It has a larger government measured by percentage of GDP: government spending equals 50% of GDP. It's true that it has lower debt, because it also has much higher taxes (around 50% of GDP as well), so it pays for its spending rather than selling bonds to pay for it.
Sounds pretty silly. I moved from the USA to Denmark and things work much better here. You know why? Because the government is twice as big, not smaller. So infrastructure is actually built and maintained, healthcare coverage is universal, education is strong, the unemployed get skills retraining, etc., etc.
it's easy for LivingSocial to force password resets, but impossible to get users to create different passwords for each site they visit
It also ought to be easy for LivingSocial to store passwords hashed with a secure hash designed for passwords, like scrypt (or the related bcrypt). That way even if the password db is compromised, the plaintext passwords aren't, and the attacker cannot use the result to get into other services, even if users shared passwords across services.
It's easy to blame users, but there has been no excuse for storing plaintext passwords for years now. Password reuse is a much smaller problem if websites are designed properly. So rather than "as an industry" attempting to change user behavior, how about "as an industry" implement your damn sites properly, and audit that.
You'd think if you were buying some devices claiming to detect something-or-other, you would try out a specimen and see if it works. Did all of these countries he sold them to fail to do any testing on whether they worked?
I agree there are diminishing returns, but some heavily traveled routes could certainly be better. For example, the whole Westside is relatively compact but poorly served by transit, since the purple line stops after like 1 mile due to being axed after partial construction. It'd be sensible for it to continue west, which fortunately does seem like it may happen. Any kind of transit connection to LAX would also be useful.
People have been making receivers on CNC machines for years. It's not a particularly difficult part to manufacture, compared to something like a barrel.
The 405 expansion is only moderately cheaper than the Red Line, even if you measure purely in terms of construction cost per capacity. For $1.1b, it's estimated to add capacity for another 50k passengers/day or so, making it cost about $22k per new passenger. The Red Line, for $4.5b, carries about 150k passengers/day, so it cost about $30k per passenger.
Something similar has also been used more recently to play a record that doesn't exist anymore in physical format, but had a photograph printed in a book that survives. They were able to optically play a scan of the printed photograph of the record.
This project was budgeted at $1 billion dollars, and is currently projected to cost $1.1 billion. So no, $50k is not significant. Also, he didn't even spend the $50k on construction: he paid it to a lobbying group, Angelinos Against Gridlock, whose goal is to speed construction. The group actually looks like one worth supporting (they have a vision that includes both roads and rail improvements and it seems reasonably thought out), so that $50k might be well spent. But it's spent on an advocacy organization, not on construction.
He didn't pay money to speed construction. He spent $50,000 on a consulting organization that would look into how to speed up construction. They did not find a way to do so. But hey, he's learning how these things work: spending $50k to "study" something with no results is exactly how many real projects happen too.;-)
A better question might be why L.A. is spending $1.1 billion on widening a freeway, instead of improving its damn transit. Adding another lane is going to be a stop-gap solution at best, and it'll be congested to the hilt within another few years. Is the goal to have 30-lane freeways by 2030 or something?
Google has nothing to do with experiments in anarchy.
Regardless of whether you prefer more socialist anarchists like Bakunin or Kropotkin, or more individualist anarchists like Lysander Spooner, giant corporations running things is not really what anarchist theory has in mind as a good outcome. Large corporations are just another kind of organized power structure, which to anarchists is something to be opposed as much as governmental power structures are. In fact, corporations often take on government-like aspects when they get the opportunity to do so: homeowners' associations and company towns are two examples of the private sector reinventing municipal government through property and contract law. You can read Neuromancer or Snow Crash if you want to see where that ends up.
Yeah, it worked pretty well. You know what I did when the GOP assholes started to ruin the U.S. government? I moved to Denmark. Government is twice as big here if you measure it in percentage of GDP, and it works great.
We have an autonomously operated, driverless metro system that runs 24/7. Universal healthcare. Free university. Shit, not only free, you get paid to go to college. Unemployment insurance will cover you for up to 2 years between jobs, and is actually useful in helping you find a new one. The minimum wage is $20/hr.
You losers left in the race-to-the-bottom USA don't know how shit you have it.
It's along those lines, yeah, though I think the strategy is morphing a bit.
That term, "starve the beast", is associated with Grover Norquist's idea that if Republicans managed to hold a hard line on taxes, by pushing for tax cuts and demanding party discipline over refusing any tax rises, it would starve the government of money, and it would be forced to shrink, even if people didn't want to vote for program cuts.
He underestimated the government's ability to borrow, however, so what actually happened for quite some time was that taxes were cut while spending simultaneously rose. That backfired by actually increasing the popularity of many government programs for two decades or so. People got the programs and low taxes, which is what everyone wants! A number of GOP types are still trying to make that strategy work; the manufactured fights over the debt ceiling, and the sequester here, are an attempt to "starve the beast".
However not all GOPers think that's a good strategy anymore. The new twist over the past few years is trying to reduce confidence in government by deliberately running it badly. The idea is that people will vote for a smaller government if they think government doesn't work well, and the best way to make them think government doesn't work well is to make it not work well.
That's actually not uncommon in systems with little buffer. If a highway is right near a critical point of congestion, 4% more traffic can result in 40% longer commutes.
Banning widespread surveillance doesn't require banning every instance of someone looking out their window. There is a qualitative difference between looking out your window, and (to take the opposite extreme, not yet reached) flying 10,000 drones around the city constantly recording video.
Also: permitting corporate surveillance implies government surveillance, because the government can just buy data from companies. If you want to protect any semblance of a non-surveillance state, both governmental and private surveillance need to be curtailed.
In theory it should also be doing some kind of negotiation before pushing power, such as ensuring that it has a connection to something that speaks USB on the other end (as opposed to, say, your finger, which doesn't), and that resistance is within the expected range for the cable. It's not "always on" current like an electric socket is.
Europe has privacy laws that regulate what kinds of databases of user data you can compile. It's not an issue of cracking encryption, but that you simply cannot collect certain kinds of information, and the information you do collect has to be used in certain ways. The goal is to keep companies like Google or Facebook from doing what amounts to surveillance of the population.
If fines are intended as compensation, then fixed-size fines make sense. But if they're intended as a deterrent, they end up being completely ineffective for people or companies with a lot of money. A $10k fine might deter a small business, and a $100k fine will truly scare them, but for a Google-sized company those numbers are all noise, lost somewhere in the sushi budget.
If you really want to have effective deterrence, fines based on a percentage of annual income would be more effective. Some countries already do this with traffic tickets, to ensure that rich people have to care about getting a speeding ticket, rather than just laughing at the (to them) paltry amount.
A bit different. The rough rotor equivalent of the Harrier is a tiltrotor design, where the rotor rotates from a position where it generates vertical thrust (for takeoff) to one where it generates horizontal thrust (for flight).
This design instead stops the rotor when in horizontal flight, fixing it at an angle perpendicular to the fuselage so it becomes a wing generating lift. Then forward thrust is provided by separate, flight-only engines mounted in a conventional manner. When the plane wants to land again, the rotor stops being a wing, and starts spinning again in a helicopter style, to provide vertical thrust.
This is what it seems to be from a quick read. It would also explain why he would publish an AI paper in a physics journal, rather than in, you know, an AI journal: probably because he was hoping to get clueless physicists who aren't familiar with existing AI work as the reviewers.
Which isn't to say that physicists can't make good contributions to AI; a number have. But the ones who have an impact and provide something new: 1) explain how it relates to existing approaches, and why it's superior; and 2) publish their work actually relevant journals with qualified peer-reviewers.
Oh, that part's certainly true. I didn't really mean to take a side in the recent Chomsky v. Norvig et al wars, more just that the specific research program of universal grammar has "blocked the box" so to speak for some decades, despite relatively little progress.
I do agree with his critique that statistical NLP is a good engineering tool but not something that gives us scientific insight. One can analogize it to a function approximator in machine learning: you can approximate a lot of things with a sum of weighted gaussians, but that doesn't mean the underlying process was actually generated that way, or that you now understand the underlying process. It just means you've approximated it well enough for practical use in a particular application.
While it's a nice achievement, I'm not sure this has much to do with a new space age. Orbital Sciences already has a number of working launch options, which they regularly use to launch both commercial and NASA payloads. This is adding one which can launch larger payloads than their current options (such as the Minotaur) are able to do, but it's not for going to Mars or anything like that.
Everyone seems to be screwing up their SSL lately. Bing is broken too, because the cert seems to point to some akamai domain and isn't valid for bing.com.
Slashdot Mirror
It has a larger government measured by percentage of GDP: government spending equals 50% of GDP. It's true that it has lower debt, because it also has much higher taxes (around 50% of GDP as well), so it pays for its spending rather than selling bonds to pay for it.
Sounds pretty silly. I moved from the USA to Denmark and things work much better here. You know why? Because the government is twice as big, not smaller. So infrastructure is actually built and maintained, healthcare coverage is universal, education is strong, the unemployed get skills retraining, etc., etc.
Replying to self: It looks like LivingSocial actually has switched to bcrypt now. But not early enough!
It also ought to be easy for LivingSocial to store passwords hashed with a secure hash designed for passwords, like scrypt (or the related bcrypt). That way even if the password db is compromised, the plaintext passwords aren't, and the attacker cannot use the result to get into other services, even if users shared passwords across services.
It's easy to blame users, but there has been no excuse for storing plaintext passwords for years now. Password reuse is a much smaller problem if websites are designed properly. So rather than "as an industry" attempting to change user behavior, how about "as an industry" implement your damn sites properly, and audit that.
You'd think if you were buying some devices claiming to detect something-or-other, you would try out a specimen and see if it works. Did all of these countries he sold them to fail to do any testing on whether they worked?
I agree there are diminishing returns, but some heavily traveled routes could certainly be better. For example, the whole Westside is relatively compact but poorly served by transit, since the purple line stops after like 1 mile due to being axed after partial construction. It'd be sensible for it to continue west, which fortunately does seem like it may happen. Any kind of transit connection to LAX would also be useful.
People have been making receivers on CNC machines for years. It's not a particularly difficult part to manufacture, compared to something like a barrel.
The 405 expansion is only moderately cheaper than the Red Line, even if you measure purely in terms of construction cost per capacity. For $1.1b, it's estimated to add capacity for another 50k passengers/day or so, making it cost about $22k per new passenger. The Red Line, for $4.5b, carries about 150k passengers/day, so it cost about $30k per passenger.
Something similar has also been used more recently to play a record that doesn't exist anymore in physical format, but had a photograph printed in a book that survives. They were able to optically play a scan of the printed photograph of the record.
This project was budgeted at $1 billion dollars, and is currently projected to cost $1.1 billion. So no, $50k is not significant. Also, he didn't even spend the $50k on construction: he paid it to a lobbying group, Angelinos Against Gridlock, whose goal is to speed construction. The group actually looks like one worth supporting (they have a vision that includes both roads and rail improvements and it seems reasonably thought out), so that $50k might be well spent. But it's spent on an advocacy organization, not on construction.
He didn't pay money to speed construction. He spent $50,000 on a consulting organization that would look into how to speed up construction. They did not find a way to do so. But hey, he's learning how these things work: spending $50k to "study" something with no results is exactly how many real projects happen too. ;-)
A better question might be why L.A. is spending $1.1 billion on widening a freeway, instead of improving its damn transit. Adding another lane is going to be a stop-gap solution at best, and it'll be congested to the hilt within another few years. Is the goal to have 30-lane freeways by 2030 or something?
What non-game software did EA used to make? I can't think of anything, and a quick Google doesn't turn anything up.
Google has nothing to do with experiments in anarchy.
Regardless of whether you prefer more socialist anarchists like Bakunin or Kropotkin, or more individualist anarchists like Lysander Spooner, giant corporations running things is not really what anarchist theory has in mind as a good outcome. Large corporations are just another kind of organized power structure, which to anarchists is something to be opposed as much as governmental power structures are. In fact, corporations often take on government-like aspects when they get the opportunity to do so: homeowners' associations and company towns are two examples of the private sector reinventing municipal government through property and contract law. You can read Neuromancer or Snow Crash if you want to see where that ends up.
Yeah, it worked pretty well. You know what I did when the GOP assholes started to ruin the U.S. government? I moved to Denmark. Government is twice as big here if you measure it in percentage of GDP, and it works great.
We have an autonomously operated, driverless metro system that runs 24/7. Universal healthcare. Free university. Shit, not only free, you get paid to go to college. Unemployment insurance will cover you for up to 2 years between jobs, and is actually useful in helping you find a new one. The minimum wage is $20/hr.
You losers left in the race-to-the-bottom USA don't know how shit you have it.
It's along those lines, yeah, though I think the strategy is morphing a bit.
That term, "starve the beast", is associated with Grover Norquist's idea that if Republicans managed to hold a hard line on taxes, by pushing for tax cuts and demanding party discipline over refusing any tax rises, it would starve the government of money, and it would be forced to shrink, even if people didn't want to vote for program cuts.
He underestimated the government's ability to borrow, however, so what actually happened for quite some time was that taxes were cut while spending simultaneously rose. That backfired by actually increasing the popularity of many government programs for two decades or so. People got the programs and low taxes, which is what everyone wants! A number of GOP types are still trying to make that strategy work; the manufactured fights over the debt ceiling, and the sequester here, are an attempt to "starve the beast".
However not all GOPers think that's a good strategy anymore. The new twist over the past few years is trying to reduce confidence in government by deliberately running it badly. The idea is that people will vote for a smaller government if they think government doesn't work well, and the best way to make them think government doesn't work well is to make it not work well.
That's actually not uncommon in systems with little buffer. If a highway is right near a critical point of congestion, 4% more traffic can result in 40% longer commutes.
Banning widespread surveillance doesn't require banning every instance of someone looking out their window. There is a qualitative difference between looking out your window, and (to take the opposite extreme, not yet reached) flying 10,000 drones around the city constantly recording video.
Also: permitting corporate surveillance implies government surveillance, because the government can just buy data from companies. If you want to protect any semblance of a non-surveillance state, both governmental and private surveillance need to be curtailed.
In theory it should also be doing some kind of negotiation before pushing power, such as ensuring that it has a connection to something that speaks USB on the other end (as opposed to, say, your finger, which doesn't), and that resistance is within the expected range for the cable. It's not "always on" current like an electric socket is.
Europe has privacy laws that regulate what kinds of databases of user data you can compile. It's not an issue of cracking encryption, but that you simply cannot collect certain kinds of information, and the information you do collect has to be used in certain ways. The goal is to keep companies like Google or Facebook from doing what amounts to surveillance of the population.
If fines are intended as compensation, then fixed-size fines make sense. But if they're intended as a deterrent, they end up being completely ineffective for people or companies with a lot of money. A $10k fine might deter a small business, and a $100k fine will truly scare them, but for a Google-sized company those numbers are all noise, lost somewhere in the sushi budget.
If you really want to have effective deterrence, fines based on a percentage of annual income would be more effective. Some countries already do this with traffic tickets, to ensure that rich people have to care about getting a speeding ticket, rather than just laughing at the (to them) paltry amount.
A bit different. The rough rotor equivalent of the Harrier is a tiltrotor design, where the rotor rotates from a position where it generates vertical thrust (for takeoff) to one where it generates horizontal thrust (for flight).
This design instead stops the rotor when in horizontal flight, fixing it at an angle perpendicular to the fuselage so it becomes a wing generating lift. Then forward thrust is provided by separate, flight-only engines mounted in a conventional manner. When the plane wants to land again, the rotor stops being a wing, and starts spinning again in a helicopter style, to provide vertical thrust.
This is what it seems to be from a quick read. It would also explain why he would publish an AI paper in a physics journal, rather than in, you know, an AI journal: probably because he was hoping to get clueless physicists who aren't familiar with existing AI work as the reviewers.
Which isn't to say that physicists can't make good contributions to AI; a number have. But the ones who have an impact and provide something new: 1) explain how it relates to existing approaches, and why it's superior; and 2) publish their work actually relevant journals with qualified peer-reviewers.
Oh, that part's certainly true. I didn't really mean to take a side in the recent Chomsky v. Norvig et al wars, more just that the specific research program of universal grammar has "blocked the box" so to speak for some decades, despite relatively little progress.
I do agree with his critique that statistical NLP is a good engineering tool but not something that gives us scientific insight. One can analogize it to a function approximator in machine learning: you can approximate a lot of things with a sum of weighted gaussians, but that doesn't mean the underlying process was actually generated that way, or that you now understand the underlying process. It just means you've approximated it well enough for practical use in a particular application.
While it's a nice achievement, I'm not sure this has much to do with a new space age. Orbital Sciences already has a number of working launch options, which they regularly use to launch both commercial and NASA payloads. This is adding one which can launch larger payloads than their current options (such as the Minotaur) are able to do, but it's not for going to Mars or anything like that.
Everyone seems to be screwing up their SSL lately. Bing is broken too, because the cert seems to point to some akamai domain and isn't valid for bing.com.