Sorry to spoil the fun, but the developer who found the bug fixed it "after a few months" according to the check-in comment. The code may have been buggy for a decade, but that doesn't mean that anybody was affected during that time. Once someone was affected (the developer), it was fixed in a much shorter timescale than this article makes you believe.
When I see a distance of a multiple of 60 one can quickly determine how many hours it will take to get there when driving.:-)
Until time is also switched over to base 10 using miles/hr has a very nice 1:1 mapping with time! (assuming one drives 60 mi/hr.) The metric is a nice scientific system; the imperial system is a "nice" organic system. There is no reason BOTH systems couldn't be kept on the signage.
Ummm, yeah. I'm assuming you either just forgot your sarcasm tag or had a massive brain fart....
Last I checked km / hour was 1:1 as well. 1 hour @ 65 km/hour = 65km traveled.
Your point is right of course. But I don't see the importance of converting road signage to metric: if a road sign says a distance of 80 miles, and the speed limit is 80 miles per hour, then it takes you an hour to get there. Same for 130 km and 130 kph. Road-signage has two roles: on the one hand it allows you to estimate the time to destination, and on the other hand it is used to indicate the speed limit. Both these roles are completely independent of whether you use miles or kilometers -- provided you use them consistently. Road signage has no implication beyond this, so it simply doesn't matter what system of units is used.
Where units matter are tools, pipe diameters, the height of stairsteps, the diameters of tires etc., basically everything where parts can be bought and sold all over the world. Units also matter for food, because easily converted units make cheating with package sizes much more difficult: almost everybody understands that 1.5 kg shouldn't cost approx. 1.5x as much as 1000 grams. Now ask yourself that same question about weights expressed in pounds and ounces. Compared to these advantages, road signage simply doesn't matter at all. Keep it in miles and nothing's lost.
For how many years needs something to be known before it is no longer a revelation? Seriously, this schedule has been in the plans for several years, it was also clear from even before the initial start that before going to design luminosity (i.e. beam intensity in layman's speak) and design energy a shutdown for refurbishment would be necessary. This is no surprise at all -- after all running the world's highest energy particle collider (the LHC at 7 TeV) would necessarily teach us something about running a machine at even higher energies (the LHC which will run at 13-14 TeV starting 2014) that we didn't know before.
Well, strictly speaking, it's also not confirmed that the protons in the beams are standard model protons, and the same for every other particle. Once the Higgs diverges from the standard model, all other particles will diverge from the SM as well due to quantum corrections. Of course the corrections may be small, but if your threshold of calling it Higgs is "exactly like the SM", then no particle is confirmed to be an SM particle.
A lot of people should have their geek card removed. That, or I'm totally not up-to-date. Karl Fogel of subversion fame is reviews a book on git and describes himself as an everyday user of git. Yet noone asks the obvious question: does netcraft confirm svn's death or are the reports greatly exaggerated? Or do you still see a role for subversion, e.g. as the central server which everybody uses via git-svn (the gcc people appear to be doing this)?
If you think you can explain the results away by gerrymandering, I'm not buying it. You can't wave away the validity of the results that easily. There have been huge changes in the House overnight in the past; notable 1994. That election it went from 258-176D to 230-204R. Gerrymandering is as old as the hills, but it didn't "work" that time.
Of course gerrymandering cannot explain all of the results, and Democrats do it too, but Democrats won the popular vote and still in terms of seats they are behind by a 15% margin. To explain how this can happen, see two of the most egregious examples:
Ohio: 53:47 Rep:Dem in terms of votes, 11:3 seats (i.e. 79:21 percent of seats) Wisconsin: 48:51 Rep:Dem in terms of votes, 6:4 seats (i.e. 60:40 percent of seats) Pennsylvania was also bad, but I don't have the numbers around any longer.
"Correcting" the results from OH (7:7 seats, say) and WI (4:6 seats, say) shrinks the republican majority by a third. Now imagine that voters don't vote in elections where the result is predetermined (why go there anyway?), and you see how badly gerrymandering affects the legitimacy of elections.
At one point, the GOP and Karl Rove were ahead of the Democrats at using databases and software to rally support and gerrymander voting districts. But it appears that they have run out of steam.
You do realize that the Republican majority in the House is due to gerrymandering? The machine still did them some good. It shouldn't be a surprise that Pennsylvania is one of the worst offenders WRT this, after all that's the same state where a new voter ID law was enacted which the republican majority leader famously described with the words "[enact a law that] will allow Gov. Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania — done!"
What's so disgusting about this is that the republicans lost the popular vote in the house elections, yet the gerrymandering especially in Ohio and Pennsylvania but also in smaller states such as Wisonsin gave them a huge majority in the house. Still Boehner thinks entitled to demand that Romney's program (succinctly summarized as "more for the rich") be implemented. I think they can get away with this because understanding the implications of the gerrymander takes a few seconds of thought.
To preempt the obvious replies: yes, Democrats state governments also gerrymander, and yes, Florida actually enacted laws against it. Neither means that the republicans won this house election.
Would you apply the same reasoning to government contractors? Or to the employees of the privately run cafeteria inside the Pentagon (I assume there's such a thing, it doesn't matter, you get the idea: they make all their money through the government)? What about government employees that own stock in companies and make more money out of that than out of their government jobs?
Honest questions, since you don't really give many reasons for your opinion. I don't know what you're doing exactly, but why are government employees (i.e. mostly schoolteachers, policemen, firefighters) not "productive" members of society? I don't think there's much disputing that the examples I gave add value to society.
I'm actually surprised that there hasn't yet been a nuttish reply. Normally, if you post something like this you get several angry replies within minutes, especially if your post places prominently enough to receive a +5 moderation. I expected at least one answer claiming that people leaving the state is a good thing because the market is always right (never mind that it doesn't speak for the state and its policies), another claiming that all this is due to reduced government (as if that were an ends in itself), and so on. Repubotrolls today aren't as predictable as they used to be.
Interestingly the fight in Wisconsin lead to Wisconsin being distanced by the rest of the USA in what concerns job performance. See this graph which shows the total number of nonfarm employees in Wisconsin (blue) vs. the entire US (red). Note how in early 2011, when Wisconsin's job creation policies were enacted Wisconsin stopped following the upwards trend of the country. (Details: the graph is normalized to the 2009 numbers, any other pre-2011 normalization wouldn't change the picture; nonfarm to not be distorted by seasonal variations; employment numbers instead of unemployment to accoutn for people leaving the state).
I don't know how much of Wisonsin's policies Ryan could claim for himself, but it certainly looks like he shouldn't at all.
Since this is the second time that line is misread that particular way, I'll offer an explanation, even though it should be obvious. California's government happens to go bankrupt from time to time. That doesn't make the state poor, because there are also people and companies in the state who own and produce assets that are valuable. Interesting that you would think that only the government can create or maintain value;-)
As for why the state of California regularly goes bankrupt: having the populace vote on every tax increase is a surefire way of never getting taxes increased. If at the same time people vote pro-spending, government becomes unsustainable. Not that hard to figure out, definitely a construction failure, and fairly unrelated to the question of regulations.
(BTW slashdot sitll doesn't allow unicode? Why can't I put something as innocous as the not equal sign into the subject? It's 2012, not 1992)
I think you're misreading me. I'm not talking about government investing, I'm talking about government spending. And really, government can't act as an investor in the way a company can: if the government invests, then it gets its investment back in the form of greater welfare of the populace, not by selling more products as a private manufacturer would.
To me it appears that right now people would rather give their money to the government than to private institutions. Why? Because they know they'll get it back (which implies that they don't see inflation as a risk). What the government does with that money is a different story. Of course government should spend the money on things that make sense, but that seems to be fairly independent of the initial observation.
I'm looking forward to someone explaing to me why the government needs to save money now, when it can borrow for free? That is to say that the US government can borrow money for zero or even negative interest rates. To me, this seems to say that people have so little faith in the economy that they rather take a little loss but a guaranteed return (even if only via the mythical printing press) than invest their money in the economy. Now, if the government can have money so cheaply, and if my analysis of the reason is correct, then it should be an immediate logical consequence that government should make up the lack of investment in the private sector by spending itself.
Here is CPI with and without food and gas included. It's not like the people providing the data didn't think about that. You can also plot the rate of change or whatever, but this plot shows that except for short-term fluctuations the CPI all items and the CPI less food and energy agree, something that is hard to read from a rate of change alone.
Can you give me a link showing how well his clients were doing? Taking into account those that jumped off in late 2008 preferably.
So you're saying hyperinflation will happen one day. The monetary base was tripled in 2008. Where's the inflation? How long does it take for this inevitable hyperinflation to manifest itself? I mean, it's nice that every person as smart as you knows that this hyperinflation has to come some day. That's a prediction like "the earth will be hit by a huge meteor someday" -- even if it's true it's of no value, as something that is going to happen 100000000 years down the line simply isn't relevant.
It seems that all central banks around the world agree that some inflation is good and necessary for the economy. Say all you want, prosperity has increased worldwide for a long time, it seems that they aren't completely wrong. Yet to you they obviously are.
Lastly you missed my point on why I would trust more the public statements of people who don't depend financially on their statements being right.
Oh well, I'll have to work now. Don't bother replying.
Well the gold price didn't buy you the same thing at different times as you can see from the different evolution of the gold price and inflation (BTW why is a car a good measure of value? a modern car is something quite different from a model T). Maybe I'm ignorant of economicas, you're ignorant of facts, in that you choose to ignore them when they contradict what you're saying.
Gold has a value when you don't have the ovens needed to process other metals. An unlikely proposition for the near future. The gold price is totally artificial, just like the price for diamonds. Small market, lots of people going in -> high prices.
But let's leave the academic discussion at the side. Everytime the gold price fluctuates you would claim that we have rapid increases in the rate of inflation? Why did the gold price peak in 1980 when inflation took place in the 70ies as you said earlier?
Inflation rate is the factor with which to multiply prices. Hence we have to compare ratios of prices not differences. Not that hard to understand, really. I have no idea why you think it makes sense to compare the particular difference you chose to calculate.
Anyway, as long as interest rates are comparable to the inflation rate, there is no way this exponential growth is somethign to worry about -- unless you keep your money under your mattress where the interest rate is zero.
Can you show me any index that responded to the huge increase in the monetary base in 2008 with large inflation? You seem to have missed that part of my reply, focusing on my mention of CPI. If the CPI measures anything related to inflation, shouldn't it have shown an uptick in response?
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to spoil the fun, but the developer who found the bug fixed it "after a few months" according to the check-in comment. The code may have been buggy for a decade, but that doesn't mean that anybody was affected during that time. Once someone was affected (the developer), it was fixed in a much shorter timescale than this article makes you believe.
almost everybody understands that 1.5 kg shouldn't cost approx. 1.5x as much as 1000 grams.
that should read "should cost", of course ;-)
When I see a distance of a multiple of 60 one can quickly determine how many hours it will take to get there when driving. :-)
Until time is also switched over to base 10 using miles/hr has a very nice 1:1 mapping with time! (assuming one drives 60 mi/hr.) The metric is a nice scientific system; the imperial system is a "nice" organic system. There is no reason BOTH systems couldn't be kept on the signage.
Ummm, yeah. I'm assuming you either just forgot your sarcasm tag or had a massive brain fart....
Last I checked km / hour was 1:1 as well. 1 hour @ 65 km/hour = 65km traveled.
Your point is right of course. But I don't see the importance of converting road signage to metric: if a road sign says a distance of 80 miles, and the speed limit is 80 miles per hour, then it takes you an hour to get there. Same for 130 km and 130 kph. Road-signage has two roles: on the one hand it allows you to estimate the time to destination, and on the other hand it is used to indicate the speed limit. Both these roles are completely independent of whether you use miles or kilometers -- provided you use them consistently. Road signage has no implication beyond this, so it simply doesn't matter what system of units is used.
Where units matter are tools, pipe diameters, the height of stairsteps, the diameters of tires etc., basically everything where parts can be bought and sold all over the world. Units also matter for food, because easily converted units make cheating with package sizes much more difficult: almost everybody understands that 1.5 kg shouldn't cost approx. 1.5x as much as 1000 grams. Now ask yourself that same question about weights expressed in pounds and ounces. Compared to these advantages, road signage simply doesn't matter at all. Keep it in miles and nothing's lost.
For how many years needs something to be known before it is no longer a revelation? Seriously, this schedule has been in the plans for several years, it was also clear from even before the initial start that before going to design luminosity (i.e. beam intensity in layman's speak) and design energy a shutdown for refurbishment would be necessary. This is no surprise at all -- after all running the world's highest energy particle collider (the LHC at 7 TeV) would necessarily teach us something about running a machine at even higher energies (the LHC which will run at 13-14 TeV starting 2014) that we didn't know before.
Well, strictly speaking, it's also not confirmed that the protons in the beams are standard model protons, and the same for every other particle. Once the Higgs diverges from the standard model, all other particles will diverge from the SM as well due to quantum corrections. Of course the corrections may be small, but if your threshold of calling it Higgs is "exactly like the SM", then no particle is confirmed to be an SM particle.
A lot of people should have their geek card removed. That, or I'm totally not up-to-date. Karl Fogel of subversion fame is reviews a book on git and describes himself as an everyday user of git. Yet noone asks the obvious question: does netcraft confirm svn's death or are the reports greatly exaggerated? Or do you still see a role for subversion, e.g. as the central server which everybody uses via git-svn (the gcc people appear to be doing this)?
If you think you can explain the results away by gerrymandering, I'm not buying it. You can't wave away the validity of the results that easily. There have been huge changes in the House overnight in the past; notable 1994. That election it went from 258-176D to 230-204R. Gerrymandering is as old as the hills, but it didn't "work" that time.
Of course gerrymandering cannot explain all of the results, and Democrats do it too, but Democrats won the popular vote and still in terms of seats they are behind by a 15% margin. To explain how this can happen, see two of the most egregious examples:
Ohio: 53:47 Rep:Dem in terms of votes, 11:3 seats (i.e. 79:21 percent of seats)
Wisconsin: 48:51 Rep:Dem in terms of votes, 6:4 seats (i.e. 60:40 percent of seats)
Pennsylvania was also bad, but I don't have the numbers around any longer.
"Correcting" the results from OH (7:7 seats, say) and WI (4:6 seats, say) shrinks the republican majority by a third. Now imagine that voters don't vote in elections where the result is predetermined (why go there anyway?), and you see how badly gerrymandering affects the legitimacy of elections.
At one point, the GOP and Karl Rove were ahead of the Democrats at using databases and software to rally support and gerrymander voting districts. But it appears that they have run out of steam.
You do realize that the Republican majority in the House is due to gerrymandering? The machine still did them some good. It shouldn't be a surprise that Pennsylvania is one of the worst offenders WRT this, after all that's the same state where a new voter ID law was enacted which the republican majority leader famously described with the words "[enact a law that] will allow Gov. Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania — done!"
What's so disgusting about this is that the republicans lost the popular vote in the house elections, yet the gerrymandering especially in Ohio and Pennsylvania but also in smaller states such as Wisonsin gave them a huge majority in the house. Still Boehner thinks entitled to demand that Romney's program (succinctly summarized as "more for the rich") be implemented. I think they can get away with this because understanding the implications of the gerrymander takes a few seconds of thought.
To preempt the obvious replies: yes, Democrats state governments also gerrymander, and yes, Florida actually enacted laws against it. Neither means that the republicans won this house election.
Would you apply the same reasoning to government contractors?
Or to the employees of the privately run cafeteria inside the Pentagon (I assume there's such a thing, it doesn't matter, you get the idea: they make all their money through the government)?
What about government employees that own stock in companies and make more money out of that than out of their government jobs?
Honest questions, since you don't really give many reasons for your opinion. I don't know what you're doing exactly, but why are government employees (i.e. mostly schoolteachers, policemen, firefighters) not "productive" members of society? I don't think there's much disputing that the examples I gave add value to society.
I'm actually surprised that there hasn't yet been a nuttish reply. Normally, if you post something like this you get several angry replies within minutes, especially if your post places prominently enough to receive a +5 moderation. I expected at least one answer claiming that people leaving the state is a good thing because the market is always right (never mind that it doesn't speak for the state and its policies), another claiming that all this is due to reduced government (as if that were an ends in itself), and so on. Repubotrolls today aren't as predictable as they used to be.
Interestingly the fight in Wisconsin lead to Wisconsin being distanced by the rest of the USA in what concerns job performance. See this graph which shows the total number of nonfarm employees in Wisconsin (blue) vs. the entire US (red). Note how in early 2011, when Wisconsin's job creation policies were enacted Wisconsin stopped following the upwards trend of the country. (Details: the graph is normalized to the 2009 numbers, any other pre-2011 normalization wouldn't change the picture; nonfarm to not be distorted by seasonal variations; employment numbers instead of unemployment to accoutn for people leaving the state).
I don't know how much of Wisonsin's policies Ryan could claim for himself, but it certainly looks like he shouldn't at all.
Since this is the second time that line is misread that particular way, I'll offer an explanation, even though it should be obvious. California's government happens to go bankrupt from time to time. That doesn't make the state poor, because there are also people and companies in the state who own and produce assets that are valuable. Interesting that you would think that only the government can create or maintain value ;-)
As for why the state of California regularly goes bankrupt: having the populace vote on every tax increase is a surefire way of never getting taxes increased. If at the same time people vote pro-spending, government becomes unsustainable. Not that hard to figure out, definitely a construction failure, and fairly unrelated to the question of regulations.
(BTW slashdot sitll doesn't allow unicode? Why can't I put something as innocous as the not equal sign into the subject? It's 2012, not 1992)
I think you're misreading me. I'm not talking about government investing, I'm talking about government spending. And really, government can't act as an investor in the way a company can: if the government invests, then it gets its investment back in the form of greater welfare of the populace, not by selling more products as a private manufacturer would.
To me it appears that right now people would rather give their money to the government than to private institutions. Why? Because they know they'll get it back (which implies that they don't see inflation as a risk). What the government does with that money is a different story. Of course government should spend the money on things that make sense, but that seems to be fairly independent of the initial observation.
I'm looking forward to someone explaing to me why the government needs to save money now, when it can borrow for free? That is to say that the US government can borrow money for zero or even negative interest rates. To me, this seems to say that people have so little faith in the economy that they rather take a little loss but a guaranteed return (even if only via the mythical printing press) than invest their money in the economy. Now, if the government can have money so cheaply, and if my analysis of the reason is correct, then it should be an immediate logical consequence that government should make up the lack of investment in the private sector by spending itself.
So, why should the government save money?
Hm, where's the government in his argument?
Amazing that not only someone would write something as stupid but that someone would actually copy it into a slashdot comment and be modded up for it.
Almost as good as a Control Panel option: add this to your system.ini
MessageBackColor=D
MessageTextColor=C
That should give you bright red on bright magenta, which is as close as you get to Power Ranger status.
Don't worry, who isn't?
Sorry, I meant to link to this page where you can actually modify the plot :-)
Here is CPI with and without food and gas included. It's not like the people providing the data didn't think about that. You can also plot the rate of change or whatever, but this plot shows that except for short-term fluctuations the CPI all items and the CPI less food and energy agree, something that is hard to read from a rate of change alone.
Can you give me a link showing how well his clients were doing? Taking into account those that jumped off in late 2008 preferably.
So you're saying hyperinflation will happen one day. The monetary base was tripled in 2008. Where's the inflation? How long does it take for this inevitable hyperinflation to manifest itself? I mean, it's nice that every person as smart as you knows that this hyperinflation has to come some day. That's a prediction like "the earth will be hit by a huge meteor someday" -- even if it's true it's of no value, as something that is going to happen 100000000 years down the line simply isn't relevant.
It seems that all central banks around the world agree that some inflation is good and necessary for the economy. Say all you want, prosperity has increased worldwide for a long time, it seems that they aren't completely wrong. Yet to you they obviously are.
Lastly you missed my point on why I would trust more the public statements of people who don't depend financially on their statements being right.
Oh well, I'll have to work now. Don't bother replying.
Well the gold price didn't buy you the same thing at different times as you can see from the different evolution of the gold price and inflation (BTW why is a car a good measure of value? a modern car is something quite different from a model T). Maybe I'm ignorant of economicas, you're ignorant of facts, in that you choose to ignore them when they contradict what you're saying.
Gold has a value when you don't have the ovens needed to process other metals. An unlikely proposition for the near future. The gold price is totally artificial, just like the price for diamonds. Small market, lots of people going in -> high prices.
But let's leave the academic discussion at the side. Everytime the gold price fluctuates you would claim that we have rapid increases in the rate of inflation? Why did the gold price peak in 1980 when inflation took place in the 70ies as you said earlier?
Inflation rate is the factor with which to multiply prices. Hence we have to compare ratios of prices not differences. Not that hard to understand, really. I have no idea why you think it makes sense to compare the particular difference you chose to calculate.
Anyway, as long as interest rates are comparable to the inflation rate, there is no way this exponential growth is somethign to worry about -- unless you keep your money under your mattress where the interest rate is zero.
Can you show me any index that responded to the huge increase in the monetary base in 2008 with large inflation? You seem to have missed that part of my reply, focusing on my mention of CPI. If the CPI measures anything related to inflation, shouldn't it have shown an uptick in response?