Straight off, you're off by a factor of 10. Streaming video can quite easily be compressed down to 1 Mb/second corresponding to about the quality of SDTV. Since you'd only then require 1/10th of the bandwidth, that means only 1.2 ghz.
But not having a clear idea of exactly why this is and spouting my intuition out, while perhaps a Slashdot tradition, is not very constructive, so I offer this intuition with this disclaimer.
I'll tell you why. HTML 5 browsers won't be produced by Adobe, that's why.
Software security isn't just about the technology or specifications, or whatever. It's really mostly (no not entirely) about the people who write the stuff. Sendmail (the ever popular SMTP agent) was the giant poster child of how NOT to write software. For a while there was a root exploit every month in the damn thing. Postfix (another SMTP agent) on the other hand was designed with security from the ground up, and has had few, if any security problems.
Adobe has a TERRIBLE reputation when it comes to security. How many exploits have I seen over the past couple years for PDF reader? How many have I seen for Flash? I don't know exactly, but it's at least several for each. After Microsoft, Adobe is by far the biggest threat to the security of your computer. Flash is so prevalent and so useful you really can't live without it being installed. I know there's a free alternative (from gnu I think) but as I recall it's a giant steaming pile of crap.
The slot machines have very clearly printed disclaimers that all malfunctions void the entire transaction.
Well gee.. I guess that's that then. Printed disclaimers trump everything, right?
Pssst.. in the real world those disclaimers are mostly their to make people such as yourself believe them so they won't file a lawsuit. Half the time it's not applicable, won't hold up in court, or just a pure fantasy. It might be worth something, and I have no idea whether this case has any merit or not. But the idea that you present that the disclaimer is like a summary judgment is beyond ridiculous.
I understand all that. What you're missing is that there's about a thousand details necessary to show the results are statistically significant. Beyond just statistics, there's also the methods used to arrive at the data sets in the first place, bias introduced in sample selection, etc.
There's a few things that sound a bit odd to my untrained eye.
What do gut bacteria have to do with urine? Why wouldn't this be more related to diet, metabolism, liver function, or possibly even neurotransmitter levels?
They used NMR spectroscopy to compare the urine samples. They weren't able to identify any specific chemical differences. I guess my question would be, how much does the NMR spectroscopy of urine vary between individuals? If I eat a lot of cheeseburgers, and my buddy is a vegetarian, is there going to be a huge difference in our urine profiles when analyzed with NMR? If the variance is large, that implies you'd need a large sample size to account for the "profile" of groups. These group sizes were relatively small at around 30-40.
So does anyone with knowledge of NMR want to chime in and provide some opinions? I've only the barest knowledge about it, which essentially amounts to it produces a frequency spectrum from your sample, and you try to use software to perform the analysis of the complex signal you get back and hopefully identify some structure. Is it really useful in providing a "chemical fingerprint" in something as potentially complicated as urine?
They had four of them, still a small sample size of course though that doesn't mean results are necessarily wrong.
No, it means the results are meaningless (quite literally). If the two sets behave almost identical
Except they don't, and anyone with a lick of sense about bees knows that. This isn't a carefully controlled machine made in a factory assembly line where nothing varies much. It's a box sitting out in a field somewhere that each contain a different queen which determine the behavior of the rest of the colony through genetics. Not only that, bees are subject to a bunch of diseases we already know about. Colonies are infected with mites, foulbrood, and a host of other different diseases. 4 colonies is nowhere near enough to adjust for this natural variability.
It's exactly these reasons and many others that you need LARGE sample sizes to have any hope of trying to produce meaningful results in science. This kind of variability in samples has been known about for a LONG LONG time, and is certainly nothing to be surprised about. The researchers who wrote this study should be sacked, and the journal that published it should lose all its subscribers.
I'm a beekeeper. Any beekeeper knows that hive productivity and queen laying varies quite a bit. Why? Queens aren't all the same, and the genetics obviously varies. Some queens lay more than other queens. As queens get older, they start to lay less eggs (and eventually the workers give her the boot and make a new queen). The queen will produce all the workers, and her genetics combined with the genetics of the drones she mated with will determine the behavior of the workers produced. There's probably a dozen other factors at work as well.
The idea that you can take only 4 hives, average the results, and expect any kind of meaningful answer out of that is ridiculous. If they did this with 40 hives I might start listening. But 4? Beyond stupid.
Every time I see a story like this it makes me want to find the part of my state with the highest Islamic population and then decorate the streets so they cannot walk ten feet without seeing a cartoon making fun of Mohammed. I
Which would be great fuel for the nut-job extremists. You think their goal is to create non-believers into believers? Not a chance. Their goal is to create believers into extremists. If you REALLY did what you propose, you'd fuel the fires of the extremists by creating a stark separation between Them and Us.
Extremism lives on these separations and allows it to be OK to do otherwise horrendous things to people. It works both ways. I recently saw a Frontline about a platoon of U.S. soldiers (a minority I hope) who spoke of not caring about killing innocent civilians and doing so for particularly good reason because they were only "hodgie" (a slur used by some U.S. Military against Iraqis). The story was about this platoon that had some serious problems, and it was quite obvious the sick individuals tried to justify their cruelty through a separation of Them and Us. Many of them wound up in prison later after continuing their behavior once they got back to the US.
By creating a series of cartoons making fun of their religious leader all you do is send a message that "you're not us". When you do that, people turn inward and look to anyone already spreading that message (i.e. extremists). If you think there's some deep analysis going on beyond that, you're sorely mistaken.
is never rely on a single source. Always have a plan B.
There WAS a plan B. Switch to some other provider.
Transitioning would have been a pain for a while, but it wouldn't have killed the project. A mailing list and discussion area is something widely available, and there's absolutely no reason why Google has any kind of lock on it over anyone else. Your backup plan only protects against a single failure mechanism. If the guy had known ahead of time the product would fail in that way, that's great. But of course you never know how it's going to fail.
In this case, the failure obviously wasn't that catastrophic, since he went 3 years before really trying to fix it.
They will impose a stricter map-refreshs-per-hour policy and charge a fee(albeit small) for that Google Maps Key. Next thing, that small Web House Company that did sites for those real estate agents, Rental Car Companies, and Motels will have to pay a fee, and need to recoup that.
I agree that Google Maps will likely eventually start charging. I don't think it'll be a charge per key though, but charge per usage.
If I were making the decision I'd give away a certain amount of refreshes per month. Beyond that, you have to sign up for a set plan. It'd be foolish to put a barrier for entry for 3rd parties in since they don't get the benefit of the Map. You give away some set amount of refreshes/month to capture the low-end market and people not sure it's really worth it but will eventually see the benefits of it once built. Put all your eggs in someone elses basket at your peril I say. At least with hosting you can have backups and pick up another provider if things turn to custard.
And who's written anything approaching the functionality of Google Maps that can all be owned and hosted privately? I don't know of any, but if they exist I'd guess it's VERY expensive. The attraction of Google Maps, or any similar service is you can deliver services you just wouldn't be able to do otherwise because it'd be just way too expensive. If you're talking about trivial things like a "store locater by zipcode", that's so trivial to implement as to not even be worth discussing.
Google Maps is cool, but using it for fear of unknown charges coming your way isn't so dire. I've developed for it, and it's not THAT difficult to work with, nor would it be hard to transition to some other service if Google started charging ridiculous fees. Google isn't stupid, and they certainly understand this. So any fees they charge would have to be far smaller than any savings gained by switching to some other cheaper competitor.
The problems start when you start getting locked into one provider so deeply that it becomes very expensive to extricate yourself from them. Microsoft is the most obvious candidate for this. Google may eventually get to that stage, but from what I've seen they aren't their yet.
So the question becomes: how much extra on a gallon are you prepared to pay for this extra safety factor?
I don't know.. how much extra a gallon are you willing to pay for cleanup efforts? How much extra are you willing to pay in taxes to support the disaster to the economies of New Orleans because of the environmental impact? How many peoples livelihoods are you willing to destroy so you can pay a little less at the pump?
You speak as if the costs of this disaster and any future ones because of recklessness is just something we should all absorb and shrug at. There's more to life, economics and cost than simply gas prices.
Right. If only the U.S. didn't waste so much water, there'd be enough for everyone.
Sheesh. Water is the ultimate renewable, and the ultimate in "local problem". I live in Minnesota. We've got quite a bit of water up here, and the only "scarcity" is one of the infra-structure to deliver it when people are watering their lawns too much. If I let the tap run a bit longer it all winds up going down the Mississippi river which it would have gone down anyway if it hadn't been captured into the distribution network. My water source IS the river. For people who rely on well water, it's a different story. Water rights in California are a BIG DEAL however. The farmers are always squabbling with everyone else about access to irrigation, etc. So the point being, talking about water availability on a national scale is meaningless.
Water is largely a REGIONAL issue. Me using more or less water in Minnesota has ZERO impact on someone in Arizona. The entire U.S. water usage has ZERO impact on someone in Sweden.
So what's your beef here about the "wasteful" nature of the US with regard to water?
That depends on whether you're caught up in the idea that your 'career' needs to be your life's pursuit.
I guess I don't agree it's one or the other. I find it hard to believe anyone with any degree of intelligence is going to find cutting up chickens at a meat processing plant for 8 hours a day very rewarding. Career doesn't need to be your life's pursuit, but it should at least be something you enjoy doing. From what I've seen smart people don't like doing dumb things. There's exceptions to be sure, but we're speaking in generalities here so the specific cases are quite irrelevant.
You're probably right. There's a whole set of blue collar jobs that require quite a bit of creativity and intelligence. There's many more that don't. I don't think a factory job cutting up chickens, or a farm job picking tomatoes requires a lot of creativity. It's the AVERAGE we're talking about here though, not specifics.
Are you REALLY trying to say there's no correlation between educational attainment, and smarts? Sorry, I just find the idea ridiculous. There's smart people without college degrees, there's really dumb people with PHDs. The problem starts when assumptions are made and held about a person with only regard to education, and not based on the actual person. There's probably some smart people cutting up chickens, but being smart I don't think they're going to want to do that for very long since there's better paying, more rewarding jobs out their.
So why would you have to move to create a concentration of "human educational capital"?
For at least a couple different reasons.
1. It's far easier to work with someone in the same building as you are than it is to work with someone 1000 miles away. This is especially true if you work together closely.
2. Creative and brainy people want creative and brainy things. Creative and brainy things can largely only be supported in places where there's large concentrations of creative and brainy people. Therefore the creative and brainy people will tend to conglomerate together into population centers. If you think the internet and UPS can solve this, then you don't realize that "things" can mean other creative and brainy people, and things like an theatre district or a good selection of ethnic restaurants. you don't see all those jobs that were outsourced to India requiring that their workers move to North America or Europe.
Actually, I'd bet you'd see the exact same thing happening in India. You think all the tech jobs in India are spread out all over the sub-continent? From what I understand there's two cities where all the action happens.
Good thing nobody was talking about forcing anyone.
I guess I can read between the lines enough to understand this whole conversation is about trying to encourage an interest where none exists. Nobody is EVER going to say "I want to force my child into field X". "Encourage" is often a euphemism people use to cover their own desires. You say encouraging like it's a bad thing. In my world, suggesting new things to your kid and encouraging them to get involved in their interests is called good parenting.
Clearly this isn't about mere suggestions. The whole blog post is about some guy who wants to find a way to get his kid interested in software development merely because he saw the kid playing games. Encouraging your kids to follow their interests and desires is one thing. "Encouraging" your kids to try things to try hobbies "for fun" that they really didn't show any interest in to begin with is quite another.
But it's disingenuous to say that the risk is modest. The risk is unknown.
Holy cow! That sounds TERRIBLE!
Hey, BTW, do you know the risks of all the "normal", non GMO/nano foods? Have they all undergone extensive testing, or are the risks of eating those "unknown" as well? Someone once told me a folk tale about how eating mung beans will make you go blind. Has that ever been tested?
Life is an unsafe experiment. Risks need to be weighed against other risks, not weighed against zero risk (which doesn't exist). Right now there's some very high KNOWN risks of eating foods high in salt, saturated fat, trans-fat, sugar, etc. Our food policy in the US encourages us to produce large quantities of non-nutritious foods that wind up being far cheaper than the higher quality alternatives. Which do you think consumers are going to choose? But yet the flurry of food stories and worry concentrates on this GMO/nano-food/OMG WE DON'T KNOW THE RISKS. Why not concentrate on the known risks of our existing food policy?
I agree with the speaker on many points, but the honest truth is that humanity is rather poor at predicting long-term dangers in products.
You include some things we were wrong about, but you don't include the things we were right about. An honest assessment if we're good at predicting long term dangers would take into account both right and wrong and not just pull out famous examples where we were very wrong.
But honest labeling should be mandated to allow consumers to make informed choices. Making a bad choice is allowable.
What would you propose labeling? GMO vs non GMO?
The problem with GMO is it's an incredibly broad categorization that's essentially meaningless. GMO is a technique of modifying organisms, not something that really tells the consumer anything meaningful. How am I, a consumer, supposed to make an informed decision about something labeled GMO? It really tells me nothing about HOW it was genetically modified. Labeling a product as being GMO could mean anything from the plant contains some new protein I might be allergic to, to being modified to now contain Vitamin D. That's not a decision, that's just irrational fear.
Saltier water could be allowed to evaporate in tanks to make nice crystals.
It could. You'd need quite a lot of dry space to absorb enough energy though to evaporate all the water. There's not a lot of dry space in the ocean. Salt isn't worth very much, and there's already tons of the stuff already evaporated.
Dude, relax. They were talking about getting the kid started, not determining his life path.
No matter how mildly you put it, you're still wrong.
Trying to force children into enjoying something they haven't expressed interest in is just beyond idiotic. My mother always wanted to play the piano she was growing up, but the family could never afford lessons, a piano, etc. As a result of my mothers unfulfilled desire to play the piano, my sister was heavily encouraged to start piano lessons at an early age and did so. She took lessons for many years and continued through teenage years and was relatively accomplished at it getting high marks at recitals, etc. As soon as she was able though, she ditched the whole thing and hasn't played since. She clearly never liked the whole thing and only did it to please mom. So a lot of money, effort, and time was wasted on something that was essentially a desire of a misguided parent trying to put her own desires onto her child. Funny, 'cuz when I started it had EVERYTHING to do with me being a gamer.
Believe it or not, the world has changed quite a bit in the last 25 years, particularly with regard to how mainstream computers have become. 25 years ago if you had a computer, odds are you were probably interested in computing. These days if you DON'T have a computer you're either poor, or some kind of strange techno-phobe.
These days gaming is as mainstream as television. Equating the the two makes about as much sense as noticing your kid likes TV, and encouraging him/her to produce their own TV show. (Hell, that's probably a lot more fun and accessible to your average 14 year old than software development is).
The water would be for drinking, the salt and other minerals, probably sold.
The salt would most likely be discarded. Reverse-Osmosis doesn't produce nice crystals of salt that you can store away and sell. It produces SALTIER water, and salt-less water.
The counter sounds more like a gimmick than anything else. There also seems to be a dispute about whether the EEPROM they're testing is the same thing as a flash memory module. Real SSD and flash storage has wear leveling. Does this thing? Also, Flash memory comes in different variants (multi-level cell, single level cell, and likely other variations). Which is this?
So... I guess I have to wonder why not just some damn flash chips, and write a program to write to them over and over, then read. That sounds like about an hours work or so. It seems like they're more interested in creating a toy than actually producing independent relevant results.
But all of them add a level of complexity to this that the batch file doesn't have. Which leads me to my second saying:
Somehow I don't think a bat file that accepts user input for a few options, sends PCL to printers, and generates a web page would really fit into anyones definition of "simple".
You talk about the added complexity of using a real language, but don't count how much simpler you can actually make the code because of it.
If a kludge works, is documented, was implemented with proper change controls, and can be repeated, is it really a kludge anymore?
Yes.
You've either don't know what a kludge is, or don't have enough ability to see how fixing things or implementing something the wrong way can really be a horrible mistake that feeds on itself and creates other mistakes. Kludges aren't something you can simply document around. The rest of your post isn't really worth responding to, since it makes the false assumption that kludges are simply poorly documented behavior. If that's the worst you've seen, you're lucky.
Opinions of the general uninformed public does not override well defined technical definitions (satellite = object in orbit) in technical discussions (slashdot).
This is a technical discussion? I thought it was a discussion forum.
Slashdot Mirror
If each handset consumes 10 Mbps (10^7 bps)
Straight off, you're off by a factor of 10. Streaming video can quite easily be compressed down to 1 Mb/second corresponding to about the quality of SDTV. Since you'd only then require 1/10th of the bandwidth, that means only 1.2 ghz.
But not having a clear idea of exactly why this is and spouting my intuition out, while perhaps a Slashdot tradition, is not very constructive, so I offer this intuition with this disclaimer.
I'll tell you why. HTML 5 browsers won't be produced by Adobe, that's why.
Software security isn't just about the technology or specifications, or whatever. It's really mostly (no not entirely) about the people who write the stuff. Sendmail (the ever popular SMTP agent) was the giant poster child of how NOT to write software. For a while there was a root exploit every month in the damn thing. Postfix (another SMTP agent) on the other hand was designed with security from the ground up, and has had few, if any security problems.
Adobe has a TERRIBLE reputation when it comes to security. How many exploits have I seen over the past couple years for PDF reader? How many have I seen for Flash? I don't know exactly, but it's at least several for each. After Microsoft, Adobe is by far the biggest threat to the security of your computer. Flash is so prevalent and so useful you really can't live without it being installed. I know there's a free alternative (from gnu I think) but as I recall it's a giant steaming pile of crap.
The slot machines have very clearly printed disclaimers that all malfunctions void the entire transaction.
Well gee.. I guess that's that then. Printed disclaimers trump everything, right?
Pssst.. in the real world those disclaimers are mostly their to make people such as yourself believe them so they won't file a lawsuit. Half the time it's not applicable, won't hold up in court, or just a pure fantasy. It might be worth something, and I have no idea whether this case has any merit or not. But the idea that you present that the disclaimer is like a summary judgment is beyond ridiculous.
I understand all that. What you're missing is that there's about a thousand details necessary to show the results are statistically significant. Beyond just statistics, there's also the methods used to arrive at the data sets in the first place, bias introduced in sample selection, etc.
There's a few things that sound a bit odd to my untrained eye.
What do gut bacteria have to do with urine? Why wouldn't this be more related to diet, metabolism, liver function, or possibly even neurotransmitter levels?
They used NMR spectroscopy to compare the urine samples. They weren't able to identify any specific chemical differences. I guess my question would be, how much does the NMR spectroscopy of urine vary between individuals? If I eat a lot of cheeseburgers, and my buddy is a vegetarian, is there going to be a huge difference in our urine profiles when analyzed with NMR? If the variance is large, that implies you'd need a large sample size to account for the "profile" of groups. These group sizes were relatively small at around 30-40.
So does anyone with knowledge of NMR want to chime in and provide some opinions? I've only the barest knowledge about it, which essentially amounts to it produces a frequency spectrum from your sample, and you try to use software to perform the analysis of the complex signal you get back and hopefully identify some structure. Is it really useful in providing a "chemical fingerprint" in something as potentially complicated as urine?
They had four of them, still a small sample size of course though that doesn't mean results are necessarily wrong.
No, it means the results are meaningless (quite literally).
If the two sets behave almost identical
Except they don't, and anyone with a lick of sense about bees knows that. This isn't a carefully controlled machine made in a factory assembly line where nothing varies much. It's a box sitting out in a field somewhere that each contain a different queen which determine the behavior of the rest of the colony through genetics. Not only that, bees are subject to a bunch of diseases we already know about. Colonies are infected with mites, foulbrood, and a host of other different diseases. 4 colonies is nowhere near enough to adjust for this natural variability.
It's exactly these reasons and many others that you need LARGE sample sizes to have any hope of trying to produce meaningful results in science. This kind of variability in samples has been known about for a LONG LONG time, and is certainly nothing to be surprised about. The researchers who wrote this study should be sacked, and the journal that published it should lose all its subscribers.
4 WHOLE hives you say? Wow.. just wow.
I'm a beekeeper. Any beekeeper knows that hive productivity and queen laying varies quite a bit. Why? Queens aren't all the same, and the genetics obviously varies. Some queens lay more than other queens. As queens get older, they start to lay less eggs (and eventually the workers give her the boot and make a new queen). The queen will produce all the workers, and her genetics combined with the genetics of the drones she mated with will determine the behavior of the workers produced. There's probably a dozen other factors at work as well.
The idea that you can take only 4 hives, average the results, and expect any kind of meaningful answer out of that is ridiculous. If they did this with 40 hives I might start listening. But 4? Beyond stupid.
Every time I see a story like this it makes me want to find the part of my state with the highest Islamic population and then decorate the streets so they cannot walk ten feet without seeing a cartoon making fun of Mohammed. I
Which would be great fuel for the nut-job extremists. You think their goal is to create non-believers into believers? Not a chance. Their goal is to create believers into extremists. If you REALLY did what you propose, you'd fuel the fires of the extremists by creating a stark separation between Them and Us.
Extremism lives on these separations and allows it to be OK to do otherwise horrendous things to people. It works both ways. I recently saw a Frontline about a platoon of U.S. soldiers (a minority I hope) who spoke of not caring about killing innocent civilians and doing so for particularly good reason because they were only "hodgie" (a slur used by some U.S. Military against Iraqis). The story was about this platoon that had some serious problems, and it was quite obvious the sick individuals tried to justify their cruelty through a separation of Them and Us. Many of them wound up in prison later after continuing their behavior once they got back to the US.
By creating a series of cartoons making fun of their religious leader all you do is send a message that "you're not us". When you do that, people turn inward and look to anyone already spreading that message (i.e. extremists). If you think there's some deep analysis going on beyond that, you're sorely mistaken.
is never rely on a single source. Always have a plan B.
There WAS a plan B. Switch to some other provider.
Transitioning would have been a pain for a while, but it wouldn't have killed the project. A mailing list and discussion area is something widely available, and there's absolutely no reason why Google has any kind of lock on it over anyone else. Your backup plan only protects against a single failure mechanism. If the guy had known ahead of time the product would fail in that way, that's great. But of course you never know how it's going to fail.
In this case, the failure obviously wasn't that catastrophic, since he went 3 years before really trying to fix it.
They will impose a stricter map-refreshs-per-hour policy and charge a fee(albeit small) for that Google Maps Key. Next thing, that small Web House Company that did sites for those real estate agents, Rental Car Companies, and Motels will have to pay a fee, and need to recoup that.
I agree that Google Maps will likely eventually start charging. I don't think it'll be a charge per key though, but charge per usage.
If I were making the decision I'd give away a certain amount of refreshes per month. Beyond that, you have to sign up for a set plan. It'd be foolish to put a barrier for entry for 3rd parties in since they don't get the benefit of the Map. You give away some set amount of refreshes/month to capture the low-end market and people not sure it's really worth it but will eventually see the benefits of it once built.
Put all your eggs in someone elses basket at your peril I say. At least with hosting you can have backups and pick up another provider if things turn to custard.
And who's written anything approaching the functionality of Google Maps that can all be owned and hosted privately? I don't know of any, but if they exist I'd guess it's VERY expensive. The attraction of Google Maps, or any similar service is you can deliver services you just wouldn't be able to do otherwise because it'd be just way too expensive. If you're talking about trivial things like a "store locater by zipcode", that's so trivial to implement as to not even be worth discussing.
Google Maps is cool, but using it for fear of unknown charges coming your way isn't so dire. I've developed for it, and it's not THAT difficult to work with, nor would it be hard to transition to some other service if Google started charging ridiculous fees. Google isn't stupid, and they certainly understand this. So any fees they charge would have to be far smaller than any savings gained by switching to some other cheaper competitor.
The problems start when you start getting locked into one provider so deeply that it becomes very expensive to extricate yourself from them. Microsoft is the most obvious candidate for this. Google may eventually get to that stage, but from what I've seen they aren't their yet.
So the question becomes: how much extra on a gallon are you prepared to pay for this extra safety factor?
I don't know.. how much extra a gallon are you willing to pay for cleanup efforts? How much extra are you willing to pay in taxes to support the disaster to the economies of New Orleans because of the environmental impact? How many peoples livelihoods are you willing to destroy so you can pay a little less at the pump?
You speak as if the costs of this disaster and any future ones because of recklessness is just something we should all absorb and shrug at. There's more to life, economics and cost than simply gas prices.
Right. If only the U.S. didn't waste so much water, there'd be enough for everyone.
Sheesh. Water is the ultimate renewable, and the ultimate in "local problem". I live in Minnesota. We've got quite a bit of water up here, and the only "scarcity" is one of the infra-structure to deliver it when people are watering their lawns too much. If I let the tap run a bit longer it all winds up going down the Mississippi river which it would have gone down anyway if it hadn't been captured into the distribution network. My water source IS the river. For people who rely on well water, it's a different story. Water rights in California are a BIG DEAL however. The farmers are always squabbling with everyone else about access to irrigation, etc. So the point being, talking about water availability on a national scale is meaningless.
Water is largely a REGIONAL issue. Me using more or less water in Minnesota has ZERO impact on someone in Arizona. The entire U.S. water usage has ZERO impact on someone in Sweden.
So what's your beef here about the "wasteful" nature of the US with regard to water?
That depends on whether you're caught up in the idea that your 'career' needs to be your life's pursuit.
I guess I don't agree it's one or the other. I find it hard to believe anyone with any degree of intelligence is going to find cutting up chickens at a meat processing plant for 8 hours a day very rewarding. Career doesn't need to be your life's pursuit, but it should at least be something you enjoy doing. From what I've seen smart people don't like doing dumb things. There's exceptions to be sure, but we're speaking in generalities here so the specific cases are quite irrelevant.
You're probably right. There's a whole set of blue collar jobs that require quite a bit of creativity and intelligence. There's many more that don't. I don't think a factory job cutting up chickens, or a farm job picking tomatoes requires a lot of creativity. It's the AVERAGE we're talking about here though, not specifics.
Are you REALLY trying to say there's no correlation between educational attainment, and smarts? Sorry, I just find the idea ridiculous. There's smart people without college degrees, there's really dumb people with PHDs. The problem starts when assumptions are made and held about a person with only regard to education, and not based on the actual person. There's probably some smart people cutting up chickens, but being smart I don't think they're going to want to do that for very long since there's better paying, more rewarding jobs out their.
So why would you have to move to create a concentration of "human educational capital"?
For at least a couple different reasons.
1. It's far easier to work with someone in the same building as you are than it is to work with someone 1000 miles away. This is especially true if you work together closely.
2. Creative and brainy people want creative and brainy things. Creative and brainy things can largely only be supported in places where there's large concentrations of creative and brainy people. Therefore the creative and brainy people will tend to conglomerate together into population centers. If you think the internet and UPS can solve this, then you don't realize that "things" can mean other creative and brainy people, and things like an theatre district or a good selection of ethnic restaurants.
you don't see all those jobs that were outsourced to India requiring that their workers move to North America or Europe.
Actually, I'd bet you'd see the exact same thing happening in India. You think all the tech jobs in India are spread out all over the sub-continent? From what I understand there's two cities where all the action happens.
Good thing nobody was talking about forcing anyone.
I guess I can read between the lines enough to understand this whole conversation is about trying to encourage an interest where none exists. Nobody is EVER going to say "I want to force my child into field X". "Encourage" is often a euphemism people use to cover their own desires.
You say encouraging like it's a bad thing. In my world, suggesting new things to your kid and encouraging them to get involved in their interests is called good parenting.
Clearly this isn't about mere suggestions. The whole blog post is about some guy who wants to find a way to get his kid interested in software development merely because he saw the kid playing games. Encouraging your kids to follow their interests and desires is one thing. "Encouraging" your kids to try things to try hobbies "for fun" that they really didn't show any interest in to begin with is quite another.
But it's disingenuous to say that the risk is modest. The risk is unknown.
Holy cow! That sounds TERRIBLE!
Hey, BTW, do you know the risks of all the "normal", non GMO/nano foods? Have they all undergone extensive testing, or are the risks of eating those "unknown" as well? Someone once told me a folk tale about how eating mung beans will make you go blind. Has that ever been tested?
Life is an unsafe experiment. Risks need to be weighed against other risks, not weighed against zero risk (which doesn't exist). Right now there's some very high KNOWN risks of eating foods high in salt, saturated fat, trans-fat, sugar, etc. Our food policy in the US encourages us to produce large quantities of non-nutritious foods that wind up being far cheaper than the higher quality alternatives. Which do you think consumers are going to choose? But yet the flurry of food stories and worry concentrates on this GMO/nano-food/OMG WE DON'T KNOW THE RISKS. Why not concentrate on the known risks of our existing food policy?
I agree with the speaker on many points, but the honest truth is that humanity is rather poor at predicting long-term dangers in products.
You include some things we were wrong about, but you don't include the things we were right about. An honest assessment if we're good at predicting long term dangers would take into account both right and wrong and not just pull out famous examples where we were very wrong.
But honest labeling should be mandated to allow consumers to make informed choices. Making a bad choice is allowable.
What would you propose labeling? GMO vs non GMO?
The problem with GMO is it's an incredibly broad categorization that's essentially meaningless. GMO is a technique of modifying organisms, not something that really tells the consumer anything meaningful. How am I, a consumer, supposed to make an informed decision about something labeled GMO? It really tells me nothing about HOW it was genetically modified. Labeling a product as being GMO could mean anything from the plant contains some new protein I might be allergic to, to being modified to now contain Vitamin D. That's not a decision, that's just irrational fear.
Saltier water could be allowed to evaporate in tanks to make nice crystals.
It could. You'd need quite a lot of dry space to absorb enough energy though to evaporate all the water. There's not a lot of dry space in the ocean. Salt isn't worth very much, and there's already tons of the stuff already evaporated.
Dude, relax. They were talking about getting the kid started, not determining his life path.
No matter how mildly you put it, you're still wrong.
Trying to force children into enjoying something they haven't expressed interest in is just beyond idiotic. My mother always wanted to play the piano she was growing up, but the family could never afford lessons, a piano, etc. As a result of my mothers unfulfilled desire to play the piano, my sister was heavily encouraged to start piano lessons at an early age and did so. She took lessons for many years and continued through teenage years and was relatively accomplished at it getting high marks at recitals, etc. As soon as she was able though, she ditched the whole thing and hasn't played since. She clearly never liked the whole thing and only did it to please mom. So a lot of money, effort, and time was wasted on something that was essentially a desire of a misguided parent trying to put her own desires onto her child.
Funny, 'cuz when I started it had EVERYTHING to do with me being a gamer.
Believe it or not, the world has changed quite a bit in the last 25 years, particularly with regard to how mainstream computers have become. 25 years ago if you had a computer, odds are you were probably interested in computing. These days if you DON'T have a computer you're either poor, or some kind of strange techno-phobe.
These days gaming is as mainstream as television. Equating the the two makes about as much sense as noticing your kid likes TV, and encouraging him/her to produce their own TV show. (Hell, that's probably a lot more fun and accessible to your average 14 year old than software development is).
The water would be for drinking, the salt and other minerals, probably sold.
The salt would most likely be discarded. Reverse-Osmosis doesn't produce nice crystals of salt that you can store away and sell. It produces SALTIER water, and salt-less water.
The counter sounds more like a gimmick than anything else. There also seems to be a dispute about whether the EEPROM they're testing is the same thing as a flash memory module. Real SSD and flash storage has wear leveling. Does this thing? Also, Flash memory comes in different variants (multi-level cell, single level cell, and likely other variations). Which is this?
So... I guess I have to wonder why not just some damn flash chips, and write a program to write to them over and over, then read. That sounds like about an hours work or so. It seems like they're more interested in creating a toy than actually producing independent relevant results.
But all of them add a level of complexity to this that the batch file doesn't have. Which leads me to my second saying:
Somehow I don't think a bat file that accepts user input for a few options, sends PCL to printers, and generates a web page would really fit into anyones definition of "simple".
You talk about the added complexity of using a real language, but don't count how much simpler you can actually make the code because of it.
If a kludge works, is documented, was implemented with proper change controls, and can be repeated, is it really a kludge anymore?
Yes.
You've either don't know what a kludge is, or don't have enough ability to see how fixing things or implementing something the wrong way can really be a horrible mistake that feeds on itself and creates other mistakes. Kludges aren't something you can simply document around. The rest of your post isn't really worth responding to, since it makes the false assumption that kludges are simply poorly documented behavior. If that's the worst you've seen, you're lucky.
Opinions of the general uninformed public does not override well defined technical definitions (satellite = object in orbit) in technical discussions (slashdot).
This is a technical discussion? I thought it was a discussion forum.