Houston is leaning more center-left these days (I'm from Houston), especially in local politics. The last Republican to occupy the mayor's office left it thirty years ago. Even in national politics it's slightly D-leaning, by a few percent: Barack Obama and John McCain almost exactly tied in Harris County (Obama won by 0.1%), but McCain outperformed in unincorporated Harris County, with Obama winning the city by ~5%.
PACER charges far more than the cost of operating the service; their goal (as instructed by Congress) seems to be to fund the entire court system's electronic infrastructure out of PACER fees, not only PACER itself. As a result, the service itself generates more than $100m annual surplus.
Cutting up Texas doesn't really resolve most of the political issues, though. There isn't a huge regional difference in attitudes, but more of an urban/suburban/rural split. The big Texas cities (Austin, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas) are all center-left to varying degrees, while the suburbs are center-right, and the rural areas are hard-right.
A split that puts Marin in a different state from SF doesn't make a lot of sense, considering how much commuting goes across the Golden Gate. The greater SF Bay Area should at least be in the same state.
There is a really small but similar sentiment in Illinois too. The people who live in rural Illinois feel like the people who live in Chicago and the suburban areas surrounding Chicago disproportionately affect Illinois politics. They feel that the state would be better without Chicago.
I can actually understand that sentiment. But the California equivalent would be Central Valley or far northern secessionists. Silicon Valley can't really make the same kind of argument, because it is already very influential in California politics. Of course, it shares that influence with Los Angeles rather than having it entirely to itself, but the Bay Area is one of the state's main political power bases.
The government themselves do this kind of thing sometimes: charge for the actual delivery of the digital documents, which are public domain. That's not illegal, just not really sustainable. Since they're public domain, anyone who buys them could, if they choose, redistribute them. One instance of that that I recall was that in 1999, Bruce Perens bought the TIGER geographic data set from the US Census on CD, for I think $500 or $1000 or something, and then released it online freely. The Census Bureau wised up and you can now download new versions of the TIGER data set directly from the Census at the previous link instead of having to play that game.
Another example is the court document database, PACER, which has public-domain documents but charges per-page for access. That's led to RECAP, a project to slowly siphon documents out of it and republish them.
Hey man we don't need none of yo science, we got Common Sense Internet Man here, who read 4 sentences on the topic and is gonna design him a better rover than all them eggheads!
Just a printout of random numbers would be way much more secure than their otp generator electronic crapola.
A pretty large amount of what RSA sells could be replaced with simple commodity tech and be an improvement. At best they sell hugely overpriced Enterprise-Ready versions of those same commodity encryption tools, packaged into "appliances". Apparently they didn't even do that right, though.
From the summary, it seems they're specifically looking at the decline in mitochondrial function that accompanies aging. There's already known to be such a relationship, and the study linked here is claiming that increasing the levels of something claimed NAD+ in the muscular tissue of mice appears to reverse the decline in mitochondrial function.
One interesting stat is that 75% of sales were actually older BB7 devices.
It's hard to say for sure, but I suspect this is mostly existing corporate customers who are already standardized on BB7 company-wide just buying more devices, as replacements for broken devices, and/or to provide devices to new staff. That provides a nice short/medium-term revenue stream, but is only sustainable in the long-term if, when these corporate customers eventually replace their BB7 infrastructure, they go with something newer that's also from BlackBerry, rather than moving elsewhere.
My guess is they didn't choose Genesis chapter 3 for the reading either, about how Man shouldn't eat from the forbidden tree of knowledge, lest he realize he's naked.
Genesis 3:8 And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.
3:9 And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?
3:10 And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.
3:11 And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?
The "Zero" refers to the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, a suicide-bombing device that's been manufactured in large quantities, many of which are currently unaccounted for. A "Zero attack" is a common kind of suicide bomber strategy that's killed thousands of Americans. Here's some footage. It's not as popular as it used to be, but we can't risk letting up our vigilance, of course.
Another way of phrasing this is that the NSA's metadata collection program, while admittedly not perfect, has met or exceeded the benchmarks set by peer agencies, such as the TSA.
The subtext is that it's less controversial among people who could possibly constrain the NSA's activities in this area, i.e. U.S. citizens & politicians.
Just Say No! (alas too many people fear income tax)
Yeah, I think it comes down to that. I've lived in Texas at times, and it's a huge point of pride that there is no income tax in Texas. Of course, it still needs a budget to provide basic government services. So there are very high property taxes, moderate but recently increased sales taxes, and a recently introduced corporate tax (called the "franchise tax" in local lingo). Those are all in several ways actually worse than an income tax, but they "aren't an income tax", so politicians and voters prefer them.
Jennifer Bartlett does seem to be 2nd author on the linked paper (out of 14 authors). It's true the news story doesn't seem to have interviewed her or given much credit, though.
As the summary notes, it was only recently discovered that this system has three gravitationally bound stars, making it the widest such group currently known. Paper from a few months ago on the arXiv, and a news write-up of that.
With a value-added tax (VAT), if you buy $150 of intermediary stuff, and use it to produce $200 of stuff, the tax is levied on $200 in total value, which is charged as $150 on the first sale and $50 to the second sale. If you buy equipment that is producing goods or more equipment, you only pay sales tax on the incremental value added, not on the cost of the machinery.
With a sales tax, you either charge on both sales for the full amount, in which case a $200 product has paid sales tax on $350 worth of sales in this example, or you do special-case exemptions, such as exempting "manufacturing equipment" from sales tax entirely, as some states do. Sales taxes are also more brittle because since the entire tax on charged on the final retail transaction, it encourages black-market no-sales-tax sales.
So far they seem to be one of the safer parts of spaceflight, in that there have been 204 spacewalkers, and none died or suffered serious injuries. Whereas a number of people have died during take-off or reentry. On the other hand, they're typically planned for very carefully and not done that often. And 204 is too small a sample to reliably compare it to the safety of scuba diving, since serious scuba accidents, especially by professionals, are far less common than 1/200 dives.
Sure, but that's a market-internal "value" that doesn't lead to the kind of idealized market that actually makes any sense.
You can see this fairly clearly if you study dynamical systems. Some of them are "well-behaved", in which inputs/ouputs relate as you might expect. But many have internal pathologies that they can fall into if they reach certain states: feedback loops and chaotic behavior and such that's driven by system-internal (aka market-internal) dynamics and disconnected from anything else (such as any market-external notion of value).
Both parties in a trade value what they are getting more than what they give.
For a certain definition of value, yes, but not necessarily for the common one. In an idealized market, you do hope this is true for the common definition also: people have independently assessed how much they value some commodity, and offer a price accordingly. The price then converges on some aggregation of values.
But in real markets, this is often recursive: someone is offering $x for a commodity not because they themselves consider it to have a certain value, but because they think they will be able to resell it for $(x+y), due to market fluctuations. They may themselves consider it a worthless pile of trash valued at $0; day-traders, unlike value investors, don't make trade decisions based on their own assessments of the underlying value of the commodities or equities they're buying and selling. Instead they base their decisions on statistical estimates of market dynamics, independent of whatever the underlying item is and whether it may or may not have any value at all (models often don't even consider the underlying item in the equation).
Well, he did produce OpenBSD, which could be seen as constructive criticism in a sense (instead of just complaining, build something). But yeah, if you mean constructively criticizing things in text, that's not really his strong point.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you mean "O.co".
Houston is leaning more center-left these days (I'm from Houston), especially in local politics. The last Republican to occupy the mayor's office left it thirty years ago. Even in national politics it's slightly D-leaning, by a few percent: Barack Obama and John McCain almost exactly tied in Harris County (Obama won by 0.1%), but McCain outperformed in unincorporated Harris County, with Obama winning the city by ~5%.
PACER charges far more than the cost of operating the service; their goal (as instructed by Congress) seems to be to fund the entire court system's electronic infrastructure out of PACER fees, not only PACER itself. As a result, the service itself generates more than $100m annual surplus.
So, umm... who's the idiot(s) here?
It's you, hillbilly.
Cutting up Texas doesn't really resolve most of the political issues, though. There isn't a huge regional difference in attitudes, but more of an urban/suburban/rural split. The big Texas cities (Austin, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas) are all center-left to varying degrees, while the suburbs are center-right, and the rural areas are hard-right.
A split that puts Marin in a different state from SF doesn't make a lot of sense, considering how much commuting goes across the Golden Gate. The greater SF Bay Area should at least be in the same state.
There is a really small but similar sentiment in Illinois too. The people who live in rural Illinois feel like the people who live in Chicago and the suburban areas surrounding Chicago disproportionately affect Illinois politics. They feel that the state would be better without Chicago.
I can actually understand that sentiment. But the California equivalent would be Central Valley or far northern secessionists. Silicon Valley can't really make the same kind of argument, because it is already very influential in California politics. Of course, it shares that influence with Los Angeles rather than having it entirely to itself, but the Bay Area is one of the state's main political power bases.
The government themselves do this kind of thing sometimes: charge for the actual delivery of the digital documents, which are public domain. That's not illegal, just not really sustainable. Since they're public domain, anyone who buys them could, if they choose, redistribute them. One instance of that that I recall was that in 1999, Bruce Perens bought the TIGER geographic data set from the US Census on CD, for I think $500 or $1000 or something, and then released it online freely. The Census Bureau wised up and you can now download new versions of the TIGER data set directly from the Census at the previous link instead of having to play that game.
Another example is the court document database, PACER, which has public-domain documents but charges per-page for access. That's led to RECAP, a project to slowly siphon documents out of it and republish them.
Hey man we don't need none of yo science, we got Common Sense Internet Man here, who read 4 sentences on the topic and is gonna design him a better rover than all them eggheads!
A pretty large amount of what RSA sells could be replaced with simple commodity tech and be an improvement. At best they sell hugely overpriced Enterprise-Ready versions of those same commodity encryption tools, packaged into "appliances". Apparently they didn't even do that right, though.
From the summary, it seems they're specifically looking at the decline in mitochondrial function that accompanies aging. There's already known to be such a relationship, and the study linked here is claiming that increasing the levels of something claimed NAD+ in the muscular tissue of mice appears to reverse the decline in mitochondrial function.
It's hard to say for sure, but I suspect this is mostly existing corporate customers who are already standardized on BB7 company-wide just buying more devices, as replacements for broken devices, and/or to provide devices to new staff. That provides a nice short/medium-term revenue stream, but is only sustainable in the long-term if, when these corporate customers eventually replace their BB7 infrastructure, they go with something newer that's also from BlackBerry, rather than moving elsewhere.
My guess is they didn't choose Genesis chapter 3 for the reading either, about how Man shouldn't eat from the forbidden tree of knowledge, lest he realize he's naked.
The "Zero" refers to the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, a suicide-bombing device that's been manufactured in large quantities, many of which are currently unaccounted for. A "Zero attack" is a common kind of suicide bomber strategy that's killed thousands of Americans. Here's some footage. It's not as popular as it used to be, but we can't risk letting up our vigilance, of course.
Another way of phrasing this is that the NSA's metadata collection program, while admittedly not perfect, has met or exceeded the benchmarks set by peer agencies, such as the TSA.
The subtext is that it's less controversial among people who could possibly constrain the NSA's activities in this area, i.e. U.S. citizens & politicians.
Just Say No! (alas too many people fear income tax)
Yeah, I think it comes down to that. I've lived in Texas at times, and it's a huge point of pride that there is no income tax in Texas. Of course, it still needs a budget to provide basic government services. So there are very high property taxes, moderate but recently increased sales taxes, and a recently introduced corporate tax (called the "franchise tax" in local lingo). Those are all in several ways actually worse than an income tax, but they "aren't an income tax", so politicians and voters prefer them.
Jennifer Bartlett does seem to be 2nd author on the linked paper (out of 14 authors). It's true the news story doesn't seem to have interviewed her or given much credit, though.
As the summary notes, it was only recently discovered that this system has three gravitationally bound stars, making it the widest such group currently known. Paper from a few months ago on the arXiv, and a news write-up of that.
With a value-added tax (VAT), if you buy $150 of intermediary stuff, and use it to produce $200 of stuff, the tax is levied on $200 in total value, which is charged as $150 on the first sale and $50 to the second sale. If you buy equipment that is producing goods or more equipment, you only pay sales tax on the incremental value added, not on the cost of the machinery.
With a sales tax, you either charge on both sales for the full amount, in which case a $200 product has paid sales tax on $350 worth of sales in this example, or you do special-case exemptions, such as exempting "manufacturing equipment" from sales tax entirely, as some states do. Sales taxes are also more brittle because since the entire tax on charged on the final retail transaction, it encourages black-market no-sales-tax sales.
So far they seem to be one of the safer parts of spaceflight, in that there have been 204 spacewalkers, and none died or suffered serious injuries. Whereas a number of people have died during take-off or reentry. On the other hand, they're typically planned for very carefully and not done that often. And 204 is too small a sample to reliably compare it to the safety of scuba diving, since serious scuba accidents, especially by professionals, are far less common than 1/200 dives.
Bitcoiners on reddit are completely delusional.
A sentence that is guaranteed to be true for two independent reasons. ;-)
Sure, but that's a market-internal "value" that doesn't lead to the kind of idealized market that actually makes any sense.
You can see this fairly clearly if you study dynamical systems. Some of them are "well-behaved", in which inputs/ouputs relate as you might expect. But many have internal pathologies that they can fall into if they reach certain states: feedback loops and chaotic behavior and such that's driven by system-internal (aka market-internal) dynamics and disconnected from anything else (such as any market-external notion of value).
For a certain definition of value, yes, but not necessarily for the common one. In an idealized market, you do hope this is true for the common definition also: people have independently assessed how much they value some commodity, and offer a price accordingly. The price then converges on some aggregation of values.
But in real markets, this is often recursive: someone is offering $x for a commodity not because they themselves consider it to have a certain value, but because they think they will be able to resell it for $(x+y), due to market fluctuations. They may themselves consider it a worthless pile of trash valued at $0; day-traders, unlike value investors, don't make trade decisions based on their own assessments of the underlying value of the commodities or equities they're buying and selling. Instead they base their decisions on statistical estimates of market dynamics, independent of whatever the underlying item is and whether it may or may not have any value at all (models often don't even consider the underlying item in the equation).
Well, he did produce OpenBSD, which could be seen as constructive criticism in a sense (instead of just complaining, build something). But yeah, if you mean constructively criticizing things in text, that's not really his strong point.