CTO is the technology that the company makes and sells. In other words, the real business.
Only if a company makes/sells a technology product. In other cases (such as government), CTO and CIO are used interchangeably to mean CIO. We are discussing a government entity here, and there is only a single CIO/CTO officer (as evidenced by the fact that, PTFA, the various departments CIOs report to this CTO.
The reason is the "business side" in north america and the UK have great distain for technical people, and the CTO is often seen as that annoying guy who (stupid) customers seem to connect with. In Germany, China and Japan, the technical side actually does have authority for technology (imagine that!).
That "Business Side" you seem to disrespect so much, pays the bills. CTOs have a bad habit of forgetting their place. IT is a cost center, not a revenue center. As such, their role is to provide the required services as cheaply as possible. If they are having trouble doing their job its because they have failed to understand the business role they are primarily supposed to fill. If they feel something needs to be done, they should do the cost/benefit analysis and present it. If it is compelling then they will have no problem getting what they want. If its not, then there really is no justification for it anyways. This is the fundamental truth that many IT people simply don't get. Companies are about making money, not making peoples jobs easier.
Seen another way, if a change is proposed, the math to figure out what to do is stupid simple: If the cost of making a particular change is less than the amount of money that change will save, then do it. If its more, or if its roughly equal, then no dice. End of Story
History has shown that Socialism does not work period. It does not matter the type of government.
Actually, history has shown that socialism doesn't exist. By its very nature, Socialism requires a power vacuum, a situation that is highly unstable and temporary. It quickly gets replaced by something else (historically, a dictatorship).
You could ask the same about football or Marvell movie adaptations. Mostly entertainment. The Mars rover entertains a different audience.
and I am equally unhappy about my money being used to subsidize those other things.
I spend more money on the untied way than I do in taxes, and I wouldn't have any issue with NASA if they had done anything I consider remotely useful in my lifetime. Going to the moon was useful because it was trailblazing. The space shuttle was supposed to be the first step in creating a space economy, but it failed because they couldn't make it cost effective. The new launch system looks to be more of the same. Meanwhile, private companies are starting to do what NASA either couldn't or wouldn't do: make space accessible to wider audiences... We'd be better served taking NASA's entire budget away and giving it to sir Richard Branson or Elon Musk.
Including a smooth-running ISS, a mars rover that goes on and on and on and on and on, and a new launch system.
We cant get to that ISS without paying Russians for the ride (those same Russians we currently have sanctions against for their international behavior...)
That mars rover has produced some interesting information about mars, but in what way does that knowledge benefit me? In what way has anything to do with the mars rover benefited the average American? NASA could have done that 30 years ago. They could have and should have done it in '85 so what has the last 30 years bought us?
What new launch system? Last I heard they were a decade behind schedule and so far over budget as to make most government efforts look efficient by comparison. Even when they do finish it (in 5 years?), it will still not be significantly more cost effective than the last launch system (hopefully a little safer maybe, but I doubt it...)
After everything is said and done, the one thing we need NASA to do, is save the human race: Both by getting us off this rock, and by keeping other rocks from hitting us. We are no closer to either of those goals than we were in 1980, so I feel no particular inclination to keep on giving them any money. I don't care how much we spend on defense, as that does not pertain to this question. At least $200 out of my pocket went to NASA last year, and based on what I have seen from them, I do whatever is in my power to avoid giving them any more. I know I am not alone, as NASA every year faces an uphill battle to maintain their funding (and for good reason, they haven't earned a damn thing in the last 30 years).
Among other things, the Crew Survivability study discovered an unexpected failure mode in the titanium structures of the crew compartment.
Actually the "faulty" part was the roller bearing for the bay doors, and it should be noted that the part was being used so far outside its design parameters at the time of failure that the analysis provides no useful information.
There's many people who want NASA to be doing *more* science, and much less of anything having to do with people in space
none of whom are paying the bills. The people paying the bills are largely indifferent to the science, and only want to know "whats in it for us?" That is not at all an unreasonable question, and one that basic research struggles with all the time. The idea that basic research has any intrinsic value is not at all obvious to anyone outside the scientific community (for whom science pays the bills, and provides interesting work. In short, not an objective crowd ).
You're off by at least twenty years and a second world war's worth of engineering investment.
I'm not off at all, and space flight had the cold war which saw the USA alone spending many times what the entirety of world war II cost the entire world.
but they already have done exceptionally well especially when compared to some military defense contractor
We can compare them to Enron too, or compare them to Jeffrey Dahmer. It proves nothing.
NASA peaked in '69, and it has been all downhill since then. Its long since past time for them to shit or get off the pot. Since they seem unwilling to produce, its time to cut them out and replace them with someone who can show results.
To be fair, a large part of the problem is political and legal. Our legal and political systems cant deal with / don't tolerate fatalities. Even the military is loosing their protections in this regard. It means that the politicians and the lawyers are actively preventing us from making forward progress because of the overwhelming backlash against "allowing" a fatality.
There has to be proof, in safety-critical processes
First: Why? everything in life is a risk. If you put out an add looking for volunteers for a mission that is almost 100% guaranteed to kill the volunteer, you will still get many thousands of times the number of volunteers as you need...
Second: There is no such thing as proof. the very concept is for mathematicians, politicians and idiots; none of whom deal in the real world. The real world is dangerous, and people are notoriously bad at planning for the unexpected. The amount of danger increases as a function of the energy involved, making spaceflight very dangerous by definition. The people involved accept that risk, but what good is installing 3 redundant hydraulic systems when a single fault in the leading edge of a wing severs all three... A better use of weight and cost would be two systems with armor... (Might have saved Columbia, or at least gotten the crew to a slow enough speed and low enough altitude that they could have survived breakup/bailout).
Redundant systems have a demonstrated usefulness, but they fail completely when face with area effects, and yet, redundancy is used to "prove" low odds of failure, that simply do not pan out in reality. Fukushima was supposed to survive a one in a thousand years tsunami...
flight 232 had all three hydraulic system severed in what was supposed to be a 1 in a billion event...
Kegworth was a result of redundant engines being useless because the wrong engine got shut down...
"Proof" in mechanical systems is usually demonstrated through redundancy which only gets you so far: Not nearly as far as the engineers are taught...
"Life in space is so complicated that a lot of logistics have to be off-loaded to the ground if astronauts are to actually do anything substantive. Just building the schedule for the astronauts in orbit on the U.S. side of the station requires a full-time team of 50 staffers.
I'm sorry, but that just flies in the face of reason. If its true, then NASA is doing something badly wrong. It should not take 50x as long to figure out what order to do things as it does to actually do them. I could understand a complex operation like a spacewalk taking 50 man hours to plan for a one hour project, but the majority of things that people do simply do not benefit from that extreme level of planning.
A good example of the over-thinking that NASA does is the Columbia Crew survivability report. Many tens of thousands of hours were spent on the analysis that concluded the same thing that just about anyone could have stated after 30 seconds of deliberation: There were many different factors involved in supersonic re-entry, most of which are fatal, and there is no known technology that could have saved the crew from any significant portion of those factors. Yet NASA felt it necessary to spend millions on that part of the investigation...
If people want to continue NASA in any meaningful way, two decisions need to be made: First, what do we really want NASA to accomplish? (meaning we the people, NOT we the NASA), and how much will it really cost.
I can virtually guarantee that no one cares if NASA achieves any more science. What people want NASA to be achieving is the engineering of going into space and staying there. Everything else costs more than it is worth, and should be undertaken only if the costs can be partially subsidized by the engineering projects needed to achieve cheap space travel.
Given the progression of human engineering expression, space travel should be accessible to a significant minority of the worlds population. 35 years after the wright brothers, the entire upper middle class could afford to fly. 35 years after Apollo, only a handfull of people have even been to the moon, and less than 100 individuals could afford to pay out of pocket to do so today, and even if they did, they would have to wait 10 years for someone to put together a dedicated mission.
NASA has failed in its primary responsibility to the American people: Make space travel commonplace.
Any law made like that could almost certainly be used to ensure that any Patent YOU might ever have could be voided if you weren't making the product the day the patent was issued, and every day thereafter.
The surface consists of a hardened layer that has been darkened by weathering process'. The subsurface is a much lighter layer of sand that blows away easily, and is a different color from the hardened surface. Once damage has been inflicted on the surface, the sand beneath can blow away (and does with each storm) causing the damaged areas to spread over time. The only way to prevent this is not to cause the damage in the first place.
It should be noted that there is no wildlife in those areas of sufficient size to damage the surface, It is only through human intervention that damage can occur. If Greenpeace values its reputation, they will expel every idiot involved in this debacle and tell them don't come back.
No-one is asking for special treatment to make women "more" than men, just to restore the balance, which by practically every metric shows that women are at a disadvantage in society, and especially the workplace, and double-especially in IT. We (feminists) want everyone to be equal, as we are equal, and that means highlighting these oft-overlooked degrading behaviours and circumstances which conspire to keep this gender difference around,
The fundamental problem is that equality will not be good enough to make women equal. I understand that sounds pretty self-conflicting, so let me explain.
The world works around a few basic principles that apply to almost all situations. The first of those is evolution and survival of the fittest. The root of this is that any action that gives an individual an advantage will ultimately be selectively bred for. It has made humans aggressive, and our societies have similarly evolved to favor aggressive people. Men, by historical chance happen to be the more aggressive half of the species.
Women end up taking a back seat (statistically speaking) because they are not as aggressive. We can change society to help address this imbalance, and make up for the existing discrepancy, by artificially selecting against aggression, but this may in fact be a fools errand. If the selective advantage of aggressive behavior is too great, attempting to eliminate that advantage, could potentially end up destroying society. If you breed out aggression, there is a strong possibility that you also breed out the single trait which makes us nearly unstoppable: Our drive to challenge and thoroughly destroy any competitive or existential threat. Those that have not bred out this trait then come in and mop us up, as our own species represents our greatest rivals.
At the end of the day, it looks as though we are making these societal changes to weed out and breed out aggression, but it is important to note that these changes in our society are being met with a certain degree of backlash from various religious groups, and also seems to be coinciding with an apparent decline in many facets of American society. The two are likely unrelated, but we have to consider the possibility that there is a causal relationship between the reduction in aggression and the decline of our high standard of living.
So if "consumer" connotes a livestock mentality, then what's a better word for "someone who buys a thing other than to use it to make other things that he can sell"?
There really isn't a better word for it, but it has negative connotations because the behavior is generally not rational. There are two kinds of consumption: Necessary and discretionary. No one talks about necessary consumption because it is a fact of life: Eating, place to sleep, clothes, etc... The other kind of consumption is not necessary to survival, but consists of luxuries. The purchase of luxuries is not rational, but rather an expression of personal enjoyment. Some discretionary consumption is more rational and socially acceptable than others. For example, buying a large wardrobe, or eating out at fancy restaurants are perfectly socially acceptable forms of discretionary spending. What is generally less socially acceptable consumption is the purchase of a gas guzzler, wearing offensive clothing, etc. While we wish to preserve the right to do these things, we wish to excise a tax on the behavior in order to discourage it, while at the same time helping to offset the cost to society of allowing these behaviors at all. At the end of the day, the individual right to operate a vehicle has a huge cost to society, is monumentally destructive to the environment, and should be discouraged in favor of public transportation and higher fuel efficiency wherever possible.
There is an old saying often attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes JR, "My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins." Operating a motor vehicle on public motorways is right on the line where everyones nose begins.
Hell, politics would be an awful lot better if politicians were driven by scientific results instead of baseless ideologies.
I like that idea. Lets make em run on a platform of what they intend to do, and what they intend to maintain while in office. These intentions have to be measurable. Once in office, they stay in office until they fail to meet the requirements they themselves set. Once they fail, there is a new election to replace them with someone new to make new promises.
It happens about 40 times a day on you average PC, it is just rare it hits anything vital. If you run ECC memory you can track how many read errors it corrects. In fact error-correcting memory exists for servers and workstations for this very purpose. It is real and common.
If it is happening at all with any regularity, it is a sign of faulty hardware. The fact that you would allow a machine to continue operating with a demonstrated record of on-going hardware errors shows you are either using very faulty equipment, or don't have any reason to care.
NASA uses mil-spec parts for good reason. They dont have the luxury of hot-swapping a broken part. Long story short, if youre seeing any ECC failures, you have a faulty part that needs to be replaced. If you're seeing it across an entire range of machines, youre observing either a design flaw, or a manufacturing problem.
Basketball tickets are a luxury. If you buy them, it's because you chose to give Ballmer money. I can't help you with that.
Thats right, we can choose not to buy basketball tickets (and I'm already in that camp), but we can't choose not to subsidize Balmers purchase of the team because a set of, long since gone, politicians wrote that nice little loophole into our tax code for us. The way I do the math, those assholes transferred about $10 from my pocket into Blamers pocket with just this one transaction. I had no say in the matter. I had no interest in the stupid basketball team (or the sport for that matter), and yet here I am subsidizing it...
I want to know: What humanitarian need did my $10 fill? In what way is the world a better place than it would have been if Balmer had to cough up the price without my subsidy? I could fully support the idea if my money had gone towards curing cancer, or helping dying children, or something equally righteous, but how is supporting Basketball, a sport that is fully capable of paying its own way, helping better humanity? How is this anything other than yet another way in which those with the power and the money are stealing from the rest of us?
I finally concluded that submerging the entire system was impracticable. Ultimately, I concluded that something that just circulated the liquid against the CPU itself in a closed loop would be better. This is in fact what most modern liquid coolers do.
I looked at a number of fluids including Flourinert, but concluded they were just not really reasonable. Almost all liquids get more viscous as they get colder, which makes pumping them more difficult, and requires special pumps. Many of them are susceptible to contamination which changes there behavior. I've always suspected that the mineral oil became corrosive due to contamination, but I had moved on before I could test anything.
Another idea which I like even better is to immerse the whole machine in mineral oil.
This is actually not that good of an idea. I ran a mineral oil rig back when I was in school, and the mineral oil dissolves the dielectric used in the "can" style capacitors used on almost all electronics. Over the space of about 3 years, the oil will destroy the exposed caps, and the machine will become flaky and ultimately stop working altogether. Also of note, the oil permeates and partially dissolves most silicone caulk and the plastics used for hot glue. Ultimately, its pretty nasty stuff in spite of appearing to be relatively inert.
If he finds someone that is willing to invest in his project, let it happen, and when the cold fusion device turns out to be a scam, let them report it to the police and trow him back in jail where he belongs.
The best way to deal with a bluff is to call it, not argue about it.
The problem is that people like this undermine the public trust in science. That is a huge problem because it opens the door to allow an entire other set of charlatans into the picture. These other people gain traction only because the name of science has been tarnished as the provider of truth. Once this other group of people have the public ear, they start pushing all kinds of counter productive BS like creationism and other idiot dogma
Our governments need to assign science and all its keywords as trademarks to a standards body and give them full right to enforce. This will help to put an end to all of those deceitful commercials that begin with "scientifically proven to xxx". Joe Sixpack doesn't even understand how they're being lied to, or even that they are, and that failure to understand is in no small part due to the behavior of people like Rossi and his associates.
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CTO is the technology that the company makes and sells. In other words, the real business.
Only if a company makes/sells a technology product. In other cases (such as government), CTO and CIO are used interchangeably to mean CIO. We are discussing a government entity here, and there is only a single CIO/CTO officer (as evidenced by the fact that, PTFA, the various departments CIOs report to this CTO.
The reason is the "business side" in north america and the UK have great distain for technical people, and the CTO is often seen as that annoying guy who (stupid) customers seem to connect with. In Germany, China and Japan, the technical side actually does have authority for technology (imagine that!).
That "Business Side" you seem to disrespect so much, pays the bills. CTOs have a bad habit of forgetting their place. IT is a cost center, not a revenue center. As such, their role is to provide the required services as cheaply as possible. If they are having trouble doing their job its because they have failed to understand the business role they are primarily supposed to fill. If they feel something needs to be done, they should do the cost/benefit analysis and present it. If it is compelling then they will have no problem getting what they want. If its not, then there really is no justification for it anyways. This is the fundamental truth that many IT people simply don't get. Companies are about making money, not making peoples jobs easier.
Seen another way, if a change is proposed, the math to figure out what to do is stupid simple: If the cost of making a particular change is less than the amount of money that change will save, then do it. If its more, or if its roughly equal, then no dice. End of Story
History has shown that Socialism does not work period. It does not matter the type of government.
Actually, history has shown that socialism doesn't exist. By its very nature, Socialism requires a power vacuum, a situation that is highly unstable and temporary. It quickly gets replaced by something else (historically, a dictatorship).
You could ask the same about football or Marvell movie adaptations. Mostly entertainment. The Mars rover entertains a different audience.
and I am equally unhappy about my money being used to subsidize those other things.
I spend more money on the untied way than I do in taxes, and I wouldn't have any issue with NASA if they had done anything I consider remotely useful in my lifetime. Going to the moon was useful because it was trailblazing. The space shuttle was supposed to be the first step in creating a space economy, but it failed because they couldn't make it cost effective. The new launch system looks to be more of the same. Meanwhile, private companies are starting to do what NASA either couldn't or wouldn't do: make space accessible to wider audiences... We'd be better served taking NASA's entire budget away and giving it to sir Richard Branson or Elon Musk.
Including a smooth-running ISS, a mars rover that goes on and on and on and on and on, and a new launch system.
We cant get to that ISS without paying Russians for the ride (those same Russians we currently have sanctions against for their international behavior...)
That mars rover has produced some interesting information about mars, but in what way does that knowledge benefit me? In what way has anything to do with the mars rover benefited the average American? NASA could have done that 30 years ago. They could have and should have done it in '85 so what has the last 30 years bought us?
What new launch system? Last I heard they were a decade behind schedule and so far over budget as to make most government efforts look efficient by comparison. Even when they do finish it (in 5 years?), it will still not be significantly more cost effective than the last launch system (hopefully a little safer maybe, but I doubt it...)
After everything is said and done, the one thing we need NASA to do, is save the human race: Both by getting us off this rock, and by keeping other rocks from hitting us. We are no closer to either of those goals than we were in 1980, so I feel no particular inclination to keep on giving them any money. I don't care how much we spend on defense, as that does not pertain to this question. At least $200 out of my pocket went to NASA last year, and based on what I have seen from them, I do whatever is in my power to avoid giving them any more. I know I am not alone, as NASA every year faces an uphill battle to maintain their funding (and for good reason, they haven't earned a damn thing in the last 30 years).
Among other things, the Crew Survivability study discovered an unexpected failure mode in the titanium structures of the crew compartment.
Actually the "faulty" part was the roller bearing for the bay doors, and it should be noted that the part was being used so far outside its design parameters at the time of failure that the analysis provides no useful information.
There's many people who want NASA to be doing *more* science, and much less of anything having to do with people in space
none of whom are paying the bills. The people paying the bills are largely indifferent to the science, and only want to know "whats in it for us?" That is not at all an unreasonable question, and one that basic research struggles with all the time. The idea that basic research has any intrinsic value is not at all obvious to anyone outside the scientific community (for whom science pays the bills, and provides interesting work. In short, not an objective crowd ).
You're off by at least twenty years and a second world war's worth of engineering investment.
I'm not off at all, and space flight had the cold war which saw the USA alone spending many times what the entirety of world war II cost the entire world.
Columbia was a commercial enterprise?
but they already have done exceptionally well especially when compared to some military defense contractor
We can compare them to Enron too, or compare them to Jeffrey Dahmer. It proves nothing.
NASA peaked in '69, and it has been all downhill since then. Its long since past time for them to shit or get off the pot. Since they seem unwilling to produce, its time to cut them out and replace them with someone who can show results.
To be fair, a large part of the problem is political and legal. Our legal and political systems cant deal with / don't tolerate fatalities. Even the military is loosing their protections in this regard. It means that the politicians and the lawyers are actively preventing us from making forward progress because of the overwhelming backlash against "allowing" a fatality.
There has to be proof, in safety-critical processes
First: Why? everything in life is a risk. If you put out an add looking for volunteers for a mission that is almost 100% guaranteed to kill the volunteer, you will still get many thousands of times the number of volunteers as you need...
Second: There is no such thing as proof. the very concept is for mathematicians, politicians and idiots; none of whom deal in the real world. The real world is dangerous, and people are notoriously bad at planning for the unexpected. The amount of danger increases as a function of the energy involved, making spaceflight very dangerous by definition. The people involved accept that risk, but what good is installing 3 redundant hydraulic systems when a single fault in the leading edge of a wing severs all three... A better use of weight and cost would be two systems with armor... (Might have saved Columbia, or at least gotten the crew to a slow enough speed and low enough altitude that they could have survived breakup/bailout). Redundant systems have a demonstrated usefulness, but they fail completely when face with area effects, and yet, redundancy is used to "prove" low odds of failure, that simply do not pan out in reality. Fukushima was supposed to survive a one in a thousand years tsunami...
flight 232 had all three hydraulic system severed in what was supposed to be a 1 in a billion event...
Kegworth was a result of redundant engines being useless because the wrong engine got shut down...
"Proof" in mechanical systems is usually demonstrated through redundancy which only gets you so far: Not nearly as far as the engineers are taught...
"Life in space is so complicated that a lot of logistics have to be off-loaded to the ground if astronauts are to actually do anything substantive. Just building the schedule for the astronauts in orbit on the U.S. side of the station requires a full-time team of 50 staffers.
I'm sorry, but that just flies in the face of reason. If its true, then NASA is doing something badly wrong. It should not take 50x as long to figure out what order to do things as it does to actually do them. I could understand a complex operation like a spacewalk taking 50 man hours to plan for a one hour project, but the majority of things that people do simply do not benefit from that extreme level of planning.
A good example of the over-thinking that NASA does is the Columbia Crew survivability report. Many tens of thousands of hours were spent on the analysis that concluded the same thing that just about anyone could have stated after 30 seconds of deliberation: There were many different factors involved in supersonic re-entry, most of which are fatal, and there is no known technology that could have saved the crew from any significant portion of those factors. Yet NASA felt it necessary to spend millions on that part of the investigation...
If people want to continue NASA in any meaningful way, two decisions need to be made: First, what do we really want NASA to accomplish? (meaning we the people, NOT we the NASA), and how much will it really cost.
I can virtually guarantee that no one cares if NASA achieves any more science. What people want NASA to be achieving is the engineering of going into space and staying there. Everything else costs more than it is worth, and should be undertaken only if the costs can be partially subsidized by the engineering projects needed to achieve cheap space travel.
Given the progression of human engineering expression, space travel should be accessible to a significant minority of the worlds population. 35 years after the wright brothers, the entire upper middle class could afford to fly. 35 years after Apollo, only a handfull of people have even been to the moon, and less than 100 individuals could afford to pay out of pocket to do so today, and even if they did, they would have to wait 10 years for someone to put together a dedicated mission.
NASA has failed in its primary responsibility to the American people: Make space travel commonplace.
Any law made like that could almost certainly be used to ensure that any Patent YOU might ever have could be voided if you weren't making the product the day the patent was issued, and every day thereafter.
Bingo...
Then please tell us how a rake would not work.
The surface consists of a hardened layer that has been darkened by weathering process'. The subsurface is a much lighter layer of sand that blows away easily, and is a different color from the hardened surface. Once damage has been inflicted on the surface, the sand beneath can blow away (and does with each storm) causing the damaged areas to spread over time. The only way to prevent this is not to cause the damage in the first place.
It should be noted that there is no wildlife in those areas of sufficient size to damage the surface, It is only through human intervention that damage can occur. If Greenpeace values its reputation, they will expel every idiot involved in this debacle and tell them don't come back.
Why would they be using something that deals with "Wet" leaves in a drought?
Two Words: Industrial Accident
If the law was intended to prevent psychos from driving taxis, why are medallions limited in number, and what prevents a rich psycho from buying one?
What the makers of laws intend, and what actually result from the laws as written, rarely overlap.
Two things can be different but still equal.
No, two things can be different but still equivalent.
The difference is subtle but real.
No-one is asking for special treatment to make women "more" than men, just to restore the balance, which by practically every metric shows that women are at a disadvantage in society, and especially the workplace, and double-especially in IT. We (feminists) want everyone to be equal, as we are equal, and that means highlighting these oft-overlooked degrading behaviours and circumstances which conspire to keep this gender difference around,
The fundamental problem is that equality will not be good enough to make women equal. I understand that sounds pretty self-conflicting, so let me explain.
The world works around a few basic principles that apply to almost all situations. The first of those is evolution and survival of the fittest. The root of this is that any action that gives an individual an advantage will ultimately be selectively bred for. It has made humans aggressive, and our societies have similarly evolved to favor aggressive people. Men, by historical chance happen to be the more aggressive half of the species.
Women end up taking a back seat (statistically speaking) because they are not as aggressive. We can change society to help address this imbalance, and make up for the existing discrepancy, by artificially selecting against aggression, but this may in fact be a fools errand. If the selective advantage of aggressive behavior is too great, attempting to eliminate that advantage, could potentially end up destroying society. If you breed out aggression, there is a strong possibility that you also breed out the single trait which makes us nearly unstoppable: Our drive to challenge and thoroughly destroy any competitive or existential threat. Those that have not bred out this trait then come in and mop us up, as our own species represents our greatest rivals.
At the end of the day, it looks as though we are making these societal changes to weed out and breed out aggression, but it is important to note that these changes in our society are being met with a certain degree of backlash from various religious groups, and also seems to be coinciding with an apparent decline in many facets of American society. The two are likely unrelated, but we have to consider the possibility that there is a causal relationship between the reduction in aggression and the decline of our high standard of living.
Yeah, except for the part where it doesn't specify the unit of measurement in the answer. 634100 what? Kilometres? Yards? Feet? Acres?
The result is a unitless number. It is the proportion of two areas, and so the units cancel leaving just a raw proportion.
So if "consumer" connotes a livestock mentality, then what's a better word for "someone who buys a thing other than to use it to make other things that he can sell"?
There really isn't a better word for it, but it has negative connotations because the behavior is generally not rational. There are two kinds of consumption: Necessary and discretionary. No one talks about necessary consumption because it is a fact of life: Eating, place to sleep, clothes, etc... The other kind of consumption is not necessary to survival, but consists of luxuries. The purchase of luxuries is not rational, but rather an expression of personal enjoyment. Some discretionary consumption is more rational and socially acceptable than others. For example, buying a large wardrobe, or eating out at fancy restaurants are perfectly socially acceptable forms of discretionary spending. What is generally less socially acceptable consumption is the purchase of a gas guzzler, wearing offensive clothing, etc. While we wish to preserve the right to do these things, we wish to excise a tax on the behavior in order to discourage it, while at the same time helping to offset the cost to society of allowing these behaviors at all. At the end of the day, the individual right to operate a vehicle has a huge cost to society, is monumentally destructive to the environment, and should be discouraged in favor of public transportation and higher fuel efficiency wherever possible.
There is an old saying often attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes JR, "My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins." Operating a motor vehicle on public motorways is right on the line where everyones nose begins.
Hell, politics would be an awful lot better if politicians were driven by scientific results instead of baseless ideologies.
I like that idea. Lets make em run on a platform of what they intend to do, and what they intend to maintain while in office. These intentions have to be measurable. Once in office, they stay in office until they fail to meet the requirements they themselves set. Once they fail, there is a new election to replace them with someone new to make new promises.
It happens about 40 times a day on you average PC, it is just rare it hits anything vital. If you run ECC memory you can track how many read errors it corrects. In fact error-correcting memory exists for servers and workstations for this very purpose. It is real and common.
If it is happening at all with any regularity, it is a sign of faulty hardware. The fact that you would allow a machine to continue operating with a demonstrated record of on-going hardware errors shows you are either using very faulty equipment, or don't have any reason to care.
NASA uses mil-spec parts for good reason. They dont have the luxury of hot-swapping a broken part. Long story short, if youre seeing any ECC failures, you have a faulty part that needs to be replaced. If you're seeing it across an entire range of machines, youre observing either a design flaw, or a manufacturing problem.
Basketball tickets are a luxury. If you buy them, it's because you chose to give Ballmer money. I can't help you with that.
Thats right, we can choose not to buy basketball tickets (and I'm already in that camp), but we can't choose not to subsidize Balmers purchase of the team because a set of, long since gone, politicians wrote that nice little loophole into our tax code for us. The way I do the math, those assholes transferred about $10 from my pocket into Blamers pocket with just this one transaction. I had no say in the matter. I had no interest in the stupid basketball team (or the sport for that matter), and yet here I am subsidizing it...
I want to know: What humanitarian need did my $10 fill? In what way is the world a better place than it would have been if Balmer had to cough up the price without my subsidy? I could fully support the idea if my money had gone towards curing cancer, or helping dying children, or something equally righteous, but how is supporting Basketball, a sport that is fully capable of paying its own way, helping better humanity? How is this anything other than yet another way in which those with the power and the money are stealing from the rest of us?
Hmmm... do you have a better solution?
I finally concluded that submerging the entire system was impracticable. Ultimately, I concluded that something that just circulated the liquid against the CPU itself in a closed loop would be better. This is in fact what most modern liquid coolers do.
I looked at a number of fluids including Flourinert, but concluded they were just not really reasonable. Almost all liquids get more viscous as they get colder, which makes pumping them more difficult, and requires special pumps. Many of them are susceptible to contamination which changes there behavior. I've always suspected that the mineral oil became corrosive due to contamination, but I had moved on before I could test anything.
Another idea which I like even better is to immerse the whole machine in mineral oil.
This is actually not that good of an idea. I ran a mineral oil rig back when I was in school, and the mineral oil dissolves the dielectric used in the "can" style capacitors used on almost all electronics. Over the space of about 3 years, the oil will destroy the exposed caps, and the machine will become flaky and ultimately stop working altogether. Also of note, the oil permeates and partially dissolves most silicone caulk and the plastics used for hot glue. Ultimately, its pretty nasty stuff in spite of appearing to be relatively inert.
Blackberry is rumoured to consider selling their handset division
So, Blackberry, after changing their name to Blackberry would no longer be making or selling... Blackberrys.
If he finds someone that is willing to invest in his project, let it happen, and when the cold fusion device turns out to be a scam, let them report it to the police and trow him back in jail where he belongs. The best way to deal with a bluff is to call it, not argue about it.
The problem is that people like this undermine the public trust in science. That is a huge problem because it opens the door to allow an entire other set of charlatans into the picture. These other people gain traction only because the name of science has been tarnished as the provider of truth. Once this other group of people have the public ear, they start pushing all kinds of counter productive BS like creationism and other idiot dogma
Our governments need to assign science and all its keywords as trademarks to a standards body and give them full right to enforce. This will help to put an end to all of those deceitful commercials that begin with "scientifically proven to xxx". Joe Sixpack doesn't even understand how they're being lied to, or even that they are, and that failure to understand is in no small part due to the behavior of people like Rossi and his associates.