License the driver or the machine? Most places do both for public road use. But maybe we need licenses for computers which attach to the public internet rather than (or in addition to) the drivers of those computers. After all, many jurisdictions require yearly safety or pollution control inspections for cars. Is a requirement that your computer have a yearly check for security patches much different?
Disclaimer: I'm unlikely to support this, but all discussions of licenses so far seem to be geared toward licensing the operator when what we really want is to make the machines safer.
Your earthquake insurance mandate is a bad analogy unless you limit it to firms in CA or make firms everywhere pay based on the probablility of an earthquake where they are located. For firms with a low probability of layoffs, the cost of unemployment insurance is quite low.
No one will sell you private unemployment insurance... (that) you can afford Because the market is monopolized - the funds that could have been spent on the insurance is already allocated to a mandated one.
No, it isn't because the market is monopolized, it is because it is a market with a condition (high risk of potential catastrophe) that private insurors are unwilling to underwrite. Have you ever priced earthquake insurance in CA? There is no fed mandate that you buy it and no fed insurance program. No one buys it.
I did my Ph.D. work in the economics of federal flood insurance. What you have missed here is that there are some conditions that convential markets don't handle well. The market for insurance where there are potential catastrophic events is one of those cases. And so the gov't takes on the job of insurance underwriting in these cases of market failure because the private sector won't.
Snort. No you didn't. You don't pay the unemployment insurance premium. Your employer does (and they, BTW, pay a rate based on their layoff history). If they did not have to pay it, it is unlikely you would see a pay raise since you have already agreed to work for them for your current salary. What makes you think that premium is somehow yours?
In the event of a large scale depression, I am still at a higher risk under a mandated system rather than a self regulated one as again I am loosing income to an inadequate system.
You do not understand the difference between mutual insurance and catastrophic insurance. No one will sell you private unemployment insurance at a rate you can afford for the same reason that most California homeowners can't afford earthquake insurance.
So why don't you self-insure? It is real easy to set aside enough money to cover your expenses for 6-9 mo. You also may have a credit card which can be used to supplement your expenses in the event you are laid off. There is effectively zero difference between a personal rainy day savings fund and private unemployment insurance. Buying unemployment insurance is likely to be an attractive solution only for people who have yet to build any savings and who have families to protect. But even here, the private firm is likely to require that you have worked for several months before you are eligible to buy (just like the gov't system). During that time, you save what you would normally save plus what you would pay in premiums, et voila, you have your private insurance and no need to buy unemployment insurance. So I really don't see why any individual would choose on their own to purchase unemployment insurance.
Now having it offered as a benefit by an employer is a different story. But here, the cost to the employer would be contingent upon the firm's layoff history. So a firm that would offer unemployment insurance as a benefit is more likely to be a firm with a low layoff probability. So again, no need to offer it.
Unless we are talking about a catastrophe like the Great Depression. For private firms to sell unemployment insurance, the economy can't have depressions. Private sellers of insurance require a risk structure like auto accidents. If everyone had an accident on the same day, auto insurors would go belly up, too (and, yes, I understand re-insurance. But that just spreads the risk over a larger group of individuals -- e.g. the princpals of LLoyds and there have been cases where they couldn't pay). And that is why the gov't has taken over the unemployment insurance mkt. Because they do have deep enough pockets to cover a situation where a large number of people have been laid off at the same time.
Different processors have different memory semantics (differing degrees of cache coherency, for example), and most threading libraries simply "inherit" the memory semantics of the underlying processor architecture, so concurrent code may well behave differently on one processor that it will on another.
This sounds like a lot of nonsence to me. C libs like pthreads run on top of an OS which runs on top of the processor. In what way are differences in cache coherency among processors exposed by the OS and thread libs such that concurrent code behaves differently from one processor to another -- or at least differently enough that I would ever care enough to rewrite thread code written for, say, ix86/Linux vs. sparc/Solaris? Remember, too, that Java runs on top of libs such as pthreads. How exactly is Java different from any other app that uses portable C code and links against standard posix C libs? And don't tell me its the memory model. Why can't I just use one of the many replacement thread-safe mallocs to achieve the same thing?
I like Java. It is quite a useful language and the many libraries, APIs and frameworks built around it make it easy to create powerful programs. But its cross platform features have been available for many years to C coders using various cross platform libraries that solve the same cross platform problems that Java solves.
Multithreading and concurrency are nothing new, but one of the innovations of the Java language design was that it was the first mainstream programming language to incorporate a cross-platform threading model and formal memory model directly into the language specification.
We've had threading in libraries for years (e.g. DCE, Posix, and NT threads). In fact, doesn't Java itself use those libraries to provide its own cross platform thread abstraction? In that sense, Java is nothing special in that there are several good cross platform thread abstraction libraries (see ACE, for example). Or to quote the Bell Labs proverb: "library design is language design" so Java is hardly the first language to incorporate a cross-platform threading model.
Isn't it interesting that you instantly believed a report written by four students?
The primary author, Michael Hout, is a Professor, not a student.
That this report was not published by any respected journals?
It is a working paper which is usually the first step in the reporting of scientific results. Early results from subjects of topical interest are often reported this way.
That they call simple statistical techniques "complicated"?
RTFA. They compare several statistical measures and only refer to one set as more complicated than the base set. Nowhere do they say or infer that simple stats techniques are complicated.
A company named Candescent Technologies tried this a few years ago. They had backing from HP and Sony IIRC. I saw one of their demo screens. The color saturation was fantastic, there was no fading as you moved off to the side, and there were none of the ghost artifacts you get from LCDs when stuff on the screen is moving rapidly. Unfortunately, Candescent was poorly managed and is now in Chapter 11.
I did time one summer as a Lyndon Baines Johnson Congressional Intern. What you suggest is only partially true. When the letters are little more than a coupon clipped from a newspaper, then expect a response of like kind. However, a few (sometimes as few as 2 or 3) well written, personalized letters from constituents can often make a huge difference on how a member votes on an issue. The response may be written by an intern, but that response will be read and corrected for content and grammer (Note to interns: never start a letter w/ "As your Congressman...) by the Congressman. People who take the time to craft their own letter are people who care enough to vote and they often influence how other constituents will vote. A member who stops listening to these folks will eventually lose their job.
Sorry, programers suck at art and artist suck at programing.
More generally, engineers are lousy artists and artists are lousy engineers. That is why the best looking water pitchers always dribble when you pour from them.
Kerry was never 10 pts up in the NH polls except for early last spring. Same for Ohio and Florida. The exit polls had Kerry up, but the state-by-state pre-election polls were remarkably accurate across the US. This suggests that the exit polls were badly flawed.
Estes Rockets, Legos, Lincoln Logs, Slinkys, Frisbees. There were model airplanes with gas engines that were guided by a string when I was a kid. Are those still available or has rc become so cheap that those are not worth it anymore?
Speakeasy is seriously overpriced. My TW cable bill (70 channel std pkg) + RR (they are offering 6.0 mbs up) runs me $65. Add in VOIP for $20 and my total is $85. Speakeasy wants $135 for 6/768 + VOIP. Granted, they provide static IPs (I use dyndns) and a shell account (who cares?) and a local RPM mirror (again, so what?). But that $135 is w/out video. No wonder dsl has been so slow to take off compared with cable.
And finally, it is impossible to imagine any medium- and larger size company not being able to track the minutes of the board meetings. These documents are mandatory and they are extremely important to show that the company as a collective entity, not John Doe as a private person, decided to do this and that.
Just because the company knows where all of the board minutes are does not mean the staff lawyers know everything that is in all of them. Reading all of the potentially germain past minutes in order to find support for a lawsuit like like this might take some time.
As of last week 49% of Americans think the other 51% are idiots. And 51% of Americans think the other 49% are idiots. This proves that it isn't just the rest of the world that thinks Americans are idiots. 100% of Americans think we are idiots, too.
If the rest of the world does not like what we do then take care of your problems yourself and stay out of our way.
To expand on the parent's theme, why did Dutch "peacekeepers" stand aside and let the Serbs massacre Muslim Bosnians in Srebrenica? What has Europe done to solve the civil war in Rwanda and the Congo? Why has Europe has nothing to stop the rapes and killing in Darfur? I don't know which pisses me off more -- unilateral US intervention and our pretensions of moral superiority or European complacency and their pretensions of moral superiority.
1. I did not vote for Bush. I do not even like him.
ditto. 2. I am not a Republican.
ditto. 3. I do have a passport and it has stamps in it from the EU to asia.
ditto. 4. I did server in the millitary and have seen combat.
Fortunately, I never saw combat.
And I agree with you that we should remove all dictatorships and replace them with some sort of democracy.
I agree that all dictatorships should be replaced with some sort of democracy, but I don't agree that we should do the replacing. More often than not, the US has done things the other way around (Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973). This kind of record is not very encouraging.
Slashdot Mirror
License the driver or the machine? Most places do both for public road use. But maybe we need licenses for computers which attach to the public internet rather than (or in addition to) the drivers of those computers. After all, many jurisdictions require yearly safety or pollution control inspections for cars. Is a requirement that your computer have a yearly check for security patches much different?
Disclaimer: I'm unlikely to support this, but all discussions of licenses so far seem to be geared toward licensing the operator when what we really want is to make the machines safer.
Cut the budget for the National Science Foundation while spending money on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and other inane ideas. This will eventually kill basic research and hence the flow of new jobs to replace the 400,000 IT jobs lost in the past three years.
Your earthquake insurance mandate is a bad analogy unless you limit it to firms in CA or make firms everywhere pay based on the probablility of an earthquake where they are located. For firms with a low probability of layoffs, the cost of unemployment insurance is quite low.
... (that) you can afford Because the market is monopolized - the funds that could have been spent on the insurance is already allocated to a mandated one.
No one will sell you private unemployment insurance
No, it isn't because the market is monopolized, it is because it is a market with a condition (high risk of potential catastrophe) that private insurors are unwilling to underwrite. Have you ever priced earthquake insurance in CA? There is no fed mandate that you buy it and no fed insurance program. No one buys it.
I did my Ph.D. work in the economics of federal flood insurance. What you have missed here is that there are some conditions that convential markets don't handle well. The market for insurance where there are potential catastrophic events is one of those cases. And so the gov't takes on the job of insurance underwriting in these cases of market failure because the private sector won't.
However, I called my payroll department...
Snort. No you didn't. You don't pay the unemployment insurance premium. Your employer does (and they, BTW, pay a rate based on their layoff history). If they did not have to pay it, it is unlikely you would see a pay raise since you have already agreed to work for them for your current salary. What makes you think that premium is somehow yours?
In the event of a large scale depression, I am still at a higher risk under a mandated system rather than a self regulated one as again I am loosing income to an inadequate system.
You do not understand the difference between mutual insurance and catastrophic insurance. No one will sell you private unemployment insurance at a rate you can afford for the same reason that most California homeowners can't afford earthquake insurance.
So why don't you self-insure? It is real easy to set aside enough money to cover your expenses for 6-9 mo. You also may have a credit card which can be used to supplement your expenses in the event you are laid off. There is effectively zero difference between a personal rainy day savings fund and private unemployment insurance. Buying unemployment insurance is likely to be an attractive solution only for people who have yet to build any savings and who have families to protect. But even here, the private firm is likely to require that you have worked for several months before you are eligible to buy (just like the gov't system). During that time, you save what you would normally save plus what you would pay in premiums, et voila, you have your private insurance and no need to buy unemployment insurance. So I really don't see why any individual would choose on their own to purchase unemployment insurance.
Now having it offered as a benefit by an employer is a different story. But here, the cost to the employer would be contingent upon the firm's layoff history. So a firm that would offer unemployment insurance as a benefit is more likely to be a firm with a low layoff probability. So again, no need to offer it.
Unless we are talking about a catastrophe like the Great Depression. For private firms to sell unemployment insurance, the economy can't have depressions. Private sellers of insurance require a risk structure like auto accidents. If everyone had an accident on the same day, auto insurors would go belly up, too (and, yes, I understand re-insurance. But that just spreads the risk over a larger group of individuals -- e.g. the princpals of LLoyds and there have been cases where they couldn't pay). And that is why the gov't has taken over the unemployment insurance mkt. Because they do have deep enough pockets to cover a situation where a large number of people have been laid off at the same time.
Different processors have different memory semantics (differing degrees of cache coherency, for example), and most threading libraries simply "inherit" the memory semantics of the underlying processor architecture, so concurrent code may well behave differently on one processor that it will on another.
This sounds like a lot of nonsence to me. C libs like pthreads run on top of an OS which runs on top of the processor. In what way are differences in cache coherency among processors exposed by the OS and thread libs such that concurrent code behaves differently from one processor to another -- or at least differently enough that I would ever care enough to rewrite thread code written for, say, ix86/Linux vs. sparc/Solaris? Remember, too, that Java runs on top of libs such as pthreads. How exactly is Java different from any other app that uses portable C code and links against standard posix C libs? And don't tell me its the memory model. Why can't I just use one of the many replacement thread-safe mallocs to achieve the same thing?
I like Java. It is quite a useful language and the many libraries, APIs and frameworks built around it make it easy to create powerful programs. But its cross platform features have been available for many years to C coders using various cross platform libraries that solve the same cross platform problems that Java solves.
Multithreading and concurrency are nothing new, but one of the innovations of the Java language design was that it was the first mainstream programming language to incorporate a cross-platform threading model and formal memory model directly into the language specification.
We've had threading in libraries for years (e.g. DCE, Posix, and NT threads). In fact, doesn't Java itself use those libraries to provide its own cross platform thread abstraction? In that sense, Java is nothing special in that there are several good cross platform thread abstraction libraries (see ACE, for example). Or to quote the Bell Labs proverb: "library design is language design" so Java is hardly the first language to incorporate a cross-platform threading model.
Isn't it interesting that you instantly believed a report written by four students?
The primary author, Michael Hout, is a Professor, not a student.
That this report was not published by any respected journals?
It is a working paper which is usually the first step in the reporting of scientific results. Early results from subjects of topical interest are often reported this way.
That they call simple statistical techniques "complicated"?
RTFA. They compare several statistical measures and only refer to one set as more complicated than the base set. Nowhere do they say or infer that simple stats techniques are complicated.
A company named Candescent Technologies tried this a few years ago. They had backing from HP and Sony IIRC. I saw one of their demo screens. The color saturation was fantastic, there was no fading as you moved off to the side, and there were none of the ghost artifacts you get from LCDs when stuff on the screen is moving rapidly. Unfortunately, Candescent was poorly managed and is now in Chapter 11.
I did time one summer as a Lyndon Baines Johnson Congressional Intern. What you suggest is only partially true. When the letters are little more than a coupon clipped from a newspaper, then expect a response of like kind. However, a few (sometimes as few as 2 or 3) well written, personalized letters from constituents can often make a huge difference on how a member votes on an issue. The response may be written by an intern, but that response will be read and corrected for content and grammer (Note to interns: never start a letter w/ "As your Congressman...) by the Congressman. People who take the time to craft their own letter are people who care enough to vote and they often influence how other constituents will vote. A member who stops listening to these folks will eventually lose their job.
Sorry, programers suck at art and artist suck at programing.
More generally, engineers are lousy artists and artists are lousy engineers. That is why the best looking water pitchers always dribble when you pour from them.
Kerry was never 10 pts up in the NH polls except for early last spring. Same for Ohio and Florida. The exit polls had Kerry up, but the state-by-state pre-election polls were remarkably accurate across the US. This suggests that the exit polls were badly flawed.
BTW, I voted for Kerry.
But Estes rockets are the tools of terrorists.
Is there a difference between terrorists and teenagers besides the scale of the damage they inflict?
Estes Rockets, Legos, Lincoln Logs, Slinkys, Frisbees. There were model airplanes with gas engines that were guided by a string when I was a kid. Are those still available or has rc become so cheap that those are not worth it anymore?
Speakeasy is seriously overpriced. My TW cable bill (70 channel std pkg) + RR (they are offering 6.0 mbs up) runs me $65. Add in VOIP for $20 and my total is $85. Speakeasy wants $135 for 6/768 + VOIP. Granted, they provide static IPs (I use dyndns) and a shell account (who cares?) and a local RPM mirror (again, so what?). But that $135 is w/out video. No wonder dsl has been so slow to take off compared with cable.
And finally, it is impossible to imagine any medium- and larger size company not being able to track the minutes of the board meetings. These documents are mandatory and they are extremely important to show that the company as a collective entity, not John Doe as a private person, decided to do this and that.
Just because the company knows where all of the board minutes are does not mean the staff lawyers know everything that is in all of them. Reading all of the potentially germain past minutes in order to find support for a lawsuit like like this might take some time.
Saddam is a Sunni, Osama a shia.
No, OBL is also a Sunni.
As of last week 49% of Americans think the other 51% are idiots. And 51% of Americans think the other 49% are idiots. This proves that it isn't just the rest of the world that thinks Americans are idiots. 100% of Americans think we are idiots, too.
Dilbert: People who don't vote don't have any right to complain.
Dogbert: Why not?
Dilbert: Well, uh, well, because that's how I was raised, that's why.
Dogbert: You were raised by bumber stickers?
Any Libertarian who says that only some people have the right to complain isn't really a Libertarian. Everyone has the right to complain.
More input for M-X spook
If the rest of the world does not like what we do then take care of your problems yourself and stay out of our way.
To expand on the parent's theme, why did Dutch "peacekeepers" stand aside and let the Serbs massacre Muslim Bosnians in Srebrenica? What has Europe done to solve the civil war in Rwanda and the Congo? Why has Europe has nothing to stop the rapes and killing in Darfur? I don't know which pisses me off more -- unilateral US intervention and our pretensions of moral superiority or European complacency and their pretensions of moral superiority.
1. I did not vote for Bush. I do not even like him.
ditto.
2. I am not a Republican.
ditto.
3. I do have a passport and it has stamps in it from the EU to asia.
ditto.
4. I did server in the millitary and have seen combat.
Fortunately, I never saw combat.
Bush got more votes than any American in history ...
for exactly the same reason that he also got more votes than George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln combined.
- 3. Slang. A large party or other social affair: "Lunch was a billion-calorie blowout beside the pool" (Vanity Fair).
- 4. Informal. A lopsided victory or thorough defeat.
I'm having friends over Tues evening for a def #3 so we can either celebrate (or perhaps mourn over) def #4.And I agree with you that we should remove all dictatorships and replace them with some sort of democracy.
I agree that all dictatorships should be replaced with some sort of democracy, but I don't agree that we should do the replacing. More often than not, the US has done things the other way around (Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973). This kind of record is not very encouraging.
Let's get something straight - we are "meddling" in the affairs of other countries, for the most part, by their request.
Er, no, we are meddling in the affairs of other countries, for the most part, by the request of their unelected governments.