Can we have a reality check on that "criminal offence" please? There is not a blanket ban on shipping computers, there is a ban on shipping computers above a certain power. When I saw it, in about 1984, it was set at about iPad level. I bet it has moved since then.I seriously doubt that it covers anything for home use by non-geeks.
Did the clerk know what was on the list? While I am sure such a lists exists, rightly, I am also pretty sure that iPads are not on it. There is a complex specification of what computer style devices may, and may not, be sold. i came across it in about 1984, at which time an iPad CPU might have exceeded the limit at that time. But I am pretty sure that that limit will have been lifted in the intervening 28 years (14 iterations of Moore's law) and that there is not a blanket restriction on anything that might be called a computing device. I think the clerk was extrapolating, quite unreasonably, from the fact that export of some computers was controlled to that export of all computers are controlled. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
According to Feynman, the US effectively used human computers. Large numbers of people passing round card decks doing rote calculations for months on end. Complete with caching and pipeline processing. It is therefore possible to build a bomb without computers, but much easier with computers. And the more compute power you have, the more efficient your bomb. That said, computers of iPad power are endemic in the world; I am sure that Iran has thousands of PCs far more capable of having an iPad. Not selling iPads to Iranians is like not selling steel toed boots - steel is used to build tanks, so a billion pairs of boots could be melted down to produce one tank.
While there are undoubtedly regulations against selling computers to Iran, they have a specification of how powerful such a computer needs to be. I was involved in getting a piece of kit cleared years ago, and had to advise whether we fell below the critical level (by miles). Equally, I am confident that an iPad would fall below today's equivalent benchmark by miles. The sales assistant was being a know-all, spreading a little knowledge (there are regulations) far beyond its limit (what those regulations actually say)..
Employers want people who already have skills. Which almost certainly means people who are already in work. Because if you have been out of work for any significant time, you are "behind the curve". Therefore, employers want to poach.
But employers want to pay "the market rate". But everybody is already paying "the market rate" - those who were not have lost the employees you want to poach already. So most of the people they might consider are already employed at the market rate. The only people with skills and available are those whose companies are, at this moment, downsizing. But even downsizers hang on to the best, so few of the best come onto the market.
So employers must do one of two things: 1. Pay more. 2. Train more.
Both cost, but 1 costs for ever, while 2 costs for the few months it takes to get a new employee up to speed on a new skill. Employers need to widen their specifications and take on people who, while generally bright, capable, and knowledgeable in the field, do not necessarily have the exact skills needed for the job today.
Which, in turn, means taking less of a "Just In Time" attitude to hiring. Good workers are not items you can order off the shelf, along with a desk, a chair, and a PC.
Particularly, in the software field, stop specifying X years of a particular language and in-depth knowledge of four specific tools. Look instead for a good record of bringing in projects on time with few bugs. Projects have to be in the same general field, but the specifics are irrelevant. The right person will be trained up on your tools in tree to six months, when s/he will have cost you less than you paid the recruiter, and will have don at least something to earn that on the way,
School lunches are a surprisingly powerful tool against malnourished kids in deprived areas. Getting a decent meal into deprived children is both good for their general health and for their ability to absorb the education the school is offering. Therefore it is a policy aim that all schools be able to offer a quality meal to any deprived children in the area (since deprivation occurs in wealthy areas as well as poor). In fact, the percentage of children entitled to such meals for free is used as a metric of the school's intake, those with a higher level of free lunches being assumed to have a less well supported intake. Given that such a meal must be offered to those entitled to it free, it makes economic sense to offer it to all children. It doesn't stop children bringing their own lunches to school as you describe, and many do. In my experience in comfortably off areas, about half of all children bring their own lunches and half have school lunches.
I agree. The cost/benefit of the patent system is our of whack. Without saying it has no benefits, in the software arena the costs it is burdening companies, and hence consumers, with are much greater than the benefits. Does anybody think Apple would/not/ have implemented swipe to unlock because their competitors would copy it? How many research man hours went into this startling invention?
Exactly my experience. A lot of my friends were very pro the idea of Google+, until they found out it had a "real names only" policy. For someone who has been on the net more than ten years, their internet nick is their real name - or one of them, anyway. The inability to use the name by which they were usually know to their net-friends meant they didn't want to be there. And therefore their friends didn't want to be there. The people who felt excluded may only have been a minority - but they were a hard core, net-savvy minority who tended to be at the centre of circles. If they weren't there, a lot of people didn't want to be there either.
The point in TFA was that the structures were not planned. The 12 year old gamer was not involved - nor was there anybody else making a conscious system design decision. Despite the obstacles of "you cant do that here", similar topologies evolved.
Just as it is trivial to make a spherical lump if stone, it is interesting that nature sometimes manufactures perfect spheres without a designer. Likewise, it is would not be interesting if these efficient subway designs had been created by a master designer. It is interesting that efficient designs evolved without a designer. I bit of an answer to the Intelligent Design camp: purely short term decision can come up with a system with large-scale efficiency.
I think Plato did have a lot of sense mixed with his nonsense. But the sense has become so much part of our common knowledge that we don't realise that it was, in his time, original. Of course, the nonsense has remained nonsense.
A bit like the woman leaving a performance of Hamlet, who said "I don't know why they think Shakespeare is so great - that was just a load of well known quotes tied together."
The trouble is that most such "X causes cancer" statements come from the media themselves, recklessly shortening research results saying "consumption of X correlates with a positive increase in cancer", where the nature of the correlation is unknown and the increase is very small. So it is all to often not an accurate prediction of the research. Particularly, there can often be a chinese whispers effect, where the researcher publishes a paper, the University PR department publishes a precis edited for PR purposes, a popular science journal then reports with its own bias, and it is then taken by mainstream media and truncated again.
A particular example, as often reported b y Ben Goldacre, is the Daily Mail, which seems to summarise everything into causing or curing cancer, and will report the same substance on both sides within days.
tl;dr version: stuff gets in my head sometimes and I have no idea how it got there.
Which is fine, provided when you quote it, you say that it is a fragment, not by you, whose source you cannot recall. But the standards for scientific papers are higher than the standards for poetry. Poetry stands on its own: either it is good in its own right, or not. But a scientific paper is a record of work done or ideas correlated. If it is data or concepts from elsewhere, you should say so, Otherwise it should be your work. And if you cannot say where you got something from. you cannot include it.
It is unusual to copy it verbatim, or nearly so, without knowing what you copied it from. If you copy, you have a duty to attribute. Even if you are only copying into your notes, you should copy the attribution in case you put it into a paper. Both out of respect for the original author, and for readers of your paper who may legitimately ask how you knew what you state. We don't want scientific papers where the answer to "how did you know that?" is "I read it on the web somewhere".
I wonder why a SCADA system needs a direct connection to the wild Internet. Surely it wold be better to have a separate interface system connected to the Net, which one could upgrade as needed, sending commands to an isolated SCADA system using a protocol other than IP? That way, IP sent over the Internet can never under any circumstances reach the vulnerable system.
Employees rights certainly matter. But over years, there is enough natural wastage to handle a lot of it. And leases can be renegotiated. How long each branch lasts, and which of the two is closed, will depend upon lease terms. But they can pit two landlords against each other, or leave one as a shell with a couple of cash machines in it. They are in no hurry, and will react tactically as the particular situation demands. Average lease length seem to be of the order of 5-10 years, even if there is not an earlier break, which there often is, so the chances are that one branch or other is coming up in a 3-5 year timescale. Staff can be redeployed to the other. Bans are a different propositions from grocery stores.
Keep an eye on those Santanders. One will close soon.
The reason the keep both for a while is to let customers of the old brands get used to the new brand, and think of themselves as customers of Santander, before closing one. If you tell an Abbey customer to leave their old Abbey branch and go to a freshly rebadged Bradford & Bingley, they may ask themselves if they might not be better elsewhere. If you change the name, but assure them that all else stays the same, then later change the branch while assuring them that all else stays the same, they are much less motivated to jump ship. The Frog in a Saucepan effect. About 2-3 years after both have been rebadged Santander, one will close.
My local Woolworths has been replaced by a Wilkinson which is just about exactly the same as Woolworths was except for no attempt to sell records, games, and videos. Woolworths had a perfectly good business dating back a century - cheap household goods. Then they lucked into a windfall with music, and later video. When both the net and specialists like Game (dying, as reported, and HMV (in trouble) destroyed this business, instead of going back to their traditional strengths, they tried to keep the dead business by giving it more and more store space. People lost sight of the household goods behind a wall of games and DVDs. And the traditional business is relatively immune to the net: delivery represents too large a fraction of the cost of many items, and instant access to stuff you want for a job today has value.
Indeed. If you abandon all the principles the US was founded on, you cam make many things happen. Many of which you will not like.
This would be simple protectionism. And protectionism reduces growth over the long term.
The market is giving you a simple signal. CUT YOUR OIL CONSUMPTION. And going lalala I can't hear you is not going to solve the problem. The free market works, and the US grew great believing that. But now you seem to stop wanting to believe it. If you do, you will lose its benefits as well as its costs. So you want Saudi civil liberties as the price of Saudi gas prices?
I think you are very wrong in saying those days have gone. The estimated reserves, even for wells in production, vary drastically. And new resources are in more difficult, harder to estimate places, simply because they did the easy ones first.
I yell socialism if you say that making a profit in an open market against a lot of competition is bad. As a fraction of turnover, their profits are no more than normal; they make large profits because they are large companies selling large amounts of stuff. WalMart probably makes more profits, simply because it ships more stuff, so you should control them first.
As to tax regimes: you may have a case, but nationalisation is not the solution.
If you know a way to fix the system, let us know. Basically, it is cause by using those fallible components called "human beings". It happens under all political systems, and probably less under a democracy than any other. But it still happens. It is the same thing as makes politicians two-faces windbags, so once you have worked out how to fix it, politics will be a hell of a lot nicer.
A general rule of powers given to government is that if they can be abused. See anti-terror laws used to spy on people alleged to be cheating the school placement system, and jaywalkers who happen to do it in a defence establishment. And I can see so many ways this can be abused to persecute the merely curious.
Slashdot Mirror
Can we have a reality check on that "criminal offence" please? There is not a blanket ban on shipping computers, there is a ban on shipping computers above a certain power. When I saw it, in about 1984, it was set at about iPad level. I bet it has moved since then.I seriously doubt that it covers anything for home use by non-geeks.
Did the clerk know what was on the list? While I am sure such a lists exists, rightly, I am also pretty sure that iPads are not on it. There is a complex specification of what computer style devices may, and may not, be sold. i came across it in about 1984, at which time an iPad CPU might have exceeded the limit at that time. But I am pretty sure that that limit will have been lifted in the intervening 28 years (14 iterations of Moore's law) and that there is not a blanket restriction on anything that might be called a computing device. I think the clerk was extrapolating, quite unreasonably, from the fact that export of some computers was controlled to that export of all computers are controlled. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
According to Feynman, the US effectively used human computers. Large numbers of people passing round card decks doing rote calculations for months on end. Complete with caching and pipeline processing. It is therefore possible to build a bomb without computers, but much easier with computers. And the more compute power you have, the more efficient your bomb. That said, computers of iPad power are endemic in the world; I am sure that Iran has thousands of PCs far more capable of having an iPad. Not selling iPads to Iranians is like not selling steel toed boots - steel is used to build tanks, so a billion pairs of boots could be melted down to produce one tank.
While there are undoubtedly regulations against selling computers to Iran, they have a specification of how powerful such a computer needs to be. I was involved in getting a piece of kit cleared years ago, and had to advise whether we fell below the critical level (by miles). Equally, I am confident that an iPad would fall below today's equivalent benchmark by miles. The sales assistant was being a know-all, spreading a little knowledge (there are regulations) far beyond its limit (what those regulations actually say)..
Summarising from TFA:
Employers want people who already have skills. Which almost certainly means people who are already in work. Because if you have been out of work for any significant time, you are "behind the curve". Therefore, employers want to poach.
But employers want to pay "the market rate". But everybody is already paying "the market rate" - those who were not have lost the employees you want to poach already. So most of the people they might consider are already employed at the market rate. The only people with skills and available are those whose companies are, at this moment, downsizing. But even downsizers hang on to the best, so few of the best come onto the market.
So employers must do one of two things:
1. Pay more.
2. Train more.
Both cost, but 1 costs for ever, while 2 costs for the few months it takes to get a new employee up to speed on a new skill. Employers need to widen their specifications and take on people who, while generally bright, capable, and knowledgeable in the field, do not necessarily have the exact skills needed for the job today.
Which, in turn, means taking less of a "Just In Time" attitude to hiring. Good workers are not items you can order off the shelf, along with a desk, a chair, and a PC.
Particularly, in the software field, stop specifying X years of a particular language and in-depth knowledge of four specific tools. Look instead for a good record of bringing in projects on time with few bugs. Projects have to be in the same general field, but the specifics are irrelevant. The right person will be trained up on your tools in tree to six months, when s/he will have cost you less than you paid the recruiter, and will have don at least something to earn that on the way,
School lunches are a surprisingly powerful tool against malnourished kids in deprived areas. Getting a decent meal into deprived children is both good for their general health and for their ability to absorb the education the school is offering. Therefore it is a policy aim that all schools be able to offer a quality meal to any deprived children in the area (since deprivation occurs in wealthy areas as well as poor). In fact, the percentage of children entitled to such meals for free is used as a metric of the school's intake, those with a higher level of free lunches being assumed to have a less well supported intake. Given that such a meal must be offered to those entitled to it free, it makes economic sense to offer it to all children. It doesn't stop children bringing their own lunches to school as you describe, and many do. In my experience in comfortably off areas, about half of all children bring their own lunches and half have school lunches.
I agree. The cost/benefit of the patent system is our of whack. Without saying it has no benefits, in the software arena the costs it is burdening companies, and hence consumers, with are much greater than the benefits. Does anybody think Apple would /not/ have implemented swipe to unlock because their competitors would copy it? How many research man hours went into this startling invention?
Exactly my experience. A lot of my friends were very pro the idea of Google+, until they found out it had a "real names only" policy. For someone who has been on the net more than ten years, their internet nick is their real name - or one of them, anyway. The inability to use the name by which they were usually know to their net-friends meant they didn't want to be there. And therefore their friends didn't want to be there. The people who felt excluded may only have been a minority - but they were a hard core, net-savvy minority who tended to be at the centre of circles. If they weren't there, a lot of people didn't want to be there either.
One of the referenced articles referred to the strong constraints of the two rivers,
The point in TFA was that the structures were not planned. The 12 year old gamer was not involved - nor was there anybody else making a conscious system design decision. Despite the obstacles of "you cant do that here", similar topologies evolved.
Just as it is trivial to make a spherical lump if stone, it is interesting that nature sometimes manufactures perfect spheres without a designer. Likewise, it is would not be interesting if these efficient subway designs had been created by a master designer. It is interesting that efficient designs evolved without a designer. I bit of an answer to the Intelligent Design camp: purely short term decision can come up with a system with large-scale efficiency.
I think Plato did have a lot of sense mixed with his nonsense. But the sense has become so much part of our common knowledge that we don't realise that it was, in his time, original. Of course, the nonsense has remained nonsense.
A bit like the woman leaving a performance of Hamlet, who said "I don't know why they think Shakespeare is so great - that was just a load of well known quotes tied together."
The trouble is that most such "X causes cancer" statements come from the media themselves, recklessly shortening research results saying "consumption of X correlates with a positive increase in cancer", where the nature of the correlation is unknown and the increase is very small. So it is all to often not an accurate prediction of the research. Particularly, there can often be a chinese whispers effect, where the researcher publishes a paper, the University PR department publishes a precis edited for PR purposes, a popular science journal then reports with its own bias, and it is then taken by mainstream media and truncated again.
A particular example, as often reported b y Ben Goldacre, is the Daily Mail, which seems to summarise everything into causing or curing cancer, and will report the same substance on both sides within days.
No - you charge people to get in, as a deterrent, but let them out free for humanitarian reasons.
(My wife is Welsh, so I know).
tl;dr version: stuff gets in my head sometimes and I have no idea how it got there.
Which is fine, provided when you quote it, you say that it is a fragment, not by you, whose source you cannot recall. But the standards for scientific papers are higher than the standards for poetry. Poetry stands on its own: either it is good in its own right, or not. But a scientific paper is a record of work done or ideas correlated. If it is data or concepts from elsewhere, you should say so, Otherwise it should be your work. And if you cannot say where you got something from. you cannot include it.
It is unusual to copy it verbatim, or nearly so, without knowing what you copied it from. If you copy, you have a duty to attribute. Even if you are only copying into your notes, you should copy the attribution in case you put it into a paper. Both out of respect for the original author, and for readers of your paper who may legitimately ask how you knew what you state. We don't want scientific papers where the answer to "how did you know that?" is "I read it on the web somewhere".
Thank you. I think you just stopped my brain melting. I now have a smidgeon of a fragment of a trace of a clue what the article is about.
I wonder why a SCADA system needs a direct connection to the wild Internet. Surely it wold be better to have a separate interface system connected to the Net, which one could upgrade as needed, sending commands to an isolated SCADA system using a protocol other than IP? That way, IP sent over the Internet can never under any circumstances reach the vulnerable system.
That fact was true in the 1950s, when Eisenhower quoted it in order to rubbish socialist governments. It has not been true for decades.
Employees rights certainly matter. But over years, there is enough natural wastage to handle a lot of it. And leases can be renegotiated. How long each branch lasts, and which of the two is closed, will depend upon lease terms. But they can pit two landlords against each other, or leave one as a shell with a couple of cash machines in it. They are in no hurry, and will react tactically as the particular situation demands. Average lease length seem to be of the order of 5-10 years, even if there is not an earlier break, which there often is, so the chances are that one branch or other is coming up in a 3-5 year timescale. Staff can be redeployed to the other. Bans are a different propositions from grocery stores.
Keep an eye on those Santanders. One will close soon.
The reason the keep both for a while is to let customers of the old brands get used to the new brand, and think of themselves as customers of Santander, before closing one. If you tell an Abbey customer to leave their old Abbey branch and go to a freshly rebadged Bradford & Bingley, they may ask themselves if they might not be better elsewhere. If you change the name, but assure them that all else stays the same, then later change the branch while assuring them that all else stays the same, they are much less motivated to jump ship. The Frog in a Saucepan effect. About 2-3 years after both have been rebadged Santander, one will close.
My local Woolworths has been replaced by a Wilkinson which is just about exactly the same as Woolworths was except for no attempt to sell records, games, and videos. Woolworths had a perfectly good business dating back a century - cheap household goods. Then they lucked into a windfall with music, and later video. When both the net and specialists like Game (dying, as reported, and HMV (in trouble) destroyed this business, instead of going back to their traditional strengths, they tried to keep the dead business by giving it more and more store space. People lost sight of the household goods behind a wall of games and DVDs. And the traditional business is relatively immune to the net: delivery represents too large a fraction of the cost of many items, and instant access to stuff you want for a job today has value.
Indeed. If you abandon all the principles the US was founded on, you cam make many things happen. Many of which you will not like.
This would be simple protectionism. And protectionism reduces growth over the long term.
The market is giving you a simple signal. CUT YOUR OIL CONSUMPTION. And going lalala I can't hear you is not going to solve the problem. The free market works, and the US grew great believing that. But now you seem to stop wanting to believe it. If you do, you will lose its benefits as well as its costs. So you want Saudi civil liberties as the price of Saudi gas prices?
Thank you - that is what I meant.
A genuine FTFY for once.
I think you are very wrong in saying those days have gone. The estimated reserves, even for wells in production, vary drastically. And new resources are in more difficult, harder to estimate places, simply because they did the easy ones first.
I yell socialism if you say that making a profit in an open market against a lot of competition is bad. As a fraction of turnover, their profits are no more than normal; they make large profits because they are large companies selling large amounts of stuff. WalMart probably makes more profits, simply because it ships more stuff, so you should control them first.
As to tax regimes: you may have a case, but nationalisation is not the solution.
If you know a way to fix the system, let us know. Basically, it is cause by using those fallible components called "human beings". It happens under all political systems, and probably less under a democracy than any other. But it still happens. It is the same thing as makes politicians two-faces windbags, so once you have worked out how to fix it, politics will be a hell of a lot nicer.
A general rule of powers given to government is that if they can be abused. See anti-terror laws used to spy on people alleged to be cheating the school placement system, and jaywalkers who happen to do it in a defence establishment. And I can see so many ways this can be abused to persecute the merely curious.