Why? Serial killers are a tiny blip in terms of what causes mortality. They are a massive economic engine, though, and make very profitable books, movies and TV. (And this is not a good thing.) It's why someone can get funding to pursue such a frivolous line of research.
We are not nearly as negatively effected by serial killers as we are the flu. Do serial killers kill anything like the 36,000 people who die of seasonal flu? (That's regular flu, not swine.) Or diabetes? Way more people die of that than murder. How about attacking our sweet tooth gene? We could attack diabetes, obesity, and heart disease all at the same time by finding and eliminating the sits on McDonald's board of directors gene, though you might argue that that's essentially the same as the serial killer gene.
We can profit more as a society by focusing on other things, both in terms of problems to attack and what we dwell on. Stopping talking about serial killers wouldn't make them go away, but it would reduce our unfounded terror, and the cultural insanity that comes with it.
Ah, now I've got it. Let's find the gene that makes people put serial killers on TV whenever they possibly can.
Years ago, I was amused and horrified when I went to a talk by Carl Schank. He was saying that people don't think when they converse. Instead, they just listen for key words and index those to stories they can reply with, such that a conversation is just one story after another, related only by key words, not key ideas.
One of the people listening to the talk said "Well, but right now, I'm asking you a question about your comment. How does that fit? it seems like I'm thinking about what you say, and reacting to the ideas, rather than simply repeating a story."
Schank waves his hands and says, approximately, "No, no, no. I'm not talking about us, here. I'm talking about Them. You know, normal people."
So much for that theory. Only not. Because the theory and the study actually still holds, to some extent. It holds with dumb people most of the time, and smart people some of the time. We can all be rational actors when we want to exert that effort. The problem is that it's an effort.
For some people it's really, really hard, and for other's it's not so hard. We need to teach people to do it more, and we need to understand that they don't do it a lot of the time and react/legislate accordingly. You cannot argue that people are 100% rational actors and thus we should get the hell out of their way, and you cannot argue that people are lemmings, and we need to make a safe cage for them. To do either is a rhetorical trick to prevent action.
I also take issue with your claims that people "want" corn so processed it retains zero nutritional value, fats so perverted the body can barely process them, and sugar that is heavily biased towards being stored as fat rather than burned that then creates a depressed insulin response and the near-instant desire for more.
Yes, they do "want". They want crack, they want meth. We all want that stuff. It's just that some folks don't know about the consequences, and some know and are willing to suffer them.
And then we, as a society, pay for it.
Nanny-state my ass. We need a stingy state. A real attention to lowering government costs, instead of the phony one we're always being sold. We need to tax the crap out of this junk to save ourselves some money. If the consumer wants something which screws society, then they can pay extra for it.
But that doesn't in any way address companies offshoring service labor (call centers, remote maint for machines, etc.) or offshoring their headquarters to get tax breaks.
Really, it's a good idea. Now apply that brain to the other issues.
Lying? Taking machines for personal use (as in theft)?
If you see that and you don't report it to management, I sure as hell don't want to work with you, and can honestly say I've never knowingly worked with anyone like you.
But that won't happen in our corporate-controlled state.
Furthermore, if corporations are people (a thought I hate, but others can use it in the courts), then this would set a precedent for doing such things to individuals. I don't want the state to infringe on my ability to dump this country in favor of another.
However, I think, in the mentality of 'If the result is a trade war...fight to win.' we could tax such companies when they try to do business in the US and make the initial move a very bad business decision. That would mean taxing other foreign businesses, too, though.
I know this guy. He says NJ is 9.46% full. He's a guy who knows these things.
He suggests you place the cards in the trunk of a older domestic vehicle, then have the car crushed into a cube. That cube will be melted down and recycled. This is, he says, a way to keep our beautiful state from becoming too full of... "network cards". And since the "network cards" get recycled, it is also good for the environment.
If you're squeamish, he could do it for you, for the right price.
I've gotta say that I find LaTeX extremely productive, not hard to use, and certainly not unreadable. Yes, you could argue that Wysiwyg formatting is more intuitive, but LaTeX is wildly better at quickly producing a book or article in a consistent fashion. As far as readability goes, LaTeX markups in a document are not a big hindrance to readability in the doc, if what you're focused on is content, as opposed to messing around with margins and fonts.
It's a compromise, but LaTeX is a big winner over Wysiwyg in many ways. Having struggled to produce a book using Wysiwyg methods, I found myself longing for LaTex or a similar system after the first month or so.
If you're not thinking of Wysiwyg in contrast to LaTeX, and have some other markup system in mind when you say LaTeX is barely usable, please sing out.
This summary, and even the NYT article seem to be missing the point.
The point is not that MacDonald's serves crap. We all know MacDonald's serves crap. Even MacDonald's knows MacDonald's serves crap, which is why they are constantly saying "look! We have these non-crap things on the menu, TOO!" (And even when they do that, they point to their alternative to fries -- apples you can dip in a sugar mixture. Brilliant.)
The issue is advertising to children.
To quote the article: "Citing toys aimed at promoting the latest "Shrek" movie, the Center for Science in the Public Interest said that the plastic promotions lure children into McDonald's restaurants where they are then likely to order food that is too high in calories, fat and salt."
The important part of this line should be: "Citing toys aimed at promoting the latest "Shrek" movie, the Center for Science in the Public Interest said that the plastic promotions lure children into McDonald's restaurants" Because that is ILLEGAL.
Advertising to children is not legal. It's something that we, as a society, have looked the other way on for many, many years, but there are laws aimed at preventing it. When you advertise to children, you externalize the cost of advertising to the parents because the children will nag the parents until they cave. Influencing adults costs a lot more, when you do it directly, and sometimes it's just impossible. Many parents wouldn't dream of ever taking their kids to MacDonald's, but cave when they're shrilly begged for MacDonald's for the 400th time. You want to keep your children healthy by keeping them from eating that crap, but it's far, far easier to cave than to fight your kids every single day, and even if you do, their sitter or grandmother or even their teacher on a field trip will cave. It's practically an irresistible force.
I once talked to a MacDonald's ad man (a woman, in this case) who proudly pointed out to me that Ronald never eats the burgers. You see, any MacDonald's ad is broken into segments. The entertainment segments don't advertise. The advertisement is only the parts where Ronald isn't on screen. The parts where Ronald is on screen is apparently a friggin' PSA.
The toys in the Happy meal are supposedly a value item to help an adult make a judgment to buy a happy meal because it will both feed and entertain his/her child. That's value. That's also bullshit. The toy, as we all know, is there because kids will want to go to MacDonald's to get the toy.
They're advertising to children. They need to stop.
I'm not sure about this -- it's been a long time since I was in academia, but don't the most prestigious journals (and most journals, really) have as one of their criteria that the paper not have been published elsewhere, and wouldn't a conference presentation count as such?
Someone who knows this stuff for sure, please answer on this -- what constitutes a previous exposure/publishing such that a prestigious journal won't publish the paper?
Or are those old rules which people no longer follow?
I'm with you on PS2 and VGA but
a. Some of us need serial, real serial that really works, not some half-functioning USB dongle.
b. It's seems too early to drop DVI, but if the adapters from HDMI work spectacularly well, and the HDMI connectors are cheaper, then I'd be down with that.
c. Printer ports are too big: they use too much material and too much space. We could save money by dropping them, and I think USB to parallel converters work fine, but I have no experience with them. It seems like there are two reasons why people use parallel ports, though: the first is old printers, the second is to get fast bidirectional 5v data on and off the machine, which is good for LEDs, sensors, and talking to chips. Are there good USB based alternatives to the parallel port for that?
The big point here should not be removing kruft, but rather lowering costs, lowering energy use and making smaller motherboards fit in tighter places. So, for example, if patents on the HDMI connector make it more expensive than a DVI connector, then we should stay with DVI.
The idea of using a salt-based desiccant and heating it to release the water has been around for a long time. The liquid aspect of that desiccant, and the permeable membrane seem to be the new ideas, here.
If they're in management, I think a CS degree (at least one less than 10 years old one) is often a detriment to a manager in corporate America. Managers should manage. The common desire for managers to be "Working managers" is a recipe for disaster. People do what they like and are good at. If you have a manager who's a good programmer, he'll program instead of doing what a manager should actually do, which is to constantly work to remove obstacles from the path of his or her team.
Furthermore, a CS degree can lead the manager to start making decisions that the team lead(s) should really be making, which is another recipe for waste, gotchas and unhappy workers.
I'm not saying a degree is a bad thing, but it shouldn't be a classical CS degree. The "lines of code" metric mentioned above is a good example of the problem. The manager needs to know about metrics that actually work. He or she needs to be able to judge software quality by speed, usefulness, buglessnes, user comfort, etc. These can be metrics. But most managers don't know (and aren't interested in knowing) how to measure them.
We generally bribe our politicians through contributions to their election funding. A bribe paid to a politician who doesn't get elected is lost money, so it's VERY important to know who will win. If you can't tell who'll win in the present system, the number of bribes you need to pay multiplies by TWO. In this system, you'd need to bribe everyone running. That could get very expensive.
Step one, manage the forces on a liquid to make a constant bowl -- this allows you to make a telescope and point it anywhere you want.
Step two, manipulate that bowl to alter the parabola. No more adjustable mirrors on solar collection systems, for starters, but this also allows you to direct sunlight on a quickly moving target, like a solar powered space elevator crawler. This gets particularly interesting in space. It allows you to focus sunlight on a satellite, or an object on the ground. A small mirror could charge up the batteries on a satellite, with a wide focal point, and a big one could burn tiny little holes in even the fastest moving target. A big enough lens could do the same gag on people's heads on the ground. Not sure how big it would have to be accomplish that through the atmosphere, though.
Imagine a 200-sq foot mylar fixed mirror doing a crappy job of focusing sunlight on a fixed position high-quality adaptive mirror, which was in turn capable to directing that light down to a few receiver stations on the rotating planet below, constantly compensating for the movement of the receiver.
" 0.1% of the network's users were consuming almost a third of the traffic"... "the average heavy data user consumes a staggering 66,666MB (so around 65GB) per month."
If this were truly the case, they could cap things at 5G at no extra cost and get back 90% of that 1/3, while only effecting a little more than.1% of their customers. Instead, they are setting the cap lower such that they get back maybe another 5% of that 1/3 (that's a gain of less than 2%) and screwing people only one or two SD from the mean. That's going to be a lot of people.
Every situation a telco sees is a new opportunity to try to screw their customers or a government out of more money. Every situation, without exception.
One might argue that every business should try to make as much money as possible. But businesses who screw their customers get dumped in favor of other, more customer friendly businesses fast, and therefor most successful companies try to take care of their customers.
This dynamic is completely absent in the big telcos. It's an entire industry of terrible companies run by lying bastards.
(Small telcos try harder, and attempt to take care of their customers, but small telcos don't have cell networks or access to most people's last mile.)
Slashdot Mirror
Why? Serial killers are a tiny blip in terms of what causes mortality. They are a massive economic engine, though, and make very profitable books, movies and TV. (And this is not a good thing.) It's why someone can get funding to pursue such a frivolous line of research.
We are not nearly as negatively effected by serial killers as we are the flu. Do serial killers kill anything like the 36,000 people who die of seasonal flu? (That's regular flu, not swine.) Or diabetes? Way more people die of that than murder. How about attacking our sweet tooth gene? We could attack diabetes, obesity, and heart disease all at the same time by finding and eliminating the sits on McDonald's board of directors gene, though you might argue that that's essentially the same as the serial killer gene.
We can profit more as a society by focusing on other things, both in terms of problems to attack and what we dwell on. Stopping talking about serial killers wouldn't make them go away, but it would reduce our unfounded terror, and the cultural insanity that comes with it.
Ah, now I've got it. Let's find the gene that makes people put serial killers on TV whenever they possibly can.
Years ago, I was amused and horrified when I went to a talk by Carl Schank. He was saying that people don't think when they converse. Instead, they just listen for key words and index those to stories they can reply with, such that a conversation is just one story after another, related only by key words, not key ideas.
One of the people listening to the talk said "Well, but right now, I'm asking you a question about your comment. How does that fit? it seems like I'm thinking about what you say, and reacting to the ideas, rather than simply repeating a story."
Schank waves his hands and says, approximately, "No, no, no. I'm not talking about us, here. I'm talking about Them. You know, normal people."
So much for that theory. Only not. Because the theory and the study actually still holds, to some extent. It holds with dumb people most of the time, and smart people some of the time. We can all be rational actors when we want to exert that effort. The problem is that it's an effort.
For some people it's really, really hard, and for other's it's not so hard. We need to teach people to do it more, and we need to understand that they don't do it a lot of the time and react/legislate accordingly. You cannot argue that people are 100% rational actors and thus we should get the hell out of their way, and you cannot argue that people are lemmings, and we need to make a safe cage for them. To do either is a rhetorical trick to prevent action.
I also take issue with your claims that people "want" corn so processed it retains zero nutritional value, fats so perverted the body can barely process them, and sugar that is heavily biased towards being stored as fat rather than burned that then creates a depressed insulin response and the near-instant desire for more.
Yes, they do "want". They want crack, they want meth. We all want that stuff. It's just that some folks don't know about the consequences, and some know and are willing to suffer them.
And then we, as a society, pay for it.
Nanny-state my ass. We need a stingy state. A real attention to lowering government costs, instead of the phony one we're always being sold. We need to tax the crap out of this junk to save ourselves some money. If the consumer wants something which screws society, then they can pay extra for it.
Is that why he made all the later SW movies so terrible?
I think that's a great idea.
But that doesn't in any way address companies offshoring service labor (call centers, remote maint for machines, etc.) or offshoring their headquarters to get tax breaks.
Really, it's a good idea. Now apply that brain to the other issues.
What?
Lying? Taking machines for personal use (as in theft)?
If you see that and you don't report it to management, I sure as hell don't want to work with you, and can honestly say I've never knowingly worked with anyone like you.
I completely agree with you in sentiment.
But that won't happen in our corporate-controlled state.
Furthermore, if corporations are people (a thought I hate, but others can use it in the courts), then this would set a precedent for doing such things to individuals. I don't want the state to infringe on my ability to dump this country in favor of another.
However, I think, in the mentality of 'If the result is a trade war...fight to win.' we could tax such companies when they try to do business in the US and make the initial move a very bad business decision. That would mean taxing other foreign businesses, too, though.
I know this guy. He says NJ is 9.46% full. He's a guy who knows these things.
He suggests you place the cards in the trunk of a older domestic vehicle, then have the car crushed into a cube. That cube will be melted down and recycled. This is, he says, a way to keep our beautiful state from becoming too full of... "network cards". And since the "network cards" get recycled, it is also good for the environment.
If you're squeamish, he could do it for you, for the right price.
I've gotta say that I find LaTeX extremely productive, not hard to use, and certainly not unreadable. Yes, you could argue that Wysiwyg formatting is more intuitive, but LaTeX is wildly better at quickly producing a book or article in a consistent fashion. As far as readability goes, LaTeX markups in a document are not a big hindrance to readability in the doc, if what you're focused on is content, as opposed to messing around with margins and fonts.
It's a compromise, but LaTeX is a big winner over Wysiwyg in many ways. Having struggled to produce a book using Wysiwyg methods, I found myself longing for LaTex or a similar system after the first month or so.
If you're not thinking of Wysiwyg in contrast to LaTeX, and have some other markup system in mind when you say LaTeX is barely usable, please sing out.
This summary, and even the NYT article seem to be missing the point.
The point is not that MacDonald's serves crap. We all know MacDonald's serves crap. Even MacDonald's knows MacDonald's serves crap, which is why they are constantly saying "look! We have these non-crap things on the menu, TOO!" (And even when they do that, they point to their alternative to fries -- apples you can dip in a sugar mixture. Brilliant.)
The issue is advertising to children.
To quote the article: "Citing toys aimed at promoting the latest "Shrek" movie, the Center for Science in the Public Interest said that the plastic promotions lure children into McDonald's restaurants where they are then likely to order food that is too high in calories, fat and salt."
The important part of this line should be: "Citing toys aimed at promoting the latest "Shrek" movie, the Center for Science in the Public Interest said that the plastic promotions lure children into McDonald's restaurants" Because that is ILLEGAL.
Advertising to children is not legal. It's something that we, as a society, have looked the other way on for many, many years, but there are laws aimed at preventing it. When you advertise to children, you externalize the cost of advertising to the parents because the children will nag the parents until they cave. Influencing adults costs a lot more, when you do it directly, and sometimes it's just impossible. Many parents wouldn't dream of ever taking their kids to MacDonald's, but cave when they're shrilly begged for MacDonald's for the 400th time. You want to keep your children healthy by keeping them from eating that crap, but it's far, far easier to cave than to fight your kids every single day, and even if you do, their sitter or grandmother or even their teacher on a field trip will cave. It's practically an irresistible force.
I once talked to a MacDonald's ad man (a woman, in this case) who proudly pointed out to me that Ronald never eats the burgers. You see, any MacDonald's ad is broken into segments. The entertainment segments don't advertise. The advertisement is only the parts where Ronald isn't on screen. The parts where Ronald is on screen is apparently a friggin' PSA.
The toys in the Happy meal are supposedly a value item to help an adult make a judgment to buy a happy meal because it will both feed and entertain his/her child. That's value. That's also bullshit. The toy, as we all know, is there because kids will want to go to MacDonald's to get the toy.
They're advertising to children. They need to stop.
The fact that they serve crap is immaterial.
I'm not sure about this -- it's been a long time since I was in academia, but don't the most prestigious journals (and most journals, really) have as one of their criteria that the paper not have been published elsewhere, and wouldn't a conference presentation count as such?
Someone who knows this stuff for sure, please answer on this -- what constitutes a previous exposure/publishing such that a prestigious journal won't publish the paper?
Or are those old rules which people no longer follow?
I'm with you on PS2 and VGA but
a. Some of us need serial, real serial that really works, not some half-functioning USB dongle.
b. It's seems too early to drop DVI, but if the adapters from HDMI work spectacularly well, and the HDMI connectors are cheaper, then I'd be down with that.
c. Printer ports are too big: they use too much material and too much space. We could save money by dropping them, and I think USB to parallel converters work fine, but I have no experience with them. It seems like there are two reasons why people use parallel ports, though: the first is old printers, the second is to get fast bidirectional 5v data on and off the machine, which is good for LEDs, sensors, and talking to chips. Are there good USB based alternatives to the parallel port for that?
The big point here should not be removing kruft, but rather lowering costs, lowering energy use and making smaller motherboards fit in tighter places. So, for example, if patents on the HDMI connector make it more expensive than a DVI connector, then we should stay with DVI.
or any other chip maker willing to continue supporting PCI for a few years while the transition away from PCI finishes up.
Federal judges are appointed. What's the procedure for removing a judge from office?
Does failure to recuse himself when there's an obvious conflict of interest constitute grounds for such a removal?
Umm... is his wife Japanese?
The idea of using a salt-based desiccant and heating it to release the water has been around for a long time. The liquid aspect of that desiccant, and the permeable membrane seem to be the new ideas, here.
If they're in management, I think a CS degree (at least one less than 10 years old one) is often a detriment to a manager in corporate America. Managers should manage. The common desire for managers to be "Working managers" is a recipe for disaster. People do what they like and are good at. If you have a manager who's a good programmer, he'll program instead of doing what a manager should actually do, which is to constantly work to remove obstacles from the path of his or her team.
Furthermore, a CS degree can lead the manager to start making decisions that the team lead(s) should really be making, which is another recipe for waste, gotchas and unhappy workers.
I'm not saying a degree is a bad thing, but it shouldn't be a classical CS degree. The "lines of code" metric mentioned above is a good example of the problem. The manager needs to know about metrics that actually work. He or she needs to be able to judge software quality by speed, usefulness, buglessnes, user comfort, etc. These can be metrics. But most managers don't know (and aren't interested in knowing) how to measure them.
The word you want is "fungible" -- one programmer is exactly the same as any other. You can swap 'em around and get the same result.
This worked when you hired 7 year olds to run machines in the 1800's, and since those were the glory days for employers, they keep thinking that way.
We generally bribe our politicians through contributions to their election funding. A bribe paid to a politician who doesn't get elected is lost money, so it's VERY important to know who will win. If you can't tell who'll win in the present system, the number of bribes you need to pay multiplies by TWO. In this system, you'd need to bribe everyone running. That could get very expensive.
Step one, manage the forces on a liquid to make a constant bowl -- this allows you to make a telescope and point it anywhere you want.
Step two, manipulate that bowl to alter the parabola. No more adjustable mirrors on solar collection systems, for starters, but this also allows you to direct sunlight on a quickly moving target, like a solar powered space elevator crawler. This gets particularly interesting in space. It allows you to focus sunlight on a satellite, or an object on the ground. A small mirror could charge up the batteries on a satellite, with a wide focal point, and a big one could burn tiny little holes in even the fastest moving target. A big enough lens could do the same gag on people's heads on the ground. Not sure how big it would have to be accomplish that through the atmosphere, though.
Imagine a 200-sq foot mylar fixed mirror doing a crappy job of focusing sunlight on a fixed position high-quality adaptive mirror, which was in turn capable to directing that light down to a few receiver stations on the rotating planet below, constantly compensating for the movement of the receiver.
I stand corrected.
This is clearly the definitive answer for this article.
We can all stop posting now.
Ok, you're saying a serial philanderer, at least one borderline sociopath and several egomaniacs (there's overlap here) turned out OK?
They were mostly successful and certainly clever, but OK?
No.
That said, I suspect a laptop would have made them even worse.
" 0.1% of the network's users were consuming almost a third of the traffic" ... "the average heavy data user consumes a staggering 66,666MB (so around 65GB) per month."
If this were truly the case, they could cap things at 5G at no extra cost and get back 90% of that 1/3, while only effecting a little more than .1% of their customers. Instead, they are setting the cap lower such that they get back maybe another 5% of that 1/3 (that's a gain of less than 2%) and screwing people only one or two SD from the mean. That's going to be a lot of people.
Every situation a telco sees is a new opportunity to try to screw their customers or a government out of more money. Every situation, without exception.
One might argue that every business should try to make as much money as possible. But businesses who screw their customers get dumped in favor of other, more customer friendly businesses fast, and therefor most successful companies try to take care of their customers.
This dynamic is completely absent in the big telcos. It's an entire industry of terrible companies run by lying bastards.
(Small telcos try harder, and attempt to take care of their customers, but small telcos don't have cell networks or access to most people's last mile.)
OK, so we got too problems.