Whenever I deal with setting time, daylight savings, time zones etc., managers just assume it is going to be easy. And then the corner cases start popping up. What happens when a co-processor clock drifts 3 seconds ahead during the transition at the end of daylight savings and you had an event that started at 2am local time... Your 20 minute easy bug fix turns into a week of long hours and 2 weeks of testing for the test team. And don't get me started with NTP, that code is awesome but the jitter handling is so complicated.
We need power when we want it not just when the wind blows. Wind is a nightmare to manage. In Ontario and our neighbouring US states it has been so badly managed that the price of electricity goes negative. (the governments guarantee a price for the wind mill operators regardless to whether or not anyone needs the energy). While during our highest demand the wind often isn't blowing at all.
No cause is so great that it isn't supported by idiots. Unfortunately the idiots seem to have the most time to yell and scream. They also ruin many chances at having a reasonable discussion. I've been having a number of discussions with female programmers and they all have more problems with SJW than I ever have. But that isn't to say there aren't issues they face. Women are different from men. (This may be a shock to some SJW) They do, on average have different goals, priorities and risk tolerances. There are fewer women in crypto currency work than men, not because they can't do it but because that isn't something most women are interested in. And guess what? That's fine.
There are some real issues that women face for example:
Being back stabbed by other non-technical women and having no means to fix it.
Not arguing in a way that ends. When I call someone an idiot for checking in code that breaks the build, I expect an apology, donuts for the team, and then the issue is over. Women don't argue that way with other women though so you get friction when two women are on the team. My ex, who makes Linus seem like a pussy cat, can manage the most dysfunctional men on the planet but can't manage other women without making them cry
Dark offices - given the chance many men will work till 2am in a dark office and then sleep in till noon. The guys that do this are often responsible for some key part of the company's product. Women don't feel safe in a dark office or going home at 2am. Once your key component is developed in this way, you have mostly excluded women from the team.
The last point, dark offices, is something I had never thought of. I don't have a good solution for it and I'm sure there are other things that separate men from women at work that aren't sexist but are personal preferences that differ between sexes.
Inequality is if you have first invested something and the employer has a monopoly. So sports players have a union because the players have devoted a lot of time specializing in one job and there is often only one league they can work for. Teachers have unions, you have to train to be a teacher and there is often only a limited number of employers in your area. A mine in a remote location should have a union, since it takes an investment to move to the area the mine is in. Sometimes you need a union to negotiate for worker safety because the cost of changing jobs a slight inequality. (Note: every union I've belong to actually manage to make places less safe).
There is no inequality in bargaining power with uber. There are no sunk costs associated with choosing to work for them. You can walk away at any moment and be in the same position you were in before you started working for them.
Uber drivers - provide all their own tools (the car), work when they want for as long as they want, choose the rides they pick up, they can choose how they perform the job (they have some choice in the route to take). They can even work for competitors at the same time. Contractor vs Employee is about the workers level of control. If you show up at an office at a specific time, work using a company computer, do the tasks they assign and can't work for a competitor then you are definitely an employee. Uber drivers are further from being an employee than any of the governments "contractors".
The gulf stream cools, in order of importance, by evaporation, by net radiating into space and conduction at the surface with cooler air. There are no glaciers near it. The gulf stream then sinks because it has a slightly higher salt content making it more dense than the water around it. Note, the water around it is actually slightly cooler than the gulf stream at the point when it sinks.
I make double what I was making as a salaried employee. I take uber fairly often and the drivers all have said they make more driving for Uber (duh) than they did at there last job. One even shown me spread sheets of his expenses and his strategies for being available when the fairs are higher. I don't see anyone in the gig economy complaining, so I have no idea where these articles are coming from.
Disclaimer:I'm in Ontario, Canada - minimum wage is $14/hr.
That's not how global warming works. CO2 increases the amount of time that energy from the sun takes to radiate back into space. Since the energy is in the atmosphere and oceans longer the over all amount of energy is greater. That is to say, CO2 increases the equilibrium temperature of the earth. A one time removal of energy to melt all the worlds glaciers has no effect on the equilibrium temperature.
Losing the glaciers does however decrease the Earth's albedo and that also will increase the Earth's equilibrium temperature.
An energy gradient and a way to store information. On earth the energy gradients are created by thermal vents and the sun. Storage of information is RNA and DNA.
The banks hold the master ledger of all the accounts they have. You regulate a bank saying what transactions are allowed, safeguards they must make, insurance etc.
There is no such entity in crypto currencies. The ledger is what everyone agrees the ledger is.
The UK can regulate the exchanges where the exchanges interact with existing banks, that's really about it.
Finally, other than Monero, all crypto currencies suck for money laundering. Every transaction is public for everyone to see. If the UK government was actually worried about money laundering maybe they should create a public ledger for every British pound transaction.
Why all the negative comments. The insurance company doesn't want to pay out and neither do you. It's insurance. You hope you don't need it but you get it just in case. If your insurance company wants to give you incentives to live longer that seems like a good thing. Yes they are sharing your information when they try and get incentives for you to do things but 99% of the people not on slashdot give all that information away for free.
The police took away any means he had to defend himself, threatened him with a ridiculous punishment and he accepted a plea bargain. There is only one country in the world that regularly pretends such a thing is a conviction. Of course going to federal court is also a 99.8% chance of being convicted of something. Some federal districts in the USA actually go more than a year without an innocent verdict. http://justicedenied.org/wordp...
This attack is on the remote monitoring system for the cameras. And yes, you do put your camera's on the internet. Most of us are not as rich as some an AC and can't run our own dedicated cable to monitor the cameras.
An employee has very little control of what they do. In Canada the measure of employee vs contractor considers:
who sets the hours
who sets the specific tasks and how they will be done
freedom to work for other people
who provides the office and equipment
Uber drivers have complete freedom in all those thing except the specific tasks (even then, they could chose the route). Most of the "contractors" I know in high tech fail all those tests.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!) but “That’s funny ”
— Isaac Asimov
(OK - Asimov is credit with the quote but it's more a paraphrase of a number of quotes he made)
In the past the crashes were caused by liquidity, confidence and people trying to take their profit. (Or Mt. Gox covering their stupidity) This crash was caused by people having to sell to pay electricity bills. With a normal stock or commodity there are natural sellers. The people who mine silver have to pay the mining cost, when GM sells stock they do it to retool or invest in themselves and they will repeatedly sell more and more. There is also a natural ceiling on the value of GM stock. If the price gets crazy GM will sell more and horde the cash. With crypto currency we had huge market caps but most of the coins were held by a few people who had no need to sell. There was no theoretical max value of the currencies. You couldn't short crypto because you were literally exposed to limitless losses. The only major forced selling before mining went insane was MT Gox and every time they sold the markets would crash.
This rule would make it impossible for any small company to maintain any kind of interactive presence on the internet. You would need staff working 24x7 just to watch for this. That would be 5 full time employees (7 in France). Popular sites won't have a chance. Hell I could be malicious and take down a site by posting hate on it.
This is a case of the fix being worse than the problem. (or maybe the problem is control freak politicians)
Patents have never been to spur innovation. Their purpose is to preserve knowledge. We as society decided we would trade a limited monopoly on an invention for the complete description of that invention. The invention was supposed to be innovative such that any other person knowledgeable in the craft would say "hey, that's a really good idea, I can use that". I should want to read patents because they would teach me, they should be a resource when I want to solve a problem. Journalists should publish them in trade journals because of the innovation in them.
Inventors will invent because we want to solve problems, because there is profit in providing solutions to our customers. We don't need patents to do that. (and we don't need drug patents either - our way of developing drugs is wasteful and broken)
Today when someone actually comes up with something innovative they often don't patent it. Manufacturing methods, if they are truly useful are rarely patented. Small companies can't defend a patent and any inventor who is altruistic will publish their idea almost anywhere other than the patent office. Not only are patents now unreadable (I can't make any sense of any of the patents my name is on) but we are told not to read them because it might increase our companies liability.
When companies spend more money on patent lawyers than on new product development (Apple, google, Oracle) or get screwed when they don't (RIM/Black Berry) we have a problem.
It is now your moral duty to shun East Texas and actively fight patent laws.
People turned off having one app store and record their location, mistakenly thought they weren't being tracked and are now upset? They didn't notice that google maps still worked, that their uber driver still came to get them, that they still got asked to review stores they were in, etc. The app in question didn't even say it turned off tracking.
Maybe google should create an app to turn off tracking but it means turning off your cell phone, GPS and wi-fi. I know many people who might die of facebook/twitter withdrawal if they ever used such an app.
The cost of mining is now a non-trivial percentage of the worlds economy. The miners now have to pay real world money to pay for the electricity and the money they borrowed to buy/build their rigs. This constant selling of crypto currency to finance the mining likely means that we have either seen the last crypto currency rally or maybe there is just one more left.
We have also now seen the limits of what crypto currencies can do and it looks like the existing banking infrastructure does it better...For now. Maybe a highly scalable proof of stake currency will be invented. Maybe one of this existing currencies can already securely do it. It's not going to be bitcoin though.
I see this all the time in security. The company responsible for the security isn't the one hurt by a security breach so they put almost no effort into security. Banks in the UK used to be the worst example of this. Internal fraud was so bad they would resist any controls so that they could deny it was their fault. Small toy companies and companies printing tickets had the best security. (Military security is in just incompetent by inertia)
What we need are regulations that shift the cost of security breaches onto the entities best able to prevent them. We also need to make stored data toxic so that most companies won't even keep your information.
You are the product. (Just like you are facebook and google's product). You are however your credit card companies customer. If there was pressure put on the credit companies not to share information with an insecure entity like Equifax then Equifax would either put some effort into security or go bankrupt. Equifax has to have a near complete picture of everyone's credit score to remain in business. If even a few creditors stopped sharing information with them they would be in big trouble.
So if you want to punish Equifax, somehow convince your bank or credit card company not to share their credit information with them. Not sure you will have any luck, but it's probably your best approach.
Slashdot Mirror
It's power.
Did you mean 70 billion kilowatt hours?
They took the title out of context and did so on purpose. I'm pretty sure that's slander in the UK.
Whenever I deal with setting time, daylight savings, time zones etc., managers just assume it is going to be easy. And then the corner cases start popping up. What happens when a co-processor clock drifts 3 seconds ahead during the transition at the end of daylight savings and you had an event that started at 2am local time... Your 20 minute easy bug fix turns into a week of long hours and 2 weeks of testing for the test team. And don't get me started with NTP, that code is awesome but the jitter handling is so complicated.
We need power when we want it not just when the wind blows. Wind is a nightmare to manage. In Ontario and our neighbouring US states it has been so badly managed that the price of electricity goes negative. (the governments guarantee a price for the wind mill operators regardless to whether or not anyone needs the energy). While during our highest demand the wind often isn't blowing at all.
No cause is so great that it isn't supported by idiots. Unfortunately the idiots seem to have the most time to yell and scream. They also ruin many chances at having a reasonable discussion. I've been having a number of discussions with female programmers and they all have more problems with SJW than I ever have. But that isn't to say there aren't issues they face. Women are different from men. (This may be a shock to some SJW) They do, on average have different goals, priorities and risk tolerances. There are fewer women in crypto currency work than men, not because they can't do it but because that isn't something most women are interested in. And guess what? That's fine.
There are some real issues that women face for example:
Being back stabbed by other non-technical women and having no means to fix it.
Not arguing in a way that ends. When I call someone an idiot for checking in code that breaks the build, I expect an apology, donuts for the team, and then the issue is over. Women don't argue that way with other women though so you get friction when two women are on the team. My ex, who makes Linus seem like a pussy cat, can manage the most dysfunctional men on the planet but can't manage other women without making them cry
Dark offices - given the chance many men will work till 2am in a dark office and then sleep in till noon. The guys that do this are often responsible for some key part of the company's product. Women don't feel safe in a dark office or going home at 2am. Once your key component is developed in this way, you have mostly excluded women from the team.
The last point, dark offices, is something I had never thought of. I don't have a good solution for it and I'm sure there are other things that separate men from women at work that aren't sexist but are personal preferences that differ between sexes.
Inequality is if you have first invested something and the employer has a monopoly. So sports players have a union because the players have devoted a lot of time specializing in one job and there is often only one league they can work for. Teachers have unions, you have to train to be a teacher and there is often only a limited number of employers in your area. A mine in a remote location should have a union, since it takes an investment to move to the area the mine is in. Sometimes you need a union to negotiate for worker safety because the cost of changing jobs a slight inequality. (Note: every union I've belong to actually manage to make places less safe).
There is no inequality in bargaining power with uber. There are no sunk costs associated with choosing to work for them. You can walk away at any moment and be in the same position you were in before you started working for them.
Uber drivers - provide all their own tools (the car), work when they want for as long as they want, choose the rides they pick up, they can choose how they perform the job (they have some choice in the route to take). They can even work for competitors at the same time. Contractor vs Employee is about the workers level of control. If you show up at an office at a specific time, work using a company computer, do the tasks they assign and can't work for a competitor then you are definitely an employee. Uber drivers are further from being an employee than any of the governments "contractors".
The gulf stream cools, in order of importance, by evaporation, by net radiating into space and conduction at the surface with cooler air. There are no glaciers near it. The gulf stream then sinks because it has a slightly higher salt content making it more dense than the water around it. Note, the water around it is actually slightly cooler than the gulf stream at the point when it sinks.
I make double what I was making as a salaried employee. I take uber fairly often and the drivers all have said they make more driving for Uber (duh) than they did at there last job. One even shown me spread sheets of his expenses and his strategies for being available when the fairs are higher. I don't see anyone in the gig economy complaining, so I have no idea where these articles are coming from.
Disclaimer:I'm in Ontario, Canada - minimum wage is $14/hr.
That's not how global warming works. CO2 increases the amount of time that energy from the sun takes to radiate back into space. Since the energy is in the atmosphere and oceans longer the over all amount of energy is greater. That is to say, CO2 increases the equilibrium temperature of the earth. A one time removal of energy to melt all the worlds glaciers has no effect on the equilibrium temperature.
Losing the glaciers does however decrease the Earth's albedo and that also will increase the Earth's equilibrium temperature.
An energy gradient and a way to store information. On earth the energy gradients are created by thermal vents and the sun. Storage of information is RNA and DNA.
The banks hold the master ledger of all the accounts they have. You regulate a bank saying what transactions are allowed, safeguards they must make, insurance etc.
There is no such entity in crypto currencies. The ledger is what everyone agrees the ledger is.
The UK can regulate the exchanges where the exchanges interact with existing banks, that's really about it.
Finally, other than Monero, all crypto currencies suck for money laundering. Every transaction is public for everyone to see. If the UK government was actually worried about money laundering maybe they should create a public ledger for every British pound transaction.
Why all the negative comments. The insurance company doesn't want to pay out and neither do you. It's insurance. You hope you don't need it but you get it just in case. If your insurance company wants to give you incentives to live longer that seems like a good thing. Yes they are sharing your information when they try and get incentives for you to do things but 99% of the people not on slashdot give all that information away for free.
The police took away any means he had to defend himself, threatened him with a ridiculous punishment and he accepted a plea bargain. There is only one country in the world that regularly pretends such a thing is a conviction. Of course going to federal court is also a 99.8% chance of being convicted of something. Some federal districts in the USA actually go more than a year without an innocent verdict. http://justicedenied.org/wordp...
This attack is on the remote monitoring system for the cameras. And yes, you do put your camera's on the internet. Most of us are not as rich as some an AC and can't run our own dedicated cable to monitor the cameras.
An employee has very little control of what they do. In Canada the measure of employee vs contractor considers:
who sets the hours
who sets the specific tasks and how they will be done
freedom to work for other people
who provides the office and equipment
Uber drivers have complete freedom in all those thing except the specific tasks (even then, they could chose the route). Most of the "contractors" I know in high tech fail all those tests.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!) but “That’s funny ” — Isaac Asimov (OK - Asimov is credit with the quote but it's more a paraphrase of a number of quotes he made)
In the past the crashes were caused by liquidity, confidence and people trying to take their profit. (Or Mt. Gox covering their stupidity) This crash was caused by people having to sell to pay electricity bills. With a normal stock or commodity there are natural sellers. The people who mine silver have to pay the mining cost, when GM sells stock they do it to retool or invest in themselves and they will repeatedly sell more and more. There is also a natural ceiling on the value of GM stock. If the price gets crazy GM will sell more and horde the cash. With crypto currency we had huge market caps but most of the coins were held by a few people who had no need to sell. There was no theoretical max value of the currencies. You couldn't short crypto because you were literally exposed to limitless losses. The only major forced selling before mining went insane was MT Gox and every time they sold the markets would crash.
This rule would make it impossible for any small company to maintain any kind of interactive presence on the internet. You would need staff working 24x7 just to watch for this. That would be 5 full time employees (7 in France). Popular sites won't have a chance. Hell I could be malicious and take down a site by posting hate on it.
This is a case of the fix being worse than the problem. (or maybe the problem is control freak politicians)
If you really have to see a movie pirate it. Don't give these people another penny. It sad but pirating is now the moral thing to do.
Patents have never been to spur innovation. Their purpose is to preserve knowledge. We as society decided we would trade a limited monopoly on an invention for the complete description of that invention. The invention was supposed to be innovative such that any other person knowledgeable in the craft would say "hey, that's a really good idea, I can use that". I should want to read patents because they would teach me, they should be a resource when I want to solve a problem. Journalists should publish them in trade journals because of the innovation in them.
Inventors will invent because we want to solve problems, because there is profit in providing solutions to our customers. We don't need patents to do that. (and we don't need drug patents either - our way of developing drugs is wasteful and broken)
Today when someone actually comes up with something innovative they often don't patent it. Manufacturing methods, if they are truly useful are rarely patented. Small companies can't defend a patent and any inventor who is altruistic will publish their idea almost anywhere other than the patent office. Not only are patents now unreadable (I can't make any sense of any of the patents my name is on) but we are told not to read them because it might increase our companies liability.
When companies spend more money on patent lawyers than on new product development (Apple, google, Oracle) or get screwed when they don't (RIM/Black Berry) we have a problem.
It is now your moral duty to shun East Texas and actively fight patent laws.
People turned off having one app store and record their location, mistakenly thought they weren't being tracked and are now upset? They didn't notice that google maps still worked, that their uber driver still came to get them, that they still got asked to review stores they were in, etc. The app in question didn't even say it turned off tracking.
Maybe google should create an app to turn off tracking but it means turning off your cell phone, GPS and wi-fi. I know many people who might die of facebook/twitter withdrawal if they ever used such an app.
The cost of mining is now a non-trivial percentage of the worlds economy. The miners now have to pay real world money to pay for the electricity and the money they borrowed to buy/build their rigs. This constant selling of crypto currency to finance the mining likely means that we have either seen the last crypto currency rally or maybe there is just one more left.
We have also now seen the limits of what crypto currencies can do and it looks like the existing banking infrastructure does it better...For now. Maybe a highly scalable proof of stake currency will be invented. Maybe one of this existing currencies can already securely do it. It's not going to be bitcoin though.
I see this all the time in security. The company responsible for the security isn't the one hurt by a security breach so they put almost no effort into security. Banks in the UK used to be the worst example of this. Internal fraud was so bad they would resist any controls so that they could deny it was their fault. Small toy companies and companies printing tickets had the best security. (Military security is in just incompetent by inertia)
What we need are regulations that shift the cost of security breaches onto the entities best able to prevent them. We also need to make stored data toxic so that most companies won't even keep your information.
You are the product. (Just like you are facebook and google's product). You are however your credit card companies customer. If there was pressure put on the credit companies not to share information with an insecure entity like Equifax then Equifax would either put some effort into security or go bankrupt. Equifax has to have a near complete picture of everyone's credit score to remain in business. If even a few creditors stopped sharing information with them they would be in big trouble.
So if you want to punish Equifax, somehow convince your bank or credit card company not to share their credit information with them. Not sure you will have any luck, but it's probably your best approach.