From what I remember, in the late 1980s/early 1990s we didn't have Circuit City or Best Buy here in Chicago. The electronics stores around here were called Highland, Silo, and Omni. They all went out of business during the recession of the early 1990s. It seems like history has repeated itself once again. Lesson learned, don't hold stock in electronics retailers during a recession.
Yeah, but electronics retailers aren't the only ones going out of business. Linens'N'Shit is closing, and I understand Chrysler and GM (hey, what about Ford?) are in deep trouble.
So I think you could generalize to say something like "Don't hold stock in a poorly run company in a crowded market." Then again, isn't that good advice in general?
Gilgamesh is older than that. It was handed down from before the pictograms that preceded cuneiform.
First, that 3500 BC date includes the pictogram phase. The characteristic cuneiform wedges didn't come until later.
Second, there's not any evidence that the Gilgamesh epic was handed down from earlier. The earliest versions of the Gilgamesh legend date from the third dynasty of Ur, beginning roughly 2150 BC. There is some historical evidence for an actual Gilgamesh, who is mentioned in the Sumerian king list. There's also some contemporary evidence for some of the other kings mentioned in the epic. If he did exist, he probably dates to around 2700 BC.
To be fair, the epic of Gilgamesh could certainly be based on older legends. There's just no evidence for it.
I think your logic is incorrect. The original poster did not say "my server went down around midnight, could this be a coincidence?" rather he said "my server, which has a particularly excellent track record of not going down, did so near midnight with very high precision. Could this not be a coincidence?" Given that this happening at any specific time is very unlikely compared to the relative abundance of rollover errors, this is a very legitimate hypothesis.
Furthermore your argument is essentially saying that anything with a non-zero probability of occurring randomly is probably not a coincidence. Otherwise, instead of comparing to some 50 million servers you ought to be comparing to a much smaller number of servers meeting the description of the original poster's. I don't think you pose any legitimate argument that this is coincidental, and it strikes me as very probable that it is not.
If you want to show that this is anything but a coincidence, you either need to show that this happened to more than one server, or you need to demonstrate the mechsnism. At this point we have exactly one server and we can't point to a specific bug. Until that changes, "coincidence" is the best answer.
For instance, this could be an entirely local problem. The motherboard or some other hardware component is beginning to fail, and the server will start crashing more frequently until that component dies completely. Or it could have been caused by a power surge, or a problem resulting from some bad wiring. Or the guy who manages the server above it came in to swap out some hardware and accidentally unplugged the server, and won't admit to it. (I have a former boss who did exactly that, after he went to work for a customer.)
Sure, it could still be related to the time. Without any additional evidence, though, it's just speculation.
My publisher had a Word template their authors had to use. For the page proofs, we'd send PDFs back and forth--although for my first couple of books we shipped them back and forth with US or FedEx.
Yes, it was a pain in the ass. Word formatting does weird things when you use a lot of it, and I had to use a lot of it. On the bright side, I was able to use Word on CrossOver Office for most of it.
At that time, there was another developed culture of similar size on Earth, although at that time Han China had already split into three kingdoms. There were also other civilized peoples with developed cities in the Middle East, India and Mexico. It would be interesting to see all of them on Google Earth.
I think it has a lot to do with preservation. Remember, the Romans did a lot of their building with stone and Marble. Rome is strewn with buildings from the ancient Roman empire like the Colliseum and the Pantheon. The Chinese, however, used a lot of wood in their cities. Very little of the Han cities survive, making them a bit harder to reconstruct.
I certainly hope this isn't the last, though. I personally would like to see Babylon or one of the Mayan cities like Palenque or Tikal.
Even if heat didn't break it down, yeast in bread does not have a lot of time to produce reservatrol. There's also not a lot of free sugar in bread for the yeast to eat. So you're probably not going to get much reservatrol out of bread even before it breaks down from the heat.
Stouts contain roasted / heated malt barley which is what lends it its colour and flavour. Some stouts contain all sorts of peculiar ingredients including chocolate and oysters. A light beer is going to have less malt barley and possibly use other ingredients such as rice. The way the beer is pressurized may also differ. Since stout is slightly more viscous, the bubbles of a pressurized pint tend to be smaller and the drink is less gassy. So the only difference is not the colour. The entire flavour and texture is different.
That said... I live in Ireland and my preference would Murphys or even Beamish to Guinness. Good luck finding them though because Diageo (which makes Guinness) also has an unhealthy monopoly on Irish pubs. You probably won't find a competing brand outside of County Cork where Heineken (owner of Murphys and Beamish) has a toehold and mixes up the variety a bit.
Better yet, see if there is a local micro brewery (a few exist here and there) and sink back a few of theirs instead. Three decent bars that come to mind are the Porthouse and Messrs Macguires in Dublin and the Franciscan Well in Cork.
A light beer is not necessarily going to have less malted barley than a stout. Draft Guinness is actually a pretty light beer, with an original gravity around 1.039 (IIRC, I may be off by a point or two). Original gravity is a measure of the sugars in the unbrewed wort before fermentation; the higher the original gravity, the more sugar (and hence malt) the beer contains. A classical pilsner has an original gravity around 1.048, and is made with only malted barley.
A lot of brewers do use rice, corn or even sugar to make the finished product lighter in color or body. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Many of the great Belgian beers use sugar. The Classic American Pilsner is a style revived by home brewers and is basically the pre-Prohibition American lager. It contains a good amount of corn or rice but is still an excellent beer. Most of the industrial lagers brewed today would still be terrible beers even if they used only malt.
I don't think the viscosity is terribly relevant to the gassiness of a stout. Stouts aren't typically carbonated highly (part of the style), and Guinness confuses everybody with the nitrogen they use for their draft beer.
There's one major difference this analysis doesn't cover. If you're patient, you can get a dell for up to 40% off, and although it's not quite as drastic with Lenovo, the same is true. This macbook will ALWAYS be expensive.
I can't speak for Dell, but are you sure you want a Lenovo laptop? I've used Thinkpads for the last ten years. The quality has really gone downhill. The last couple have shown themselves to be crap within the first year. It was particularly disappointing with the last one, which would have been a very nice laptop if I hadn't had to have the motherboard replaced within six months.
And yes, I bought a Macbook Pro (although I wound up with another Thinkpad for work, too). I spent too much money for it, but I'm far, far happier with it than I have been with a Thinkpad in at least five years.
All this means is that they will wait another year or maybe two before shutting down the DRM servers. They will in the end, there is no doubt.
Do you seriously think the DRM servers will be running in 20 years? No way.
While I'm in agreement, Walmart could certainly use that year or two in order to attempt to convince the labels to allow Walmart to remove the DRM from users' purchases. I think it'd be in their interest: they'd be able to shut down the DRM servers, they wouldn't take a big PR hit, and this episode would be much less likely to affect future music sales. Walmart is certainly willing to use their leverage to squeeze suppliers, and they probably have enough leverage with the labels to at least give it a try.
In hindsight - and discounting all technical failures, operators errors and violent attacks by organized military air-defense of whatever country - the major reason for loss of life in air travel is violence by terrorists. And most, if not all of these terrorists fit the description of being male and describing themselves as being affiliated to Islam. A great deal of them being also affluent, educated and of middle-eastern descent.
Please note that A->B does not imply B->A, which means that of course middle-eastern Muslim men are not all terrorists.
But A->B still holds and implies not(B ->not(A), meaning that if all airline terrorists are male and most would consider themselves to be Muslims, you could quite logically argue to relax security checks on Jewish, Christian or atheistic women of European or Asian descent.
I have two issues with this. First, it's stupid to assume that terrorists will continue to be rimarily Muslim men from the Middle East. Historically, terrorists have come from all sorts of groups. The Tamil Tigers, who were early pioneers in the use of vests to conceal suicide bombs, are most assuredly not Muslims. Nor were the Sikh groups active in the eighties and nineties. Nor were Timothy McVeigh or Eric Rudolf. Non-Muslims will commit acts of terrorism.
Secondly, easing security checks on non-Muslim groups will make it easier for terrorists to game the system. For instance, you suggest that we could "relax security checks on Jewish, Christian or atheistic women of European or Asian descent." By recruiting women of European and Asian descent, they can get around security more easily. Female suicide bombers are not uncommon, even in the Arab world. Or they can use these women to get around security. For instance, in 1986 a Palestinian man attemted to smuggle a bomb onto a plane using his pregnant, Irish girlfriend. There's also nothing to stop terrorists from simply attempting to pass as members of "friendly" ethnic groups. I've known plenty of Middle Eastern men and women who had that Mediterranean look and could easily pass for Spanish or Italian if they didn't talk a lot.
Let's assume $50/month. 1 order of magnitude larger is $500. 2 is $5,000. 3 is $50,000.
I think you meant 1-2 orders larger.
Even with your own numbers, 2-3 orders of magnitude is reasonable. The bill in question was $19,370. If, as you say, they receive a $50 bill monthly, $19,370 is clearly about 4 times larger than 2 orders of magnitude ($5000). It is closest to 3 orders of magnitude (roughly 2.5 times smaller than $50,000). Strictly speaking, it's between 2 and 3 orders of magnitude, which is pretty much what the GP said.
Remember, the GP was using them to make an estimate. It's not intended to be a precise calculation. It's supposed to be in the ballpark, and it was.
Could this coincide with the upcoming Apocalypse on December 21st 2012?
Nah. Apocalypse? The classical Mayans would have had a party, which is what they did at the end of a lesser calendar cycle.
Then they'd either have started the Long Count cycle over or (much more likely in my opinion) modified it slightly to keep going. For instance, they could have added another cycle consisting of (for instance) 20 b'ak'tun.
The classical Mayans also occasionally dated events far in the future, which hardly suggests that they thought the world was ending. See the Wikipedia article on the Long Count, which, yeah, it's Wikipedia, but the article looks pretty decent. (There's also some support for the idea of higher-order cycles beyond the b'aktun like I suggest above.)
I thought it was awkward. I probably wouldn't have said anything if he had left out "for the uninformed."
Also, if he had to explain it, why use another slang term? "Stoned" may be better known than "baked," but it's still not necessarily a word you'd know if English was not your native language.
What else would you call using a word that means X and subvert it to Y instead?
I would call it slang. I would also call it the natural evolution of language. It may not always be for the better, but any language is always changing. I recommend getting used to it.
Using "baked" to mean "stoned" is actually fairly common. It's certainly not random, and any hijacking took place long ago. It's slang, of course, but that used to be true of "stoned" as well.
I was more annoyed at the clumsy parenthetical aside explaining what it meant.
In fact, that really ought to be a law with few exceptions: customer and personal data must be stored on a server that is both physically and electronically protected. Period.
Servers get decommissioned, too. All that protection isn't going to help if they screw up and leave unencrypted data on their drives. Decommissioned hardware may certainly get used again, depending on how it was disposed of. I'm aware of one company that disposes of hardware--they recycle some parts and sell others. (I believe they require their customers to scrub the data before they throw it out.)
For instance, I have a customer in an industry where that would be bad (which doesn't narrow things down, I admit). I was helping them with some server consolidation, and they wanted some recommendations on wiping the disks. I suggested physically destroying the disks. They didn't like that--apparently the disks (and everything else) were leased.
Standards for encrypting the data and for data disposal might help.
According to the comment, he was standing on a balcony directly above one of the female employees, and the boss assumed that he was looking down her top. You don't need a zoom lens, or for that matter a camera, to do it at that distance. If he was changing settings on his camera, I could understand why it would look like he was pointing the camera right down at her.
Right--the boss assumed he was. He could have cleared that up in about 15 seconds by looking at the pictures on the camer's LCD when Hawk offered to show them to him, but chose not to.
I'm not so sure about this "the photo in question" business. I kind of doubt he only took one shot, and that the only point in which he angled the camera down was when he took that one shot. Whether he was perving or not, it's entirely possible that he seemed to be.
He was using a 14mm lens. This is a prime lens, not a zoom, so he couldn't zoom in without changing lenses. There's no indication by anybody that he changed lenses, and for what it's worth he did have a friend there who backs up the use of the 14mm lens.
And if he was perving with a 14mm lens, he'd have to be standing within a couple of feet of his victim, or she'd look like an ant.
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From what I remember, in the late 1980s/early 1990s we didn't have Circuit City or Best Buy here in Chicago. The electronics stores around here were called Highland, Silo, and Omni. They all went out of business during the recession of the early 1990s. It seems like history has repeated itself once again. Lesson learned, don't hold stock in electronics retailers during a recession.
Yeah, but electronics retailers aren't the only ones going out of business. Linens'N'Shit is closing, and I understand Chrysler and GM (hey, what about Ford?) are in deep trouble.
So I think you could generalize to say something like "Don't hold stock in a poorly run company in a crowded market." Then again, isn't that good advice in general?
Haven't you heard of Irish coffee? I've also had the occasional stout or porter brewed with coffee.
Are people really that stupid?
Yes. Yes, people really are that stupid.
If a Slashdot member with a girlfriend is rare, what does that make me? I'm a Slashdot member with a wife and two sons.
You, sir, are an affront to an old and tired Slashdot joke. Did I say tired? I meant cherished. Old and cherished. But definitely old.
RAID 0 does not create a primary and backup.
You can say that again.
(Looking at the timestamp, I can understand the mistake....)
Gilgamesh is older than that. It was handed down from before the pictograms that preceded cuneiform.
First, that 3500 BC date includes the pictogram phase. The characteristic cuneiform wedges didn't come until later.
Second, there's not any evidence that the Gilgamesh epic was handed down from earlier. The earliest versions of the Gilgamesh legend date from the third dynasty of Ur, beginning roughly 2150 BC. There is some historical evidence for an actual Gilgamesh, who is mentioned in the Sumerian king list. There's also some contemporary evidence for some of the other kings mentioned in the epic. If he did exist, he probably dates to around 2700 BC.
To be fair, the epic of Gilgamesh could certainly be based on older legends. There's just no evidence for it.
I think your logic is incorrect. The original poster did not say "my server went down around midnight, could this be a coincidence?" rather he said "my server, which has a particularly excellent track record of not going down, did so near midnight with very high precision. Could this not be a coincidence?" Given that this happening at any specific time is very unlikely compared to the relative abundance of rollover errors, this is a very legitimate hypothesis. Furthermore your argument is essentially saying that anything with a non-zero probability of occurring randomly is probably not a coincidence. Otherwise, instead of comparing to some 50 million servers you ought to be comparing to a much smaller number of servers meeting the description of the original poster's. I don't think you pose any legitimate argument that this is coincidental, and it strikes me as very probable that it is not.
If you want to show that this is anything but a coincidence, you either need to show that this happened to more than one server, or you need to demonstrate the mechsnism. At this point we have exactly one server and we can't point to a specific bug. Until that changes, "coincidence" is the best answer.
For instance, this could be an entirely local problem. The motherboard or some other hardware component is beginning to fail, and the server will start crashing more frequently until that component dies completely. Or it could have been caused by a power surge, or a problem resulting from some bad wiring. Or the guy who manages the server above it came in to swap out some hardware and accidentally unplugged the server, and won't admit to it. (I have a former boss who did exactly that, after he went to work for a customer.)
Sure, it could still be related to the time. Without any additional evidence, though, it's just speculation.
My publisher had a Word template their authors had to use. For the page proofs, we'd send PDFs back and forth--although for my first couple of books we shipped them back and forth with US or FedEx.
Yes, it was a pain in the ass. Word formatting does weird things when you use a lot of it, and I had to use a lot of it. On the bright side, I was able to use Word on CrossOver Office for most of it.
Crap. Phone in the fridge is a sign of old age? I've been doing that since I was 17.
Way back then, it was my keys or whatever I was reading at the time, but damn it, it still wound up in the fridge.
At that time, there was another developed culture of similar size on Earth, although at that time Han China had already split into three kingdoms. There were also other civilized peoples with developed cities in the Middle East, India and Mexico. It would be interesting to see all of them on Google Earth.
I think it has a lot to do with preservation. Remember, the Romans did a lot of their building with stone and Marble. Rome is strewn with buildings from the ancient Roman empire like the Colliseum and the Pantheon. The Chinese, however, used a lot of wood in their cities. Very little of the Han cities survive, making them a bit harder to reconstruct.
I certainly hope this isn't the last, though. I personally would like to see Babylon or one of the Mayan cities like Palenque or Tikal.
Even if heat didn't break it down, yeast in bread does not have a lot of time to produce reservatrol. There's also not a lot of free sugar in bread for the yeast to eat. So you're probably not going to get much reservatrol out of bread even before it breaks down from the heat.
Stouts contain roasted / heated malt barley which is what lends it its colour and flavour. Some stouts contain all sorts of peculiar ingredients including chocolate and oysters. A light beer is going to have less malt barley and possibly use other ingredients such as rice. The way the beer is pressurized may also differ. Since stout is slightly more viscous, the bubbles of a pressurized pint tend to be smaller and the drink is less gassy. So the only difference is not the colour. The entire flavour and texture is different.
That said... I live in Ireland and my preference would Murphys or even Beamish to Guinness. Good luck finding them though because Diageo (which makes Guinness) also has an unhealthy monopoly on Irish pubs. You probably won't find a competing brand outside of County Cork where Heineken (owner of Murphys and Beamish) has a toehold and mixes up the variety a bit.
Better yet, see if there is a local micro brewery (a few exist here and there) and sink back a few of theirs instead. Three decent bars that come to mind are the Porthouse and Messrs Macguires in Dublin and the Franciscan Well in Cork.
A light beer is not necessarily going to have less malted barley than a stout. Draft Guinness is actually a pretty light beer, with an original gravity around 1.039 (IIRC, I may be off by a point or two). Original gravity is a measure of the sugars in the unbrewed wort before fermentation; the higher the original gravity, the more sugar (and hence malt) the beer contains. A classical pilsner has an original gravity around 1.048, and is made with only malted barley.
A lot of brewers do use rice, corn or even sugar to make the finished product lighter in color or body. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Many of the great Belgian beers use sugar. The Classic American Pilsner is a style revived by home brewers and is basically the pre-Prohibition American lager. It contains a good amount of corn or rice but is still an excellent beer. Most of the industrial lagers brewed today would still be terrible beers even if they used only malt.
I don't think the viscosity is terribly relevant to the gassiness of a stout. Stouts aren't typically carbonated highly (part of the style), and Guinness confuses everybody with the nitrogen they use for their draft beer.
There's one major difference this analysis doesn't cover. If you're patient, you can get a dell for up to 40% off, and although it's not quite as drastic with Lenovo, the same is true. This macbook will ALWAYS be expensive.
I can't speak for Dell, but are you sure you want a Lenovo laptop? I've used Thinkpads for the last ten years. The quality has really gone downhill. The last couple have shown themselves to be crap within the first year. It was particularly disappointing with the last one, which would have been a very nice laptop if I hadn't had to have the motherboard replaced within six months.
And yes, I bought a Macbook Pro (although I wound up with another Thinkpad for work, too). I spent too much money for it, but I'm far, far happier with it than I have been with a Thinkpad in at least five years.
All this means is that they will wait another year or maybe two before shutting down the DRM servers. They will in the end, there is no doubt.
Do you seriously think the DRM servers will be running in 20 years? No way.
While I'm in agreement, Walmart could certainly use that year or two in order to attempt to convince the labels to allow Walmart to remove the DRM from users' purchases. I think it'd be in their interest: they'd be able to shut down the DRM servers, they wouldn't take a big PR hit, and this episode would be much less likely to affect future music sales. Walmart is certainly willing to use their leverage to squeeze suppliers, and they probably have enough leverage with the labels to at least give it a try.
Would they get anywhere? Hell if I know.
In hindsight - and discounting all technical failures, operators errors and violent attacks by organized military air-defense of whatever country - the major reason for loss of life in air travel is violence by terrorists. And most, if not all of these terrorists fit the description of being male and describing themselves as being affiliated to Islam. A great deal of them being also affluent, educated and of middle-eastern descent.
Please note that A->B does not imply B->A, which means that of course middle-eastern Muslim men are not all terrorists.
But A->B still holds and implies not(B ->not(A), meaning that if all airline terrorists are male and most would consider themselves to be Muslims, you could quite logically argue to relax security checks on Jewish, Christian or atheistic women of European or Asian descent.
I have two issues with this. First, it's stupid to assume that terrorists will continue to be rimarily Muslim men from the Middle East. Historically, terrorists have come from all sorts of groups. The Tamil Tigers, who were early pioneers in the use of vests to conceal suicide bombs, are most assuredly not Muslims. Nor were the Sikh groups active in the eighties and nineties. Nor were Timothy McVeigh or Eric Rudolf. Non-Muslims will commit acts of terrorism.
Secondly, easing security checks on non-Muslim groups will make it easier for terrorists to game the system. For instance, you suggest that we could "relax security checks on Jewish, Christian or atheistic women of European or Asian descent." By recruiting women of European and Asian descent, they can get around security more easily. Female suicide bombers are not uncommon, even in the Arab world. Or they can use these women to get around security. For instance, in 1986 a Palestinian man attemted to smuggle a bomb onto a plane using his pregnant, Irish girlfriend. There's also nothing to stop terrorists from simply attempting to pass as members of "friendly" ethnic groups. I've known plenty of Middle Eastern men and women who had that Mediterranean look and could easily pass for Spanish or Italian if they didn't talk a lot.
2-3 orders of magnitude larger?
Let's assume $50/month. 1 order of magnitude larger is $500. 2 is $5,000. 3 is $50,000.
I think you meant 1-2 orders larger.
Even with your own numbers, 2-3 orders of magnitude is reasonable. The bill in question was $19,370. If, as you say, they receive a $50 bill monthly, $19,370 is clearly about 4 times larger than 2 orders of magnitude ($5000). It is closest to 3 orders of magnitude (roughly 2.5 times smaller than $50,000). Strictly speaking, it's between 2 and 3 orders of magnitude, which is pretty much what the GP said.
Remember, the GP was using them to make an estimate. It's not intended to be a precise calculation. It's supposed to be in the ballpark, and it was.
Could this coincide with the upcoming Apocalypse on December 21st 2012?
Nah. Apocalypse? The classical Mayans would have had a party, which is what they did at the end of a lesser calendar cycle.
Then they'd either have started the Long Count cycle over or (much more likely in my opinion) modified it slightly to keep going. For instance, they could have added another cycle consisting of (for instance) 20 b'ak'tun.
The classical Mayans also occasionally dated events far in the future, which hardly suggests that they thought the world was ending. See the Wikipedia article on the Long Count, which, yeah, it's Wikipedia, but the article looks pretty decent. (There's also some support for the idea of higher-order cycles beyond the b'aktun like I suggest above.)
Don't worry, I moderated him -1 troll to make up for it.
Also, if he had to explain it, why use another slang term? "Stoned" may be better known than "baked," but it's still not necessarily a word you'd know if English was not your native language.
Beer is a drug, but I suspect Babe Ruth's drinking hindered his performance more than it helped.
What else would you call using a word that means X and subvert it to Y instead?
I would call it slang. I would also call it the natural evolution of language. It may not always be for the better, but any language is always changing. I recommend getting used to it.
I was more annoyed at the clumsy parenthetical aside explaining what it meant.
In fact, that really ought to be a law with few exceptions: customer and personal data must be stored on a server that is both physically and electronically protected. Period.
Servers get decommissioned, too. All that protection isn't going to help if they screw up and leave unencrypted data on their drives. Decommissioned hardware may certainly get used again, depending on how it was disposed of. I'm aware of one company that disposes of hardware--they recycle some parts and sell others. (I believe they require their customers to scrub the data before they throw it out.)
For instance, I have a customer in an industry where that would be bad (which doesn't narrow things down, I admit). I was helping them with some server consolidation, and they wanted some recommendations on wiping the disks. I suggested physically destroying the disks. They didn't like that--apparently the disks (and everything else) were leased.
Standards for encrypting the data and for data disposal might help.
According to the comment, he was standing on a balcony directly above one of the female employees, and the boss assumed that he was looking down her top. You don't need a zoom lens, or for that matter a camera, to do it at that distance. If he was changing settings on his camera, I could understand why it would look like he was pointing the camera right down at her.
Right--the boss assumed he was. He could have cleared that up in about 15 seconds by looking at the pictures on the camer's LCD when Hawk offered to show them to him, but chose not to.
I'm not so sure about this "the photo in question" business. I kind of doubt he only took one shot, and that the only point in which he angled the camera down was when he took that one shot. Whether he was perving or not, it's entirely possible that he seemed to be.
He was using a 14mm lens. This is a prime lens, not a zoom, so he couldn't zoom in without changing lenses. There's no indication by anybody that he changed lenses, and for what it's worth he did have a friend there who backs up the use of the 14mm lens.
And if he was perving with a 14mm lens, he'd have to be standing within a couple of feet of his victim, or she'd look like an ant.