Very highly paid people do very little work for each dollar they earn. This is not my opinion, it is simple mathematics. The average CEO "earns" 250 times as much as the average worker. Let's assume the average worker is an overpaid, underworked union slob (as "wealth=merit" types tend to believe) and does only 10 minutes of actual productive work per day. The CEO would still have to work 104 hours per day to work equally for each dollar. Not even Ayn Rand can fail to see that logic. So you need to switch to something else, like "they're smarter and more disciplined than you and I," or, "sitting around in meetings is much harder than backbreaking repetitive labor," or something like that.
it's "unlimited usage." And it's not even that; if you drill down, the $150 plan is actually a $75-for-100gb/mo, with a promise to cap overage charges at $75 -- thus virtually unlimited usage for $150. How long before they renege on that particular promise?
Actually that's better than unlimited usage for $150/mo, since you'll never pay more, and on months when you use less, you might pay as little as $75.
I share you skepticism of predicting alternate futures. But in this case the banks were mere hours from becoming insolvent. Millions of people would have found their deposits wiped out the next Monday. Based on historical precedent, it is hard to imagine that millions of others would not have made runs on their banks that same day.
Anyways, the trick of making assumptions cuts both ways. It is easy to criticise problems cause by what has been done, while discounting the likely downsides of a different course of action, since those didn't actually happen. That's what I meant by pessimism.
if our governments recently taught me anything then that not doing anything can be a good thing when all you do makes things worse.
What I've noticed recently is a rash of negativism that is unwarranted. Like it or not, government intervention saved our economy. Bad as it now is, it would have been far, far worse if all the large banks had all folded (which they undoubtedly would have), taking with them everybody's life savings (the FDIC is govt. intervention after all). Before disagreeing, take a minute to dwell on the utter failure of banking in America and what that would have meant.
Other interventions were more debatable, but they were, in all cases, at least debatable. Those who consider it obvious what to do are the most clueless of all.
So the perfect copy protection is hard to break using normal methods, but is still breakable: It shows the breaker had an INTENTION to illegally make copies.
So, at what point did that marginal additional argument against pirates earn Microsoft $388M?
What I thought was weird was how they consistently released photos and stories just to make him look bad - Saddam getting his teeth inspected, Saddam wearing whitey-tighties, Saddam likes Cheetos and Doritos - every release of information about him was carefully controlled to discredit him as a strongman. But the US govt always claimed these were all just unintended leaks, and they were going to "investigate" the leaks, but of course nothing was ever heard of those investigations again... and then (finally, the weird part), the media just uncritically passed along the derogatory information and the ruse of it all being accidental when obviously it was propaganda to weaken his support among Iraqis.
Compare with mapping the genome. Does sending a long string of A, C, G, and T into space give an alien recipient to ability to re-construct a human body, much less a person to teach them our culture? No. But affordable gene sequencing still has dozens of applications.
Here, I'll throw out a juicy one. The pattern of connections in your brain may very well capture all of your memories. You know those people paying big bucks to be cryogenically frozen? This is a big step towards re-animating them - even if by grinding their original brain into powder by layers:)
Your observation is really no different than e.g. numeric integration vs symbolic. The whole reason digital systems work is because with a high enough sample rate, they are a good enough approximation for the purpose. You start with something continuous (a blob of matter - a brain) and want a symbolic representation (a neural network) with discrete elements, so at some point, yes, you have to start discretizing things, but it doesn't mean you are discarding any of the desired structure.
That still leaves a middleman: Apple. Why do we need them? All we need is something like bittorrent but that incorporates a payment system. OK, PayPal and/or google checkout would still be middlemen - but with a much smaller role and lower cost. Pirating music is so easy, the industry basically runs on the honor system already, so complex security concerns aren't really relevant.
I think they'd probably prefer not to, they'd prefer to go back to simpler times, before this damn internet thing, when they were still making money hand over fist.
Oh, do you really think news was ever such a lucrative racket?
The news outlets have really thrown themselves to the mercy of the Internet revolution, sticking by their values, and look where it got them. I am very worried about the decline of "real news" in the US. A million bloggers don't make up for one real investigative reporter who has the time to do the legwork because they're paid to do it. I am starting to think we need some new law, like more stringent copyright within the first 24 hours after publication.
How about this system? Main thing for me would be to avoid fans at all cost. I hate fans. They crap out all the time, drag dirt into your system, make noise, and consume power.
Also, I would go with SSD drives. Intel makes theirs to last 5 years under heavy use, so I wouldn't be surprised to get 15 of light use.
And yet HR is very able to evaluate candidates in terms of what this headline claims is the most important - people skills. This draws the premise of the article into question.
I am involved with hiring and firing where I work. I can tell you, for certain, we have gotten rid of numerous people with good soft skills, whom I personally liked, because I gave them specific technical tasks and they couldn't produce. Sure, the best people have both technical and social skills (and they move up almost too fast!) But given the choice of one over the other, give me somebody who might not sit with me at lunch, but who turns around assignments so quickly it surprises me. You know how it is, one person does in an afternoon what another somehow couldn't manage in 2 weeks.
The Navy seems to have a better safety record than just about anybody, including the Air Force.
Re:I, for one, welcome our new regulator overlords
on
Three Mile Island Memories
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Maybe they do understand but don't agree.
Privatizing land is no way to protect it from toxic or nuclear waste. Ownership of land is a handy legal contrivance, but let's not take it too far. There is a finite amount of Earth for all the people that have lived, live now, and will ever live. Individuals live relatively briefly and have no right to carelessly dump nuclear waste that will far outlive them, regardless of some piece of paper. Ultimately our right to bury nuclear waste comes from exercising diligence and doing it in a way that won't cause any accidents for a very long time.
I tend to agree but look at the recent splash-landing on the Hudson. Computers beat humans' stick-and-rudder skills hands down, but the decision to glide over to the Hudson (instead of...what? crash-landing in a crowded city, I guess?) saved everybody. You could try to make the statistical argument that other crashes caused by human error outweigh this, but I don't know what the numbers are.
Anyways, airline pilots will be the last to go, after military recon pilots, bombers, cargo, and finally fighters, then civilian cargo flights. After a few decades and billions of miles flow autonomously in those roles, then we can talk about airliners without pilots.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't even see how twitter is a new medium. It's just really short entries, right? Like YouTube comments.
It would be funny to see our response if China or Iran made this proposal for their own use today.
Very highly paid people do very little work for each dollar they earn. This is not my opinion, it is simple mathematics. The average CEO "earns" 250 times as much as the average worker. Let's assume the average worker is an overpaid, underworked union slob (as "wealth=merit" types tend to believe) and does only 10 minutes of actual productive work per day. The CEO would still have to work 104 hours per day to work equally for each dollar. Not even Ayn Rand can fail to see that logic. So you need to switch to something else, like "they're smarter and more disciplined than you and I," or, "sitting around in meetings is much harder than backbreaking repetitive labor," or something like that.
Actually that's better than unlimited usage for $150/mo, since you'll never pay more, and on months when you use less, you might pay as little as $75.
Show me a developer who doesn't think everybody else's code is crap.
And things were OK until banks and insurers were de-regulated and morphed into investment banks that ridiculously over-leveraged their assets.
Anyways, the trick of making assumptions cuts both ways. It is easy to criticise problems cause by what has been done, while discounting the likely downsides of a different course of action, since those didn't actually happen. That's what I meant by pessimism.
What I've noticed recently is a rash of negativism that is unwarranted. Like it or not, government intervention saved our economy. Bad as it now is, it would have been far, far worse if all the large banks had all folded (which they undoubtedly would have), taking with them everybody's life savings (the FDIC is govt. intervention after all). Before disagreeing, take a minute to dwell on the utter failure of banking in America and what that would have meant.
Other interventions were more debatable, but they were, in all cases, at least debatable. Those who consider it obvious what to do are the most clueless of all.
So, at what point did that marginal additional argument against pirates earn Microsoft $388M?
What I thought was weird was how they consistently released photos and stories just to make him look bad - Saddam getting his teeth inspected, Saddam wearing whitey-tighties, Saddam likes Cheetos and Doritos - every release of information about him was carefully controlled to discredit him as a strongman. But the US govt always claimed these were all just unintended leaks, and they were going to "investigate" the leaks, but of course nothing was ever heard of those investigations again... and then (finally, the weird part), the media just uncritically passed along the derogatory information and the ruse of it all being accidental when obviously it was propaganda to weaken his support among Iraqis.
Here, I'll throw out a juicy one. The pattern of connections in your brain may very well capture all of your memories. You know those people paying big bucks to be cryogenically frozen? This is a big step towards re-animating them - even if by grinding their original brain into powder by layers :)
Your observation is really no different than e.g. numeric integration vs symbolic. The whole reason digital systems work is because with a high enough sample rate, they are a good enough approximation for the purpose. You start with something continuous (a blob of matter - a brain) and want a symbolic representation (a neural network) with discrete elements, so at some point, yes, you have to start discretizing things, but it doesn't mean you are discarding any of the desired structure.
That still leaves a middleman: Apple. Why do we need them? All we need is something like bittorrent but that incorporates a payment system. OK, PayPal and/or google checkout would still be middlemen - but with a much smaller role and lower cost. Pirating music is so easy, the industry basically runs on the honor system already, so complex security concerns aren't really relevant.
OK, but what if you're just invading someplace to make money and boost your political image domestically? Any rules on those wars?
Oh, do you really think news was ever such a lucrative racket?
The news outlets have really thrown themselves to the mercy of the Internet revolution, sticking by their values, and look where it got them. I am very worried about the decline of "real news" in the US. A million bloggers don't make up for one real investigative reporter who has the time to do the legwork because they're paid to do it. I am starting to think we need some new law, like more stringent copyright within the first 24 hours after publication.
"Countless dozens" is overstating things. The shuttle has flown under 12 dozen missions, and two ended in catastrophic failure.
I'm just surprised nobody in this thread has mentioned NASA's rather similar failure to launch a satellite into orbit all of one month ago.
But how does grub get loaded from the boot sector of drive 0 in the first place if the drive is broken?
Also, I would go with SSD drives. Intel makes theirs to last 5 years under heavy use, so I wouldn't be surprised to get 15 of light use.
Software RAID won't boot if the primary hdd fails, will it?
In fact half of all cars on US roads are at least 10 years old.
I am involved with hiring and firing where I work. I can tell you, for certain, we have gotten rid of numerous people with good soft skills, whom I personally liked, because I gave them specific technical tasks and they couldn't produce. Sure, the best people have both technical and social skills (and they move up almost too fast!) But given the choice of one over the other, give me somebody who might not sit with me at lunch, but who turns around assignments so quickly it surprises me. You know how it is, one person does in an afternoon what another somehow couldn't manage in 2 weeks.
The Navy seems to have a better safety record than just about anybody, including the Air Force.
Maybe they do understand but don't agree. Privatizing land is no way to protect it from toxic or nuclear waste. Ownership of land is a handy legal contrivance, but let's not take it too far. There is a finite amount of Earth for all the people that have lived, live now, and will ever live. Individuals live relatively briefly and have no right to carelessly dump nuclear waste that will far outlive them, regardless of some piece of paper. Ultimately our right to bury nuclear waste comes from exercising diligence and doing it in a way that won't cause any accidents for a very long time.
Anyways, airline pilots will be the last to go, after military recon pilots, bombers, cargo, and finally fighters, then civilian cargo flights. After a few decades and billions of miles flow autonomously in those roles, then we can talk about airliners without pilots.