The FBI only cares if you embarass a major campaign contributor. e.g. AT&T is the largest campaign contributor in the country, beating out even Goldman Sachs.
Or if you use BitTorrent for completely lawful purposes.
“But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad."
"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, or you wouldn’t have come here.”
I find it really ironic that it is a "Free Trade Agreement" that is preventing an activity that fundamentally is "Free Trade" (you can sell an unlocked phone to someone on another network).
I believe it comes down to the fact that governments support business at the expense of small business and DIYers. Probably because small business can't aford lobbyists.
A dictator backed by US gets toppled by his own citizens. Typical response from US government is to support dictator to the last possible moment. If it does not help, US politicians with their mouths full of lies about "democracy and freedom" attempt to reinstall the old regime with another frontman. This scenario played well in Egypt. In Libya, US and EU did much worse things: old dictator has been removed and whole country has been pushed into permanent civil war.
Your comment is unfair to the U.S. government.
In one breath, you criticize the U.S. for supporting friendly dictatorial regimes. In another, you criticize it for supporting popular rebellions. What is the U.S. supposed to do? You accuse the U.S. of committing atrocities in Libya, but it neither sent ground troops nor war-planes beyond those providing logistical support to allies.
As you mention, the outcomes in those countries that have cast off dictators have not been good, but that can't be blamed on foreign powers–they stayed out of the nation building process. If you are going to blame them for not attempting nation building, I point you at the cautionary tales of Afghanistan and Iraq.
We don't hear nor see anything about it because of media blackout instated by fucking corporate media.
If you believe that there were atrocities committed by the U.S. in Libya, please be more specific. Preferably cite reliable sources (there are other sources than corporate ones). If there were atrocities, they certainly weren't large-scale. The U.S. military doesn't have sufficient information security to keep large scale atrocities from becoming public. Certainly not the murder of 1500K Libyans are you are implying. If you can't be more specific, STFU.
The lack of success in achieving stable democracies in the middle east and central asia obviously has far greater factors than foreign involvement. The lingering effects of colonialism obviously play a role, but other parts of the world have been able to bounce back from colonialism (East Asia and South America are examples). The inequality bred by a large economic dependence on extractive industries (mining in particular) is a better candidate. The failure of West and Southern Africa to achieve stable, equitable societies supports this factor as explaining middle eastern stability. Of course, there are likely cultural issues involved as well, the extremism of Salafist Islam and the general misogyny do not support peaceful, democratic social ends.
And we still perceive ourselves as being "good" except that we are no better than nazis were. Just our warmongering elites learned that masquerading killing with crap about "democracy" and "freedom" is better than being explicit and grotesque as Hitler was. This is propably the greatest mass hipocrisy excercise in history...
Of course, the motives nor methods of the U.S. nor its allies are beyond reproach. There certainly have been many atrocities committed by U.S. forces. There have also been many interventions undertaken for nefarious purposes. However, there have been several undertaken for reasonable humanitarian purposes. Furthermore, if any nations that does not want the U.S., U.N., or other stable Western democracies to intervene militarily can simply adopt a stable, peaceful democracy.
I don't care which books are being read by the most people. I want to read books that are well-written, fun, and/or informative. What the herd reads doesn't matter to me.
Unless you are a book critic, I would suggest that you ignore what the herd reads as well.
It has been the case for nearly a decade that a college diploma was necessary even for low level jobs.
Food service, hospitality, factory work, agriculture, manual labor, and adult services are the only industries left where you can get an entry level job without a college degree, and those jobs suck.
Let's not forget that Hillary Clinton is Secretary of State. If Slashdotter's are not familiar with that position, that is a DIPLOMATIC position.
Her job is to NEGOTIATE with foreign governments. Public acknowledgment of such attacks might hash the negotiations.
I would prefer that she DOES HER JOB and works through diplomatic channels. Public threats will not help. Private threats might. This is doubly true for a secretive regime such as China.
It is the job of the cyber-warfare unit–part of the MILITARY. Of course, it probably is not to the military's strategic nor tactical advantage to publicly acknowledge the either.
So sorry Slashdotters, you probably won't get the public details about cyber-warfare that you might want. Don't be so surprised, you haven't be all of the details of physical warfare either.
It's better that the government does its job than keep us informed.
The issue is that databases based applications are usually server-side. But FOSS has already taken over the server side market. Linux, Apache Http, Jboss, MySQLTomcat, Open Jdk, Jersey, Guava, GWT, etc, allow developers to build applications on top of FOSS at a fraction of the cost of a single Oracle license.
What FOSS needs to grow is an increase in consumer/enterprise PC adoption, but what to build?
One of the bigger issues with end users adopting FOSS is hardware compatibility.
A database system that for retrieving hardware compatibility information for various hardware devices would be great. Although many installers manage compatibility, that information is stored in an OS and distribution specific format.
An open system where a community could update OS/driver/hardware compatibility information, and installers could retrieve relevant drivers would increase the ease of maintaining various distributions and perhaps more importantly would decrease the cost for hardware manufacturers to develop and maintain drivers.
I am not suggesting that anyone be forced to take such a vaccine only that people have access to it. When a junkie gets so desperate for a fix that he turns to crime, he will have another option. Thus, much less drug related crime. Although some will still steal to get drugs because they don't want to quit, there are people who steal to get lots of things.
There is also a genetic basis for nicotine tolerance. The mechanism is essentially the same. There is an gene that codes for an enzyme which removes nicotine from the bloodstream. This gene has several different alleles that code for more or less effective versions of the same enzyme. Individuals who have the allele that codes for the most effective enzyme are heavy smokers if they smoke. They smoke a cigarette, receive the desired stimulation, and then the enzyme clears the nicotine. Thus they desire another dose soon afterward. Individuals who produce the least effective version of the enzyme get sick when they smoke. The enzyme fails to clear the toxin in a reasonable time and they feel ill, sometimes vomiting. Individuals producing middling effective versions can be occasional smokers. Read more here.
If researchers can create a treatment for alcohol in this way, they can probably create a smoking treatment as well. It is unlikely, though, that the treatment would alleviate withdrawal symptoms on its own. This approach likely will lead to treatments for other addiction problems also.
If there come sto exist effective treatments for illegal drugs, there will be serious socio-political implications. The rational for the the war on drugs will be completely destroyed. If people can choose effective treatment, then there will be no unwilling chemical dependence. This will decrease crime, health problems, and other negative effects of dangerous drugs. So there will be no basis for illegality. Will that change the politics surrounding drugs? I don't think so.
You are absolutely correct that Slashdot's readership is a bit older. I fall into that demographic, but feel that I can speak on the subject of lowering college standards.
I believe that the OP is correct, but there are qualifications. Public universities cannot raise tuition and their government funding is being drastically squeezed between the national debt and the small government tea-baggersI mean tea party. Private universities are raising tuition prices and standards.
I attended a top fifteen private university. The standards were very high. Sure there were a few blow-off classes, but the requirements were such that every student had to take some quite rigorous classes. Engineering students could get away with a minimum of writing classes, but they were HARD. Humanities students could get away with a minimum of math and science. They weren't as hard, but were blow off classes either.
I am friends with several current students at my alma mater. The standards have definitely gone up. The average standardized test scores have gone up. Students now have to take clusters, and the rigorousness of the course work has increased.
My (very recently) ex-girlfriend graduated from a public university recently, and I can tell you that the standards have dropped. There is essentially no math requirement. There are majors where one can take 80% blow-off classes, and student services are poor.
Having said that, there are some fantastic professors at her school, and some great classes. If you attend a school with low standards, you can still get a great education. You just need to seek out those classes that have good professors and interest you.
Check out reatemyprofessors.com, but don't just go by the numeric ratings. Read actual comments. Some people rate primarily based on workload; others actually rate the quality of the teching.
Numero Uno: get a job. Get more experience in the real world.
How best to do that?
Well, you are lucky in that the job market is pretty good for tech skills. Companies would like to hire more experienced people, but can't always find them. Put your resume together as well as you can and prep for interviews by Googling potential questions and working on them.
Better yet, if you know anyone in IT, have them grill you.
If you are going for a programming job, make sure that you know and can apply basic procedural program concepts such as working with arrays, lists, queues, stacks, iteration, and recursion. Understand the basics of object oriented design. Write programs to practice these things. Find a good CS course online and do the homework.
If you want to move up, learn more advanced algorithms concepts.
If you are going for a sys admin job, install Linux on your home machine and manually manage it. Ubuntu is great, but learn about partition, booting, permissions, sudo privileges. A Linux admin handbook can teach you a lot.
Don't sweat the philosophy degree.
I do a lot of interviewing/hiring technical types, and have no problem with an non tech degree. Just know your shit.
I can't speak to networking/DBA certs, but I will say that in my experience hiring developers, programming certificates are relatively useless.
In fact, when I read a resume, I am happy to see no certificates. The developers who highlight certificates on their resumes seem to be able to parrot back technical specs, but not to think dynamically about programming problems and that is what I am more interested in.
No certificate will replace writing code on a whiteboard.
Researchers at Australia's Queensland University of Technology (QUT) have now developed what they say is a world-first intelligent absorbent that is capable of removing radioactive material from large amounts of contaminated water
So, they've reinvented zeolite filters which have been used since the 40s to do the exact same task exactly the same way?
From the article:
"By showing that some common game-theoretical problems are so hard that they’d take the lifetime of the universe to solve, Daskalakis is suggesting that they can’t accurately represent what happens in the real world."
But he didn't actually show this. He showed (again from TFA):
"Daskalakis proved that the Nash equilibrium belongs to a subset of NP consisting of hard problems with the property that a solution to one can be adapted to solve all the others." I.e. computing the Nash equilibrium is NP-complete.
These problems have no efficient solution if (and only if) P != NP. That is if there is a polynomial (efficient) solution for any of these, then there is a polynomial time solution for all. We don't know WHETHER THAT'S TRUE. Computer scientists suspect very strongly that there is no polynomial time solution for these problems, but it isn't known for sure.
Seriously. Silverlight is gaining on flash in all areas. What about portability... open standards... interoperability. Not that flash is really that much better, but at least Adobe is making a token effort.
Actually shouldn't have TOO much effect. I can't comment on the cylinders of CO2 used in pumping or carbonation, but the CO2 that the yeast releases is balanced by the CO2 which the plant absorb in order to produce the sugar that is fermented.
As to how many petrochemicals/fossil fuels are used in the production/creation of those plants and that sugar, that's a different story, but that is less related to alcohol specifically and more to how our agricultural/transportation system function generally.
If it is done in polynomial time, then it would by definition be in P which means it would NOT be NP complete unless P=NP.
I think you are trying to ask how it could be done in less than exponential time (which is how fast the fastest algorithms to solve NP complete problems run).
I personally would expect an algorithm to perform the match would run in O(U*US+K*KS+UI*KI*U) where U=the number of unknown (ie flickr pictures), K=the number of known pictures, US=the average size of an unknown picture, K=the size of the average known picture, UI=the number of interesting things in an unknown picture and KI=the number of interesting things in a known picture. However, it would often run faster because it should be fairly easy to disqualify two pictures as containing any of the same interesting features.
When will you Aussie's stand up for your rights and oust that lout Mugabe. Ohh, wait. That's some other commonwealth country. Who's your dictator again?
Slashdot Mirror
The FBI only cares if you embarass a major campaign contributor. e.g. AT&T is the largest campaign contributor in the country, beating out even Goldman Sachs.
Or if you use BitTorrent for completely lawful purposes.
“But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad."
"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, or you wouldn’t have come here.”
I find it really ironic that it is a "Free Trade Agreement" that is preventing an activity that fundamentally is "Free Trade" (you can sell an unlocked phone to someone on another network).
I believe it comes down to the fact that governments support business at the expense of small business and DIYers. Probably because small business can't aford lobbyists.
A dictator backed by US gets toppled by his own citizens. Typical response from US government is to support dictator to the last possible moment. If it does not help, US politicians with their mouths full of lies about "democracy and freedom" attempt to reinstall the old regime with another frontman. This scenario played well in Egypt. In Libya, US and EU did much worse things: old dictator has been removed and whole country has been pushed into permanent civil war.
Your comment is unfair to the U.S. government.
In one breath, you criticize the U.S. for supporting friendly dictatorial regimes. In another, you criticize it for supporting popular rebellions. What is the U.S. supposed to do? You accuse the U.S. of committing atrocities in Libya, but it neither sent ground troops nor war-planes beyond those providing logistical support to allies.
As you mention, the outcomes in those countries that have cast off dictators have not been good, but that can't be blamed on foreign powers–they stayed out of the nation building process. If you are going to blame them for not attempting nation building, I point you at the cautionary tales of Afghanistan and Iraq.
We don't hear nor see anything about it because of media blackout instated by fucking corporate media.
If you believe that there were atrocities committed by the U.S. in Libya, please be more specific. Preferably cite reliable sources (there are other sources than corporate ones). If there were atrocities, they certainly weren't large-scale. The U.S. military doesn't have sufficient information security to keep large scale atrocities from becoming public. Certainly not the murder of 1500K Libyans are you are implying. If you can't be more specific, STFU.
The lack of success in achieving stable democracies in the middle east and central asia obviously has far greater factors than foreign involvement. The lingering effects of colonialism obviously play a role, but other parts of the world have been able to bounce back from colonialism (East Asia and South America are examples). The inequality bred by a large economic dependence on extractive industries (mining in particular) is a better candidate. The failure of West and Southern Africa to achieve stable, equitable societies supports this factor as explaining middle eastern stability. Of course, there are likely cultural issues involved as well, the extremism of Salafist Islam and the general misogyny do not support peaceful, democratic social ends.
And we still perceive ourselves as being "good" except that we are no better than nazis were. Just our warmongering elites learned that masquerading killing with crap about "democracy" and "freedom" is better than being explicit and grotesque as Hitler was. This is propably the greatest mass hipocrisy excercise in history...
Of course, the motives nor methods of the U.S. nor its allies are beyond reproach. There certainly have been many atrocities committed by U.S. forces. There have also been many interventions undertaken for nefarious purposes. However, there have been several undertaken for reasonable humanitarian purposes. Furthermore, if any nations that does not want the U.S., U.N., or other stable Western democracies to intervene militarily can simply adopt a stable, peaceful democracy.
I don't care which books are being read by the most people. I want to read books that are well-written, fun, and/or informative. What the herd reads doesn't matter to me.
Unless you are a book critic, I would suggest that you ignore what the herd reads as well.
Seriously.
It has been the case for nearly a decade that a college diploma was necessary even for low level jobs.
Food service, hospitality, factory work, agriculture, manual labor, and adult services are the only industries left where you can get an entry level job without a college degree, and those jobs suck.
Let's not forget that Hillary Clinton is Secretary of State. If Slashdotter's are not familiar with that position, that is a DIPLOMATIC position.
Her job is to NEGOTIATE with foreign governments. Public acknowledgment of such attacks might hash the negotiations.
I would prefer that she DOES HER JOB and works through diplomatic channels. Public threats will not help. Private threats might. This is doubly true for a secretive regime such as China.
It is the job of the cyber-warfare unit–part of the MILITARY. Of course, it probably is not to the military's strategic nor tactical advantage to publicly acknowledge the either.
So sorry Slashdotters, you probably won't get the public details about cyber-warfare that you might want. Don't be so surprised, you haven't be all of the details of physical warfare either.
It's better that the government does its job than keep us informed.
The issue is that databases based applications are usually server-side. But FOSS has already taken over the server side market. Linux, Apache Http, Jboss, MySQLTomcat, Open Jdk, Jersey, Guava, GWT, etc, allow developers to build applications on top of FOSS at a fraction of the cost of a single Oracle license. What FOSS needs to grow is an increase in consumer/enterprise PC adoption, but what to build? One of the bigger issues with end users adopting FOSS is hardware compatibility. A database system that for retrieving hardware compatibility information for various hardware devices would be great. Although many installers manage compatibility, that information is stored in an OS and distribution specific format. An open system where a community could update OS/driver/hardware compatibility information, and installers could retrieve relevant drivers would increase the ease of maintaining various distributions and perhaps more importantly would decrease the cost for hardware manufacturers to develop and maintain drivers.
I am not suggesting that anyone be forced to take such a vaccine only that people have access to it. When a junkie gets so desperate for a fix that he turns to crime, he will have another option. Thus, much less drug related crime. Although some will still steal to get drugs because they don't want to quit, there are people who steal to get lots of things.
There is also a genetic basis for nicotine tolerance. The mechanism is essentially the same. There is an gene that codes for an enzyme which removes nicotine from the bloodstream. This gene has several different alleles that code for more or less effective versions of the same enzyme. Individuals who have the allele that codes for the most effective enzyme are heavy smokers if they smoke. They smoke a cigarette, receive the desired stimulation, and then the enzyme clears the nicotine. Thus they desire another dose soon afterward. Individuals who produce the least effective version of the enzyme get sick when they smoke. The enzyme fails to clear the toxin in a reasonable time and they feel ill, sometimes vomiting. Individuals producing middling effective versions can be occasional smokers. Read more here.
If researchers can create a treatment for alcohol in this way, they can probably create a smoking treatment as well. It is unlikely, though, that the treatment would alleviate withdrawal symptoms on its own. This approach likely will lead to treatments for other addiction problems also.
If there come sto exist effective treatments for illegal drugs, there will be serious socio-political implications. The rational for the the war on drugs will be completely destroyed. If people can choose effective treatment, then there will be no unwilling chemical dependence. This will decrease crime, health problems, and other negative effects of dangerous drugs. So there will be no basis for illegality. Will that change the politics surrounding drugs? I don't think so.
You are absolutely correct that Slashdot's readership is a bit older. I fall into that demographic, but feel that I can speak on the subject of lowering college standards.
I believe that the OP is correct, but there are qualifications. Public universities cannot raise tuition and their government funding is being drastically squeezed between the national debt and the small government tea-baggersI mean tea party. Private universities are raising tuition prices and standards.
I attended a top fifteen private university. The standards were very high. Sure there were a few blow-off classes, but the requirements were such that every student had to take some quite rigorous classes. Engineering students could get away with a minimum of writing classes, but they were HARD. Humanities students could get away with a minimum of math and science. They weren't as hard, but were blow off classes either.
I am friends with several current students at my alma mater. The standards have definitely gone up. The average standardized test scores have gone up. Students now have to take clusters, and the rigorousness of the course work has increased.
My (very recently) ex-girlfriend graduated from a public university recently, and I can tell you that the standards have dropped. There is essentially no math requirement. There are majors where one can take 80% blow-off classes, and student services are poor.
Having said that, there are some fantastic professors at her school, and some great classes. If you attend a school with low standards, you can still get a great education. You just need to seek out those classes that have good professors and interest you.
Check out reatemyprofessors.com, but don't just go by the numeric ratings. Read actual comments. Some people rate primarily based on workload; others actually rate the quality of the teching.
Numero Uno: get a job. Get more experience in the real world.
How best to do that?
Well, you are lucky in that the job market is pretty good for tech skills. Companies would like to hire more experienced people, but can't always find them. Put your resume together as well as you can and prep for interviews by Googling potential questions and working on them.
Better yet, if you know anyone in IT, have them grill you.
If you are going for a programming job, make sure that you know and can apply basic procedural program concepts such as working with arrays, lists, queues, stacks, iteration, and recursion. Understand the basics of object oriented design. Write programs to practice these things. Find a good CS course online and do the homework.
Wrox's Programming Interviews Exposed is great practice for programming interviews.
If you want to move up, learn more advanced algorithms concepts.
If you are going for a sys admin job, install Linux on your home machine and manually manage it. Ubuntu is great, but learn about partition, booting, permissions, sudo privileges. A Linux admin handbook can teach you a lot.
Don't sweat the philosophy degree.
I do a lot of interviewing/hiring technical types, and have no problem with an non tech degree. Just know your shit.
I can't speak to networking/DBA certs, but I will say that in my experience hiring developers, programming certificates are relatively useless.
In fact, when I read a resume, I am happy to see no certificates. The developers who highlight certificates on their resumes seem to be able to parrot back technical specs, but not to think dynamically about programming problems and that is what I am more interested in.
No certificate will replace writing code on a whiteboard.
Want the FDA to do something about this?
FTFA:
Contact William Flynn:
7519 Standish Pl.
Rockville, MD 20855, (240) 276–9000
William.flynn@fda.hhs.gov
If you can't even do that, STFU and stop bitching about corruption.
Researchers at Australia's Queensland University of Technology (QUT) have now developed what they say is a world-first intelligent absorbent that is capable of removing radioactive material from large amounts of contaminated water
So, they've reinvented zeolite filters which have been used since the 40s to do the exact same task exactly the same way?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeolite#Nuclear_industry
"One gram of the nanofibres can effectively purify at least one tonne of polluted water," Professor Zhu said.
That's extremely efficient.
Mod Parent Up!
From the article: "By showing that some common game-theoretical problems are so hard that they’d take the lifetime of the universe to solve, Daskalakis is suggesting that they can’t accurately represent what happens in the real world." But he didn't actually show this. He showed (again from TFA): "Daskalakis proved that the Nash equilibrium belongs to a subset of NP consisting of hard problems with the property that a solution to one can be adapted to solve all the others." I.e. computing the Nash equilibrium is NP-complete. These problems have no efficient solution if (and only if) P != NP. That is if there is a polynomial (efficient) solution for any of these, then there is a polynomial time solution for all. We don't know WHETHER THAT'S TRUE. Computer scientists suspect very strongly that there is no polynomial time solution for these problems, but it isn't known for sure.
Seriously. Silverlight is gaining on flash in all areas. What about portability ... open standards ... interoperability. Not that flash is really that much better, but at least Adobe is making a token effort.
Actually shouldn't have TOO much effect. I can't comment on the cylinders of CO2 used in pumping or carbonation, but the CO2 that the yeast releases is balanced by the CO2 which the plant absorb in order to produce the sugar that is fermented.
As to how many petrochemicals/fossil fuels are used in the production/creation of those plants and that sugar, that's a different story, but that is less related to alcohol specifically and more to how our agricultural/transportation system function generally.
If it is done in polynomial time, then it would by definition be in P which means it would NOT be NP complete unless P=NP.
I think you are trying to ask how it could be done in less than exponential time (which is how fast the fastest algorithms to solve NP complete problems run).
I personally would expect an algorithm to perform the match would run in O(U*US+K*KS+UI*KI*U) where U=the number of unknown (ie flickr pictures), K=the number of known pictures, US=the average size of an unknown picture, K=the size of the average known picture, UI=the number of interesting things in an unknown picture and KI=the number of interesting things in a known picture. However, it would often run faster because it should be fairly easy to disqualify two pictures as containing any of the same interesting features.
Canadian pr0n... Interesting concept, but wouldn't the hockey sticks get in the way?
Or better yet, email him: RIF@scsenate.org
Maybe he was kidding?
That's right. Soon the only people not in the government db will be those who entered the country illegally outside of designated entry points.
When will you Aussie's stand up for your rights and oust that lout Mugabe. Ohh, wait. That's some other commonwealth country. Who's your dictator again?