It's not pretty, but this is what globalization and capitalism is all about. As people get more prosperous and affluent, they're less willing to work for rock bottom prices any more. Others undercut them and take their place in the food chain.
Sometimes this is a good thing, sometimes a bad thing. It brings economic development to poor parts of the world that can do things better and cheaper. It allocates resources very efficiently. But it also creates a lot of instability and waste of resources at the same time. Look how fast the jobs can be created -- and eliminated. And what happens to the people who used to have those jobs. And do you notice how the countries that take the shittiest jobs often end up with polluted environments as a result?
Someday, I hope we will come up with an understanding of how we can balance efficient economics and social good.
I wouldn't be surprised if they spammed us by email to announce that the no-call list had been set up!
Or maybe they'll turn over the day to day operations of the list to AOL or CBS or someone just to make things complete...
damn it, I thought I was going to be able to make a witty reply. But after 10 minutes of searching how to make that stupid Euro symbol, I'm giving up.:)
I still don't get it
on
IT at the CIA
·
· Score: 4, Funny
who needs Information Technology at the Culinary Institute of America?
Maybe I'm a little unfamiliar with voting machines, so forgive me... What in the world are 200,000 lines needed for?
Are we talking about the interface software included in this count? Because last time I thought about it, it doesn't take 200,000 lines of code to place a ticket in one of several bins...
So, you're saying that whenever a piece of information can be used against you, it must have violated the protections of the 4th and 5th amendments? Yours is a severely misguided and ignorant view of the constitutional protections that we benefit from.
Here's some news for you. The amendments to the constitution don't exist to protect you from evidence that could incriminate you in court. That, my friend, is called the truth.
The amendments to the constitution were put in place so that innocent people would not be forced/tortured/coerced into giving false confessions against themselves. We and our lawyers today have perverted this to mean that anything we freely do or say, even if (or especially if) it points to our guilt, should be prevented from being presented in a court. This use of the amendments is a far cry from protecting people from unjust action by government or others. Since when did your physical property become equal to a person, benefiting from protection against "self-incrimination"?
Privacy is about being let alone in your daily affairs and being free from unreasonable government or other intrusion on your person or property. Privacy is not about being able to censor information that you don't happen to like. I thought a privacy nut would already understand that? Or does your definition of privacy only apply when it's good for you?
Time to read that constitution a little closer, my friend.
''It's only partly about privacy. It's mostly about fairness,'' says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C. ''Invariably, the information is used against the driver.''
well duh. That's because most of the time, the black box is showing that the driver just lied about the accident...
People living in the United States seem to have come to a very wrong belief about the concepts of "self-incrimination" and privacy -- to the extent that I think many of us do not really understand what these concepts mean anymore.
Take the constitutional amendment against self-incrimination. Do you really think that this protection was put into place to prevent evidence from your car being used "against you"? For godsake, this amendment was created to prevent people from being tortured or coerced into false confessions by the government, a basic human right. It's kind of embarassing to have this human right turned into "my car's data recorder cannot be used to incriminate me", don't you think? Since when did your car become an extension of your body, subject to the protections of the constitutional restriction on self-incrimination??
And then, the issue of privacy. People here have come to the belief that "privacy" means that nothing you do should ever be aired for anyone else to see. Again, a perversion of what was fought long and hard for. Privacy is the right of common citizens to be let alone in their daily affairs, to be secure in their peoples and posessions from unwarranted intrusion by others. It is *not* the right to conceal information in a car crash. Sorry.
This is a problem in a prosperous society, where many people have forgotten the reasons why urgent protections were needed from different kinds of intrusions by government or others. Basic rights have been manipulated to become more and more, rights of luxury and desire -- so that we claim violation of basic rights for the most trivial (or undeserving) things. The "right" to smoke in bars? The "right" to have an unobstructed view of the beach? etc etc. We need to get a grip and not squander the real rights that were wisely given to us.
come on, what do you expect?
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 1
this is a frickin computer scientist telling people what they should do. Should you have expected something sane and easy for the masses?
Next they'll ask a particle theorist, who'll tell us that the coins should be non-integer multiples of pi, and that the general public should be able to normalize those to 1 since it's an arbitrary unit system anyway.:)
take for example the post office -- you'd think that one of their aims would be to promote less junk mail for all of us. But that's not how it works in a society where the bottom line is how much money you can rake in. And god forbid the government take an "anti-business" stance.
So what is their pricing scheme? It costs 37c to mail a single letter, but if you're a physical spammer, you can get huge bulk discounts, effectively making it more attractive to spam. I say, why not make junk mail *more* expensive?
Will email, if charged per-piece, be any different?
this is not for dissemination to the general public -- according to the scientist who designed the camera that took this picture, if you had sent to the Hubble a solid piece of gold that weighed the same amount as the instrument (which was about as large as a telephone booth), you would have saved approximately 30x the money...
The Hubble has an instrument called the Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS) package. Given two stars that are bright enough near the sky location of your desired target, Hubble will be able to guide to within sub-pixel accuracy for as long as you like.
If only one star is available, guiding is still possible, but the field may slowly rotate, since one star only provides one of the two needed pointing constraints (of position and orientation).
A big project in preparation for Hubble was the creation of the Hubble Guide Star catalog, exactly for this purpose -- to make sure that given what people would want to observe, there would always be enough guide stars within an acceptable distance!
for more information, see here if you're interested! If you're ambitious, you can even read the instrument handbooks for yourself: here
Ok, here's the calculation for you curious types, regarding how many photons arrived from the faintest star in the picture:
Let's suppose that the picture was taken in the "V" filter. I just happen to have the number of photons per second per meter squared that arrive from a star of 20th magnitude: 86.157. (taken from here ).
So the faintest stars in this picture are 31st magnitude? That's 11 mags fainter than 20, which by the handy old formula
mag1-mag2 = -2.5 * log(flux1/flux2)
which means that the 30th magnitude star puts out about 4x10^(-5) times as much flux.
Using the reference star's flux from above, this means that 0.0034299 photons per second per meter squared arrived at Hubble. The exposure was 84 hours, and the area of Hubble is (2.5m)^2*pi, so tada:
The total number of photons in the picture from the faintest star is: 20365.83
Still not too shabby. They probably could have found even fainter stuff.
first of all, here is where you can get a free credit report (by law). You don't have to pay someone to give it to you online:
Experian
Call Experian at 888 397 3742 to order your free credit report
Equifax
Call Equifax at 800 997 2493 to order your free credit report
TransUnion
Call TransUnion at 800 888 4213 to order your free credit report
Second point, I recently received my reports from them, and interestingly found one institution that had checked my credit: the US dept. of State (from when I had applied for a job there).
Is this a reasonable use of credit checking? For a national security position? What does your credit report have to do with that?:) And if you don't want to give your credit report out, would you have the guts to take on the federal government? If the federal govt. starts doing this regularly, you'd better take a second look...
and stop whining about "losing freedoms" or "privacy". Sure it can be abused. But we need a way to identify people, and if you think that driver's licenses and social security numbers aren't already doing this, you're just closing your eyes to it.
If anything, requiring fingerprints or retinal scans will make these ids more secure and trustworthy.
or do you like the way id theft is so common in the US that there's a form you can fill out when yours has been stolen? look here
Let him keep his stubborn, pig-headed attitude... and let him fail with it.
Who ever said that in business, you are guaranteed to make money forever doing the same old shit? It takes innovation to keep alive, and those people who give the customer new, interesting things, without trying to extort them for every last cent, will be the ones to succeed.
So I say let him go on despising Tivo and all these technologies we like. It will only make better companies stand out more.
A related question to spam: How is it that after I create a hotmail account, within one day, I can be getting spam? Does hotmail sell lists? Or are there people and bots that just put together random strings of possible user names? Does hotmail try to filter these out?
Didn't the Alabama department of education already calculate the value of pi out to a trillion places? 3.000000... and I think their trillionth digit is zero too...
I suppose that traces of radiation is all they can look for, but do we really think that terrorists will not have wiped themselves clean and measured using counters already?
I mean, it's like people think in their minds that terrorists are mixing this stuff up in their kitchens, slopping it around, and then tossing the ziplock back in the trunk, and we'll be able to detect it.
Well suprise: they are probably well-equipped and the people doing the work almost certainly have access to the same instruments, supplies that can be bought here. Don't count on being smarter than them, or being able to find them with common sense.
Slashdot Mirror
you call that challenging? Wait until the command-line version of the game comes out! :)
It's not pretty, but this is what globalization and capitalism is all about. As people get more prosperous and affluent, they're less willing to work for rock bottom prices any more. Others undercut them and take their place in the food chain.
Sometimes this is a good thing, sometimes a bad thing. It brings economic development to poor parts of the world that can do things better and cheaper. It allocates resources very efficiently. But it also creates a lot of instability and waste of resources at the same time. Look how fast the jobs can be created -- and eliminated. And what happens to the people who used to have those jobs. And do you notice how the countries that take the shittiest jobs often end up with polluted environments as a result?
Someday, I hope we will come up with an understanding of how we can balance efficient economics and social good.
I wouldn't be surprised if they spammed us by email to announce that the no-call list had been set up! Or maybe they'll turn over the day to day operations of the list to AOL or CBS or someone just to make things complete...
damn it, I thought I was going to be able to make a witty reply. But after 10 minutes of searching how to make that stupid Euro symbol, I'm giving up. :)
who needs Information Technology at the Culinary Institute of America?
Maybe I'm a little unfamiliar with voting machines, so forgive me... What in the world are 200,000 lines needed for?
Are we talking about the interface software included in this count? Because last time I thought about it, it doesn't take 200,000 lines of code to place a ticket in one of several bins...
let me get this straight. They're going to follow the model of the airlines. Does that mean they'll charge less for movies that suck ass?
Just stick them in the microwave for a couple of seconds... zap! No more tracking.
So, you're saying that whenever a piece of information can be used against you, it must have violated the protections of the 4th and 5th amendments? Yours is a severely misguided and ignorant view of the constitutional protections that we benefit from.
Here's some news for you. The amendments to the constitution don't exist to protect you from evidence that could incriminate you in court. That, my friend, is called the truth.
The amendments to the constitution were put in place so that innocent people would not be forced/tortured/coerced into giving false confessions against themselves. We and our lawyers today have perverted this to mean that anything we freely do or say, even if (or especially if) it points to our guilt, should be prevented from being presented in a court. This use of the amendments is a far cry from protecting people from unjust action by government or others. Since when did your physical property become equal to a person, benefiting from protection against "self-incrimination"?
Privacy is about being let alone in your daily affairs and being free from unreasonable government or other intrusion on your person or property. Privacy is not about being able to censor information that you don't happen to like. I thought a privacy nut would already understand that? Or does your definition of privacy only apply when it's good for you?
Time to read that constitution a little closer, my friend.
People living in the United States seem to have come to a very wrong belief about the concepts of "self-incrimination" and privacy -- to the extent that I think many of us do not really understand what these concepts mean anymore.
Take the constitutional amendment against self-incrimination. Do you really think that this protection was put into place to prevent evidence from your car being used "against you"? For godsake, this amendment was created to prevent people from being tortured or coerced into false confessions by the government, a basic human right. It's kind of embarassing to have this human right turned into "my car's data recorder cannot be used to incriminate me", don't you think? Since when did your car become an extension of your body, subject to the protections of the constitutional restriction on self-incrimination??
And then, the issue of privacy. People here have come to the belief that "privacy" means that nothing you do should ever be aired for anyone else to see. Again, a perversion of what was fought long and hard for. Privacy is the right of common citizens to be let alone in their daily affairs, to be secure in their peoples and posessions from unwarranted intrusion by others. It is *not* the right to conceal information in a car crash. Sorry.
This is a problem in a prosperous society, where many people have forgotten the reasons why urgent protections were needed from different kinds of intrusions by government or others. Basic rights have been manipulated to become more and more, rights of luxury and desire -- so that we claim violation of basic rights for the most trivial (or undeserving) things. The "right" to smoke in bars? The "right" to have an unobstructed view of the beach? etc etc. We need to get a grip and not squander the real rights that were wisely given to us.
this is a frickin computer scientist telling people what they should do. Should you have expected something sane and easy for the masses?
:)
Next they'll ask a particle theorist, who'll tell us that the coins should be non-integer multiples of pi, and that the general public should be able to normalize those to 1 since it's an arbitrary unit system anyway.
they still shouldn't go fishing for research topics at the movie theater!! :)
take for example the post office -- you'd think that one of their aims would be to promote less junk mail for all of us. But that's not how it works in a society where the bottom line is how much money you can rake in. And god forbid the government take an "anti-business" stance.
So what is their pricing scheme? It costs 37c to mail a single letter, but if you're a physical spammer, you can get huge bulk discounts, effectively making it more attractive to spam. I say, why not make junk mail *more* expensive?
Will email, if charged per-piece, be any different?
point taken. Divide the final number by 4!
this is not for dissemination to the general public -- according to the scientist who designed the camera that took this picture, if you had sent to the Hubble a solid piece of gold that weighed the same amount as the instrument (which was about as large as a telephone booth), you would have saved approximately 30x the money...
but you're right, it *was* worth it!!!
The Hubble has an instrument called the Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS) package. Given two stars that are bright enough near the sky location of your desired target, Hubble will be able to guide to within sub-pixel accuracy for as long as you like.
If only one star is available, guiding is still possible, but the field may slowly rotate, since one star only provides one of the two needed pointing constraints (of position and orientation).
A big project in preparation for Hubble was the creation of the Hubble Guide Star catalog, exactly for this purpose -- to make sure that given what people would want to observe, there would always be enough guide stars within an acceptable distance!
for more information, see here if you're interested! If you're ambitious, you can even read the instrument handbooks for yourself: here
Ok, here's the calculation for you curious types, regarding how many photons arrived from the faintest star in the picture:
Let's suppose that the picture was taken in the "V" filter. I just happen to have the number of photons per second per meter squared that arrive from a star of 20th magnitude: 86.157. (taken from here ).
So the faintest stars in this picture are 31st magnitude? That's 11 mags fainter than 20, which by the handy old formula
mag1-mag2 = -2.5 * log(flux1/flux2)
which means that the 30th magnitude star puts out about 4x10^(-5) times as much flux.
Using the reference star's flux from above, this means that 0.0034299 photons per second per meter squared arrived at Hubble. The exposure was 84 hours, and the area of Hubble is (2.5m)^2*pi, so tada:
The total number of photons in the picture from the faintest star is: 20365.83
Still not too shabby. They probably could have found even fainter stuff.
I can't believe how much those questions and answers sucked. Amazingly unfunny.
first of all, here is where you can get a free credit report (by law). You don't have to pay someone to give it to you online:
:) And if you don't want to give your credit report out, would you have the guts to take on the federal government? If the federal govt. starts doing this regularly, you'd better take a second look...
Experian
Call Experian at 888 397 3742 to order your free credit report
Equifax
Call Equifax at 800 997 2493 to order your free credit report
TransUnion
Call TransUnion at 800 888 4213 to order your free credit report
Second point, I recently received my reports from them, and interestingly found one institution that had checked my credit: the US dept. of State (from when I had applied for a job there).
Is this a reasonable use of credit checking? For a national security position? What does your credit report have to do with that?
and stop whining about "losing freedoms" or "privacy". Sure it can be abused. But we need a way to identify people, and if you think that driver's licenses and social security numbers aren't already doing this, you're just closing your eyes to it.
If anything, requiring fingerprints or retinal scans will make these ids more secure and trustworthy.
or do you like the way id theft is so common in the US that there's a form you can fill out when yours has been stolen? look here
Let him keep his stubborn, pig-headed attitude... and let him fail with it.
Who ever said that in business, you are guaranteed to make money forever doing the same old shit? It takes innovation to keep alive, and those people who give the customer new, interesting things, without trying to extort them for every last cent, will be the ones to succeed.
So I say let him go on despising Tivo and all these technologies we like. It will only make better companies stand out more.
A related question to spam: How is it that after I create a hotmail account, within one day, I can be getting spam? Does hotmail sell lists? Or are there people and bots that just put together random strings of possible user names? Does hotmail try to filter these out?
Didn't the Alabama department of education already calculate the value of pi out to a trillion places? 3.000000... and I think their trillionth digit is zero too...
What a timesaver for the kids!
I suppose that traces of radiation is all they can look for, but do we really think that terrorists will not have wiped themselves clean and measured using counters already?
I mean, it's like people think in their minds that terrorists are mixing this stuff up in their kitchens, slopping it around, and then tossing the ziplock back in the trunk, and we'll be able to detect it.
Well suprise: they are probably well-equipped and the people doing the work almost certainly have access to the same instruments, supplies that can be bought here. Don't count on being smarter than them, or being able to find them with common sense.