A lot of people seem to sort of think of doctors as an authority figure who tells them not to do "bad" stuff. Maybe this product is trying to strengthen that view?
Of course, it's not clear anyone asked the doctors if they want that role, or this addition information. What are doctors going to do with thousands of smartphone notifications about their patients doing dumb things?
Those were really specific tariffs, though, only on solar panels, which are not really essential to the U.S. economy. The problem with general trade sanctions is that we get all our stuff from China, so we can't afford to ban importing it. If there were even a temporary blanket import ban, almost all U.S. computer manufacturers would have to suspend sales. You probably wouldn't even be able to buy a toaster.
Out of curiosity: How far back do you have to go to find a car with no electronics in it? Early-'90s? Or is there more recent stuff still manufactured without onboard computers?
This is more about ad-hoc/inefficient/poorly-maintained storage of stuff on scattered servers, not bulk storage.
The NSA, by contrast, actually has relatively few data centers, just a few large and well-provisioned ones. They're not storing your stuff on random Windows servers parked in the corner of an office, which is more what this initiative is trying to identify and reduce.
If you count every group of servers stashed in an office somewhere as a "data center", most big companies have thousands. Tech companies may take things slightly more seriously, but big non-tech companies have data scattered everywhere, often in poorly organized network drives full of Excel spreadsheets and Word docs. That's why you end up with things like a petrochemical company losing blueprints when an office moves and some random machines get lost in the shuffle.
I agree with your second point, but the "it was a natural disaster" part isn't a very good defense. Designing for safe shutdown and containment in case of a natural disaster is very much within the scope of nuclear engineering. A reactor isn't supposed to fail in this way even during a natural disaster, so if it does, something has gone wrong on the human side: either the design was not sufficient, the construction was faulty, operational procedures were insufficient, or some mixture of those causes.
In this case, as far as I can gather, the plant's engineering relative to its design basis was solid, but the initially chosen design basis was too low, based on significant underestimates of what a worst-case storm surge would look like. That was apparently discovered some years ago as storm-surge estimates improved, but the plant was not upgraded or replaced, for some mixture of regulatory/financial/etc. reasons.
That's actually a much better policy from an economic perspective as well. If you want to let in a fixed number of people (say, 50,000) for the reason that they will fill shortages and benefit the economy, how should you allocate them to different fields? The obvious market-driven answer is: allocate them to the highest bidder, who we can presume must have the greatest need for them. An employer willing to pay $120k for an H1-B obviously feels a greater need for them than an employer only willing to pay $60k.
Basing it on prevailing wages, by contrast, doesn't really make much sense.
Tourism's an important part of the local economy, so this could end up a decent gimmick from that perspective. Giant sun-tracking mirrors sounds like a more interesting tourist attraction than stadium-style floodlights.
Man, the 12" PowerBook G4 is still my favorite computer I've owned. Got about 5 years of full-time use out of it. Good portable form-factor, especially for the time, durable, decent battery life.
I eventually moved on because PPC stopped being treated as a first-class citizen, and things like browsers ended up with a huge performance gap, since the modern JS engines didn't get ported to PPC. And new software stopped being available.
That's actually a pretty competitive price. I can't find a way to configure, say, a Lenovo Ultrabook with an SSD and anywhere near comparable CPU for less than $1200.
Off-topic: Why did you link to that book in your sig?
Just think it's an interesting book, and might be interesting to some folks here. It's an analysis of a particularly simple Commodore-era maze generator, like the kind that got pushed much further by later work in procedural level/terrain/etc. generation, and especially in demoscene stuff. Here's what the code looks like when run. The book's a bit "academic" at times (it's an MIT Press book after all), but I think quite interesting. Two of the co-authors also wrote a book on the Atari 2600.
Turns out that Norway has one of the world's largest thorium deposits, which is part of the motivation. I guess having huge oil deposits, hydro-energy resources, and wind-energy resources wasn't enough...
Looking at the 7" tablets, it seems like these devices are all quite similar:
Google Nexus 7
Lenovo IdeaTab A3000
Samsung Galaxy 3 7"
All roughly $200. Front and back cameras, vaguely comparable processors. The Nexus has a higher screen resolution than the other two, but lacks the microSD slot that the other two have. The Samsung uses its own Samsung app store, while the Google and Lenovo use the Google Play store. Anything else different?
If I get this correct, this is the original study being challenged:
A 2009 study (PDF) by the McAfee estimated that hacking costs the global economy $1 trillion.
And here is the new evidence:
A new estimate by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (and underwritten by McAfee) suggests the number is closer to closer to $300 billion
So this is two different McAfee-funded studies dueling it out?
A fun fact is that neither of the two Ataris suing each other here are in any reasonable sense the original Atari. First of all, the original company split in 1984 due to financial difficulties, into two companies: 1) Atari Games, which owned the rights to the classic game IP; and 2) Atari Computer, which took over making actual hardware.
Atari Games existed for a few year in the mid-'80s, but in the late '80s went defunct, getting bought up by Time Warner, which later became AOL, which later sold them to Midway Games, which was later acquired by Warner Bros. So it's basically a copyright holding company owned by some group of investors that is several degrees of separation removed from anyone who actually worked on an Atari game.
Atari Computer initially did some interesting stuff, mostly notably putting out the Atari ST, and later the Atari 7800. They sort of tanked in the late-'80s/early-'90s though, when the Atari Lynx and the Atari Jaguar both fell hugely short of expectations. This half of the company then met the same fate as Atari Games: it de-facto ceased to exist, except as IP that got sold around between various companies that never had anything to do with its products, in this case Hasbro and Infogrames. And now two parts of this half are suing each other.
The short version of the story is: Atari got split up in 1984, was defunct by 1993, and now two, of at least three, companies that own some kind of claim to the name "Atari" are suing each other, but none of them have anything to do with Atari, except insofar as they are leeches who've somehow ended up with the rights to exploit the trademark.
Viber Media is a Cyprus-based company with development centers in Belarus and Israel. The company was founded by American-Israeli entrepreneur Talmon Marco.
From that, you can surmise how many different governments are likely to have access to its call "metadata".
At the moment, even noncommercial users who download the software and use it to encode videos are in a murky situation, since patents don't by default have an exception for noncommercial use; simply encoding personal videos via a patented method constitutes "practicing" the invention. The H.264 license specifically gives a royalty-free patent grant for noncommercial use (as well as a few other types of use), which clears up that case. What would be helpful is if MPEG-LA came out and said whether it plans to do that with H.265 also.
Not even just that it's almost certainly covered by a pile of patents, but unlike H.264, there isn't any clarity yet about which ones, and what the licensing terms will be like. Will the categories of royalty-free use granted to H.264 codecs also be applied to H.265? Nobody seems to know. MPEG-LA hasn't issued an update since June 2012, at which point they were still at the stage of calling for patent-holders to submit claims.
Sure, I'm not arguing they did well, and they might even lose some money. But they don't seem like massive, industry-changing flops. I mean, The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002) was a real flop: $100 million budget, theatre gross of $7 million. Yes, a single-digit gross. Or more recently and only slightly less bad, Mars Needs Moms (2011), which will be lucky if it ever earns back even $50 million of its $150 million production budget.
It could be wrong expectations, but when I read this story about six massive flops that could change the industry, I was expecting a cluster of flops of that magnitude.
Sure, they're shit films, and they didn't do as well as hoped, either. But take White House Down: this flop has still made $100m at the box office so far, out of a budget of $150m. Add in some residual sales over the next few weeks and Netflix and cable and whatnot and it'll probably either break even or come close. Now breaking even isn't the ideal outcome, but a massive flop requires doing considerably worse than that.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of people seem to sort of think of doctors as an authority figure who tells them not to do "bad" stuff. Maybe this product is trying to strengthen that view?
Of course, it's not clear anyone asked the doctors if they want that role, or this addition information. What are doctors going to do with thousands of smartphone notifications about their patients doing dumb things?
Did they throw out the simulation code as well?
Those were really specific tariffs, though, only on solar panels, which are not really essential to the U.S. economy. The problem with general trade sanctions is that we get all our stuff from China, so we can't afford to ban importing it. If there were even a temporary blanket import ban, almost all U.S. computer manufacturers would have to suspend sales. You probably wouldn't even be able to buy a toaster.
Out of curiosity: How far back do you have to go to find a car with no electronics in it? Early-'90s? Or is there more recent stuff still manufactured without onboard computers?
This is more about ad-hoc/inefficient/poorly-maintained storage of stuff on scattered servers, not bulk storage.
The NSA, by contrast, actually has relatively few data centers, just a few large and well-provisioned ones. They're not storing your stuff on random Windows servers parked in the corner of an office, which is more what this initiative is trying to identify and reduce.
If you count every group of servers stashed in an office somewhere as a "data center", most big companies have thousands. Tech companies may take things slightly more seriously, but big non-tech companies have data scattered everywhere, often in poorly organized network drives full of Excel spreadsheets and Word docs. That's why you end up with things like a petrochemical company losing blueprints when an office moves and some random machines get lost in the shuffle.
I agree with your second point, but the "it was a natural disaster" part isn't a very good defense. Designing for safe shutdown and containment in case of a natural disaster is very much within the scope of nuclear engineering. A reactor isn't supposed to fail in this way even during a natural disaster, so if it does, something has gone wrong on the human side: either the design was not sufficient, the construction was faulty, operational procedures were insufficient, or some mixture of those causes.
In this case, as far as I can gather, the plant's engineering relative to its design basis was solid, but the initially chosen design basis was too low, based on significant underestimates of what a worst-case storm surge would look like. That was apparently discovered some years ago as storm-surge estimates improved, but the plant was not upgraded or replaced, for some mixture of regulatory/financial/etc. reasons.
The ol' Archimedes death ray.
Well, it was wrong about the roll-call, anyway. It was posted within an hour or so, which is exactly where that Slashdot comment got the tally.
Here's every roll call vote this Congressional session, from the Library of Congress. And here is the one you're thinking of.
That's actually a much better policy from an economic perspective as well. If you want to let in a fixed number of people (say, 50,000) for the reason that they will fill shortages and benefit the economy, how should you allocate them to different fields? The obvious market-driven answer is: allocate them to the highest bidder, who we can presume must have the greatest need for them. An employer willing to pay $120k for an H1-B obviously feels a greater need for them than an employer only willing to pay $60k.
Basing it on prevailing wages, by contrast, doesn't really make much sense.
Or doctors, for that matter, a field that actually does have a bona-fide shortage.
Tourism's an important part of the local economy, so this could end up a decent gimmick from that perspective. Giant sun-tracking mirrors sounds like a more interesting tourist attraction than stadium-style floodlights.
Man, the 12" PowerBook G4 is still my favorite computer I've owned. Got about 5 years of full-time use out of it. Good portable form-factor, especially for the time, durable, decent battery life.
I eventually moved on because PPC stopped being treated as a first-class citizen, and things like browsers ended up with a huge performance gap, since the modern JS engines didn't get ported to PPC. And new software stopped being available.
That's actually a pretty competitive price. I can't find a way to configure, say, a Lenovo Ultrabook with an SSD and anywhere near comparable CPU for less than $1200.
Just think it's an interesting book, and might be interesting to some folks here. It's an analysis of a particularly simple Commodore-era maze generator, like the kind that got pushed much further by later work in procedural level/terrain/etc. generation, and especially in demoscene stuff. Here's what the code looks like when run. The book's a bit "academic" at times (it's an MIT Press book after all), but I think quite interesting. Two of the co-authors also wrote a book on the Atari 2600.
Thor Energy started a trial earlier this month.
Turns out that Norway has one of the world's largest thorium deposits, which is part of the motivation. I guess having huge oil deposits, hydro-energy resources, and wind-energy resources wasn't enough...
Looking at the 7" tablets, it seems like these devices are all quite similar:
All roughly $200. Front and back cameras, vaguely comparable processors. The Nexus has a higher screen resolution than the other two, but lacks the microSD slot that the other two have. The Samsung uses its own Samsung app store, while the Google and Lenovo use the Google Play store. Anything else different?
If I get this correct, this is the original study being challenged:
And here is the new evidence:
So this is two different McAfee-funded studies dueling it out?
A fun fact is that neither of the two Ataris suing each other here are in any reasonable sense the original Atari. First of all, the original company split in 1984 due to financial difficulties, into two companies: 1) Atari Games, which owned the rights to the classic game IP; and 2) Atari Computer, which took over making actual hardware.
Atari Games existed for a few year in the mid-'80s, but in the late '80s went defunct, getting bought up by Time Warner, which later became AOL, which later sold them to Midway Games, which was later acquired by Warner Bros. So it's basically a copyright holding company owned by some group of investors that is several degrees of separation removed from anyone who actually worked on an Atari game.
Atari Computer initially did some interesting stuff, mostly notably putting out the Atari ST, and later the Atari 7800. They sort of tanked in the late-'80s/early-'90s though, when the Atari Lynx and the Atari Jaguar both fell hugely short of expectations. This half of the company then met the same fate as Atari Games: it de-facto ceased to exist, except as IP that got sold around between various companies that never had anything to do with its products, in this case Hasbro and Infogrames. And now two parts of this half are suing each other.
The short version of the story is: Atari got split up in 1984, was defunct by 1993, and now two, of at least three, companies that own some kind of claim to the name "Atari" are suing each other, but none of them have anything to do with Atari, except insofar as they are leeches who've somehow ended up with the rights to exploit the trademark.
From Wikipedia,
From that, you can surmise how many different governments are likely to have access to its call "metadata".
At the moment, even noncommercial users who download the software and use it to encode videos are in a murky situation, since patents don't by default have an exception for noncommercial use; simply encoding personal videos via a patented method constitutes "practicing" the invention. The H.264 license specifically gives a royalty-free patent grant for noncommercial use (as well as a few other types of use), which clears up that case. What would be helpful is if MPEG-LA came out and said whether it plans to do that with H.265 also.
Not even just that it's almost certainly covered by a pile of patents, but unlike H.264, there isn't any clarity yet about which ones, and what the licensing terms will be like. Will the categories of royalty-free use granted to H.264 codecs also be applied to H.265? Nobody seems to know. MPEG-LA hasn't issued an update since June 2012, at which point they were still at the stage of calling for patent-holders to submit claims.
Sure, I'm not arguing they did well, and they might even lose some money. But they don't seem like massive, industry-changing flops. I mean, The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002) was a real flop: $100 million budget, theatre gross of $7 million. Yes, a single-digit gross. Or more recently and only slightly less bad, Mars Needs Moms (2011), which will be lucky if it ever earns back even $50 million of its $150 million production budget.
It could be wrong expectations, but when I read this story about six massive flops that could change the industry, I was expecting a cluster of flops of that magnitude.
So why couldn't Google do that?
Sure, they're shit films, and they didn't do as well as hoped, either. But take White House Down: this flop has still made $100m at the box office so far, out of a budget of $150m. Add in some residual sales over the next few weeks and Netflix and cable and whatnot and it'll probably either break even or come close. Now breaking even isn't the ideal outcome, but a massive flop requires doing considerably worse than that.