While it may be true that this is the core of their business, I think that quite a few people nowadays know AMD because of their higher-end chips. I know I do, and although I really didn't give two squirts for the x86 market until fairly recently (being a Mac user, mostly), and so perhaps I don't have the whole-market perspective, it seems like the perception of AMD as a low-end manufacturer isn't quite true. They have to be making a fairly good profit margin on those Opterons and the rest of the x86-64 stuff, and it stands to reason that market segment is going to increase in the future.
Understood -- I didn't mean to go off at you so much as people higher up in the thread, plus more generally at the whole "McDonalds should be banned" meme which seems rather popular in some circles. It wasn't meant so much as a personal attack.
Sometimes you just pick a comment and hit 'Reply,' when it's not really much of a direct response...:)
Um, has it ever occurred to you that people just like eating unhealthy food?
You could put a Surgeon General's warning on every McDonald's meal, and force the cashiers to say "By purchasing and consuming this product you are taking 1 day off of your statistical life-span and increasing your healthcare costs by $100, do you want to continue?" and people would still eat there.
Greasy, salty, fatty food TASTES GOOD to a whole lot of people. If you're not one of them, congratulations. Go eat carrots and live a long life. But to many people--admittedly, myself included--McDonalds' french fries taste quite good. I am aware of exactly how bad they are for me, and exactly how many calories and grams of fat they have in them, and I still enjoy eating them very goddamn much.
People have a right to eat what they want to eat, and this means that they may do things that you and other people find inexplicable or illogical. Even if you educate them about the risks and benefits involved, people are still going to smoke cigarettes, eat french fries, and drink aqueous solutions of ethanol. It's not because they don't realize or don't understand what they're doing; on some level, they're doing a risk/benefit analysis and their results are coming up the opposite way yours (or someone who doesn't eat at McDonalds, or smoke, or drink) is.
I'm really tired of all these people, both on Slashdot and elsewhere, who think that people eat at McDonalds or Burger King because they're somehow being forced into it by the Man. There are plenty of other food choices you could get for the price of a McDonalds meal, and unless you're also implying that poor people are by nature stupid, and should be forced to live a certain way because they're too dumb to do it on their own, they're choosing to eat at McDonalds regardless.
I have this feeling that if the people who want to punish McDonalds for selling unhealthy food were allowed to run the world, I'd have to turn to my friendly local drug dealer in order to eat what I want; and let's face it, a world where Klondike bars have to be smuggled across the border in the rectum of some Mexican mule is just not one worth living in.
I think you just ignored what he was saying. If you know a certain page exists, then there are many ways to bypass China's internet filtering. It's not perfect, and it never will be.
But by removing the blocked pages from Google's index completely, it's as if they never existed. In fact, blocking them no longer matters, because most people will never realize they exist in the first place.
Fundamentally, it's the difference between being handed a history book that's been filled with black marker lines covering stuff that's "redacted," and being given a history book that's been totally rewritten to only show one point of view. In the first case, you're at least painfully aware that you're getting a one-sided viewpoint, in the latter case you're not.
Thank god somebody understands. If everything was priced relative to earnings you might as well go and make everything free, because you've removed my incentive to work hard. If I could do nothing all day and still go out to the store (or down to the auto dealership) and take stuff home with me, you can damn well bet I wouldn't be busting my ass getting up at 6:30 Monday morning to go to work.
Yeah, I've heard all these quasi-socialist arguments that "people aren't motivated by money and physical goods, they'd still work for the joy of working," and I think it's a load of crap. I'd probably do something with my time, but you can bet it wouldn't benefit anyone but me: I'd be sitting around building radio-controlled airplanes, probably, or maybe seeing how cool a home theater I can build in my basement. The world and the economy doesn't benefit from that, at least not in the way it benefits from the job I normally do (and wouldn't do, if it wasn't the ticket to a standard of living that I enjoy).
Any system which gives a low-value worker access to the same things that are available to a highly trained worker just destroys the motivation for a person to work hard and produce more. People work because they want things: a bigger house, a nicer car, put their kids into better schools, whatever. If you go into work every day because you honestly love your job, and you'd do it regardless of whether or not you were being paid, congratulations on putting one over on your boss, because they're overpaying you! The great majority of people do what they do because they think it's worth doing in return for the compensation they get. Make it easier to get that level of compensation, and people will take the easier jobs.
It should be obvious, but there are a whole lot of quasi-socialists who have their heads in the sand, and think that they can somehow create this wonderful world where rice farmers in Indochina and software engineers in Delaware can both drive the same car and have the same DVD player because they both work as hard. It doesn't work that way, and never will.
You do realize you subsidize the discounted postage bulk mail pays with your full rate first class postage, right?
Funny, I was always told the exact opposite. Namely, that the discounts given to presorted bulk mail were actually less than the labor saved by the Post Office as a result of the presorting, thus most "junk mail" and stuff shipped at the bulk rate is more profitable, on a piece-by-piece basis, than individual First Class letters. So that really it's all those catalogs and crap that are subsidizing the Post Office's ability to deliver your letter to Grandma for 39 cents.
If what you're saying is true, and it's the other way around, then what I've basically been told my entire life about the Post Office is wrong.
I just ran some quick Google searches and I'm not the only person under this impression: "Most people are unaware that bulk mailing is highly profitable for the U.S. Postal Service and it subsidizes first class mail." http://www.lawmall.com/abuse/abe-mail.html "Bulk mail thereby subsidizes low cost stamps for letter, magazine, and book mailing." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_mail#Legislati on &c., etc.
In the retail store I worked at most recently (not a grocery store but hardgoods, so smaller quantities of higher-value merch), all the restocking stuff was automated based on the POS terminals. The store had a certain number of each item that it was supposed to have in stock, and the system also knew the quantity that they could be shipped in. When you sold enough of an item to equal the minimum reship quantity, it got added to your order for the next week. It just "magically" showed up in the box of stuff from FedEx, no human input was necessary.
Of course, in the real world, stuff gets lost, items get stolen, things get damaged and not reported back...generally things get messed up. Over time, a system like that would get desynchronized from the real world. So to combat this, the whole store had to be inventoried with UPC-reader guns every quarter. Theoretically it was supposed to be every other month, but in reality it was quarterly. This information got fed into the system and was used to "baseline" the store's quantities for reshipments, and also got used to figure out the amount of "shrink" (loss due to to theft, misplacement, etc.), which affected the manager's compensation.
Very interesting; I have to admit I was unfamiliar with how the CANDU reactors actually operated, but they do seem quite well designed. Certainly if they can run on the spent fuel from the U.S.-favored PWR types, then it certainly seems even more shortsighted to be throwing their spent fuel away.
I also wasn't aware that it was the CANDUs that are capable of enriching Thorium, which is another process I've always found interesting. (India, possessing some ridiculously large percentage of the world's thorium, is the leader in this I believe.)
Actually I once heard someone refer to this as "the Superfund solution."
I can't remember where I read/heard it, but it was referring to a hypothetical situation where your house was about to be taken away in order to allow someone to build a new mini-mall, or parking garage, or something else similarly obnoxious, because of some corrupt political maneuvering.
The suggestion being that when you think your house or land is about to be taken, you attempt to contaminate it in some way which would be extremely expensive to clean up, or dangerous to remove. I think the example I heard was reveal that your basement is filled with old transformers leaking PCBs, such that demolishing your house would release the contaminants in the concrete and bedrock. (This sounds suspiciously like it's based on the contaminated GE plant at Hudson River.)
There are any number of obvious problems with this, mostly related that anything dangerous enough to prohibit commercial redevelopment of a parcel would probably render it uninhabitable as residential property also, by any safe standard; plus it's not a particularly creative move and thus you'd be risking getting thrown in jail for it as well.
My thought is that you'd have to come up with some kind of legitimate thing that you could legally acquire and store, but which is toxic if broken and expensive to remove in quantity. Something perhaps like a whole barn full of fluorescent lamp tubes, or CRT computer monitors. Nobody in their right mind would want to go near that, thus it might be easier just to build around it. Although I think an area would have to be quite heavily contaminated to make redeveloping it unprofitable, and in the example, a well-connected developer would probably just be able to get tax money to decontaminate the site.
All in all, not a very bright plan. Anyway, just reminded me of that, though.
You are aware, I hope, that this sort of thing is going on RIGHT NOW? Sadly, not as a government conspiracy to make killer mutant soldiers, although that would be cool.
It has, in fact, been going on since.... (checks watch)...the beginning of time. What we call "background radiation" is doing exactly what you talk about, it triggers mutations during cell division. Just not at a rate high enough to kill us as a species, because we've evolved protective measures to cope with it.
But if you brought some alien species to our planet, that evolved on a planet (hypothetically) with very low background radiation and had come here in heavily shielded spaceships, and they just started living here and breeding, you can bet that they might have some Funny Looking Kids* as a result of our 2.4 mSv per year. In the absence of such stimulus, their cellular structure would not have evolved to protect their genetic material from ionizing radiation, as ours has.
I do wonder though whether you could "harden" a species over time using some sort of selective mutation and breeding program to make them more suitable for space travel, though... probably more work than just shielding the ship properly.
* This assumes that the aliens aren't funny-looking to begin with.
But, in any case, dumping all our radioactive waste in the sun would be a horribly short sighted squandering of a potentially precious resource for the future. Heavy metals don't exactly grow on trees you know.
An excellent point, one that I think can't be said enough. While we're burying all this nuclear waste, or tossing it down into the Marianas Trench, or whatever, I think it's important to consider that while the storage method should be able to last as long as the longest-lived dangerous isotopes in the waste (in case we just want to leave it there) it should also have as a design criteria the ability for us to recover it.
I could easily envision a time in the future, a lot sooner than 10,000 years or even a few hundred, when we might want to get at some of that "waste" in order to reprocess it in ways that are not economically viable, or perhaps technologically feasible, right now.
This is hugely the case with the type of nuclear energy we use in the United States, where the majority of the fuel rods are comprised of U-238 and only a small percentage of it is U-235, the latter is the fissionable fuel, the former isn't (although it can be bred into Plutonium) and currently we really just use it as a sort of contaminant in order to make weaponization of the fuel difficult. A change in attitudes regarding breeder reactors would instantly make U-238, particularly the stuff that comes out of reactors (which has greater-than-trace amounts of plutonium in it already) a hot commodity. (No pun intended.)
Frankly given our energy requirements, I think the need to reprocess nuclear fuel waste may occur sooner rather than later, perhaps within a few centuries or even decades, depending on technological developments of other energy sources and the geopolitics of Uranium mining, and thus the solutions for waste storage that are recoverable while also being secure are the best ones.
That's good to know, but regardless of whether she's 26 or 30, or whether she rode a motorbike or a Jeep, the real question is whether or not the photos in the photo-essay are authentic. I've been reading through it and by and large I think the text is far less interesting and compelling than the photos.
Anybody have any clue as to the authenticity of the photos?
(Particularly, since we're talking about the wildlife in this thread, the ones of the mutant animals? Which she admits are not hers.)
Really? Then explain to me why I could maintain my current standard of living for a lot less hard currency if I lived in India? I could replace most of my major household appliances with human servants, and toss them out on the street when they got too old to work.
Actually as other people pointed out, it might be more than you'd think. Especially if the store uses some form of electronic inventory-management (RFID or barcode scanners) system, it could be helpful to have employees that aren't complete retards.
Sure, most of those systems are designed so that a chimpanzee could use them, but that doesn't mean they always work right, or that it's not helpful to have someone with basic problem-solving skills using it. For example, let's say you have two scanner/printer combination units; one of them stops printing. A total moron just sets it down and says it's broken; a slightly more intelligent moron might try disconnecting the two pieces and swapping one for the working unit from the other set, in order to determine whether the problem is in the scanner or the printer. Then you can at least say "this printer is broken" instead of "the whole thing doesn't work."
While that might seem like a very basic skill, I have definitely worked with people that it would never occur to.
Nope, it has not. And they're moving towards a situation, whether formal or unspoken I'm not sure, where in order to be promotable beyond a certain level, you either need to have a BA/BS or some type of fairly specialized training. If you look in the back of the Army Times, you'll see tons of ads for correspondence and online schools that cater to military personnel who are working on degrees in order to help their promotability. Education counts towards your "points" which are the basis of enlisted grade increases. I don't know the actual point values, but I'm sure you can look them up if you're interested.
There are certain officer levels that are fairly education-dependent, also: you basically need a bachelors or to be working on a bachelors to get commissioned, and they really like you to have a masters in something when you go for Major from Captain. (I don't know if they require a PhD for your star or not, but it wouldn't surprise me.) That masters might be from the Army War College and in a skill that's not particularly applicable outside the Army, but it's a degree nonetheless.
I've been told -- and it makes sense -- that the Army tends to concentrate more on higher education during peacetime, or in times when there aren't a lot of guys with actual combat experience in promotion tracks. I'd expect that during and after a war, somebody with actual in-theater time would probably be able to get a lot of the academic stuff waived. I also think this is why a lot of the requirements aren't formalized as such; they don't require you to have a college degree to be an officer, but you're probably not going to be competitive if you don't. But they leave the possibility open just so that someone really qualified based on military experience doesn't get barred based on a technicality.
Huh? No -- it's the equivalent of walking into a store and asking for an application, and having them say "I'm sorry, we're out of application forms today."
The fact that the computer was broken isn't like being given an application in some language that only a small number of people can read, it means nobody can use it. It's just totally unavailable. There's no discrimination, because regardless of who you were, you're stuck.
The only thing I can think of is maybe if this guy had been brighter or better with computers, he could have somehow fixed the system, sent in his application, and then "broken" the computer again when he was done. Now that would be the equivalent of getting an application in hieroglyphics; only the rare person who had a certain skill (and one unrelated to the job they were applying for) would be able to submit the application. But this guy didn't fix the computer, he just wasn't able to apply. Just like everyone else.
I think it's more of a cost issue. Storing hardcopies is a lot more expensive than storing electronic documents, and there's a greater perceived risk of noncompliance (being able to recover a document on demand). Every time you want to get a file box out of storage at an Iron Mountain type archival facility, it costs money and takes time; the cost of recovering one more document from online storage is pretty low (virtually zero if it's truly online storage, slightly higher if it's in a nearline or offline backup). And most modern companies have the electronic recordkeeping and computer equipment anyway, so the fixed costs are already paid for.
The fact that you can satisfy Sarbanes-Oxley with hardcopies doesn't mean that it's something that companies want to do; I'll bet you can satisfy S-O with stone tablets or microfiche, but nobody is going to do either of those if they possibly can avoid them.
Perhaps this is a dumb/obvious question, but how did the respondant to that post get the precise number of moderations of each type? (E.g., Moderation Totals: Offtopic=377, Flamebait=4... etc.) Was this a feature that's since been removed in favor of the percentage-based readout?
I'm sort of curious how many moderations are on some comments, rather than just the percentages. I've always thought that there should be some sort of weighting based on how many moderations are on a particular post... I'm interested to see how they handle the "next generation" of moderation with the tags and everything.
I see your point, but I would rather that they allocate bandwidth to people/entities that are going to use it for the maximum amount of public good (maximize utility) rather than who can pay the most.
If two people are competing to get the right to use a frequency or band, I would rather that the FCC made its call based on the proposed use of the frequency, rather than how much each person was willing to pay for it. There are a whole lot of interesting uses for spectrum that aren't revenue-generating (at least to the "owner" of the spectrum) but yet would create a lot of public benefit.
The amount of revenue that the public gets from the one-time sale of a slice of spectrum is tiny compared to the long term harm of benefit that can be done based on how it's used. Just think of how much has been done with the tiny 2.4GHz ISM band -- that's where cordless phones, 802.11b internet, and countless other low-power stuff is located, yet virtually none of the users of that band could pay for it. If the FCC was more revenue-centric, or saw "ability to pay" as the sole source of public good, we'd be in more trouble than we are right now.
That's why I think a revenue-neutral, Park Service model would be the best way to go; evaluate every proposed use of spectrum on its merits and public utility alone, and remove the fiscal incentive from it completely.
I've checked out Digg from time to time, and frankly the quality of the discussion is just not there. I admit I find pithy one-liners amusing, but most of the one-liners there aren't pithy, they're just dumb kneejerk comments.
That's not to say we don't have (a lot of) that here, but I'm usually impressed by something that someone writes here on Slashdot at least once a week; chalk it up to the monkey-on-a-typewriter effect if you want, but I haven't seen anything over on Digg that seems to approach even the occasional insightfulness of Slashdot. It's like reading/. at +4 but after setting -5 Insightful, -3 Interesting, -2 Informative, +1 Offtopic, +2 Funny, and +6 Redundant.
I used to cruise by the front page of digg every once in a while when it was a slow news day and I just wanted some links to read, but since I've discovered del.icio.us I can get all the links I want; what sets a site apart is the quality of the community and the discussion.
Not sure if that was a joke, but just in case it wasn't:
Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL)
Market Cap $73.07 Billion USD,
revenue $13.41 B
gross profit $9.15 B
Employees 49,872
International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM)
Market Cap $128.6 Billion USD,
revenue $91.13 B
gross profit $36.53 B
Employees 341,750
So if either company were to buy the other, it would be IBM acquiring Oracle, but I think Oracle's probably too big for them to swallow in any event.
Oracle is certainly the more profitable company though, in terms of profit/revenue, but then again they don't really manufacture anything, while IBM still makes and sells a lot of stuff.
Anybody else remember the skit, I think it was from SNL, that had Bill Gates whistling 2400 baud into a telephone, and at the end he reveals that he just bought a sports team? The punchline is something like "I didn't just buy the team, I mean I bought the individual people!"
This is my situation also; from about the time I hit "Excellent" karma until a while ago, I pretty much got mod points weekly, but then all of a sudden stopped getting them. I'm not sure if it's just a quirk of the algorithm, or whether I made some particularly unpopular moderation / metamoderation, or what. Or maybe it was because I let some points expire.
I just treat mod points as a kind of weird force of nature, like the weather. Only less predictable and occasionally vindictive. (So, kind of like the weather to someone in 341 BC.) The fact that I haven't gotten any hasn't really affected my use of the site that much, in fact I think I probably post more when I don't have any.
This is changing the topic for a moment, but I always thought it was odd that Slashdot doesn't have any sort of a "Meta" section, kind of like K5 does, where discussion about the site itself could happen. We don't really get stories like this one (that lend themselves to a discussion of online discussion in general and Slashdot in particular) very often, so most of the talk about Slashdot occurs in odd bits and pieces, in off-topic threads. It seems like it would be more useful if it was centralized, either by posting a story once in a while about the site itself, or by having some sort of an open story/thread somewhere. It would obviously have the potential to turn into an obnoxious bitchfest, but on the other hand it would remove a lot of the off-topic Slashdot meta-comments from other stories. Call it a meta-commenting ghetto, if you will.
Yes, I think that the relationship between China and the U.S. is more one of codependence than anything else; it's two countries 69-ing each other, if we must continue the sex analogy. Both of us have the other by the balls. China has a whole lot of paper that's only worth anything because the U.S. Treasury says it is, and the U.S. basically doesn't manufacture enough stuff anymore to supply our own needs for pretty much anything (except perhaps basic food staples).
Slashdot Mirror
While it may be true that this is the core of their business, I think that quite a few people nowadays know AMD because of their higher-end chips. I know I do, and although I really didn't give two squirts for the x86 market until fairly recently (being a Mac user, mostly), and so perhaps I don't have the whole-market perspective, it seems like the perception of AMD as a low-end manufacturer isn't quite true. They have to be making a fairly good profit margin on those Opterons and the rest of the x86-64 stuff, and it stands to reason that market segment is going to increase in the future.
Understood -- I didn't mean to go off at you so much as people higher up in the thread, plus more generally at the whole "McDonalds should be banned" meme which seems rather popular in some circles. It wasn't meant so much as a personal attack.
... :)
Sometimes you just pick a comment and hit 'Reply,' when it's not really much of a direct response
Um, has it ever occurred to you that people just like eating unhealthy food?
You could put a Surgeon General's warning on every McDonald's meal, and force the cashiers to say "By purchasing and consuming this product you are taking 1 day off of your statistical life-span and increasing your healthcare costs by $100, do you want to continue?" and people would still eat there.
Greasy, salty, fatty food TASTES GOOD to a whole lot of people. If you're not one of them, congratulations. Go eat carrots and live a long life. But to many people--admittedly, myself included--McDonalds' french fries taste quite good. I am aware of exactly how bad they are for me, and exactly how many calories and grams of fat they have in them, and I still enjoy eating them very goddamn much.
People have a right to eat what they want to eat, and this means that they may do things that you and other people find inexplicable or illogical. Even if you educate them about the risks and benefits involved, people are still going to smoke cigarettes, eat french fries, and drink aqueous solutions of ethanol. It's not because they don't realize or don't understand what they're doing; on some level, they're doing a risk/benefit analysis and their results are coming up the opposite way yours (or someone who doesn't eat at McDonalds, or smoke, or drink) is.
I'm really tired of all these people, both on Slashdot and elsewhere, who think that people eat at McDonalds or Burger King because they're somehow being forced into it by the Man. There are plenty of other food choices you could get for the price of a McDonalds meal, and unless you're also implying that poor people are by nature stupid, and should be forced to live a certain way because they're too dumb to do it on their own, they're choosing to eat at McDonalds regardless.
I have this feeling that if the people who want to punish McDonalds for selling unhealthy food were allowed to run the world, I'd have to turn to my friendly local drug dealer in order to eat what I want; and let's face it, a world where Klondike bars have to be smuggled across the border in the rectum of some Mexican mule is just not one worth living in.
I think you just ignored what he was saying. If you know a certain page exists, then there are many ways to bypass China's internet filtering. It's not perfect, and it never will be.
But by removing the blocked pages from Google's index completely, it's as if they never existed. In fact, blocking them no longer matters, because most people will never realize they exist in the first place.
Fundamentally, it's the difference between being handed a history book that's been filled with black marker lines covering stuff that's "redacted," and being given a history book that's been totally rewritten to only show one point of view. In the first case, you're at least painfully aware that you're getting a one-sided viewpoint, in the latter case you're not.
Thank god somebody understands. If everything was priced relative to earnings you might as well go and make everything free, because you've removed my incentive to work hard. If I could do nothing all day and still go out to the store (or down to the auto dealership) and take stuff home with me, you can damn well bet I wouldn't be busting my ass getting up at 6:30 Monday morning to go to work.
Yeah, I've heard all these quasi-socialist arguments that "people aren't motivated by money and physical goods, they'd still work for the joy of working," and I think it's a load of crap. I'd probably do something with my time, but you can bet it wouldn't benefit anyone but me: I'd be sitting around building radio-controlled airplanes, probably, or maybe seeing how cool a home theater I can build in my basement. The world and the economy doesn't benefit from that, at least not in the way it benefits from the job I normally do (and wouldn't do, if it wasn't the ticket to a standard of living that I enjoy).
Any system which gives a low-value worker access to the same things that are available to a highly trained worker just destroys the motivation for a person to work hard and produce more. People work because they want things: a bigger house, a nicer car, put their kids into better schools, whatever. If you go into work every day because you honestly love your job, and you'd do it regardless of whether or not you were being paid, congratulations on putting one over on your boss, because they're overpaying you! The great majority of people do what they do because they think it's worth doing in return for the compensation they get. Make it easier to get that level of compensation, and people will take the easier jobs.
It should be obvious, but there are a whole lot of quasi-socialists who have their heads in the sand, and think that they can somehow create this wonderful world where rice farmers in Indochina and software engineers in Delaware can both drive the same car and have the same DVD player because they both work as hard. It doesn't work that way, and never will.
You do realize you subsidize the discounted postage bulk mail pays with your full rate first class postage, right?
i on
Funny, I was always told the exact opposite. Namely, that the discounts given to presorted bulk mail were actually less than the labor saved by the Post Office as a result of the presorting, thus most "junk mail" and stuff shipped at the bulk rate is more profitable, on a piece-by-piece basis, than individual First Class letters. So that really it's all those catalogs and crap that are subsidizing the Post Office's ability to deliver your letter to Grandma for 39 cents.
If what you're saying is true, and it's the other way around, then what I've basically been told my entire life about the Post Office is wrong.
I just ran some quick Google searches and I'm not the only person under this impression:
"Most people are unaware that bulk mailing is highly profitable for the U.S. Postal Service and it subsidizes first class mail." http://www.lawmall.com/abuse/abe-mail.html
"Bulk mail thereby subsidizes low cost stamps for letter, magazine, and book mailing." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_mail#Legislat
&c., etc.
In the retail store I worked at most recently (not a grocery store but hardgoods, so smaller quantities of higher-value merch), all the restocking stuff was automated based on the POS terminals. The store had a certain number of each item that it was supposed to have in stock, and the system also knew the quantity that they could be shipped in. When you sold enough of an item to equal the minimum reship quantity, it got added to your order for the next week. It just "magically" showed up in the box of stuff from FedEx, no human input was necessary.
Of course, in the real world, stuff gets lost, items get stolen, things get damaged and not reported back...generally things get messed up. Over time, a system like that would get desynchronized from the real world. So to combat this, the whole store had to be inventoried with UPC-reader guns every quarter. Theoretically it was supposed to be every other month, but in reality it was quarterly. This information got fed into the system and was used to "baseline" the store's quantities for reshipments, and also got used to figure out the amount of "shrink" (loss due to to theft, misplacement, etc.), which affected the manager's compensation.
Very interesting; I have to admit I was unfamiliar with how the CANDU reactors actually operated, but they do seem quite well designed. Certainly if they can run on the spent fuel from the U.S.-favored PWR types, then it certainly seems even more shortsighted to be throwing their spent fuel away.
I also wasn't aware that it was the CANDUs that are capable of enriching Thorium, which is another process I've always found interesting. (India, possessing some ridiculously large percentage of the world's thorium, is the leader in this I believe.)
Actually I once heard someone refer to this as "the Superfund solution."
I can't remember where I read/heard it, but it was referring to a hypothetical situation where your house was about to be taken away in order to allow someone to build a new mini-mall, or parking garage, or something else similarly obnoxious, because of some corrupt political maneuvering.
The suggestion being that when you think your house or land is about to be taken, you attempt to contaminate it in some way which would be extremely expensive to clean up, or dangerous to remove. I think the example I heard was reveal that your basement is filled with old transformers leaking PCBs, such that demolishing your house would release the contaminants in the concrete and bedrock. (This sounds suspiciously like it's based on the contaminated GE plant at Hudson River.)
There are any number of obvious problems with this, mostly related that anything dangerous enough to prohibit commercial redevelopment of a parcel would probably render it uninhabitable as residential property also, by any safe standard; plus it's not a particularly creative move and thus you'd be risking getting thrown in jail for it as well.
My thought is that you'd have to come up with some kind of legitimate thing that you could legally acquire and store, but which is toxic if broken and expensive to remove in quantity. Something perhaps like a whole barn full of fluorescent lamp tubes, or CRT computer monitors. Nobody in their right mind would want to go near that, thus it might be easier just to build around it. Although I think an area would have to be quite heavily contaminated to make redeveloping it unprofitable, and in the example, a well-connected developer would probably just be able to get tax money to decontaminate the site.
All in all, not a very bright plan. Anyway, just reminded me of that, though.
You are aware, I hope, that this sort of thing is going on RIGHT NOW? Sadly, not as a government conspiracy to make killer mutant soldiers, although that would be cool.
...the beginning of time. What we call "background radiation" is doing exactly what you talk about, it triggers mutations during cell division. Just not at a rate high enough to kill us as a species, because we've evolved protective measures to cope with it.
... probably more work than just shielding the ship properly.
It has, in fact, been going on since.... (checks watch)
But if you brought some alien species to our planet, that evolved on a planet (hypothetically) with very low background radiation and had come here in heavily shielded spaceships, and they just started living here and breeding, you can bet that they might have some Funny Looking Kids* as a result of our 2.4 mSv per year. In the absence of such stimulus, their cellular structure would not have evolved to protect their genetic material from ionizing radiation, as ours has.
I do wonder though whether you could "harden" a species over time using some sort of selective mutation and breeding program to make them more suitable for space travel, though
* This assumes that the aliens aren't funny-looking to begin with.
But, in any case, dumping all our radioactive waste in the sun would be a horribly short sighted squandering of a potentially precious resource for the future. Heavy metals don't exactly grow on trees you know.
An excellent point, one that I think can't be said enough. While we're burying all this nuclear waste, or tossing it down into the Marianas Trench, or whatever, I think it's important to consider that while the storage method should be able to last as long as the longest-lived dangerous isotopes in the waste (in case we just want to leave it there) it should also have as a design criteria the ability for us to recover it.
I could easily envision a time in the future, a lot sooner than 10,000 years or even a few hundred, when we might want to get at some of that "waste" in order to reprocess it in ways that are not economically viable, or perhaps technologically feasible, right now.
This is hugely the case with the type of nuclear energy we use in the United States, where the majority of the fuel rods are comprised of U-238 and only a small percentage of it is U-235, the latter is the fissionable fuel, the former isn't (although it can be bred into Plutonium) and currently we really just use it as a sort of contaminant in order to make weaponization of the fuel difficult. A change in attitudes regarding breeder reactors would instantly make U-238, particularly the stuff that comes out of reactors (which has greater-than-trace amounts of plutonium in it already) a hot commodity. (No pun intended.)
Frankly given our energy requirements, I think the need to reprocess nuclear fuel waste may occur sooner rather than later, perhaps within a few centuries or even decades, depending on technological developments of other energy sources and the geopolitics of Uranium mining, and thus the solutions for waste storage that are recoverable while also being secure are the best ones.
That's good to know, but regardless of whether she's 26 or 30, or whether she rode a motorbike or a Jeep, the real question is whether or not the photos in the photo-essay are authentic. I've been reading through it and by and large I think the text is far less interesting and compelling than the photos.
Anybody have any clue as to the authenticity of the photos?
(Particularly, since we're talking about the wildlife in this thread, the ones of the mutant animals? Which she admits are not hers.)
Really? Then explain to me why I could maintain my current standard of living for a lot less hard currency if I lived in India? I could replace most of my major household appliances with human servants, and toss them out on the street when they got too old to work.
No, it's egalitarianism that's damned expensive.
Actually as other people pointed out, it might be more than you'd think. Especially if the store uses some form of electronic inventory-management (RFID or barcode scanners) system, it could be helpful to have employees that aren't complete retards.
Sure, most of those systems are designed so that a chimpanzee could use them, but that doesn't mean they always work right, or that it's not helpful to have someone with basic problem-solving skills using it. For example, let's say you have two scanner/printer combination units; one of them stops printing. A total moron just sets it down and says it's broken; a slightly more intelligent moron might try disconnecting the two pieces and swapping one for the working unit from the other set, in order to determine whether the problem is in the scanner or the printer. Then you can at least say "this printer is broken" instead of "the whole thing doesn't work."
While that might seem like a very basic skill, I have definitely worked with people that it would never occur to.
OMFG! Please back this up! That is not significantly off the normal range.
You forget -- he was talking about New Hampshire.
Nope, it has not. And they're moving towards a situation, whether formal or unspoken I'm not sure, where in order to be promotable beyond a certain level, you either need to have a BA/BS or some type of fairly specialized training. If you look in the back of the Army Times, you'll see tons of ads for correspondence and online schools that cater to military personnel who are working on degrees in order to help their promotability. Education counts towards your "points" which are the basis of enlisted grade increases. I don't know the actual point values, but I'm sure you can look them up if you're interested.
There are certain officer levels that are fairly education-dependent, also: you basically need a bachelors or to be working on a bachelors to get commissioned, and they really like you to have a masters in something when you go for Major from Captain. (I don't know if they require a PhD for your star or not, but it wouldn't surprise me.) That masters might be from the Army War College and in a skill that's not particularly applicable outside the Army, but it's a degree nonetheless.
I've been told -- and it makes sense -- that the Army tends to concentrate more on higher education during peacetime, or in times when there aren't a lot of guys with actual combat experience in promotion tracks. I'd expect that during and after a war, somebody with actual in-theater time would probably be able to get a lot of the academic stuff waived. I also think this is why a lot of the requirements aren't formalized as such; they don't require you to have a college degree to be an officer, but you're probably not going to be competitive if you don't. But they leave the possibility open just so that someone really qualified based on military experience doesn't get barred based on a technicality.
Huh? No -- it's the equivalent of walking into a store and asking for an application, and having them say "I'm sorry, we're out of application forms today."
The fact that the computer was broken isn't like being given an application in some language that only a small number of people can read, it means nobody can use it. It's just totally unavailable. There's no discrimination, because regardless of who you were, you're stuck.
The only thing I can think of is maybe if this guy had been brighter or better with computers, he could have somehow fixed the system, sent in his application, and then "broken" the computer again when he was done. Now that would be the equivalent of getting an application in hieroglyphics; only the rare person who had a certain skill (and one unrelated to the job they were applying for) would be able to submit the application. But this guy didn't fix the computer, he just wasn't able to apply. Just like everyone else.
I think it's more of a cost issue. Storing hardcopies is a lot more expensive than storing electronic documents, and there's a greater perceived risk of noncompliance (being able to recover a document on demand). Every time you want to get a file box out of storage at an Iron Mountain type archival facility, it costs money and takes time; the cost of recovering one more document from online storage is pretty low (virtually zero if it's truly online storage, slightly higher if it's in a nearline or offline backup). And most modern companies have the electronic recordkeeping and computer equipment anyway, so the fixed costs are already paid for.
The fact that you can satisfy Sarbanes-Oxley with hardcopies doesn't mean that it's something that companies want to do; I'll bet you can satisfy S-O with stone tablets or microfiche, but nobody is going to do either of those if they possibly can avoid them.
Perhaps this is a dumb/obvious question, but how did the respondant to that post get the precise number of moderations of each type? (E.g., Moderation Totals: Offtopic=377, Flamebait=4 ... etc.) Was this a feature that's since been removed in favor of the percentage-based readout?
... I'm interested to see how they handle the "next generation" of moderation with the tags and everything.
I'm sort of curious how many moderations are on some comments, rather than just the percentages. I've always thought that there should be some sort of weighting based on how many moderations are on a particular post
I see your point, but I would rather that they allocate bandwidth to people/entities that are going to use it for the maximum amount of public good (maximize utility) rather than who can pay the most.
If two people are competing to get the right to use a frequency or band, I would rather that the FCC made its call based on the proposed use of the frequency, rather than how much each person was willing to pay for it. There are a whole lot of interesting uses for spectrum that aren't revenue-generating (at least to the "owner" of the spectrum) but yet would create a lot of public benefit.
The amount of revenue that the public gets from the one-time sale of a slice of spectrum is tiny compared to the long term harm of benefit that can be done based on how it's used. Just think of how much has been done with the tiny 2.4GHz ISM band -- that's where cordless phones, 802.11b internet, and countless other low-power stuff is located, yet virtually none of the users of that band could pay for it. If the FCC was more revenue-centric, or saw "ability to pay" as the sole source of public good, we'd be in more trouble than we are right now.
That's why I think a revenue-neutral, Park Service model would be the best way to go; evaluate every proposed use of spectrum on its merits and public utility alone, and remove the fiscal incentive from it completely.
I've checked out Digg from time to time, and frankly the quality of the discussion is just not there. I admit I find pithy one-liners amusing, but most of the one-liners there aren't pithy, they're just dumb kneejerk comments.
/. at +4 but after setting -5 Insightful, -3 Interesting, -2 Informative, +1 Offtopic, +2 Funny, and +6 Redundant.
That's not to say we don't have (a lot of) that here, but I'm usually impressed by something that someone writes here on Slashdot at least once a week; chalk it up to the monkey-on-a-typewriter effect if you want, but I haven't seen anything over on Digg that seems to approach even the occasional insightfulness of Slashdot. It's like reading
I used to cruise by the front page of digg every once in a while when it was a slow news day and I just wanted some links to read, but since I've discovered del.icio.us I can get all the links I want; what sets a site apart is the quality of the community and the discussion.
Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL)
International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM)
So if either company were to buy the other, it would be IBM acquiring Oracle, but I think Oracle's probably too big for them to swallow in any event.
Oracle is certainly the more profitable company though, in terms of profit/revenue, but then again they don't really manufacture anything, while IBM still makes and sells a lot of stuff.
Anybody else remember the skit, I think it was from SNL, that had Bill Gates whistling 2400 baud into a telephone, and at the end he reveals that he just bought a sports team? The punchline is something like "I didn't just buy the team, I mean I bought the individual people!"
This is my situation also; from about the time I hit "Excellent" karma until a while ago, I pretty much got mod points weekly, but then all of a sudden stopped getting them. I'm not sure if it's just a quirk of the algorithm, or whether I made some particularly unpopular moderation / metamoderation, or what. Or maybe it was because I let some points expire.
I just treat mod points as a kind of weird force of nature, like the weather. Only less predictable and occasionally vindictive. (So, kind of like the weather to someone in 341 BC.) The fact that I haven't gotten any hasn't really affected my use of the site that much, in fact I think I probably post more when I don't have any.
This is changing the topic for a moment, but I always thought it was odd that Slashdot doesn't have any sort of a "Meta" section, kind of like K5 does, where discussion about the site itself could happen. We don't really get stories like this one (that lend themselves to a discussion of online discussion in general and Slashdot in particular) very often, so most of the talk about Slashdot occurs in odd bits and pieces, in off-topic threads. It seems like it would be more useful if it was centralized, either by posting a story once in a while about the site itself, or by having some sort of an open story/thread somewhere. It would obviously have the potential to turn into an obnoxious bitchfest, but on the other hand it would remove a lot of the off-topic Slashdot meta-comments from other stories. Call it a meta-commenting ghetto, if you will.
Yes, I think that the relationship between China and the U.S. is more one of codependence than anything else; it's two countries 69-ing each other, if we must continue the sex analogy. Both of us have the other by the balls. China has a whole lot of paper that's only worth anything because the U.S. Treasury says it is, and the U.S. basically doesn't manufacture enough stuff anymore to supply our own needs for pretty much anything (except perhaps basic food staples).