*The* alternative? Nobody could think up something better? We have lots of smart people on this planet - I'm hopeful that somebody can think up a way to fund science that involves neither one nor 435 PHB's making such decisions.
The simplest way is to prohibit free access to publicly-collected data and research outcomes (papers, presentations, etc.) and instead require direct and immediate payment for anyone to see the data concerned. Then it can all become a self-financing activity.
A very large number of businesses would utterly hate that.
The real problem is that there's plenty going on, but it can't be done for free, for nothing. It's too hard to do and (overall) too important to leave to the random whims of gentlemen amateurs; that model worked through to the back end of the 19th century, but it's been found to be not sufficiently effective for modern society. Directly paying people to do research works better, as it stops people from having to become independently wealthy first before embarking on a scientific career.
If you've direct paying of people to do research, you'll also have to have some sort of mechanism for deciding how to distribute the money (as there's never going to be enough to pay for every idea that anyone might think of, ever). The least sucky way of managing that found so far has been to have a board of people, typically some senior scientists and some money-men, evaluate what are the best ideas out of a bunch submitted and to fund just those. This encourages competition between scientists to do good work so that they can justify being funded in the future, but does tend to end up looking rather bureaucratic, whatever organisation is ultimately paying. (Most private charitable funders aren't as bureaucratic mainly because they don't get as many applications, haven't as much money to give away, and aren't being quite as closely hounded by bosses to ensure that no money is wasted.) If you don't have people having to regularly do a pitch to get more money, you're then going either by the independently-wealthy model (mostly fairly slow and doesn't really build collaborations) or you're planning to just give people carte blanche to spend whatever way they want (and if you want to do that, I want to conduct a scientific investigation into holidaying on a beach for the next few years. For Science!) Any other models? Crowdsourcing is just a minor variation on the standard model that is going to be better at funding the PT Barnums of this world rather than those doing anything innovative.
I always think it is ironic that some of the biggest wasting of money is due to the efforts to prevent wasting of money. There's not enough facepalm in the world to cover just how stupid that is.
Planning to teach a 1 hour lesson shouldn't take more than a few hours. A week is cutting it close, but there is still ample time to prep for the lesson.
Assuming that all the teaching material (books, tests, electronic materials, etc.) is already there. It's the preparation of that which takes a long time, and which is why teaching at universities takes so much more time outside of actually giving the class; there's just much less opportunity to share materials, especially for anything vaguely close to cutting edge. That's why nearly everything in a normal school is not cutting edge; realistic time pressures simply don't allow it.
If you managed to change the instruction set of your computer's CPU, I'm sure it would be Slashdot-worthy.
Reconfigurable hardware? That's been done for decades. You don't normally build a whole CPU that way because you don't get especially good gate density.
...particularly physicists who think they can code.
The best way to deal with such people is to break their code before their eyes in a few minutes (and having seen what passes for code among physicists, you should be able to do that without breaking into a sweat). Then tell them that they've got to make it work again, and that they've got to ensure that it stays working for 5 years. While they do their own job as well.
Good programming is not just about banging the code out, it is about making it so that the code is obviously correct and obviously strongly resistant to getting broken, all on a very restricted budget.
The use of pure functions makes for cleaner programs, but more data copying. Data copying isn't necessarily bad today. It's cheap to copy data you just used or created, because it's in the cache. Modern CPUs have wide buses, are good at copying, and can probably do the copy in parallel with something else. Don't avoid copying data to "improve performance" unless the data item is large.
If you treat your data structures as also obeying Single Static Assignment rules, you can share them widely by reference. That reduces the number of copies. With a sufficiently smart compiler/reference management engine, you can even go to using copy-on-write-to-shared, so that operations on an unshared value that is about to be replaced can be done inline. That gets the number of copies down even further, to nearly the level that you have with classic shared-writable-state programming, except without any of that mysterious changing-behind-your-back behaviour.
SSA rules also make type analysis much easier, in turn making compilation and optimisation easier...
Only time I can imagine I can imagine taking the formatting from web site or outside source is something like a table. Sometimes it's nice to be able to insert those without reformatting them in Excel or something
If you ever take up teaching, you'll love the feature. Why? Because the lazy plagiarising shits that you want to fail your course will be easy to spot as they'll never figure out how to make the formatting match; if the margins march back and forth across the page by small fractions of an inch (without attribution: let's be fair) or the fonts change mysteriously, then you know you can kick them with good conscience. Lazy dumbasses are lazy dumbasses, and don't need to be cosseted.
Yes, some might be smart enough to figure out this trick. Luckily, they're also smart enough to not try to cheat in the first place (especially not by doing things that can be easily checked in other ways).
the only big difference is now word and excel are in XML. sometimes, and only partially
The main thing that isn't in XML is any embedded media files, and encoding those totally as XML is a really bad idea. "Let's encode our video as XML!" sounds like one of the scarier jokes that people tell about the W3C...
Want people to use it. Get rid of all surcharges related to it. I don't have to pay extra when I use cash.
That's because the cost in cash is set by law to the minimum amount that you can charge — that's what "good for any debt, public or private" really means — so it ends up dragging up all prices. This particularly applies at a larger retail business (e.g., supermarket) where they have to have multiple armored cars arriving per day to take the cash to a bank, and can also have a significant impact on employee theft levels. It's also very stealable by third-parties, so you'll have to be getting insurance. These are all real costs, and they have to be borne by raising the price itself.
Very small businesses don't handle so much money at all, so they don't incur so many of the costs, and large businesses in other sectors don't use nearly so much cash either. After all, would a car manufacturer sell cars to a dealership in exchange for cash, or would they use some sort of invoiced bank transfer? Hmmm... which one might they be picking for its inherent advantages?
After that, you are buying from another investor. And some day, another investor is buying from you. The money at this point is just bouncing around from investor to investor.
Most normal stocks pay dividends regularly.
Tech stocks mostly aren't normal, for various reasons that come down to "lawful tax fiddle"; as a holder of a tech stock you're having to hope that the withholding of the dividend leads to a greater increase in value than you'd get from having the dividend payed out. Sometimes that works.
It would be nice if java supported something like typedefs.
What for? Either you're doing it to name a type elegantly — except you don't need that in Java because classes already have reasonable names and you don't have a mess of structures as values plus pointers and references, as in C++ — or you're doing it to hide how complex the implementation of a data structure is — but there you're really encouraged to wrap a class around it and put an honest API in place — or you're doing something like aliasing. Aliasing isn't a great idea either; it's very non-obvious when used in substantial amounts. No, the lack of typedefs is not something that is particularly felt by Java programmers.
I'd much rather have the built-in DOM support integrated into the standard collection model; that would genuinely save a lot of messing around.
Swing was more powerful but was still very ugly and was hobbled by the lack of any truly great UI designers for it (every IDE creator invented their own).
I've seen non-ugly GUIs done with Swing. I'm pretty sure they're a demonstration of the fact that pigs can fly as long as you provide sufficient TNT-derived thrust (and that you don't really want to stand underneath as the pieces soar overhead).
If that were true, advertising could just be a bunch of people burning money onscreen and saying "yeah, our stuff is so awesome we can do this with our spare cash".
Anyways the Queen is only part of the government with the major part being Parliament and the major part of Parliament being the House of Commons who are elected by UK citizens and responsible to them. And the Queen herself serves the people and if she screws up she can be removed. As recently as 1936 a King was encouraged to quit as he had fascist tendencies and it was considered that he wouldn't serve the people well.
Though for a full-on kicking out of a monarch — as opposed to a gentle "jump before you're pushed" — you've got to go back to 1688. That triggered a (mostly minor, except in Ireland) civil war.
Yes, pagerank is a great idea, and it was perhaps an improvement over what was being done before. But that wasn't why people abandoned the likes of Lycos and Yahoo(!) for Google back in the late 90's
Bullcrap. That's exactly why people switched to Google. You got the answer you wanted in the first hit instead of maybe somewhere in the first 10 pages if you were very lucky. The problem was that before Google, people were statically giving each site a ranking and just ordering by that ranking; that might work for the most popular terms, but for anything even vaguely off the beaten track (i.e., a very large fraction of searches) then its totally shit. (There was also the old Yahoo! technique of manually curating the links for each search term. If you can't spot why that is a poor idea, there's no hope for you.) Google found a practical way to use bibliometric techniques for web searches, and (second innovation) managed to make it pay very well.
The comparatively lightweight interface was just a bonus; I (and many other people I know) would have put up with more heavyweight pages if it meant that we still found the thing we were looking for quickly. And time has proved that this is indeed true. (What the bandwidth gives, the bloated javascript takes away.)
Bad idea. The person who is good with business and people will use his skills to take nearly all the money and all the credit. That's just the way they're wired. If you think otherwise about a particular business person, remember the fable of the scorpion and the frog.
But if you don't partner up or learn how to do those parts yourself, you still won't succeed. Business skills and people skills are necessary to taking an idea and turning it into a proper money-spinner. But then, as was said earlier, ideas are cheap; the value is virtually entirely in the execution. In particular, you have to be able to delegate (no one person can do it all except in the smallest of businesses; there's just not enough time) and there's a great many specialist areas: finance, project management, personnel, legal, purchasing, sales, manufacturing, IT/communications support, marketing, R&D. (Some of the above may be rolled together into a single position, especially in a smaller business or in a very development-oriented one.)
Ask them both to solve the same problem an you'll probably find a wide range of solutions from the former, to brilliant and concise to what the hell are you doing; From the latter, the same tired solution that was considered smart 5 years ago which, while adequate, will not lead to any innovative approaches.
You are aware that the world doesn't need yet another damn sorting algorithm? If people want to innovate, they should do so in an area that hasn't been solved totally. There's lots of those.
Obamacare was passed on a straight party line vote by the Democrats. [...] Now the Republicans have the majority in the House.
The correct thing to do with a law you hate is to repeal it. As it is, the Republicans don't have the votes to outright pass a bill repealing Obamacare — the senate is known to be not interested in such an idea — so they're trying to force it through by the backdoor through utterly gutting it in the appropriations bill. The senate told the house that they saw through their little game, and that they should go away and try to pass a straight bill without all the (to-them) unacceptable bits. So far, the house doesn't seem to have wanted to back down on this, nor has the senate. (Yes, the president is also shoving his oar in, but right now he's not been formally asked to sign the appropriations bill into law; it's still an argument within congress.)
To me, the interesting thing comes really when the business of the debt ceiling becomes urgent. Will the house do their best to get debts defaulted on? If they do, you can bet that the consequences will come back to bite them in all sorts of ways...
I live in the middle of Austin, yet I'm represented by someone who lives in suburban Houston. My only option is to vote for or against the guy who is guaranteed to win thanks to gerrymandering.
How exactly can I fire him?
Well... technically, there's always the possibility to fire on him with a rifle. You'll probably end up on a murder (or attempted murder) charge if you do, so you might want to make doubly sure that this is important enough for you to do so. Myself, I'd rather focus on trying to break up the system that makes outrageous gerrymandering possible (though yes, that's probably going to be very difficult, given the corrupt nature of politics that lead to it happening in the first place). After all, I'm sure you can make the argument that it would have incensed the founding fathers as well.
Or you could pull a Machiavelli and quietly encourage the Reps to seek to equalise the area of each of the states (which would end up strongly favoring them in the Senate) while relying on everyone else to be keen on keeping state borders the same. But perhaps that's just a little too unconsiderable...
They should include legislative salaries in the shutdown, that would encourage them. Put in a constitutional amendment - when a budget for the United States is not in effect, Congressional representatives and senators shall not be paid.
I'd rather defund the salaries of congressional security workers. Let legislators continue, but let them do so while worrying about what some crazy with a gun might do.
Slashdot Mirror
*The* alternative? Nobody could think up something better? We have lots of smart people on this planet - I'm hopeful that somebody can think up a way to fund science that involves neither one nor 435 PHB's making such decisions.
The simplest way is to prohibit free access to publicly-collected data and research outcomes (papers, presentations, etc.) and instead require direct and immediate payment for anyone to see the data concerned. Then it can all become a self-financing activity.
A very large number of businesses would utterly hate that.
The real problem is that there's plenty going on, but it can't be done for free, for nothing. It's too hard to do and (overall) too important to leave to the random whims of gentlemen amateurs; that model worked through to the back end of the 19th century, but it's been found to be not sufficiently effective for modern society. Directly paying people to do research works better, as it stops people from having to become independently wealthy first before embarking on a scientific career.
If you've direct paying of people to do research, you'll also have to have some sort of mechanism for deciding how to distribute the money (as there's never going to be enough to pay for every idea that anyone might think of, ever). The least sucky way of managing that found so far has been to have a board of people, typically some senior scientists and some money-men, evaluate what are the best ideas out of a bunch submitted and to fund just those. This encourages competition between scientists to do good work so that they can justify being funded in the future, but does tend to end up looking rather bureaucratic, whatever organisation is ultimately paying. (Most private charitable funders aren't as bureaucratic mainly because they don't get as many applications, haven't as much money to give away, and aren't being quite as closely hounded by bosses to ensure that no money is wasted.) If you don't have people having to regularly do a pitch to get more money, you're then going either by the independently-wealthy model (mostly fairly slow and doesn't really build collaborations) or you're planning to just give people carte blanche to spend whatever way they want (and if you want to do that, I want to conduct a scientific investigation into holidaying on a beach for the next few years. For Science!) Any other models? Crowdsourcing is just a minor variation on the standard model that is going to be better at funding the PT Barnums of this world rather than those doing anything innovative.
I always think it is ironic that some of the biggest wasting of money is due to the efforts to prevent wasting of money. There's not enough facepalm in the world to cover just how stupid that is.
Planning to teach a 1 hour lesson shouldn't take more than a few hours. A week is cutting it close, but there is still ample time to prep for the lesson.
Assuming that all the teaching material (books, tests, electronic materials, etc.) is already there. It's the preparation of that which takes a long time, and which is why teaching at universities takes so much more time outside of actually giving the class; there's just much less opportunity to share materials, especially for anything vaguely close to cutting edge. That's why nearly everything in a normal school is not cutting edge; realistic time pressures simply don't allow it.
If you managed to change the instruction set of your computer's CPU, I'm sure it would be Slashdot-worthy.
Reconfigurable hardware? That's been done for decades. You don't normally build a whole CPU that way because you don't get especially good gate density.
Good. Any spending cut is a good spending cut.
So cut tax rebates and military spending.
Either that, or produce relevant, well-defined logging.
You get much better at that if you develop complex multi-process server applications where there's no chance of attaching a debugger.
...particularly physicists who think they can code.
The best way to deal with such people is to break their code before their eyes in a few minutes (and having seen what passes for code among physicists, you should be able to do that without breaking into a sweat). Then tell them that they've got to make it work again, and that they've got to ensure that it stays working for 5 years. While they do their own job as well.
Good programming is not just about banging the code out, it is about making it so that the code is obviously correct and obviously strongly resistant to getting broken, all on a very restricted budget.
The use of pure functions makes for cleaner programs, but more data copying. Data copying isn't necessarily bad today. It's cheap to copy data you just used or created, because it's in the cache. Modern CPUs have wide buses, are good at copying, and can probably do the copy in parallel with something else. Don't avoid copying data to "improve performance" unless the data item is large.
If you treat your data structures as also obeying Single Static Assignment rules, you can share them widely by reference. That reduces the number of copies. With a sufficiently smart compiler/reference management engine, you can even go to using copy-on-write-to-shared, so that operations on an unshared value that is about to be replaced can be done inline. That gets the number of copies down even further, to nearly the level that you have with classic shared-writable-state programming, except without any of that mysterious changing-behind-your-back behaviour.
SSA rules also make type analysis much easier, in turn making compilation and optimisation easier...
Only time I can imagine I can imagine taking the formatting from web site or outside source is something like a table. Sometimes it's nice to be able to insert those without reformatting them in Excel or something
If you ever take up teaching, you'll love the feature. Why? Because the lazy plagiarising shits that you want to fail your course will be easy to spot as they'll never figure out how to make the formatting match; if the margins march back and forth across the page by small fractions of an inch (without attribution: let's be fair) or the fonts change mysteriously, then you know you can kick them with good conscience. Lazy dumbasses are lazy dumbasses, and don't need to be cosseted.
Yes, some might be smart enough to figure out this trick. Luckily, they're also smart enough to not try to cheat in the first place (especially not by doing things that can be easily checked in other ways).
the only big difference is now word and excel are in XML. sometimes, and only partially
The main thing that isn't in XML is any embedded media files, and encoding those totally as XML is a really bad idea. "Let's encode our video as XML!" sounds like one of the scarier jokes that people tell about the W3C...
Want people to use it. Get rid of all surcharges related to it. I don't have to pay extra when I use cash.
That's because the cost in cash is set by law to the minimum amount that you can charge — that's what "good for any debt, public or private" really means — so it ends up dragging up all prices. This particularly applies at a larger retail business (e.g., supermarket) where they have to have multiple armored cars arriving per day to take the cash to a bank, and can also have a significant impact on employee theft levels. It's also very stealable by third-parties, so you'll have to be getting insurance. These are all real costs, and they have to be borne by raising the price itself.
Very small businesses don't handle so much money at all, so they don't incur so many of the costs, and large businesses in other sectors don't use nearly so much cash either. After all, would a car manufacturer sell cars to a dealership in exchange for cash, or would they use some sort of invoiced bank transfer? Hmmm... which one might they be picking for its inherent advantages?
After that, you are buying from another investor. And some day, another investor is buying from you. The money at this point is just bouncing around from investor to investor.
Most normal stocks pay dividends regularly.
Tech stocks mostly aren't normal, for various reasons that come down to "lawful tax fiddle"; as a holder of a tech stock you're having to hope that the withholding of the dividend leads to a greater increase in value than you'd get from having the dividend payed out. Sometimes that works.
Terrorists are real.
Really? Are you sure about that?
There you go! Claim disproved, trivially...
It would be nice if java supported something like typedefs.
What for? Either you're doing it to name a type elegantly — except you don't need that in Java because classes already have reasonable names and you don't have a mess of structures as values plus pointers and references, as in C++ — or you're doing it to hide how complex the implementation of a data structure is — but there you're really encouraged to wrap a class around it and put an honest API in place — or you're doing something like aliasing. Aliasing isn't a great idea either; it's very non-obvious when used in substantial amounts. No, the lack of typedefs is not something that is particularly felt by Java programmers.
I'd much rather have the built-in DOM support integrated into the standard collection model; that would genuinely save a lot of messing around.
Swing was more powerful but was still very ugly and was hobbled by the lack of any truly great UI designers for it (every IDE creator invented their own).
I've seen non-ugly GUIs done with Swing. I'm pretty sure they're a demonstration of the fact that pigs can fly as long as you provide sufficient TNT-derived thrust (and that you don't really want to stand underneath as the pieces soar overhead).
Java only promised write once and run anywhere. Nowhere in that promise was write once, be able to read it later.
Oh, you can read it later. It's just so damn verbose that you'd better set aside a long time for reading it...
If that were true, advertising could just be a bunch of people burning money onscreen and saying "yeah, our stuff is so awesome we can do this with our spare cash".
I'd buy that!
the inevitable "This thing we thought would be easy turns out to be difficult" part of the project
Ah yes, the part also known as the second 90%...
Anyways the Queen is only part of the government with the major part being Parliament and the major part of Parliament being the House of Commons who are elected by UK citizens and responsible to them. And the Queen herself serves the people and if she screws up she can be removed. As recently as 1936 a King was encouraged to quit as he had fascist tendencies and it was considered that he wouldn't serve the people well.
Though for a full-on kicking out of a monarch — as opposed to a gentle "jump before you're pushed" — you've got to go back to 1688. That triggered a (mostly minor, except in Ireland) civil war.
Yes, pagerank is a great idea, and it was perhaps an improvement over what was being done before. But that wasn't why people abandoned the likes of Lycos and Yahoo(!) for Google back in the late 90's
Bullcrap. That's exactly why people switched to Google. You got the answer you wanted in the first hit instead of maybe somewhere in the first 10 pages if you were very lucky. The problem was that before Google, people were statically giving each site a ranking and just ordering by that ranking; that might work for the most popular terms, but for anything even vaguely off the beaten track (i.e., a very large fraction of searches) then its totally shit. (There was also the old Yahoo! technique of manually curating the links for each search term. If you can't spot why that is a poor idea, there's no hope for you.) Google found a practical way to use bibliometric techniques for web searches, and (second innovation) managed to make it pay very well.
The comparatively lightweight interface was just a bonus; I (and many other people I know) would have put up with more heavyweight pages if it meant that we still found the thing we were looking for quickly. And time has proved that this is indeed true. (What the bandwidth gives, the bloated javascript takes away.)
Bad idea. The person who is good with business and people will use his skills to take nearly all the money and all the credit. That's just the way they're wired. If you think otherwise about a particular business person, remember the fable of the scorpion and the frog.
But if you don't partner up or learn how to do those parts yourself, you still won't succeed. Business skills and people skills are necessary to taking an idea and turning it into a proper money-spinner. But then, as was said earlier, ideas are cheap; the value is virtually entirely in the execution. In particular, you have to be able to delegate (no one person can do it all except in the smallest of businesses; there's just not enough time) and there's a great many specialist areas: finance, project management, personnel, legal, purchasing, sales, manufacturing, IT/communications support, marketing, R&D. (Some of the above may be rolled together into a single position, especially in a smaller business or in a very development-oriented one.)
Ask them both to solve the same problem an you'll probably find a wide range of solutions from the former, to brilliant and concise to what the hell are you doing; From the latter, the same tired solution that was considered smart 5 years ago which, while adequate, will not lead to any innovative approaches.
You are aware that the world doesn't need yet another damn sorting algorithm? If people want to innovate, they should do so in an area that hasn't been solved totally. There's lots of those.
Obamacare was passed on a straight party line vote by the Democrats.
[...]
Now the Republicans have the majority in the House.
The correct thing to do with a law you hate is to repeal it. As it is, the Republicans don't have the votes to outright pass a bill repealing Obamacare — the senate is known to be not interested in such an idea — so they're trying to force it through by the backdoor through utterly gutting it in the appropriations bill. The senate told the house that they saw through their little game, and that they should go away and try to pass a straight bill without all the (to-them) unacceptable bits. So far, the house doesn't seem to have wanted to back down on this, nor has the senate. (Yes, the president is also shoving his oar in, but right now he's not been formally asked to sign the appropriations bill into law; it's still an argument within congress.)
To me, the interesting thing comes really when the business of the debt ceiling becomes urgent. Will the house do their best to get debts defaulted on? If they do, you can bet that the consequences will come back to bite them in all sorts of ways...
Exactly, how can big companies like these shutdown just because one of their clients stops paying?
The companies aren't shut down. They're just shutting down parts. How can they do this? It depends on the details in all those employment contracts.
I live in the middle of Austin, yet I'm represented by someone who lives in suburban Houston. My only option is to vote for or against the guy who is guaranteed to win thanks to gerrymandering.
How exactly can I fire him?
Well... technically, there's always the possibility to fire on him with a rifle. You'll probably end up on a murder (or attempted murder) charge if you do, so you might want to make doubly sure that this is important enough for you to do so. Myself, I'd rather focus on trying to break up the system that makes outrageous gerrymandering possible (though yes, that's probably going to be very difficult, given the corrupt nature of politics that lead to it happening in the first place). After all, I'm sure you can make the argument that it would have incensed the founding fathers as well.
Or you could pull a Machiavelli and quietly encourage the Reps to seek to equalise the area of each of the states (which would end up strongly favoring them in the Senate) while relying on everyone else to be keen on keeping state borders the same. But perhaps that's just a little too unconsiderable...
They should include legislative salaries in the shutdown, that would encourage them. Put in a constitutional amendment - when a budget for the United States is not in effect, Congressional representatives and senators shall not be paid.
I'd rather defund the salaries of congressional security workers. Let legislators continue, but let them do so while worrying about what some crazy with a gun might do.