I wonder why people who use P2P don't help each other out a little more. For example, you have someone with 200 files shared. They are downloading and sharing at the same time. Sometimes they download a bad file, and share it. It would make more sense to have a "unchecked" folder for downloads, then more it to the "checked" folder to share.
That would break a feature which enables greater sharing... Uploading of parts of files that you do not have all of. Think BitTorrent, but less organized...
I too left coorporate america (for a lower paying job in academia) a little over a year ago. I mave never been happier. I lost twenty pounds (without trying), I am going to be able to retire sooner, I knocked almost an hour off my marathon time. Life is good.
I am convinced that preaching is not the way to convince people that their lifestyle sucks. The way to do it is to go about your life, and enjoy it. Every once in a while people will ask you why you are always smiling, let them know why...
There is rampant misinformation on the estate tax.
If your estate is worth less than 1.5 million dollars there is no estate tax. I realize that 1.5 mil doesn't go as far as it used to, but would still enable a dependant to retire to an upper middle class lifestyle upon receiving this inheritance.
And when it comes down to it, an inheritance is income. Should this income be excluded from taxation? If so why? The only argument I have heard on this is that it has already has been taxed (the "unfair double taxation" argument), when it was earned by the deceased. But this argument doesn't hold water. Would you say that one should not pay income tax on one's salary because that money is paid from the income of the organization that employees one; that money was taxed when it was income of the employer (Oh no! double taxation). The simple fact is that money circulates, it gets used repeatedly, if money was not taxed repeatedly, the government would, literally, have zero income. And while we might disagree on the needed level of government services that we should be taxed to fund, I think we can all acknowledge that some level of funding is necessary...
Is there another reason that it should be excluded that I am unaware of?
As a product of UIUC working for Cornell, and a former employee of a company that employees hundreds of MIT grads (mostly from the prestigous MIT Gas Turbine Lab). I have to say, you are almost exactly right.
I'd say the top 10% at UIUC are roughly equivilant to the top 20-30% at MIT (and the bottom 20% of UIUC engineering/physics would never get in the door at MIT). Not everyone at MIT is great, but they do have a higher rate...
Those aren't wars. Those are occupations - a very different sort of activity. Soldiers are trained to think of well defined enemies and allies with clear demarkations of who's who, where police are trained to think of the majority of strangers as allies or bystanders with just a few "enemies" hidden among them. They are very different states of mind, and that's why soldiers aren't police and police aren't soldiers. (And that's why we won the war but are losing the occupation).
It's semantics... I view them as two phases of the same conflict.
If we win the war, and loose the occupation, what have we won? Certainly not the conflict...
Hmm... The US population is a little under 300 million, the Chinese population is well over a billion. I'm too lazy to look up exact numbers, but China definitely has more manpower in their military. Who'd win in an all-out war? Anyone who thinks superior technology can't overcome a difference in numbers shouldn't comment on warfare. Numbers only matter if there's a ridiculous difference, or if the two sides have essentially the same technology.
When both sides have nuclear weapons, numbers mean nothing in an all our war.
Numbers really mean very little in any war, it is number you are willing to loose for the cause, that is important (see Vietnam)...
Neither side is exactly using the latest and greatest stuff - they can't afford it.
I would consider that a war fought mostly with 20 year old technology. Consider that computers can do a lot to aid in warefare. Think about what computers were like 20 years ago. They weren't so much help back then.
Are you talking about the war in Iraq, or the one in Israel? If you are talking about the war in Iraq, how can you make the claim that "technology wins todays wars" when the world's economic superpower can't afford the technology that would win the war? If the technology can't be afforded, then it can't be used to win a war, and it becomes largly irellivant...
If you were talking about the war in Israel, did you know that their military (particularrly their special forces), usually has newer technology than our own military?
Also, I read your reply to the other poster... I too work on a DARPA project, and have 3 years of experience working for one of the largest defence contractors in the US before my current position.
Tell that to the guys in Iraq who have been fighting an insurgency for a couple of years. Or the Israeli solders who have been fighting for decades.
I don't deny that technology is helping them, but it certainly is not winning wars for them, they are still getting killed on a regular basis, with no end in sight.
Never underestimate the power of those willing to die for what they believe, regardless of technology available to them.
He regularly has Bill Safire on, and he is always treated nicely, you mentioned Bill O'Reilly...
Why do you think Bush would have been treated differently? Does Bush's Letterman apearance somehow convince you that a daily show appearance would have been similar?
When Bush won his second term. No Shit look it up. He was in NYC going to some media party where everyone was having a good time(including his staff writers) despite the results coming in.Like most Lefty Partisan Hacks Stewie had been pounding his pud in celebatory anticipation of the Kerry Victory the rigged MSM exit polls had predicted.Like Michael More Lil Jonny was already to take credit for bringing down "Bush Chimpler".
Well he walks in and sees FL for Bush and Ohio leaning and he walked out sulking and back home to cry. If he is so Hip and Au Courant and "better" than real journalists why the fuck couldn't he have a good time and say Ce La Vie? Cuse he is a whining little prettyboy who takes himself too seriously.
About half the people who love this country and care about what happens to it cried that day (the other half celebrated). A lot of people, regardless of their job felt very strongly about this election...
Why do you assume it has to do with his career? He knows he will have much more material this way...
I had a 1991 dodge dynasty (I know it is a shitty car, but the price was right and I was in college...)
Every once in a while the transmission would forget what was going on and shift into safe mode (second gear was the only gear). The solution was to reboot the car... Actually there was next a some kind of heat source next to a vacume tube that made it keep loosing vacume, and I wasn't about to spend much $ on that heap, so I just put up with having to reboot it every once in a while, but the tin foil heat shield did help...
Actually first cousin marriages are still a problem even if not illegal. It has been shown to give a 10 times higher chance for birth defects than pregnancies in general
If a situation were to arrise where a minimum number of people needed to produce maximum decendants in minimum time... 10 times a small number is still pretty small.
What exactly is the benefit of having top notch international graduate students?
They tend to become top notch American employees. And even if they don't, the research they do while here disproportionatly benefits American interests.
I don't have time to research this myself, but I suspect Sun Microsystems was not the only company in the US founded by a foreign student to do great things for this country...
Oh, they don't all get caught, my point is is that, in the public sector, poorly performing executives continue to be promoted. In the private sector, some get caught, but some simply get pushed out and have to live out their remaining days sipping pina coladas in the Caymans, as happened to Gerald Levin, whose merge of T-W with AOL was really, really bad business, but not a criminal act. That may not appeal much to our sense of justice, but it does stop them from doing any more harm.
I can tell you from experience that bad execs at large coorporations do get promoted (in my experience at least as often as they get pushed out).
There is a reason for this. Corporate CEO's are hired by the board of directors, who themselves are elected by the stockholders. That tends to populate the board with major stockholders, because (a) they vote for themselves, and (b) smaller stockholders vote for those who have an interest improving the value of the stock. That means CEO's are selected by a group of people that have a strong interest in scrutinizing the candidate. Any past "irregularities" will probably be discovered.
School officials are elected in some places, and in others hired by elected officials who are themselves resposible to the electorate. These people have made just as much a career out of scrutinizing others as has anyone in the corporate world.
The process of hiring a superintendent, however, consists of looking at what college he went to and what districts he has previously managed. Schools (as of today) aren't intended to turn a profit so metrics of performance are hard to come by and easily gamed (fudged).
They hire execs by seeing where his MBA is from and looking at past companies he has managed. And you can very easily canablize a companies future for profits on your watch without having it show up on your balance sheets, so the corporate metrics are easily fudged as well.
Promotions ride more on being politically connected and not spouting off something that might look bad in the papers. (The latter is one reason public schools are so resistant to reform...a superintendent is better off being fired by a reform-hungry electorate than doing something bold & innovative.) So up the ladder they go.
The exact same thing is true in corporate america, except, instead of getting promoted for not fixing the broken system, they more often get promoted for attempting to fix it and making it worse, or fixing something that wasn't broken.
This is why I say large school districts should be broken up, or even better, privatized.
breaking up large districts is fine... but privitization is askinig for trouble.
Right now, the community has to vest a tremendous amount of power (and money) in a superintendent for which they have very little information to judge his competency, and little means to oversee his performance.
And having a private entity gets more information how?
You wouldn't, after looking at a resume, hand $20,000 to someone to buy a car for you. But that is exactly what we do with public schools.
And it is exactly what we would be doing with private schools, except someone else takes the check...
I have to ask you one question: How many years have you worked for a company with more than 1000 employees? Your optimism about the abilities of private companies seems to indicate a lack of exposure to me...
If public schools are adequate, then why do public school teachers send THEIR children to private schools at TWICE the rate (25%) as the general US population (12%)? Washington Times: "Public schools no place for teachers' kids"
I don't have the hard numbers, but what happens when you look only at the rate at which people who graduated college send their kids to private school?
Also, you are among the many who are missing my point. The problem is the families of kids in public school can bring down the school. The teachers don't want their kids to have to be in a class full of thugs; if the kids that they tought were in private school, the teachers probably wouldn't send their own there either.
For most of your post, I will just say that I hope you are right, but I am a sceptic. Let's just say that I have seen to much corportate stupidity in my day to accept that corporations are inherantly more efficient, or more responsive than government organizations.
But this part of your post: In fact, opponents of school choice have been known to drum up support by presenting the specter of masses of urban children from broken homes flooding the local district (which is a fallacy, the incoming children will be the most ambitious achievers, not the most problematic).
Could you explain how this condition could exist as anything more than a transient? The way I see it happening (correct me please, if I am wrong), is that in the first year, the top 10% of bad public highschool goes to the private school, and the next year, the top 10% of the remaining go...
eventually there are so few people left in the public school (or they are all failing so miserably) that the school gets shut down, and they all go to the private school, which then has to deal with all of the kids that were bringing the public school down.
My post, while not indicating the parent was wrong (I don't think it should have been modded down), is entirely based in fact. It proposes (not claims as fact) an alternative explanation, which (in fact) would cause the result of the parent.
And Cali and NY do have pretty high standards, if you stay out of the cities...
In fact, small urban populations are a common thread among the states listed by the parent of my post.
There are some private schools that take in "high-risk" students on charity-funded grants (or recently, gov't vouchers), so we have a test of how much difference is attributable to the self-selection bias you describe. Private schools still perform better, though not as dramatically (yeah, yeah, should have a source here). emphasis mine.
I definitly would buy that, don't need a source... But how would it be if the trend of was carried out to the limit where all of the students now in the public schools are in the private schools?
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder why people who use P2P don't help each other out a little more. For example, you have someone with 200 files shared. They are downloading and sharing at the same time. Sometimes they download a bad file, and share it. It would make more sense to have a "unchecked" folder for downloads, then more it to the "checked" folder to share.
That would break a feature which enables greater sharing... Uploading of parts of files that you do not have all of. Think BitTorrent, but less organized...
The best way to win converts is by being happy.
I too left coorporate america (for a lower paying job in academia) a little over a year ago. I mave never been happier. I lost twenty pounds (without trying), I am going to be able to retire sooner, I knocked almost an hour off my marathon time. Life is good.
I am convinced that preaching is not the way to convince people that their lifestyle sucks. The way to do it is to go about your life, and enjoy it. Every once in a while people will ask you why you are always smiling, let them know why...
There is rampant misinformation on the estate tax.
If your estate is worth less than 1.5 million dollars there is no estate tax. I realize that 1.5 mil doesn't go as far as it used to, but would still enable a dependant to retire to an upper middle class lifestyle upon receiving this inheritance.
And when it comes down to it, an inheritance is income. Should this income be excluded from taxation? If so why? The only argument I have heard on this is that it has already has been taxed (the "unfair double taxation" argument), when it was earned by the deceased. But this argument doesn't hold water. Would you say that one should not pay income tax on one's salary because that money is paid from the income of the organization that employees one; that money was taxed when it was income of the employer (Oh no! double taxation). The simple fact is that money circulates, it gets used repeatedly, if money was not taxed repeatedly, the government would, literally, have zero income. And while we might disagree on the needed level of government services that we should be taxed to fund, I think we can all acknowledge that some level of funding is necessary...
Is there another reason that it should be excluded that I am unaware of?
INI
As a product of UIUC working for Cornell, and a former employee of a company that employees hundreds of MIT grads (mostly from the prestigous MIT Gas Turbine Lab). I have to say, you are almost exactly right.
I'd say the top 10% at UIUC are roughly equivilant to the top 20-30% at MIT (and the bottom 20% of UIUC engineering/physics would never get in the door at MIT). Not everyone at MIT is great, but they do have a higher rate...
Pratt & Whitney, one of the big 3 jet engine makers, has been doing that for over a decade. It is there primary means of supercomputing.
They have been at it so long that they had to write their own message passing system (PROWESS) because MPI was not there yet.
I used to work for them as a computational fluid dynamicist, we were the main consumers of this "cluster".
Those aren't wars. Those are occupations - a very different sort of activity. Soldiers are trained to think of well defined enemies and allies with clear demarkations of who's who, where police are trained to think of the majority of strangers as allies or bystanders with just a few "enemies" hidden among them. They are very different states of mind, and that's why soldiers aren't police and police aren't soldiers. (And that's why we won the war but are losing the occupation).
It's semantics... I view them as two phases of the same conflict.
If we win the war, and loose the occupation, what have we won? Certainly not the conflict...
Everything you say is correct, but most wars are not really big WWII style wars.
Hmm... The US population is a little under 300 million, the Chinese population is well over a billion. I'm too lazy to look up exact numbers, but China definitely has more manpower in their military. Who'd win in an all-out war? Anyone who thinks superior technology can't overcome a difference in numbers shouldn't comment on warfare. Numbers only matter if there's a ridiculous difference, or if the two sides have essentially the same technology.
When both sides have nuclear weapons, numbers mean nothing in an all our war.
Numbers really mean very little in any war, it is number you are willing to loose for the cause, that is important (see Vietnam)...
Neither side is exactly using the latest and greatest stuff - they can't afford it.
I would consider that a war fought mostly with 20 year old technology. Consider that computers can do a lot to aid in warefare. Think about what computers were like 20 years ago. They weren't so much help back then.
Are you talking about the war in Iraq, or the one in Israel? If you are talking about the war in Iraq, how can you make the claim that "technology wins todays wars" when the world's economic superpower can't afford the technology that would win the war? If the technology can't be afforded, then it can't be used to win a war, and it becomes largly irellivant...
If you were talking about the war in Israel, did you know that their military (particularrly their special forces), usually has newer technology than our own military?
Also, I read your reply to the other poster... I too work on a DARPA project, and have 3 years of experience working for one of the largest defence contractors in the US before my current position.
Technology wins today's wars
Tell that to the guys in Iraq who have been fighting an insurgency for a couple of years. Or the Israeli solders who have been fighting for decades.
I don't deny that technology is helping them, but it certainly is not winning wars for them, they are still getting killed on a regular basis, with no end in sight.
Never underestimate the power of those willing to die for what they believe, regardless of technology available to them.
"You can have my dildo when you pry it from my...
hot...
wet..."
He treats his guests nicely.
He regularly has Bill Safire on, and he is always treated nicely, you mentioned Bill O'Reilly...
Why do you think Bush would have been treated differently? Does Bush's Letterman apearance somehow convince you that a daily show appearance would have been similar?
When Bush won his second term.
No Shit look it up.
He was in NYC going to some media party where everyone was having a good time(including his staff writers) despite the results coming in.Like most Lefty Partisan Hacks Stewie had been pounding his pud in celebatory anticipation of the Kerry Victory the rigged MSM exit polls had predicted.Like Michael More Lil Jonny was already to take credit for bringing down "Bush Chimpler".
Well he walks in and sees FL for Bush and Ohio leaning and he walked out sulking and back home to cry.
If he is so Hip and Au Courant and "better" than real journalists why the fuck couldn't he have a good time and say Ce La Vie?
Cuse he is a whining little prettyboy who takes himself too seriously.
About half the people who love this country and care about what happens to it cried that day (the other half celebrated). A lot of people, regardless of their job felt very strongly about this election...
Why do you assume it has to do with his career? He knows he will have much more material this way...
I had a 1991 dodge dynasty (I know it is a shitty car, but the price was right and I was in college...)
Every once in a while the transmission would forget what was going on and shift into safe mode (second gear was the only gear). The solution was to reboot the car... Actually there was next a some kind of heat source next to a vacume tube that made it keep loosing vacume, and I wasn't about to spend much $ on that heap, so I just put up with having to reboot it every once in a while, but the tin foil heat shield did help...
Actually first cousin marriages are still a problem even if not illegal. It has been shown to give a 10 times higher chance for birth defects than pregnancies in general
If a situation were to arrise where a minimum number of people needed to produce maximum decendants in minimum time... 10 times a small number is still pretty small.
What exactly is the benefit of having top notch international graduate students?
They tend to become top notch American employees. And even if they don't, the research they do while here disproportionatly benefits American interests.
I don't have time to research this myself, but I suspect Sun Microsystems was not the only company in the US founded by a foreign student to do great things for this country...
We seem to differ on matters of fact, and on those, mostly on mattters of degree.
:)
Finaly, something we agree on
good day...
Oh, they don't all get caught, my point is is that, in the public sector, poorly performing executives continue to be promoted. In the private sector, some get caught, but some simply get pushed out and have to live out their remaining days sipping pina coladas in the Caymans, as happened to Gerald Levin, whose merge of T-W with AOL was really, really bad business, but not a criminal act. That may not appeal much to our sense of justice, but it does stop them from doing any more harm.
I can tell you from experience that bad execs at large coorporations do get promoted (in my experience at least as often as they get pushed out).
There is a reason for this. Corporate CEO's are hired by the board of directors, who themselves are elected by the stockholders. That tends to populate the board with major stockholders, because (a) they vote for themselves, and (b) smaller stockholders vote for those who have an interest improving the value of the stock. That means CEO's are selected by a group of people that have a strong interest in scrutinizing the candidate. Any past "irregularities" will probably be discovered.
School officials are elected in some places, and in others hired by elected officials who are themselves resposible to the electorate. These people have made just as much a career out of scrutinizing others as has anyone in the corporate world.
The process of hiring a superintendent, however, consists of looking at what college he went to and what districts he has previously managed. Schools (as of today) aren't intended to turn a profit so metrics of performance are hard to come by and easily gamed (fudged).
They hire execs by seeing where his MBA is from and looking at past companies he has managed. And you can very easily canablize a companies future for profits on your watch without having it show up on your balance sheets, so the corporate metrics are easily fudged as well.
Promotions ride more on being politically connected and not spouting off something that might look bad in the papers. (The latter is one reason public schools are so resistant to reform...a superintendent is better off being fired by a reform-hungry electorate than doing something bold & innovative.) So up the ladder they go.
The exact same thing is true in corporate america, except, instead of getting promoted for not fixing the broken system, they more often get promoted for attempting to fix it and making it worse, or fixing something that wasn't broken.
This is why I say large school districts should be broken up, or even better, privatized.
breaking up large districts is fine... but privitization is askinig for trouble.
Right now, the community has to vest a tremendous amount of power (and money) in a superintendent for which they have very little information to judge his competency, and little means to oversee his performance.
And having a private entity gets more information how?
You wouldn't, after looking at a resume, hand $20,000 to someone to buy a car for you. But that is exactly what we do with public schools.
And it is exactly what we would be doing with private schools, except someone else takes the check...
I have to ask you one question:
How many years have you worked for a company with more than 1000 employees? Your optimism about the abilities of private companies seems to indicate a lack of exposure to me...
For every Kozlowski they catch, how many do you think get away?
I live in upstate NY (finger lakes), I know what it is like here.
If public schools are adequate, then why do public school teachers send THEIR children to private schools at TWICE the rate (25%) as the general US population (12%)? Washington Times: "Public schools no place for teachers' kids"
I don't have the hard numbers, but what happens when you look only at the rate at which people who graduated college send their kids to private school?
Also, you are among the many who are missing my point. The problem is the families of kids in public school can bring down the school. The teachers don't want their kids to have to be in a class full of thugs; if the kids that they tought were in private school, the teachers probably wouldn't send their own there either.
For most of your post, I will just say that I hope you are right, but I am a sceptic. Let's just say that I have seen to much corportate stupidity in my day to accept that corporations are inherantly more efficient, or more responsive than government organizations.
But this part of your post:
In fact, opponents of school choice have been known to drum up support by presenting the specter of masses of urban children from broken homes flooding the local district (which is a fallacy, the incoming children will be the most ambitious achievers, not the most problematic).
Could you explain how this condition could exist as anything more than a transient? The way I see it happening (correct me please, if I am wrong), is that in the first year, the top 10% of bad public highschool goes to the private school, and the next year, the top 10% of the remaining go...
eventually there are so few people left in the public school (or they are all failing so miserably) that the school gets shut down, and they all go to the private school, which then has to deal with all of the kids that were bringing the public school down.
Ignore my last line, it should have said:
Large suburban areas tend to do well also...
My post, while not indicating the parent was wrong (I don't think it should have been modded down), is entirely based in fact. It proposes (not claims as fact) an alternative explanation, which (in fact) would cause the result of the parent.
And Cali and NY do have pretty high standards, if you stay out of the cities...
In fact, small urban populations are a common thread among the states listed by the parent of my post.
There are some private schools that take in "high-risk" students on charity-funded grants (or recently, gov't vouchers), so we have a test of how much difference is attributable to the self-selection bias you describe. Private schools still perform better, though not as dramatically (yeah, yeah, should have a source here). emphasis mine.
I definitly would buy that, don't need a source... But how would it be if the trend of was carried out to the limit where all of the students now in the public schools are in the private schools?