Are these government shutdowns and "hostage crises" the new normal for our federal government? With the increasing polarization of Congress, it seems to be the case. People overwhelmingly do not like it (Congress has something like 10% approval rate), yet cannot resolve it through the normal election process. What can we do about it?
Just wanted to add that being "highly skilled" never protected anyone. If fact, acquiring these sophisticated skills exposes one to a higher risk, as there not many jobs requiring those skills. The higher pay is partially to compensate for higher risk.
This parallels my viewpoint. Extrapolating historical data is unwise in this case. The main difference nowadays is that computers and automation are reaching a level of sophistication that surpassed the abilities of a sizable percentage of the population. This bar is being steadily raised. The outlook for these displaced workers does not look promising. They are basically competing for a shrinking pool of low-skilled jobs that are already possible to automate, but just slightly too costly. I think this situation is markedly different from that in the times of the Luddites. Back then the displaced factory workers could eventually find jobs matching their abilities.
Hmm.. smells like a troll.. Ignoring a possible threat to the White House or the Capitol is not something a self-respecting news organization would do. This definitely takes priority (for a short time) over the dragged out debate on government spending. Looks like they fixed their front page.
While most of the posters here are expressing anger, let me second your emotion of fear. I am afraid that a poorly thought out redesign will destroy the Slashdot community and scatter the comment contributors, never to return. While the layout is an issue, it can be (mostly) fixed client-side. The main thing we have to watch out for are server-side changes. There are many Slashdot features that, if removed, would tremendously reduce the value it offers. The value of these features may not be immediately obvious. This site has evolved over a very long time.
I hope they preserve the server side of Slashdot and only mess with the CSS. What alarms me is that many server-side features are missing from the beta version...
It does not seem like their method truly verifies the solution. It only checks that the quantum computer is functioning correctly for specific problems with known solutions. By inserting these problems in many places in the quantum algorithm, they verify that the quantum computer was working correctly for the entire duration of the computation. Maybe that grants enough confidence in the solution... I don't know.
This should have been the story. The launch itself is not as technically interesting, even though it is a new version of Falcon 9. Waiting for the video and timeline of the descent of the first stage. A cheer for reusable rocketry!
Letting a short-term downturn in natural gas prices ruin other established energy producers just strikes me as unwise. Reliable energy infrastructure, like nuclear power, takes decades to build up. Natural gas prices are volatile. It may be cheap now, and may easily double or quadruple again in the near future for unforeseen reasons. Nuclear power is not volatile like this.
While I'm all for nuclear power, I think we also have a pretty boring alternative: solver power combined with pumped hydro (or air) storage. This combination of relatively benign technologies is becoming more and more viable. Large pumped storage facilities are already online and have proven economical to operate. There are plenty of deserts to put up solar power plants, and costs are dropping. Investment in both nuclear in more boring solar power plus storage are both warranted. Wind doesn't strike me as nearly as reliable as the sun in a desert, though.
Your analysis seems mostly correct. However, what would you make of suicide bombers? They don't survive the attack, so can't attack again. But this terrorism tactic still seems to be effective, or they would not continue using it. So the existence of a larger terrorist organization besides the attackers themselves must factor into the effect.
I'm thinking that at some point electrical utilities will lobby to stop people from connecting PV systems directly into their household grid. It is hugely unprofitable for them to pay people the full delivered electricity rate for uncontrolled power generation. Maybe they will require a separate meter for the power generating part of your installation and pay you a much lower rate for the generated power. Making that meter part of the smart grid, so that the electric company would have the ability to turn on or off your electricity generation can probably bump up the rate paid for generated power, bus still to less then half the consumer rate. As grid-connected PV installations become more common, I think this change is inevitable.
Also, the cost of the entire installation should be taken into account. The cost of land and inverters all add into this. So a 2x more efficient but 4x more expensive panel is most likely a win.
I think most non-finance people who read a little about high-frequency trading systems are repulsed by the concept. Can someone point out a useful economic function for them?
One the one hand they dramatically reduce the bid-ask spread for low-volume trades. But is that really all that economically beneficial?
On the other hand, they prey on large trades that mutual funds must place to rebalance their holdings. This probably hurts the average investor quite a lot.
Some claim that they increase liquidity and reduce volatility. Is that really so?
Someone down the thread points out that the light travel time from DC to Chicago is 3.757 ms. So maybe legally the perpetrators are in the clear (at least in their minds)?
He was likely trading against others who also had the same insider information but put in their trades at the correct time, allowing for the speed of light. If the FTC did not punish this kind of behavior severely, others would very soon follow this example. Or is this already commonplace?
Correct. Now the question is: Can they be prosecuted for insider trading? This is an interesting situation where the speed of light may factor into the legality of their action.
Perhaps letting non-moderators express their interest in low-modded posts would be a good idea. How much interest is expressed would be visible only to moderators. This may help moderators focus their efforts.
It'll probably remain a dream, since it will be impossible to keep all these little internet-connected devices secure. Or do they have a good plan for keeping these devices updated when vulnerabilities are inevitably discovered?
This is probably the next logical step in the evolution of fighter aircraft. Maintaining a reliable wireless link for quick maneuvers might be an issue. Maybe the maneuvering can be semi-automated.
I can sympathize with the police too, as they are usually underfunded for doing the more demanding enforcement work. We can't pretend the extra revenue from traffic tickets is not a motivator. The situation in poorer countries is far worse, where severe underfunding drives the cops into corruption, and they won't even attempt to catch a criminal unless the victim pays them first.
Police is not an easy thing to get right. It might be much easier to reduce crime in other ways, such as legalizing certain things (like drugs) and economic assistance to high-risk (poor) people/neighborhoods.
That's a helpful explanation. So basically the tasked police officers do traffic enforcement when they are not needed for other duties, like making arrests. Still, I'm pretty sure these cops have a bad reputation for a reason. They often treat the general public very badly (perhaps because they dealt with some really bad criminals in the past). And as the story we're discussing points out, they do tend to issue tickets for the most trivial stuff. Maybe they would be better off patrolling the bad neighborhoods. Or maybe we don't need as many of them, and more detectives.. etc.
While you're right about traffic deaths, it is still dubious for me how most traffic tickets save lives. Using a phone while stopped at a traffic light? Running a stop sign at low speed? Parking violations? Speeding 10 mph above the speed limit? I don't know. It's a very gray area. More serious crime, on the other hand, is pretty destructive to communities. I wonder if police behavior is actually driven by statistics of which policing activity is the most beneficial versus which is just easier?
What I don't like about cops is that they prefer to enforce laws that are easy to enforce. They happily issue lots of traffic tickets, while drug dealers, rapists, murderers, burglars, muggers, etc. are not getting caught.
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I would be happy if they had a Vocaloid perform at the opening ceremony.
Are these government shutdowns and "hostage crises" the new normal for our federal government? With the increasing polarization of Congress, it seems to be the case. People overwhelmingly do not like it (Congress has something like 10% approval rate), yet cannot resolve it through the normal election process. What can we do about it?
Just wanted to add that being "highly skilled" never protected anyone. If fact, acquiring these sophisticated skills exposes one to a higher risk, as there not many jobs requiring those skills. The higher pay is partially to compensate for higher risk.
This parallels my viewpoint. Extrapolating historical data is unwise in this case. The main difference nowadays is that computers and automation are reaching a level of sophistication that surpassed the abilities of a sizable percentage of the population. This bar is being steadily raised. The outlook for these displaced workers does not look promising. They are basically competing for a shrinking pool of low-skilled jobs that are already possible to automate, but just slightly too costly. I think this situation is markedly different from that in the times of the Luddites. Back then the displaced factory workers could eventually find jobs matching their abilities.
Hmm.. smells like a troll.. Ignoring a possible threat to the White House or the Capitol is not something a self-respecting news organization would do. This definitely takes priority (for a short time) over the dragged out debate on government spending. Looks like they fixed their front page.
While most of the posters here are expressing anger, let me second your emotion of fear. I am afraid that a poorly thought out redesign will destroy the Slashdot community and scatter the comment contributors, never to return. While the layout is an issue, it can be (mostly) fixed client-side. The main thing we have to watch out for are server-side changes. There are many Slashdot features that, if removed, would tremendously reduce the value it offers. The value of these features may not be immediately obvious. This site has evolved over a very long time.
I hope they preserve the server side of Slashdot and only mess with the CSS. What alarms me is that many server-side features are missing from the beta version...
It does not seem like their method truly verifies the solution. It only checks that the quantum computer is functioning correctly for specific problems with known solutions. By inserting these problems in many places in the quantum algorithm, they verify that the quantum computer was working correctly for the entire duration of the computation. Maybe that grants enough confidence in the solution... I don't know.
This should have been the story. The launch itself is not as technically interesting, even though it is a new version of Falcon 9. Waiting for the video and timeline of the descent of the first stage. A cheer for reusable rocketry!
Letting a short-term downturn in natural gas prices ruin other established energy producers just strikes me as unwise. Reliable energy infrastructure, like nuclear power, takes decades to build up. Natural gas prices are volatile. It may be cheap now, and may easily double or quadruple again in the near future for unforeseen reasons. Nuclear power is not volatile like this.
While I'm all for nuclear power, I think we also have a pretty boring alternative: solver power combined with pumped hydro (or air) storage. This combination of relatively benign technologies is becoming more and more viable. Large pumped storage facilities are already online and have proven economical to operate. There are plenty of deserts to put up solar power plants, and costs are dropping. Investment in both nuclear in more boring solar power plus storage are both warranted. Wind doesn't strike me as nearly as reliable as the sun in a desert, though.
Your analysis seems mostly correct. However, what would you make of suicide bombers? They don't survive the attack, so can't attack again. But this terrorism tactic still seems to be effective, or they would not continue using it. So the existence of a larger terrorist organization besides the attackers themselves must factor into the effect.
I'm thinking that at some point electrical utilities will lobby to stop people from connecting PV systems directly into their household grid. It is hugely unprofitable for them to pay people the full delivered electricity rate for uncontrolled power generation. Maybe they will require a separate meter for the power generating part of your installation and pay you a much lower rate for the generated power. Making that meter part of the smart grid, so that the electric company would have the ability to turn on or off your electricity generation can probably bump up the rate paid for generated power, bus still to less then half the consumer rate. As grid-connected PV installations become more common, I think this change is inevitable.
Also, the cost of the entire installation should be taken into account. The cost of land and inverters all add into this. So a 2x more efficient but 4x more expensive panel is most likely a win.
I think most non-finance people who read a little about high-frequency trading systems are repulsed by the concept. Can someone point out a useful economic function for them?
One the one hand they dramatically reduce the bid-ask spread for low-volume trades. But is that really all that economically beneficial?
On the other hand, they prey on large trades that mutual funds must place to rebalance their holdings. This probably hurts the average investor quite a lot.
Some claim that they increase liquidity and reduce volatility. Is that really so?
Someone down the thread points out that the light travel time from DC to Chicago is 3.757 ms. So maybe legally the perpetrators are in the clear (at least in their minds)?
He was likely trading against others who also had the same insider information but put in their trades at the correct time, allowing for the speed of light. If the FTC did not punish this kind of behavior severely, others would very soon follow this example. Or is this already commonplace?
Correct. Now the question is: Can they be prosecuted for insider trading? This is an interesting situation where the speed of light may factor into the legality of their action.
Perhaps letting non-moderators express their interest in low-modded posts would be a good idea. How much interest is expressed would be visible only to moderators. This may help moderators focus their efforts.
It'll probably remain a dream, since it will be impossible to keep all these little internet-connected devices secure. Or do they have a good plan for keeping these devices updated when vulnerabilities are inevitably discovered?
This is probably the next logical step in the evolution of fighter aircraft. Maintaining a reliable wireless link for quick maneuvers might be an issue. Maybe the maneuvering can be semi-automated.
Yeah, this came off as a troll.
I can sympathize with the police too, as they are usually underfunded for doing the more demanding enforcement work. We can't pretend the extra revenue from traffic tickets is not a motivator. The situation in poorer countries is far worse, where severe underfunding drives the cops into corruption, and they won't even attempt to catch a criminal unless the victim pays them first.
Police is not an easy thing to get right. It might be much easier to reduce crime in other ways, such as legalizing certain things (like drugs) and economic assistance to high-risk (poor) people/neighborhoods.
They arrest the small-time drug dealers while the violent drug cartels are as strong as ever. An example of the same thing, actually.
That's a helpful explanation. So basically the tasked police officers do traffic enforcement when they are not needed for other duties, like making arrests. Still, I'm pretty sure these cops have a bad reputation for a reason. They often treat the general public very badly (perhaps because they dealt with some really bad criminals in the past). And as the story we're discussing points out, they do tend to issue tickets for the most trivial stuff. Maybe they would be better off patrolling the bad neighborhoods. Or maybe we don't need as many of them, and more detectives.. etc.
While you're right about traffic deaths, it is still dubious for me how most traffic tickets save lives. Using a phone while stopped at a traffic light? Running a stop sign at low speed? Parking violations? Speeding 10 mph above the speed limit? I don't know. It's a very gray area. More serious crime, on the other hand, is pretty destructive to communities. I wonder if police behavior is actually driven by statistics of which policing activity is the most beneficial versus which is just easier?
What I don't like about cops is that they prefer to enforce laws that are easy to enforce. They happily issue lots of traffic tickets, while drug dealers, rapists, murderers, burglars, muggers, etc. are not getting caught.