I don't know. Look at Social Security - a purely financial, and relatively predictable future cost. From Al Gore's 2000 platform, I quote: "Devote all Social Security Surpluses to Social Security and debt reduction. Social Security should not be undermined by a large risky tax cut or other government spending that wastes Social Security surpluses."
What did the electorate choose? Where are we now? I fear the human race is incurably short-sighted.
This isn't just about the econmy trumping the environment, it's about the economy now trumping the economy in the near future. Global warming will have enormous associated costs... but not yet, so it somehow doesn't count?
Looks like your prediction is coming true as of... yesterday:
11/30/2011
At the Senate Commerce Committee's confirmation hearings for Federal Communications Commission nominees Wednesday, Republican nominee Ajit Pai - previously employed by at Jenner & Block, the law firm representing clients in the AT&T/T-Mobile deal - told Texas Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison that he "would not feel any prejudice" towards a client of his former firm.
In response to a question from the senator over whether Pai would have possible conflicts of interest going forward, and whether he would recuse himself from the proceedings if he did, Pai told Hutschison, "I do not believe that my short period of employment at Jenner & Block would preclude me from being an effective commissioner, or from robustly participating in commission proceedings."
True, it is of course possible to spend tax money in ways that doesn't benefit taxpayers. I should have said something like, "...if it goes into taxes that are spent on services for the taxpayer..." (Granted, it's often subjective who benefits from services...)
Specifically, my point was that raising gas taxes may not increase transportation costs IF that tax money was used to provide public transport or infrastructure.
Charge $10/gallon at the pump and then sit back and watch unemployment go from 9% to 19% or more.
It depends. If that money goes into the pockets of the rich and is wasted on useless luxuries, then yes. If it goes into taxes, and thus back to the people, then no. It could be invested in public transit and actually lessen the cost of getting to work.
I don't see why you interpret this as a US-based helpdesk China could call for assistance.
I interpret it more like the cold-war Moscow/Washington "red telephone," the idea being that if bilateral conflict seems at risk of spiraling out of control, there is some mechanism to communicate and hopefully pull back from the brink of mutual harm.
Without regulation, all markets tend towards monopoly. Natural barriers to entry are far from the only cause. Once one party gets a lead, they can simply undercut any upstart competitors until they go out of business, then raise prices again. This was standard practice in the bad old days of last century (e.g. Standard Oil) until it was finally acknowledge that laissez faire economics simply does not work, just as a soccer game with no rules or referee would not work. Unfortunately some powerful people (e.g. Alan Greenspan) were extremely slow to get the memo, or were in league with the monopolists.
OK, it's art. But when I watch this, I also see impossibly dense traffic flowing through a city, and I see a perfectly orchestrated army attacking from all sides at once.
Central control isn't necessarily bad. Yes, people have been enamored for the last 10-15 years with decentralized control and swarming - which is all well and good. But in general decentralized control will NOT reach the efficiency of centralized control. We assume decentralization is better because we're accustomed to the cognitive limitations of animals (ourselves included), where the only way to scale past some point is parallelization, and thus decentralization. But with vastly more powerful compute nodes, and vastly more bandwidth between them, pretty much any distributed architecture is feasible, including centralization. Or if you don't like the single point of failure, have all the nodes broadcast all their information to all others, and independently reach the same (perfectly coordinated) conclusion.
Soon the idea of humans manually routing ourselves will be just as obsolete as switchboard operators compared to a Cisco router.
Wait, are we talking about the common-senses truth here, or the open lies companies use to evade (oops, "avoid") taxes?
Google, the owner of the world's most popular search engine, uses a strategy that has gained favor among such companies as Facebook Inc. and Microsoft Corp. The method takes advantage of Irish tax law to legally shuttle profits into and out of subsidiaries there, largely escaping the country's 12.5 percent income tax.
These higher frequencies are not only directional, but they don't penetrate walls. So if you can settle for needing near-line-of-sight within your apartment, you can be guaranteed no interference from neighbors.
However, there may also be better ways to manage shared bandwidth, as you stated. Frankly, one solution is to sell slices of the spectrum to companies to manage autocratically and efficiently as they see fit. If there's a way to make more devices get more throughput on a limited spectrum by cooperating with each other, companies like AT&T paying billions for spectrum are likely to find it.
I keep seeing Jobs cited as a counterexample. People need to read the section about him in Malcom Gladwell's "Outliers" and decide for themselves. Gladwell argues Jobs worked hard but also 1) was born around the same time - actually in the year - as most other people who made it big in microcomputers, and 2) lived in Silicon Valley where he got exposure to the budding industry. Hewlett or Packard, I forget which, personally sent him spare computer parts to work with! Again, Gladwell's argument isn't that everybody with the advantage of being in the right place at the right time is a big success - by far most are not - but that being in the right place at the right time is a precondition.
Ah, but the walls aren't vertical. To me, this idea resembles the Luxor hotel/casino in Las Vegas, except inverted. If you have ever been inside it, every room has an unobstructed view of the casino area on the first floor - which in this case would be the sky.
Still, it's true you'd probably only have a skylight at the edge of your room, so maybe not good enough.
I was complaining that I'm tired of reading slashdot articles that post a time of release as "in a few years"
But I think people are mistaken for not seeing the link between these types of announcements, and the incremental increases in capability and reductions in price that we are accustomed to seeing in new products. It's so easy to just assume Moore's "Law" will continue to hold, likewise for hard drive density, networking, and other applications such as medical imaging, as if that just comes naturally for free, and as if all these advances in physics, material science, and manufacturing are just games people play off to the side that never amount to anything. It's not true.
30 years ago we were still paying $1.50 per minute to make international calls and you weren't allowed to plug a modulator/demodulator (aka "modem") into your phone line. 10 years ago, email was considered a high-bandwidth application for cellphones. 5 years ago the idea of widespread video streaming over the Internet was commonly dismissed on slashdot as infeasible.
To complain that network technology never really improves is the height of absurdity.
Despite what the blurb says, this technology may finally be a good competitor for wired ethernet to the home. It's directional, so it doesn't have to be shared among a huge number of houses, and at $5/pop you can build a "disco-ball" covered with them to blanket an area. It won't penetrate walls well, but will penetrate adverse weather better than laser light.
Short of replacing Comcast, at least we can finally have a wireless HDMI "cable" that is affordable, so I can hook any number of terminals to a computer without having to bunch them all together.
Isn't that just modern life in general? Everything is an increasingly narrow specialized niche, and nothing is personal, "just business." Even Christmas is a reduced to a rabid frenzy of competitive shopping. We've debunked the old myths, but haven't found anything meaningful to replace them with.
Sadly, progress is not made in academia. It's made in the market. Until there is a photonic device on the market they are simply blowing smoke... Wake me up when they have actually got something on the market.
This mentality is a big part of our national decline. Nobody wants to make the investments or do the hard work. They just want to swoop in when the technology is ripe for commercialization and reap all the profit from others' years of investment. Individuals and big companies act this out in different ways, but it boils down to, "just wake me up when I can get it on sale at Walmart."
I would caveat that - big business and government do have formal requirements for such things, and they sometimes DO get enforced even when they don't make sense. It could also affect your job classification (regardless of what actual work you do), which would affect your pay rate.
I agree it won't matter in most cases, but to be on the safe side, I would personally rather have the CS PhD.
I think it is incorrect to say publishing leaked information is punished in the US. For example, nobody is prosecuting NY Times for reprinting excerpts of wikileaks. Whether this is due to a law or a judicial precedent, I don't know.
Your short post has a high percentage of "hate" and "stupid." Hey, she goofed up, it happens, even AT&T DDOS'd their own network with the iPhone. She wasn't being malicious, let's just learn something from her mistake and move on. A year from now she'll probably still be running her own small business and most of us will still be sniping at people on the Internet.
I don't think this is as big a deal as people always fear. The person operating a machine normally takes responsibility for what it does under their direction. Nobody says, "that backhoe just dug a cellar," they say, "I dug a cellar" (even though 99.99% of the caloric expenditure was by the backhoe). Nobody says, "Excel just computed our monthly budget," they say, "I just worked out our monthly budget" (even if Excel did 99.99% of the calculations). Only when we're thinking into a future we don't yet understand does it seem like the machines will be making all these "intelligent" decisions. Once the machine is in hand and understood, we feel like we are making the decisions (even though the machine is actually making thousands every second, as with an airplane autopilot). Our perception of intelligence on the part of the machine disappears. Once we know what to expect from them we simply laugh at those who don't and assume they are idiots (pertinent example). People even feel this way when working through human subordinates. "George Washington crossed the Delaware River." It doesn't mean he rowed the boat.
Slashdot Mirror
What did the electorate choose? Where are we now? I fear the human race is incurably short-sighted.
This isn't just about the econmy trumping the environment, it's about the economy now trumping the economy in the near future. Global warming will have enormous associated costs... but not yet, so it somehow doesn't count?
Guess what? There is nothing more to the story. It's exactly what it sounds like: a money grab.
(cite)
They just love appointing foxes to guard the henhouse, don't they? It sure worked out well for the banking industry, why not telecoms?
Specifically, my point was that raising gas taxes may not increase transportation costs IF that tax money was used to provide public transport or infrastructure.
It depends. If that money goes into the pockets of the rich and is wasted on useless luxuries, then yes. If it goes into taxes, and thus back to the people, then no. It could be invested in public transit and actually lessen the cost of getting to work.
I interpret it more like the cold-war Moscow/Washington "red telephone," the idea being that if bilateral conflict seems at risk of spiraling out of control, there is some mechanism to communicate and hopefully pull back from the brink of mutual harm.
More importantly, what does "core" really mean in this context?
Is this a joke? The Dow and S&P500 are exactly where they were 12 years ago. It's upper management that's getting rich, not stockholders.
Without regulation, all markets tend towards monopoly. Natural barriers to entry are far from the only cause. Once one party gets a lead, they can simply undercut any upstart competitors until they go out of business, then raise prices again. This was standard practice in the bad old days of last century (e.g. Standard Oil) until it was finally acknowledge that laissez faire economics simply does not work, just as a soccer game with no rules or referee would not work. Unfortunately some powerful people (e.g. Alan Greenspan) were extremely slow to get the memo, or were in league with the monopolists.
Central control isn't necessarily bad. Yes, people have been enamored for the last 10-15 years with decentralized control and swarming - which is all well and good. But in general decentralized control will NOT reach the efficiency of centralized control. We assume decentralization is better because we're accustomed to the cognitive limitations of animals (ourselves included), where the only way to scale past some point is parallelization, and thus decentralization. But with vastly more powerful compute nodes, and vastly more bandwidth between them, pretty much any distributed architecture is feasible, including centralization. Or if you don't like the single point of failure, have all the nodes broadcast all their information to all others, and independently reach the same (perfectly coordinated) conclusion.
Soon the idea of humans manually routing ourselves will be just as obsolete as switchboard operators compared to a Cisco router.
What percentage of their revenue do they book in Ireland?
However, there may also be better ways to manage shared bandwidth, as you stated. Frankly, one solution is to sell slices of the spectrum to companies to manage autocratically and efficiently as they see fit. If there's a way to make more devices get more throughput on a limited spectrum by cooperating with each other, companies like AT&T paying billions for spectrum are likely to find it.
I keep seeing Jobs cited as a counterexample. People need to read the section about him in Malcom Gladwell's "Outliers" and decide for themselves. Gladwell argues Jobs worked hard but also 1) was born around the same time - actually in the year - as most other people who made it big in microcomputers, and 2) lived in Silicon Valley where he got exposure to the budding industry. Hewlett or Packard, I forget which, personally sent him spare computer parts to work with! Again, Gladwell's argument isn't that everybody with the advantage of being in the right place at the right time is a big success - by far most are not - but that being in the right place at the right time is a precondition.
That's a really interesting statement, could you please explain further?
Still, it's true you'd probably only have a skylight at the edge of your room, so maybe not good enough.
But I think people are mistaken for not seeing the link between these types of announcements, and the incremental increases in capability and reductions in price that we are accustomed to seeing in new products. It's so easy to just assume Moore's "Law" will continue to hold, likewise for hard drive density, networking, and other applications such as medical imaging, as if that just comes naturally for free, and as if all these advances in physics, material science, and manufacturing are just games people play off to the side that never amount to anything. It's not true.
To complain that network technology never really improves is the height of absurdity.
Despite what the blurb says, this technology may finally be a good competitor for wired ethernet to the home. It's directional, so it doesn't have to be shared among a huge number of houses, and at $5/pop you can build a "disco-ball" covered with them to blanket an area. It won't penetrate walls well, but will penetrate adverse weather better than laser light.
Short of replacing Comcast, at least we can finally have a wireless HDMI "cable" that is affordable, so I can hook any number of terminals to a computer without having to bunch them all together.
Isn't that just modern life in general? Everything is an increasingly narrow specialized niche, and nothing is personal, "just business." Even Christmas is a reduced to a rabid frenzy of competitive shopping. We've debunked the old myths, but haven't found anything meaningful to replace them with.
This mentality is a big part of our national decline. Nobody wants to make the investments or do the hard work. They just want to swoop in when the technology is ripe for commercialization and reap all the profit from others' years of investment. Individuals and big companies act this out in different ways, but it boils down to, "just wake me up when I can get it on sale at Walmart."
I agree it won't matter in most cases, but to be on the safe side, I would personally rather have the CS PhD.
I think it is incorrect to say publishing leaked information is punished in the US. For example, nobody is prosecuting NY Times for reprinting excerpts of wikileaks. Whether this is due to a law or a judicial precedent, I don't know.
Your short post has a high percentage of "hate" and "stupid." Hey, she goofed up, it happens, even AT&T DDOS'd their own network with the iPhone. She wasn't being malicious, let's just learn something from her mistake and move on. A year from now she'll probably still be running her own small business and most of us will still be sniping at people on the Internet.
I don't think this is as big a deal as people always fear. The person operating a machine normally takes responsibility for what it does under their direction. Nobody says, "that backhoe just dug a cellar," they say, "I dug a cellar" (even though 99.99% of the caloric expenditure was by the backhoe). Nobody says, "Excel just computed our monthly budget," they say, "I just worked out our monthly budget" (even if Excel did 99.99% of the calculations). Only when we're thinking into a future we don't yet understand does it seem like the machines will be making all these "intelligent" decisions. Once the machine is in hand and understood, we feel like we are making the decisions (even though the machine is actually making thousands every second, as with an airplane autopilot). Our perception of intelligence on the part of the machine disappears. Once we know what to expect from them we simply laugh at those who don't and assume they are idiots (pertinent example). People even feel this way when working through human subordinates. "George Washington crossed the Delaware River." It doesn't mean he rowed the boat.