Interesting - I would wonder if fundamentally you'd expect a person's ability in a particular subject to be influenced by the method in which it is taught, if some areas of the brain truly are better at some things than others.
Perhaps the nature of the auditory areas of the brain is more or less suited to processing math (or more likely some kinds of math) than other regions, and you handicap yourself if you learn in one way vs another.
Plus, people have different learning styles, but could that be because when they started learning one method or another was chosen and so trying to learn in a new way wastes effort trying to build up capability in an area of a brain that doesn't have much, vs building on top of an established foundation. The RPG concept of min-maxing comes to mind - where being REALLY good at one thing and horrible at others is fundamentally different from being well-rounded. Or, perhaps some people start out with more innate ability in various regions of the brain, and so teaching those regions gets you more bang for the time invested.
To be honest, I have all the 4G network I need right now, so I'd be happy to just pay T-mobile their nice lower rates until the towers rust out, in which case I can argue failure to perform and get out of any contract I might still have.
I don't see ATT/etc adding any value for me. They charge more and let you do less with their network, and have lousier customer service. Their phones historically have also been far more locked down. If anything I'd switch to Sprint or Verizon, but I really prefer using GSM (you know, the standard that actually works worldwide and allows you to easily switch carriers on the fly with prepaid SIM cards/etc).
I think that Deutsche Telekom is just blustering to get the sale to go through. In the end if they have spectrum and money, and spending that money will generate profits, then they will do it. They will never overtake ATT/Verizon, but I'm sure they're making money just the same. As Apple has proved you don't have to have majority marketshare to make money, and as Walmart has proved you don't need to have the fanciest stores to get people to buy your product.
I can speak a little from practical experience, even if I'm not an authority. My wife has aphasia as a result of a stroke in her left temporal lobe. Immediately after her stroke she struggled to remember her own name and language-based communication of virtually any kind was almost impossible (written, verbal). However, she had no trouble understanding pictures or drawing them, and heavy use of a smartphone with google image search was able to get us through the early problems.
Since then she has recovered quite a bit, though she struggles especially with proper names, and her vocabulary is nowhere near what it used to be.
She never had any problems with movement (but some with vision - the stroke carried over into the occipital lobe). She could go through the operational aspects of maintaining her checkbook though she often got the math wrong (I suspect largely because she couldn't recognize the numbers - not because she didn't know how to add). From the moment she was home to this day if there were any question about where she needed to be I'd just get in the car and have her give me turn-by-turn navigation instructions and we'd end up exactly where she wanted to be.
Before this whole episode I would have assumed that the brain just worked like some like of abstract neural network where data goes in and comes out and how it gets from one to the other is just the result of training and varies person by person. Since then I've learned quite a bit and varies lines of evidence exist that suggest that many areas of the brain are highly specialized. Sure, within those areas neural networks may be what cause learning and adaptation, but if you stick a blood clot in the left temporal lobe, or the right temporal lobe, you'll wipe out a person's ability to use language in two completely different ways.
And I'm talking about language here - which encompasses a lot (listening, speaking, reading, writing, and likely more). Reading might be relatively new, but verbal language is likely to be MUCH older. And, since people can do it an most animals can't, it stands to reason that there is some biological reason for this.
Oh, aphasia can impact lots of other things as well - like short-term memory. The thinking (as I've heard), is that our short term memory often is augmented by repeating things to ourselves, and aphasia apparently inhibits your brain's ability to even talk to itself inside your own head.
I think these kinds of findings might have profound impacts on the pursuit of AI. It isn't enough to have a big network and good training method. You might need to pre-wire the network in some way to get something that resembles a human intelligence and not just the neural net you might find in a jellyfish or something.
As an Android user from just about the start I can hardly complain about T-Mo phone selection.
Their coverage is clearly lesser than their peers, but I rarely run into a dead zone - mainly in the mountains/etc. Just about anywhere I go I not only have coverage, but 4G coverage and I reliably get multi-Mbps transfer rates.
I really don't need to see any improvements with T-Mo. I really was hoping the merger would fall through because T-Mo has a history of supporting Nexus phones and the non-Nexus phones tend to be easy to root, and ATT is the complete opposite. T-Mo also has lower rates, softer caps, and fewer (but not non-existent) predatory practices.
Uh, the tide is difficult to predict, since you have two high and two low tides every day. A few hours arrival time difference is all it takes.
Phase of the moon is easy to predict. However, a new moon's high tide is extra high, just as a new moon's low tide is extra low. So, a new moon is a reason to be more concerned, not less.
And nobody was predicting the sudden drop in intensity.
I think you're looking at it from the wrong angle though. CAs do provide a higher degree of security from MITM. However, SSL without a CA is no more vulnerable to MITM than http without SSL.
That is my gripe - we sound alarms at self-signed certificates, but we don't sound alarms at plain http connections. If we really cared that much about authentication then we should get rid of non-SSL http entirely, as it is LESS secure than self-signed SSL.
And, rather than doing either of those, I'd prefer to just see SSL use certificates embedded in DNSSEC-protected DNS records. Maybe have a notation in WHOIS (also signed) as to whether the contact info was verified. So, for all sites you'd have strong assurance that you're connecting to the person who registered the domain, and then for an extra cost when registering a domain you could have assurance that the person who owns the domain is who they say they are. For most cases, just the lower level of security provides all the assurance you need.
The fraud was discovered more than a month after it happened. In the meantime who knows how much havoc was caused.
SSL as it is presently implemented has a number of key problems:
1. It doesn't allow encryption without authentication. An encrypted and unauthenticated connection to a server is considered LESS safe than an unencrypted and unauthenticated connection.
2. Every software package out there has its own trust database. Do you think that every instance of this bad certificate is really going to get purged? How do you know that some random piece of software you have doesn't download updates using it and thus allows for remote execution of arbitrary code?
3. The trust database is just way too big. Do we really know that ALL of those CAs are secure?
4. The scope of trust is unlimited. If you trust a CA they can issue a certificate for anybody.
5. CRLs tend to fail-unsafe. No connection means everything is fine. So, we can't even use those when things go bad.
6. CA certification tends to be more about paperwork, process, and audits (one time, usually), and a hefty fee, and I haven't seen any evidence that this really promotes security.
There are a number of ways that most of these issues could be eliminated. DNSSEC comes to mind as a big one.
Oh good, so I get to reinstall multiple browsers on multiple machines as a result of a single failure of a system destined to generate these failures twice a year.
Can we come up with a better way of managing trust than hard-coding a list of CAs in every single software package I install that uses SSL? Why should Mozilla be in the business of deciding who is trustworthy? Why not just have your software reference a single CA list at the OS level? For OSes that don't support it the list could be distributed as a software package that has its own update mechanism.
Also - rather than having 500 root CAs, you could just have one, and that CA could have a CRL (that fails-safe). So, to trust Thawte Mozilla (or better yet the distro) would sign Thawte's CA and distribute that certificate. Then if they no longer trust them they'd just revoke that signature.
We need to get away from hard-coding certificate white/blacklists in software.
And while we're at it, can we just ditch the CAs entirely and use DNSSEC and make the certificates a record at the domain level?
First, there should be one list of CAs for the system - not one for every application on the system. Why should Firefox, Thunderbird, Chrome, IE, and who knows what else all have an embedded list?
Second, that list should be easy to update without having to download new copies of all your software.
Ideally, that list should have its own CRL of sorts - so that automated revokes of root CA certificates can be done with a simple process. That should be a fail-safe mechanism - if the CRL can't be authenticated in some period of time, then a warning is displayed or all certificates relying on that CRL become invalid.
You'll need to define "profit" in your case. If it were truly profitable to put a bunch of people in space, then all you need to do is convince a bunch of investment bankers to loan you a few hundred billion dollars and go do it.
I suspect that activities in space would only be profitable if you ignore the costs of transportation and infrastructure (that is 99.999999% of the costs of being there in the first place).
Uh, the US is going into debt to the tune of over a trillion dollars per year. We don't have a trillion dollars to spend on fancy spacecraft, or on unnecessary wars overseas. The solution is to get rid of both, not use one area of waste as an excuse to expand another area of waste. I'm fine with having a military that is large enough to keep somebody from launching an invasion of South Carolina, and that doesn't have to cost nearly what we currently spend.
The problem with your argument is that EVERYBODY has some favorite area of government where they think that spending a trillion dollars is a good use of money. The problem is that if everybody gets their way then we go bankrupt. The solution is to restrict government to only those functions for which there isn't a practical alternative. I think that basic research is one of those legitimate areas, but beyond that if something actually has a practical use chances are that somebody will foot the bill to make it happen.
The problem is that basically anytime a new TLD comes out everybody with a.com/etc domain is allowed to pre-register. Everybody does. So then the new domain ends up being a replica of the main domains, and just another annual check to write for domain owners. What is the point of that?
Either just make it all first-come-first-serve, or get rid of all the TLDs, or enforce some criteria for actually registering on all but one TLDs.
Agreed - I love flight sims and hate 3D cockpits. I also hate 2D cockpits that don't have some view that at least gives me a reasonable amount of outside view. Yes, I know a real instrument panel takes up more space than a 19" monitor, but I don't want to have to set up a 14-monitor system to use the thing. Sometimes realism alone isn't the goal - you need to work out the aspects of realism that fit the genre. I wouldn't want a 747 simulator that required 100k pounds of jet fuel to operate either.
I think the tablet model works well for content consumption. We did pilots of tablets years ago (pre-ipad days), and if you left out the cost, that was basically what we found then. If you wanted to browse information, or just enter a little bit of data, then they were fairly ideal platforms. On the other hand, if I wanted to type this comment on a tablet it would take me 10x as long.
I think the other factor is corporate IT. There isn't a way to install a "Standard Image" on an Ipad, because Apple doesn't let people mess with them. That means that it actually is usable as soon as you want to use it, and every time you click on something it doesn't churn through 14 layers of virus scanning, full-disk encryption, checks for patches, and who-knows-what-else - all marketed by some vendor that knows the features that sell are fancy dashboards and central control and white papers, and not things like workstations that actually are usable.
I'm typing this on a Chromebook that can go from cold boot to work in 15 seconds. If I booted up my work laptop I could probably finish breakfast before it became responsive. What Apple and Google (and others) are starting to do is to realize that if you give companies the chance to shoot themselves in the foot, they will do so. So, the trend is to take away that power to control the end-to-end experience. What I'd like is to at least be able to get consumer-targeted hardware that gives that control back when I want it (a la developer switch or fastboot oem unlock / etc).
I dunno - there is a tendency to equate "genetic" with "determined by the sequence of your DNA." Environmental factors could impact the gametes without affecting the sequence of the DNA they carry. Some of that is epigenetics, and there is very little knowledge about how half the stuff in the cytoplasm works normally, let alone how it works abnormally.
You know - if a study demonstrated that spending 90 minutes a day debugging C code extended lifespan, all those guys who spend 14 hours a week in the Gym would be complaining about how unenjoyable it is. Those of us on SlashDot would of course be saying stuff like the above to them.
Maybe for some people the intersection of things that they enjoy and the set of things that involve serious physical exercise is the empty set. Maybe for others it isn't. You know, because we aren't all clones...
Fidelity and State Street are the two largest inst shareholders of Apple. Wanna know why? It is part of an index and therefore part of index mfs. A lot of people benefit from Apples performance.
So, if I steal a million dollars from a homeless shelter, and then redistribute $10k to each of 90 middle-class suburbanites and keep $100k for myself, does that make me Robin Hood?
Just because a lot of people profit from something doesn't make greed a public good.
I'm sure that 90+% of stock is held by the top 10% of income earners, so any benefit to shareholders gets distributed accordingly - to a very small segment of society. That might happen to be the same segment that many people here spend all their time associating with.
Algorithms are really nothing more than rules - and our world is FLOODED with rules. I'd say that this is to our detriment.
A friend recently had a car part that should last years fail after 13 months (it wasn't a part really subject to wear-and-tear). Dealer response: out of warranty - pay to get it done all over again. It was almost impossible to get somebody to do anything other than follow the rules.
Whether implemented by people or machines, our world is becoming dominated by rules. Rules determine who gets fired during a restructuring; rules determine who gets served in what order, and so on.
I think the reason for this is just management laziness. Making judgment calls involves taking risks, and possibly ticking off your boss. If you want your business to make the right judgment calls, you need to hire people with experience and entrust them with responsibility. On the other hand, if you insist on people only following the rules then you can hire anybody to do the job, and since the rules tend to be approved by committee everybody has a share of the responsibility when something goes wrong (which means that everybody collectively agrees to bury it and nobody is held accountable).
Process becomes more important than people, and eventually process becomes more important than results. If a competitor who is more nimble comes along, the first thing an established company tries to do is drag them into court - the ultimate example of process having more importance than results. (Where else can you win a case and end up bankrupt?)
Ok, assume I'm some mid-level manager. Why would I want to be smarter about saving my employer money? It isn't like I get to pocket the profits.
So, I can "be smarter" which means working extra hard both to generate meaningful metrics and sell them to everybody else who have to "be smarter" just to understand them and accept them. Then my boss is skeptical of all of this and isn't likely to credit me with any future improvements, so there is little upside for me.
Instead I can just "be dumber" and pick some superficial metric to micro-optimize. That takes me all of 30 seconds to do, so I can focus the rest of my work week on nice-looking powerpoint slides to convince my boss to back my project. Since the metric is simple, he will be easy to convince, especially if he can sell the same metric to his boss so we both make lots of money. Big bonuses for all, well, except those we lay off to micro-optimize our metrics.
Trying to sell a "smart" idea to management is like trying to sell a smart idea to voters - you'll lose to your competition who has simple sound-bites that make for great elevator speeches. In the end, whether the debt is down-rated or not the guy in charge still gets his paycheck and all the perks...
They're companies. They want to make money. If they have a way to sell you something you're going to be willing to pay for, they'll do it. Most people are willing to pay for the cure to cancer, so if they had one they'd sell it.
People think that big companies would hide away such a discovery so that they can make a fortune for 30 years selling treatments. News flash - executives don't care if the company is gone in 30 years. They only care that if they have the cure for cancer it will make them a ton of money next quarter, which means HUGE bonuses for them, and if the company dies in a year they just move on.
The conspiracy theories just don't make sense even if you assume the worst possible motives.
You can say anything you want about drug companies and their products. You just can't say it TO THEM unless you call their official reporting line. They don't want to hear about it otherwise, because they'd have a legal duty to follow-up and it would be difficult to do so.
If you post "this drug gave my mother cancer" on some facebook page, do you really want them subpoenaing your personal info so that they can track you down, find out who your mother is and her doctor is, and find out if that fact had already been reported? When drug companies hear bad things about their products they're actually required by law to investigate. Nobody knows how this applies to things like facebook, since regulatory bodies have issued no formal rulings.
I think most doctors are fine, but I still have complaints about the system:
1. I'm legally barred from obtaining most medications or having procedures of any kind done without the recommendation of a doctor. Unless there is a true harm to the common interest anybody should be able to have anything they want done as long as they are informed of the risks, consent, and don't expect anybody else to pay for it.
2. Usually I can't even get my medical records without begging a doctor for them. Doctors usually aren't required to disclose them either.
3. The payment system generally only pays doctors for visits, which leads to a lot of visits. Show up to get a recommendation to take a test, take the test, show up to discuss the results, and so on. Email/phone is highly discouraged, since it is not compensated but still leads to liability exposure.
4. Doctors generally don't work well together. If you have 10 doctors treating 15 conditions, best of luck to you. They'll always be angry with other doctors changing their medication regimens, and will never have time to consult with everybody anytime they make a change. Sometimes groups of doctors work well together (often at the same hospital), but go to three different hospitals and they'll pretend that nobody else exists half the time.
5. The whole system is optimized to provide acute care. When you're in the hospital you get daily attention and all your medications titrated/etc. If you're out of the hospital you get adjustments once a quarter and spend an eternity waiting in lines of various sorts. It is impossible to take just a single half-day off and see all 10 of your doctors and get all of your tests done, even though in a hospital that would happen every morning.
I'll be the first to admit that my experiences in the healthcare system are not typical, as I have to care for somebody with some serious health problems. However, with the aging of the US population they better solve this problem or half of the US population is going to end up being occupied full-time taking the other half to doctor's visits.
So, we're worried that a doctor goes hunting on an open forum on facebook for medical advise? I think we have to worry about whether this is an actual doctor... or human with an IQ over 17.
I think they worry more about the IQs of the jurors who will hear the lawsuit after it happens. Nobody is saying that this is all based on common sense.
The big legal questions are: 1. Does the pharma company have a legal duty to quickly respond to facebook comments with factual medical information? 2. Can the company actually keep up with #1 - when every teenager with a facebook account is posting "LOL" and this requires a response? 3. What kinds of comments do and do not legally require responses? 4. Does the company have a duty to follow up on a random facebook comment that suggests that somebody had a problem taking the drug? What is the threshold for taking action, and how much will you be sued for if you make the wrong judgment call? 5. What happens if it turns out that somebody replying to a comment happens to be an off-duty employee who doesn't represent the official thinking of the company? Can the company now be fined for off-label promotion of their product?
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting - I would wonder if fundamentally you'd expect a person's ability in a particular subject to be influenced by the method in which it is taught, if some areas of the brain truly are better at some things than others.
Perhaps the nature of the auditory areas of the brain is more or less suited to processing math (or more likely some kinds of math) than other regions, and you handicap yourself if you learn in one way vs another.
Plus, people have different learning styles, but could that be because when they started learning one method or another was chosen and so trying to learn in a new way wastes effort trying to build up capability in an area of a brain that doesn't have much, vs building on top of an established foundation. The RPG concept of min-maxing comes to mind - where being REALLY good at one thing and horrible at others is fundamentally different from being well-rounded. Or, perhaps some people start out with more innate ability in various regions of the brain, and so teaching those regions gets you more bang for the time invested.
Fascinating stuff...
To be honest, I have all the 4G network I need right now, so I'd be happy to just pay T-mobile their nice lower rates until the towers rust out, in which case I can argue failure to perform and get out of any contract I might still have.
I don't see ATT/etc adding any value for me. They charge more and let you do less with their network, and have lousier customer service. Their phones historically have also been far more locked down. If anything I'd switch to Sprint or Verizon, but I really prefer using GSM (you know, the standard that actually works worldwide and allows you to easily switch carriers on the fly with prepaid SIM cards/etc).
I think that Deutsche Telekom is just blustering to get the sale to go through. In the end if they have spectrum and money, and spending that money will generate profits, then they will do it. They will never overtake ATT/Verizon, but I'm sure they're making money just the same. As Apple has proved you don't have to have majority marketshare to make money, and as Walmart has proved you don't need to have the fanciest stores to get people to buy your product.
I can speak a little from practical experience, even if I'm not an authority. My wife has aphasia as a result of a stroke in her left temporal lobe. Immediately after her stroke she struggled to remember her own name and language-based communication of virtually any kind was almost impossible (written, verbal). However, she had no trouble understanding pictures or drawing them, and heavy use of a smartphone with google image search was able to get us through the early problems.
Since then she has recovered quite a bit, though she struggles especially with proper names, and her vocabulary is nowhere near what it used to be.
She never had any problems with movement (but some with vision - the stroke carried over into the occipital lobe). She could go through the operational aspects of maintaining her checkbook though she often got the math wrong (I suspect largely because she couldn't recognize the numbers - not because she didn't know how to add). From the moment she was home to this day if there were any question about where she needed to be I'd just get in the car and have her give me turn-by-turn navigation instructions and we'd end up exactly where she wanted to be.
Before this whole episode I would have assumed that the brain just worked like some like of abstract neural network where data goes in and comes out and how it gets from one to the other is just the result of training and varies person by person. Since then I've learned quite a bit and varies lines of evidence exist that suggest that many areas of the brain are highly specialized. Sure, within those areas neural networks may be what cause learning and adaptation, but if you stick a blood clot in the left temporal lobe, or the right temporal lobe, you'll wipe out a person's ability to use language in two completely different ways.
And I'm talking about language here - which encompasses a lot (listening, speaking, reading, writing, and likely more). Reading might be relatively new, but verbal language is likely to be MUCH older. And, since people can do it an most animals can't, it stands to reason that there is some biological reason for this.
Oh, aphasia can impact lots of other things as well - like short-term memory. The thinking (as I've heard), is that our short term memory often is augmented by repeating things to ourselves, and aphasia apparently inhibits your brain's ability to even talk to itself inside your own head.
I think these kinds of findings might have profound impacts on the pursuit of AI. It isn't enough to have a big network and good training method. You might need to pre-wire the network in some way to get something that resembles a human intelligence and not just the neural net you might find in a jellyfish or something.
As an Android user from just about the start I can hardly complain about T-Mo phone selection.
Their coverage is clearly lesser than their peers, but I rarely run into a dead zone - mainly in the mountains/etc. Just about anywhere I go I not only have coverage, but 4G coverage and I reliably get multi-Mbps transfer rates.
I really don't need to see any improvements with T-Mo. I really was hoping the merger would fall through because T-Mo has a history of supporting Nexus phones and the non-Nexus phones tend to be easy to root, and ATT is the complete opposite. T-Mo also has lower rates, softer caps, and fewer (but not non-existent) predatory practices.
Uh, the tide is difficult to predict, since you have two high and two low tides every day. A few hours arrival time difference is all it takes.
Phase of the moon is easy to predict. However, a new moon's high tide is extra high, just as a new moon's low tide is extra low. So, a new moon is a reason to be more concerned, not less.
And nobody was predicting the sudden drop in intensity.
Yup - Y2K in a nutshell. It was a non-event precisely because it was a huge event.
I've posted to the same effect for years here.
I think you're looking at it from the wrong angle though. CAs do provide a higher degree of security from MITM. However, SSL without a CA is no more vulnerable to MITM than http without SSL.
That is my gripe - we sound alarms at self-signed certificates, but we don't sound alarms at plain http connections. If we really cared that much about authentication then we should get rid of non-SSL http entirely, as it is LESS secure than self-signed SSL.
And, rather than doing either of those, I'd prefer to just see SSL use certificates embedded in DNSSEC-protected DNS records. Maybe have a notation in WHOIS (also signed) as to whether the contact info was verified. So, for all sites you'd have strong assurance that you're connecting to the person who registered the domain, and then for an extra cost when registering a domain you could have assurance that the person who owns the domain is who they say they are. For most cases, just the lower level of security provides all the assurance you need.
The fraud was discovered more than a month after it happened. In the meantime who knows how much havoc was caused.
SSL as it is presently implemented has a number of key problems:
1. It doesn't allow encryption without authentication. An encrypted and unauthenticated connection to a server is considered LESS safe than an unencrypted and unauthenticated connection.
2. Every software package out there has its own trust database. Do you think that every instance of this bad certificate is really going to get purged? How do you know that some random piece of software you have doesn't download updates using it and thus allows for remote execution of arbitrary code?
3. The trust database is just way too big. Do we really know that ALL of those CAs are secure?
4. The scope of trust is unlimited. If you trust a CA they can issue a certificate for anybody.
5. CRLs tend to fail-unsafe. No connection means everything is fine. So, we can't even use those when things go bad.
6. CA certification tends to be more about paperwork, process, and audits (one time, usually), and a hefty fee, and I haven't seen any evidence that this really promotes security.
There are a number of ways that most of these issues could be eliminated. DNSSEC comes to mind as a big one.
Oh good, so I get to reinstall multiple browsers on multiple machines as a result of a single failure of a system destined to generate these failures twice a year.
Can we come up with a better way of managing trust than hard-coding a list of CAs in every single software package I install that uses SSL? Why should Mozilla be in the business of deciding who is trustworthy? Why not just have your software reference a single CA list at the OS level? For OSes that don't support it the list could be distributed as a software package that has its own update mechanism.
Also - rather than having 500 root CAs, you could just have one, and that CA could have a CRL (that fails-safe). So, to trust Thawte Mozilla (or better yet the distro) would sign Thawte's CA and distribute that certificate. Then if they no longer trust them they'd just revoke that signature.
We need to get away from hard-coding certificate white/blacklists in software.
And while we're at it, can we just ditch the CAs entirely and use DNSSEC and make the certificates a record at the domain level?
We REALLY need a better way to handle root CAs.
First, there should be one list of CAs for the system - not one for every application on the system. Why should Firefox, Thunderbird, Chrome, IE, and who knows what else all have an embedded list?
Second, that list should be easy to update without having to download new copies of all your software.
Ideally, that list should have its own CRL of sorts - so that automated revokes of root CA certificates can be done with a simple process. That should be a fail-safe mechanism - if the CRL can't be authenticated in some period of time, then a warning is displayed or all certificates relying on that CRL become invalid.
You'll need to define "profit" in your case. If it were truly profitable to put a bunch of people in space, then all you need to do is convince a bunch of investment bankers to loan you a few hundred billion dollars and go do it.
I suspect that activities in space would only be profitable if you ignore the costs of transportation and infrastructure (that is 99.999999% of the costs of being there in the first place).
Uh, the US is going into debt to the tune of over a trillion dollars per year. We don't have a trillion dollars to spend on fancy spacecraft, or on unnecessary wars overseas. The solution is to get rid of both, not use one area of waste as an excuse to expand another area of waste. I'm fine with having a military that is large enough to keep somebody from launching an invasion of South Carolina, and that doesn't have to cost nearly what we currently spend.
The problem with your argument is that EVERYBODY has some favorite area of government where they think that spending a trillion dollars is a good use of money. The problem is that if everybody gets their way then we go bankrupt. The solution is to restrict government to only those functions for which there isn't a practical alternative. I think that basic research is one of those legitimate areas, but beyond that if something actually has a practical use chances are that somebody will foot the bill to make it happen.
The problem is that basically anytime a new TLD comes out everybody with a .com/etc domain is allowed to pre-register. Everybody does. So then the new domain ends up being a replica of the main domains, and just another annual check to write for domain owners. What is the point of that?
Either just make it all first-come-first-serve, or get rid of all the TLDs, or enforce some criteria for actually registering on all but one TLDs.
Agreed - I love flight sims and hate 3D cockpits. I also hate 2D cockpits that don't have some view that at least gives me a reasonable amount of outside view. Yes, I know a real instrument panel takes up more space than a 19" monitor, but I don't want to have to set up a 14-monitor system to use the thing. Sometimes realism alone isn't the goal - you need to work out the aspects of realism that fit the genre. I wouldn't want a 747 simulator that required 100k pounds of jet fuel to operate either.
I think the tablet model works well for content consumption. We did pilots of tablets years ago (pre-ipad days), and if you left out the cost, that was basically what we found then. If you wanted to browse information, or just enter a little bit of data, then they were fairly ideal platforms. On the other hand, if I wanted to type this comment on a tablet it would take me 10x as long.
I think the other factor is corporate IT. There isn't a way to install a "Standard Image" on an Ipad, because Apple doesn't let people mess with them. That means that it actually is usable as soon as you want to use it, and every time you click on something it doesn't churn through 14 layers of virus scanning, full-disk encryption, checks for patches, and who-knows-what-else - all marketed by some vendor that knows the features that sell are fancy dashboards and central control and white papers, and not things like workstations that actually are usable.
I'm typing this on a Chromebook that can go from cold boot to work in 15 seconds. If I booted up my work laptop I could probably finish breakfast before it became responsive. What Apple and Google (and others) are starting to do is to realize that if you give companies the chance to shoot themselves in the foot, they will do so. So, the trend is to take away that power to control the end-to-end experience. What I'd like is to at least be able to get consumer-targeted hardware that gives that control back when I want it (a la developer switch or fastboot oem unlock / etc).
I dunno - there is a tendency to equate "genetic" with "determined by the sequence of your DNA." Environmental factors could impact the gametes without affecting the sequence of the DNA they carry. Some of that is epigenetics, and there is very little knowledge about how half the stuff in the cytoplasm works normally, let alone how it works abnormally.
You know - if a study demonstrated that spending 90 minutes a day debugging C code extended lifespan, all those guys who spend 14 hours a week in the Gym would be complaining about how unenjoyable it is. Those of us on SlashDot would of course be saying stuff like the above to them.
Maybe for some people the intersection of things that they enjoy and the set of things that involve serious physical exercise is the empty set. Maybe for others it isn't. You know, because we aren't all clones...
Fidelity and State Street are the two largest inst shareholders of Apple. Wanna know why? It is part of an index and therefore part of index mfs. A lot of people benefit from Apples performance.
So, if I steal a million dollars from a homeless shelter, and then redistribute $10k to each of 90 middle-class suburbanites and keep $100k for myself, does that make me Robin Hood?
Just because a lot of people profit from something doesn't make greed a public good.
I'm sure that 90+% of stock is held by the top 10% of income earners, so any benefit to shareholders gets distributed accordingly - to a very small segment of society. That might happen to be the same segment that many people here spend all their time associating with.
Algorithms are really nothing more than rules - and our world is FLOODED with rules. I'd say that this is to our detriment.
A friend recently had a car part that should last years fail after 13 months (it wasn't a part really subject to wear-and-tear). Dealer response: out of warranty - pay to get it done all over again. It was almost impossible to get somebody to do anything other than follow the rules.
Whether implemented by people or machines, our world is becoming dominated by rules. Rules determine who gets fired during a restructuring; rules determine who gets served in what order, and so on.
I think the reason for this is just management laziness. Making judgment calls involves taking risks, and possibly ticking off your boss. If you want your business to make the right judgment calls, you need to hire people with experience and entrust them with responsibility. On the other hand, if you insist on people only following the rules then you can hire anybody to do the job, and since the rules tend to be approved by committee everybody has a share of the responsibility when something goes wrong (which means that everybody collectively agrees to bury it and nobody is held accountable).
Process becomes more important than people, and eventually process becomes more important than results. If a competitor who is more nimble comes along, the first thing an established company tries to do is drag them into court - the ultimate example of process having more importance than results. (Where else can you win a case and end up bankrupt?)
b. Who says it can't be measured? Be smarter.
Ok, assume I'm some mid-level manager. Why would I want to be smarter about saving my employer money? It isn't like I get to pocket the profits.
So, I can "be smarter" which means working extra hard both to generate meaningful metrics and sell them to everybody else who have to "be smarter" just to understand them and accept them. Then my boss is skeptical of all of this and isn't likely to credit me with any future improvements, so there is little upside for me.
Instead I can just "be dumber" and pick some superficial metric to micro-optimize. That takes me all of 30 seconds to do, so I can focus the rest of my work week on nice-looking powerpoint slides to convince my boss to back my project. Since the metric is simple, he will be easy to convince, especially if he can sell the same metric to his boss so we both make lots of money. Big bonuses for all, well, except those we lay off to micro-optimize our metrics.
Trying to sell a "smart" idea to management is like trying to sell a smart idea to voters - you'll lose to your competition who has simple sound-bites that make for great elevator speeches. In the end, whether the debt is down-rated or not the guy in charge still gets his paycheck and all the perks...
Yup, I keep scratching my head since the whole point of Firefox was to have something lean and mean. Talk about mission creep...
They're companies. They want to make money. If they have a way to sell you something you're going to be willing to pay for, they'll do it. Most people are willing to pay for the cure to cancer, so if they had one they'd sell it.
People think that big companies would hide away such a discovery so that they can make a fortune for 30 years selling treatments. News flash - executives don't care if the company is gone in 30 years. They only care that if they have the cure for cancer it will make them a ton of money next quarter, which means HUGE bonuses for them, and if the company dies in a year they just move on.
The conspiracy theories just don't make sense even if you assume the worst possible motives.
You can say anything you want about drug companies and their products. You just can't say it TO THEM unless you call their official reporting line. They don't want to hear about it otherwise, because they'd have a legal duty to follow-up and it would be difficult to do so.
If you post "this drug gave my mother cancer" on some facebook page, do you really want them subpoenaing your personal info so that they can track you down, find out who your mother is and her doctor is, and find out if that fact had already been reported? When drug companies hear bad things about their products they're actually required by law to investigate. Nobody knows how this applies to things like facebook, since regulatory bodies have issued no formal rulings.
I think most doctors are fine, but I still have complaints about the system:
1. I'm legally barred from obtaining most medications or having procedures of any kind done without the recommendation of a doctor. Unless there is a true harm to the common interest anybody should be able to have anything they want done as long as they are informed of the risks, consent, and don't expect anybody else to pay for it.
2. Usually I can't even get my medical records without begging a doctor for them. Doctors usually aren't required to disclose them either.
3. The payment system generally only pays doctors for visits, which leads to a lot of visits. Show up to get a recommendation to take a test, take the test, show up to discuss the results, and so on. Email/phone is highly discouraged, since it is not compensated but still leads to liability exposure.
4. Doctors generally don't work well together. If you have 10 doctors treating 15 conditions, best of luck to you. They'll always be angry with other doctors changing their medication regimens, and will never have time to consult with everybody anytime they make a change. Sometimes groups of doctors work well together (often at the same hospital), but go to three different hospitals and they'll pretend that nobody else exists half the time.
5. The whole system is optimized to provide acute care. When you're in the hospital you get daily attention and all your medications titrated/etc. If you're out of the hospital you get adjustments once a quarter and spend an eternity waiting in lines of various sorts. It is impossible to take just a single half-day off and see all 10 of your doctors and get all of your tests done, even though in a hospital that would happen every morning.
I'll be the first to admit that my experiences in the healthcare system are not typical, as I have to care for somebody with some serious health problems. However, with the aging of the US population they better solve this problem or half of the US population is going to end up being occupied full-time taking the other half to doctor's visits.
So, we're worried that a doctor goes hunting on an open forum on facebook for medical advise? I think we have to worry about whether this is an actual doctor ... or human with an IQ over 17.
I think they worry more about the IQs of the jurors who will hear the lawsuit after it happens. Nobody is saying that this is all based on common sense.
The big legal questions are:
1. Does the pharma company have a legal duty to quickly respond to facebook comments with factual medical information?
2. Can the company actually keep up with #1 - when every teenager with a facebook account is posting "LOL" and this requires a response?
3. What kinds of comments do and do not legally require responses?
4. Does the company have a duty to follow up on a random facebook comment that suggests that somebody had a problem taking the drug? What is the threshold for taking action, and how much will you be sued for if you make the wrong judgment call?
5. What happens if it turns out that somebody replying to a comment happens to be an off-duty employee who doesn't represent the official thinking of the company? Can the company now be fined for off-label promotion of their product?