Does it need to? Perhaps part of the danger of being a farmer is that you'll make so little that you'll need to work until you die, increasing your risk of dying young.
Never mind. I reread the summary... it was stolen. Nevertheless I STILL don't think it's worthwhile to spend $1000 to recover a $200 item.
I think it is completely worthwhile if when somebody steals a $200 phone we spend $10k for the police to figure out who did it, $20k on the trial, and $100k jailing the guy for a year, even if in the process the $200 gets dropped and is broken.
Law enforcement isn't about the value of a single crime - it is about the cost of the millions of crimes that would happen if people thought they could get away with them because nobody cared about small crimes.
When I was a kid somebody sprayed graffiti on my school building. The next day it was gone, at a taxpayer-funded cost of $20k from what I heard, and it was made a very big deal of by the authorities. Most considered it money well-spent. If you left it there, the next week there would be more marks, until the whole place was covered in them. I don't follow the local news there anymore, but for quite a few years the event never happened again.
That was basically Guiliani's claim to fame (before 9/11) - whether you're an R or a D most admit he did a decent job cutting crime in NYC, and it was mostly done by cracking down on silly little crimes that don't cost much but generally are the kinds of crimes people start out on before they move on to more serious crimes. By getting rid of the casual attitude towards minor crimes you can have a big impact on the major crimes down the road.
I'm not for living in a police state, and laws against victimless crimes generally need to be eliminated. However, things like vandalism and theft are generally stuff we can all agree is wrong, and we should be getting rid of them.
You talk about their stock price and market cap drops as if they were two separate things.
Market cap in no way reflects a companies profitability or their balance sheet. It merely reflects what people think the company might be worth, and is VERY subject to sentiment/etc.
About the only times it really has direct relevance is if somebody wants to take over the company, or if the company wants to issue a ton of new shares.
There is no decision to make. If you are an insurance company, you must accept all applicants at the standard rates.
It doesn't matter. The standard rates will be 10 million dollars a year, or the company won't offer service to anybody if they can avoid it. If you legislate the rates, then only sick people will sign up, and the company simply goes out of business. Any way you slice it there won't be private insurance.
Remember - the potential customer already knows how long they're going to live (I said that insurance wouldn't work IF you could prick your finger and know your life expectancy). If they know they'll live until 100, then they won't buy a life insurance policy that only pays out if they die before age 65. If they know they'll live until the age of 40, then they'll buy all the insurance they can get and their dependents will live like kings. People who decline life insurance will still buy accidental death insurnace, which will still be cheap.
If you could magically know whether you'll have a fire then fire insurance would go out of business too.
Now, the government could choose to just provide everybody with insurance, or make everybody pay for it if they need it or not. That would be a completely viable system, because it still forces those who don't need the benefits to pay for those who do.
Insurance is just a voluntary form of socialism, and it only works in the absence of information.
Yup, couldn't agree more that fixing the standard makes the most sense. Something similar was done with reflinks in support of btrfs, so you'd think that something like this would be easy to get support for at least by the kernel.
There are also some potential performance/security improvements by closing the write hole. If the filesystem knows that all the space in a stripe is unused, then it can just overwrite part of it blindly without having to read+merge+write. If the filesystem and raid are in separate layers then no layer has visibility into all of that info.
Sure, layering makes sense much of the time, but if there are genuine benefits from breaking layers then I don't see why we can't claim them.
I suspect that some of the features like instant snapshots would also be difficult with layering. In many ways btrfs does for files what git did for scm - it makes more complex manipulations of data very easy.
Ah, the classic must-protect-the-user-from-themselves point of view.
Rarely is one option ALWAYS better than another. Maybe the data on a drive isn't as useful as the battery lifetime of the system? We're talking about a browser here too - potentially the system it is running on contains absolutely no data of any importance at all.
Yup, and just as well because that article is as wrong today as the day it was written.
POSIX might very well be as broken as using fsync, but the solution is to fix POSIX, and not abandon write caching by having every application calling fsync.
If you start with file A, and write some data to the end of it, and power fails in the middle of this operation, then the only acceptable outcomes in my mind are: 1. After cleanup the filesystem contains an unmodified A. 2. After cleanup the filesystem contains the full A+n modified contents. 3. While not ideal, many would accept that the file system might contain A+(n-m) modified contents - that is only some of the additional data was written.
If overwriting just a part of the file then the file should be some combination of the original and some number of modified sections (ideally zero or all of them).
A situation where after cleanup you've lost the original A entirely, or any part of it is completely unacceptable. Some seem to argue otherwise, and fortunately Linus felt otherwise and committed a patch over the objections of the people who originally wrote the code (a rarity in FOSS).
And one of the big reasons I'm looking forward to btrfs is that being COW it should generally end up with either the untouched or final versions of the file.
As far as laptop mode goes - if a user doesn't mind taking on the risk, I see no reason that apps should override that preference, unless the user has explicitly set that preference. I think a big failing in modern security design is failing to distinguish between a user's preferences, and an app running under their credentials. Android is a big example of this where users can't even modify the permissions of an app - they can only accept or reject them.
If your system doesn't have a UPS and a very reliable OS, and you care about data loss more than performance, then it shouldn't be caching data for a long period of time. Complain to whoever configured the OS (whether using defaults or otherwise).
If I tell the OS I don't mind living dangerously, then I don't want some app pretending I don't know what I'm doing.
I just wish linux had the ability to ignore unprivileged fsyncs. It would save me lots of patching. I've actually had such applications CAUSE data-loss (if data is coming in at a particular rate, and you force your disks to write data at a lower rate because you insist they seek for every 10kb of data to be written, then you will have problems).
The problem is with certain broken programs that fsync after every single write.
It doesn't help that some of the ext3/4 folks were claiming that this was the only proper way to write applications, because apparently filesystems are supposed to lose data if you don't do that. I think Linus basically overrode them and committed a patch against the maintainer's wishes since filesystems are apparently not supposed to lose data (go figure).
MythTV does this all the time - in fact it caused me to actually lose video since the drives were perfectly capable of sustaining the write load, except for the fact that all those fsyncs caused them to spend all their time seeking and very little time reading/writing. When you have stuff like striped RAID and plenty of cache it is best to let the OS manage the write order so that the drives can leverage their extremely high bandwidth and minimize the seek penalties. For the 95% of users who don't run databases serving networked clients it probably would be nice to have a kernel option that turns non-root sync calls into a no-op.
95% of the time, whether the data actually makes it to disk or not should be none of the application's business.
If you're trying to write portable code, fsync() is absolutely necessary. If you don't fsync(), there is no way to enforce that the data *ever* gets written to the disk platter--it could be sitting in a cache somewhere.
And why should a typical application care whether the data ever ends up on disk? That is an implementation-level detail. If the underlying OS doesn't ever actually sync the cache to disk then it had better have some strategy for ensuring the cache is never lost, and maybe it actually has such a strategy, and therefore the syncs just ruin performance...
I'm a big believer in letting applications do the application stuff, and letting the OS figure out when it is best to write something to disk. That gives both the best performance, and the best overall data security as well. Maybe while firefox was busying tying up the disk something more important was stuck in the cache when the power failed?
Now if somebody can get that across to the MythTV team maybe I can stop patching it every time I build it... My system is a bit faster now, but for the longest time I'd LOSE video because mythtv insisted on fsyncing it so often that the disk throughput suffered and frames actually got dropped (because all kinds of other stuff just accumulated in the cache while the heads were busying seeking just to write a few hundred kb until the OS just had to flush it all and then the fsyncs blocked). And why even fsync a DVR at all? If the power fails, then while the system reboots (and the cable box I have no control over) I'm going to lose several minutes of recording time, so do I really care about the three seconds of video flushed between each of the 47 bazillion calls to fsync?
Well, if you could convert the mass of all that matter to energy that would probably nuke the sun pretty effectively, but good luck finding some way to do that. The sun already converts hundreds of millions of tons of matter to energy every second, and apparently hasn't blown apart yet.
If you dumped a substantial portion of the sun's mass in iron into the sun that might trigger a supernova relatively soon (I would think the extra mass would increase its gravitational pull, increasing the density of the gas inside, causing it to burn much faster and accelerating the stellar lifecycle, and putting it over the Chandrasekhar limit).
Filing separately does not use the same deductions/exemptions/brackets/etc as filing as single.
I haven't looked at the tables in a few years, but for couples where both make similar incomes marriage tends to result in a tax loss. For couples where incomes are very different marriage can lead to a tax benefit (since the higher income earner can often avoid paying full taxes on more of that income). If one person earns nothing the benefit is modest but substantial - you now have a single income but being taxed in lower brackets (the joint rates), and you can claim more exemptions against that single income, where the person if single wouldn't have any income to claim the exemption against. Then again, if somebody with no income really were single then they'd be able to claim all kinds of benefits like the EIC, but they'd need to be subsidized by somebody else to live that way.
Until 2007 Moodys thought they had data showing that their algorithms were wrong a lot less often than that.
Based on 200 years of data? Somehow I doubt they've been using those algorithms so long. Certainly the financial instruments they're rating have changed in that time. My issue with your comparison is that markets are artificial and rapidly evolving (usually to escape regulation, and it is hard to con somebody with the same routine you were using 15 years ago). Natural systems change much more slowly, assuming that we don't start actively engineering ourselves.
But since you don't seem to be getting it I will try a different tack: a lot of people, likely including yourself, think they are super awesome drivers who would never cause an accident. Do you pay your state's opt-out-of-insurance fee or do you have car insurance anyway just in case of an accident? Health insurance doesnt just cover crap that your body does to you; it also covers crap that other people do to your body. So unless you dont care whether you get fixed up after god drops a sheet of ice off a building on your head an intelligent person will always prefer to be insured.
I specifically said "except for accidental death" in my illustration. I didn't explicitly call that out in the health insurance mention, but I agree that a market for insurance for accidental injuries will probably be viable in the long-term. However, accidental injuries account for a small fraction of the US health care spend. Things that break quickly tend to mend quickly, unless you're talking about brain damage or permanent disability. Even then, it doesn't happen nearly as often as stuff like the slow wasting effects of diabetes and heart disease. I know a few relatively young people with serious health problems, and they probably cost as much as a serious car accident every year.
If the technology existed that could predict whether you'd get type-2 diabetes at an early age, the only way you'd be able to buy insurance covering its effects would be if the government sold it to you. No private company could afford to do so, or would wish to do so. If they knew your status, then they'd refuse to cover you for any price you could afford. If they didn't know your status, they'd figure that you knew your status and were only seeking coverage because you knew you needed it, and thus they'd again not offer any price you could afford. Insurance only works in the absence of information. That's why you can't buy fire insurance the day after you have a fire and file a claim.
Don't get me wrong - I have nothing against insurance. My point was essentially that socialized medicine is almost unavoidable, and so are lots of other things in a world where there is no privacy and where the ability to predict in a general way many aspects of the future of any individual has been greatly refined. I suspect that the society of 100 years from now will look VERY different from the one we're in now, and beyond just technological change. I suspect that things like socialized medicine and basic income will have to be the norm, as so many people would be entirely left out without them that society could not remain stable otherwise.
By what tortured logic do you avoid considering "a bunch of officers" his peers? They are at least as much his peers as 12 random strangers who couldn't get out of jury duty are. Then he got another hearing before the Provincial Congress. Before you make a similarly desperate attempt to torture logic, I'll go ahead and quote a bit that will establish the delegates to the congress to be his peers:
Great, then I suppose you're happy that all those people in Gitmo have had hearings to confirm their status in front of a group of their peers - a bunch of military lawyers I would assume.
In that same section of text you'll see that they are affirmed by SCOTUS to have Constitutional rights.
Not sure where you're getting that. I see where a Washington judge ruled that, not where the SCOTUS ruled that. They did rule that he did not receive a proper tribunal, and was to be afforded rights under the Geneva conventions. They did not rule that they were to be given POW status. In any case, the Constitution certainly does give the SCOTUS jurisdiction over matters in which the US finds itself entangled abroad, and the executive should follow it.
Honestly, I think that granting POW status to non-uniformed combatants is a big mistake. Why would any army wear a uniform under such circumstances? US soldiers would do far better to disguise themselves as natives, using difficult-to-observe IFF devices to coordinate with each other, and then mount guerrilla operations - basically turn "peacekeeping" operations into one big CIA operation. Of course, if the US did that their soldiers would be treated as spies, since nobody else is going to grant POW status to non-uniformed soldiers. In fact, in places like Afghanistan even being a uniformed soldier does not make it likely that you will receive the full protections of the Geneva Convention - you're just as likely to end up being beheaded on TV.
The US shouldn't be wasting its time in places like Afghanistan in the first place, but if you're going to engage in warfare in a place like that, you can't let yourself get dragged into asymmetric warfare, and you certainly can't coddle those who try. The only thing armies are really good at is killing lots of people, so if doing that is the right thing, then do it, and if not, quit mucking around. I think that precision weapons have created some kind of illusion that you can fight a surgical war. A GPS can let a 500lb bomb do the job that it used to take 50x 2000lb bombs to do, but it isn't going to result in fewer people dying on the ground. People fight on until they've had enough relatives die - I've never seen a war end differently. If the cause doesn't seem to justify that, then find a better way to settle things.
Considering the whole metric ton of financial risk involved and taxes are the only financial gain, I think it's a fairly sound argument the GP was making. You could just get married in the eyes of a church and not in the eyes of the STATE, but why isn't that common? Well, that's not all of it because you'd still have to deal with the legal ramifications of common law marriage.
Seems like you're arguing both sides here, but I think the reasons that people don't just get married in church and not before the law are:
1. Most churches wouldn't allow it. In their eyes marriage is a permanent commitment so adding legal force to it is a good thing.
2. Social norms. Could you imagine trying to explain to your family that you were going to get married religiously but not legally? Parents would think you aren't taking it seriously, or that one or the other of you is up to no good.
I really doubt that tax planning really factors into the decision at all. If you charged people an extra $500/yr if they were married they'd still do it.
Whatever the reason people go into it for, I think the government's involvement in it is _crazy_.
I'm the first to agree with you here. Half of the political bickering of the day would go away if you stopped trying to regulate what amounts to tradition and religion. Churches (or whoever) could come out with standard contracts and if people want to bind themselves under one they could do so. Couples could pick whatever agreement they believed in and be governed accordingly. The rights of children are an issue whether we legislate marriage or not, since being married is not a physical pre-requisite for having children.
Under socialism, there are no private health insurance companies, so you don't pay premiums and no one raises your premiums.
Yup, hence the reason I suggested that socialism was inevitable - private insurance simply won't be able to exist. Not because somebody outlawed it, but because it just isn't financially viable - nobody will buy it, because everybody will either not need it or not be able to afford it. As a result we'll either be living in a socialized world, or one where we just let people die on the streets.
When you talk about socialism like that, you send a strong signal that you don't understand the issues.
Like what? You haven't pointed out whatever it was that I said that you're apparently bothered by. It seems to me that we're both describing the same thing.
While i agree with your general point, that's pretty much the same assumption AIG thought was a valid basis for all those CDOs they agreed to reinsure and look how well that turned out for them
I'm not sure this is a great comparison. Suppose I told you that I had a black box that would tell you how old you would be if you died of health-related issues. Then I showed you data showing how for the last 200 years it had never been wrong more than 0.001% of the time. It says that you won't die until 110. Would you spend a lot of money on life insurance, other than an accidental death policy? How about health insurance?
Sure, we won't be at that point for at least 200 years, but I'm talking about the long term. Eventually we'll have this stuff figured out, and many things we take for granted simply won't be able to work the same way. Hopefully by the time we have this kind of technology we can make much of human suffering obsolete as well, but we'll see...
Ok, if the punishments for copyright law are considered sufficient deterrence for things like treason or espionage that they're WAY too strong. Why on Earth would we want a set of laws that puts distributing a copy of a movie on the same level as disseminating nuclear weapon plans?
The first was a court martial. I guess you could consider a bunch of officers his peers, but that really isn't what most people consider a criminal trial.
It also isn't terribly helpful, since my understanding is that those jailed in gitmo have actually had military hearings to determine their status. I'm not sure that I agree with their decisions in most cases, but they've had due process of some sort.
Honestly, I think the whole "due process" thing is pretty weak in general. Suppose I pass a law saying that anybody I decide I don't like should be ground up on a meat grinder, after a trial in which I look at them and confirm that I don't like them. That's process, but hardly justice. We've come up with a system that generally substitutes the former for the latter.
I used "socialism" in the sense that 99% of people reading my post would understand. Feel free to substitute whatever you feel the appropriate term is accordingly when you read it. If you still don't understand my post, then pretend that you didn't read it.:)
Quibbling over definitions is about as productive as debating proper grammar.
Marriage...has only held on as long as it has because of the tax benefits involved. Dump the tax benefits of marriage and watch the marriage rate plummet overnight.
Not sure I can buy into this side of your argument. When you consider everything involved, do you really think that people get married primarily for tax reasons? Half the people who get married spend so much on the event that I find it hard to believe that they ever recoup that in taxes unless they make $200k/yr or something.
Tons of marriages are between people in their mid-20s who barely have jobs let alone a grasp of tax accounting.
I think the main driver for marriage is tradition and pressure by family to conform to social norms. That, and nobody in love really wants to plan for the incredibly unlikely event that something will go wrong.
Then make laws disallowing the use of genetic testing, or any medical testing in general, for setting premium rates.
That is impossible to enforce. Sure, it makes it hard to systematically discriminate, but it is impossible to know what criteria some individual used when making a decision. You need to hire somebody. You have 50 applications, and 10 qualified applicants. You pick 1 and discard 9. You don't tell any of them anything but "you're hired" or "sorry." How do the 9 know whether you used genetic information to discriminate against them?
Insurance companies won't mind.
Uh, insurance companies won't mind not having access to information that affects the actuarial tables, that their customers DO have access to?
However, part of me thinks that privacy is almost entirely a thing of the past. Oh, it will take a while for the transformation to finish, but at some point everybody will know everything about everybody else. Laws will simply have to deal with the consequences and not try to prevent them. The first consequence I can think of? Well, that insurance thing you mentioned will probably go away. Once I can prick your finger and tell you your life expectancy (barring accidents) to within a year, you'll either decide you don't need insurance, or you won't be able to afford insurance.
I think socialism is about the only likely outcome of all of this - or what most of us would consider a very cruel world. People will be essentially written-off at a young age, and their only means of survival will be public assistance. Others will be chosen for greatness, and they'll either watch everybody else suffer around them, or help them out. Some of the criteria used to select people will be genetic, and others will be behavioral, but either way everybody will have you characterized and put in a box, and your worth will be measured accordingly.
I think the point is that things like the biotech have the ability to greatly improve everybody's lives. While it may be true that it isn't so good for making money, shouldn't there be some kind of incentive for investing in things that actually benefits society in the long term? The issue isn't with the investors so much as the current economic system, which rewards putting money into CDS's far more than into things that actually benefit people.
What actually happened is that the writer of that article outed himself as being a prick who'd never do anything, no matter how important, if there's no money in it for him (one also wonders about all those things he'd do for enough money). He's so full of it, he cannot even conceive of other people doing things for other reasons than money exclusively.
The word used was investment. Usually the reason you invest is to make money. If he just wanted to help people out the word would be "donate." This isn't just a 1% thing either - almost everybody I know with a 401k picks the fund with the highest return, and doesn't invest in companies with benefitting the world as their first criterion. Of course, anybody can donate money or time to a worthy cause as well, perhaps in addition to investing to make a return.
While it is noble to donate to a good cause, our economy would be better served if there were more financial incentives to invest in them as well and actually make money.
Of course people will invest in blockbuster cancer drugs (well, we first need a blockbuster cancer drug).
Yeah, you've basically got that backwards. First you invest in the drug, and then you find out if it works or if it is a blockbuster. Sure, you can do some up-front research on the cheap (happens all the time in academia), but even the best candidates licensed out of academic labs usually don't pan out. That's why it is an investment, and not a gravy train...
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Does it need to? Perhaps part of the danger of being a farmer is that you'll make so little that you'll need to work until you die, increasing your risk of dying young.
Never mind. I reread the summary... it was stolen. Nevertheless I STILL don't think it's worthwhile to spend $1000 to recover a $200 item.
I think it is completely worthwhile if when somebody steals a $200 phone we spend $10k for the police to figure out who did it, $20k on the trial, and $100k jailing the guy for a year, even if in the process the $200 gets dropped and is broken.
Law enforcement isn't about the value of a single crime - it is about the cost of the millions of crimes that would happen if people thought they could get away with them because nobody cared about small crimes.
When I was a kid somebody sprayed graffiti on my school building. The next day it was gone, at a taxpayer-funded cost of $20k from what I heard, and it was made a very big deal of by the authorities. Most considered it money well-spent. If you left it there, the next week there would be more marks, until the whole place was covered in them. I don't follow the local news there anymore, but for quite a few years the event never happened again.
That was basically Guiliani's claim to fame (before 9/11) - whether you're an R or a D most admit he did a decent job cutting crime in NYC, and it was mostly done by cracking down on silly little crimes that don't cost much but generally are the kinds of crimes people start out on before they move on to more serious crimes. By getting rid of the casual attitude towards minor crimes you can have a big impact on the major crimes down the road.
I'm not for living in a police state, and laws against victimless crimes generally need to be eliminated. However, things like vandalism and theft are generally stuff we can all agree is wrong, and we should be getting rid of them.
Related to this, there were rumors about a week ago that Apple had decided to place a large order for DRAM with a company other than Samsung. Samsung's market cap took a $10 billion hit that day and went down even further in the days after, while their stock price took its largest single-day plummet in the last four years.
You talk about their stock price and market cap drops as if they were two separate things.
Market cap in no way reflects a companies profitability or their balance sheet. It merely reflects what people think the company might be worth, and is VERY subject to sentiment/etc.
About the only times it really has direct relevance is if somebody wants to take over the company, or if the company wants to issue a ton of new shares.
There is no decision to make. If you are an insurance company, you must accept all applicants at the standard rates.
It doesn't matter. The standard rates will be 10 million dollars a year, or the company won't offer service to anybody if they can avoid it. If you legislate the rates, then only sick people will sign up, and the company simply goes out of business. Any way you slice it there won't be private insurance.
Remember - the potential customer already knows how long they're going to live (I said that insurance wouldn't work IF you could prick your finger and know your life expectancy). If they know they'll live until 100, then they won't buy a life insurance policy that only pays out if they die before age 65. If they know they'll live until the age of 40, then they'll buy all the insurance they can get and their dependents will live like kings. People who decline life insurance will still buy accidental death insurnace, which will still be cheap.
If you could magically know whether you'll have a fire then fire insurance would go out of business too.
Now, the government could choose to just provide everybody with insurance, or make everybody pay for it if they need it or not. That would be a completely viable system, because it still forces those who don't need the benefits to pay for those who do.
Insurance is just a voluntary form of socialism, and it only works in the absence of information.
Yup, couldn't agree more that fixing the standard makes the most sense. Something similar was done with reflinks in support of btrfs, so you'd think that something like this would be easy to get support for at least by the kernel.
There are also some potential performance/security improvements by closing the write hole. If the filesystem knows that all the space in a stripe is unused, then it can just overwrite part of it blindly without having to read+merge+write. If the filesystem and raid are in separate layers then no layer has visibility into all of that info.
Sure, layering makes sense much of the time, but if there are genuine benefits from breaking layers then I don't see why we can't claim them.
I suspect that some of the features like instant snapshots would also be difficult with layering. In many ways btrfs does for files what git did for scm - it makes more complex manipulations of data very easy.
Ah, the classic must-protect-the-user-from-themselves point of view.
Rarely is one option ALWAYS better than another. Maybe the data on a drive isn't as useful as the battery lifetime of the system? We're talking about a browser here too - potentially the system it is running on contains absolutely no data of any importance at all.
Yup, and just as well because that article is as wrong today as the day it was written.
POSIX might very well be as broken as using fsync, but the solution is to fix POSIX, and not abandon write caching by having every application calling fsync.
If you start with file A, and write some data to the end of it, and power fails in the middle of this operation, then the only acceptable outcomes in my mind are:
1. After cleanup the filesystem contains an unmodified A.
2. After cleanup the filesystem contains the full A+n modified contents.
3. While not ideal, many would accept that the file system might contain A+(n-m) modified contents - that is only some of the additional data was written.
If overwriting just a part of the file then the file should be some combination of the original and some number of modified sections (ideally zero or all of them).
A situation where after cleanup you've lost the original A entirely, or any part of it is completely unacceptable. Some seem to argue otherwise, and fortunately Linus felt otherwise and committed a patch over the objections of the people who originally wrote the code (a rarity in FOSS).
And one of the big reasons I'm looking forward to btrfs is that being COW it should generally end up with either the untouched or final versions of the file.
As far as laptop mode goes - if a user doesn't mind taking on the risk, I see no reason that apps should override that preference, unless the user has explicitly set that preference. I think a big failing in modern security design is failing to distinguish between a user's preferences, and an app running under their credentials. Android is a big example of this where users can't even modify the permissions of an app - they can only accept or reject them.
If your system doesn't have a UPS and a very reliable OS, and you care about data loss more than performance, then it shouldn't be caching data for a long period of time. Complain to whoever configured the OS (whether using defaults or otherwise).
If I tell the OS I don't mind living dangerously, then I don't want some app pretending I don't know what I'm doing.
I just wish linux had the ability to ignore unprivileged fsyncs. It would save me lots of patching. I've actually had such applications CAUSE data-loss (if data is coming in at a particular rate, and you force your disks to write data at a lower rate because you insist they seek for every 10kb of data to be written, then you will have problems).
The problem is with certain broken programs that fsync after every single write.
It doesn't help that some of the ext3/4 folks were claiming that this was the only proper way to write applications, because apparently filesystems are supposed to lose data if you don't do that. I think Linus basically overrode them and committed a patch against the maintainer's wishes since filesystems are apparently not supposed to lose data (go figure).
MythTV does this all the time - in fact it caused me to actually lose video since the drives were perfectly capable of sustaining the write load, except for the fact that all those fsyncs caused them to spend all their time seeking and very little time reading/writing. When you have stuff like striped RAID and plenty of cache it is best to let the OS manage the write order so that the drives can leverage their extremely high bandwidth and minimize the seek penalties. For the 95% of users who don't run databases serving networked clients it probably would be nice to have a kernel option that turns non-root sync calls into a no-op.
95% of the time, whether the data actually makes it to disk or not should be none of the application's business.
If you're trying to write portable code, fsync() is absolutely necessary. If you don't fsync(), there is no way to enforce that the data *ever* gets written to the disk platter--it could be sitting in a cache somewhere.
And why should a typical application care whether the data ever ends up on disk? That is an implementation-level detail. If the underlying OS doesn't ever actually sync the cache to disk then it had better have some strategy for ensuring the cache is never lost, and maybe it actually has such a strategy, and therefore the syncs just ruin performance...
I'm a big believer in letting applications do the application stuff, and letting the OS figure out when it is best to write something to disk. That gives both the best performance, and the best overall data security as well. Maybe while firefox was busying tying up the disk something more important was stuck in the cache when the power failed?
Now if somebody can get that across to the MythTV team maybe I can stop patching it every time I build it... My system is a bit faster now, but for the longest time I'd LOSE video because mythtv insisted on fsyncing it so often that the disk throughput suffered and frames actually got dropped (because all kinds of other stuff just accumulated in the cache while the heads were busying seeking just to write a few hundred kb until the OS just had to flush it all and then the fsyncs blocked). And why even fsync a DVR at all? If the power fails, then while the system reboots (and the cable box I have no control over) I'm going to lose several minutes of recording time, so do I really care about the three seconds of video flushed between each of the 47 bazillion calls to fsync?
Well, if you could convert the mass of all that matter to energy that would probably nuke the sun pretty effectively, but good luck finding some way to do that. The sun already converts hundreds of millions of tons of matter to energy every second, and apparently hasn't blown apart yet.
If you dumped a substantial portion of the sun's mass in iron into the sun that might trigger a supernova relatively soon (I would think the extra mass would increase its gravitational pull, increasing the density of the gas inside, causing it to burn much faster and accelerating the stellar lifecycle, and putting it over the Chandrasekhar limit).
Filing separately does not use the same deductions/exemptions/brackets/etc as filing as single.
I haven't looked at the tables in a few years, but for couples where both make similar incomes marriage tends to result in a tax loss. For couples where incomes are very different marriage can lead to a tax benefit (since the higher income earner can often avoid paying full taxes on more of that income). If one person earns nothing the benefit is modest but substantial - you now have a single income but being taxed in lower brackets (the joint rates), and you can claim more exemptions against that single income, where the person if single wouldn't have any income to claim the exemption against. Then again, if somebody with no income really were single then they'd be able to claim all kinds of benefits like the EIC, but they'd need to be subsidized by somebody else to live that way.
What's your point you ask. I have no point...
Until 2007 Moodys thought they had data showing that their algorithms were wrong a lot less often than that.
Based on 200 years of data? Somehow I doubt they've been using those algorithms so long. Certainly the financial instruments they're rating have changed in that time. My issue with your comparison is that markets are artificial and rapidly evolving (usually to escape regulation, and it is hard to con somebody with the same routine you were using 15 years ago). Natural systems change much more slowly, assuming that we don't start actively engineering ourselves.
But since you don't seem to be getting it I will try a different tack: a lot of people, likely including yourself, think they are super awesome drivers who would never cause an accident. Do you pay your state's opt-out-of-insurance fee or do you have car insurance anyway just in case of an accident? Health insurance doesnt just cover crap that your body does to you; it also covers crap that other people do to your body. So unless you dont care whether you get fixed up after god drops a sheet of ice off a building on your head an intelligent person will always prefer to be insured.
I specifically said "except for accidental death" in my illustration. I didn't explicitly call that out in the health insurance mention, but I agree that a market for insurance for accidental injuries will probably be viable in the long-term. However, accidental injuries account for a small fraction of the US health care spend. Things that break quickly tend to mend quickly, unless you're talking about brain damage or permanent disability. Even then, it doesn't happen nearly as often as stuff like the slow wasting effects of diabetes and heart disease. I know a few relatively young people with serious health problems, and they probably cost as much as a serious car accident every year.
If the technology existed that could predict whether you'd get type-2 diabetes at an early age, the only way you'd be able to buy insurance covering its effects would be if the government sold it to you. No private company could afford to do so, or would wish to do so. If they knew your status, then they'd refuse to cover you for any price you could afford. If they didn't know your status, they'd figure that you knew your status and were only seeking coverage because you knew you needed it, and thus they'd again not offer any price you could afford. Insurance only works in the absence of information. That's why you can't buy fire insurance the day after you have a fire and file a claim.
Don't get me wrong - I have nothing against insurance. My point was essentially that socialized medicine is almost unavoidable, and so are lots of other things in a world where there is no privacy and where the ability to predict in a general way many aspects of the future of any individual has been greatly refined. I suspect that the society of 100 years from now will look VERY different from the one we're in now, and beyond just technological change. I suspect that things like socialized medicine and basic income will have to be the norm, as so many people would be entirely left out without them that society could not remain stable otherwise.
By what tortured logic do you avoid considering "a bunch of officers" his peers? They are at least as much his peers as 12 random strangers who couldn't get out of jury duty are. Then he got another hearing before the Provincial Congress. Before you make a similarly desperate attempt to torture logic, I'll go ahead and quote a bit that will establish the delegates to the congress to be his peers:
Great, then I suppose you're happy that all those people in Gitmo have had hearings to confirm their status in front of a group of their peers - a bunch of military lawyers I would assume.
In that same section of text you'll see that they are affirmed by SCOTUS to have Constitutional rights.
Not sure where you're getting that. I see where a Washington judge ruled that, not where the SCOTUS ruled that. They did rule that he did not receive a proper tribunal, and was to be afforded rights under the Geneva conventions. They did not rule that they were to be given POW status. In any case, the Constitution certainly does give the SCOTUS jurisdiction over matters in which the US finds itself entangled abroad, and the executive should follow it.
Honestly, I think that granting POW status to non-uniformed combatants is a big mistake. Why would any army wear a uniform under such circumstances? US soldiers would do far better to disguise themselves as natives, using difficult-to-observe IFF devices to coordinate with each other, and then mount guerrilla operations - basically turn "peacekeeping" operations into one big CIA operation. Of course, if the US did that their soldiers would be treated as spies, since nobody else is going to grant POW status to non-uniformed soldiers. In fact, in places like Afghanistan even being a uniformed soldier does not make it likely that you will receive the full protections of the Geneva Convention - you're just as likely to end up being beheaded on TV.
The US shouldn't be wasting its time in places like Afghanistan in the first place, but if you're going to engage in warfare in a place like that, you can't let yourself get dragged into asymmetric warfare, and you certainly can't coddle those who try. The only thing armies are really good at is killing lots of people, so if doing that is the right thing, then do it, and if not, quit mucking around. I think that precision weapons have created some kind of illusion that you can fight a surgical war. A GPS can let a 500lb bomb do the job that it used to take 50x 2000lb bombs to do, but it isn't going to result in fewer people dying on the ground. People fight on until they've had enough relatives die - I've never seen a war end differently. If the cause doesn't seem to justify that, then find a better way to settle things.
Considering the whole metric ton of financial risk involved and taxes are the only financial gain, I think it's a fairly sound argument the GP was making. You could just get married in the eyes of a church and not in the eyes of the STATE, but why isn't that common? Well, that's not all of it because you'd still have to deal with the legal ramifications of common law marriage.
Seems like you're arguing both sides here, but I think the reasons that people don't just get married in church and not before the law are:
1. Most churches wouldn't allow it. In their eyes marriage is a permanent commitment so adding legal force to it is a good thing.
2. Social norms. Could you imagine trying to explain to your family that you were going to get married religiously but not legally? Parents would think you aren't taking it seriously, or that one or the other of you is up to no good.
I really doubt that tax planning really factors into the decision at all. If you charged people an extra $500/yr if they were married they'd still do it.
Whatever the reason people go into it for, I think the government's involvement in it is _crazy_.
I'm the first to agree with you here. Half of the political bickering of the day would go away if you stopped trying to regulate what amounts to tradition and religion. Churches (or whoever) could come out with standard contracts and if people want to bind themselves under one they could do so. Couples could pick whatever agreement they believed in and be governed accordingly. The rights of children are an issue whether we legislate marriage or not, since being married is not a physical pre-requisite for having children.
Under socialism, there are no private health insurance companies, so you don't pay premiums and no one raises your premiums.
Yup, hence the reason I suggested that socialism was inevitable - private insurance simply won't be able to exist. Not because somebody outlawed it, but because it just isn't financially viable - nobody will buy it, because everybody will either not need it or not be able to afford it. As a result we'll either be living in a socialized world, or one where we just let people die on the streets.
When you talk about socialism like that, you send a strong signal that you don't understand the issues.
Like what? You haven't pointed out whatever it was that I said that you're apparently bothered by. It seems to me that we're both describing the same thing.
While i agree with your general point, that's pretty much the same assumption AIG thought was a valid basis for all those CDOs they agreed to reinsure and look how well that turned out for them
I'm not sure this is a great comparison. Suppose I told you that I had a black box that would tell you how old you would be if you died of health-related issues. Then I showed you data showing how for the last 200 years it had never been wrong more than 0.001% of the time. It says that you won't die until 110. Would you spend a lot of money on life insurance, other than an accidental death policy? How about health insurance?
Sure, we won't be at that point for at least 200 years, but I'm talking about the long term. Eventually we'll have this stuff figured out, and many things we take for granted simply won't be able to work the same way. Hopefully by the time we have this kind of technology we can make much of human suffering obsolete as well, but we'll see...
Ok, if the punishments for copyright law are considered sufficient deterrence for things like treason or espionage that they're WAY too strong. Why on Earth would we want a set of laws that puts distributing a copy of a movie on the same level as disseminating nuclear weapon plans?
The first was a court martial. I guess you could consider a bunch of officers his peers, but that really isn't what most people consider a criminal trial.
It also isn't terribly helpful, since my understanding is that those jailed in gitmo have actually had military hearings to determine their status. I'm not sure that I agree with their decisions in most cases, but they've had due process of some sort.
Honestly, I think the whole "due process" thing is pretty weak in general. Suppose I pass a law saying that anybody I decide I don't like should be ground up on a meat grinder, after a trial in which I look at them and confirm that I don't like them. That's process, but hardly justice. We've come up with a system that generally substitutes the former for the latter.
I used "socialism" in the sense that 99% of people reading my post would understand. Feel free to substitute whatever you feel the appropriate term is accordingly when you read it. If you still don't understand my post, then pretend that you didn't read it. :)
Quibbling over definitions is about as productive as debating proper grammar.
Marriage...has only held on as long as it has because of the tax benefits involved. Dump the tax benefits of marriage and watch the marriage rate plummet overnight.
Not sure I can buy into this side of your argument. When you consider everything involved, do you really think that people get married primarily for tax reasons? Half the people who get married spend so much on the event that I find it hard to believe that they ever recoup that in taxes unless they make $200k/yr or something.
Tons of marriages are between people in their mid-20s who barely have jobs let alone a grasp of tax accounting.
I think the main driver for marriage is tradition and pressure by family to conform to social norms. That, and nobody in love really wants to plan for the incredibly unlikely event that something will go wrong.
Then make laws disallowing the use of genetic testing, or any medical testing in general, for setting premium rates.
That is impossible to enforce. Sure, it makes it hard to systematically discriminate, but it is impossible to know what criteria some individual used when making a decision. You need to hire somebody. You have 50 applications, and 10 qualified applicants. You pick 1 and discard 9. You don't tell any of them anything but "you're hired" or "sorry." How do the 9 know whether you used genetic information to discriminate against them?
Insurance companies won't mind.
Uh, insurance companies won't mind not having access to information that affects the actuarial tables, that their customers DO have access to?
However, part of me thinks that privacy is almost entirely a thing of the past. Oh, it will take a while for the transformation to finish, but at some point everybody will know everything about everybody else. Laws will simply have to deal with the consequences and not try to prevent them. The first consequence I can think of? Well, that insurance thing you mentioned will probably go away. Once I can prick your finger and tell you your life expectancy (barring accidents) to within a year, you'll either decide you don't need insurance, or you won't be able to afford insurance.
I think socialism is about the only likely outcome of all of this - or what most of us would consider a very cruel world. People will be essentially written-off at a young age, and their only means of survival will be public assistance. Others will be chosen for greatness, and they'll either watch everybody else suffer around them, or help them out. Some of the criteria used to select people will be genetic, and others will be behavioral, but either way everybody will have you characterized and put in a box, and your worth will be measured accordingly.
I think the point is that things like the biotech have the ability to greatly improve everybody's lives. While it may be true that it isn't so good for making money, shouldn't there be some kind of incentive for investing in things that actually benefits society in the long term? The issue isn't with the investors so much as the current economic system, which rewards putting money into CDS's far more than into things that actually benefit people.
What actually happened is that the writer of that article outed himself as being a prick who'd never do anything, no matter how important, if there's no money in it for him (one also wonders about all those things he'd do for enough money). He's so full of it, he cannot even conceive of other people doing things for other reasons than money exclusively.
The word used was investment. Usually the reason you invest is to make money. If he just wanted to help people out the word would be "donate." This isn't just a 1% thing either - almost everybody I know with a 401k picks the fund with the highest return, and doesn't invest in companies with benefitting the world as their first criterion. Of course, anybody can donate money or time to a worthy cause as well, perhaps in addition to investing to make a return.
While it is noble to donate to a good cause, our economy would be better served if there were more financial incentives to invest in them as well and actually make money.
Of course people will invest in blockbuster cancer drugs (well, we first need a blockbuster cancer drug).
Yeah, you've basically got that backwards. First you invest in the drug, and then you find out if it works or if it is a blockbuster. Sure, you can do some up-front research on the cheap (happens all the time in academia), but even the best candidates licensed out of academic labs usually don't pan out. That's why it is an investment, and not a gravy train...