you're really helping your side with the whole "this isn't disparaging" thing
I never said anything about "this isn't disparaging". The name clearly has an offensive taint to it.
I said that it doesn't matter if they want to call themselves the Redskins or the Wetbacks or the Niggers or even the Senators (I apologize if that last one traumatized anyone), for all the government can and should do about it. If public pressure forces them to change their name, great. If Uncle Sam has to do it, we've actually all lost, despite a positive outcome.
The problem with discussions like this, we always see a certain group of people casually accusing of racism (or sexism or whatever-ism) anyone expressing a philosophical objection to a positive outcome by the use of dangerously precedent-setting government overreach.
Oh, cool, a conservative argument citing the 14th Amendment.
Believe it or not, the 14th amendment has done far more for the "bad" kind of conservatism than it has ever done for minorities. I alluded to the BS "money is speech" argument in my previous post - The 14th itself provided the core framework for decisions like that. We could even go so far as to claim that it made the whole "robber baron" stage of US industrialism possible.
Now all that said, I do find characterizing all American Indians as "history's losers" as offensive. And ignorant too.
They lost, and lost big. The European conquerors won. Simple as that.
I don't consider it "right", but I fail to see how you can realistically call it anything else. And yes, I understand that their conquerors only won thanks to a coincidental plague (really coincidental, not talking about "plague blankets" here, not even a European plague, but a native strain of hantavirus) wiping out up to 98% of the western hemisphere's former civilizations in the decades before the Mayflower.
And as for the idea that gaining an upper hand by force and treachery entitles you to do whatever you want to the other side, I find that repugnant.
Again, I don't consider it right, but I also don't dispute reality.
Specifically a free speech issue, in a way that "money is speech" doesn't even come close to.
A department of the US government has denied equal protection to an entity incorporated in the US on the basis of the political implications of what they want to say. Short of "free speech zones", you don't get a much more solid 1st amendment issue.
And they have history on their side - They won on appeal for exactly that reason last time. And they will win again this time.
Personally, I consider this whole issue much ado about nothing - The indians lost to the white demons; if a sports team wants to name themselves after history's losers, hey, their call.
We use expensive photovoltaic panels for ginormous solar power plants with active arrays spanning huge fields. We should use salt towers or parabolic reflectors.
Currently, we have the technology to make PV cells more efficient (44%) than the best of solar Stirling engines (32%); in practice, we can't mass produce either of those, but I believe you have it correct that we can do a lot better with the old-school Stirlings than we can with PV cells. So in that regard, I agree with you - Large-scale generating facilities should stick with the most cost-effective technology available. Why they would go with PV over something like a salt tower, I can't say - Perhaps the "fire and forget" aspect of it gives a better ROI than a site with moving parts that requires live human maintenance staff on-hand 24/7 (well, for solar, more like 8-12/7, but same idea)? I really don't know the answer to that one. I meant only to address the small-scale home producer. So continuing on that vein...
Who says you can't mount a shiny satellite dish on top your house?
Whether or not you legally could (I don't have the faintest idea how you would classify that under NFPA), that doesn't make it a good idea. Solar power depends entirely on the area of the shadow it casts, with 1kw/m^2 as a pretty good ballpark estimate of what you would get at 100% efficiency on a nice clear sunny day.
The old C-band satellite dishes "only" had an area of 2.5 to 7 square meters, and had some pretty serious issues with wind (which led to later models using that metal mesh design, which works just great for microwaves, not so great for visible light). For a typical household, you need around 1.5KW continuously (averaged over time) and 5KW peak. If you can only capture that for 6-8 hours a day, you need a 6-8KW array to realistically meet your needs. At 100% efficiency, that comes out to a size in the same ballpark as the larger of the old satellite dishes. Using the current Stirling record of 32% efficient puts us at 18-24 m^2, or a diameter of 4.8 to 5.5 meters - REALLY frickin' big, and I hope your roof can hold 10+ tons, plus a wind shear force of over 3300lbs at 50mph.
100% wrong. Maybe the company should have been better prepared, but the fact is they were attacked by a criminal who first hijacked and then destroyed possibly an enormous amount of value in people's data. He, she or they committed a horrible crime and should go to jail for a long time.
You'll notice that at no point did I excuse the criminal. I agree with you completely that we as a society should dedicate the resources to hunting him down and punishing him.
That doesn't change the fact that Code Spaces sold a project hosting solution, using all the "safety" and "redundancy" and ease of access of "the cloud" as direct marketing points, and as a result bear direct liability for negligence in failing to secure their systems. Why did they opt to close up shop? Not because they got hacked and lost their current customers' data, but because they know with 100% certainty that in the next few weeks, they will get sued into oblivion.
Yes, of course we still go after the bad guys... But sorry, the morons leaving the front door open don't just get a pass. If someone gets food poisoning from McDonald's, they don't get to pass the buck to the electric company for their refrigerators going off for a few hours, nor do they get to blame the "real" culprit, e coli. They should have known better, and so should Code Spaces.
And they would generate twice as much energy in the same land area with lower cost of manufacture if they had used parabolic reflector dishes and sterling engines attached to dynamo.
Quite a bit of difference between having a dedicated solar furnace in your back yard, vs covering already-wasted space on your roof with more-or-less passive 2x4ft "tiles" that just happen to produce a significant portion of your home's electricity.
That said, I think the big manufacturers have really missed an opportunity in exactly the opposite direction of that you suggest - I don't give a damn about efficiency or how much space it takes up, I care about price per watt. Sell me 10-20KW of 5% efficient panels for 25 cents per watt, and you'd have a very happy customer. Hell, I might even go out and rearrange them weekly to decorate the "back 40" with messages for passing airplanes.
Yes, we need more efficient solar cells to make up for the fact that people have a psychotic preference for living under stressful ultra-high density conditions (aka "cities"). We still have the other half of the human population living in places that don't stack housing like Tyson stacks chicken cages, however.
But useless for when you need to run the debugged program full-screen while watching what happens in a debugger, network sniffer, etc. at the same time. There really are times when you need multiple displays not just for the added screen area, but because each display is being used for something different.
You can still run a cheap 20" 1080p 2nd monitor while using a 4k as your primary.
I say this as a developer, who until recently used a 4-headed machine for most of my work - I haven't bothered to turn on a 2nd monitor since I got my 4k panel. It has the same combined screen real-estate, covers the same portion of my visual field, and has no annoying bezels between sections of screen. Not to mention, every time a single digitally-connected monitor turns off for any reason (oops, bumped the "input" button again on #3, damn!), Win7 "conveniently" dumps all your icons and programs to your primary... No longer an issue!
I don't claim that doesn't still leave situations where a 2nd head could come in useful (such as the case you mention), but I'll gladly trade a signifcant improvement 99% of the time, for a minor nuisance the three times a year it comes up.:)
The new rule enables WP to expel paid propagandists when they are caught breaking the new rule.
Jimmy W could do that now, without needing a "rule", justifying it simply by an appeal to common decency. Where else in life do we consider undisclosed paid placement of promotional content even remotely kosher?
But then, if Jimbo cared in the least about anything but donations at this point, he'd have already permabanned the literally hundreds of "editors" who contribute nothing more than edit wars over single word choices they feel very, very, very deeply about. How many of us have caught small errors on Wikipedia, considered fixing them, and said "meh, screw it" because of the high rate of some random 13YO editroll having the power to "correct" the work of a seasoned professional writing within their own domain of expertise?
Your question presupposes that every rational actor will always attempt to engage in the highest-profit activity possible without regard for external circumstances (or even simply personal preference). Why doesn't everyone become doctors-aspiring-to-play-pro-football?
In the John Deere and corn farmer examples, you quickly spotted the problem - John Deere doesn't want to mow lawns, they want to manufacture tractors; and yet, people do quite successfully buy Deere mowers and make a profit using them to mow lawns. Farmer Brown doesn't want to work in snackfood manufacturing, he wants to work the soil; and yet, Frito Lay manages to make a profit taking Farmer Brown's corn and turning it into Doritos.
Now, in the case of Bitcoin, your question has a simple, direct answer based on external factors: price volatility. If the US government bans Bitcoin tomorrow, would you want a multi-million dollar inventory of dedicated mining rigs on-hand? That doesn't mean they can't make money mining today, it just means they don't have all their eggs in the "make money mining for the next quarter" basket.
Especially if the bitcoin machines have to be tested with their final functionality, which is 100% indistinguishable from its end user utilization.
Given the lead times to order most ASIC rigs, I highly suspect the manufacturer's do keep them around for "testing" a good bit longer than strictly necessary. That still doesn't mean they want to operate a server farm as their core business rather than building and selling mining rigs for others.
Why would they not? All they would have to do is to not unplug their bitcoin rigs from their testing harness. In short, it takes them more effort to stop being miners than it does to be miners.
That doesn't even come close to "all" they would have to do. Capital has costs, ROI does not equal ROIC, and engaging in manufacturing conveys tax breaks that operating a server farm does not. It sounds great to say "just don't sell them", until you consider that that means, at the very least, writing down the cost of all on-hand inventory at the time and restating the past year's tax statements to reflect purchases for use rather than purchases for resale. Okay, you say, so they get a loan to cover the switch, and then start building just to mine - Good luck convincing any bank of that business plan! "We want you to finance our switch from high-tech manufacturing to bitcoin mining"...I can hear the laughter already.
I get your point, but I think you have massively oversimplified the differences between making ASIC rigs for resale vs making them to run in-house; you have also overlooked a variety of reasons one might want to do the former but not the latter. Whether or not they could make more doing the latter today actually comes pretty low on the list of reasons they should or shouldn't.
Offering a different version of a CS curriculum isn't offering a "pink CS degree"; it simply shows that there are different ways to be a CS major.
I see your point, but respectfully disagree. If GA Tech has found an effective alternative curriculum for CS (that doesn't amount to pumping out direct-to-MBA "programmers" who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag), good for them... But as you say, some boys like pink, so why resort to the good ol' fallback of promotional materials that appeal to gender stereotypes?
As for the likelyhood of the existence of alternative curricula... At my Alma Mater, most liberal arts majors included only one year of actual core reqs; most sciences, two. CS took up all but one semester of free electives, and included a math minor (it actually didn't, but one could - and I did - plan which maths to take so it lined up with a minor). And even with that behemoth of a curriculum, I honestly don't feel it produced, in most cases, graduates ready to start careers as productive programmers. Graduates well grounded in the fundamentals, and in my case, a great capstone for someone who started programming in 3rd grade? Absolutely! But very much not a "vocational training" approach to the field.
Now, could universities focus on just school-to-workforce training in their CS degrees? Sure! I would argue that that goes in entirely the opposite direction of what we mean here by "alternative" curricula, however. So how do you make a CS curriculum with less rigor, while not turning out the aforementioned equivalent of career-middle-managers with a CS undergrad? I have no idea. Even leaving out much of the higher math on the (IMO incorrect) assumption that 99% of programming tasks require nothing more than algebra, that would gain back a bit less than two semesters of class time, and still leave the core requirements brutally hard for those not inclined to "push through the pain" as a means to an end.
tldr: An "easy" CS major cannot exist in any workforce-meaningful way.
And we wonder why females have little interest in CS? The male version talks about gaming and creating toys, while the female version sounds like they want to target non-mathphobic social workers.
All the female programmers I know (yeah yeah, n=3, anecdata sucks) got into it for the same reasons as their male counterparts - The love of ripping into the metaphorical guts of a computer and bending it to their will. The love of gaming, whether or not it satisfies the current BS about "strong female protagonists". The pure joy of losing countless hours in the trance-like state we enter in a really good coding session.
Then again, they all self-describe as "Tom-boys", so I see it as entirely plausible that those women currently in CS simply fall into the small minority that do like the same things as male geeks. Even if that holds true, however, I find it fairly disturbing that anyone would seriously try to promote a CS degree by offering it in pink.
or do you think the shovel makers are just stupid enough to not to plug the usb cable into their own computer?
A market exists for mowing lawns. Do you consider John Deere too stupid to fuel up their own products and make a profit like that? A market exists for corn chips. Do you view the farmers as too stupid to grind and bake their own corn and bypass the middle men?
We don't see perfect vertical integration across all markets because sometimes, manufacturers want nothing to do with the end product. A lot of companies view BitCoin as a high risk opportunity; how do you get in on it while limiting exposure to that risk? Selling mining rigs looks like a pretty much ideal answer to that question, IMO. Now, could GAW or Butterfly potentially make more mining on their own gear? Currently, yes, they could. That doesn't mean they want that as a business model.
It doesn't matter if we WANT a "connected home". We are going to have it, like it or not. In a couple decades, it will be impossible to buy an appliance that isn't "connected'.
You could say that today about things like printers and TVs - They always seem to want you to plug in a network and tell them how to get to the outside world. But! We have one option that will always work - Don't plug it in. And if it uses wireless, well, you should already use MAC whitelisting on your router (yes, I know, not "real" security, but as with so many other things, it keeps the "honest" casual-thieves away).
Of course, with your TV, that will break functionality you may want, such as direct access to YouTube. With printers, I've never understood why they need to know how to get out of your LAN, they just need a valid local address; no gateway, no DNS required. And with your refrigerator, toaster, microwave oven? Sorry, but automatic restocking, a live video feed of the color of my toast, and remotely starting dinner don't really count as "killer apps" (except insofar as the last one will eventually lead to houses burning down as a result).
The real problem comes with more expensive things like cars, where the cost of giving it its own cell connection falls far short of the marketing value of selling out your driving habits; in that case, though, you can disable it, they just make it somewhat difficult (in the case of my most recent car, I needed to pull out the entire center console to get at and unplug the TMU). But overall, the way to keep your devices offline? Pull the plug, simple as that.
Yes, it does - But those all hold true. The corruption did occur under HFS+, and HFS+ did "lose" some portion of those files. It didn't, however, cause the corruption or the loss of those files. You have read attribution into a scenario where none exists.
In fairness, I will agree with you that TFS (and to a lesser degree, TFA) doesn't clearly discriminate between "HFS-induced damage" and "cosmic-ray-induced damage". But they both knew the root cause, and it wouldn't have made sense to blame it on HFS+ unless they did so as an outright deception. Do you claim they did so intentionally, or just that their wording leaves room for interpretation? If the latter, I will agree with you. If the former, I don't know what else to say except that I don't agree.
In a footnote he admits that the corruption was caused by hardware issues, not HFS+ bugs, and of course the summary ignores that completely.
The summary doesn't claim HFS caused the bitrot, you read that into it. The summary merely points out that HFS doesn't reliably detect and correct flaws in the underlying storage media (as does NTFS, as does almost every filesystem widely used).
More importantly, while merely detecting this issue may not incur too much overhead, correcting it requires some fairly large degree of redundancy. So although plenty of people have mentioned assorted alternative FSs that may (or may not) actually address the problem, doing so still requires wasting some not-insignificant percent of your disk space (a mere 10% of a 4TB drive would hold a whopping 90 full single-layer DVDs).
Joe Sixpack doesn't even get why 4TB doesn't equal 4 TiB; you expect him to understand the concept of parity striping to deal with cosmic rays randomly flipping bits on his platters? Try explaining that one to the public, and next time you visit Grandma, you can expect to find her PC dead because she wrapped it in tinfoil, including the ventilation fans.
Why is it not safe for them to drive to the airports, but it's safe for them to drive elsewhere?
Because states get huge amounts of money tacked on to cab fares to and from airports, it would clearly count as much, much less safe to the state's coffers.
Can't have any of those dirty ridesharing hippies putting a sweet revenue stream at risk!
The new computer is meant to solve a coming crisis due to limitations around DRAM and Flash.
Would someone like to elaborate on this "coming crisis" that memristors magically solve?
I can think of plenty of limitations (in the present) to DRAM and flash that merely throwing money at the problem can't solve. I can also think of a few good uses for viable memristor technology (instant-wake hibernating-as-the-default-state computers as the obvious first use). I can't, however, think of any "crisis" that adding a pinch of memristor phlebotinum would solve.
This will end up as just another pointless "look, we actually do something!" PR stunt, with the inevitable outcome of a token "no admission of wrongdoing" fine that amounts to 30 seconds' worth of Apple's profits and probably doesn't even pay for the "investigation".
I don't like that multinationals have perfected the art of gaming the world's tax systems, but I highly doubt Apple (and others) actually broke any laws here. Intra-company licensing fees make it trivial to shuffle both income and expenses around the world to the most favorable jurisdictions; and tax havens like Ireland that use territorial taxation make it too easy to pick a destination for reporting profits.
We don't need an investigation, we need serious tax reform. As a complete no-brainer, we could solve 99% of the problem (and not just the tax problem, but also the "3rd world child slave labor as a manufacturing strategy" problem as well) by simply disallowing cross-border cost allocation. You sell something in the US? You only get to offset that revenue (for tax purposes) with US expenses, and no, you can't sell yourself Indonesian-made iPads and call it a US expense. You have legitimate expenses? You'd damned well better have domestic profits to offset them, then, or you get to eat them. Can't afford your slave workforce anymore? Cry me a frickin' river.
But that will never happen, because no one in power seriously wants the situation to change. You think the EU doesn't understand the benefit they get from a massive influx of capital via Ireland (even if not taxed directly, it still moves around the economy)? I have a bridge to sell you. Even US leaders have no motivation to act, because it takes a hell of a lot less effort to control a welfare-dependent population than a self-sufficient one. As they see it, the higher the unemployment rate (or better, the higher the full time minimum wage employment rate - Someone has to serve Larry Ellison his lattes and Obama his chili-dogs, after all), the better.
Uhhh most states have 'fire at will' laws that mean you can get rid of a person for any reason or no reason whatsoever.
At-will employment describes the default state, in the absence of a contract specifying the terms of employment. Public teachers in most (all?) states work under the terms of a contract. You can't, therefore, simply fire teachers without cause - You need to find a reason allowed under the terms of the contract to get rid of them. "Tenure" doesn't describe some magical untouchable status; it just means that in the absence of a legitimate reason to fire someone, the contractual obligations on the school district require reductions in staffing levels to take place in reverse order of seniority.
That makes this ruling particularly interesting, because it means that a judge has ruled that the right to an education trumps contractual obligations, such as LIFO workforce reductions.
It would very much surprise me if this ruling doesn't get obliterated by the USSC; if it stands, this ruling will rank on par with Reagan's gutting of PATCO for significance, and possibly moreso - With ATCs, you can more-or-less legitimately call them part of a critical national infrastructure. Teachers' unions, not so much. If we allow school districts to invalidate mutually agreed-upon contractual obligations, we could realistically see public sector unions cease to exist altogether. And in some ways, I would approve of that outcome, though I very much don't approve of the means - When we allow unilateral "renegotiation", the government stops looking like a legitimate employer, and starts looking like the local mafia.
Put another way - You think we have some real losers in education today? Just wait until you see what we get when only the absolute bottom of the barrel would seriously consider public education as a career. Now extend that to police, fire, DOT, etc.
I find it truly delightful that the NSA has accidentally accomplished one small aspect of their cover-story mission through their bad PR of late...
By making us paranoid of the documented snooping of our own government, the NSA has managed to do what the likes of Bruce Stirling and Phil Zimmerman failed to accomplish for decades - Get us to finally start encrypting everything possible, from end-to-end. This code audit of TrueCrypt counts as only one tiny part of that whole, but attitudes have changed for the better!
My driving skills are too complex to obey the speed limit.
Bernie Madoff's finances were too complex to obey SEC regulations.
God's will is too complex to charge priests as pedophiles.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's relationship with his brother is too complex to charge him in the bombing.
You buyin' any of that bullshit, NSA? Yeah, neither do we.
How about "Edward Snowden's political views are too complex to charge him with treason". You understand that?
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you're really helping your side with the whole "this isn't disparaging" thing
I never said anything about "this isn't disparaging". The name clearly has an offensive taint to it.
I said that it doesn't matter if they want to call themselves the Redskins or the Wetbacks or the Niggers or even the Senators (I apologize if that last one traumatized anyone), for all the government can and should do about it. If public pressure forces them to change their name, great. If Uncle Sam has to do it, we've actually all lost, despite a positive outcome.
The problem with discussions like this, we always see a certain group of people casually accusing of racism (or sexism or whatever-ism) anyone expressing a philosophical objection to a positive outcome by the use of dangerously precedent-setting government overreach.
Oh, cool, a conservative argument citing the 14th Amendment.
Believe it or not, the 14th amendment has done far more for the "bad" kind of conservatism than it has ever done for minorities. I alluded to the BS "money is speech" argument in my previous post - The 14th itself provided the core framework for decisions like that. We could even go so far as to claim that it made the whole "robber baron" stage of US industrialism possible.
Now all that said, I do find characterizing all American Indians as "history's losers" as offensive. And ignorant too.
They lost, and lost big. The European conquerors won. Simple as that.
I don't consider it "right", but I fail to see how you can realistically call it anything else. And yes, I understand that their conquerors only won thanks to a coincidental plague (really coincidental, not talking about "plague blankets" here, not even a European plague, but a native strain of hantavirus) wiping out up to 98% of the western hemisphere's former civilizations in the decades before the Mayflower.
And as for the idea that gaining an upper hand by force and treachery entitles you to do whatever you want to the other side, I find that repugnant.
Again, I don't consider it right, but I also don't dispute reality.
Hardly a free speech issue.
Specifically a free speech issue, in a way that "money is speech" doesn't even come close to.
A department of the US government has denied equal protection to an entity incorporated in the US on the basis of the political implications of what they want to say. Short of "free speech zones", you don't get a much more solid 1st amendment issue.
And they have history on their side - They won on appeal for exactly that reason last time. And they will win again this time.
Personally, I consider this whole issue much ado about nothing - The indians lost to the white demons; if a sports team wants to name themselves after history's losers, hey, their call.
We use expensive photovoltaic panels for ginormous solar power plants with active arrays spanning huge fields. We should use salt towers or parabolic reflectors.
:)
Currently, we have the technology to make PV cells more efficient (44%) than the best of solar Stirling engines (32%); in practice, we can't mass produce either of those, but I believe you have it correct that we can do a lot better with the old-school Stirlings than we can with PV cells. So in that regard, I agree with you - Large-scale generating facilities should stick with the most cost-effective technology available. Why they would go with PV over something like a salt tower, I can't say - Perhaps the "fire and forget" aspect of it gives a better ROI than a site with moving parts that requires live human maintenance staff on-hand 24/7 (well, for solar, more like 8-12/7, but same idea)? I really don't know the answer to that one. I meant only to address the small-scale home producer. So continuing on that vein...
Who says you can't mount a shiny satellite dish on top your house?
Whether or not you legally could (I don't have the faintest idea how you would classify that under NFPA), that doesn't make it a good idea. Solar power depends entirely on the area of the shadow it casts, with 1kw/m^2 as a pretty good ballpark estimate of what you would get at 100% efficiency on a nice clear sunny day.
The old C-band satellite dishes "only" had an area of 2.5 to 7 square meters, and had some pretty serious issues with wind (which led to later models using that metal mesh design, which works just great for microwaves, not so great for visible light). For a typical household, you need around 1.5KW continuously (averaged over time) and 5KW peak. If you can only capture that for 6-8 hours a day, you need a 6-8KW array to realistically meet your needs. At 100% efficiency, that comes out to a size in the same ballpark as the larger of the old satellite dishes. Using the current Stirling record of 32% efficient puts us at 18-24 m^2, or a diameter of 4.8 to 5.5 meters - REALLY frickin' big, and I hope your roof can hold 10+ tons, plus a wind shear force of over 3300lbs at 50mph.
Panels make a lot more sense on a small scale.
100% wrong. Maybe the company should have been better prepared, but the fact is they were attacked by a criminal who first hijacked and then destroyed possibly an enormous amount of value in people's data. He, she or they committed a horrible crime and should go to jail for a long time.
You'll notice that at no point did I excuse the criminal. I agree with you completely that we as a society should dedicate the resources to hunting him down and punishing him.
That doesn't change the fact that Code Spaces sold a project hosting solution, using all the "safety" and "redundancy" and ease of access of "the cloud" as direct marketing points, and as a result bear direct liability for negligence in failing to secure their systems. Why did they opt to close up shop? Not because they got hacked and lost their current customers' data, but because they know with 100% certainty that in the next few weeks, they will get sued into oblivion.
Yes, of course we still go after the bad guys... But sorry, the morons leaving the front door open don't just get a pass. If someone gets food poisoning from McDonald's, they don't get to pass the buck to the electric company for their refrigerators going off for a few hours, nor do they get to blame the "real" culprit, e coli. They should have known better, and so should Code Spaces.
And they would generate twice as much energy in the same land area with lower cost of manufacture if they had used parabolic reflector dishes and sterling engines attached to dynamo.
Quite a bit of difference between having a dedicated solar furnace in your back yard, vs covering already-wasted space on your roof with more-or-less passive 2x4ft "tiles" that just happen to produce a significant portion of your home's electricity.
That said, I think the big manufacturers have really missed an opportunity in exactly the opposite direction of that you suggest - I don't give a damn about efficiency or how much space it takes up, I care about price per watt. Sell me 10-20KW of 5% efficient panels for 25 cents per watt, and you'd have a very happy customer. Hell, I might even go out and rearrange them weekly to decorate the "back 40" with messages for passing airplanes.
Yes, we need more efficient solar cells to make up for the fact that people have a psychotic preference for living under stressful ultra-high density conditions (aka "cities"). We still have the other half of the human population living in places that don't stack housing like Tyson stacks chicken cages, however.
Besides, where does this "blame the victim" attitude always come from? It's ridiculous.
Bad people exist. Plan accordingly, or don't come crying when you get hacked.
Otherwise, I agree with you, this looks more like an oversight of risk management: When wandering around the park at 2am in a mini-dress... don't.
But useless for when you need to run the debugged program full-screen while watching what happens in a debugger, network sniffer, etc. at the same time. There really are times when you need multiple displays not just for the added screen area, but because each display is being used for something different.
:)
You can still run a cheap 20" 1080p 2nd monitor while using a 4k as your primary.
I say this as a developer, who until recently used a 4-headed machine for most of my work - I haven't bothered to turn on a 2nd monitor since I got my 4k panel. It has the same combined screen real-estate, covers the same portion of my visual field, and has no annoying bezels between sections of screen. Not to mention, every time a single digitally-connected monitor turns off for any reason (oops, bumped the "input" button again on #3, damn!), Win7 "conveniently" dumps all your icons and programs to your primary... No longer an issue!
I don't claim that doesn't still leave situations where a 2nd head could come in useful (such as the case you mention), but I'll gladly trade a signifcant improvement 99% of the time, for a minor nuisance the three times a year it comes up.
The new rule enables WP to expel paid propagandists when they are caught breaking the new rule.
Jimmy W could do that now, without needing a "rule", justifying it simply by an appeal to common decency. Where else in life do we consider undisclosed paid placement of promotional content even remotely kosher?
But then, if Jimbo cared in the least about anything but donations at this point, he'd have already permabanned the literally hundreds of "editors" who contribute nothing more than edit wars over single word choices they feel very, very, very deeply about. How many of us have caught small errors on Wikipedia, considered fixing them, and said "meh, screw it" because of the high rate of some random 13YO editroll having the power to "correct" the work of a seasoned professional writing within their own domain of expertise?
Why would they not?
Your question presupposes that every rational actor will always attempt to engage in the highest-profit activity possible without regard for external circumstances (or even simply personal preference). Why doesn't everyone become doctors-aspiring-to-play-pro-football?
In the John Deere and corn farmer examples, you quickly spotted the problem - John Deere doesn't want to mow lawns, they want to manufacture tractors; and yet, people do quite successfully buy Deere mowers and make a profit using them to mow lawns. Farmer Brown doesn't want to work in snackfood manufacturing, he wants to work the soil; and yet, Frito Lay manages to make a profit taking Farmer Brown's corn and turning it into Doritos.
Now, in the case of Bitcoin, your question has a simple, direct answer based on external factors: price volatility. If the US government bans Bitcoin tomorrow, would you want a multi-million dollar inventory of dedicated mining rigs on-hand? That doesn't mean they can't make money mining today, it just means they don't have all their eggs in the "make money mining for the next quarter" basket.
Especially if the bitcoin machines have to be tested with their final functionality, which is 100% indistinguishable from its end user utilization.
Given the lead times to order most ASIC rigs, I highly suspect the manufacturer's do keep them around for "testing" a good bit longer than strictly necessary. That still doesn't mean they want to operate a server farm as their core business rather than building and selling mining rigs for others.
Why would they not? All they would have to do is to not unplug their bitcoin rigs from their testing harness. In short, it takes them more effort to stop being miners than it does to be miners.
That doesn't even come close to "all" they would have to do. Capital has costs, ROI does not equal ROIC, and engaging in manufacturing conveys tax breaks that operating a server farm does not. It sounds great to say "just don't sell them", until you consider that that means, at the very least, writing down the cost of all on-hand inventory at the time and restating the past year's tax statements to reflect purchases for use rather than purchases for resale. Okay, you say, so they get a loan to cover the switch, and then start building just to mine - Good luck convincing any bank of that business plan! "We want you to finance our switch from high-tech manufacturing to bitcoin mining"...I can hear the laughter already.
I get your point, but I think you have massively oversimplified the differences between making ASIC rigs for resale vs making them to run in-house; you have also overlooked a variety of reasons one might want to do the former but not the latter. Whether or not they could make more doing the latter today actually comes pretty low on the list of reasons they should or shouldn't.
Offering a different version of a CS curriculum isn't offering a "pink CS degree"; it simply shows that there are different ways to be a CS major.
I see your point, but respectfully disagree. If GA Tech has found an effective alternative curriculum for CS (that doesn't amount to pumping out direct-to-MBA "programmers" who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag), good for them... But as you say, some boys like pink, so why resort to the good ol' fallback of promotional materials that appeal to gender stereotypes?
As for the likelyhood of the existence of alternative curricula... At my Alma Mater, most liberal arts majors included only one year of actual core reqs; most sciences, two. CS took up all but one semester of free electives, and included a math minor (it actually didn't, but one could - and I did - plan which maths to take so it lined up with a minor). And even with that behemoth of a curriculum, I honestly don't feel it produced, in most cases, graduates ready to start careers as productive programmers. Graduates well grounded in the fundamentals, and in my case, a great capstone for someone who started programming in 3rd grade? Absolutely! But very much not a "vocational training" approach to the field.
Now, could universities focus on just school-to-workforce training in their CS degrees? Sure! I would argue that that goes in entirely the opposite direction of what we mean here by "alternative" curricula, however. So how do you make a CS curriculum with less rigor, while not turning out the aforementioned equivalent of career-middle-managers with a CS undergrad? I have no idea. Even leaving out much of the higher math on the (IMO incorrect) assumption that 99% of programming tasks require nothing more than algebra, that would gain back a bit less than two semesters of class time, and still leave the core requirements brutally hard for those not inclined to "push through the pain" as a means to an end.
tldr: An "easy" CS major cannot exist in any workforce-meaningful way.
And we wonder why females have little interest in CS? The male version talks about gaming and creating toys, while the female version sounds like they want to target non-mathphobic social workers.
All the female programmers I know (yeah yeah, n=3, anecdata sucks) got into it for the same reasons as their male counterparts - The love of ripping into the metaphorical guts of a computer and bending it to their will. The love of gaming, whether or not it satisfies the current BS about "strong female protagonists". The pure joy of losing countless hours in the trance-like state we enter in a really good coding session.
Then again, they all self-describe as "Tom-boys", so I see it as entirely plausible that those women currently in CS simply fall into the small minority that do like the same things as male geeks. Even if that holds true, however, I find it fairly disturbing that anyone would seriously try to promote a CS degree by offering it in pink.
or do you think the shovel makers are just stupid enough to not to plug the usb cable into their own computer?
A market exists for mowing lawns. Do you consider John Deere too stupid to fuel up their own products and make a profit like that? A market exists for corn chips. Do you view the farmers as too stupid to grind and bake their own corn and bypass the middle men?
We don't see perfect vertical integration across all markets because sometimes, manufacturers want nothing to do with the end product. A lot of companies view BitCoin as a high risk opportunity; how do you get in on it while limiting exposure to that risk? Selling mining rigs looks like a pretty much ideal answer to that question, IMO. Now, could GAW or Butterfly potentially make more mining on their own gear? Currently, yes, they could. That doesn't mean they want that as a business model.
Anaphylaxis is not the only allergic reaction.
Absolutely true! But, uh... "tummy ache" ain't one of them. Not even with really bad puking and diarrhea. Sorry.
It doesn't really matter what the operating system is if the security bug is inside the software you need to run.
You may have meant this, but I would rephrase that to: "if the security bug is the software you need to run".
/ Fuck the Internet of Things, aka "Please let Madison Ave into your kitchen".
It doesn't matter if we WANT a "connected home". We are going to have it, like it or not. In a couple decades, it will be impossible to buy an appliance that isn't "connected'.
You could say that today about things like printers and TVs - They always seem to want you to plug in a network and tell them how to get to the outside world. But! We have one option that will always work - Don't plug it in. And if it uses wireless, well, you should already use MAC whitelisting on your router (yes, I know, not "real" security, but as with so many other things, it keeps the "honest" casual-thieves away).
Of course, with your TV, that will break functionality you may want, such as direct access to YouTube. With printers, I've never understood why they need to know how to get out of your LAN, they just need a valid local address; no gateway, no DNS required. And with your refrigerator, toaster, microwave oven? Sorry, but automatic restocking, a live video feed of the color of my toast, and remotely starting dinner don't really count as "killer apps" (except insofar as the last one will eventually lead to houses burning down as a result).
The real problem comes with more expensive things like cars, where the cost of giving it its own cell connection falls far short of the marketing value of selling out your driving habits; in that case, though, you can disable it, they just make it somewhat difficult (in the case of my most recent car, I needed to pull out the entire center console to get at and unplug the TMU). But overall, the way to keep your devices offline? Pull the plug, simple as that.
Yes, it does - But those all hold true. The corruption did occur under HFS+, and HFS+ did "lose" some portion of those files. It didn't, however, cause the corruption or the loss of those files. You have read attribution into a scenario where none exists.
In fairness, I will agree with you that TFS (and to a lesser degree, TFA) doesn't clearly discriminate between "HFS-induced damage" and "cosmic-ray-induced damage". But they both knew the root cause, and it wouldn't have made sense to blame it on HFS+ unless they did so as an outright deception. Do you claim they did so intentionally, or just that their wording leaves room for interpretation? If the latter, I will agree with you. If the former, I don't know what else to say except that I don't agree.
In a footnote he admits that the corruption was caused by hardware issues, not HFS+ bugs, and of course the summary ignores that completely.
The summary doesn't claim HFS caused the bitrot, you read that into it. The summary merely points out that HFS doesn't reliably detect and correct flaws in the underlying storage media (as does NTFS, as does almost every filesystem widely used).
More importantly, while merely detecting this issue may not incur too much overhead, correcting it requires some fairly large degree of redundancy. So although plenty of people have mentioned assorted alternative FSs that may (or may not) actually address the problem, doing so still requires wasting some not-insignificant percent of your disk space (a mere 10% of a 4TB drive would hold a whopping 90 full single-layer DVDs).
Joe Sixpack doesn't even get why 4TB doesn't equal 4 TiB; you expect him to understand the concept of parity striping to deal with cosmic rays randomly flipping bits on his platters? Try explaining that one to the public, and next time you visit Grandma, you can expect to find her PC dead because she wrapped it in tinfoil, including the ventilation fans.
Why is it not safe for them to drive to the airports, but it's safe for them to drive elsewhere?
Because states get huge amounts of money tacked on to cab fares to and from airports, it would clearly count as much, much less safe to the state's coffers.
Can't have any of those dirty ridesharing hippies putting a sweet revenue stream at risk!
"This Amazon circus just shows us the dangers with a monopoly where one player dictates what can be purchased and sold" ...
... You said, in response to someone pointing out that a COMPETITOR of Amazon will still gladly take your money in exchange for goods and services.
/ I do not think it means what you think it means
The new computer is meant to solve a coming crisis due to limitations around DRAM and Flash.
Would someone like to elaborate on this "coming crisis" that memristors magically solve?
I can think of plenty of limitations (in the present) to DRAM and flash that merely throwing money at the problem can't solve. I can also think of a few good uses for viable memristor technology (instant-wake hibernating-as-the-default-state computers as the obvious first use). I can't, however, think of any "crisis" that adding a pinch of memristor phlebotinum would solve.
This will end up as just another pointless "look, we actually do something!" PR stunt, with the inevitable outcome of a token "no admission of wrongdoing" fine that amounts to 30 seconds' worth of Apple's profits and probably doesn't even pay for the "investigation".
I don't like that multinationals have perfected the art of gaming the world's tax systems, but I highly doubt Apple (and others) actually broke any laws here. Intra-company licensing fees make it trivial to shuffle both income and expenses around the world to the most favorable jurisdictions; and tax havens like Ireland that use territorial taxation make it too easy to pick a destination for reporting profits.
We don't need an investigation, we need serious tax reform. As a complete no-brainer, we could solve 99% of the problem (and not just the tax problem, but also the "3rd world child slave labor as a manufacturing strategy" problem as well) by simply disallowing cross-border cost allocation. You sell something in the US? You only get to offset that revenue (for tax purposes) with US expenses, and no, you can't sell yourself Indonesian-made iPads and call it a US expense. You have legitimate expenses? You'd damned well better have domestic profits to offset them, then, or you get to eat them. Can't afford your slave workforce anymore? Cry me a frickin' river.
But that will never happen, because no one in power seriously wants the situation to change. You think the EU doesn't understand the benefit they get from a massive influx of capital via Ireland (even if not taxed directly, it still moves around the economy)? I have a bridge to sell you. Even US leaders have no motivation to act, because it takes a hell of a lot less effort to control a welfare-dependent population than a self-sufficient one. As they see it, the higher the unemployment rate (or better, the higher the full time minimum wage employment rate - Someone has to serve Larry Ellison his lattes and Obama his chili-dogs, after all), the better.
Uhhh most states have 'fire at will' laws that mean you can get rid of a person for any reason or no reason whatsoever.
At-will employment describes the default state, in the absence of a contract specifying the terms of employment. Public teachers in most (all?) states work under the terms of a contract. You can't, therefore, simply fire teachers without cause - You need to find a reason allowed under the terms of the contract to get rid of them. "Tenure" doesn't describe some magical untouchable status; it just means that in the absence of a legitimate reason to fire someone, the contractual obligations on the school district require reductions in staffing levels to take place in reverse order of seniority.
That makes this ruling particularly interesting, because it means that a judge has ruled that the right to an education trumps contractual obligations, such as LIFO workforce reductions.
It would very much surprise me if this ruling doesn't get obliterated by the USSC; if it stands, this ruling will rank on par with Reagan's gutting of PATCO for significance, and possibly moreso - With ATCs, you can more-or-less legitimately call them part of a critical national infrastructure. Teachers' unions, not so much. If we allow school districts to invalidate mutually agreed-upon contractual obligations, we could realistically see public sector unions cease to exist altogether. And in some ways, I would approve of that outcome, though I very much don't approve of the means - When we allow unilateral "renegotiation", the government stops looking like a legitimate employer, and starts looking like the local mafia.
Put another way - You think we have some real losers in education today? Just wait until you see what we get when only the absolute bottom of the barrel would seriously consider public education as a career. Now extend that to police, fire, DOT, etc.
I find it truly delightful that the NSA has accidentally accomplished one small aspect of their cover-story mission through their bad PR of late...
By making us paranoid of the documented snooping of our own government, the NSA has managed to do what the likes of Bruce Stirling and Phil Zimmerman failed to accomplish for decades - Get us to finally start encrypting everything possible, from end-to-end. This code audit of TrueCrypt counts as only one tiny part of that whole, but attitudes have changed for the better!
My driving skills are too complex to obey the speed limit.
Bernie Madoff's finances were too complex to obey SEC regulations.
God's will is too complex to charge priests as pedophiles.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's relationship with his brother is too complex to charge him in the bombing.
You buyin' any of that bullshit, NSA? Yeah, neither do we.
How about "Edward Snowden's political views are too complex to charge him with treason". You understand that?