This sure sounds like baloney to me. Think about it... do they not have all kinds of data logging software on these things? Why would the DoD need to be monitoring keystrokes, when they surely have better information available via data logs?
This is simply an attempt to raise uncertainty about the incompetence of our digital security.
And all those fears about the national stoopidification by TV appear groundless now. With almost a century of wireless RF broadcasting pretty much every where, we went to the Moon, developed antibiotics, and decoded the human genome!
And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go stick my head in the microwave for a quick topping-off and then tackle the Sunday crossword puzzle!
This strikes me as a task comparable to the Y2K crisis, which was handled well enough that the vast majority of the sheeple believe it to have been a scam, a tremendous waste of time, money, and urgency that was all for naught.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The major differences between this and the Y2K crisis is that the politically-dominated government, and not profit-minded enterprises, is responsible for dealing with the problem. And so we are likely to see government gridlock drive us straight into a collapse of the system that would have been paying out a huge chunk of the spending money to just about the largest demographic group in the country -- those age 60-something-and-over, with the resultant impact on the economy triggering an economic crisis that will be truly stupendous to behold.
Consider the alternative: an economy that is strapped for reasonable-paying jobs, hires a bunch of the near-retiring or retired boomer coders, delaying their retirements and generating additional cash flows into the economy. We get a smooth transition to a SS system (hardware and software) that is capable up supporting the huge demographic bubble of the boomers, that also happens to lessen the impact of an abrupt boomer retirement. This covers more than mere coders, as the planning and logistics and setup of a number of fault-tolerant fail-over capable data centers employs a lot more than just coders and analysts.
And Obama says he can't find any "shovel-ready" jobs.
... as the simple plastic strips used by diabetics to monitor their blood glucose levels daily runs about a dollar per strip, and provides only an accuracy of roughly plus-or-minus 20%. And that's using a meter that they give away, the profits are so great on the plastic strips.
Given that the machinery to process this "disposable plastic cartridge" is going to be fairly costly, the per-use charge seems likely to be expensive enough to preclude use of this as a coarse diagnostic filter, which would seem to be its greatest usefulness.
... all the decent brokerages use web access for trading.
I use an OpenOffice-based spreadsheet that manages my overall financial status, downloading end-of-day quotes, maintaining various financial aggregates and performing charting and record keeping.
All this is on a Mac, under OS X, but the same (or very similar) software should work under Linux.
If you want to run a Black-Sholes derivative analysis modeling program, you're in a different realm from me.
Otherwise, a simple web browser and spreadsheet should handle your needs.
You will, of course, need to know something about writing spreadsheet macros, and have a command of spreadsheet formulas that goes beyond simple =C2-B2 formulas. That sort of thing can be picked up pretty easily via some googling and a bit of effort on your part.
but I wonder how they plan to get a bandwidth pipe large enough and still be reliable
Google satellites of course!
Shouldn't that be Google Skynet?
Of course, the obvious next step will be moving the data centers into orbit -- power is cheaper there. People will not be a problem, because as with most large data centers these days, it will be a "lights out" operation. A few robots to replace hardware that has failed and shut itself off/switched over to a replacement (as it also happens today) will be all that is necessary.
Just moving the data centers into LEO reduces the set of folks who can do serious harm to it, and (except for the transport cost) lowers the overall cost of operation.
Yes, it is true that no alternative power source can quickly and immediately replace an infrastructure that took about a century to put in place.
It is also true that the amount of solar energy that falls on the US exceeds our total power consumption by many times, even accounting for the low efficiency of PV and solar thermal collectors. Here's a snippet from wikipedia (where it references a page from Stanford -- you can chase the links yourselves): "The amount of solar energy reaching the surface of the planet is so vast that in one year it is about twice as much as will ever be obtained from all of the Earth's non-renewable resources of coal, oil, natural gas, and mined uranium combined."
It is also true that the available wind power amounts to many times the total amount of energy consumed by the US (you can look it up yourself -- it's also a ginormous number).
Finally, Google's recent investment into Enhanced Geothermal Systems highlights the potential to pull energy from the latent heat within drilling range, using more economical technologies than have previously been utilized. There is a 2006 MIT pdf on Enhanced Geothermal Systems which shows that there also, we find available reclaimable energy capable of satisfying our total energy needs many times over.
If wind power is inconstant, over-build, and generate far more power than we need on average, and use the excess to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen to drive fuel cells during the calm periods. The odds of having a lengthy calm period that extends over much of the US is practically nil. Same thing for solar power -- build out more than you need, and use the surplus to split water (which covers 3/4 of the planet) into hydrogen and oxygen. If a nation the size of Germany with limited resources (compared to the US) can commit to 100% alternative energy, there's no reason why the US cannot do so as well, with our much larger supplies of available energy and much larger economic resources.
But with such a variety of available and abundant energy sources, we don't need to overbuild, the point is to utilize each of them where they can provide the most impact (e.g., solar for peak utilization, which occurs during the day), and build an enhanced distribution grid (again, we're going to need to anyhow) to move electricity from where it is generated to where it is needed, just like we do today.
Wind power generates voltage spikes? So use flywheel technologies (e.g., Beacon Power (BCON)) to spin flywheels, and generate clean, regulated power from the flywheels. This is technology that exists today. It will even serve as a store of energy, to level out brief lulls in the output. New technologies require (and always receive) improvements as we learn how to best utilize them. Our experience with them improves them.
The point is, we CAN replace ALL our existing fossil fuel power generation infrastructure -- we have to anyway, due to obsolescence and planned upgrades -- we just can't do it quickly. It took us about a century to build what we have, we won't be replacing it in only a decade.
But we can gain a decade or so by making it an active conversion, by purposefully moving to alternative power, instead of waiting until it is enough cheaper than coal to make it the selection of choice. According to some sources, wind is already price-competitive with coal, and there is a lot of improvement left in the technologies to extract energy from wind. Not so much from coal.
... has a cost, in terms of cpu cycles and memory.
For compiled code, that cost is paid at compile time.
For interpreted code -- JIT or any other sort -- those costs are paid at run time.
Let's try to be at least a LITTLE analytical about this.
if M (the amount of memory required) consists of m1 + m2 + m3, where:
m1 is the amount of memory required by the compiled code
m2 is the amount of memory required by the compiler/interpreter/optimizer
m3 is the amount of memory required by the problem data
Then it is pretty easy to see that m2 is zero at runtime for compiled code, and that the difference (if any) in m1 for the (supposedly) superior real-time optimization will be far, FAR less than m2 (which will be zero at runtime for compiled code).
Similarly, if we look at P, the amount of processor resource required, we can break it down into p1 and p2, with:
p1 being the cycles used to perform the problem
p2 being the cycles used to optimize the code
Again, p2 is done in real time with interpreted languages, JIT or not, and is done at compile time for compiled code. At runtime, the amount saved in p1 by (supposedly) superior optimization will only exceed p2 in the case of repetitive problems executed for long periods of time. Remember, at execution time (which is what we care about), p2 is ZERO for previously compiled code.
It takes a very long-running, highly repetitive program for the improvements in efficiency from superior optimization to overcome the overhead of realtime compilation.
For short, non-repetitive executions, interpretive execution is HIGHLY unlikely to prove superior to previously compiled code.
In a very large fraction of the computer programs run today, the compile time exceeds the run time of the program. When you consider interpretive code as requiring "compilation" every time it is loaded, you begin to see the advantage of previously compiled code.
The major reasons for using interpretive languages have always been the improvements in the development cycle. Raw execution performance of interpretive code (JIT or otherwise) is unlikely to ever exceed that of compiled code, for C or any other language, for exactly the reasons outlined above.
ummmm... over the last decade the S&P 500 has risen by about 11% -- not per year, IN TOTAL. Looking ahead, it could well be the case that the next decade will be even worse, with the national debt blowing past ten trilling, deficits rising, and inflation roaring away.
Just the increase in electric rates from inflation might make this an economically sound thing to do.
But if you read TFA, the author's primary goals were to lower his carbon footprint and electric bill, not to make a profitable investment.
I think he's probably dreaming if the thinks his home value has not sagged in California, but that's an entirely different issue. No question that in the California market, fresh from being Enron'd in the electricity markets, this is something that enhances the value of his home.
The answer to that, and the thing that desperately needs to be done, is to transition the electric utilities (possibly splitting them into separate companies) from being power producers into being power producers AND power brokers.
The power broker would make money by reselling the power they purchase from the grid at a small profit, reflecting the expenses of maintaining the grid and their own overhead.
Unfortunately, I know of no utilities anywhere in the nation that are moving in any way toward becoming brokers of power generated from the grid. One would think that this would be an obvious thing to do, with all the commercial rooftop PV installations in use, but sadly, no.
In the case of Duke Energy (at least in my state), the utility credits the producer for excess power generated, and maintains a "kWh bank" of all the excess credits, which is applied to future consumption. When the producer and utility part company, any contents still in the "bank" revert to the utility. There is NEVER a check cut the to producer. The best one can do is reduce one's electric bill to zero. Needless to say, this pretty much eliminates any incentive for generating lots of green energy.
An update on the progress of Bussard's Polywell fusion reactor by the folks at EMC2 fusion would be a GREAT topic. The tough part would be condensing the back story to fit into the tight time constraints for a TED Talk.
This is assuming that they aren't working under a complete news blackout situation.
... I can envision herds of healthy young vegans, otherwise unable to earn a living, perhaps due to inadequate education, perhaps innate stupidity, perhaps cheap foreign competition, but able to get by in society by mining their granulocytes for a population of aged boomers, facilitating the generational transference of wealth...
... or perhaps convicts will be tested for healthy immune systems, and serve their debt to society in a manner reminiscent of Niven's organ banks...
... both quantitative and qualitative metrics that describe the multidimensional entity fuzzily defined as "intelligence", that describe a continuum from insects to humans -- and mapping the huge variation of all aspects of "intelligence" that is present (or absent) in humans, any discussion of "artificial intelligence" is going to be extremely unsatisfying.
We can recognize that many people are simply stone-stupid by virtually any measure, and we can recognize that some people possess substantial amounts of various aspects of "intelligence", but we can neither quantify nor enumerate those aspects of "intelligence", and cannot even precisely define them in any way that would be generally agreed upon.
So how can we POSSIBLY expect to recognize when an AI performs adequately in enough of the set of intelligence aspects to be classified as "intelligent"?
By any reasonable assessment, most individuals would not be any more intelligent than a clever chimp or dog. Were it not for the tiny minority of exceptional individuals (none of whom are readers of Slashdot), humanity would have no basis to even be considered an "intelligent" species.
The most defensible claim we can make is that we are the most dangerous predator on the planet, anything else is wishful thinking.
Learning how to distinguish Truth from Non-Truth is incredibly difficult. Perhaps impossible.
Learning to accept that You Can Be Wrong is only the easiest step, and the one most easily forgotten.
Here's a simple mathematical test:
Do you believe that addition is commutative? i.e., that 1+2 = 2+1? For any values of 2 and 1? How about (-2) + 1 = 1 + (-2)?
In any circumstances? ALWAYS????
I used to.
And then I was working my way through (no, I have not yet completed it, and I probably need to begin anew at page 1) John Derbyshire's Prime Obsession -- a historical treatment of Riemann's Hypothesis that attempts to educate the non-professional mathematician reader so that they can at least kinda/sorta understand the problem. And then on pages 149-150, he introduces the Gentle Reader to "conditionally convergent" infinite series, which resolve into different results depending on the order the terms are summed! Yes, there have to be some subtractions mixed in with the additions in the infinite series, but I tend to treat subtraction as a flavor of addition (clearly an error, but I still don't see how) and it made me put down the book and walk around and ponder the significance of what I had read (and I found myself returning to those pages repeatedly instead of moving steadily forward).
While I can accept that I was wrong, I still don't understand WHY (and am almost certainly never going to). And if I can be wrong about something as apparently simple as addition -- even when dealing with the realm of the infinite (which is almost certainly wherein the difficulties lie) -- I can be wrong about pretty much anything. And so can You.
When we move from understanding simple mathematical concepts like addition/subtraction to dealing with a Reality that we can grasp only weakly, and can only perceive fragments of (can you see x-rays? feel neutrinos? hear frequencies beyond a narrow range?), it becomes quite impossible to wrap one's mind around even the notion of Absolute Truth. But we seem to be constructed to latch onto simple perceived truths and defend them as if they were the very foundations of our existence -- which in a sense, they are. But that's why being willing to re-invent oneself, casting aside those ideas that have been shown to be different than our notions of them, is so very important.
Proof is a slippery little devil, while Belief is incredibly sticky.
... the Democrat leadership chooses to milk the damage that Dubya is doing to the Republican party and ignore the damage he is doing to the nation.
That's pretty much the only reason that impeachment is "off the table" -- the Democrat party is benefitting too much from Dubya's incompetence to dream of removing him before next January.
If they could, they'd have Dubya run again, and would field a candidate sure to lose against him (regardless of how difficult it would be to find such a candidate). The gains they are making in the House and Senate make the Presidency almost superfluous.
... the "Dead Sea Effect" has been ongoing in the corporate world in its entirety as things have changed from a career-based relationship to a body-shop environment.
The old "relationship" between employer and employee, with bonds of trust and commitment (however false or unreliable those bonds were) and things like pensions and health care coverage, with a corresponding commitment to the employer and career, that relationship is gone.
The current relationship is one that is a good deal more volatile, and entirely temporary. Employees today regularly switch employers and even careers.
So what have you done for me today? This leads directly to the Dead Sea Effect, and exists not just in the IT industry, but in every walk of life.
Slashdot Mirror
OK geniuses, Foxconn is a Taiwanese company, operating manufacturing plants in China, Malaysia, India, Mexico, Brazil, Europe, Japan, and soon the US.
Not only does he not know the meaning of the term "communist", he does not know which country Foxconn is from, or has plants in, or much of anything.
Which is likely why the US is one of the last places they are willing to manufacture stuff. Too many assholes and idiots here.
This sure sounds like baloney to me. Think about it ... do they not have all kinds of data logging software on these things? Why would the DoD need to be monitoring keystrokes, when they surely have better information available via data logs?
This is simply an attempt to raise uncertainty about the incompetence of our digital security.
And all those fears about the national stoopidification by TV appear groundless now. With almost a century of wireless RF broadcasting pretty much every where, we went to the Moon, developed antibiotics, and decoded the human genome!
And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go stick my head in the microwave for a quick topping-off and then tackle the Sunday crossword puzzle!
If there were anything to this at all, no EULA on Earth could protect Microsoft from liability lawsuits for damages done by virus writers ...
This strikes me as a task comparable to the Y2K crisis, which was handled well enough that the vast majority of the sheeple believe it to have been a scam, a tremendous waste of time, money, and urgency that was all for naught.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The major differences between this and the Y2K crisis is that the politically-dominated government, and not profit-minded enterprises, is responsible for dealing with the problem. And so we are likely to see government gridlock drive us straight into a collapse of the system that would have been paying out a huge chunk of the spending money to just about the largest demographic group in the country -- those age 60-something-and-over, with the resultant impact on the economy triggering an economic crisis that will be truly stupendous to behold.
Consider the alternative: an economy that is strapped for reasonable-paying jobs, hires a bunch of the near-retiring or retired boomer coders, delaying their retirements and generating additional cash flows into the economy. We get a smooth transition to a SS system (hardware and software) that is capable up supporting the huge demographic bubble of the boomers, that also happens to lessen the impact of an abrupt boomer retirement. This covers more than mere coders, as the planning and logistics and setup of a number of fault-tolerant fail-over capable data centers employs a lot more than just coders and analysts.
And Obama says he can't find any "shovel-ready" jobs.
... as the simple plastic strips used by diabetics to monitor their blood glucose levels daily runs about a dollar per strip, and provides only an accuracy of roughly plus-or-minus 20%. And that's using a meter that they give away, the profits are so great on the plastic strips.
Given that the machinery to process this "disposable plastic cartridge" is going to be fairly costly, the per-use charge seems likely to be expensive enough to preclude use of this as a coarse diagnostic filter, which would seem to be its greatest usefulness.
Er, but what are we going to do with all the people who just don't "have" the brains? They get a free ride?
Soylent Green.
Yeah, but if I didn't say it, somebody else would have.
but how about a serious DDoS attack?
... all the decent brokerages use web access for trading.
I use an OpenOffice-based spreadsheet that manages my overall financial status, downloading end-of-day quotes, maintaining various financial aggregates and performing charting and record keeping.
All this is on a Mac, under OS X, but the same (or very similar) software should work under Linux.
If you want to run a Black-Sholes derivative analysis modeling program, you're in a different realm from me.
Otherwise, a simple web browser and spreadsheet should handle your needs.
You will, of course, need to know something about writing spreadsheet macros, and have a command of spreadsheet formulas that goes beyond simple =C2-B2 formulas. That sort of thing can be picked up pretty easily via some googling and a bit of effort on your part.
80% -- that's some kinda vig.
Google satellites of course!
Shouldn't that be Google Skynet?
Of course, the obvious next step will be moving the data centers into orbit -- power is cheaper there. People will not be a problem, because as with most large data centers these days, it will be a "lights out" operation. A few robots to replace hardware that has failed and shut itself off/switched over to a replacement (as it also happens today) will be all that is necessary.
Just moving the data centers into LEO reduces the set of folks who can do serious harm to it, and (except for the transport cost) lowers the overall cost of operation.
[sigh]
Yes, it is true that no alternative power source can quickly and immediately replace an infrastructure that took about a century to put in place.
It is also true that the amount of solar energy that falls on the US exceeds our total power consumption by many times, even accounting for the low efficiency of PV and solar thermal collectors. Here's a snippet from wikipedia (where it references a page from Stanford -- you can chase the links yourselves): "The amount of solar energy reaching the surface of the planet is so vast that in one year it is about twice as much as will ever be obtained from all of the Earth's non-renewable resources of coal, oil, natural gas, and mined uranium combined."
It is also true that the available wind power amounts to many times the total amount of energy consumed by the US (you can look it up yourself -- it's also a ginormous number).
Finally, Google's recent investment into Enhanced Geothermal Systems highlights the potential to pull energy from the latent heat within drilling range, using more economical technologies than have previously been utilized. There is a 2006 MIT pdf on Enhanced Geothermal Systems which shows that there also, we find available reclaimable energy capable of satisfying our total energy needs many times over.
If wind power is inconstant, over-build, and generate far more power than we need on average, and use the excess to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen to drive fuel cells during the calm periods. The odds of having a lengthy calm period that extends over much of the US is practically nil. Same thing for solar power -- build out more than you need, and use the surplus to split water (which covers 3/4 of the planet) into hydrogen and oxygen. If a nation the size of Germany with limited resources (compared to the US) can commit to 100% alternative energy, there's no reason why the US cannot do so as well, with our much larger supplies of available energy and much larger economic resources.
But with such a variety of available and abundant energy sources, we don't need to overbuild, the point is to utilize each of them where they can provide the most impact (e.g., solar for peak utilization, which occurs during the day), and build an enhanced distribution grid (again, we're going to need to anyhow) to move electricity from where it is generated to where it is needed, just like we do today.
Wind power generates voltage spikes? So use flywheel technologies (e.g., Beacon Power (BCON)) to spin flywheels, and generate clean, regulated power from the flywheels. This is technology that exists today. It will even serve as a store of energy, to level out brief lulls in the output. New technologies require (and always receive) improvements as we learn how to best utilize them. Our experience with them improves them.
The point is, we CAN replace ALL our existing fossil fuel power generation infrastructure -- we have to anyway, due to obsolescence and planned upgrades -- we just can't do it quickly. It took us about a century to build what we have, we won't be replacing it in only a decade.
But we can gain a decade or so by making it an active conversion, by purposefully moving to alternative power, instead of waiting until it is enough cheaper than coal to make it the selection of choice. According to some sources, wind is already price-competitive with coal, and there is a lot of improvement left in the technologies to extract energy from wind. Not so much from coal.
... has a cost, in terms of cpu cycles and memory.
For compiled code, that cost is paid at compile time.
For interpreted code -- JIT or any other sort -- those costs are paid at run time.
Let's try to be at least a LITTLE analytical about this.
if M (the amount of memory required) consists of m1 + m2 + m3, where:
m1 is the amount of memory required by the compiled code
m2 is the amount of memory required by the compiler/interpreter/optimizer
m3 is the amount of memory required by the problem data
Then it is pretty easy to see that m2 is zero at runtime for compiled code, and that the difference (if any) in m1 for the (supposedly) superior real-time optimization will be far, FAR less than m2 (which will be zero at runtime for compiled code).
Similarly, if we look at P, the amount of processor resource required, we can break it down into p1 and p2, with:
p1 being the cycles used to perform the problem
p2 being the cycles used to optimize the code
Again, p2 is done in real time with interpreted languages, JIT or not, and is done at compile time for compiled code. At runtime, the amount saved in p1 by (supposedly) superior optimization will only exceed p2 in the case of repetitive problems executed for long periods of time. Remember, at execution time (which is what we care about), p2 is ZERO for previously compiled code.
It takes a very long-running, highly repetitive program for the improvements in efficiency from superior optimization to overcome the overhead of realtime compilation.
For short, non-repetitive executions, interpretive execution is HIGHLY unlikely to prove superior to previously compiled code.
In a very large fraction of the computer programs run today, the compile time exceeds the run time of the program. When you consider interpretive code as requiring "compilation" every time it is loaded, you begin to see the advantage of previously compiled code.
The major reasons for using interpretive languages have always been the improvements in the development cycle. Raw execution performance of interpretive code (JIT or otherwise) is unlikely to ever exceed that of compiled code, for C or any other language, for exactly the reasons outlined above.
He lost?
I thought we lost. It sure feels like we lost -- surely winning feels better than this.
Just the increase in electric rates from inflation might make this an economically sound thing to do.
But if you read TFA, the author's primary goals were to lower his carbon footprint and electric bill, not to make a profitable investment.
I think he's probably dreaming if the thinks his home value has not sagged in California, but that's an entirely different issue. No question that in the California market, fresh from being Enron'd in the electricity markets, this is something that enhances the value of his home.
The power broker would make money by reselling the power they purchase from the grid at a small profit, reflecting the expenses of maintaining the grid and their own overhead.
Unfortunately, I know of no utilities anywhere in the nation that are moving in any way toward becoming brokers of power generated from the grid. One would think that this would be an obvious thing to do, with all the commercial rooftop PV installations in use, but sadly, no.
In the case of Duke Energy (at least in my state), the utility credits the producer for excess power generated, and maintains a "kWh bank" of all the excess credits, which is applied to future consumption. When the producer and utility part company, any contents still in the "bank" revert to the utility. There is NEVER a check cut the to producer. The best one can do is reduce one's electric bill to zero. Needless to say, this pretty much eliminates any incentive for generating lots of green energy.
An update on the progress of Bussard's Polywell fusion reactor by the folks at EMC2 fusion would be a GREAT topic. The tough part would be condensing the back story to fit into the tight time constraints for a TED Talk. This is assuming that they aren't working under a complete news blackout situation.
How about a nice game of Global Thermonuclear Chess?
... both quantitative and qualitative metrics that describe the multidimensional entity fuzzily defined as "intelligence", that describe a continuum from insects to humans -- and mapping the huge variation of all aspects of "intelligence" that is present (or absent) in humans, any discussion of "artificial intelligence" is going to be extremely unsatisfying.
We can recognize that many people are simply stone-stupid by virtually any measure, and we can recognize that some people possess substantial amounts of various aspects of "intelligence", but we can neither quantify nor enumerate those aspects of "intelligence", and cannot even precisely define them in any way that would be generally agreed upon.
So how can we POSSIBLY expect to recognize when an AI performs adequately in enough of the set of intelligence aspects to be classified as "intelligent"?
By any reasonable assessment, most individuals would not be any more intelligent than a clever chimp or dog. Were it not for the tiny minority of exceptional individuals (none of whom are readers of Slashdot), humanity would have no basis to even be considered an "intelligent" species.
The most defensible claim we can make is that we are the most dangerous predator on the planet, anything else is wishful thinking.
Learning to accept that You Can Be Wrong is only the easiest step, and the one most easily forgotten.
Here's a simple mathematical test:
Do you believe that addition is commutative? i.e., that 1+2 = 2+1? For any values of 2 and 1? How about (-2) + 1 = 1 + (-2)?
In any circumstances? ALWAYS????
I used to.
And then I was working my way through (no, I have not yet completed it, and I probably need to begin anew at page 1) John Derbyshire's Prime Obsession -- a historical treatment of Riemann's Hypothesis that attempts to educate the non-professional mathematician reader so that they can at least kinda/sorta understand the problem. And then on pages 149-150, he introduces the Gentle Reader to "conditionally convergent" infinite series, which resolve into different results depending on the order the terms are summed! Yes, there have to be some subtractions mixed in with the additions in the infinite series, but I tend to treat subtraction as a flavor of addition (clearly an error, but I still don't see how) and it made me put down the book and walk around and ponder the significance of what I had read (and I found myself returning to those pages repeatedly instead of moving steadily forward).
While I can accept that I was wrong, I still don't understand WHY (and am almost certainly never going to). And if I can be wrong about something as apparently simple as addition -- even when dealing with the realm of the infinite (which is almost certainly wherein the difficulties lie) -- I can be wrong about pretty much anything. And so can You.
When we move from understanding simple mathematical concepts like addition/subtraction to dealing with a Reality that we can grasp only weakly, and can only perceive fragments of (can you see x-rays? feel neutrinos? hear frequencies beyond a narrow range?), it becomes quite impossible to wrap one's mind around even the notion of Absolute Truth. But we seem to be constructed to latch onto simple perceived truths and defend them as if they were the very foundations of our existence -- which in a sense, they are. But that's why being willing to re-invent oneself, casting aside those ideas that have been shown to be different than our notions of them, is so very important.
Proof is a slippery little devil, while Belief is incredibly sticky.
... the Democrat leadership chooses to milk the damage that Dubya is doing to the Republican party and ignore the damage he is doing to the nation.
That's pretty much the only reason that impeachment is "off the table" -- the Democrat party is benefitting too much from Dubya's incompetence to dream of removing him before next January.
If they could, they'd have Dubya run again, and would field a candidate sure to lose against him (regardless of how difficult it would be to find such a candidate). The gains they are making in the House and Senate make the Presidency almost superfluous.
Soylent Green.
It's the only way to deal with the explosive population growth of overweight people.
... euthanizing Dilbert.
Certainly more ironic than Bill Waterson's shutting down Calvin and Hobbes, this was worthy of the combined efforts of Wally and Dogbert.
... the "Dead Sea Effect" has been ongoing in the corporate world in its entirety as things have changed from a career-based relationship to a body-shop environment.
The old "relationship" between employer and employee, with bonds of trust and commitment (however false or unreliable those bonds were) and things like pensions and health care coverage, with a corresponding commitment to the employer and career, that relationship is gone.
The current relationship is one that is a good deal more volatile, and entirely temporary. Employees today regularly switch employers and even careers.
So what have you done for me today?
This leads directly to the Dead Sea Effect, and exists not just in the IT industry, but in every walk of life.
Get over it and move on.