I'm using the Intel SSD and I think it's great - fast and silent. Will it last? I'd argue you never know about any particular model of hard drive or SSD until a few years after it is released. On the other hand, I'd also argue it doesn't matter much. Say one drive has a 3% failure rate in the 3rd year and another has a 6% rate. That's a huge difference percentage-wise (100% increase). And yet it's only a 3% extra risk - and, most importantly, you need a backup either way.
I'm amazed your point is not obvious to all the coders here on slashdot. What if your clients demanded you code in "plain english" so they could understand what they were getting? There's a reason we cannot do that.
But paying a few hundred bucks for a hard drive was normal then, too, and now it's not.
And when data CDs first came out (mid-80s), they stored several times more than a high-end hard drive. Somewhere along the way, optical media fell far, far behind.
I've this constant concern that *something* will go wrong in the digital process.
You repeat the summary's 2x usage of "digital" distribution, meaning network distribution. What sort of physical media are you guys using, LP's? (Then again there's no reason you couldn't put digital information on those too).
Has this become common terminology while I wasn't looking?
That was my thought. FLIR, or binoculars, could fall under a reasonable definition of "bionic eyeballs" if they were miniaturized and implantable. Contact lenses might qualify right now. Sure they don't amaze you because you're used to them, but to somebody 1000 years ago they would be positively miraculous.
But analysing Bill Gates will never answer the question: given my own (sub-optimal) personal situation, how much would I benefit by trying? You don't want to be unrealistically optimistic (and waste your time) or pessimistic (and not achieve as much as you could have). All the Bill G. example shows is you'll never be #1 in the entire world unless you are both lucky and good. But normally you don't have to be #1 for something to be worthwhile.
I don't think there's a good answer to that. Libertarianism is a protest movement, so it doesn't need to be particularly well-defined. It's not until you actually get into power that you have to start making tough, divisive decisions.
I am one of them. But the idea that everybody could get wealthy on capital gains was always a mirage. People are down 50% from the market high, that doesn't mean they've lost half of what they put in. As for "nothing to do with it," I don't see how you can miss it. Using public funds in a way that benefits people so disproportionately is obviously wrong.
US real total compensation per hour has doubled since 1970.
So says the American Heritage Foundation (so this is in line with their usual tone), yet it doesn't even pass the laugh test. It would mean my real income is about twice that of my father at the same age. As it happens my position is extremely similar to his 30 years ago, both working at govt. labs. Except he got there with a bachelor's degree and I have a PhD, so I was in school (not earning a real income) much longer. He had the same number of kids, same number of cars, and a bigger house on a much bigger lot. He had a pension (which is now a godsend since his 401k nosedived shortly after his retirement).
The idea that real income has doubled since then is ludicrous.
Most people ARE Wall Street whether they know it or not. At least, anyone with a 401K, pension, or other retirement fund.
Far too many people are falling for this argument. The truth is, the top 1% alone owns over 30% of the wealth in America!. The bottom 80% of Americans, meanwhile, own only 16% of the wealth. So, sure, most Americans have a few stock holdings. But when people push for policies that rob workers to prop up speculators and sell it to the masses using this argument, it's a case of "100 for me, 1 for you."
It's without precedent. There is a little graph I would like to show you...
Just hold on for a second. Here's the same plot on a log scale, which is really more fair when comparing growth rates. Doesn't look quite so unprecedented now, does it? In fact if you look over near the left of the chart, ohh, about 1928 or so, something even worse happened. Now if only there were some way to adjust the whole thing for inflation.
Something HUGE has to happen to change that. Most people thought it would be a new president, but now we know that's not the case.
I watched Jim Cramer's Mad Money on the web last night and I cannot believe how much responsibility all these supposed capitalists are suddenly placing on the government. You know what Cramer's big explanation for the financial meltdown is? It's that Obama is scaring everybody by pushing for universal health care and carbon cap and trade. Give me a break! Let's go ahead and assume these programs are worse than even the Republicans ever dreamed... even so, is it rational to think they could push down the entire stock market by 40% or 50%? It's a curious desperation certain people have to place all blame on the government. "It must be because the government forced banks to extend loans to poor people." Or Steve Forbes (and the rest of the WSJ crowd) who blame "government blunders [that] temporarily paralyzed the global credit system." Sure Steve. It couldn't be that all your billionaire cronies were actually obscenely overpaid dart-throwing monkeys all along.
It's not clear to me that computer models have made bubbles any more severe or frequent than they were beforehand. Depressions/recessions/"panics" were fairly common in US history until the great depression. After than govt adopted a stronger approach to regulating the markets through the money supply which decreased the frequency of recessions.
This book has a chapter on how non science-based medicine actually is. For instance, when you go in and get a checkup and they listen to your heart with a stethoscope, guess what that's for? Nothing. But everybody does it. Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" also has a chapter about how an extremely small decision tree (with about 4 nodes) diagnoses heart attacks more accurately than physicians can do it subjectively.
It's typically very, very difficult to make a realistic calculation of how long it will take a residential PV system to pay for itself. People always ask me how long mine will take to pay for itself, and I always tell them honestly that I have absolutely no idea. The problem is that energy prices are extremely volatile -- that's why they exclude them from the CPI.
That just makes solar more appealing - who wants unpredictable uncontrollable costs? It gets tiring not knowing what kind of car to buy, or (for some) whether you'll be eating people food or cat food this winter due to yo-yoing energy costs.
Seemingly you'd need need less electricity for AC if your roof had solar panels diverting energy elsewhere instead of just turning sunshine into heat. Anybody know if that's true?
If physical books are no longer printed or printed in far smaller runs, this means that the secondary market collapses.
As a fellow book cheapskate I agree that is a little frightening. Hopefully the efficiency of electronic delivery, combined with the market forces of supply and demand, will force e-publishers to lower their prices after a book is a few months old. (Though I realize this has been a long-running issue with iTunes with many objecting to graduated pricing.)
If nothing else, look at it this way, somebody will build a lego Mindstorms robot to turn the pages on Kindle so you can scan it in and upload it to bittorrent without even cutting the spine off, take that DRM:) PS if you want me to implement this cool hack please gift me a new Kindle 2, I want one.
Well, that's because every discussion about economics on slashdot reminds somebody of the broken windows fallacy. In a few minutes somebody will claim Kindle is a hoax because saving energy on newspaper presses violates (their understanding of) the laws of thermodynamics. Then somebody else will say turning pages on Kindle is inherently unreliable because of the halting problem.
You know, that could be a good movie plot. A silicon valley company conceals the death of their reclusive but revered founder and CEO to prop up their stock price using high technology. Rather than "weekend and Bernie's" they could go more philosophical, like the substitution of brand identity for individual identity. In the end the secret is revealed but the public is so fond of the cgi character, they don't care, and true believers claim he obtained immortality by choosing to discard his body after uploading his soul into the CGI.
If anyone (fundies included) has a good argument against genetic manipulation,
they should be able to make it without invoking God, personal values or personal morals.
Why? Those are the things that are important to them. Expecting somebody to disregard their own values and morals in decision-making isn't just unrealistic, it's immoral:)
That's crazy. Your looks are a big factor in how people relate to you almost from birth. That has to impact your personality, and it certainly affects your prospects.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm using the Intel SSD and I think it's great - fast and silent. Will it last? I'd argue you never know about any particular model of hard drive or SSD until a few years after it is released. On the other hand, I'd also argue it doesn't matter much. Say one drive has a 3% failure rate in the 3rd year and another has a 6% rate. That's a huge difference percentage-wise (100% increase). And yet it's only a 3% extra risk - and, most importantly, you need a backup either way.
I'm amazed your point is not obvious to all the coders here on slashdot. What if your clients demanded you code in "plain english" so they could understand what they were getting? There's a reason we cannot do that.
Fine, but I refuse to use any newfangled CPU that has integrated cache memory and can't harness the power of my math coprocessor.
And when data CDs first came out (mid-80s), they stored several times more than a high-end hard drive. Somewhere along the way, optical media fell far, far behind.
You repeat the summary's 2x usage of "digital" distribution, meaning network distribution. What sort of physical media are you guys using, LP's? (Then again there's no reason you couldn't put digital information on those too).
Has this become common terminology while I wasn't looking?
That was my thought. FLIR, or binoculars, could fall under a reasonable definition of "bionic eyeballs" if they were miniaturized and implantable. Contact lenses might qualify right now. Sure they don't amaze you because you're used to them, but to somebody 1000 years ago they would be positively miraculous.
The headline should have said, "Authors of Every Book Still Under Copyright." That's what really matters, and does limit the scope.
But analysing Bill Gates will never answer the question: given my own (sub-optimal) personal situation, how much would I benefit by trying? You don't want to be unrealistically optimistic (and waste your time) or pessimistic (and not achieve as much as you could have). All the Bill G. example shows is you'll never be #1 in the entire world unless you are both lucky and good. But normally you don't have to be #1 for something to be worthwhile.
I don't think there's a good answer to that. Libertarianism is a protest movement, so it doesn't need to be particularly well-defined. It's not until you actually get into power that you have to start making tough, divisive decisions.
I am one of them. But the idea that everybody could get wealthy on capital gains was always a mirage. People are down 50% from the market high, that doesn't mean they've lost half of what they put in. As for "nothing to do with it," I don't see how you can miss it. Using public funds in a way that benefits people so disproportionately is obviously wrong.
So says the American Heritage Foundation (so this is in line with their usual tone), yet it doesn't even pass the laugh test. It would mean my real income is about twice that of my father at the same age. As it happens my position is extremely similar to his 30 years ago, both working at govt. labs. Except he got there with a bachelor's degree and I have a PhD, so I was in school (not earning a real income) much longer. He had the same number of kids, same number of cars, and a bigger house on a much bigger lot. He had a pension (which is now a godsend since his 401k nosedived shortly after his retirement).
The idea that real income has doubled since then is ludicrous.
Far too many people are falling for this argument. The truth is, the top 1% alone owns over 30% of the wealth in America!. The bottom 80% of Americans, meanwhile, own only 16% of the wealth. So, sure, most Americans have a few stock holdings. But when people push for policies that rob workers to prop up speculators and sell it to the masses using this argument, it's a case of "100 for me, 1 for you."
Just hold on for a second. Here's the same plot on a log scale, which is really more fair when comparing growth rates. Doesn't look quite so unprecedented now, does it? In fact if you look over near the left of the chart, ohh, about 1928 or so, something even worse happened. Now if only there were some way to adjust the whole thing for inflation.
I watched Jim Cramer's Mad Money on the web last night and I cannot believe how much responsibility all these supposed capitalists are suddenly placing on the government. You know what Cramer's big explanation for the financial meltdown is? It's that Obama is scaring everybody by pushing for universal health care and carbon cap and trade. Give me a break! Let's go ahead and assume these programs are worse than even the Republicans ever dreamed... even so, is it rational to think they could push down the entire stock market by 40% or 50%? It's a curious desperation certain people have to place all blame on the government. "It must be because the government forced banks to extend loans to poor people." Or Steve Forbes (and the rest of the WSJ crowd) who blame "government blunders [that] temporarily paralyzed the global credit system." Sure Steve. It couldn't be that all your billionaire cronies were actually obscenely overpaid dart-throwing monkeys all along.
It's not clear to me that computer models have made bubbles any more severe or frequent than they were beforehand. Depressions/recessions/"panics" were fairly common in US history until the great depression. After than govt adopted a stronger approach to regulating the markets through the money supply which decreased the frequency of recessions.
This book has a chapter on how non science-based medicine actually is. For instance, when you go in and get a checkup and they listen to your heart with a stethoscope, guess what that's for? Nothing. But everybody does it. Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" also has a chapter about how an extremely small decision tree (with about 4 nodes) diagnoses heart attacks more accurately than physicians can do it subjectively.
That just makes solar more appealing - who wants unpredictable uncontrollable costs? It gets tiring not knowing what kind of car to buy, or (for some) whether you'll be eating people food or cat food this winter due to yo-yoing energy costs.
Seemingly you'd need need less electricity for AC if your roof had solar panels diverting energy elsewhere instead of just turning sunshine into heat. Anybody know if that's true?
As a fellow book cheapskate I agree that is a little frightening. Hopefully the efficiency of electronic delivery, combined with the market forces of supply and demand, will force e-publishers to lower their prices after a book is a few months old. (Though I realize this has been a long-running issue with iTunes with many objecting to graduated pricing.)
If nothing else, look at it this way, somebody will build a lego Mindstorms robot to turn the pages on Kindle so you can scan it in and upload it to bittorrent without even cutting the spine off, take that DRM :) PS if you want me to implement this cool hack please gift me a new Kindle 2, I want one.
In your world, are cellphones a ploy to put bike messengers out of work?
Well, that's because every discussion about economics on slashdot reminds somebody of the broken windows fallacy. In a few minutes somebody will claim Kindle is a hoax because saving energy on newspaper presses violates (their understanding of) the laws of thermodynamics. Then somebody else will say turning pages on Kindle is inherently unreliable because of the halting problem.
You know, that could be a good movie plot. A silicon valley company conceals the death of their reclusive but revered founder and CEO to prop up their stock price using high technology. Rather than "weekend and Bernie's" they could go more philosophical, like the substitution of brand identity for individual identity. In the end the secret is revealed but the public is so fond of the cgi character, they don't care, and true believers claim he obtained immortality by choosing to discard his body after uploading his soul into the CGI.
Quick, email NASA before they forget to engineer reliability in the new space station they're launching next week.
Why? Those are the things that are important to them. Expecting somebody to disregard their own values and morals in decision-making isn't just unrealistic, it's immoral :)
That's crazy. Your looks are a big factor in how people relate to you almost from birth. That has to impact your personality, and it certainly affects your prospects.