To be more specific, the geometric mean has the property that a 5% change in factor A and a 5% change in factor B have the same influence on the result, regardless of their units.
There actually are rules on that, but in this case the firm winning the contract was technically a U.S.-based firm, which happens to be a subsidiary of a foreign company.
You could try to prohibit that, but that would cut out a lot of companies that often legitimately bid for contracts, e.g. Siemens USA is the American subsidiary of German-based Siemens. You could alternatively disqualify companies that outsource more than a certain percentage of their work, but that would disqualify a number of US-based firms, too, like IBM.
These kinds of contracts are supposed to be bid out to the lowest bidder.
If that actually happens: people complain that a company like Infosys wins the contract.
If it doesn't happen: people complain that the government is overpaying for IT services, and back up their allegations by quoting a much lower price someone in the private sector got (...from Infosys) as evidence that the government is inefficient.
All people who enjoy living in cities are hipsters? I guess like, 75% of Europeans are hipsters, because they prefer living in a nice part of London to some godforsaken suburb...
The parts of Oakland near the BART stations have undergone considerable gentrification over the past 10 years, and yeah, a lot of it is due to techies moving there. The area around West Oakland BART is nothing like it used to be, although some of that is also due to the area being less cut off since the demolition of the Cypress Street Viaduct. Uptown Oakland (near 19th st BART) is also pretty gentrified, again largely with tech workers.
Ah, good catch. In that case, if they aren't actually using existing wifi hardware, why pick that particular frequency range? It doesn't seem like it has particularly great properties as far as the intended application. Is it just due to regulatory issues, since it's in the mostly-unregulated ISM band?
When it comes to viewing the movement of humans through walls, there have already been infrared cameras for years, which in most situations will do anything this wifi approach can do and more. The only real advantage of this wifi approach is that it's cheaper, using ubiquitous commodity hardware.
So when it comes to government agencies, this doesn't really change the technological situation: they've already had the ability to track movement through walls for years. They're only restricted in using it to the extent that legal restraints are successful. For example in Kyllo v. United States the Supreme Court threw out a conviction that was obtained in part by using infrared cameras to look inside a home without a warrant.
Yeah, from their perspective individual inaccuracies aren't a huge deal. The only kind of inaccuracies that particularly matter to them are systemic ones that their actual customers, banks and lenders, care about. So e.g. if they were flagging large groups of would've-been-profitable folks or not flagging large groups of deadbeats, they might try to tweak their data-collection or score formula to reduce the rate of those false-positives or false-negatives. But that's all at a macro-level: much like Google, they don't care to resolve individual mistakes in a case-by-case manner.
I agree there are cases when you'd like to be able to write in the same language on the client and server sides. I'm undecided, though, whether Javascript on the server is the direction to go, or something-else-on-the-client. For example, you can now write both sides of the stack in Ocaml, and deploy the client side via Js_of_ocaml.
I guess it comes down to which ends up being less awkward: using JS on the server side instead of a more mature server-side language, or using something like Ocaml on the client side via a compiler, instead of the more standard client-side language?
Java's class system is quite static, compared to the runtime-modifiable classes of Smalltalk, Javascript, Lisp/CLOS, Python, etc. In some cases that doesn't matter. But if you want a highly dynamic language, V8 is a pretty solid compiler, better than anything in the Python or Ruby spheres (though perhaps some of the stuff in the Lisp world gives it a run for its money).
I wouldn't necessarily pick Javascript on its merits as a language, but for a language as dynamic as it is, it has very good optimizing compilers, probably research state-of-the-art for this kind of language (Google's V8 engine is largely built by ex-Smalltalk researchers). That gives it some advantages over, say, Python.
How did I imply it would be free? I said I was willing to pay $2 in R&D to save $1 in oil. Obviously that means I'm expecting and willing to pay a 2x premium.
Do you really think the corporations will absorb the costs or pass them on to the consumers!?
It depends on the market. If all products were priced as cost + fixed profit margin, then yes, an increase in cost would be reflected exactly in retail prices. And so would a decrease in cost.
But of course, retail prices aren't a fixed function of cost, and profit margins aren't fixed. In general, the prices companies charge is set by what the market will bear, not directly by their costs. If they could raise prices and still sell their stuff, they would've done so already, and just pocketed more money. If their costs go up, this does not necessarily mean the price the market will bear will go up the same amount. It depends on a number of factors, such as the structure of their competition, elasticity of demand, elasticity of supply, and so on. In most cases the answer is that it'll be some mixture: cost increases will be partly passed on and partly eaten by the company. Similarly, price decreases tend to be partly passed on and partly pocketed by the company.
Not to mention that reducing our use of oil might be a good way to stop sending piles of our cash to places like Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. I'd rather spend $2 on R&D to improve technology than $1 on importing oil: the latter is cheaper in the short-term, but not really in the long-term.
"It wasn't long ago that asteroid mining was only found in the pages of science fiction. Now [...] a Kick Starter campaign aimed at raising public awareness about asteroid mining..."
A Kickstarter campaign to raise money to raise awareness still seems like a few steps from mining asteroids...
Also their business model seems somewhat speculative. One of the main ideas seems to be that they can get around the return-it-to-earth problem by not returning it to earth. What good will the mining do then, you ask? Well, they'll just sell the resources to the Mars colony:
Space habitats, space stations are going to need hundreds of thousands or millions of liters of water, but there are some asteroids 75 meters across that are water rich. Just one has enough hydrogen and oxygen to fuel every Space Shuttle that’s ever been launched. It’s useful for fuel, its useful for supporting life and it’s full-blown radiation shielding for all those people talking about going to Mars. So, that is a resource that is of near-term interest.
But you're still putting some cuffs back on! Just different cuffs that use a different key. I'll admit it's a key that more people own, so it could be useful to e.g. open the phone at a friend's house.
Slashdot Mirror
To be more specific, the geometric mean has the property that a 5% change in factor A and a 5% change in factor B have the same influence on the result, regardless of their units.
There actually are rules on that, but in this case the firm winning the contract was technically a U.S.-based firm, which happens to be a subsidiary of a foreign company.
You could try to prohibit that, but that would cut out a lot of companies that often legitimately bid for contracts, e.g. Siemens USA is the American subsidiary of German-based Siemens. You could alternatively disqualify companies that outsource more than a certain percentage of their work, but that would disqualify a number of US-based firms, too, like IBM.
These kinds of contracts are supposed to be bid out to the lowest bidder.
If that actually happens: people complain that a company like Infosys wins the contract.
If it doesn't happen: people complain that the government is overpaying for IT services, and back up their allegations by quoting a much lower price someone in the private sector got (...from Infosys) as evidence that the government is inefficient.
I'm waiting for them to put out a press release when they hit 5x Linux market share.
They also have an abandoned/destroyed village from the area around Fukushima.
Now they just need to get Ukraine to let them drive the Street View car through Pripyat...
These days I don't think you really get sketchy points for anything in SF proper. Unless maybe you're living in an SRO in the Tenderloin.
All people who enjoy living in cities are hipsters? I guess like, 75% of Europeans are hipsters, because they prefer living in a nice part of London to some godforsaken suburb...
The parts of Oakland near the BART stations have undergone considerable gentrification over the past 10 years, and yeah, a lot of it is due to techies moving there. The area around West Oakland BART is nothing like it used to be, although some of that is also due to the area being less cut off since the demolition of the Cypress Street Viaduct. Uptown Oakland (near 19th st BART) is also pretty gentrified, again largely with tech workers.
Ah, good catch. In that case, if they aren't actually using existing wifi hardware, why pick that particular frequency range? It doesn't seem like it has particularly great properties as far as the intended application. Is it just due to regulatory issues, since it's in the mostly-unregulated ISM band?
When it comes to viewing the movement of humans through walls, there have already been infrared cameras for years, which in most situations will do anything this wifi approach can do and more. The only real advantage of this wifi approach is that it's cheaper, using ubiquitous commodity hardware.
So when it comes to government agencies, this doesn't really change the technological situation: they've already had the ability to track movement through walls for years. They're only restricted in using it to the extent that legal restraints are successful. For example in Kyllo v. United States the Supreme Court threw out a conviction that was obtained in part by using infrared cameras to look inside a home without a warrant.
Yeah, from their perspective individual inaccuracies aren't a huge deal. The only kind of inaccuracies that particularly matter to them are systemic ones that their actual customers, banks and lenders, care about. So e.g. if they were flagging large groups of would've-been-profitable folks or not flagging large groups of deadbeats, they might try to tweak their data-collection or score formula to reduce the rate of those false-positives or false-negatives. But that's all at a macro-level: much like Google, they don't care to resolve individual mistakes in a case-by-case manner.
Oddly the UK version still uses the Ask Jeeves branding, though I think it's not actually different.
You'll never make me use Google!
I agree there are cases when you'd like to be able to write in the same language on the client and server sides. I'm undecided, though, whether Javascript on the server is the direction to go, or something-else-on-the-client. For example, you can now write both sides of the stack in Ocaml, and deploy the client side via Js_of_ocaml.
I guess it comes down to which ends up being less awkward: using JS on the server side instead of a more mature server-side language, or using something like Ocaml on the client side via a compiler, instead of the more standard client-side language?
Java's class system is quite static, compared to the runtime-modifiable classes of Smalltalk, Javascript, Lisp/CLOS, Python, etc. In some cases that doesn't matter. But if you want a highly dynamic language, V8 is a pretty solid compiler, better than anything in the Python or Ruby spheres (though perhaps some of the stuff in the Lisp world gives it a run for its money).
I wouldn't necessarily pick Javascript on its merits as a language, but for a language as dynamic as it is, it has very good optimizing compilers, probably research state-of-the-art for this kind of language (Google's V8 engine is largely built by ex-Smalltalk researchers). That gives it some advantages over, say, Python.
You forgot $200 for black helicopters, $2000 for aliens, and $20,000 for communist fluoride in the water.
How did I imply it would be free? I said I was willing to pay $2 in R&D to save $1 in oil. Obviously that means I'm expecting and willing to pay a 2x premium.
Do you really think the corporations will absorb the costs or pass them on to the consumers!?
It depends on the market. If all products were priced as cost + fixed profit margin, then yes, an increase in cost would be reflected exactly in retail prices. And so would a decrease in cost.
But of course, retail prices aren't a fixed function of cost, and profit margins aren't fixed. In general, the prices companies charge is set by what the market will bear, not directly by their costs. If they could raise prices and still sell their stuff, they would've done so already, and just pocketed more money. If their costs go up, this does not necessarily mean the price the market will bear will go up the same amount. It depends on a number of factors, such as the structure of their competition, elasticity of demand, elasticity of supply, and so on. In most cases the answer is that it'll be some mixture: cost increases will be partly passed on and partly eaten by the company. Similarly, price decreases tend to be partly passed on and partly pocketed by the company.
Not to mention that reducing our use of oil might be a good way to stop sending piles of our cash to places like Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. I'd rather spend $2 on R&D to improve technology than $1 on importing oil: the latter is cheaper in the short-term, but not really in the long-term.
I've been trying out both a bit and I don't actually see a consistent edge either way anymore. Some queries are better on one side, some on the other.
And yes, it moved from the sci-fi pages to the realm of business plans and strategies.
So it got downgraded from hard sci-fi to soft sci-fi? ;-)
"It wasn't long ago that asteroid mining was only found in the pages of science fiction. Now [...] a Kick Starter campaign aimed at raising public awareness about asteroid mining..."
A Kickstarter campaign to raise money to raise awareness still seems like a few steps from mining asteroids...
Also their business model seems somewhat speculative. One of the main ideas seems to be that they can get around the return-it-to-earth problem by not returning it to earth. What good will the mining do then, you ask? Well, they'll just sell the resources to the Mars colony:
But you're still putting some cuffs back on! Just different cuffs that use a different key. I'll admit it's a key that more people own, so it could be useful to e.g. open the phone at a friend's house.
I agree it's annoying that the screws are a nonstandard kind. But this "liberation kit" consists of:
1. A pentalobe screwdriver that lets you operate the iPhone screws.
2. Some Philips head screws that you can replace the pentalobe screws with.
But once you have #1, why do you need to do #2?