I hope he's right about that. I suspect he may have thought that the last time.
Overthrowing dictators is always a good thing, but I consider it a tossup at best as to whether the new leadership actually wants to rule democratically. Egyptians voluntarily elected an Islamist party last time, and even if the Muslim Brotherhood is out, Islamist sentiments remain. I will hope for better, but I'll believe it when I see it.
Old English used ð and more or less interchangeably. Different scribes used them differently, sometimes dependent on the position in the word. In IPA, ð is voiced (as in "this", transcribed/ðs/. (Thorn is unused).
I personally find it very confusing that "eth" is pronounced/ð/; I'd expected it to be pronounced// since in English "th" at the end of a word is generally unvoiced.
*Fail* to *diminish* *prosocial* (presumably the opposite of anti-social)... flip the negative, carry the two... and we get what we knew all along.
Look, I understand that scientists have to speak very precisely about their results so as to not overstate them. But surely there was a better way to write this headline.
Baffling, ain't it? It's free money. Somebody puts in an afternoon's worth of work, presses copies for next to nothing, and millions of dollars will come rolling in.
Usually when they're not doing that it's because one of the contracts wasn't clear. They didn't anticipate release of it when they negotiated the contracts, and they don't want to get sued. Unlike banging out a copy, negotiating a contract is work. Lawyer work, at multiple hundreds of dollar per hour.
A good case in point is WKRP in Cincinnati, which uses a lot of music. Rights to the music were negotiated at the time, but expired. In a lot of cases they had to rerecord the music with cover bands, and the licensing was still a pain.
They went through it (and are still working on it) because the show was very popular. "Spenser for Hire"... well... I assume they'll get around to it one of these days.
Well, yes and no. It's not like the various people who pay tuition would find it dropping by the same amount if health insurance were suspended.
The fundamental theory of unions is that the price paid for an item is a function of both supply and demand. When demand is high, the seller can charge a price higher than the cost. The question then becomes, who receives the profits?
That's not a simple question to answer, as there are a lot of inputs, but in the case of low- to moderate-skill workers, the answer is generally that the employer gets 100% of the profits. The workers are easily replaced by ones who will demand less. (In the limit case, MUCH less, and the workers are reduced to subsistence wages.) A union is a way for the workers to demand a share of the profits, by agreeing among each other not to work for the lowest offered wage.
In those circumstances, the increased wages aren't coming out of the pockets of the customers. They're coming out of the pockets of the employers. That's the point.
There are even more complex economics going on with grad students, whose "job" is being subsidized by a variety of sources, for work that is well removed from market forces. Student tuitions have been going up faster than inflation, and the grad students are competing for that extra money with a variety of campus functions (everything from fat football coach paychecks to new buildings). A grad student union is really more a representation than a true union, but it serves one of the same functions: to represent the group in the negotiation for how much they will receive of the difference between costs and monies received.
Question for me is, will they replace it with something more effective? Technocratic benevolent dictatorships are a lot more attractive on paper than they turn out to be in real life.
And if the military intends to (again) establish a democracy, will the people just vote the Muslim Brotherhood back into power? I may not like Morsi but he was the democratically elected leader, with no more than the usual level of shenanigans in the election. (And given the shenanigans that show up in the US, I'm not going to throw too many stones. They're different, in both kind and degree, but we're hardly beyond reproach.)
This is true, but we're not getting nearly the advantage out of it that cats or camels do, with their more biomechanically efficient lower limbs. You're running on your toes by comparison to sneaker-wearing runners, but not when compared to dogs, who couldn't put their heels down if they tried.
We're not dogs, nor are dogs us. But the point was to confirm one of the upthread posts: the knee and leg are not how you'd have designed them. Lots of other animals do better.
You can certainly run a marathon on an artificial knee. You can't play pro sports, but you're talking about the top.00001% of all players. If you go down, there's somebody behind you who hasn't had to do a length recovery, and who hasn't had a knee replacement literally rammed into his bone.
Knee replacements aren't actually all that great yet; they've got a lifespan shorter than your original knee. Cartilage takes a pounding. My own personal gripe with the knee is the ligaments, which are exposed and subject to tremendous leverage: my replacement is stronger than the original. (Even though it's actually made of more biological parts, rather than a purely artificial one.)
The real problem with the knee can't be fixed by trying to replace its parts, but to reconsider the way the whole joint is arranged. Most mammals use their ankle joints for purposes that we put our knees to, and walk on their toes instead of on their heels. We mis-adapted that design to bipedal walking, rather than redesigning from scratch, which is what a good engineer would have done. Had we evolved from ground-dwellers, it might have worked out better on the knees, but we came from tree-dwellers who went back to the ground, and some good ideas were lost in the transitions.
This is in the print edition, not just an online blogger. Samuelson is one of their regular opinion writers.
Having hired him, they put very little editorial control over him. They hired him because they believe his opinion should be heard, without interference from their own opinions. They have a stable of both liberal and conservative voices, both of which are separate from their editorial staff (and all of those separate from their newsroom).
I personally find Samuelson's opinion on economics (his primary focus) as ignorant as his opinion of technology. But perhaps that's just my own bias showing, so the Post Writers Group is helping expose you to "both" sides of the story. (I don't think that "both" is a very helpful way to look at such things, but it's the way journalism has long operated in the US.)
IMHO, there's a better chance of the news acquiring a few facts, and squeezing out a little bit of the partisan punditry (as the various partisan pundits point out each others' lies and exaggerations), if you let the news age for a week. It gives it a chance for some of the knee-jerk reactions to die off and perhaps even for slightly more thoughtful ones to creep in.
Unless you're actually Edward Snowden, you'd have done just fine getting this news next week, or next month. I believe that the rise of instant news is part of what's making political discussion so vacuous.
It's hard to imagine that section being considered constitutional. I suspect that there is already some case working its way through the federal system where somebody with an out-of-state same-sex marriage is suing for recognition. I know that Texas has already refused to grant a divorce in those circumstances; I don't know if it's been filed in a federal court.
It's unfortunate that such a blisteringly obvious conclusion will require the Supreme Court to inform backward states who don't want to believe it, and that this will take years and still result in a 5-4 decision.
That's interesting. Most of this kerfluffle is about 501(c)4, used for civic organizations. They were singling out groups whose names implied that they were political, rather than civic, and should file under section 527 instead.
The tax implications are the same: you can't deduct donations to either one. Both are tax exempt, which means that their profits aren't taxed, but they can't be paid out to investors. They have to be used for the organization's stated purpose.
The key difference between the two is that 501(c)4s are allowed to keep their donor lists secret, while 527s as political organizations have to make their donor lists public. Whether that's right or not is immaterial; it is the law. Some of the groups aiming for 501(c)4 status were being "rugged individualists"; others were trying to cover up astroturfing. (A lot of them, I suspect, just had no idea what they were doing.)
This appears to be a completely unrelated issue, involving potential tax dodging rather than trying to avoid public scrutiny. But the IRS is very much in the news for doing its job of making these difficult (and some would say arbitrary) distinctions.
The "everybody" I'm talking about here is kind of a fudge. I'm really talking about the people who talk. The vast majority don't think about this too much, and don't talk about it too much.
But they end up being complicit in the problem. They are influenced by those who do talk, and when they vote, they are swayed by the loudest talkers. That's why the talking has become screaming, in both ears, at the highest volume anybody can manage.
The Presidency is the one office where all of America comes together to vote. Every other job is done on a state-by-state or district-by-district vote, where one side or the other gets an easier foothold, and they're sent to scream at the top of their lungs. We end up with a moderate in the top job, but a legislature that's incapable of a single collective rational thought.
Here is what I've learned about politics in America:
1. The right hates the left. 2. The left hates the right. 3. Everybody hates the center.
Compromise is evil. If you didn't get everything that you want, then you've lost. When people say that they're hoping for a "moderate", they mean somebody who agrees with them on everything meaningful and gives up only trivial things that you don't care about at all.
This sarcasm isn't really about trying to defend the plan, or pick out the parts I think are good from the parts I think are bad. It's just that I can't think of any plan, on any topic, that won't be declared "dead on arrival" by both sides. I can't be bothered to see whether this plan is good, bad, or indifferent because it doesn't matter: everybody objects to it even before it's written down. It will be scrutinized only for the things to object to, and they will be found. Politics, as the "art of the possible", no longer exists because there is no longer any "possible", and nobody wants there to be any.
1. A.au address doesn't mean you're not in the US. CCTLDs are used for all sorts of reasons; bit.ly isn't libyan and gool.gl isn't in Greenland. Or maybe you're hanging on to an old email address for personal reasons. Filtering that out could have cost them donations, especially in light of:
2. Spam is cheap. It costs them essentially nothing to send you that email. If you wanted out, you'd have opted out.
If you had offered them money they'd actually have had to turn you down, since they'd ask for your address and non-American donors may not donate directly to political campaigns. (You are, however, welcome to spend as much as you like on "issue ads" filtered through a 527.) You could certainly call them lazy if they're still soliciting you after they know explicitly where you live, but I bet they don't bother (since implicit opt-outs are also potentially problematic).
A torrentor who Tor'd some torrent Tried to tutor two torrentors to Tor Said the two to the tutor Is it harder to Tor Than to torrent two torrents over Tor?
Well... not "disagree", exactly, but I'd consider it up for some debate. Borlaug did indeed save hundreds of millions of lives from starvation, but it created other problems of overcrowding (lack of access to water, increased violence from too many people crammed in together, disease, etc.) In some places it simply shifted the problems of starvation to larger populations. The number of hungry people in the world is expected to hit a record billion people:
I really don't intend this to diminish the sheer number of lives that Borlaug has saved, and some places have done much better in than others in taking advantage of the opportunity. For the past few decades the problem isn't really about quantity of food, per se, but rather the difficulty of getting it where it's needed despite local instability (including, just today, a murderous attack on UN aid personnel in Somalia).
But I do think that Borlaug's achievement doesn't reach its full capability without population control and decent government, and if we had those things Borlaug's extraordinary accomplishment might be unnecessary.
It can be a great improvement. Letting people know that you're OK, or that you need help, can be a major improvement. You still need cell towers to achieve that, but as with the charging stations, they can be independent of each other. Bringing in a new, temporary one will take less time and skill than fixing a downed power line.
Strengthening the infrastructure is expensive and hard. Putting up a lot of independent devices is cheap and easy. It's not the complete solution, but it's a feasible step that can make some things better without having to boil the ocean.
The only thing that the building has in common is geography. If you're going to take those responsibilities outside of your own device, why not just stick them in a remote data center and be done with it? Why should the building manager want to do anything other than route the bits between you and that center?
If the distance is too great and creates latencies, the solution isn't some server for the building, but some local CDN installation. Perhaps it would be in the building itself, or just in the neighborhood. It wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing to have my Google Drive or Netflix Instant cache or some AWS instance. But let the professionals manage that, which is a whole massive headache of its own.
The only hardware a building manager should need is the part that is geographic, the hard wire that leads to the rest of the Internet.
Presumably he meant Halt and Catch Fire, a joke assembly language instruction from the good old days when (a) people wrote in assembly language and (b) catching fire was something done by the CPU rather than the battery (and the idea that such a device could be powered by a battery that didn't require a truck to carry it would have been a joke of its own).
It's not even gambling, since it's rigged in the favor of the high-frequency traders. They obtain knowledge of trades before other people, and arbitrage that knowledge to buy slightly lower and sell slightly higher. The profits per trade are minuscule, but they leverage it by enormous sums of money and the vast number of transactions to turn a tidy profit for no work.
Slashdot Mirror
But it does suggest that this is like putting racing wheels on your skateboard when you weigh 400 pounds.
I hope he's right about that. I suspect he may have thought that the last time.
Overthrowing dictators is always a good thing, but I consider it a tossup at best as to whether the new leadership actually wants to rule democratically. Egyptians voluntarily elected an Islamist party last time, and even if the Muslim Brotherhood is out, Islamist sentiments remain. I will hope for better, but I'll believe it when I see it.
They could substitute that headline for about 80% of the reports about "studies" without loss.
Ah, sh**. I didn't look at the preview. Stupid habit.
Instead, I'll refer to the Wikipedia entries:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eth
ð is an "eth". A "thorn" is .
Old English used ð and more or less interchangeably. Different scribes used them differently, sometimes dependent on the position in the word. In IPA, ð is voiced (as in "this", transcribed /ðs/. (Thorn is unused).
I personally find it very confusing that "eth" is pronounced /ð/; I'd expected it to be pronounced // since in English "th" at the end of a word is generally unvoiced.
*Fail* to *diminish* *prosocial* (presumably the opposite of anti-social)... flip the negative, carry the two... and we get what we knew all along.
Look, I understand that scientists have to speak very precisely about their results so as to not overstate them. But surely there was a better way to write this headline.
Baffling, ain't it? It's free money. Somebody puts in an afternoon's worth of work, presses copies for next to nothing, and millions of dollars will come rolling in.
Usually when they're not doing that it's because one of the contracts wasn't clear. They didn't anticipate release of it when they negotiated the contracts, and they don't want to get sued. Unlike banging out a copy, negotiating a contract is work. Lawyer work, at multiple hundreds of dollar per hour.
A good case in point is WKRP in Cincinnati, which uses a lot of music. Rights to the music were negotiated at the time, but expired. In a lot of cases they had to rerecord the music with cover bands, and the licensing was still a pain.
They went through it (and are still working on it) because the show was very popular. "Spenser for Hire"... well... I assume they'll get around to it one of these days.
Well, yes and no. It's not like the various people who pay tuition would find it dropping by the same amount if health insurance were suspended.
The fundamental theory of unions is that the price paid for an item is a function of both supply and demand. When demand is high, the seller can charge a price higher than the cost. The question then becomes, who receives the profits?
That's not a simple question to answer, as there are a lot of inputs, but in the case of low- to moderate-skill workers, the answer is generally that the employer gets 100% of the profits. The workers are easily replaced by ones who will demand less. (In the limit case, MUCH less, and the workers are reduced to subsistence wages.) A union is a way for the workers to demand a share of the profits, by agreeing among each other not to work for the lowest offered wage.
In those circumstances, the increased wages aren't coming out of the pockets of the customers. They're coming out of the pockets of the employers. That's the point.
There are even more complex economics going on with grad students, whose "job" is being subsidized by a variety of sources, for work that is well removed from market forces. Student tuitions have been going up faster than inflation, and the grad students are competing for that extra money with a variety of campus functions (everything from fat football coach paychecks to new buildings). A grad student union is really more a representation than a true union, but it serves one of the same functions: to represent the group in the negotiation for how much they will receive of the difference between costs and monies received.
Question for me is, will they replace it with something more effective? Technocratic benevolent dictatorships are a lot more attractive on paper than they turn out to be in real life.
And if the military intends to (again) establish a democracy, will the people just vote the Muslim Brotherhood back into power? I may not like Morsi but he was the democratically elected leader, with no more than the usual level of shenanigans in the election. (And given the shenanigans that show up in the US, I'm not going to throw too many stones. They're different, in both kind and degree, but we're hardly beyond reproach.)
This is true, but we're not getting nearly the advantage out of it that cats or camels do, with their more biomechanically efficient lower limbs. You're running on your toes by comparison to sneaker-wearing runners, but not when compared to dogs, who couldn't put their heels down if they tried.
We're not dogs, nor are dogs us. But the point was to confirm one of the upthread posts: the knee and leg are not how you'd have designed them. Lots of other animals do better.
You can certainly run a marathon on an artificial knee. You can't play pro sports, but you're talking about the top .00001% of all players. If you go down, there's somebody behind you who hasn't had to do a length recovery, and who hasn't had a knee replacement literally rammed into his bone.
Knee replacements aren't actually all that great yet; they've got a lifespan shorter than your original knee. Cartilage takes a pounding. My own personal gripe with the knee is the ligaments, which are exposed and subject to tremendous leverage: my replacement is stronger than the original. (Even though it's actually made of more biological parts, rather than a purely artificial one.)
The real problem with the knee can't be fixed by trying to replace its parts, but to reconsider the way the whole joint is arranged. Most mammals use their ankle joints for purposes that we put our knees to, and walk on their toes instead of on their heels. We mis-adapted that design to bipedal walking, rather than redesigning from scratch, which is what a good engineer would have done. Had we evolved from ground-dwellers, it might have worked out better on the knees, but we came from tree-dwellers who went back to the ground, and some good ideas were lost in the transitions.
This is in the print edition, not just an online blogger. Samuelson is one of their regular opinion writers.
Having hired him, they put very little editorial control over him. They hired him because they believe his opinion should be heard, without interference from their own opinions. They have a stable of both liberal and conservative voices, both of which are separate from their editorial staff (and all of those separate from their newsroom).
I personally find Samuelson's opinion on economics (his primary focus) as ignorant as his opinion of technology. But perhaps that's just my own bias showing, so the Post Writers Group is helping expose you to "both" sides of the story. (I don't think that "both" is a very helpful way to look at such things, but it's the way journalism has long operated in the US.)
IMHO, there's a better chance of the news acquiring a few facts, and squeezing out a little bit of the partisan punditry (as the various partisan pundits point out each others' lies and exaggerations), if you let the news age for a week. It gives it a chance for some of the knee-jerk reactions to die off and perhaps even for slightly more thoughtful ones to creep in.
Unless you're actually Edward Snowden, you'd have done just fine getting this news next week, or next month. I believe that the rise of instant news is part of what's making political discussion so vacuous.
It's hard to imagine that section being considered constitutional. I suspect that there is already some case working its way through the federal system where somebody with an out-of-state same-sex marriage is suing for recognition. I know that Texas has already refused to grant a divorce in those circumstances; I don't know if it's been filed in a federal court.
It's unfortunate that such a blisteringly obvious conclusion will require the Supreme Court to inform backward states who don't want to believe it, and that this will take years and still result in a 5-4 decision.
That's interesting. Most of this kerfluffle is about 501(c)4, used for civic organizations. They were singling out groups whose names implied that they were political, rather than civic, and should file under section 527 instead.
The tax implications are the same: you can't deduct donations to either one. Both are tax exempt, which means that their profits aren't taxed, but they can't be paid out to investors. They have to be used for the organization's stated purpose.
The key difference between the two is that 501(c)4s are allowed to keep their donor lists secret, while 527s as political organizations have to make their donor lists public. Whether that's right or not is immaterial; it is the law. Some of the groups aiming for 501(c)4 status were being "rugged individualists"; others were trying to cover up astroturfing. (A lot of them, I suspect, just had no idea what they were doing.)
This appears to be a completely unrelated issue, involving potential tax dodging rather than trying to avoid public scrutiny. But the IRS is very much in the news for doing its job of making these difficult (and some would say arbitrary) distinctions.
The "everybody" I'm talking about here is kind of a fudge. I'm really talking about the people who talk. The vast majority don't think about this too much, and don't talk about it too much.
But they end up being complicit in the problem. They are influenced by those who do talk, and when they vote, they are swayed by the loudest talkers. That's why the talking has become screaming, in both ears, at the highest volume anybody can manage.
The Presidency is the one office where all of America comes together to vote. Every other job is done on a state-by-state or district-by-district vote, where one side or the other gets an easier foothold, and they're sent to scream at the top of their lungs. We end up with a moderate in the top job, but a legislature that's incapable of a single collective rational thought.
Here is what I've learned about politics in America:
1. The right hates the left.
2. The left hates the right.
3. Everybody hates the center.
Compromise is evil. If you didn't get everything that you want, then you've lost. When people say that they're hoping for a "moderate", they mean somebody who agrees with them on everything meaningful and gives up only trivial things that you don't care about at all.
This sarcasm isn't really about trying to defend the plan, or pick out the parts I think are good from the parts I think are bad. It's just that I can't think of any plan, on any topic, that won't be declared "dead on arrival" by both sides. I can't be bothered to see whether this plan is good, bad, or indifferent because it doesn't matter: everybody objects to it even before it's written down. It will be scrutinized only for the things to object to, and they will be found. Politics, as the "art of the possible", no longer exists because there is no longer any "possible", and nobody wants there to be any.
Was that ever not the case?
Possibly, but two things come to mind.
1. A .au address doesn't mean you're not in the US. CCTLDs are used for all sorts of reasons; bit.ly isn't libyan and gool.gl isn't in Greenland. Or maybe you're hanging on to an old email address for personal reasons. Filtering that out could have cost them donations, especially in light of:
2. Spam is cheap. It costs them essentially nothing to send you that email. If you wanted out, you'd have opted out.
If you had offered them money they'd actually have had to turn you down, since they'd ask for your address and non-American donors may not donate directly to political campaigns. (You are, however, welcome to spend as much as you like on "issue ads" filtered through a 527.) You could certainly call them lazy if they're still soliciting you after they know explicitly where you live, but I bet they don't bother (since implicit opt-outs are also potentially problematic).
A torrentor who Tor'd some torrent
Tried to tutor two torrentors to Tor
Said the two to the tutor
Is it harder to Tor
Than to torrent two torrents over Tor?
Well... not "disagree", exactly, but I'd consider it up for some debate. Borlaug did indeed save hundreds of millions of lives from starvation, but it created other problems of overcrowding (lack of access to water, increased violence from too many people crammed in together, disease, etc.) In some places it simply shifted the problems of starvation to larger populations. The number of hungry people in the world is expected to hit a record billion people:
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=29231
http://www.wfp.org/sites/default/files/imagecache/600x400/photos/600_bis_Total_Hungry_People_2001-2009.jpg
I really don't intend this to diminish the sheer number of lives that Borlaug has saved, and some places have done much better in than others in taking advantage of the opportunity. For the past few decades the problem isn't really about quantity of food, per se, but rather the difficulty of getting it where it's needed despite local instability (including, just today, a murderous attack on UN aid personnel in Somalia).
But I do think that Borlaug's achievement doesn't reach its full capability without population control and decent government, and if we had those things Borlaug's extraordinary accomplishment might be unnecessary.
It can be a great improvement. Letting people know that you're OK, or that you need help, can be a major improvement. You still need cell towers to achieve that, but as with the charging stations, they can be independent of each other. Bringing in a new, temporary one will take less time and skill than fixing a downed power line.
Strengthening the infrastructure is expensive and hard. Putting up a lot of independent devices is cheap and easy. It's not the complete solution, but it's a feasible step that can make some things better without having to boil the ocean.
The only thing that the building has in common is geography. If you're going to take those responsibilities outside of your own device, why not just stick them in a remote data center and be done with it? Why should the building manager want to do anything other than route the bits between you and that center?
If the distance is too great and creates latencies, the solution isn't some server for the building, but some local CDN installation. Perhaps it would be in the building itself, or just in the neighborhood. It wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing to have my Google Drive or Netflix Instant cache or some AWS instance. But let the professionals manage that, which is a whole massive headache of its own.
The only hardware a building manager should need is the part that is geographic, the hard wire that leads to the rest of the Internet.
Presumably he meant Halt and Catch Fire, a joke assembly language instruction from the good old days when (a) people wrote in assembly language and (b) catching fire was something done by the CPU rather than the battery (and the idea that such a device could be powered by a battery that didn't require a truck to carry it would have been a joke of its own).
It's not even gambling, since it's rigged in the favor of the high-frequency traders. They obtain knowledge of trades before other people, and arbitrage that knowledge to buy slightly lower and sell slightly higher. The profits per trade are minuscule, but they leverage it by enormous sums of money and the vast number of transactions to turn a tidy profit for no work.