Wow, learn to read, I'll bold the relevant part of the original quote for you:
TBH that's probably not worth it. Hard to be sure because obviously the 40% + 25% goes to other things as well. You've probably spent a lot extra in taxes than you would have if you'd just paid for college.
Methinks it's you who have to learn to read, or rather have your selective memory looked at. Free university education is not the only thing I get for the higher taxes I pay by a long shot. This is the second time I've tried to explain that to you.
free university education for my 40% income tax and 25% sales tax
TBH that's probably not worth it. Hard to be sure because obviously the 40% + 25% goes to other things as well. You've probably spent a lot extra in taxes than you would have if you'd just paid for college.
Probably true if those were the only two perks but I notice you did not include universal healthcare in your quote which means I don't pay a dime even for extremely expensive treatments that often ruin US households. You also cut out the low crime rate which I consider to be a major plus of life in this country. There are also many other things like free daycare for everybody, no toll roads, a well maintained infrastructure, 100% internet coverage at speeds that most Americans can only dream of,... the list goes on. I can see how some people might be interested in a minimal state with low taxes where most of the things that are public services or utilities in my country are privatised and where you are shit out of luck if you are too poor to afford health insurance but I still do not feel like I'm being shortchanged or robbed and I'm not so annoyed by the universal health insurance also covering very poor people that I'd abolish the system. Funnily enough I know a number of people who were pretty annoyed with things like mandatory health insurance and mandatory pensions that they fled the 'socialism' over here and moved to the US so they could skip that stuff and have a bigger disposable income. Interestingly a number of them came back here years later to make use of the 'socialism' over here that so disgusted them to get expensive operations and cancer treatments because they had not bothered to save for such eventualities. That ended when the parliament passed a law stating you have to have lived in country for over a year before you are eligible for treatment through national universal health insurance system.
Sales tax is often above 6%, even here in Utah. There are state, county and city components to it. The federal gas tax is the low part. State more than doubles that. We pay an additional 29 cents a gallon on that. Given the cost of gas that is an effective 25%ish tax rate. Social security tax is very significant amount, varying by income.
Then again remember the second half of the equation. We are required to by health insurance and nothing is covered. We have to pay out of pocket on top of that to use the health insurance. We have to save for our own retirement as we do not get government pensions back out of our money, and in fact can't even really start collecting social security (our own money) until later and later years. Now approaching the average age that a male dies. We basically get very little for our tax money, and have to make up that difference ourselves, costing us more.
This means that the real effective tax rate is higher, and actual cost of living can be quite high do to the lack of services provided for your taxes. The corporations get cheap tax rates, the extremely rich pay very little, and the middle class carries a significant portion of the tax burden. Look at the effective rate the middle class pays and what they get.
I live in a European country. I pay 25% sales tax, a 40% income tax and a monthly charge for my pension plan but that's not a tax to my mind, it's an investment. Additionally I pay tons of all kinds of fees every time I want to use a public service, my car is subject to fuel taxes and road taxes but I expect this 'taxing by a thousand tiny cuts' phenomenon also exists in the states so let's stick with the big taxes. If I was an American I'd be paying 25% income tax and 0-10% sales tax depending on where I lived. On the face of it I'd say the American has it significantly better than I do especially because the average pay in my industry is about 30% higher in the US. However, I do get universal healthcare and free university education for my 40% income tax and 25% sales tax and the crime rate is ridiculously low here compared to the US so it's not all bad.
Being wary of the government is a hallmark of republicans.
No it isn't, being wary of government is supposed to be the hallmark of Republicans, but they have shown a great fondness for big government. This is especially true when it allows them to use public funds to buy votes, pokbarrel large defense contracts, shield their friends' businesses from unwanted competition, gerrymandering districts to keep themselves in power,... , the list goes on. Now, I'm not suggesting Democrats are any better. Just thought I'd get that out there eventhough we are not discussing Dems. and their failings just to preempt the inevitable snowflakes who'd otherwise fill in the gap and accuse me of claiming Dems. are angels of virtue.
If Republicans would stop preventing broadband competition we'd be far better off. And before anyone wants to whine about being partisan, go take a look at the places which have outlawed municipal broadband. See the pattern?
Mitch McConnell, preventer of broadband services.... doesn't quite have the same ring to it as 'Grand Moff' does it?
Compared to a competition which only survived due to a loan from the government?
Yes.
Take Ford (F) right now. Paying out healthy dividends, has a positive earnings per share (around two bucks for last year), and it costs around $12.
Then there's Tesla (TSLA). Stock price is $300. Lost $4 per share last year.
Tesla is being valued as if it wildly succeeded, becoming equivalent to one of the "Bíg Three". Now I'm not saying it won't, but there's an element of risk - will Tesla be able to scale up production, will Tesla lose it's early advantage, etc.
Tesla is overvalued.
I've never been a fan of the Tesla product line, it's to luxury oriented, so I can see how they may look overvalued from that point of view. However, the technology Tesla represents is the future and even if Tesla's product line of sports cars and luxury sedans has a limited market, it's the technologies Tesla has developed and the associated patent portfolio that makes the company valuable. This is especially true of patents on battery technology patents, and early investments in battery production capacity. Fossil fuel cars are going to become an anachronism with in the next twenty years or so, like film cameras or buggy whips and whoever owns the patents and has the tech ready when the tipping point comes is going to cash in big time. If I was to invest in Tesla today it would not be because I think Tesla has wildly succeeded, I'd invest because I'd be willing to risk some serious venture capital on the hypothesis that Tesla is going to wildly succeed, down the line. Everybody thought Apple, the iPod and iTunes was a huge mistake that was doomed to failure, well that analysis turned out to be wrong in a whole shitload of ways. Some people play the long game.
Except that if you buy Chinese you will have to buy a new tractor each time it breaks down. But maybe that's cheaper - you may get two Chinese tractors for the price of one American.
That's not necessarily a bad thing although I'd go for E-European or Ukrainian before Chinese but that requires you to be a bit more hands-on (like farmers used to be) and fix stuff yourself unlike when you use western equipment where you typically call in a service person. If Americans can use AK-47s without being worried about catching communism from them why not Ukrainian trucks or tractors? I came across a bunch of civilianized Ukrainian KrAZ army trucks in a farming village in western Europe and we're not talking some former communist nation, this was deep inside bedrock NATO territory. So I'm walking around these things taking a very close look, largely because I'd seen these beasts in news footage from war zones except painted green instead of red and with rocket artillery or AAA guns in place of the hydraulic open-box bed, when this guy shows up. He asks if he can help me so I just told him the truth, that I was pretty amazed to see these things in that particular corner of the world, which made him quite a lot more friendly and we got talking. He told me that him and several farmers in the area had decided to set up a truck pool and found it was an expensive proposition until somebody discovered that several of these Soviet/Ukrainian cold war army trucks could be had brand spanking new for the price of a much smaller number of MAN,Mercedes,Volvo,... trucks, so they just bought a couple of dozen of these things. There was little that could break down, when it did the parts were cheap, electronics were minimal and they had hired a Ukrainian mechanic to maintain them who knew these things better than his own trouser pockets.
Try, just TRY to get around John Deere. It's not like you have a lot of options.
John Deere, ~67% market share followed by Case IH at ~17% and New Holland at ~9%, that's perilously close to a monopoly. You could try to give big old JD some hard competition by importing tractors from places where they don't try to rape you over software updates but if you do 'The Donald' will slap a 30% import tariff on you so farmers are now literally fucked in every possible way.
My first instinct was to say 'no' before I had even read the summary based on the argument that if this guy should be arrested for making a legal admin tool that's been misused by hackers then the CEO of Beechcraft should be arrested because his planes are used to run drugs as well as passengers and legal cargo. However, it then occurred to me that even the evil trinity of Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Mitch McConnell could not have turned the FBI into the holy inquisition this quickly. There must be more to the story so I read the summary. If it is really true that this guy launched the marketing campaign for his 'admin tool' on black-hat hacker forums, I'd say they should at the very least drag him into an FBI field office for some serious questioning. There is a difference between your aircraft that you market for civilian purposes being used by criminals and you actively catering to the needs of criminals, concentrating your marketing on them and advertising in places that criminals frequent.
Your analogy undermines your entire argument. Newly licensed drivers are not even close to competent enough to be on the road. But we put them out there anyway, where they can teach themselves how to drive at a level that is acceptable to society.
And when you hire drivers, you don't ask how many years they have studied driving, but look for experience and record.
Especially when hiring race car drivers, you don't check whether they've passed a DMV exam. There are some good ones out there that don't even have a driver's license. What they do is akin to road driving in the same way as what a master woodworker is akin to a guy with table saw and nail gun, or a programmer is to a diploma mill code monkey.
Race car drivers are an edge case. The real question here is would the roads and highways be a better place (a) with drivers ed, practical training, theoretical training followed by a theoretical and practical test or, (b) if we completely deregulated driving and allowed anybody to buy a car and teach themselves to drive it. My argument is that (a) would yield significantly higher numbers of accident free drivers than option (b).
You actually gain things from getting a diploma that are every bit as valuable as practical experience. You can actually learn things that are worth learning by enduring theoretical courses, and you will learn it better than if you self-train. I taught myself to code C and C++, I learned a lot of stuff by myself from reading books and coding at home and at work. When I finally went and got a MSc CS degree I did not think it was a waste of time, it was an overview of an entire universe of different ideas and ways of doing things I would never have come up with on my own or thought to explore in that kind of breadth and trust me, you cannot just get away with soaking up book knowledge and regurgitating it. They make you think hard about the stuff you are learning and you don't qualify unless you demonstrate a sound working knowledge of it. Most of the robotnicks are filtered out right there and those that aren't get bad grades. Doing a degree also deepened my understanding of things like operating systems, databases and the math that makes them work and it made me a better and more flexible programmer.
You gain more knowledge by doing the work and not always by sitting in a classroom with 30 - 100 people all trying to pay attention to an instructor that may or may not be more than 1 page ahead of the class in the (outdated by the time it's printed) textbook.
Your mileage may vary but in my 40 years of consulting I know that my experience has taught me more than any college course ever has. This includes concepts such as operating systems, compilers, databases, parallel programming, etc.
I deal with incredibly incompetent "engineers" from a certain populous Asian country who arrive here on H1-B's and cannot seem to "engineer" their way out of the box they were taught to be in. They all have degrees from some hometown "prestigious" university and they all claim to have "5+ years of experience" but in truth I doubt they have half that. There are exceptions but those exception usually actually have 5+ years of experience and have learned, FROM EXPERIENCE, to be better, competent engineers.
Well, I ws talking about college courses plural, as in four years of them to get a BSc CS degree and then another two to get an MSc CS degree knowing full well the whole time that if your grade level sinks below 70% or so you're going to have a considerably harder time finding work. You gain more by getting a diploma and practical experience than you gain from either having (a) just practical experience and self-training or (b) just a diploma with limited experience. The thing is that as the diploma guy gains experience he's going to be a safer bet for any HR person looking for a good developer or IT guy. This is not to say that uneducated self-trained guys are universally less competent, the odds of finding a high calibre one are just quite a bit lower but HR people should definitely not write guys like that off. That would be stupid. Experience, self-training and formal education are not mutually exclusive, you get the best results when you combine them.
Some of what you say seems correct, but some seems like unwarranted bias. There are exceptional programmers out there that are exceptional because there was no school capable of teaching them - they are the ones that create the study material that others follow.
And good programmers tend to love reading, no matter what their education level is. And not just reading, but questioning.
If anything, I'd say that those who only soak up what they're being taught by teachers and books, and never have an original thought are mere robotniks. Good enough to repeatedly crank bolts on an assembly line, but they will never become more than mediocre, no matter what the degree says.
Yes, there are good people with degrees. And not so good ones. Just like with educated people. There may be a correlation between education and value, but it's not super strong.
The ability to continue to educate themselves without schools, training classes or mentoring is something I value in employees. But having a degree doesn't guarantee that. Some just stagnate, and have no drive to always learn, always discover, always improve.
To take a car analogy, you can learn to drive by teaching yourself how a car's controls work until you can drive around the block reasonably smoothly and consider that more than adequate to qualify somebody as a driver and let them loose to drive at a 130 km/hour down the autobahn. If you are the conscientious type you can even read a drivers ed textbook before burning rubber and speeding into live traffic. However, I think we can all agree that the streets and highways are considerably safer and there are fewer accidents precisely because every driver has not only been given driving training in actual traffic by an instructor but also because that instructor gave his student driver a thorough grounding in the traffic rules and laws followed by a written and practical test to confirm that person was paying attention. Degrees are not an expensive license your daddy pays for at an 'elite university' so that you can be an 'elite' ass hole who lords it over all those scrappy self taught guys by rubbing a diploma in their faces. You actually gain things from getting a diploma that are every bit as valuable as practical experience. You can actually learn things that are worth learning by enduring theoretical courses, and you will learn it better than if you self-train. I taught myself to code C and C++, I learned a lot of stuff by myself from reading books and coding at home and at work. When I finally went and got a MSc CS degree I did not think it was a waste of time, it was an overview of an entire universe of different ideas and ways of doing things I would never have come up with on my own or thought to explore in that kind of breadth and trust me, you cannot just get away with soaking up book knowledge and regurgitating it. They make you think hard about the stuff you are learning and you don't qualify unless you demonstrate a sound working knowledge of it. Most of the robotnicks are filtered out right there and those that aren't get bad grades. Doing a degree also deepened my understanding of things like operating systems, databases and the math that makes them work and it made me a better and more flexible programmer.
Similarly Israeli politics are dominated by orthodox Jews, who are a minority, but better organised, IMHO.
Same story in the UK with UKIP, the PVV in Holland and in France with the FN. They are fairly small but they have a disproportionately large effect because they are loud and well organised. UKIP does not even have a parliamentary representation worth mentioning but they still managed to eject the UK from the EU.
Vintage is older than five years. When I took my 2006 black MacBook into the Apple Store in 2012, they replaced the CPU fan and battery even though it was a "vintage" Apple product. When the tech broke the cable between the keyboard top and motherboard, they replaced the keyboard top. All the parts were in stock for a six-year-old laptop.
Yup, what our friend Misagon failed to take into account is that things tend to move fast in the computer business. Five years old is vintage, ten year old is ancient and fifteen years old is palaeolithic.
If this design turns out to be superior to what you can get from NVIDIA and ATI
This is almost certainly aimed at improving improving the GPU in their iOS devices. Desktop (and laptop) GPUs are still an order of magnitude faster than GPUs in mobile devices (and consume an order of magnitude more power). I seriously doubt Apple would be able to leapfrog Nvidia and AMD in GPUs. (Except maybe power efficiency - problem being almost everyone else already beats them at power efficiency. That's why you rarely see Nvidia Terga SoCs in mobile devices outside of dedicated gaming handhelds like the Nvidia Shield and Nintendo Switch.).
True but you don't chop down a couple of giant redwoods like NVIDIA and ATI in a single swing, you do it one blow of your axe at a time. If Apple really was out to compete with NVIDIA and ATI, or more accurately stated was out to make itself self sufficient in terms of GPU chips for it's entire product line, I would expect them to start small and go on from there. It's what they did with the iPhone and iPod, they started with a couple of devices who into the bargain were widely lambasted by industry pundits for having limited functionality and that they were missing basic features like copy/paste. Apple then grew those devices into entire product lines. It always seemed to me that the Apple TV had the potential to be grown into a half way decent gaming platform and if it ever is I won't complain about the sewn up cliques of GPU makers on the one hand and Console manufacturers on the other having a small fire lit under their ass by a new competitor. Oh, and don't forget this is all part of Apple's nefarious plan to achieve world domination and enslave humanity.
The summary seems to suggest that but the title is vague. It would arguably be an even bigger bombshell if they were developing a GPU to compete with NVIDIA and ATI on the desktop market.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. Apple is not normally in the business of competing in the chip and components market. Apple designs its own motherboards but it does not market them to third parties and it would surprise me if they did any more with an in-house GPU design than use it in their own devices. If this design turns out to be superior to what you can get from NVIDIA and ATI, limiting its use to their own line of devices would help them sell those devices which fits their business model. If there is anything to hope for in this context it's mostly for Apple users who can hope that this will improve Apple devices as a gaming platform and that maybe one of the next couple of iterations of Apple TV will be a truly worth while gaming console (not holding my breath though).
Now, please give a cheer for the long line of local slashdot commenters eager to explain to us why Apple is the source of all evil and how this is a part of Apple's nefarious plan to achieve world domination.
Much as I like to sit down at a table at work with six other people who all have their noses buried in their smartphones and annoy them by starting a verbal conversation (and quite a lot of the time they are visibly annoyed at having to take their noses out of their little glowing tablets and talk) I'm also in favour of preventing unnecessary loss of life. To that end kind of liked this idea:
The cafeteria at one of those ultra cool tech companies where everybody is under 30 must be a very quiet place, just lots of people sitting at tables, noses buried in smartphones group chatting with the other people at the table on Facebook.
A. Call the fire department?
B. Accuse the neighbor of telling you your house is on fire that "Fire is just somebody's religion!"
C. Convene a study to determine if the house really is on fire, and if so, if it was due to spontaneous combustion or if there's a arsonist about?
D. "Blame Liberals!"
E. Post to Facebook or instagram?
Or, you could do what Fullofshiticus, the new emperor of America, is doing and call it a Chinese hoax.
I've had the least trouble with Debian. Mint just doesn't seem to like me, and I don't like Ubuntu.
Building Gentoo from source was fun, Fedora just didn't feel right, FreeBSD wouldn't even work in Virtualbox, and I've yet to experience the pleasure of Slackware.
If this is to control manufacturing/industrial equipment, you really should be employing someone with skills and experience./advice
The first thing the person asking has to to realise is that this is a very loaded question about religion. You might as well ask which Christian/Muslim/Jewish sect has the 'one true' interpretation of it's respective religion's scripture. Having said that the parent is partly right, Debian or one of it's many derivatives is pretty easy on newbies, or at least as easy as Linux can be but then so is Fedora. Suse is also a good choice but less popular because it is meant to be a bit more Microsoft compatible and having anything to do with Microsoft is to Linux geeks what sunlight, holy water and garlic are to a vampire. When I worked with Suse I liked it because it has YaST setup and config utility which is a bit reminiscent of AIX's smitty (SMIT) command and lets you do lots of system configuration changes in one place and if you have to interact with Microsoft systems then Suse might be a good choice for you . For those looking at the enterprise sector you might want to consider CentOS which is functionally and (mostly) binary compatible with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) offerings. I'm sure there are other Linux distos that are worth mentioning but these are the ones that I have worked with the most and think are good for newbies because of their features and/or community support. If you strip away all the sectarian bullshit that surrounds Linux distros the best advice you are left with is go for a big and widely used distribution like Debian/Ubuntu or Red Hat Fedora simply because there are lots of users and therefore lots of forums, blogs, help pages howto guides, etc... Of all the things that are mostt valuable thing to any Newbie the most important one is extensive community support. Suse and the host of Debian and Red hat based distributions all have extensive and helpful communities, especially the last two. You can always move on to something less widely used or hostile to newbies later.
... If I understand this correctly this means is that grammar and spelling Nazis actually serve a purpose other than to annoy the hell rest of us? Until now I had ranked them somewhere between hairdressers and telephone sanitisers and on the usefulness scale. Since I'll be travelling on space Arkship C with the workers to New Earth, to escape the Orange Menace that threatens to destroy Old Earth, and since I'm in charge of passenger scheduling, think I'll move the grammar Nazis from space Arkship B which is destined to settle a nearby black hole. I'm going to move them to Arkship A which will accompany Arkship C to New Earth where it's occupants will colonise the southern continent which they have decided to call Atlantis and whose capital are planning to call 'Galt's Gulch'. Grammar Nazis may be useful but I'm sure as hell not travelling all the way to New Earth on the same ship as those annoying little toadies. I'm sure the leaders, scientists and other high achievers on Arkship A will enjoy the endless conversations abut the finer points of grammar and spelling on the looooong journey to New Earth.
He who innovates/invents first has little effect on 5 years later. If that long.
Look at Yahoo. The first, and for some time the best internet search engine. Now dust.
Economists, and the like, keep using 20th century (some even 19th century) models. Intellectuals cling to the past as badly as others. And the fools who like what they say pay them. Sadly the factory workers have no such benefactors.
Sure they do, they have scrappy self made men and women, billionaires who have proven themselves by rising through the ranks in the business world and built empires from nothing. I'm talking about.outspoke honest people like Donald Trump who tell it like it is run for office and go to Washington to fight for the rights of the common man, declare open season on corporate lobbyists and drain the swamp.
Slashdot Mirror
so how serious is this?
These things is why I hate the market, its a bunch of itchy crackheads reacting on hearsay and rumor
Speaking of itchy crackheads reacting on hearsay and rumor: http://s3.amazonaws.com/armstr...
Wow, learn to read, I'll bold the relevant part of the original quote for you:
TBH that's probably not worth it. Hard to be sure because obviously the 40% + 25% goes to other things as well. You've probably spent a lot extra in taxes than you would have if you'd just paid for college.
Methinks it's you who have to learn to read, or rather have your selective memory looked at. Free university education is not the only thing I get for the higher taxes I pay by a long shot. This is the second time I've tried to explain that to you.
free university education for my 40% income tax and 25% sales tax
TBH that's probably not worth it. Hard to be sure because obviously the 40% + 25% goes to other things as well. You've probably spent a lot extra in taxes than you would have if you'd just paid for college.
Probably true if those were the only two perks but I notice you did not include universal healthcare in your quote which means I don't pay a dime even for extremely expensive treatments that often ruin US households. You also cut out the low crime rate which I consider to be a major plus of life in this country. There are also many other things like free daycare for everybody, no toll roads, a well maintained infrastructure, 100% internet coverage at speeds that most Americans can only dream of, ... the list goes on. I can see how some people might be interested in a minimal state with low taxes where most of the things that are public services or utilities in my country are privatised and where you are shit out of luck if you are too poor to afford health insurance but I still do not feel like I'm being shortchanged or robbed and I'm not so annoyed by the universal health insurance also covering very poor people that I'd abolish the system. Funnily enough I know a number of people who were pretty annoyed with things like mandatory health insurance and mandatory pensions that they fled the 'socialism' over here and moved to the US so they could skip that stuff and have a bigger disposable income. Interestingly a number of them came back here years later to make use of the 'socialism' over here that so disgusted them to get expensive operations and cancer treatments because they had not bothered to save for such eventualities. That ended when the parliament passed a law stating you have to have lived in country for over a year before you are eligible for treatment through national universal health insurance system.
Sales tax is often above 6%, even here in Utah. There are state, county and city components to it. The federal gas tax is the low part. State more than doubles that. We pay an additional 29 cents a gallon on that. Given the cost of gas that is an effective 25%ish tax rate. Social security tax is very significant amount, varying by income. Then again remember the second half of the equation. We are required to by health insurance and nothing is covered. We have to pay out of pocket on top of that to use the health insurance. We have to save for our own retirement as we do not get government pensions back out of our money, and in fact can't even really start collecting social security (our own money) until later and later years. Now approaching the average age that a male dies. We basically get very little for our tax money, and have to make up that difference ourselves, costing us more. This means that the real effective tax rate is higher, and actual cost of living can be quite high do to the lack of services provided for your taxes. The corporations get cheap tax rates, the extremely rich pay very little, and the middle class carries a significant portion of the tax burden. Look at the effective rate the middle class pays and what they get.
I live in a European country. I pay 25% sales tax, a 40% income tax and a monthly charge for my pension plan but that's not a tax to my mind, it's an investment. Additionally I pay tons of all kinds of fees every time I want to use a public service, my car is subject to fuel taxes and road taxes but I expect this 'taxing by a thousand tiny cuts' phenomenon also exists in the states so let's stick with the big taxes. If I was an American I'd be paying 25% income tax and 0-10% sales tax depending on where I lived. On the face of it I'd say the American has it significantly better than I do especially because the average pay in my industry is about 30% higher in the US. However, I do get universal healthcare and free university education for my 40% income tax and 25% sales tax and the crime rate is ridiculously low here compared to the US so it's not all bad.
Being wary of the government is a hallmark of republicans.
No it isn't, being wary of government is supposed to be the hallmark of Republicans, but they have shown a great fondness for big government. This is especially true when it allows them to use public funds to buy votes, pokbarrel large defense contracts, shield their friends' businesses from unwanted competition, gerrymandering districts to keep themselves in power, ... , the list goes on. Now, I'm not suggesting Democrats are any better. Just thought I'd get that out there eventhough we are not discussing Dems. and their failings just to preempt the inevitable snowflakes who'd otherwise fill in the gap and accuse me of claiming Dems. are angels of virtue.
If Republicans would stop preventing broadband competition we'd be far better off. And before anyone wants to whine about being partisan, go take a look at the places which have outlawed municipal broadband. See the pattern?
Mitch McConnell, preventer of broadband services.... doesn't quite have the same ring to it as 'Grand Moff' does it?
Yes.
Take Ford (F) right now. Paying out healthy dividends, has a positive earnings per share (around two bucks for last year), and it costs around $12.
Then there's Tesla (TSLA). Stock price is $300. Lost $4 per share last year.
Tesla is being valued as if it wildly succeeded, becoming equivalent to one of the "Bíg Three". Now I'm not saying it won't, but there's an element of risk - will Tesla be able to scale up production, will Tesla lose it's early advantage, etc.
Tesla is overvalued.
I've never been a fan of the Tesla product line, it's to luxury oriented, so I can see how they may look overvalued from that point of view. However, the technology Tesla represents is the future and even if Tesla's product line of sports cars and luxury sedans has a limited market, it's the technologies Tesla has developed and the associated patent portfolio that makes the company valuable. This is especially true of patents on battery technology patents, and early investments in battery production capacity. Fossil fuel cars are going to become an anachronism with in the next twenty years or so, like film cameras or buggy whips and whoever owns the patents and has the tech ready when the tipping point comes is going to cash in big time. If I was to invest in Tesla today it would not be because I think Tesla has wildly succeeded, I'd invest because I'd be willing to risk some serious venture capital on the hypothesis that Tesla is going to wildly succeed, down the line. Everybody thought Apple, the iPod and iTunes was a huge mistake that was doomed to failure, well that analysis turned out to be wrong in a whole shitload of ways. Some people play the long game.
Tesla has cars on the road, it's not vaporware company. His other companies are also progressing with their goals too.
Yeah, but I still won't take him seriously until he unveils the Iron Man suit.
Except that if you buy Chinese you will have to buy a new tractor each time it breaks down. But maybe that's cheaper - you may get two Chinese tractors for the price of one American.
That's not necessarily a bad thing although I'd go for E-European or Ukrainian before Chinese but that requires you to be a bit more hands-on (like farmers used to be) and fix stuff yourself unlike when you use western equipment where you typically call in a service person. If Americans can use AK-47s without being worried about catching communism from them why not Ukrainian trucks or tractors? I came across a bunch of civilianized Ukrainian KrAZ army trucks in a farming village in western Europe and we're not talking some former communist nation, this was deep inside bedrock NATO territory. So I'm walking around these things taking a very close look, largely because I'd seen these beasts in news footage from war zones except painted green instead of red and with rocket artillery or AAA guns in place of the hydraulic open-box bed, when this guy shows up. He asks if he can help me so I just told him the truth, that I was pretty amazed to see these things in that particular corner of the world, which made him quite a lot more friendly and we got talking. He told me that him and several farmers in the area had decided to set up a truck pool and found it was an expensive proposition until somebody discovered that several of these Soviet/Ukrainian cold war army trucks could be had brand spanking new for the price of a much smaller number of MAN,Mercedes,Volvo,... trucks, so they just bought a couple of dozen of these things. There was little that could break down, when it did the parts were cheap, electronics were minimal and they had hired a Ukrainian mechanic to maintain them who knew these things better than his own trouser pockets.
Try, just TRY to get around John Deere. It's not like you have a lot of options.
John Deere, ~67% market share followed by Case IH at ~17% and New Holland at ~9%, that's perilously close to a monopoly. You could try to give big old JD some hard competition by importing tractors from places where they don't try to rape you over software updates but if you do 'The Donald' will slap a 30% import tariff on you so farmers are now literally fucked in every possible way.
My first instinct was to say 'no' before I had even read the summary based on the argument that if this guy should be arrested for making a legal admin tool that's been misused by hackers then the CEO of Beechcraft should be arrested because his planes are used to run drugs as well as passengers and legal cargo. However, it then occurred to me that even the evil trinity of Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Mitch McConnell could not have turned the FBI into the holy inquisition this quickly. There must be more to the story so I read the summary. If it is really true that this guy launched the marketing campaign for his 'admin tool' on black-hat hacker forums, I'd say they should at the very least drag him into an FBI field office for some serious questioning. There is a difference between your aircraft that you market for civilian purposes being used by criminals and you actively catering to the needs of criminals, concentrating your marketing on them and advertising in places that criminals frequent.
Your analogy undermines your entire argument. Newly licensed drivers are not even close to competent enough to be on the road. But we put them out there anyway, where they can teach themselves how to drive at a level that is acceptable to society.
And when you hire drivers, you don't ask how many years they have studied driving, but look for experience and record.
Especially when hiring race car drivers, you don't check whether they've passed a DMV exam. There are some good ones out there that don't even have a driver's license. What they do is akin to road driving in the same way as what a master woodworker is akin to a guy with table saw and nail gun, or a programmer is to a diploma mill code monkey.
Race car drivers are an edge case. The real question here is would the roads and highways be a better place (a) with drivers ed, practical training, theoretical training followed by a theoretical and practical test or, (b) if we completely deregulated driving and allowed anybody to buy a car and teach themselves to drive it. My argument is that (a) would yield significantly higher numbers of accident free drivers than option (b).
You actually gain things from getting a diploma that are every bit as valuable as practical experience. You can actually learn things that are worth learning by enduring theoretical courses, and you will learn it better than if you self-train. I taught myself to code C and C++, I learned a lot of stuff by myself from reading books and coding at home and at work. When I finally went and got a MSc CS degree I did not think it was a waste of time, it was an overview of an entire universe of different ideas and ways of doing things I would never have come up with on my own or thought to explore in that kind of breadth and trust me, you cannot just get away with soaking up book knowledge and regurgitating it. They make you think hard about the stuff you are learning and you don't qualify unless you demonstrate a sound working knowledge of it. Most of the robotnicks are filtered out right there and those that aren't get bad grades. Doing a degree also deepened my understanding of things like operating systems, databases and the math that makes them work and it made me a better and more flexible programmer.
You gain more knowledge by doing the work and not always by sitting in a classroom with 30 - 100 people all trying to pay attention to an instructor that may or may not be more than 1 page ahead of the class in the (outdated by the time it's printed) textbook.
Your mileage may vary but in my 40 years of consulting I know that my experience has taught me more than any college course ever has. This includes concepts such as operating systems, compilers, databases, parallel programming, etc.
I deal with incredibly incompetent "engineers" from a certain populous Asian country who arrive here on H1-B's and cannot seem to "engineer" their way out of the box they were taught to be in. They all have degrees from some hometown "prestigious" university and they all claim to have "5+ years of experience" but in truth I doubt they have half that. There are exceptions but those exception usually actually have 5+ years of experience and have learned, FROM EXPERIENCE, to be better, competent engineers.
Well, I ws talking about college courses plural, as in four years of them to get a BSc CS degree and then another two to get an MSc CS degree knowing full well the whole time that if your grade level sinks below 70% or so you're going to have a considerably harder time finding work. You gain more by getting a diploma and practical experience than you gain from either having (a) just practical experience and self-training or (b) just a diploma with limited experience. The thing is that as the diploma guy gains experience he's going to be a safer bet for any HR person looking for a good developer or IT guy. This is not to say that uneducated self-trained guys are universally less competent, the odds of finding a high calibre one are just quite a bit lower but HR people should definitely not write guys like that off. That would be stupid. Experience, self-training and formal education are not mutually exclusive, you get the best results when you combine them.
Some of what you say seems correct, but some seems like unwarranted bias. There are exceptional programmers out there that are exceptional because there was no school capable of teaching them - they are the ones that create the study material that others follow.
And good programmers tend to love reading, no matter what their education level is. And not just reading, but questioning.
If anything, I'd say that those who only soak up what they're being taught by teachers and books, and never have an original thought are mere robotniks. Good enough to repeatedly crank bolts on an assembly line, but they will never become more than mediocre, no matter what the degree says.
Yes, there are good people with degrees. And not so good ones. Just like with educated people. There may be a correlation between education and value, but it's not super strong. The ability to continue to educate themselves without schools, training classes or mentoring is something I value in employees. But having a degree doesn't guarantee that. Some just stagnate, and have no drive to always learn, always discover, always improve.
To take a car analogy, you can learn to drive by teaching yourself how a car's controls work until you can drive around the block reasonably smoothly and consider that more than adequate to qualify somebody as a driver and let them loose to drive at a 130 km/hour down the autobahn. If you are the conscientious type you can even read a drivers ed textbook before burning rubber and speeding into live traffic. However, I think we can all agree that the streets and highways are considerably safer and there are fewer accidents precisely because every driver has not only been given driving training in actual traffic by an instructor but also because that instructor gave his student driver a thorough grounding in the traffic rules and laws followed by a written and practical test to confirm that person was paying attention. Degrees are not an expensive license your daddy pays for at an 'elite university' so that you can be an 'elite' ass hole who lords it over all those scrappy self taught guys by rubbing a diploma in their faces. You actually gain things from getting a diploma that are every bit as valuable as practical experience. You can actually learn things that are worth learning by enduring theoretical courses, and you will learn it better than if you self-train. I taught myself to code C and C++, I learned a lot of stuff by myself from reading books and coding at home and at work. When I finally went and got a MSc CS degree I did not think it was a waste of time, it was an overview of an entire universe of different ideas and ways of doing things I would never have come up with on my own or thought to explore in that kind of breadth and trust me, you cannot just get away with soaking up book knowledge and regurgitating it. They make you think hard about the stuff you are learning and you don't qualify unless you demonstrate a sound working knowledge of it. Most of the robotnicks are filtered out right there and those that aren't get bad grades. Doing a degree also deepened my understanding of things like operating systems, databases and the math that makes them work and it made me a better and more flexible programmer.
Really. Isn't this getting old and tired.
Yes the climate is changing. Yes it's caused by Humans. No it can't be fixed.
It is impossible to change or reverse. Sorry - we can't stop murdering each other as it is. How can we stop global warming? Answer. We can't.
Just plan for the inevitable and stop screaming the sky is falling. O.L.D. F.*.C.K.I.N.G. N.E.W.S.
Ughh
There is a difference between "It can't be fixed" and "The #rightwingnuts refuse to fix it".
Similarly Israeli politics are dominated by orthodox Jews, who are a minority, but better organised, IMHO.
Same story in the UK with UKIP, the PVV in Holland and in France with the FN. They are fairly small but they have a disproportionately large effect because they are loud and well organised. UKIP does not even have a parliamentary representation worth mentioning but they still managed to eject the UK from the EU.
So the trash-can Mac Pro is "vintage" now?
Vintage is older than five years. When I took my 2006 black MacBook into the Apple Store in 2012, they replaced the CPU fan and battery even though it was a "vintage" Apple product. When the tech broke the cable between the keyboard top and motherboard, they replaced the keyboard top. All the parts were in stock for a six-year-old laptop.
Yup, what our friend Misagon failed to take into account is that things tend to move fast in the computer business. Five years old is vintage, ten year old is ancient and fifteen years old is palaeolithic.
If this design turns out to be superior to what you can get from NVIDIA and ATI
This is almost certainly aimed at improving improving the GPU in their iOS devices. Desktop (and laptop) GPUs are still an order of magnitude faster than GPUs in mobile devices (and consume an order of magnitude more power). I seriously doubt Apple would be able to leapfrog Nvidia and AMD in GPUs. (Except maybe power efficiency - problem being almost everyone else already beats them at power efficiency. That's why you rarely see Nvidia Terga SoCs in mobile devices outside of dedicated gaming handhelds like the Nvidia Shield and Nintendo Switch.).
True but you don't chop down a couple of giant redwoods like NVIDIA and ATI in a single swing, you do it one blow of your axe at a time. If Apple really was out to compete with NVIDIA and ATI, or more accurately stated was out to make itself self sufficient in terms of GPU chips for it's entire product line, I would expect them to start small and go on from there. It's what they did with the iPhone and iPod, they started with a couple of devices who into the bargain were widely lambasted by industry pundits for having limited functionality and that they were missing basic features like copy/paste. Apple then grew those devices into entire product lines. It always seemed to me that the Apple TV had the potential to be grown into a half way decent gaming platform and if it ever is I won't complain about the sewn up cliques of GPU makers on the one hand and Console manufacturers on the other having a small fire lit under their ass by a new competitor. Oh, and don't forget this is all part of Apple's nefarious plan to achieve world domination and enslave humanity.
The summary seems to suggest that but the title is vague. It would arguably be an even bigger bombshell if they were developing a GPU to compete with NVIDIA and ATI on the desktop market.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. Apple is not normally in the business of competing in the chip and components market. Apple designs its own motherboards but it does not market them to third parties and it would surprise me if they did any more with an in-house GPU design than use it in their own devices. If this design turns out to be superior to what you can get from NVIDIA and ATI, limiting its use to their own line of devices would help them sell those devices which fits their business model. If there is anything to hope for in this context it's mostly for Apple users who can hope that this will improve Apple devices as a gaming platform and that maybe one of the next couple of iterations of Apple TV will be a truly worth while gaming console (not holding my breath though).
Now, please give a cheer for the long line of local slashdot commenters eager to explain to us why Apple is the source of all evil and how this is a part of Apple's nefarious plan to achieve world domination.
Let Darwin do his work... ;-)
Much as I like to sit down at a table at work with six other people who all have their noses buried in their smartphones and annoy them by starting a verbal conversation (and quite a lot of the time they are visibly annoyed at having to take their noses out of their little glowing tablets and talk) I'm also in favour of preventing unnecessary loss of life. To that end kind of liked this idea:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
The cafeteria at one of those ultra cool tech companies where everybody is under 30 must be a very quiet place, just lots of people sitting at tables, noses buried in smartphones group chatting with the other people at the table on Facebook.
Your house is on fire. Do you:
A. Call the fire department?
B. Accuse the neighbor of telling you your house is on fire that "Fire is just somebody's religion!"
C. Convene a study to determine if the house really is on fire, and if so, if it was due to spontaneous combustion or if there's a arsonist about?
D. "Blame Liberals!"
E. Post to Facebook or instagram?
Or, you could do what Fullofshiticus, the new emperor of America, is doing and call it a Chinese hoax.
What's The Easiest Linux Distro For A Newbie?
Just Debian, no derivatives.
I've had the least trouble with Debian. Mint just doesn't seem to like me, and I don't like Ubuntu.
Building Gentoo from source was fun, Fedora just didn't feel right, FreeBSD wouldn't even work in Virtualbox, and I've yet to experience the pleasure of Slackware.
If this is to control manufacturing/industrial equipment, you really should be employing someone with skills and experience. /advice
The first thing the person asking has to to realise is that this is a very loaded question about religion. You might as well ask which Christian/Muslim/Jewish sect has the 'one true' interpretation of it's respective religion's scripture. Having said that the parent is partly right, Debian or one of it's many derivatives is pretty easy on newbies, or at least as easy as Linux can be but then so is Fedora. Suse is also a good choice but less popular because it is meant to be a bit more Microsoft compatible and having anything to do with Microsoft is to Linux geeks what sunlight, holy water and garlic are to a vampire. When I worked with Suse I liked it because it has YaST setup and config utility which is a bit reminiscent of AIX's smitty (SMIT) command and lets you do lots of system configuration changes in one place and if you have to interact with Microsoft systems then Suse might be a good choice for you . For those looking at the enterprise sector you might want to consider CentOS which is functionally and (mostly) binary compatible with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) offerings. I'm sure there are other Linux distos that are worth mentioning but these are the ones that I have worked with the most and think are good for newbies because of their features and/or community support. If you strip away all the sectarian bullshit that surrounds Linux distros the best advice you are left with is go for a big and widely used distribution like Debian/Ubuntu or Red Hat Fedora simply because there are lots of users and therefore lots of forums, blogs, help pages howto guides, etc... Of all the things that are mostt valuable thing to any Newbie the most important one is extensive community support. Suse and the host of Debian and Red hat based distributions all have extensive and helpful communities, especially the last two. You can always move on to something less widely used or hostile to newbies later.
Are you positive?
Why? the article summary is mostly, negative.
... If I understand this correctly this means is that grammar and spelling Nazis actually serve a purpose other than to annoy the hell rest of us? Until now I had ranked them somewhere between hairdressers and telephone sanitisers and on the usefulness scale. Since I'll be travelling on space Arkship C with the workers to New Earth, to escape the Orange Menace that threatens to destroy Old Earth, and since I'm in charge of passenger scheduling, think I'll move the grammar Nazis from space Arkship B which is destined to settle a nearby black hole. I'm going to move them to Arkship A which will accompany Arkship C to New Earth where it's occupants will colonise the southern continent which they have decided to call Atlantis and whose capital are planning to call 'Galt's Gulch'. Grammar Nazis may be useful but I'm sure as hell not travelling all the way to New Earth on the same ship as those annoying little toadies. I'm sure the leaders, scientists and other high achievers on Arkship A will enjoy the endless conversations abut the finer points of grammar and spelling on the looooong journey to New Earth.
He who innovates/invents first has little effect on 5 years later. If that long. Look at Yahoo. The first, and for some time the best internet search engine. Now dust. Economists, and the like, keep using 20th century (some even 19th century) models. Intellectuals cling to the past as badly as others. And the fools who like what they say pay them. Sadly the factory workers have no such benefactors.
Sure they do, they have scrappy self made men and women, billionaires who have proven themselves by rising through the ranks in the business world and built empires from nothing. I'm talking about .outspoke honest people like Donald Trump who tell it like it is run for office and go to Washington to fight for the rights of the common man, declare open season on corporate lobbyists and drain the swamp.