In other words, legalized gambling with the biggest players gaming the system to their advantage.
Prices fluctuate moment to moment as shares are bought and sold. The price is determined by the completed buy and sell orders, or the demand and supply, moment to moment. The only difference between the stock market and other markets is that most markets don't buy and sell such large volumes at such high speeds. Compare to actual casino or sports gambling where nothing new of value is produced, either directly or indirectly, other than perhaps entertainment and every play is necessarily a time limited independent event. It's certainly possible to approach the stock markets with an eye towards gambling, not investing, but that doesn't diminish the fact that markets, including the stock market, are not equivalent to casino or sports betting. If you're going to call the stock market gambling then you might as well call any form of market activity where you plan to resell in the future what you bought today gambling. Do you own a car? Do you plan to sell it at some point? Well then by your definition that's gambling. Perhaps you would draw a distinction based upon the length of time that you owned the car? Maybe buying it and selling it on the same day is gambling, but buying it and selling it five years later is not. In that case, is somebody who buys a stock today and then sells it five years later gambling? Strictly speaking, the stock market is not the same thing as gambling. They are not perfectly interchangeable substitutes for one another.
Balmer owns a bit over 4 percent of the outstanding shares and Gates, the largest single shareholder, owns 6.4 percent. That's not enough to prevent other shareholders from forcing changes at Microsoft. It's too bad the Ichan chose to get involved with Dell instead of Microsoft because what Microsoft needs now is new and better leadership and I don't see that happening without a big name, like Ichan, leading the charge.
Microsoft will die a slow death of becoming irrelevant all the while wondering where the fuck they went wrong.
Or they could stop wasting the profits from Windows, Office and XBox on trying to expand into new areas where there is already fierce competition and low margins and instead refocus on the core businesses while dropping everything else. That would have the effect of improving the quality of the existing products, as you suggested, while at the same time freeing up profits to be paid out in the form of higher dividends to shareholders. The company belongs to the shareholders and Microsoft should be figuring out how best to enrich the shareholders, not wasting shareholder's money on ill considered attempts to get into sideshow distraction businesses.
You cannot lose that which you never had. Microsoft's strength has always been in the desktop PC and the mid level enterprise, not mobile. That being said Microsoft still employs many smart people and has several profitable divisions, not including the crown jewels of Windows and Office, plus a gigantic cash hoard. Steve Ballmer is trying to reorganize the company and address long standing cultural problems at Microsoft that have been at the very least a drag on progress. Microsoft still has many strengths and I think that a good CEO with a keen understanding of the business, a firm grasp of what needs to change and the charisma to pull it all together could still turn Microsoft around. However, I have my doubts that Ballmer is the best man for that job. I think that he understands the existing businesses very well and he's nothing if not tenacious, but he seems to lack the necessary foresight on what needs to change or perhaps the leadership ability to change it. Microsoft is first and foremost a technology business and it needs a technologist at the helm, or at least making the strategic product decisions, and it needs to be somebody that the technical division heads can both respect and trust. As it stands now, Microsoft doesn't work very well together as a company and there are many separate fiefdoms with high walls and armed guards (figuratively speaking of course) and that doesn't do much to engender trust or cooperation amongst different teams. The reorganization is supposed to address this. I'm hopeful, but we'll see. Disclaimer: I'm the beneficial owner of one thousand shares of Microsoft common stock.
it's been conjectured by cryptographers and analysts--not just Bruce Schneiner, but other academics--that the U.S. government runs a plurality of all Tor nodes.
That sounds about par for the course. I remember hearing that in the later decades of the 20th century the US government, at the behest of the NSA, made sure that it was cheaper to route international phone calls going from Europe to Asia or from South America, Asia and Africa to just about any other destination through the United States by subsidizing the connections so that the fees would be cheapest. This ensured that a majority of the world telecom traffic made it's way through the United States at some point, where the NSA intercepted and analyzed it, before continuing on to it's final destination. I wouldn't be surprised if this practice continues today with undersea fiber cables for carrying backbone Internet traffic.
It is about Microsoft intentionally using a crippled encryption system to encourage a false sense of security
The encryption was not crippled. The problem here is access to keys and it exists with all systems where any intermediary has access to the keys, not just those belonging to Microsoft. I realize that most of us here on Slashdot are technically sophisticated and already know this but it bears repeating for those amongst us who remain unaware. First, no system, no matter what encryption algorithm is used or how strong it is, can prevent somebody with access to the keys from recovering the plaintext. Second, the keys to any cryptography system that's transparent to its users, especially ones running on remote servers "in the cloud", remain in the possession of the entity offering that service, whether Microsoft or any other, and not the users'. Finally, any entity under the direct jurisdiction of the United States, or indeed any other government, can be compelled by force to use those keys to satisfy requests by those governments for information. So it must be understood that if anyone besides you and your intended recipients has access to the keys used to encrypt a message, that communication is not secure against snooping by governments or indeed any other entity that's powerful enough to compel cooperation from those who have those keys.
Who the heck pays for a movie ticket to play angry birds.
Have you seen the sort of crap that Hollywood has been pooping out lately? Who would pay $10+ to see any of it? The kind of people who would play Angry Birds in the theater instead of actually watching it, that's who. And what does that say about the intelligence level of the average American, especially those who buy movie tickets? Nothing complimentary I'm afraid.
So? The people who use are the people who pay and the people who pay the most are the people who most want use the grid at any given time. The same thing happens in toll road pricing. People who want to drive during rush hour pay more to use the bypass lanes. The price of the bypass lanes rises or falls until the point where the number of people demanding their use at any given time roughly approximates their capacity. The bypass lanes might only cost a dollar or two at 2:30pm. However, if you want to drive the bypass lanes at 5:30 pm, during the peak of rush hour, it might cost $10 or more and yet the bypass lanes are still well used during peak traffic by people who feel that saving half an hour in traffic really is worth $10 or even more. To get back to our electric grid example, if everyone switches to demand pricing instead of flat rate I don't see any problem with that. In fact, it would be more economically efficient because it would force those who actually use the power to pay what it costs to deliver it to them at the time that they demand its use.
Libertarians should love solar power, because it would get them away from using the heavily regulated big-government power grid
I cannot speak for anyone but myself, but I'm fine with whatever you want to pay for out of your own pocket to put on your own roof. What I'm not for is subsidizing your solar panel purchase with public money nor am I for any mandatory across the board increase in utility rates to provide more power from wind or solar. Government regulation of rates is required in the case of electric utilities because building, running and maintaining the electric grid is a natural monopoly and natural monopolies by their very nature there cannot form an efficient market due to limitations of physical space and other infrastructure impracticalities. Libertarians favor markets and market based solutions, but we recognize that some government regulation, preferably minimal, is necessary and regulation of natural monopoly utilities is one of those special cases.
Would you support imposing these things upon others, involuntarily if necessary? You see, that's where I draw the line. If you want to voluntarily do these things or take an offer of lower rates in exchange for doing these things or whatever that's fine as long as it's voluntary. If rates need to be higher for people who want power on demand then that's fine too, charge them what it costs to deliver what they demand. If that's hard to do without a smart meter then charge them for the privilege of not using one. Charge what it costs to deliver the good or service in the quantity demanded to those who want it. However, I'm very skeptical of the government forcing people to participate in a conservation or rationing program against their wishes. Choices have prices and that's fine, but we should let those who are willing to a pay a premium to crank their AC whenever they feel like it do that and use the money to improve the grid and build the infrastructure that's necessary to deliver that supply.
It tells me that you're going to get smart meters anyway, but that the power companies will have to get legislation mandating them first.
Here in California, that's far from a sure thing. The power companies here haven't always been on the winning side over the decades when the dust from the ballot initiatives and lawsuits clears. Whether that's a good or bad thing depends upon your point of view, but here in California that's simply the way that the chips fall.
The pursuit of quality is a worthy goal, but it cannot come at the expense of finishing the project on time and on budget. I think that most people I've worked with in the software development business over the years genuinely wanted to do good work, but unreasonable schedules and demanding clients don't always allow for that. We do the best we can with what we've been given and realize that sometimes our priorities as developers are not the same as those of the business. Perhaps there is a first mover advantage to be gained by getting to market first, even if the quality suffers somewhat. That's a business decision and it's the right of those paying the bills to make that call and unlike some of my peers I do understand that the requirements of the business sometimes necessitate compromise on what I might like to build as an engineer were I given more time and budget.
As for training there's only so much that companies can reasonably expect will be done off the clock. If companies want to improve the quality of their workers then they have to invest paid time in training or allow workers time to practice and learn new things. Do you see professional sports teams refusing to pay people except for time spent playing in actual games? Some wiser companies, like Google, do allow for this sort of thing, but unfortunately not every manager understands the value of long term planning and worker self improvement. I generally prefer to read technical books and work on personal projects, where mistakes or trying new things cannot put things behind schedule, rather than going to conferences or attending meetups, but to each his own.
it's about giving back to the community that has given you so much
I do that by mentoring and teaching younger developers some of what I've learned over the years from others. I don't lay claim to any great original work on a well know open source project, but I do have a thing or two to teach from my years of work and experience as a software developer and I'm always willing to help junior developers who ask me with a desire to learn and benefit from that knowledge and experience.
but if you're going to work with me I want to see that you're active and you give a shit.
Maybe I already do:D, but rest assured that I do care about the work, as a professional, and give a shit about getting things done. I wouldn't still be working in this industry after all these years if that wasn't the case.
but I also know that nobody, noboby owes me a free ride
There was never a suggestion of that I think or at least not from me.
Clients almost never pay me to learn on their dime
The only time that I would ask them to is if they insisted upon using a specific and uncommon technology or integration with an obscure piece of software or hardware that I'm never likely to see again. It's all about supply and demand and the price has to reflect that because I'm either going to have to spend extra time learning something completely obscure or find someone to subcontract that part of the job (which is isn't always possible or feasible).
I want to work with developers who are on that wave length and do more than clock in, write their 500 LOC/day, clock out and promptly forget about programming until 9AM the next day.
I think that it's pretty easy to tell after working with them a few months. If you don't like their work then fire them and get somebody else, but even somebody who just works 9 to 5 can still be useful if they can be had at the right price. Not everyone can become a ninja after all.
Why would seniors program their smart meters to turn their air conditioners down so far during a scorcher that it gives them heat stroke?
Indeed, why would anybody do that? Don't you see the point? Almost nobody will voluntarily turn down their AC on a hot day and especially not in states like Arizona, New Mexico and Texas or indeed anywhere in the American Southeast. You're asking people to take one for the team, but I don't think that you'll have too many volunteers. Asking Americans to make do with less just doesn't work, I mean look at at our budget deficits, that alone proves the point.
Yeah, because the utilities haven't thought about *any* of these problems.
If they have they don't seem to care. Consider their initial rollout strategy here in California: move fast and install as many meters as possible before people realize what's going on or have a chance to respond. Naturally, this sort of rough shod approach led to considerable backlash in California where the people have fought numerous political battles with the public utilities over the years. So no, I don't think that they thought about any of those potential problems. I think that they saw an opportunity to cut their costs and increase profits and rushed to get as many smart meters installed as possible, with or without the knowledge of the property owners, before opt-out regulations could be passed by state and local governments.
How about a neighbourhood with AC 'rolling blackouts'?
We tried rolling blackouts here in California during the electricity crisis brought on by ill considered deregulation of the power market. The people of California didn't much care for them, but hey the people in your state might love them, right?
Each house is told to turn off their AC for 15 minutes every 2 hours.
Oh, that's just perfect. The all powerful government, that reads your emails and listens to your phone calls, and in whose wisdom you trust completely asks you to turn of your AC for 15 minutes every 2 hours. So of course you will just do what they ask, I mean who could possibly have a problem with that, right? Please.
nobody actually cares since AC off for 15 minutes is barely noticable.
You've never lived in Arizona have you?
Lather, rinse, repeat for other appliances. Car? Home owner decides how much 'expensive' electricity VS cheap overnight electricy to use, say "charge to 50%, but contimue only if rates fall below X".
Or they could just continue driving their used fossil fuel burning car, you know the one that's fully depreciated and still runs great, and not worry about any of that.
This actually isn't rocket science, and your naysaying is part of the problem.
If you want people to change their ways then you'll have to figure out how to offer them something better than the stick. Asking people to make do with less "for the good of all" and then forcing them to obey with government mandates and decrees is not the way to achieve energy savings or social peace. In fact, it often has the opposite effect, particularly in red states, as people use more energy on purpose to spit in the eye of big government and meddling busybodies who propose such things. You might not like that, but that's reality.
Oh please, really? Do you honestly believe that environmentalists don't deliberately delay power plant construction (especially nuclear) in the United States? Give me a break. Also, I said that it was a substantial cost, not the only cost. The problem is legal and economic, so it cannot be solved by a new reactor design because it wouldn't matter what design was proposed to the environmentalists, they'd still be against it. The legal problems require political not technical solutions and the economic problems are largely caused by the legal and political problems. Dragging out engineering projects, in the courts and through political maneuvering, is expensive and that's were the delays deal economic damage. The environmentalists wouldn't use those tactics if they weren't effective.
please explain how the failure of WPPSS in the late 70's and early 80's was the result of this versus economic, technical, and competency factors.
Are you going to tell me that there wasn't a single lawsuit filed or political agitation conducted by environmental groups opposed to a new reactor? I don't believe that the problem is entirely caused by technology or lack of engineering competency.
Then please explain how the new designs will escape this fate. After all, since there must be places which don't have this problem, these new designs must be operating successfully in large numbers. Where are these places?
Of course new designs cannot solve what amounts to a problem of politics. As for where nuclear power is widespread, how about France? I think that there are three basic reasons why France was able to build many reactors, using a modified US design (Westinghouse I think) no less, while things have been more problematic here in the US. First, France has almost no natural deposits of either coal, natural gas or petroleum and few rivers to be dammed so for the French it was pretty much nuclear or nothing. Second, the French have a much greater faith in their scientists and engineers than we do here in the United States. The French scientists and engineers in turn work hard to earn and sustain that trust by doing good work. I cannot recall there ever being a serious nuclear accident in France for example. Finally, it seems that the French legal system doesn't allow for NIMBYs to get in the way of projects that are deemed to be in the national interest whereas anyone with money for the filing fees can cause no end of legal trouble here in the United States.
In any case, it will still take decades for them to come on line in significant numbers at BEST (based on production estimates).
Wah, wah, wah it's too hard and it takes to long to get strated so why even try right? There's a productive attitude. You could use that argument against just about anything worth doing. Indeed, just imagine where we might be as a nation today if we allowed that objection to override all good sense. The difficulty of the task should inform our long term planning, but it shouldn't be taken as a reason to do nothing or not to get started. I could trot out that same argument for why we should do nothing about global warming, why bother to do anything now when the benefits won't be seen for decades, but I suspect that you wouldn't like the argument as much in that case.
Sure, it's not base load, but maybe we should be looking at a solution for that?
I don't claim to be omniscient, is there something else that we ought to be looking at? Something perhaps that all of the other scientists and engineers around the world have missed? I doubt it, but I'm willing to be surprised. Please tell us your brilliant plan for replacing all of the world's base load nuclear generation with fairy dust and unicorn farts (this ought to be good).
Smart meters can be programmed so that when supply is reduced, it will turn off your water heater, or turn down the heat or A/C, or stop charging your electric car, or recommend that you dry your laundry on the line instead of using the dryer.
Because people will just love it when their smart meter turns down their AC during a scorcher or stops charging their electric car so they don't have enough juice to get to work the next day or nagging them about how they should be drying their clothes on a laundry line during working hours. The belief that this will actually work in the real world is utterly obtuse. Can you imagine the political fallout from ACs being turned down in the sunbelt by smart meters and seniors being found dead in their homes from heat stroke? Even the liberals out in California want to opt out of smart meters. What does that tell you about the future of smart meters in the United States?
Nuclear reactors require huge capital investment and take a long time to build.
It's true that the capital costs of nuclear power are high, but in all fairness a substantial part of those costs and the time required to build are caused by anti-nuclear pressure groups and other NIMBYs who drag the process out for decades in courts and through environmental review boards as a delaying tactic to discourage development by artificially running up the cost. Meanwhile the world continues to burn ever more and dirtier fossil fuels to make up for lost nuclear generation capacity in national electric grids.
They also take a long time to turn on and off, so make an inflexible source of supply that integrates poorly with more variable sources
Which is why you don't turn them off and why the electric grid should never be entirely nuclear. Nuclear is for the portion of the demand that needs constant and consistent base load supply. Because the national energy grids never have zero energy demand at any time of day there will always be demand for some amount of base load power and nuclear fits that profile perfectly. The variable power sources, like wind and solar, can contribute as they're able with the remainder of variable demand being handled by natural gas turbines that can be turned on when necessary to fill in supply gaps and shutdown quickly and easily when not needed.
Natural gas, on the other hand, has a comparatively much lower capital investment and time to build for the same generation capacity.
Natural gas is also a valuable transportation, heating and cooking fuel. It's not just power plants that demand natural gas, so it would be unwise in the long run to replace base load nuclear with natural gas. We have many centuries of proven nuclear fuel, but natural gas supplies have waxed and waned over the years along with demand, depletion and development of new supplies. The lifespan of a power plant is measured in decades but nobody can tell you what the price will be for natural gas decades in the future.
The low price of natural gas also makes it extremely competitive with other power sources.
For now, but much of the newly drilled glut of natural gas comes from horizontally drilled and fracked wells in tight shale formations where the long term depletion rates are still poorly understood. We might have centuries of gas left in these formations or they might be depleted in a matter of decades; nobody's sure yet because we don't have enough data on depletion rates and demand is also uncertain. For example, increased use of natural gas in commercial transportation may eventually put upward pressure on natural gas prices as an alternative to diesel in those applications.
Natural gas turbines can also come to full power from a dead stop in 20 minutes and partial power sooner than that, allowing it it integrate gracefully in a world with variable power demand and supply.
Which is why there will always be a role for natural gas in electricity generation. My point was that we shouldn't lean too heavily on any one technology, but rather seek to optimize the grid by tapping into the different strengths of different generation technologies. We need nuclear, solar, wind, natural gas and even niche sources, like geothermal or tidal, where available. The best solution utilizes a mix of all of these technologies, but as long as there are ignorant, biased and uneducated people we will continue to "debate" whether eliminating one or more of these technologies from the mix is a "good idea", as in the case of the "no nukes" crowd.
If you're in it purely for the money you're in it for purely the wrong reason.
If I was in it purely for the money, I would have gotten my securities license or gone to law school to become a certified professional asshole instead of a software developer. I do enjoy doing the work but I don't go around gushing emotional about how great my fucking job is. What I cannot stand is all of the patronizing bullshit from management as they try to turn work into a game and offer "non monetary" rewards for overtime spent working on their projects. We aren't children we're adults and it would be better for everyone involved if the relationship was kept businesslike and adult. When I'm working for hire I work hard and put in my best effort, as a point of professional pride, but don't think that I care more about your projects than my family or my personal obligations. And besides that, why should you care how I "feel" about it as long as the work gets done on time, it's up to standard and passes spec? If at any time either one of us isn't satisfied with the arrangement we can part ways and move on, it's not personal it's just business. That to me is the mark of a true professional, not faked passion and bullshit emotional games, so spare me your management theories on why I need to be passionate because the software business, or at least the development side, is not a service business. We aren't being paid for emotional labor but for finished product. If you want "passion" in addition to the finished product, that costs extra, but hey if you've got the money honey I've got the time.
and yet, we'll continue to lie to our kids at school
The American school system, not to mention our media saturated culture, is chock full of lies from day one. That's part of the education, learning to separate the nuggets of truth from the thicket of lies by thinking for oneself.
Passion is for people who are to dumb to realize that they're being duped by the money men so how about this? I have a skill that you want or need to make money and I expect to be paid for using that skill to make you money. Are we doing business or not?
So to change their votes, we need to talk. Isn't that what we are doing?
The people who need to hear it aren't listening. Maybe a few more years of mounting debt and underemployment (or unemployment) will help convince them that the welfare state is not the utopia that they were promised. Maybe then they won't be taken in quite so easily next time by politicians offering them fiscal candy in exchange for their votes. The Millennials like to think of themselves as being smart, but their choice of political leadership thus far has been anything but. At this rate we will inherit the country just in time to spend the rest of our lives paying off the debts rung up by our parents and grandparents and all in exchange a few percentage points less on student loans. Young voters are chumps and they proved it by voting for four more years of Obama. If they have any sense left at all now they will think very carefully about whom they vote for in 2016. They will have already lost nearly a decade to Obama by then and their careers won't be able to wait any longer to get started. Maybe then they'll finally vote with their heads and pocketbooks instead of their hearts. That would be a welcome change, but for now it's just a dim hope.
If people get the government that they deserve in a democracy then I'd say that we've gotten exactly what we deserve in Obama which is to say not much.
to extract as much of money out of their customers^h^h^h^h^h^h suckers as possible.
The people who voted Obama in for a second term were most definitely suckers so it stands to reason that Ceasars would want a cut of their action because the fools and their money are soon parted as the saying goes. Between ObamaCare and Ceasars these people won't have two nickles left to rub together, perhaps then they'll ask themselves what happened to that hope and change./p>
Objectively, based on his record and the contradictions between his promises and policies, he should have been kicked out and lost badly.
What does that say about all of the people who voted for him, especially the young idealists with stars in their eyes and rocks in the heads? They were fooled twice by the same smooth talker and his bag of dirty tricks.
It isn't as if I couldn't be fired on the spot in the first 3 to 6 months at any permanent job
In California, where Google is located, employers can fire employees anytime and for any reason whatsoever without prior notice or warning and employees are likewise free to quit anytime and for any reason without notice or warning. It's theoretically illegal to fire somebody due to their race, religion, sexual orientation and the like, but good luck proving discrimination in a lawsuit, never mind the fact that nobody will ever want to hire you again once they find out that you sued your former employer.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, legalized gambling with the biggest players gaming the system to their advantage.
Prices fluctuate moment to moment as shares are bought and sold. The price is determined by the completed buy and sell orders, or the demand and supply, moment to moment. The only difference between the stock market and other markets is that most markets don't buy and sell such large volumes at such high speeds. Compare to actual casino or sports gambling where nothing new of value is produced, either directly or indirectly, other than perhaps entertainment and every play is necessarily a time limited independent event. It's certainly possible to approach the stock markets with an eye towards gambling, not investing, but that doesn't diminish the fact that markets, including the stock market, are not equivalent to casino or sports betting. If you're going to call the stock market gambling then you might as well call any form of market activity where you plan to resell in the future what you bought today gambling. Do you own a car? Do you plan to sell it at some point? Well then by your definition that's gambling. Perhaps you would draw a distinction based upon the length of time that you owned the car? Maybe buying it and selling it on the same day is gambling, but buying it and selling it five years later is not. In that case, is somebody who buys a stock today and then sells it five years later gambling? Strictly speaking, the stock market is not the same thing as gambling. They are not perfectly interchangeable substitutes for one another.
Balmer owns a bit over 4 percent of the outstanding shares and Gates, the largest single shareholder, owns 6.4 percent. That's not enough to prevent other shareholders from forcing changes at Microsoft. It's too bad the Ichan chose to get involved with Dell instead of Microsoft because what Microsoft needs now is new and better leadership and I don't see that happening without a big name, like Ichan, leading the charge.
Microsoft will die a slow death of becoming irrelevant all the while wondering where the fuck they went wrong.
Or they could stop wasting the profits from Windows, Office and XBox on trying to expand into new areas where there is already fierce competition and low margins and instead refocus on the core businesses while dropping everything else. That would have the effect of improving the quality of the existing products, as you suggested, while at the same time freeing up profits to be paid out in the form of higher dividends to shareholders. The company belongs to the shareholders and Microsoft should be figuring out how best to enrich the shareholders, not wasting shareholder's money on ill considered attempts to get into sideshow distraction businesses.
They have lost control of the platform.
You cannot lose that which you never had. Microsoft's strength has always been in the desktop PC and the mid level enterprise, not mobile. That being said Microsoft still employs many smart people and has several profitable divisions, not including the crown jewels of Windows and Office, plus a gigantic cash hoard. Steve Ballmer is trying to reorganize the company and address long standing cultural problems at Microsoft that have been at the very least a drag on progress. Microsoft still has many strengths and I think that a good CEO with a keen understanding of the business, a firm grasp of what needs to change and the charisma to pull it all together could still turn Microsoft around. However, I have my doubts that Ballmer is the best man for that job. I think that he understands the existing businesses very well and he's nothing if not tenacious, but he seems to lack the necessary foresight on what needs to change or perhaps the leadership ability to change it. Microsoft is first and foremost a technology business and it needs a technologist at the helm, or at least making the strategic product decisions, and it needs to be somebody that the technical division heads can both respect and trust. As it stands now, Microsoft doesn't work very well together as a company and there are many separate fiefdoms with high walls and armed guards (figuratively speaking of course) and that doesn't do much to engender trust or cooperation amongst different teams. The reorganization is supposed to address this. I'm hopeful, but we'll see. Disclaimer: I'm the beneficial owner of one thousand shares of Microsoft common stock.
it's been conjectured by cryptographers and analysts--not just Bruce Schneiner, but other academics--that the U.S. government runs a plurality of all Tor nodes.
That sounds about par for the course. I remember hearing that in the later decades of the 20th century the US government, at the behest of the NSA, made sure that it was cheaper to route international phone calls going from Europe to Asia or from South America, Asia and Africa to just about any other destination through the United States by subsidizing the connections so that the fees would be cheapest. This ensured that a majority of the world telecom traffic made it's way through the United States at some point, where the NSA intercepted and analyzed it, before continuing on to it's final destination. I wouldn't be surprised if this practice continues today with undersea fiber cables for carrying backbone Internet traffic.
It is about Microsoft intentionally using a crippled encryption system to encourage a false sense of security
The encryption was not crippled. The problem here is access to keys and it exists with all systems where any intermediary has access to the keys, not just those belonging to Microsoft. I realize that most of us here on Slashdot are technically sophisticated and already know this but it bears repeating for those amongst us who remain unaware. First, no system, no matter what encryption algorithm is used or how strong it is, can prevent somebody with access to the keys from recovering the plaintext. Second, the keys to any cryptography system that's transparent to its users, especially ones running on remote servers "in the cloud", remain in the possession of the entity offering that service, whether Microsoft or any other, and not the users'. Finally, any entity under the direct jurisdiction of the United States, or indeed any other government, can be compelled by force to use those keys to satisfy requests by those governments for information. So it must be understood that if anyone besides you and your intended recipients has access to the keys used to encrypt a message, that communication is not secure against snooping by governments or indeed any other entity that's powerful enough to compel cooperation from those who have those keys.
Who the heck pays for a movie ticket to play angry birds.
Have you seen the sort of crap that Hollywood has been pooping out lately? Who would pay $10+ to see any of it? The kind of people who would play Angry Birds in the theater instead of actually watching it, that's who. And what does that say about the intelligence level of the average American, especially those who buy movie tickets? Nothing complimentary I'm afraid.
So? The people who use are the people who pay and the people who pay the most are the people who most want use the grid at any given time. The same thing happens in toll road pricing. People who want to drive during rush hour pay more to use the bypass lanes. The price of the bypass lanes rises or falls until the point where the number of people demanding their use at any given time roughly approximates their capacity. The bypass lanes might only cost a dollar or two at 2:30pm. However, if you want to drive the bypass lanes at 5:30 pm, during the peak of rush hour, it might cost $10 or more and yet the bypass lanes are still well used during peak traffic by people who feel that saving half an hour in traffic really is worth $10 or even more. To get back to our electric grid example, if everyone switches to demand pricing instead of flat rate I don't see any problem with that. In fact, it would be more economically efficient because it would force those who actually use the power to pay what it costs to deliver it to them at the time that they demand its use.
Libertarians should love solar power, because it would get them away from using the heavily regulated big-government power grid
I cannot speak for anyone but myself, but I'm fine with whatever you want to pay for out of your own pocket to put on your own roof. What I'm not for is subsidizing your solar panel purchase with public money nor am I for any mandatory across the board increase in utility rates to provide more power from wind or solar. Government regulation of rates is required in the case of electric utilities because building, running and maintaining the electric grid is a natural monopoly and natural monopolies by their very nature there cannot form an efficient market due to limitations of physical space and other infrastructure impracticalities. Libertarians favor markets and market based solutions, but we recognize that some government regulation, preferably minimal, is necessary and regulation of natural monopoly utilities is one of those special cases.
Would you support imposing these things upon others, involuntarily if necessary? You see, that's where I draw the line. If you want to voluntarily do these things or take an offer of lower rates in exchange for doing these things or whatever that's fine as long as it's voluntary. If rates need to be higher for people who want power on demand then that's fine too, charge them what it costs to deliver what they demand. If that's hard to do without a smart meter then charge them for the privilege of not using one. Charge what it costs to deliver the good or service in the quantity demanded to those who want it. However, I'm very skeptical of the government forcing people to participate in a conservation or rationing program against their wishes. Choices have prices and that's fine, but we should let those who are willing to a pay a premium to crank their AC whenever they feel like it do that and use the money to improve the grid and build the infrastructure that's necessary to deliver that supply.
It tells me that you're going to get smart meters anyway, but that the power companies will have to get legislation mandating them first.
Here in California, that's far from a sure thing. The power companies here haven't always been on the winning side over the decades when the dust from the ballot initiatives and lawsuits clears. Whether that's a good or bad thing depends upon your point of view, but here in California that's simply the way that the chips fall.
The pursuit of quality is a worthy goal, but it cannot come at the expense of finishing the project on time and on budget. I think that most people I've worked with in the software development business over the years genuinely wanted to do good work, but unreasonable schedules and demanding clients don't always allow for that. We do the best we can with what we've been given and realize that sometimes our priorities as developers are not the same as those of the business. Perhaps there is a first mover advantage to be gained by getting to market first, even if the quality suffers somewhat. That's a business decision and it's the right of those paying the bills to make that call and unlike some of my peers I do understand that the requirements of the business sometimes necessitate compromise on what I might like to build as an engineer were I given more time and budget.
As for training there's only so much that companies can reasonably expect will be done off the clock. If companies want to improve the quality of their workers then they have to invest paid time in training or allow workers time to practice and learn new things. Do you see professional sports teams refusing to pay people except for time spent playing in actual games? Some wiser companies, like Google, do allow for this sort of thing, but unfortunately not every manager understands the value of long term planning and worker self improvement. I generally prefer to read technical books and work on personal projects, where mistakes or trying new things cannot put things behind schedule, rather than going to conferences or attending meetups, but to each his own.
it's about giving back to the community that has given you so much
I do that by mentoring and teaching younger developers some of what I've learned over the years from others. I don't lay claim to any great original work on a well know open source project, but I do have a thing or two to teach from my years of work and experience as a software developer and I'm always willing to help junior developers who ask me with a desire to learn and benefit from that knowledge and experience.
but if you're going to work with me I want to see that you're active and you give a shit.
Maybe I already do :D, but rest assured that I do care about the work, as a professional, and give a shit about getting things done. I wouldn't still be working in this industry after all these years if that wasn't the case.
but I also know that nobody, noboby owes me a free ride
There was never a suggestion of that I think or at least not from me.
Clients almost never pay me to learn on their dime
The only time that I would ask them to is if they insisted upon using a specific and uncommon technology or integration with an obscure piece of software or hardware that I'm never likely to see again. It's all about supply and demand and the price has to reflect that because I'm either going to have to spend extra time learning something completely obscure or find someone to subcontract that part of the job (which is isn't always possible or feasible).
I want to work with developers who are on that wave length and do more than clock in, write their 500 LOC/day, clock out and promptly forget about programming until 9AM the next day.
I think that it's pretty easy to tell after working with them a few months. If you don't like their work then fire them and get somebody else, but even somebody who just works 9 to 5 can still be useful if they can be had at the right price. Not everyone can become a ninja after all.
Why would seniors program their smart meters to turn their air conditioners down so far during a scorcher that it gives them heat stroke?
Indeed, why would anybody do that? Don't you see the point? Almost nobody will voluntarily turn down their AC on a hot day and especially not in states like Arizona, New Mexico and Texas or indeed anywhere in the American Southeast. You're asking people to take one for the team, but I don't think that you'll have too many volunteers. Asking Americans to make do with less just doesn't work, I mean look at at our budget deficits, that alone proves the point.
Yeah, because the utilities haven't thought about *any* of these problems.
If they have they don't seem to care. Consider their initial rollout strategy here in California: move fast and install as many meters as possible before people realize what's going on or have a chance to respond. Naturally, this sort of rough shod approach led to considerable backlash in California where the people have fought numerous political battles with the public utilities over the years. So no, I don't think that they thought about any of those potential problems. I think that they saw an opportunity to cut their costs and increase profits and rushed to get as many smart meters installed as possible, with or without the knowledge of the property owners, before opt-out regulations could be passed by state and local governments.
How about a neighbourhood with AC 'rolling blackouts'?
We tried rolling blackouts here in California during the electricity crisis brought on by ill considered deregulation of the power market. The people of California didn't much care for them, but hey the people in your state might love them, right?
Each house is told to turn off their AC for 15 minutes every 2 hours.
Oh, that's just perfect. The all powerful government, that reads your emails and listens to your phone calls, and in whose wisdom you trust completely asks you to turn of your AC for 15 minutes every 2 hours. So of course you will just do what they ask, I mean who could possibly have a problem with that, right? Please.
nobody actually cares since AC off for 15 minutes is barely noticable.
You've never lived in Arizona have you?
Lather, rinse, repeat for other appliances. Car? Home owner decides how much 'expensive' electricity VS cheap overnight electricy to use, say "charge to 50%, but contimue only if rates fall below X".
Or they could just continue driving their used fossil fuel burning car, you know the one that's fully depreciated and still runs great, and not worry about any of that.
This actually isn't rocket science, and your naysaying is part of the problem.
If you want people to change their ways then you'll have to figure out how to offer them something better than the stick. Asking people to make do with less "for the good of all" and then forcing them to obey with government mandates and decrees is not the way to achieve energy savings or social peace. In fact, it often has the opposite effect, particularly in red states, as people use more energy on purpose to spit in the eye of big government and meddling busybodies who propose such things. You might not like that, but that's reality.
Citation needed.
Oh please, really? Do you honestly believe that environmentalists don't deliberately delay power plant construction (especially nuclear) in the United States? Give me a break. Also, I said that it was a substantial cost, not the only cost. The problem is legal and economic, so it cannot be solved by a new reactor design because it wouldn't matter what design was proposed to the environmentalists, they'd still be against it. The legal problems require political not technical solutions and the economic problems are largely caused by the legal and political problems. Dragging out engineering projects, in the courts and through political maneuvering, is expensive and that's were the delays deal economic damage. The environmentalists wouldn't use those tactics if they weren't effective.
please explain how the failure of WPPSS in the late 70's and early 80's was the result of this versus economic, technical, and competency factors.
Are you going to tell me that there wasn't a single lawsuit filed or political agitation conducted by environmental groups opposed to a new reactor? I don't believe that the problem is entirely caused by technology or lack of engineering competency.
Then please explain how the new designs will escape this fate. After all, since there must be places which don't have this problem, these new designs must be operating successfully in large numbers. Where are these places?
Of course new designs cannot solve what amounts to a problem of politics. As for where nuclear power is widespread, how about France? I think that there are three basic reasons why France was able to build many reactors, using a modified US design (Westinghouse I think) no less, while things have been more problematic here in the US. First, France has almost no natural deposits of either coal, natural gas or petroleum and few rivers to be dammed so for the French it was pretty much nuclear or nothing. Second, the French have a much greater faith in their scientists and engineers than we do here in the United States. The French scientists and engineers in turn work hard to earn and sustain that trust by doing good work. I cannot recall there ever being a serious nuclear accident in France for example. Finally, it seems that the French legal system doesn't allow for NIMBYs to get in the way of projects that are deemed to be in the national interest whereas anyone with money for the filing fees can cause no end of legal trouble here in the United States.
In any case, it will still take decades for them to come on line in significant numbers at BEST (based on production estimates).
Wah, wah, wah it's too hard and it takes to long to get strated so why even try right? There's a productive attitude. You could use that argument against just about anything worth doing. Indeed, just imagine where we might be as a nation today if we allowed that objection to override all good sense. The difficulty of the task should inform our long term planning, but it shouldn't be taken as a reason to do nothing or not to get started. I could trot out that same argument for why we should do nothing about global warming, why bother to do anything now when the benefits won't be seen for decades, but I suspect that you wouldn't like the argument as much in that case.
Sure, it's not base load, but maybe we should be looking at a solution for that?
I don't claim to be omniscient, is there something else that we ought to be looking at? Something perhaps that all of the other scientists and engineers around the world have missed? I doubt it, but I'm willing to be surprised. Please tell us your brilliant plan for replacing all of the world's base load nuclear generation with fairy dust and unicorn farts (this ought to be good).
Smart meters can be programmed so that when supply is reduced, it will turn off your water heater, or turn down the heat or A/C, or stop charging your electric car, or recommend that you dry your laundry on the line instead of using the dryer.
Because people will just love it when their smart meter turns down their AC during a scorcher or stops charging their electric car so they don't have enough juice to get to work the next day or nagging them about how they should be drying their clothes on a laundry line during working hours. The belief that this will actually work in the real world is utterly obtuse. Can you imagine the political fallout from ACs being turned down in the sunbelt by smart meters and seniors being found dead in their homes from heat stroke? Even the liberals out in California want to opt out of smart meters. What does that tell you about the future of smart meters in the United States?
Nuclear reactors require huge capital investment and take a long time to build.
It's true that the capital costs of nuclear power are high, but in all fairness a substantial part of those costs and the time required to build are caused by anti-nuclear pressure groups and other NIMBYs who drag the process out for decades in courts and through environmental review boards as a delaying tactic to discourage development by artificially running up the cost. Meanwhile the world continues to burn ever more and dirtier fossil fuels to make up for lost nuclear generation capacity in national electric grids.
They also take a long time to turn on and off, so make an inflexible source of supply that integrates poorly with more variable sources
Which is why you don't turn them off and why the electric grid should never be entirely nuclear. Nuclear is for the portion of the demand that needs constant and consistent base load supply. Because the national energy grids never have zero energy demand at any time of day there will always be demand for some amount of base load power and nuclear fits that profile perfectly. The variable power sources, like wind and solar, can contribute as they're able with the remainder of variable demand being handled by natural gas turbines that can be turned on when necessary to fill in supply gaps and shutdown quickly and easily when not needed.
Natural gas, on the other hand, has a comparatively much lower capital investment and time to build for the same generation capacity.
Natural gas is also a valuable transportation, heating and cooking fuel. It's not just power plants that demand natural gas, so it would be unwise in the long run to replace base load nuclear with natural gas. We have many centuries of proven nuclear fuel, but natural gas supplies have waxed and waned over the years along with demand, depletion and development of new supplies. The lifespan of a power plant is measured in decades but nobody can tell you what the price will be for natural gas decades in the future.
The low price of natural gas also makes it extremely competitive with other power sources.
For now, but much of the newly drilled glut of natural gas comes from horizontally drilled and fracked wells in tight shale formations where the long term depletion rates are still poorly understood. We might have centuries of gas left in these formations or they might be depleted in a matter of decades; nobody's sure yet because we don't have enough data on depletion rates and demand is also uncertain. For example, increased use of natural gas in commercial transportation may eventually put upward pressure on natural gas prices as an alternative to diesel in those applications.
Natural gas turbines can also come to full power from a dead stop in 20 minutes and partial power sooner than that, allowing it it integrate gracefully in a world with variable power demand and supply.
Which is why there will always be a role for natural gas in electricity generation. My point was that we shouldn't lean too heavily on any one technology, but rather seek to optimize the grid by tapping into the different strengths of different generation technologies. We need nuclear, solar, wind, natural gas and even niche sources, like geothermal or tidal, where available. The best solution utilizes a mix of all of these technologies, but as long as there are ignorant, biased and uneducated people we will continue to "debate" whether eliminating one or more of these technologies from the mix is a "good idea", as in the case of the "no nukes" crowd.
If you're in it purely for the money you're in it for purely the wrong reason.
If I was in it purely for the money, I would have gotten my securities license or gone to law school to become a certified professional asshole instead of a software developer. I do enjoy doing the work but I don't go around gushing emotional about how great my fucking job is. What I cannot stand is all of the patronizing bullshit from management as they try to turn work into a game and offer "non monetary" rewards for overtime spent working on their projects. We aren't children we're adults and it would be better for everyone involved if the relationship was kept businesslike and adult. When I'm working for hire I work hard and put in my best effort, as a point of professional pride, but don't think that I care more about your projects than my family or my personal obligations. And besides that, why should you care how I "feel" about it as long as the work gets done on time, it's up to standard and passes spec? If at any time either one of us isn't satisfied with the arrangement we can part ways and move on, it's not personal it's just business. That to me is the mark of a true professional, not faked passion and bullshit emotional games, so spare me your management theories on why I need to be passionate because the software business, or at least the development side, is not a service business. We aren't being paid for emotional labor but for finished product. If you want "passion" in addition to the finished product, that costs extra, but hey if you've got the money honey I've got the time.
and yet, we'll continue to lie to our kids at school
The American school system, not to mention our media saturated culture, is chock full of lies from day one. That's part of the education, learning to separate the nuggets of truth from the thicket of lies by thinking for oneself.
Passion is for people who are to dumb to realize that they're being duped by the money men so how about this? I have a skill that you want or need to make money and I expect to be paid for using that skill to make you money. Are we doing business or not?
So to change their votes, we need to talk. Isn't that what we are doing?
The people who need to hear it aren't listening. Maybe a few more years of mounting debt and underemployment (or unemployment) will help convince them that the welfare state is not the utopia that they were promised. Maybe then they won't be taken in quite so easily next time by politicians offering them fiscal candy in exchange for their votes. The Millennials like to think of themselves as being smart, but their choice of political leadership thus far has been anything but. At this rate we will inherit the country just in time to spend the rest of our lives paying off the debts rung up by our parents and grandparents and all in exchange a few percentage points less on student loans. Young voters are chumps and they proved it by voting for four more years of Obama. If they have any sense left at all now they will think very carefully about whom they vote for in 2016. They will have already lost nearly a decade to Obama by then and their careers won't be able to wait any longer to get started. Maybe then they'll finally vote with their heads and pocketbooks instead of their hearts. That would be a welcome change, but for now it's just a dim hope.
If people get the government that they deserve in a democracy then I'd say that we've gotten exactly what we deserve in Obama which is to say not much.
to extract as much of money out of their customers^h^h^h^h^h^h suckers as possible.
The people who voted Obama in for a second term were most definitely suckers so it stands to reason that Ceasars would want a cut of their action because the fools and their money are soon parted as the saying goes. Between ObamaCare and Ceasars these people won't have two nickles left to rub together, perhaps then they'll ask themselves what happened to that hope and change./p>
Objectively, based on his record and the contradictions between his promises and policies, he should have been kicked out and lost badly.
What does that say about all of the people who voted for him, especially the young idealists with stars in their eyes and rocks in the heads? They were fooled twice by the same smooth talker and his bag of dirty tricks.
It isn't as if I couldn't be fired on the spot in the first 3 to 6 months at any permanent job
In California, where Google is located, employers can fire employees anytime and for any reason whatsoever without prior notice or warning and employees are likewise free to quit anytime and for any reason without notice or warning. It's theoretically illegal to fire somebody due to their race, religion, sexual orientation and the like, but good luck proving discrimination in a lawsuit, never mind the fact that nobody will ever want to hire you again once they find out that you sued your former employer.