Seriously, I imagine if this sort of thing holds up, authorities will. Although this warning is so vague, it's only enough to get people to load up on emergency supplies, and possibly local governments to review disaster policies. Not that that accomplishment should be minimized, but something more certain a day in advance would be great.
Exactly, and since the Martian atmosphere is considerably thinner that Earth's there will be far less scattering. Without any dust in Mars atmosphere, i.e., on a clear day, Mars sky should still look redder than Earth's, or at least whiter, kinder of like Earth's sky would look through a lens filtering out the blue.
Thinner would make blacker, not bluer - in other words, less scattering total, but the frequency range won't change. Outside of dust, Mars' atmosphere won't be much red. I'm not sure what wavelength CO2 scatters up to, though, so you could get some greener light there. But not red, and not white.
Er, IANAS, but last time I checked, ozone was the reason the earth's sky appears blue.
Nope. The ozone layer is too thin to tint the incoming sunlight to that degree. It's actually scattering of the high-frequency (ie, blue) light from oxygen and nitrogen). Larger molecules scatter longer wavelengths, allowing yellow and red to be scattered by pollutants.
When was the last time you saw a crackwhore vote? By the way, as you can see here, your worn-out stereotypes ("welfare slag?" never heard slag used in that context before.) no longer apply.
Right, because non-Democrats always win in the inner cities where the household income is like $2.75/yr.
And I would say a lot of welfare recipients vote relative to working people, as they have the free time. They're sure not working.
My company is cutting raises (which is better than cutting jobs, of course) which will save the company a several million but they are still paying out close to a 50 million in bonuses.
That's really crappy. What they don't understand is that this really breeds an "Animal Farm" style "us vs. them" thing, where they get bonuses just because they vote them to each other. Whatever happened to performance compensation? Don't they understand that they can't get any respect when they don't take the same hit they pass on? Personally, I'd respect the hell out of a CEO who gave himself a pay cut.
I suspect it's because they can always find some index where their company beat the average this year. So they're always doing a good job.;)
If people don't/can't vote correctly using even the simplest methods, then perhaps even they did not know what their intent was.
Not only that, but assuming an even distribution of morons voting for both candidates, this won't skew any but the closest elections (though admittedly that would be this one). In most elections, if the "moron vote" not getting counted throws the election....good! If I knew that most idiots voted for one candidate, I'd probably vote for the other on principle.
The VP, SVP, EVP, etc. that can be easily replaced by any of the dozens below him.
Could be, don't let me be the champion for incompetent middle management.
I am totally lost on your last comment. I am saying that outsourcing is not a good thing for anybody. I thought it was you saying the opposite.
I got tangented by the whole "instead of outsourcing, we can stop paying executives so much" thing.
But yeah, I'm in favor of outsourcing if it works for the company. I don't think companies are obligated to keep hiring Americans when there are better alternatives, for four reasons:
1) it's inefficient to artificially support anything (I don't believe in tariffs either),
2) it would give foreign companies that don't have to do so a huge advantage,
3) artificially increasing labor costs for businesses increases costs for consumers by an amazing amount, and
4) I generally don't like unfunded social mandates by governments on businesses who didn't create the social problems.
That said, I think a lot of this outsourcing is "flavor of the month" with companies trying to get something for free. I think they're doing too much of it, and some of it is doomed to failure (like tech support). But that'll all play out.
Second, when I think bloated I think about the executives who are sending these jobs overseas and pocketing million dollar bonuses for doing it. A $2 million bonus could buy you 30 blue collars even with benefits and taxes.
Easy to say, but the difference between a good and bad CEO is the difference between doubling your stock price in 5 years vs. going bankrupt for many companies. The difference between a great and bad janitor is whether or not the paper towels are kept stocked.
But I do commend you for eschewing the typical/. hypocrisy, which means that outsourcing all jobs but "mine" is a good idea.
They'll reap what they sow. If they don't have any loyalty to their employees, they're not going to get any loyalty back.
The dot-com boom showed that employees aren't loyal, and will bail for more money instantly if they have a better deal. Look at it this way - if the company is expected to pay employees more than they're worth, and this is called loyalty, how do employees show their loyalty? Should they stay with a company when the company does poorly for less money? Because this doesn't really occur.
That's pretty much where the country has headed anyway, at least in the tech sector, so maybe it's inevitable.
They have profited greatly from the American people, it's their responsibility to support them with jobs.
And if they have to pay unskilled Americans more than they're worth, then consumers worldwide will have to pay more for their products. The market for HP's goods is competitive enough that they're not gouging on margin. It's simply the fact that increased labor costs increase prices for us all. And that's NOT the right thing to do.
Would you also be in favor of paying $1000 more/car (and other steel-intensive products) to support the dying American steel industry? It ends up costing approximately 5x as much to "keep" these American jobs as they pay. In other words, the tariffs in place to keep a $60,000 steelmaking job cost consumers $300,000 in total. Great idea, huh?
I have a better idea. People whose jobs are no longer needed, or whose jobs can be done equally well be the barely educated, can retrain.
If enough people like you ran the world, we'd still be making textiles by hand on wooden looms, because mechanization cost jobs to the textile industry. This is a natural if painful, but necessary part of the labor cycle.
No. And they're not a charity, nor a soup kitchen. If they can get quality labor for cheaper elsewhere, why should they support a bloated, overpriced labor market?
who the hell is Chalmers Johnson? He seems to be your relied-upon expert here. Some of what you quoted is speculative/illogical, such as post-Taliban "anarchy" breeding terrorism (is it more likely than with the Taliban who *attacked* the US???). Others, such as US actions fragmenting a (long nonexistent) "western alliance" seems farcical.
What the US truly found is that it had 1 ally at the time of 9/11. Not because Britain was willing to go to war; I agree it was ill-advised. Rather, because France and Germany used the time before the war as an opportunity for their own domestic political gains rather than actually working diplomatically for a solution.
It's disheartening, but I'd say that the fall of the CCCP marked the end of the western alliance, as petty bullshit all around began the moment we didn't have an enemy to unite us. And since terrorist groups in the middle east isn't attacking Europe, France and Germany don't give a damn, which is very unfortunate and selfish.
As for making attacks more likely, well, there haven't been any, and I'd say they would if they could. Indeed, I'd say we pissed them off lately. However, if we are attacked as on 9/11 simply for existing, it's hard to say our risk was low previously.
You think that memo was leaked on accident? This is the best way IBM could publicize the fact that they're "eating their own dog food". No press conferences, no big statements here. Just letting it be known.
Whoops, did I just email that to the AP wire? My bad.
IBM's a large, large company with abundant resources in the area of software design. They've got the ability to tailor-design an OS to the needs of their company and deploy it enterprise-wide, and with Linux and friends, do it without losing much cross-platform compatibility.
I don't think this makes sense from a productivity standpoint. Most of us probably believe that linux wins a TCO fight with Windows, but that would not be the case if you had to develop all your basic tools from scratch, even for IBM.
No, this is about eating their own dog food. It's not a good message when you're pushing your product but you use other products. If IBM is to convince buyers to use Linux for typical desktop productivity work, they better use it themselves.
As many Non-gov agencies will tell you in order to help someone you have to feed him and provide him with clothing and shelter first. Then you can start thinking about an education.Nice troll. You had me hooked until that line. Like NGO's can provide food and shelter for 800 Million people.
There's a database of spam that can be used for training your filters that has a lot more than 10,000 spams in it....tune to the spam on whose mailing lists I happen to fall, and to my own global ratio of spam/ham. Skewing either of those in a Bayesian system isn't so great an idea.
That essay is as timid as it is long-winded. The author lacked the courage to state what cannot be said today and which social "fictions" those taboos support.
I really don't think that was the point, as his goal was to show people that looking for such ideas is the end unto itself. If he were to tell people which ideas were wrong, he would be taking the place of the society that is currently performing this task. And that would be no better.
But more importantly he failed to connect such taboos with their usefulness to, and positive effects upon, social structure.
I believe he either a) doesn't care or b) disagrees that they have any use. I certainly do.
Even if the assertions in a such a book were scientifically accurate, to accept them as fact does more harm than good if it erodes the underpinnings of a society that tries to be fair and just.
That's cowardly. If those notions are incorrect, attack them on that basis as he suggests. If they're correct, then our social structure based on fallacy isn't working. Perhaps that is indeed part of the problem.
. So can we truly be an egalitarian society? Well, we certainly can't if we don't accept that all persons are created equal.
I believe you have confused the concepts of equality of condition and opportunity. Even if the Bell Curve were right (and on some things, it was), it never said that any two groups cluster perfectly by ability. So, any person from any group can be fairly evaluated based on their merit, allowing an equal opportunity to everyone. That is a very egalitarian society.
Honestly, no one is gullible enough to believe that all people are literally created equal. As long as we give people an equal chance we're fine, and considering tough questions like those addressed in the Bell Curve, regardless of their answers, will not endanger that.
I would say the far greater danger is everyone implicitly believing those conclusions without being able to voice them.
In a sense, therefore, truth is not some unbiased, ideal thing that exists outside of our experience, but it is something that we define by our objectives and behavior. "Truth", in this sense, is a social construct.
I think that's the exact idea he's fighting, particularly since that concept changes over time.
Hmmm. Many anti-spammers seem to assume that advertisers will keep sending the same kind of spam, just superficially doctored by the spam-sender to evade the latest anti-spam heuristics.
Right now, that seems pretty true. Spammers aren't all that creative, they get in the business because it's quick money. Every once in a while, someone comes up with a new trick. My filter responds beautifully.
But I worry that eventually, some companies that advertise via spam will learn to speak in a human voice. Surely this is possible for some products or scams. Advertisements don't have to look like advertisements, especially if they are only trying to pique your interest in a product that you will then go buy (or vote for) offline.
Some try now, but there still has to be something that conveys the message. Is there a phone number? Good chance of spam. They'll still have to use certain words or phrases that can be keyed on. If they try something really strange...well, that won't look like normal email.
Basically, advertisers adapt. A parallel example: If we get too good at zapping TV commercials with our TiVOs, they'll switch to more insidious product placement in the shows, so that the commercials are indistinguishable from the content.
But that's a bit different - TV is serving me my content, and if they put the ad in the content I can't avoid it. Unless spammers find a way to put spam in wmails from my friends, that won't work. Ultimately, the anti-spam crowd simply puts more energy in the fight. Spammers simply want to make money. Antispamers are more zealous about it.
Spam might eventually come to resemble a bigger form of junk snailmail, or telemarketing -- where there are lots more advertisers but each one does a better job of targeting to a smaller list of customers (thanks to database companies like Experian).
Outside of the whole invasion of provacy thing, I'd call that a victory.
In the long run, I think we have to solve spam in the email architecture. I've always thought hashcash was the most promising idea, and it is now being pursued at Microsoft Research. There are also more radical proposals like Tripoli.
Problem is, that's something that can only be done as a standard, which means the list of groups that can do it are governments, AOL, and microsoft. The rest of us need to focus on things we can do to put these assholes out of commission, or at least make sure we never see their filth.
Do like I do, use a cpl of sure signs that an e-mail is spam and make the filter train on it as it arrives; that way you're filter will automatically learn the new tricks.
I've taken that nuclear - I have my filter save every spam I ever get so I can train a new filter if I like. I have 10,000+.;) Usually, the first three spams to try a new trick get through, I get to work, I tell Mozilla it's spam, then that trick never works again.
Mark my words: withing a year Bayesian filtering will be another dead suggestion in the pile of stopgap solutions to the problem.
I doubt that, at least to the extent you likely intend it. The great thing about Bayesian filtering is that it's adaptive. So they would have to dramatically increase the rate at which they discover and use filter-killing tricks for this to work.
I'm running Mozilla, and in the last 8 months (roughly) I've gotten 10,000 spams - modest, but a great library for catching spams. I catch about 97% or more of them. And I can tell when they come out with a new trick - my catch rate will drop to say 80% for a day, after which my filter catches up to the new trick. In fact, when they don't have new tricks, my catch rate is about 99+%. Most of what gets through is new tricks.
I'd say now, they come out with a filter-busting trick maybe once a month. For spam to become a problem to my client, they'd have to do it better than once a day. I don't think they have the resources to do that.
The spammers are doing everything they can to squeeze the anti-spammers out. They use frivolous lawsuits (aka Mark Felstein and his porn spamming backers) or DDOS attacks that either knock the anti-spam resources off completely or increase the costs so that no hobbyist can run them.
I've wondered why some of the anti-spam sites aren't run from countries with nonexistent extradiction policies like Aruba (home of internet gambling sites). Get rid of the legal aspect at least, concentrate resources on running the site and fighting DDOSs
now, the compiler-supplied errno.h in/usr/include contains a prominent copyright notice by the free software foundation. somehow i doubt they falsified that, and, even if they did, SCO would/should be going after the FSF and glibc and not linus torvalds and linux.
Perhaps they realize that, as a bunch of long-haired communist hippie freaks, the FSF have no money.
All joking aside, lawsuits find defendants with $$$$.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, I imagine if this sort of thing holds up, authorities will. Although this warning is so vague, it's only enough to get people to load up on emergency supplies, and possibly local governments to review disaster policies. Not that that accomplishment should be minimized, but something more certain a day in advance would be great.
Thinner would make blacker, not bluer - in other words, less scattering total, but the frequency range won't change. Outside of dust, Mars' atmosphere won't be much red. I'm not sure what wavelength CO2 scatters up to, though, so you could get some greener light there. But not red, and not white.
Nope. The ozone layer is too thin to tint the incoming sunlight to that degree. It's actually scattering of the high-frequency (ie, blue) light from oxygen and nitrogen). Larger molecules scatter longer wavelengths, allowing yellow and red to be scattered by pollutants.
Right, because non-Democrats always win in the inner cities where the household income is like $2.75/yr.
And I would say a lot of welfare recipients vote relative to working people, as they have the free time. They're sure not working.
And your link is broken.
Right, I'm sure all the crackwhores and general welfare slag are freaking geniuses.
That's really crappy. What they don't understand is that this really breeds an "Animal Farm" style "us vs. them" thing, where they get bonuses just because they vote them to each other. Whatever happened to performance compensation? Don't they understand that they can't get any respect when they don't take the same hit they pass on? Personally, I'd respect the hell out of a CEO who gave himself a pay cut.
I suspect it's because they can always find some index where their company beat the average this year. So they're always doing a good job. ;)
Not only that, but assuming an even distribution of morons voting for both candidates, this won't skew any but the closest elections (though admittedly that would be this one). In most elections, if the "moron vote" not getting counted throws the election....good! If I knew that most idiots voted for one candidate, I'd probably vote for the other on principle.
;) I assure you, I'm nothing of the sort.
The VP, SVP, EVP, etc. that can be easily replaced by any of the dozens below him.
Could be, don't let me be the champion for incompetent middle management.
I am totally lost on your last comment. I am saying that outsourcing is not a good thing for anybody. I thought it was you saying the opposite.
I got tangented by the whole "instead of outsourcing, we can stop paying executives so much" thing.
But yeah, I'm in favor of outsourcing if it works for the company. I don't think companies are obligated to keep hiring Americans when there are better alternatives, for four reasons:
1) it's inefficient to artificially support anything (I don't believe in tariffs either),
2) it would give foreign companies that don't have to do so a huge advantage,
3) artificially increasing labor costs for businesses increases costs for consumers by an amazing amount, and
4) I generally don't like unfunded social mandates by governments on businesses who didn't create the social problems.
That said, I think a lot of this outsourcing is "flavor of the month" with companies trying to get something for free. I think they're doing too much of it, and some of it is doomed to failure (like tech support). But that'll all play out.
Easy to say, but the difference between a good and bad CEO is the difference between doubling your stock price in 5 years vs. going bankrupt for many companies. The difference between a great and bad janitor is whether or not the paper towels are kept stocked.
But I do commend you for eschewing the typical /. hypocrisy, which means that outsourcing all jobs but "mine" is a good idea.
The dot-com boom showed that employees aren't loyal, and will bail for more money instantly if they have a better deal. Look at it this way - if the company is expected to pay employees more than they're worth, and this is called loyalty, how do employees show their loyalty? Should they stay with a company when the company does poorly for less money? Because this doesn't really occur.
That's pretty much where the country has headed anyway, at least in the tech sector, so maybe it's inevitable.
Not only inevitable, it's already happened.
And if they have to pay unskilled Americans more than they're worth, then consumers worldwide will have to pay more for their products. The market for HP's goods is competitive enough that they're not gouging on margin. It's simply the fact that increased labor costs increase prices for us all. And that's NOT the right thing to do.
Would you also be in favor of paying $1000 more/car (and other steel-intensive products) to support the dying American steel industry? It ends up costing approximately 5x as much to "keep" these American jobs as they pay. In other words, the tariffs in place to keep a $60,000 steelmaking job cost consumers $300,000 in total. Great idea, huh?
I have a better idea. People whose jobs are no longer needed, or whose jobs can be done equally well be the barely educated, can retrain.
If enough people like you ran the world, we'd still be making textiles by hand on wooden looms, because mechanization cost jobs to the textile industry. This is a natural if painful, but necessary part of the labor cycle.
My ass. Please feel free to respond linking to all the $6.00/hr programming jobs on Monster or anywhere else.
No. And they're not a charity, nor a soup kitchen. If they can get quality labor for cheaper elsewhere, why should they support a bloated, overpriced labor market?
What the US truly found is that it had 1 ally at the time of 9/11. Not because Britain was willing to go to war; I agree it was ill-advised. Rather, because France and Germany used the time before the war as an opportunity for their own domestic political gains rather than actually working diplomatically for a solution.
It's disheartening, but I'd say that the fall of the CCCP marked the end of the western alliance, as petty bullshit all around began the moment we didn't have an enemy to unite us. And since terrorist groups in the middle east isn't attacking Europe, France and Germany don't give a damn, which is very unfortunate and selfish.
As for making attacks more likely, well, there haven't been any, and I'd say they would if they could. Indeed, I'd say we pissed them off lately. However, if we are attacked as on 9/11 simply for existing, it's hard to say our risk was low previously.
Whoops, did I just email that to the AP wire? My bad.
I don't think this makes sense from a productivity standpoint. Most of us probably believe that linux wins a TCO fight with Windows, but that would not be the case if you had to develop all your basic tools from scratch, even for IBM.
No, this is about eating their own dog food. It's not a good message when you're pushing your product but you use other products. If IBM is to convince buyers to use Linux for typical desktop productivity work, they better use it themselves.
As many Non-gov agencies will tell you in order to help someone you have to feed him and provide him with clothing and shelter first. Then you can start thinking about an education. Nice troll. You had me hooked until that line. Like NGO's can provide food and shelter for 800 Million people.
There's a database of spam that can be used for training your filters that has a lot more than 10,000 spams in it. ...tune to the spam on whose mailing lists I happen to fall, and to my own global ratio of spam/ham. Skewing either of those in a Bayesian system isn't so great an idea.
Thes question is, will anyone get a "+1, Informative" for posting it?
I really don't think that was the point, as his goal was to show people that looking for such ideas is the end unto itself. If he were to tell people which ideas were wrong, he would be taking the place of the society that is currently performing this task. And that would be no better.
But more importantly he failed to connect such taboos with their usefulness to, and positive effects upon, social structure.
I believe he either a) doesn't care or b) disagrees that they have any use. I certainly do.
Even if the assertions in a such a book were scientifically accurate, to accept them as fact does more harm than good if it erodes the underpinnings of a society that tries to be fair and just.
That's cowardly. If those notions are incorrect, attack them on that basis as he suggests. If they're correct, then our social structure based on fallacy isn't working. Perhaps that is indeed part of the problem.
. So can we truly be an egalitarian society? Well, we certainly can't if we don't accept that all persons are created equal.
I believe you have confused the concepts of equality of condition and opportunity. Even if the Bell Curve were right (and on some things, it was), it never said that any two groups cluster perfectly by ability. So, any person from any group can be fairly evaluated based on their merit, allowing an equal opportunity to everyone. That is a very egalitarian society.
Honestly, no one is gullible enough to believe that all people are literally created equal. As long as we give people an equal chance we're fine, and considering tough questions like those addressed in the Bell Curve, regardless of their answers, will not endanger that.
I would say the far greater danger is everyone implicitly believing those conclusions without being able to voice them.
In a sense, therefore, truth is not some unbiased, ideal thing that exists outside of our experience, but it is something that we define by our objectives and behavior. "Truth", in this sense, is a social construct.
I think that's the exact idea he's fighting, particularly since that concept changes over time.
Right now, that seems pretty true. Spammers aren't all that creative, they get in the business because it's quick money. Every once in a while, someone comes up with a new trick. My filter responds beautifully.
But I worry that eventually, some companies that advertise via spam will learn to speak in a human voice. Surely this is possible for some products or scams. Advertisements don't have to look like advertisements, especially if they are only trying to pique your interest in a product that you will then go buy (or vote for) offline.
Some try now, but there still has to be something that conveys the message. Is there a phone number? Good chance of spam. They'll still have to use certain words or phrases that can be keyed on. If they try something really strange...well, that won't look like normal email.
Basically, advertisers adapt. A parallel example: If we get too good at zapping TV commercials with our TiVOs, they'll switch to more insidious product placement in the shows, so that the commercials are indistinguishable from the content.
But that's a bit different - TV is serving me my content, and if they put the ad in the content I can't avoid it. Unless spammers find a way to put spam in wmails from my friends, that won't work. Ultimately, the anti-spam crowd simply puts more energy in the fight. Spammers simply want to make money. Antispamers are more zealous about it.
Spam might eventually come to resemble a bigger form of junk snailmail, or telemarketing -- where there are lots more advertisers but each one does a better job of targeting to a smaller list of customers (thanks to database companies like Experian).
Outside of the whole invasion of provacy thing, I'd call that a victory.
In the long run, I think we have to solve spam in the email architecture. I've always thought hashcash was the most promising idea, and it is now being pursued at Microsoft Research. There are also more radical proposals like Tripoli.
Problem is, that's something that can only be done as a standard, which means the list of groups that can do it are governments, AOL, and microsoft. The rest of us need to focus on things we can do to put these assholes out of commission, or at least make sure we never see their filth.
I've taken that nuclear - I have my filter save every spam I ever get so I can train a new filter if I like. I have 10,000+. ;) Usually, the first three spams to try a new trick get through, I get to work, I tell Mozilla it's spam, then that trick never works again.
I doubt that, at least to the extent you likely intend it. The great thing about Bayesian filtering is that it's adaptive. So they would have to dramatically increase the rate at which they discover and use filter-killing tricks for this to work.
I'm running Mozilla, and in the last 8 months (roughly) I've gotten 10,000 spams - modest, but a great library for catching spams. I catch about 97% or more of them. And I can tell when they come out with a new trick - my catch rate will drop to say 80% for a day, after which my filter catches up to the new trick. In fact, when they don't have new tricks, my catch rate is about 99+%. Most of what gets through is new tricks.
I'd say now, they come out with a filter-busting trick maybe once a month. For spam to become a problem to my client, they'd have to do it better than once a day. I don't think they have the resources to do that.
I've wondered why some of the anti-spam sites aren't run from countries with nonexistent extradiction policies like Aruba (home of internet gambling sites). Get rid of the legal aspect at least, concentrate resources on running the site and fighting DDOSs
Perhaps they realize that, as a bunch of long-haired communist hippie freaks, the FSF have no money.
All joking aside, lawsuits find defendants with $$$$.