kaspersky was (and I doubt it) completely compromised by the Russian secret service then they seem to be doing a good job keeping it a secret. Maybe they are even more motivated to keep my information secret than a regular private company. I don't even see a down side here.
Paying your taxes is what gives most fiat currencies their value. I live in Canada. I could use barter or USD if I really wanted to for all my financial transactions but at the end of the year Revenue Canada is going to tell me that there is a specific amount that I owe them and I have to pay them in Canadian Dollars. At that point I better have Canadian dollars and as a practical point I may as well have been doing all my business in Canadian dollars all year so that I have them.
A government backed crypto currency has a number of practical advantages. Money needs to be durability, portability, divisibility, uniformity, limited supply, and acceptability. A government backed cypto currency could have all that. It also needs to be a store of wealth and a unit of account. Because of there instability no crypto currencies can be used for pricing items right now. A government backed currency could do this. (Note: in countries like Venezuela or some African countries bit coin is a very attractive way to store wealth)
If you don't have a teacher who can program don't even try. Programming, more than any other hard skill I know, takes a certain aptitude. You can fake it in high school math, you can even fake your lack of aptitude in most university science, but not programming. There are too many ways to write the correct program to even a simple problem for a person to memorize their way through. A teacher who doesn't have a good understanding of all the different ways a child might do something is going to discourage the best students.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a time 300 years ago when food was over 50% of a median person's spending. For 250 years the price of food dropped but now it only makes up a small portion of the basket because I can only eat so much. Housing on the edge of a city hasn't gone up faster than inflation and if we define the cost of housing in terms of distance to the edge of the urban area it isn't going up that fast. One other point about housing in North America is that the amount of space per person has increased significantly. So outside of urban cores, the cost per square foot may not have kept up with inflation. Cars - The car that is in the basket of goods today is a far better car than the one 30 years ago. It is more reliable, will last longer, pollutes less, has air conditioning, is far safer, gets more gas mileage, etc.,br> There has always be some part of the basket of goods that the consumer uses that drops in price. This won't lead to deflation over all though because I can only have so many TVs, computers and Spotify accounts. Maybe initially the drop in price will cause me to buy more of these goods but in the long run the portion of my spending on them will decrease and I will spend more on something else that has probably gone up in price. On exception to this is anything that rapidly decrease energy or transportation costs. Then we could have deflation - no canals, rail roads and internal combustion engines did not rapidly decrease transportation costs, they took many decades. Nuclear almost gave us cheap power in the late 60s but the environmentalists killed that (and saved the coal industry).
And all three are exploited, making 100k-150K salaries. The best developer I ever met started at what is now a very large and well know company as a high school student. 20 years later the company has 5000 engineers. If it was a choice between him and 200 random engineers at the company, management wouldn't even debate it, everyone knows he's the smartest person they ever met. The frustrating part is in all three cases management knows they have people that are worth over a million a year and that these people are responsible for a significant part of the companies profit but they still treat these people worse than their average employee.
The peace prize is awarded to someone who is alive and who has the potential to work towards peace. Gandi can't be awarded it posthumously because he can't campaign for peace anymore. The award goes to people like Yassir Arafat in the hope that giving them publicity that they will be able to accomplish more. Sometimes it doesn't work but for people like Juan Manuel Santos negotiating with the FARC in Columbia maybe it did.
Our brains are as large as they are so we can lie, cheat and persuade other humans and so we can throw things. If I want throw a rock and hit something it requires a degree of precision and coordination between my muscles that normally can't be done with nerve cells. The way our nerves work creates to much jitter. To solve this, we have orders of magnitude more nerves controlling our muscles than other mammals, so that the average transmission speed of signals in our nerves much more constant and predictable.
Playing chess, doing calculus or memorizing Pi to 100 digits has no advantage on the plains of Africa. But lying to a woman so I can sleep with is a really good advantage. Although for a woman, being able to figure out if I'm lying or being able to lie to me might be useful. So we get into a mental chess match each trying to outsmart the other and the winner is the one who thinks the most moves ahead.
The net result is we have a lot of excess brain capacity and excess communication pathways for doing almost everything.
Or say tried to do change another countries government?
Security is only an expense for them. Losing data they have on people doesn't affect their business. Hell the data only needs to be accurate 90% of the time for them to make a profit. Don't be surprised by this. Equifax is acting completely rationally. If you really cared maybe we should have an organization that is run by the public to do things that can't efficiently by private companies because their motivations don't align with how they are paid. I suggest we give this organization a cool name like "government".
CPU mining has a return of between 1 and essentially 0% depending on the currency and the price of electricity. Best case scenario, you leave you web browser open for two days, you consume $1 of extra electricity and the web site gets $0.01. Unless the browser could leverage your GPU, you live in Quebec (cheap electricity) and it's winter so you are heating your house with the GPU, this is never going to make sense.
The true circle constant that we should be using is circumference/radius. It would make so many things easier. Defining a circle by diameter doesn't even make sense as there are lots of shapes that can have the same diameter where as a radius uniquely defines a circle.
Learn something new and then tell your friends that Pi is the wrong circle constant. https://tauday.com/tau-manifes...
Still it is cool when anyone does something to promote math.
I lose faith in slashdot readers sometime. The study said nothing about X or Y chromosomes or that men had more mutations than women. It said fathers as they age pass on more mutations to BOTH their sons and daughters than mothers.
You read the short summary incorrectly. They never said men have more mutations they said men pass on more mutations to their children, both to sons and daughters. Other than in their sperm men don't have more mutations than women.
It isn't their core business keeping your information safe. You are the product not the customer. They sell your credit rating to banks and lenders. Keeping your information safe makes them no money and is in general an inconvenience. Allowing you to see your credit score and point out mistakes in it is a major expense with very little up side. So really, as a for profit company, why would they waste anything more than the bare minimum of resources on it? They definitely won't devote any key or intelligent employees.
Based on American law Equifax is acting completely rationally and in their best interests. Everyone here can save their fake indignation. If you are upset about it have your politicians change the rules.
This was not a fight about whether DRM was good or bad, it wasn't about whether it should be used or not either - It already exists and is being used. It wasn't even a debate about whether it should be standardized, you really can't stop a group of people from agreeing to agree on how to do things. The only possible debate was whether the DRM standard would be part of W3C.
Now the W3C could decided they hate DRM and not put it in their standard but then the web browsers are going to standardize it on their own outside of the W3C. This definitely weakens the W3C but it also goes against what W3C stands for. They are supposed to be the place for people to put web standards together. Just because the EFF doesn't agree with DRM, shouldn't allow them to stop the web browser makers from agreeing to the standard and making it a W3C standard.
I'm an embedded programmer with 20 years experience and self employed. I bill $175/hr and I'm drowning in work. The closest the tool has is designer with C and assembly which pays $120K/year. Maybe the sample size is they had is too small. I do wish everyone would share their salaries more so we don't all get screwed.
For sites I don't care about. Most people have 3 good passwords, 1 for email, 1 for banking and one they reuse everywhere. Most people use shit passwords for work because the work password rules encourage poor passwords. Sites that actually care about security will use a single sign on service like gmail or facebook.
There are just cheap employers looking to under pay for a skill and to lazy to value it correctly. IT is hard and it really isn't that interesting to most executives. They see the accountants every day, they can see their value and more importantly evaluate their value. Sales is easy to evaluate. How many executives actually use the companies own products? That is almost the bare minimum to know what the engineers are doing and I bet less than 10% of execs do it.
Imagine you have a container with a wall in the middle. There is a door that can be opened or closed. There is a person who can open or close that door to let individual gas particles through. Now suppose he opens or closes this door such that all the fast moving particles are moved to the left side of the container and all the slow to the right. It turns out that this person can do this without consuming any energy so long as he remembers how he did it in such a way that it can be reversed. The minimum energy required for him to forget how to reverse this opening and closing is the amount of energy a Carnot engine could produce using the hot and cold sides of the container. Basically, calculating is free, forgetting is what consumes energy.
He lied filling out the Trade Mark application. If he then used it to shake down companies for more than $5,000 ($10,000 if in Toronto), the RCMP will investigate it. (RCMP = Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Canada's national police force)
In Canada we can do the same thing but the post office never tells you about it. If you have a supermail box here ask your delivery person or stick a note on your box and say you don't want unsolicited mail. They then put a little red sticker on your box.
Yes, Jupiter is on the opposite side of the sun from us. That is why you would see it if you looked towards the sun. Today if you looked at the sun and then looked 15 degrees east you would see Jupiter (or wait till the sun sets and look 15 degrees above the horizon).
Information has a cost and this is the main reason today for unemployment. This is similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... .
I want to hire some one to do X. I want to pay the minimum possible but still get a good employee. Also I don't know how good an employee is and I (hate firing/can't fire/or incur cost with each hire). This is the asymmetry. The employee knows his value but I don't. I might pay $100K for a good worker but I'll only pay $40K for a poor one. If I offer the median $70K I only get candidates that are worth between $70K and $40K. So then I chose the median of that $55K....and eventually I'm down to $40 and not able to hire anyone.
Employees are also sticky. An employer might be willing to pay $25 for picking tobacco or some other seasonal work but no one is going to quit even a $15/hr part job and move to the middle of no where for that. Even an unemployed person won't do it because they give up the opportunity to get a steady job (and they might lose some benefits (hey maybe we need a basic income))
Some employers are either clueless or collectively keeping wages down in some industries or regions. They then use the open positions as an excuse to get seasonal immigrant labour or H1-B type visas.
A solution could be: more transparency about wages (make wages public), less regulation on employee rights but more enforcement of them and a reduction to H1-B and migrant employment.
I've help some smarter vendors with this in the past but I would guess that the vast majority are still using a checksum. It makes the verification easy and most companies are not organized enough to keep track of the cards that don't have money on them.
What if the NSA wants to make an exploit but needs help of anti-virus and network security vendors to keep the exploit secret. It is one thing to build something that works today and is undetectable it is quite another to make it undetectable 10 years from now when someone reboots a compromised VMware image and a traffic monitoring equipment starts inspecting the traffic out of the virtual machine. Does this mean Kaspersky is the only vendor not tainted by the NSA?
I never worry that a Russian company is going to steal my ideas and compete against me for actual paying customers. Chinese or American companies I worry about. Getting fucked by a stupid American patent is something I definitely worry about and thanks to the NSA and now CIA I'm very concerned about made in the USA or even passed reasonably close to the USA. If Kaspersky was (and I doubt it) completely compromised by the Russian secret service then they seem to be doing a good job keeping it a secret. Maybe they are even more motivated to keep my information secret than a regular private company. I don't even see a down side here.
Paying your taxes is what gives most fiat currencies their value. I live in Canada. I could use barter or USD if I really wanted to for all my financial transactions but at the end of the year Revenue Canada is going to tell me that there is a specific amount that I owe them and I have to pay them in Canadian Dollars. At that point I better have Canadian dollars and as a practical point I may as well have been doing all my business in Canadian dollars all year so that I have them.
A government backed crypto currency has a number of practical advantages. Money needs to be durability, portability, divisibility, uniformity, limited supply, and acceptability. A government backed cypto currency could have all that. It also needs to be a store of wealth and a unit of account. Because of there instability no crypto currencies can be used for pricing items right now. A government backed currency could do this. (Note: in countries like Venezuela or some African countries bit coin is a very attractive way to store wealth)
If you don't have a teacher who can program don't even try. Programming, more than any other hard skill I know, takes a certain aptitude. You can fake it in high school math, you can even fake your lack of aptitude in most university science, but not programming. There are too many ways to write the correct program to even a simple problem for a person to memorize their way through. A teacher who doesn't have a good understanding of all the different ways a child might do something is going to discourage the best students.