Even if a megacorp moved all of their production into the US, they might add 20,000 jobs.
Normal job increases in the US are now running at around 80K/month. Increasing that number by 20%, even is a single month, is pretty good, especially when consider the effects of those positions long-term.
An increase in cost per product of 5%, however, is noticeable by almost every consumer.
Every consumer that happens to buy that product. Playing your own game, in an economy having 300M consumers, a tax that hits 100K customers by 5% is negligible.
I agree about the music. I think everything else you said was horseshit (and I say that as someone who matched your profile - my degree was EE - who programmed for twenty years and has been managing programmers for the last twenty). Those of us who were not formally trained in CS and succeeded in the software world learned material that was the equivalent of a CS degree. I took my own time to study algorithms, data structures, compilers, databases, complexity theory, programming language theory, project management, and other topics that a well-rounded software engineer should know. It would have been a lot easier if I had done this in college, rather than studying transistors, amplifiers, power systems, and antenna theory. However, I got into programming via the electronic CAD field and I needed to become a good software engineer, too, so I learned the other stuff on my own.
I've worked with plenty of folks who had CS degrees and they did fine. I've also worked with plenty of folks (sometimes CS trained and sometimes not) who were idiots. In general, a CS degree was not sufficient to show quality, but neither was there any indication that it marked the bearer as deficient. However, it usually meant that when I asked them why they didn't use a hash table, they were able to understand what I was talking about and usually were able give me a good reason for it. But then, maybe I was programming in fields where you actually needed to know this material. I guess if you were hacking Perl scripts for some craptacular website, you wouldn't need to know any of this stuff - the site you built wouldn't scale, but then, chances are you wouldn't ever have been successful enough for it to need to anyway.
That's why years ago I started using loyalty cards with other people.
Wow! Me, too. I gave my wife one, each of my kids got one, the friends that I have all get one. Now if they want to interact with me, I use my CueCat to scan the card and I record the number of points that they earn for each action. For some of them, I can even recommend special activities that each might want to perform with me to get more points - the kids can wash the car, the cute female friends... well, modesty prevents me from detailing those; but, if they get enough points, I might even initiate interaction with them. I'll tell you, it's the modern way to make sure those you know are loyal to you, and a lot easier than actually talking to them.
Perhaps you need to abandon your irrational bigotry, grow up, and actually learn about the different forms and sects of religion out there.
Maybe I have no desire to catalog the universe of irrational beliefs out there, several of which many of you seem to be willing to kill over - abnormal psych is not my hobby. How about you guys getting your story straight, so I don't have to? Until then, I'll just regard you as one of the many with irrational beliefs that you willingly lump yourself with.
Too bad there isn't a party of "government that works."
Well, you have a choice between a party that has some people who think that government should work and another party that says "Government doesn't work and we'll do everything we can to prove it." You're going to have a government either way; but I'd think the choice of which you'd want in power would be obvious.
If everybody (or a critical mass) cooperates, there is no way for the Chinese government to block proxy IP addresses...
And how will the Chinese people find out what these proxy IP addresses are? And if the Chinese people know what these IP addresses are, doesn't the government know what they are? And can't they block them?
Don't get me wrong... it's a wonderful fantasy that every problem has a technological fix. However, it almost always has a bit of trouble once implementation begins.
I have gathered that a higher percentage of women seem to ignore objective data if their "intuition" suggests otherwise.
That's fine. It just balances out the higher percentage of men I've noticed who ignore objective data when their prejudices and biases suggest otherwise.
...this is really bad because they probably have a good chance of succeeding.
Not really. Of all of the organizations out there fighting for "artists rights" (ala RIAA, MPAA, etc.), ASCAP is probably one of the weakest. They have a large membership list, but they can't even put together a monopoly on what they do (collect mechanical repro rights for artists and publishers), splitting their membership with BMI and SESAC. Plus, I doubt that a significant number of their members, most of whom never see a penny from them (like me), actually give a rat's ass. As such, I also doubt that they get enough donations to actually play in the halls of Congress. In reality, this is just another beg for money to their membership, one that's probably not going to net them much.
Plus, if you're an ASCAP member and are really pissed about this, just go ahead and elect a bunch of folks that are against this to the board (you'd have my vote), and you can nip this in the bud.
If our representatives knew that their actions were being recorded the ethics of our representatives would go through the roof.
This was the gist of the ruling. The initiative process turns ordinary citizens into citizenlegislators. Although, in general, citizens' political activities are private (vis. voting), when acting as representatives of the public (i.e., as legislators), the presumption of privacy is waived. In addition, the presumption of privacy would have made validation of signatures much more difficult. This is actually a good, logical ruling from a court that often doesn't give them. People should be happy about this ruling.
Not if you want the system to actually be secure. In order to effectively scan, you'll need up to date virus definitions. If you don't want to be on the network for an online scan, you probably won't want to be on the network to download definitions. If wouldn't matter anyhow, as you can't put them on the USB drive because you want to maintain write-protect. As such, even if you put the AV product on your system, you'd shortly be stuck with out-of-date definitions, unless you have some other writable media to put them on, which you didn't mention.
So, to summarize - you'll need to get updated definitions and put them somewhere. If you're system doesn't have (or you don't want) that, you don't have a viable solution.
And what, exactly, makes you think it's dangerous?
Maybe the neutrons that get generated by the reactor and get absorbed by the reactor housing, eventually making it radioactive enough that proper disposal is necessary, together with the fact that this project is probably not being monitored closely enough to make sure that proper disposal happens.
No more than the last one and the one before that and the one before that. And, in fact, no more than all of the previous administrations before that (although in place of China and Iran or the current "despots of the day" you can sub those of previous years from the British up through the Commies). The only thing that has changed is the technology and capability. Way to try to politicize things...
This is what happens when you feel that every story needs "balance" and you give idiots with false information voice whenever they have an opposing agenda and/or a press release. The media walks a fine line distinguishing between legitimate dissent and encouraging stupidity. In the last few decades, it has become lazy, has abrogated its responsibility as fact checker, and has moved heavily into the "encouraging stupidity" side. Publish enough untruths and people stop trusting you. QED.
You almost certainly don't want to wait 114 years to get your results.
You know, back in the day, we had some patience. Plus, the notion that one would have to wait 114 years to get results made us develop better algorithms, not just throw cycles at a problem. Kids these days... Now get off my lawn!
I am sure that there was no issue of "due process" here. BP did not have to do as the President requested. It was just the President asking BP to step up and do what they should do out of moral decency. Of course, they could have turned down the President. Of course, in that case they probably would have been sued by the Federal government into even greater oblivion for the damages they have caused. They also could have had their regulatory ass handed to them for the next how ever many years this administration was in power over every little infraction. I think BP just made a reasonable business accommodation. And for those of you whining about how unfair to BP this is... it's our local ecosystem. They can always go home and screw up their own if they don't like the way the game is played here.
What about Fox and Cox? Would you claim that rocks?
That Fox and Cox! That Fox and Cox! I do not like that Fox and Cox. The merger rocks for Fox and Cox. But put them both into a box. And keep them both secured with locks.
To be blunt and cold, it is not economically beneficial to provide luxury care to unproductive people.
To be blunt and cold, I hope you don't mind, then, when they rise up and kill you and take your things because they have no other option. If you want an economy that forces the non-economically beneficial into a fight for survival, don't be surprised when it's you they choose to fight.
we used to have a government that strongly encouraged scientific research and development
We did. On a percentage of GDP basis, though, our funding of science has dropped and, more importantly, has shifted away from pure research to research that is easily moved to development (and most of this is in the defense sector and not areas where the man-on-the-street would notice). I'm sure that this has something to do with the whole "Government=bad; private=good; war=best" meme that inhabits both parties today - after all, why spend money on basic research that may lead to a need to do more government funded research when you can fund research in an area that defense contractors can quickly use to kill people more efficiently?
there's a process to change the Constitution if you think it's outdated.
There's also a process for the Supreme Court to decide what is constitutional and what isn't. It's odd how the supposed "strict constructionists" seem to ignore that part. Of course, you're always welcome to impeach or replace upon death, if you disagree.
Slashdot Mirror
... detect cyber assaults on private companies
You know, like downloading the latest Lady Gaga CD.
Even if a megacorp moved all of their production into the US, they might add 20,000 jobs.
Normal job increases in the US are now running at around 80K/month. Increasing that number by 20%, even is a single month, is pretty good, especially when consider the effects of those positions long-term.
An increase in cost per product of 5%, however, is noticeable by almost every consumer.
Every consumer that happens to buy that product. Playing your own game, in an economy having 300M consumers, a tax that hits 100K customers by 5% is negligible.
I agree about the music. I think everything else you said was horseshit (and I say that as someone who matched your profile - my degree was EE - who programmed for twenty years and has been managing programmers for the last twenty). Those of us who were not formally trained in CS and succeeded in the software world learned material that was the equivalent of a CS degree. I took my own time to study algorithms, data structures, compilers, databases, complexity theory, programming language theory, project management, and other topics that a well-rounded software engineer should know. It would have been a lot easier if I had done this in college, rather than studying transistors, amplifiers, power systems, and antenna theory. However, I got into programming via the electronic CAD field and I needed to become a good software engineer, too, so I learned the other stuff on my own.
I've worked with plenty of folks who had CS degrees and they did fine. I've also worked with plenty of folks (sometimes CS trained and sometimes not) who were idiots. In general, a CS degree was not sufficient to show quality, but neither was there any indication that it marked the bearer as deficient. However, it usually meant that when I asked them why they didn't use a hash table, they were able to understand what I was talking about and usually were able give me a good reason for it. But then, maybe I was programming in fields where you actually needed to know this material. I guess if you were hacking Perl scripts for some craptacular website, you wouldn't need to know any of this stuff - the site you built wouldn't scale, but then, chances are you wouldn't ever have been successful enough for it to need to anyway.
That's why years ago I started using loyalty cards with other people.
Wow! Me, too. I gave my wife one, each of my kids got one, the friends that I have all get one. Now if they want to interact with me, I use my CueCat to scan the card and I record the number of points that they earn for each action. For some of them, I can even recommend special activities that each might want to perform with me to get more points - the kids can wash the car, the cute female friends... well, modesty prevents me from detailing those; but, if they get enough points, I might even initiate interaction with them. I'll tell you, it's the modern way to make sure those you know are loyal to you, and a lot easier than actually talking to them.
Perhaps you need to abandon your irrational bigotry, grow up, and actually learn about the different forms and sects of religion out there.
Maybe I have no desire to catalog the universe of irrational beliefs out there, several of which many of you seem to be willing to kill over - abnormal psych is not my hobby. How about you guys getting your story straight, so I don't have to? Until then, I'll just regard you as one of the many with irrational beliefs that you willingly lump yourself with.
Too bad there isn't a party of "government that works."
Well, you have a choice between a party that has some people who think that government should work and another party that says "Government doesn't work and we'll do everything we can to prove it." You're going to have a government either way; but I'd think the choice of which you'd want in power would be obvious.
And this is different from any other administration how?
If everybody (or a critical mass) cooperates, there is no way for the Chinese government to block proxy IP addresses...
And how will the Chinese people find out what these proxy IP addresses are? And if the Chinese people know what these IP addresses are, doesn't the government know what they are? And can't they block them?
Don't get me wrong... it's a wonderful fantasy that every problem has a technological fix. However, it almost always has a bit of trouble once implementation begins.
Either that Don Knuth is the cover for a group of Bourbaki-like American computer scientists or that he's given up religion.
You need to have the new Lady Gaga record in order to be happy.
I'm not sure that this is a true statement, though that's what Interscope/Universal/Vivendi tells me.
Gravity map? Heavy, man!
I have gathered that a higher percentage of women seem to ignore objective data if their "intuition" suggests otherwise.
That's fine. It just balances out the higher percentage of men I've noticed who ignore objective data when their prejudices and biases suggest otherwise.
Stop stealing material from Fox News via Jon Stewart!
...this is really bad because they probably have a good chance of succeeding.
Not really. Of all of the organizations out there fighting for "artists rights" (ala RIAA, MPAA, etc.), ASCAP is probably one of the weakest. They have a large membership list, but they can't even put together a monopoly on what they do (collect mechanical repro rights for artists and publishers), splitting their membership with BMI and SESAC. Plus, I doubt that a significant number of their members, most of whom never see a penny from them (like me), actually give a rat's ass. As such, I also doubt that they get enough donations to actually play in the halls of Congress. In reality, this is just another beg for money to their membership, one that's probably not going to net them much.
Plus, if you're an ASCAP member and are really pissed about this, just go ahead and elect a bunch of folks that are against this to the board (you'd have my vote), and you can nip this in the bud.
If our representatives knew that their actions were being recorded the ethics of our representatives would go through the roof.
This was the gist of the ruling. The initiative process turns ordinary citizens into citizenlegislators. Although, in general, citizens' political activities are private (vis. voting), when acting as representatives of the public (i.e., as legislators), the presumption of privacy is waived. In addition, the presumption of privacy would have made validation of signatures much more difficult. This is actually a good, logical ruling from a court that often doesn't give them. People should be happy about this ruling.
Not if you want the system to actually be secure. In order to effectively scan, you'll need up to date virus definitions. If you don't want to be on the network for an online scan, you probably won't want to be on the network to download definitions. If wouldn't matter anyhow, as you can't put them on the USB drive because you want to maintain write-protect. As such, even if you put the AV product on your system, you'd shortly be stuck with out-of-date definitions, unless you have some other writable media to put them on, which you didn't mention.
So, to summarize - you'll need to get updated definitions and put them somewhere. If you're system doesn't have (or you don't want) that, you don't have a viable solution.
And what, exactly, makes you think it's dangerous?
Maybe the neutrons that get generated by the reactor and get absorbed by the reactor housing, eventually making it radioactive enough that proper disposal is necessary, together with the fact that this project is probably not being monitored closely enough to make sure that proper disposal happens.
...but this administration certainly does
No more than the last one and the one before that and the one before that. And, in fact, no more than all of the previous administrations before that (although in place of China and Iran or the current "despots of the day" you can sub those of previous years from the British up through the Commies). The only thing that has changed is the technology and capability. Way to try to politicize things...
This is what happens when you feel that every story needs "balance" and you give idiots with false information voice whenever they have an opposing agenda and/or a press release. The media walks a fine line distinguishing between legitimate dissent and encouraging stupidity. In the last few decades, it has become lazy, has abrogated its responsibility as fact checker, and has moved heavily into the "encouraging stupidity" side. Publish enough untruths and people stop trusting you. QED.
You almost certainly don't want to wait 114 years to get your results.
You know, back in the day, we had some patience. Plus, the notion that one would have to wait 114 years to get results made us develop better algorithms, not just throw cycles at a problem. Kids these days... Now get off my lawn!
I am sure that there was no issue of "due process" here. BP did not have to do as the President requested. It was just the President asking BP to step up and do what they should do out of moral decency. Of course, they could have turned down the President. Of course, in that case they probably would have been sued by the Federal government into even greater oblivion for the damages they have caused. They also could have had their regulatory ass handed to them for the next how ever many years this administration was in power over every little infraction. I think BP just made a reasonable business accommodation. And for those of you whining about how unfair to BP this is... it's our local ecosystem. They can always go home and screw up their own if they don't like the way the game is played here.
What about Fox and Cox? Would you claim that rocks?
That Fox and Cox! That Fox and Cox! I do not like that Fox and Cox. The merger rocks for Fox and Cox. But put them both into a box. And keep them both secured with locks.
To be blunt and cold, it is not economically beneficial to provide luxury care to unproductive people.
To be blunt and cold, I hope you don't mind, then, when they rise up and kill you and take your things because they have no other option. If you want an economy that forces the non-economically beneficial into a fight for survival, don't be surprised when it's you they choose to fight.
we used to have a government that strongly encouraged scientific research and development
We did. On a percentage of GDP basis, though, our funding of science has dropped and, more importantly, has shifted away from pure research to research that is easily moved to development (and most of this is in the defense sector and not areas where the man-on-the-street would notice). I'm sure that this has something to do with the whole "Government=bad; private=good; war=best" meme that inhabits both parties today - after all, why spend money on basic research that may lead to a need to do more government funded research when you can fund research in an area that defense contractors can quickly use to kill people more efficiently?
there's a process to change the Constitution if you think it's outdated.
There's also a process for the Supreme Court to decide what is constitutional and what isn't. It's odd how the supposed "strict constructionists" seem to ignore that part. Of course, you're always welcome to impeach or replace upon death, if you disagree.