I don't think it's reasonable to compare the difficulty controlling clusters of independent rockets using Soviet tech from the 1960s with modern materials science and computerized engineering.
They're spending a metric assload of their own money. That's likely to produce a much more reasonable assessment of capabilities and failure modes than centralized planning in the framework of a mega-bureaucracy. We'll see how it goes, until proven otherwise I expect some pretty impressive advances.
The top marginal tax rate in the early '60s was 91%.
Under Reagan it went from 70% down to 50%.
Following the Bush tax cuts, the maximum marginal tax rate is 35%.
Fiscally speaking, the lunatics have been in charge of the asylum for 20 years, which is why I have a hard time taking 'high tax' talking points seriously. Budget deficits and continually increasing income inequality, anyone?
I could care less about grammar nazis... but it'd be difficult.;-)
Health care is a problem for society as a whole.
on
What US Health Care Needs
·
· Score: 3, Informative
And those people end up paying more in the long run? I don't have a problem with that. Unless of course you ask me to foot the bill for their lack of maintenance.
...which is the point. Providing a reasonable standard of health care to all individuals in a society provides huge benefits to the functioning, productivity, and quality of life of the society as a whole, and as a society we're going to face significant costs for 'lack of maintenance' or 'bad luck' or any other given issue that leads to serious health difficulties for an individual who lacks the means to pay. The assumption that we can reduce the costs to society as a whole by letting individuals get substandard care is false even from a purely economic perspective, backed up by a great deal of epidemiological and social science research.
So, ideally, we need a rational healthcare system which decouples healthcare decisions from monetary incentives and relies on healthcare providers to make reasonable decisions about treatment that maximize the overall benefit to society.
This was effectively SOP for the health care industry in the USA until relatively recently. I have half a dozen MDs in my family near/past retirement age, and they have stated that the expectation in the field of medicine was that between 10% and 30% of patients would simply be unable to pay for treatment, and that providing a reasonable standard of treatment for them regardless was simply the cost of doing business.
Coming out of medical school today with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and with the range/cost of treatments skyrocketing, medical students today don't have this option. This has also contributed to a legion of other perverse economic incentives, such as clinics which make money from the tests they recommend, and the transitive nature of health care coverage has given insurance companies solid financial reasons to deny coverage to the greatest degree possible, so the greatest amount of the cost is distributed elsewhere. The prime motivator for the increase in health care costs isn't the cost of the treatments available, it's coupling treatment decisions with monetary incentives that are inherent in the structure of our current system.
Health care can best be envisioned as a public utility. It's in our own interest to structure it in a way that provides the best quality of care available at a price we can pay.
So, SOMEONE has to determine which treatments are actually beneficial and cost-effective for patients. The best group to do this is medical professionals who get a steady paycheck and are judged on the quality of the health outcomes of their patients.
This means SOMEONE has to provide the steady paycheck, as well as provide metrics on the quality of work done, enforce professional standards, and generally keep a lid on things. Any structure capable of doing that society-wide is going to end up being functionally equivalent to a government. Attempting to do it on a smaller scale leads to massive structural inefficiencies as other health-care entities that are running for profit do their best to chuck 'unprofitable' patients/treatments out of their coverage areas and 'cherry-pick' profitable individuals.
Any plan that significantly disagrees with these core ideas is likely to be based on political posturing or willful ignorance... which is precisely the problem we're running into.
You aren't *fighting* DRM that way; you are completely justifying the need for it.
With a pirated version, the DRM becomes irrelevant to users, courtesy of game crackers wayyyy up the supply chain. DRM only affects paying customers, because pirates completely bypass the DRM.
You can make an argument that pirated games mean DRM isn't strong enough, because it can be cracked. Sadly, the time and energy of 15-year-old wunderkind game crackers is effectively unlimited-- stronger DRM is just an interesting challenge to them.
So, you can implement ever-increasing layers of DRM that only inconveniences your paying customers, or you can focus on providing additional value that makes people want to purchase the software.
Guess which business model is more effective in getting people to buy your product.
It's not about right or wrong. Any major software release will be pirated, it's the nature of cheap bandwidth and the ability to create copies of software ad infinitum. DRM is a technical 'solution' to the social 'problem' of abundance, and like most technical solutions it simply does not work.
My co-worker used to evaluate websites for pornographic/malware/whatever content for NetNanny or one of their equivalents. She said they used to have to restore their system from the image on a more-than-daily basis after malware made it unusuable.
Uh, no. Just like someone would be annoyed that someone in World of Warcraft got all the best gear by REing the game and using bots and exploits...same with this. It doesn't matter if you are playing a game about being a gangster of it is a game about magical ponies, if it has a multiplayer element to it, people want a level playing field.
A level playing field? In an MMO? Yeah, you're dreaming-- if you want to compete with other people on a 'level playing field', play a game that's actually designed to do that, instead of one designed to keep pushing the little addiction buttons in your brain so you'll stick around and be a good little revenue producer.
The reason people are upset about about CEO compensation is because they have no idea what a CEO is being compensated for. The fact is, there are a very small number of people who are capable of running a very large organization successfully. It's the same reason most small businesses stay small businesses - the owners reach the limit of their management potential and can go no further.
Nah. It's because CEO compensation is set by... Boards of Directors that happen to be made up of other CEOs with a vested interest in promoting their pay over the interests of the shareholders. For example, GM's board of directors is 75% former/current executives.
CEOs and Boards of Directors are currently a nearly closed cartel, responsible for setting their own compensation despite the complete absence of any meaningful performance metrics.
Did I mention that in most cases the boards set their own compensation? It's all a big racket, and it's completely unrelated to performance-- CEOs are being compensated for being part of the club, not for performance.
I think that might have been true once, but not any longer. A bunch of hungry people are also going to be desperate and angry people.
Spoken by someone who isn't hungry. Hungry and desperate people don't prey on the wealthy and powerful, they prey on other hungry and desperate people, because they don't have the same degree of social protection and insulation. There are plenty of hungry and desperate people in our society right now, and it has almost no effect on the majority who are not hungry and desperate.
Providing at least a minimal level of social support to everyone does provide a vast benefit to society as a whole, but the resulting difference in safety and stability from the perspective of the upper classes is negligible.
"The system works for me, there's no need to change it."
Sounds like the best of both worlds so far, being able to operate with just the phone half, or even use the keyboard half like a bluetooth headset.
But can both halves be used at once for a home-made three-way? Does keeping the entire package together yield better battery life? How long till we've got video calls where we're talking on the keyboard and watching video on the main phone? What about texting while talking on the phone? Inquiring teenagers want to know!
The Earth's rotation already slows by 0.022 milliseconds every year from tidal friction. A simple way to get a handle on the energies involved is estimating from the increase in the radius of the moon's orbit, about 3.84cm/year, which comprises the majority of tidal effects on Earth.
Throw that into the gravitational potential energy of the Earth/Moon system, and you end up with a net energy loss in the neighborhood of 7.59x10^18 joules/year-- about 241GW. (Wikipedia says 2.4TW, but I think the paper they cited slipped a digit.
So, a direct energy drain at around either twice or twenty times the installed wind capacity is making the earth's rotation slow by... less than 2.2 seconds per 100,000 years.
Planets are big. Arguing that a chunk of rock 12500km in diameter is going to be noticeably moved by our technology in the foreseeable future isn't very plausible.
In related news, most of the energy input for wind is solar, not tidal, and net solar energy input into the system is still net solar energy input into the system, regardless of where it goes.
There are plenty of actual obstacles to worry about in implementing alternative energy, there's no need to make up imaginary ones.
There are a lot of things going on this video, but I haven't seen anyone notice that the opening act of the massacre involves opening fire on the crowds of people who are... helpfully queued up waiting to go through the metal detectors in an airport.
We could be using this controversy to point out real, obvious vulnerabilities and tradeoffs that come directly from relying on security theatre to 'protect' our society, but somehow I don't think the newsbags will even notice.
No, you know in theory which one you think you would choose, but until it actually happened, all you can do is guess about what you would do. In life or death situations, your rationale may change.
That's the point of coming to a decision beforehand under conditions where your judgement is not impaired, and then sticking to it. Game theory provides a rational framework for evaluating the interactions of two parties, and under many circumstances an advantage can be gained by pre-committing to a non-optimal course of action as your chosen response to a given set of circumstances... because the knowledge that your decision has already been made influences the decision of your counterpart.
As an individual in a life or death situation, attacking jackbooted thugs who are coming to arrest you a'la Solzhenitzyn is not a good idea-- under most circumstances, cooperating would give a better chance of survival, so the rational choice is to not resist violently.
However, this entire equation changes if you have made it known that you have strongly pre-committed yourself to a course of action regardless of the outcome. In this case, your opponent can no longer assume that you will follow the rational course of non-violence, and the decision to send out the jackbooted thugs becomes more expensive given the likelihood of resistance at all costs... and it becomes much more likely that you will never find yourself in that situation.
That's why I make no secret that I have set limits beyond which the utter destruction of those attacking me would become my only goal. May God have mercy upon anything that triggers that, for they will receive no mercy from me.
You do realize that most common games have a no-CD crack available for them, right?
Typically, games also have a no-pay cracked version. Given that there's a not-inconsiderable risk to running software without a chain of trust, if it is necessary to have to install cracked content to play it without a CD, obtrusive and annoying cdchecks make it increasingly likely that a game will be pirated outright.
Sadly, many publishers are dumb and don't pick up on the fact that annoyance increases pirating. Another reason that the convenience factor of Steam/Impulse is good for sales...
If you look at the video, that did not happen. The body stayed pretty much intact on the side away from the crash, no flying metal sheets.
And yet on the side of the vehicle that was involved in the crash, the driver would have died instantly. Unless you're completely confident that you can always sit on the side of the car that doesn't hit anything...
According to the British government, there has been a 48% decrease in recorded crime since the peak in 1995, which seems to argue that the proliferation of cameras and draconian gun control have been effective in protecting the safety of Britons.
Its more instinctive. Its pretty easy to figure out how to move and shoot in a PC game, but how about ducking? Throwing grenades? Using items? All those things are much less instinctive and things are closer. For example, you can still move and move your gun around while selecting grenades or reloading and you don't have to take your fingers off the keys. Along with how its easier to figure out where buttons are on controllers than on a keyboard, even with a good knowledge of touch typing, there is nothing distinguishing about WASD, while you can fix that sometimes by mapping things to ESDF (most keyboards have a raised bump on F and J) so its easier to find.
You gotta be shitting me, nubcake.
Mouse+keyboard >>> console shit controllers. Forever. No contest. That's why they don't have console players in the same universe as keyboard/mouse players, and you can't hook a mouse up to your xbox for halo. It's just a different universe, analog sticks and buttons can't compete.
If you want instinctive, try to convince me that all of the console games use the same control schema. They don't. No instinct, just fewer buttons and a narrow-bandwidth analog stream, divided however the clueless devs choose. Cry me an exploding river, and recognize that the console control scheme is inherently limited by the mechanics of the input device. It works for many things, and a lot of console devs use it brilliantly, but it's still a crippled input mechanism, and will not work in competition with a mouse in other fields.
It's done. Consoles do many things well, like working all the time at a standard display level. They do other things remarkably badly, like competing with PCs for input bandwidth and overall power. Use a console if you want, but don't even try to argue that they're superior from a technical standpoint.
If the Gimli Glider or Flight 1549 had been on an Airbus, there would have been a lot of dead people. When something goes wrong, Rule 1 is FLY THE FUCKING PLANE. Well, if the computers fail on an Airbus, good luck flying it!
Flight 1549 was an Airbus A320. Don't fall for the FUD, any large passenger airliner is going to be designed to be as survivable as possible in the event of power loss. This whole article is just another example of irrational hysteria.
Slashdot Mirror
Determine gender at what precision? TFA wasn't very enlightening... indeed, listing mis-identified faces doesn't really help much here.
This is like the problem of false positives in airport scans, but without the terrorists. :P
I don't think it's reasonable to compare the difficulty controlling clusters of independent rockets using Soviet tech from the 1960s with modern materials science and computerized engineering.
They're spending a metric assload of their own money. That's likely to produce a much more reasonable assessment of capabilities and failure modes than centralized planning in the framework of a mega-bureaucracy. We'll see how it goes, until proven otherwise I expect some pretty impressive advances.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/151.html
The top marginal tax rate in the early '60s was 91%.
Under Reagan it went from 70% down to 50%.
Following the Bush tax cuts, the maximum marginal tax rate is 35%.
Fiscally speaking, the lunatics have been in charge of the asylum for 20 years, which is why I have a hard time taking 'high tax' talking points seriously. Budget deficits and continually increasing income inequality, anyone?
I could care less about grammar nazis... but it'd be difficult. ;-)
And those people end up paying more in the long run? I don't have a problem with that. Unless of course you ask me to foot the bill for their lack of maintenance.
...which is the point. Providing a reasonable standard of health care to all individuals in a society provides huge benefits to the functioning, productivity, and quality of life of the society as a whole, and as a society we're going to face significant costs for 'lack of maintenance' or 'bad luck' or any other given issue that leads to serious health difficulties for an individual who lacks the means to pay. The assumption that we can reduce the costs to society as a whole by letting individuals get substandard care is false even from a purely economic perspective, backed up by a great deal of epidemiological and social science research.
So, ideally, we need a rational healthcare system which decouples healthcare decisions from monetary incentives and relies on healthcare providers to make reasonable decisions about treatment that maximize the overall benefit to society.
This was effectively SOP for the health care industry in the USA until relatively recently. I have half a dozen MDs in my family near/past retirement age, and they have stated that the expectation in the field of medicine was that between 10% and 30% of patients would simply be unable to pay for treatment, and that providing a reasonable standard of treatment for them regardless was simply the cost of doing business.
Coming out of medical school today with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and with the range/cost of treatments skyrocketing, medical students today don't have this option. This has also contributed to a legion of other perverse economic incentives, such as clinics which make money from the tests they recommend, and the transitive nature of health care coverage has given insurance companies solid financial reasons to deny coverage to the greatest degree possible, so the greatest amount of the cost is distributed elsewhere. The prime motivator for the increase in health care costs isn't the cost of the treatments available, it's coupling treatment decisions with monetary incentives that are inherent in the structure of our current system.
Health care can best be envisioned as a public utility. It's in our own interest to structure it in a way that provides the best quality of care available at a price we can pay.
So, SOMEONE has to determine which treatments are actually beneficial and cost-effective for patients. The best group to do this is medical professionals who get a steady paycheck and are judged on the quality of the health outcomes of their patients.
This means SOMEONE has to provide the steady paycheck, as well as provide metrics on the quality of work done, enforce professional standards, and generally keep a lid on things. Any structure capable of doing that society-wide is going to end up being functionally equivalent to a government. Attempting to do it on a smaller scale leads to massive structural inefficiencies as other health-care entities that are running for profit do their best to chuck 'unprofitable' patients/treatments out of their coverage areas and 'cherry-pick' profitable individuals.
Any plan that significantly disagrees with these core ideas is likely to be based on political posturing or willful ignorance... which is precisely the problem we're running into.
Step 1: Create a better scareware vector with a higher infection rate.
Step 2: ?????
Step 3: Profit!!!!
Seriously. There are incredibly lucrative incentives inherent in this kind of scam. No surprise they're spreading and getting smarter.
You aren't *fighting* DRM that way; you are completely justifying the need for it.
With a pirated version, the DRM becomes irrelevant to users, courtesy of game crackers wayyyy up the supply chain. DRM only affects paying customers, because pirates completely bypass the DRM.
You can make an argument that pirated games mean DRM isn't strong enough, because it can be cracked. Sadly, the time and energy of 15-year-old wunderkind game crackers is effectively unlimited-- stronger DRM is just an interesting challenge to them.
So, you can implement ever-increasing layers of DRM that only inconveniences your paying customers, or you can focus on providing additional value that makes people want to purchase the software.
Guess which business model is more effective in getting people to buy your product.
It's not about right or wrong. Any major software release will be pirated, it's the nature of cheap bandwidth and the ability to create copies of software ad infinitum. DRM is a technical 'solution' to the social 'problem' of abundance, and like most technical solutions it simply does not work.
Hanlon's corollary:
"Never attribute to stupidity what can adequately be explained by laziness."
I'm not stupid under any reasonable definition of the term, but I am lazy. So are most other people.
...the sledgehammer also works quite well for smacking around enemies and destroying almost anything that's destructible.
Ain't no such thang as a broke joke.
Unless you are broke, in which case you should become a comedian.
My co-worker used to evaluate websites for pornographic/malware/whatever content for NetNanny or one of their equivalents. She said they used to have to restore their system from the image on a more-than-daily basis after malware made it unusuable.
I'd imagine it got boring after a while.
Uh, no. Just like someone would be annoyed that someone in World of Warcraft got all the best gear by REing the game and using bots and exploits...same with this. It doesn't matter if you are playing a game about being a gangster of it is a game about magical ponies, if it has a multiplayer element to it, people want a level playing field.
A level playing field? In an MMO? Yeah, you're dreaming-- if you want to compete with other people on a 'level playing field', play a game that's actually designed to do that, instead of one designed to keep pushing the little addiction buttons in your brain so you'll stick around and be a good little revenue producer.
Dibs on the Culture for me! Sybaritic hedonism ftw!
The reason people are upset about about CEO compensation is because they have no idea what a CEO is being compensated for. The fact is, there are a very small number of people who are capable of running a very large organization successfully. It's the same reason most small businesses stay small businesses - the owners reach the limit of their management potential and can go no further.
Nah. It's because CEO compensation is set by... Boards of Directors that happen to be made up of other CEOs with a vested interest in promoting their pay over the interests of the shareholders. For example, GM's board of directors is 75% former/current executives.
CEOs and Boards of Directors are currently a nearly closed cartel, responsible for setting their own compensation despite the complete absence of any meaningful performance metrics.
Did I mention that in most cases the boards set their own compensation? It's all a big racket, and it's completely unrelated to performance-- CEOs are being compensated for being part of the club, not for performance.
I think that might have been true once, but not any longer. A bunch of hungry people are also going to be desperate and angry people.
Spoken by someone who isn't hungry. Hungry and desperate people don't prey on the wealthy and powerful, they prey on other hungry and desperate people, because they don't have the same degree of social protection and insulation. There are plenty of hungry and desperate people in our society right now, and it has almost no effect on the majority who are not hungry and desperate.
Providing at least a minimal level of social support to everyone does provide a vast benefit to society as a whole, but the resulting difference in safety and stability from the perspective of the upper classes is negligible.
"The system works for me, there's no need to change it."
In similar news, I'm starting a match making service based upon environmental chemical exposures.
Hey, exposure to ethyl alcohol is strongly correlated to time of conception for a majority of slashdotters.
Sounds like the best of both worlds so far, being able to operate with just the phone half, or even use the keyboard half like a bluetooth headset.
But can both halves be used at once for a home-made three-way? Does keeping the entire package together yield better battery life? How long till we've got video calls where we're talking on the keyboard and watching video on the main phone? What about texting while talking on the phone? Inquiring teenagers want to know!
Ahh, math time excuse!
The Earth's rotation already slows by 0.022 milliseconds every year from tidal friction. A simple way to get a handle on the energies involved is estimating from the increase in the radius of the moon's orbit, about 3.84cm/year, which comprises the majority of tidal effects on Earth.
Throw that into the gravitational potential energy of the Earth/Moon system, and you end up with a net energy loss in the neighborhood of 7.59x10^18 joules/year-- about 241GW. (Wikipedia says 2.4TW, but I think the paper they cited slipped a digit.
So, a direct energy drain at around either twice or twenty times the installed wind capacity is making the earth's rotation slow by... less than 2.2 seconds per 100,000 years.
Planets are big. Arguing that a chunk of rock 12500km in diameter is going to be noticeably moved by our technology in the foreseeable future isn't very plausible.
In related news, most of the energy input for wind is solar, not tidal, and net solar energy input into the system is still net solar energy input into the system, regardless of where it goes.
There are plenty of actual obstacles to worry about in implementing alternative energy, there's no need to make up imaginary ones.
There are a lot of things going on this video, but I haven't seen anyone notice that the opening act of the massacre involves opening fire on the crowds of people who are... helpfully queued up waiting to go through the metal detectors in an airport.
We could be using this controversy to point out real, obvious vulnerabilities and tradeoffs that come directly from relying on security theatre to 'protect' our society, but somehow I don't think the newsbags will even notice.
No, you know in theory which one you think you would choose, but until it actually happened, all you can do is guess about what you would do. In life or death situations, your rationale may change.
That's the point of coming to a decision beforehand under conditions where your judgement is not impaired, and then sticking to it. Game theory provides a rational framework for evaluating the interactions of two parties, and under many circumstances an advantage can be gained by pre-committing to a non-optimal course of action as your chosen response to a given set of circumstances... because the knowledge that your decision has already been made influences the decision of your counterpart.
As an individual in a life or death situation, attacking jackbooted thugs who are coming to arrest you a'la Solzhenitzyn is not a good idea-- under most circumstances, cooperating would give a better chance of survival, so the rational choice is to not resist violently.
However, this entire equation changes if you have made it known that you have strongly pre-committed yourself to a course of action regardless of the outcome. In this case, your opponent can no longer assume that you will follow the rational course of non-violence, and the decision to send out the jackbooted thugs becomes more expensive given the likelihood of resistance at all costs... and it becomes much more likely that you will never find yourself in that situation.
That's why I make no secret that I have set limits beyond which the utter destruction of those attacking me would become my only goal. May God have mercy upon anything that triggers that, for they will receive no mercy from me.
You do realize that most common games have a no-CD crack available for them, right?
Typically, games also have a no-pay cracked version. Given that there's a not-inconsiderable risk to running software without a chain of trust, if it is necessary to have to install cracked content to play it without a CD, obtrusive and annoying cdchecks make it increasingly likely that a game will be pirated outright.
Sadly, many publishers are dumb and don't pick up on the fact that annoyance increases pirating. Another reason that the convenience factor of Steam/Impulse is good for sales...
If you look at the video, that did not happen. The body stayed pretty much intact on the side away from the crash, no flying metal sheets.
And yet on the side of the vehicle that was involved in the crash, the driver would have died instantly. Unless you're completely confident that you can always sit on the side of the car that doesn't hit anything...
According to the British government, there has been a 48% decrease in recorded crime since the peak in 1995, which seems to argue that the proliferation of cameras and draconian gun control have been effective in protecting the safety of Britons.
Unfortunately, recorded violent crimes have approximately doubled since the current record-keeping system was implemented in 1998, and there are compelling reasons to believe that most other categories of crime are now being massively underreported, suggesting that crime problems in Britain are getting much worse despite a near-total ban on guns and the installation of millions of surveillance cameras.
I'd say something isn't working...
Its more instinctive. Its pretty easy to figure out how to move and shoot in a PC game, but how about ducking? Throwing grenades? Using items? All those things are much less instinctive and things are closer. For example, you can still move and move your gun around while selecting grenades or reloading and you don't have to take your fingers off the keys. Along with how its easier to figure out where buttons are on controllers than on a keyboard, even with a good knowledge of touch typing, there is nothing distinguishing about WASD, while you can fix that sometimes by mapping things to ESDF (most keyboards have a raised bump on F and J) so its easier to find.
You gotta be shitting me, nubcake.
Mouse+keyboard >>> console shit controllers. Forever. No contest. That's why they don't have console players in the same universe as keyboard/mouse players, and you can't hook a mouse up to your xbox for halo. It's just a different universe, analog sticks and buttons can't compete.
If you want instinctive, try to convince me that all of the console games use the same control schema. They don't. No instinct, just fewer buttons and a narrow-bandwidth analog stream, divided however the clueless devs choose. Cry me an exploding river, and recognize that the console control scheme is inherently limited by the mechanics of the input device. It works for many things, and a lot of console devs use it brilliantly, but it's still a crippled input mechanism, and will not work in competition with a mouse in other fields.
It's done. Consoles do many things well, like working all the time at a standard display level. They do other things remarkably badly, like competing with PCs for input bandwidth and overall power. Use a console if you want, but don't even try to argue that they're superior from a technical standpoint.
If the Gimli Glider or Flight 1549 had been on an Airbus, there would have been a lot of dead people. When something goes wrong, Rule 1 is FLY THE FUCKING PLANE. Well, if the computers fail on an Airbus, good luck flying it!
Flight 1549 was an Airbus A320. Don't fall for the FUD, any large passenger airliner is going to be designed to be as survivable as possible in the event of power loss. This whole article is just another example of irrational hysteria.