Pshaw, that's nothing. Once an editor sent me an article that had body text written in a sans-serif font!
Think on this: article written with Word using Comic Sans throughout. Or an article where the text is missing entirely. (Yes, I've seen that. It was at least easy to reject with a clear conscience!)
If you are unable to release the results of your research to the public, that's OK with me, but don't expect to get any public money from the goverment. Why should be the private research journals able to profit from tax-payers funded research?
What about people who received their research grants before this kerfuffle but haven't yet finished publishing the results from them? They don't have the money in their budgets for what you want. Their institutions don't have the money either (it's committed to other things, such as stopping the buildings from burning down; even the parts that are going to journal access have to be maintained because there's a need to keep access to existing journal articles). Getting to the situation of open access is hard because it takes rejigging the financial structure of grants and altering where the community in the particular field values as a publication location. Some fields have changed, some haven't.
Perhaps there should be a special tax on the corporations that publish journals to cover the costs of changing the access model.
No you're not! You're using a computer! You've got to download stuff off their system manually! As in no computer used at all.
(I'm almost tempted to suggest farming the work out with Amazon Mechanical Turk except then there'd be the hassle of getting past their paywall. What a bunch of incompetent jerks.)
Quite apart from the fact that the actual hosting costs are only about half that, you have to bear in mind that long-term archives have more costs than cheap-ass hosting. In particular, they've got to keep multiple copies of everything on multiple sites so that if some disaster hits they don't lose everything. If it was just about keeping one copy online as cheap as possible, the scientists would just put it on their personal webpage and maybe put another in Dropbox.
Archival isn't cheap! Work out for yourself how much would it cost to guarantee that the document will still be available 20 years from now...
However, he did a damn good job of knowing what people did want!
Moreover, he was excellent at knowing what people would want, and not just what they were saying they wanted at the time. That's a rare skill; most folks only desire the things that they actually know, and most management and market research can't look past that. The effect of this was that he was often the first in a particular market to make a really successful product, and Apple's mega-profits stemmed from that.
Jobs was still an asshole and a salesman with a massive RDF though.
BT cares, BT cares about holding onto it's nationwide monopoly no matter what. If you want BT fibre in your area the best way to do it is to setup a scheme that will compete against BT, you'll see Openreach vans turn up with fancy new cabinets in no time. It knows full well that it's biggest long term threat is local projects that turn into competing telcos over time. I guarantee if this project in TFA starts to cover more than a handful of houses, BT will get interested all of a sudden.
The difference with the US is that BT is dealing with these things by improving provision instead of by getting their friends in the government from making it illegal for anyone to build out the fiber at all. The difference is that people at least gain access to the improved service (if possibly at excessively high prices) and that's a huge difference; the (near) monopoly is contributing to the Public Good.
Yes, we realize that in England BT is a 15 billion quid company with a heart of gold which would never hire a lobbyist but shows its displeasure with harrumphs and a brandished brolly and that there is always more gruel.
The key thing for people in the US to realize here is that there is nothing like the same extent of regulatory capture in the UK, and it is actually possible for the people doing this to get connected to the wider world without ever dealing with BT at all (just use one of the other business ISPs who run fiber to the customer). If the landowners are happy, it's not causing a hazard, and there's people willing to do it, who would have the standing to put a stop to it?
But truly, BT don't care because these are people out in the countryside. Really. The UK is far more urban than the US; a policy of only properly serving towns is far more effective. (Heck, a policy of only serving towns with over 10k population would still be very profitable.) It's when towns start doing their own fiber that they (and their competitor, Virgin Media) stir themselves, and even then it is usually done by prioritizing the hardware rollout.
I don't see these methods as being as effective as profiling programs based on their behavior and then negating them by dangerous behaviors, not by prior encounter.
On systems where it is known what they should be doing, a lot of corporate desktops for example, whitelisting just those things required is far more effective: there's no need to try to figure out what is actually dangerous. It's following the principle that it is far easier to enumerate good behaviors than bad ones. Yes, that doesn't cover everything for all users but then it isn't a tool for everyone. On systems where it is applicable, it's a very good security measure.
Or would be if it wasn't for the publisher fouling up and letting the signing key out. Oops! (A system is only ever as secure as its weakest link. Always was. Always will be.)
But if wind power becomes a large part of your generating capacity (estimates vary, but somewhere in the 10%-20% range), you are likely to start having problems when the wind dies down and you have a sudden need to turn on 5% or 10% of the power generation for your state in a hurry, and you don't actually _have_ that many fast-responding generators. Oops.
It really depends on the site. Offshore wind installations tend to have much better production characteristics, as they have much steadier wind velocities, can take much larger generators, and far fewer objections from environmentalists. (Less of the NIMBY, even if the same level of BANANA.) Yes, that doesn't help with providing power to Oklahoma, but there's a lot of the rest of the world which can take advantage. We don't need the same solution everywhere. (The UK is well-placed for wind power use, as it is windy offshore for a large part of the year — typically correlating with when power is needed for heating — and solar is not very good as it is a tremendously cloudy part of the world that lies at high latitudes.)
Another bonus with solar is that as the parent post mentioned, it happens to track peak load -- in sunny areas that are ideal for solar anyway, a big part of your load is air conditioning, which happens to be run most during the day on sunny days; conveniently exactly when you're getting peak generation out of your solar cells.
Load peaks vary a lot between different parts of the world, you know. In particular, not everywhere is a heavy user of air conditioning (which is a vastly hungry use of power) and other big power uses have different profiles. For example, use of electricity for cooking tends to peak in the evening, as does use of it for heating houses (in a lot of the world, keeping cool isn't the problem, but rather keeping warm). Solar power isn't nearly as suitable where those sorts of load profiles predominate.
As I said before, we don't need the same solution everywhere. Indeed, we definitely need different solutions. Dissing something just because it doesn't work where you are is myopic and stupid.
The poverty line is defined by our almighty government as some $ 23K/year (2012 $) for a family of four. International poverty threshold is some $ 1825 a year (2005 $). Even allowing for inflation, there is an order of magnitude different.[...]
Problem is, it is very hard to compare absolute poverty levels in different countries like that as the costs of things vary so widely from place to place. If it costs vastly more to house, feed and clothe your family in the US than in, say, Ecuador, that means that the level at which observed poverty (e.g., destitution) kicks in is higher in the US than in Ecuador. Whether or not it should be, that's how it is.
The other complication is that people tend to measure social status in relative terms: how close are they to the top of the heap? They don't care about the absolute heights of other heaps in other parts of the world.
So the conclusions of this study are rather obvious.
Not really, because you've not explained why there are other social differences as well. The US appears to be exceptional in many ways (which would be appropriate to study the reason for) and that means that projecting results from the US to the rest of the world is tricky. Tricky enough that it's simpler to exclude the US from the input data of studies where the results are meant to be applicable to many cultures. Yes, better models wouldn't need that. But better models might also be completely intractable; that happens so easily...
huge gobs of system and video memory (8GB combined GDDR5 in the case of PS4)
Hate to break it to you, but owners of PCs no longer consider 8GB to be "huge gobs". A few years ago, yeah. Now, well, it's not quite entry-level yet...
The "boom boom" used in comedy shows, possibly came from the "dit dit" used by Morse operators for exactly the same purpose.
Probably not. That more likely came from the habit in music halls of using drums to mark the punchline of a joke so that the... less attentive... would know when to laugh.
Re:Review Ruby for the perl enthusiast please
on
Ruby 2.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 0
PHP deployments = ROR deployments * 10^4
Ah, the "goodness == popularity" argument. Argumentum ad populum is a logical fallacy, you know...
Re:Review Ruby for the perl enthusiast please
on
Ruby 2.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Java - I think is nice for people that like to type a lot. The modern day COBOL.
The only way Java even gets close to fun is with an IDE so that you don't need to type everything out in full by hand. No, the big advantage of Java is the assload of third-party libraries for doing interesting stuff. ("The modern day COBOL" is spot-on.)
Re:Review Ruby for the perl enthusiast please
on
Ruby 2.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Python could easily replace Perl for system admin tasks
Probably not. Python's not king of the one-line trick in the same way that Perl is, and probably can never become so because of its reliance on the use of whitespace to indicate program structure. Not that I'm complaining about the use of whitespace; just pointing out that it makes things impractical for muscling in on Perl's core territory.
This places Illinois on equal footing with Syria, China, and China.
Only if it passes. Proposing a stupid no-hope bill is, well, stupid but not a cause for panic. Passing and enforcing it would be a cause for alarm, especially if it were found to be constitutional. Vote the asshat out for wasting time and money if you feel that worried about it.
(I guess you're really keen on equating Illinois with China though, so much so that you did it twice! They're not the same though: Illinois is flatter and has better pizza.)
This gets really tricky with a language like Tcl, where the syntax is free-form enough that there's no obvious way to distinguish add-ons from built-ins, and, in fact, things frequently migrate from being add-ons to being part of the language.
That's a language where things that most people would consider to be part of the language are actually just part of the standard library. Formally, you could get rid of if, while, open and all the other "built-ins" and it would still be the language. You wouldn't expect normal code to run though. (There are use-cases for getting rid of such commands — such as evaluating code from untrusted sources — and the standard language implementation does support it.)
Slashdot Mirror
The US will be buried under its Keynesian nightmare. I just hope it doesn't take the whole world with it.
As opposed to the Friedmanian nightmare being tried here in the UK? You know, the one which is proving to be even worse?
Wordpress will publish anything at all (with no complete crap detection).
There's anything other than complete crap on Wordpress?
Pshaw, that's nothing. Once an editor sent me an article that had body text written in a sans-serif font!
Think on this: article written with Word using Comic Sans throughout. Or an article where the text is missing entirely. (Yes, I've seen that. It was at least easy to reject with a clear conscience!)
If you are unable to release the results of your research to the public, that's OK with me, but don't expect to get any public money from the goverment. Why should be the private research journals able to profit from tax-payers funded research?
What about people who received their research grants before this kerfuffle but haven't yet finished publishing the results from them? They don't have the money in their budgets for what you want. Their institutions don't have the money either (it's committed to other things, such as stopping the buildings from burning down; even the parts that are going to journal access have to be maintained because there's a need to keep access to existing journal articles). Getting to the situation of open access is hard because it takes rejigging the financial structure of grants and altering where the community in the particular field values as a publication location. Some fields have changed, some haven't.
Perhaps there should be a special tax on the corporations that publish journals to cover the costs of changing the access model.
And I'm already doing it fscking manually.
No you're not! You're using a computer! You've got to download stuff off their system manually! As in no computer used at all.
(I'm almost tempted to suggest farming the work out with Amazon Mechanical Turk except then there'd be the hassle of getting past their paywall. What a bunch of incompetent jerks.)
80k for hosting?
Tell me you forgot a decimal point!
8k would be overkill!
Quite apart from the fact that the actual hosting costs are only about half that, you have to bear in mind that long-term archives have more costs than cheap-ass hosting. In particular, they've got to keep multiple copies of everything on multiple sites so that if some disaster hits they don't lose everything. If it was just about keeping one copy online as cheap as possible, the scientists would just put it on their personal webpage and maybe put another in Dropbox.
Archival isn't cheap! Work out for yourself how much would it cost to guarantee that the document will still be available 20 years from now...
However, he did a damn good job of knowing what people did want!
Moreover, he was excellent at knowing what people would want, and not just what they were saying they wanted at the time. That's a rare skill; most folks only desire the things that they actually know, and most management and market research can't look past that. The effect of this was that he was often the first in a particular market to make a really successful product, and Apple's mega-profits stemmed from that.
Jobs was still an asshole and a salesman with a massive RDF though.
BT cares, BT cares about holding onto it's nationwide monopoly no matter what. If you want BT fibre in your area the best way to do it is to setup a scheme that will compete against BT, you'll see Openreach vans turn up with fancy new cabinets in no time. It knows full well that it's biggest long term threat is local projects that turn into competing telcos over time. I guarantee if this project in TFA starts to cover more than a handful of houses, BT will get interested all of a sudden.
The difference with the US is that BT is dealing with these things by improving provision instead of by getting their friends in the government from making it illegal for anyone to build out the fiber at all. The difference is that people at least gain access to the improved service (if possibly at excessively high prices) and that's a huge difference; the (near) monopoly is contributing to the Public Good.
One could argue that engineers should pay attention in physics class, or conversely, theorists should get their hands dirty once in a while.
Could we have both? A bit of realism on both sides would be nice...
Yes, we realize that in England BT is a 15 billion quid company with a heart of gold which would never hire a lobbyist but shows its displeasure with harrumphs and a brandished brolly and that there is always more gruel.
The key thing for people in the US to realize here is that there is nothing like the same extent of regulatory capture in the UK, and it is actually possible for the people doing this to get connected to the wider world without ever dealing with BT at all (just use one of the other business ISPs who run fiber to the customer). If the landowners are happy, it's not causing a hazard, and there's people willing to do it, who would have the standing to put a stop to it?
But truly, BT don't care because these are people out in the countryside. Really. The UK is far more urban than the US; a policy of only properly serving towns is far more effective. (Heck, a policy of only serving towns with over 10k population would still be very profitable.) It's when towns start doing their own fiber that they (and their competitor, Virgin Media) stir themselves, and even then it is usually done by prioritizing the hardware rollout.
I don't see these methods as being as effective as profiling programs based on their behavior and then negating them by dangerous behaviors, not by prior encounter.
On systems where it is known what they should be doing, a lot of corporate desktops for example, whitelisting just those things required is far more effective: there's no need to try to figure out what is actually dangerous. It's following the principle that it is far easier to enumerate good behaviors than bad ones. Yes, that doesn't cover everything for all users but then it isn't a tool for everyone. On systems where it is applicable, it's a very good security measure.
Or would be if it wasn't for the publisher fouling up and letting the signing key out. Oops! (A system is only ever as secure as its weakest link. Always was. Always will be.)
But if wind power becomes a large part of your generating capacity (estimates vary, but somewhere in the 10%-20% range), you are likely to start having problems when the wind dies down and you have a sudden need to turn on 5% or 10% of the power generation for your state in a hurry, and you don't actually _have_ that many fast-responding generators. Oops.
It really depends on the site. Offshore wind installations tend to have much better production characteristics, as they have much steadier wind velocities, can take much larger generators, and far fewer objections from environmentalists. (Less of the NIMBY, even if the same level of BANANA.) Yes, that doesn't help with providing power to Oklahoma, but there's a lot of the rest of the world which can take advantage. We don't need the same solution everywhere. (The UK is well-placed for wind power use, as it is windy offshore for a large part of the year — typically correlating with when power is needed for heating — and solar is not very good as it is a tremendously cloudy part of the world that lies at high latitudes.)
Another bonus with solar is that as the parent post mentioned, it happens to track peak load -- in sunny areas that are ideal for solar anyway, a big part of your load is air conditioning, which happens to be run most during the day on sunny days; conveniently exactly when you're getting peak generation out of your solar cells.
Load peaks vary a lot between different parts of the world, you know. In particular, not everywhere is a heavy user of air conditioning (which is a vastly hungry use of power) and other big power uses have different profiles. For example, use of electricity for cooking tends to peak in the evening, as does use of it for heating houses (in a lot of the world, keeping cool isn't the problem, but rather keeping warm). Solar power isn't nearly as suitable where those sorts of load profiles predominate.
As I said before, we don't need the same solution everywhere. Indeed, we definitely need different solutions. Dissing something just because it doesn't work where you are is myopic and stupid.
You'd think the government would be all over the Central Authentication Service.
It'd be nice if they were; it might encourage someone to come up with a solid Apache plugin to handle CAS-based authentication right.
Duress code...
How does that save the family held hostage? Or the poor sap with a gun pointed to his head?
The poverty line is defined by our almighty government as some $ 23K/year (2012 $) for a family of four. International poverty threshold is some $ 1825 a year (2005 $). Even allowing for inflation, there is an order of magnitude different.[...]
Problem is, it is very hard to compare absolute poverty levels in different countries like that as the costs of things vary so widely from place to place. If it costs vastly more to house, feed and clothe your family in the US than in, say, Ecuador, that means that the level at which observed poverty (e.g., destitution) kicks in is higher in the US than in Ecuador. Whether or not it should be, that's how it is.
The other complication is that people tend to measure social status in relative terms: how close are they to the top of the heap? They don't care about the absolute heights of other heaps in other parts of the world.
So the conclusions of this study are rather obvious.
Not really, because you've not explained why there are other social differences as well. The US appears to be exceptional in many ways (which would be appropriate to study the reason for) and that means that projecting results from the US to the rest of the world is tricky. Tricky enough that it's simpler to exclude the US from the input data of studies where the results are meant to be applicable to many cultures. Yes, better models wouldn't need that. But better models might also be completely intractable; that happens so easily...
I use the three shells where I live on the east coast of America.
I figure that must be bash, ksh and what? csh? zsh? ash? Don't keep us in suspense here!
huge gobs of system and video memory (8GB combined GDDR5 in the case of PS4)
Hate to break it to you, but owners of PCs no longer consider 8GB to be "huge gobs". A few years ago, yeah. Now, well, it's not quite entry-level yet...
So, what's the excuse here?
Nobody with actual tech expertise on staff? A database schema that's retarded? Who knows?
The "boom boom" used in comedy shows, possibly came from the "dit dit" used by Morse operators for exactly the same purpose.
Probably not. That more likely came from the habit in music halls of using drums to mark the punchline of a joke so that the... less attentive... would know when to laugh.
PHP deployments = ROR deployments * 10^4
Ah, the "goodness == popularity" argument. Argumentum ad populum is a logical fallacy, you know...
Java - I think is nice for people that like to type a lot. The modern day COBOL.
The only way Java even gets close to fun is with an IDE so that you don't need to type everything out in full by hand. No, the big advantage of Java is the assload of third-party libraries for doing interesting stuff. ("The modern day COBOL" is spot-on.)
Python could easily replace Perl for system admin tasks
Probably not. Python's not king of the one-line trick in the same way that Perl is, and probably can never become so because of its reliance on the use of whitespace to indicate program structure. Not that I'm complaining about the use of whitespace; just pointing out that it makes things impractical for muscling in on Perl's core territory.
This places Illinois on equal footing with Syria, China, and China.
Only if it passes. Proposing a stupid no-hope bill is, well, stupid but not a cause for panic. Passing and enforcing it would be a cause for alarm, especially if it were found to be constitutional. Vote the asshat out for wasting time and money if you feel that worried about it.
(I guess you're really keen on equating Illinois with China though, so much so that you did it twice! They're not the same though: Illinois is flatter and has better pizza.)
This gets really tricky with a language like Tcl, where the syntax is free-form enough that there's no obvious way to distinguish add-ons from built-ins, and, in fact, things frequently migrate from being add-ons to being part of the language.
That's a language where things that most people would consider to be part of the language are actually just part of the standard library. Formally, you could get rid of if, while, open and all the other "built-ins" and it would still be the language. You wouldn't expect normal code to run though. (There are use-cases for getting rid of such commands — such as evaluating code from untrusted sources — and the standard language implementation does support it.)
You mean just the BSA?
Remember, you can't have "BSA" without BS.