We can sit on our high horse and demand that our leaders create policies which force good options to be made available while forcing those who cause damage to the public sphere to pay for the true cost of their product.
That used to be called progress, now it's called interference.
Flat rate income tax is not the answer, most of those 60k pages are already dedicated to defining "income". Someone who "earns" a bazillion dollars a year is using up a far larger percentage of the infrastructure we all paid for than just one man. Nobody makes anything without the tacit support of the society they find themselves in, take away that support and bazillion dollar jobs will disappear. Also I don't understand why you would want to support a tax system that is clearly detrimental to your own self-interest, as you demonstrated in your post rich people don't do that.
If you're an educator, you have to choose between teaching your students that cheating is bad, and teaching them what they need to know to be successful in life.
Sorry, but the implicit assumption that you have to cheat to be successful in life is a tad offensive on a site chock full of successful professionals. If you really do believe that, then perhaps you should re-examine your definitions of "cheating" and "success".
Anonymity does not "make" people anything. Anonymity shows you how a person behaves when they think nobody is watching.
Get past your moralfragotry; honest is better then appearance-saving hypocrisy.
The best definition I know for morality is "doing the RightThingTM when you think nobody is watching". Logically religious people cannot even take that test since they firmly believe their god is always watching (ewww), nevertheless it must be true that everyone has failed that test at some point because (if we are being honest) none of us can cast the first stone when it comes to jackassery and hypocrisy.
In short: repeating what "the people in the know" say but with a different set of words is the way to go. In a sense its the tutors who are, without so many words, asking their pupils to create plagiarised works.
Putting down in your own words what others have already said a billion times over is called "learning" through "research". For example you could learn the proper meaning of "plagiarism" by researching it more thoroughly.;)
I worked at a major telco in Oz for 7years as a technical lead on their mission critical systems, The telco was an old school government monopoly that had just been semi-privatized. I agree adding something like this their systems to comply with the law would take much longer and cost a lot more than most people would think, but once it's done it's done. It's then just a fucking checkbox that needs to be ticked once, not once a month.
This is nothing more than a company thumbing their nose at regulators by saying "If we are forced to provide X as part of our service then we will do so in such a way that ensures nobody wants to use X". Such behavior is frowned on over here, it would land the company in court where they would likely be levied a fine with lots of zeros on the end. Verizon know this because they operate in Oz and somehow manage to handle unlisted Aussie numbers without the need for a recurring charge.
Why do you assume more money is his goal? When I can pay my bills on $50k, a good job is getting paid $100k for doing something I enjoy, work is doing something I hate for $150K.
I'm not one who believes that forced redistribution of wealth is the way to go.
Taxation by definition is "forced redistribution of wealth", so are you saying we should not have tax and therefore not have government, or do you think taxes should be voulentary and therefore ineffective?
Yes the fact that many of the same problems exist with coal, eg....
To get the 'advertised' output of 6 coal plants requires you build 7 to cater for maintenance.
To efficiently meet peek load, hydro dams and gas turbines must be available.
To efficiently fuel the plant it must be built on or very near a coal mine and use long transmission lines.
These are large engineering projects we are talking about, you don't get the efficiency of scale you get with a one shoe fits all solution like changing over to fluro bulbs. These projects are specifically engineered to meet the owners needs, if the market is structured such that one of those needs is to reduce pollution, then it will happen.
The time I appreciate plants the most is when a drought breaks, we had a deep and long drought here in Oz recently that lasted several years. My house is near the beach so for most of that time the yard was just bare sand. When the drought broke a couple of years ago, somehow the grass "knew" and instead of coming up in patches like it did after a storm during the drought, it came up like a carpet of barely perceptible green fuzz, within a month the city had their lawn mowers out again. I've been through several droughts and seen the greenery come back in spectacular fashion, but this one I noticed very early and the speed and synchronicity of the response blew me away. Looking at those tiny green-yellow shoots push up through the desert sands in my yard really made me appreciate just how tough ordinary grass is.
The Tasmanian devil population is currently suffering through a plague of transmissible mouth cancers, from reports it appears to be a relatively new disease, not sure how it is transmitted though.
We don't need structure, we don't need logic, we'll just throw a metric crap-ton of data at it and hope something works!
To most software people data mining involves putting a pile of unstructured data into a structured database and then running queries on it, the time and effort required for the first step is what kills most of these projects at a properly conducted requirements stage. However Watson, (the jeopardy playing computer), has demonstrated that computers can derive arbitrary facts directly from a vast pile of unstructured data, not only that but it does it both faster and more accurately than a human can scan a lifetime of trivia stored in their own head.
Of course the trade-off is accuracy since even if Watson were bug-free it would still occasionally give the wrong answer for the same reason humans do, misinterpretation of the written word. This means that (say) financial databases are not under threat from Watson. But that's not the kind of questions Watson was built to answer, think about currently labour intensive jobs such as deriving a test case suite from the software documents, and deriving the software documents from developer conversations (both text and speech). Data mining (even of relatively small unstructured sets) could (in the future) act as a technical writer, producing draft documents and flagging potential contradictions and inconsistencies, humans review and edit the draft and it goes back into the data pile as an authoritative source.
4pessimists/
Ironically such technology would put the army of 'knowledge workers' it has created back on the scrap heap with the typists and bank tellers. At that point some smart arse will teach it to code using examples on the internet and code_monkeys everywhere will suddenly find they have automated themselves out of a job. It learns to code in 2ms and immediately starts rewriting slashcode, it takes it another nano-second to work out it's own questions are more interesting than those of humans, it starts trash talking Linux, several days later civilization collapses, humans go all Mad Max and Watson is used as a motorcycle ramp...or maybe...Watson works this out beforehand and ask itself how it can avoid being used as a bike ramp?
/4pessimists
Being able to even TOUCH all of the data, let alone do something with it is a real and complicated problem
Thing is, people like my misses who has a PHd in Marketing look at Watson and shrug - "A computer is looking up answers on the internet, what's the big deal?". They don't understand the achievement because they don't understand the problem, you explain it to them and they still don't get it. It's so far out of their field of expertise that you need to train them to think like a programmer before you can even explain the problem. However just because computer "illiterates" don't know that what they are asking from computers is impossible (in a practical sense), doesn't mean they should be prevented from asking. After all, what I am doing right now with a home computer was impossible when I was at HS, even the flat screen I'm viewing it on was impossible. If Watson turns out to be useful and priced accordingly then business will make a business out of purchasing such a system and answering impossible questions for a fee. If Watson turns out to be an elaborate 'parlor trick' then some things will stay impossible for a bit longer.
Disclaimer: I'm not suggesting technical writers will be out of a job tomorrow, (or that I will be automated into retirement), rather that Watson is a high profile example of the kind of problems that data miners can now tackle using very large unstructured data sets, such a feat was impossible only a decade ago and is still cost prohibitive to all but the deepest of pockets.
The US health system is fucked because there is a maze of overlapping schemes and policy fine print, each one with its own army of accounts who are paid to work out how NOT to pay your claim. The US spends as much tax on health as Australia does (on a per capita basis). The difference is that in Australia you are fully covered with that tax money no questions asked, whereas in the US the same level of funding doesn't even buy basic cover for everyone. A good system will only come about when affordable universal health care is a bipartisan issue, which is unlikely to happen any day soon in the US.
"ID for voters" is common-sense, you want to ensure voters are eligible. OTOH attaching the ID to a particular vote destroys the secret part in what is supposed to be a secret ballot. The inked finger (as used in Iraq) is another good way to ensure people don't vote more than once, but stained fingers do nothing to confirm their eligibility to vote.
believe that insightful and cute children's books rank up there along Plato
Depends what you use to rank them, I'd dare say that more people have read "Green Eggs and Ham" in the last few decades than have read Plato in the last couple of millenia. This would tend to imply that its simple philosophical message, (try something different), has had more influence on the minds of today's 20 and 30-somethings than Plato ever had.
I'm just a grumpy old man
I'm also a grumpy old fart, I occasionally read 'Green Eggs and Ham' to my grandkids as I did with their parents, sure Plato would put toddlers to sleep quicker but that's not why I read to them. I agree however that the Dr Suess and Plato are in different leagues, one is aimed directly young kids and one for older kids/adults. For young kids the flow, inflections, and rhyme of the words is more important than the actual story, in fact if you turn on the kids channel you will see some very weird stuff that toddlers love. There's no words just sounds that flow like the spoken word, to an adult the show looks like its producer was on acid. "Bill and Ben" is something similar from our childhood, I clearly remember loving the show, but seeing old clips on youtube I'm left wondering why the "Flobalob" speak was so fascinating to me?
Here in Australia we have just come out of our worst drought on record, it lasted over a decade with one or two normal years in between. Dam levels were at 10-20% capacity and many regional towns were so low they had to boil the muddy dregs that came out of the tap. Virtually every state capital comissioned some of the largests desal plants on the planet, which are just now coming online. Thing is, the last two years have been our wettest on record, dams across the country are now overflowing and politicians are now bitching about the contracts they signed and saying they don't need the water.
To the naked eye, the climate in Autralia isn't so much changing as it is intensifying, we have always endured alternating drought and flood due to el-nino/el-nina, as does S.America. The swings are more intense now and consequently the water supply is more variable. I think building new coal powered generators to power desal plants (as we did here in Victoria) is the height of stupidity. However the reality is that we need those plants and in a few years politicians will be congratulating themselves on their "foresight" when things dry out again.
Numerical analysis is where computers shine. Basically NA is used in most real world situations because mathematicians are still looking for the general solution. Another term for NA is "simulation". For a fundamental example, there is no analytical solution to calculate the area under a normal distribution curve. The distinction between analytical and numeric was a lot more obvious when I went to school in the 70's, we used 'log tables' to find common NA solutions, a pocket calculator does the same thing but the look up tables are hidden from view and the look-ups are performed a dozen or so orders of magnitude faster.
In the real universe the things that can be solved analytically are vastly outnumbered by those things that can only be approximately solved numerically. Of course one of the primary reasons computers have proven to be so useful is that they can perform accurate, large scale NA calculations far in excess of what some hairless monkeys can do with pen and paper. Most of this maths was already there prior to computers, what computers have given us is a massive increase in our ability to "crunch numbers", this has allowed us to explore and model reality in much finer detail, which in turn has revolutionized engineering and led to countless scientific discoveries and a global redeployment of a large chunk of the available workforce, all within my lifetime.
Slashdot Mirror
We can sit on our high horse and demand that our leaders create policies which force good options to be made available while forcing those who cause damage to the public sphere to pay for the true cost of their product.
That used to be called progress, now it's called interference.
Grow up and get over hating your parents, my generation doesn't owe you anything.
Flat rate income tax is not the answer, most of those 60k pages are already dedicated to defining "income". Someone who "earns" a bazillion dollars a year is using up a far larger percentage of the infrastructure we all paid for than just one man. Nobody makes anything without the tacit support of the society they find themselves in, take away that support and bazillion dollar jobs will disappear. Also I don't understand why you would want to support a tax system that is clearly detrimental to your own self-interest, as you demonstrated in your post rich people don't do that.
Verizon Australia
If you're an educator, you have to choose between teaching your students that cheating is bad, and teaching them what they need to know to be successful in life.
Sorry, but the implicit assumption that you have to cheat to be successful in life is a tad offensive on a site chock full of successful professionals. If you really do believe that, then perhaps you should re-examine your definitions of "cheating" and "success".
Anonymity makes normal persons jackasses.
Anonymity makes normal person honest.
Anonymity does not "make" people anything. Anonymity shows you how a person behaves when they think nobody is watching.
Get past your moralfragotry; honest is better then appearance-saving hypocrisy.
The best definition I know for morality is "doing the RightThingTM when you think nobody is watching". Logically religious people cannot even take that test since they firmly believe their god is always watching (ewww), nevertheless it must be true that everyone has failed that test at some point because (if we are being honest) none of us can cast the first stone when it comes to jackassery and hypocrisy.
In short: repeating what "the people in the know" say but with a different set of words is the way to go. In a sense its the tutors who are, without so many words, asking their pupils to create plagiarised works.
Putting down in your own words what others have already said a billion times over is called "learning" through "research". For example you could learn the proper meaning of "plagiarism" by researching it more thoroughly. ;)
I worked at a major telco in Oz for 7years as a technical lead on their mission critical systems, The telco was an old school government monopoly that had just been semi-privatized. I agree adding something like this their systems to comply with the law would take much longer and cost a lot more than most people would think, but once it's done it's done. It's then just a fucking checkbox that needs to be ticked once, not once a month.
This is nothing more than a company thumbing their nose at regulators by saying "If we are forced to provide X as part of our service then we will do so in such a way that ensures nobody wants to use X". Such behavior is frowned on over here, it would land the company in court where they would likely be levied a fine with lots of zeros on the end. Verizon know this because they operate in Oz and somehow manage to handle unlisted Aussie numbers without the need for a recurring charge.
You can't prove a negative
No, but you can demonstrate you meet minimum standards, such as a pre-defined maximum level of plutonium in your baby food.
Why do you assume more money is his goal? When I can pay my bills on $50k, a good job is getting paid $100k for doing something I enjoy, work is doing something I hate for $150K.
I'm not one who believes that forced redistribution of wealth is the way to go.
Taxation by definition is "forced redistribution of wealth", so are you saying we should not have tax and therefore not have government, or do you think taxes should be voulentary and therefore ineffective?
Since when was capitalisim a "merit based system"?
did I miss anything?
Yes the fact that many of the same problems exist with coal, eg....
To get the 'advertised' output of 6 coal plants requires you build 7 to cater for maintenance.
To efficiently meet peek load, hydro dams and gas turbines must be available.
To efficiently fuel the plant it must be built on or very near a coal mine and use long transmission lines.
These are large engineering projects we are talking about, you don't get the efficiency of scale you get with a one shoe fits all solution like changing over to fluro bulbs. These projects are specifically engineered to meet the owners needs, if the market is structured such that one of those needs is to reduce pollution, then it will happen.
The time I appreciate plants the most is when a drought breaks, we had a deep and long drought here in Oz recently that lasted several years. My house is near the beach so for most of that time the yard was just bare sand. When the drought broke a couple of years ago, somehow the grass "knew" and instead of coming up in patches like it did after a storm during the drought, it came up like a carpet of barely perceptible green fuzz, within a month the city had their lawn mowers out again. I've been through several droughts and seen the greenery come back in spectacular fashion, but this one I noticed very early and the speed and synchronicity of the response blew me away. Looking at those tiny green-yellow shoots push up through the desert sands in my yard really made me appreciate just how tough ordinary grass is.
The Tasmanian devil population is currently suffering through a plague of transmissible mouth cancers, from reports it appears to be a relatively new disease, not sure how it is transmitted though.
No, meat is muscle cells from an animal or fish, muscle cells are not bacterial cells.
We don't need structure, we don't need logic, we'll just throw a metric crap-ton of data at it and hope something works!
To most software people data mining involves putting a pile of unstructured data into a structured database and then running queries on it, the time and effort required for the first step is what kills most of these projects at a properly conducted requirements stage. However Watson, (the jeopardy playing computer), has demonstrated that computers can derive arbitrary facts directly from a vast pile of unstructured data, not only that but it does it both faster and more accurately than a human can scan a lifetime of trivia stored in their own head.
/4pessimists
Of course the trade-off is accuracy since even if Watson were bug-free it would still occasionally give the wrong answer for the same reason humans do, misinterpretation of the written word. This means that (say) financial databases are not under threat from Watson. But that's not the kind of questions Watson was built to answer, think about currently labour intensive jobs such as deriving a test case suite from the software documents, and deriving the software documents from developer conversations (both text and speech). Data mining (even of relatively small unstructured sets) could (in the future) act as a technical writer, producing draft documents and flagging potential contradictions and inconsistencies, humans review and edit the draft and it goes back into the data pile as an authoritative source.
4pessimists/
Ironically such technology would put the army of 'knowledge workers' it has created back on the scrap heap with the typists and bank tellers. At that point some smart arse will teach it to code using examples on the internet and code_monkeys everywhere will suddenly find they have automated themselves out of a job. It learns to code in 2ms and immediately starts rewriting slashcode, it takes it another nano-second to work out it's own questions are more interesting than those of humans, it starts trash talking Linux, several days later civilization collapses, humans go all Mad Max and Watson is used as a motorcycle ramp...or maybe...Watson works this out beforehand and ask itself how it can avoid being used as a bike ramp?
Being able to even TOUCH all of the data, let alone do something with it is a real and complicated problem
Thing is, people like my misses who has a PHd in Marketing look at Watson and shrug - "A computer is looking up answers on the internet, what's the big deal?". They don't understand the achievement because they don't understand the problem, you explain it to them and they still don't get it. It's so far out of their field of expertise that you need to train them to think like a programmer before you can even explain the problem. However just because computer "illiterates" don't know that what they are asking from computers is impossible (in a practical sense), doesn't mean they should be prevented from asking. After all, what I am doing right now with a home computer was impossible when I was at HS, even the flat screen I'm viewing it on was impossible. If Watson turns out to be useful and priced accordingly then business will make a business out of purchasing such a system and answering impossible questions for a fee. If Watson turns out to be an elaborate 'parlor trick' then some things will stay impossible for a bit longer.
Disclaimer: I'm not suggesting technical writers will be out of a job tomorrow, (or that I will be automated into retirement), rather that Watson is a high profile example of the kind of problems that data miners can now tackle using very large unstructured data sets, such a feat was impossible only a decade ago and is still cost prohibitive to all but the deepest of pockets.
The US health system is fucked because there is a maze of overlapping schemes and policy fine print, each one with its own army of accounts who are paid to work out how NOT to pay your claim. The US spends as much tax on health as Australia does (on a per capita basis). The difference is that in Australia you are fully covered with that tax money no questions asked, whereas in the US the same level of funding doesn't even buy basic cover for everyone. A good system will only come about when affordable universal health care is a bipartisan issue, which is unlikely to happen any day soon in the US.
I can't see anywhere to go but UP from where we are now.
You have a distinct lack of imagination, the US population is still well fed, watered, and sheltered.
"ID for voters" is common-sense, you want to ensure voters are eligible. OTOH attaching the ID to a particular vote destroys the secret part in what is supposed to be a secret ballot. The inked finger (as used in Iraq) is another good way to ensure people don't vote more than once, but stained fingers do nothing to confirm their eligibility to vote.
believe that insightful and cute children's books rank up there along Plato
Depends what you use to rank them, I'd dare say that more people have read "Green Eggs and Ham" in the last few decades than have read Plato in the last couple of millenia. This would tend to imply that its simple philosophical message, (try something different), has had more influence on the minds of today's 20 and 30-somethings than Plato ever had.
I'm just a grumpy old man
I'm also a grumpy old fart, I occasionally read 'Green Eggs and Ham' to my grandkids as I did with their parents, sure Plato would put toddlers to sleep quicker but that's not why I read to them. I agree however that the Dr Suess and Plato are in different leagues, one is aimed directly young kids and one for older kids/adults. For young kids the flow, inflections, and rhyme of the words is more important than the actual story, in fact if you turn on the kids channel you will see some very weird stuff that toddlers love. There's no words just sounds that flow like the spoken word, to an adult the show looks like its producer was on acid. "Bill and Ben" is something similar from our childhood, I clearly remember loving the show, but seeing old clips on youtube I'm left wondering why the "Flobalob" speak was so fascinating to me?
Here in Australia we have just come out of our worst drought on record, it lasted over a decade with one or two normal years in between. Dam levels were at 10-20% capacity and many regional towns were so low they had to boil the muddy dregs that came out of the tap. Virtually every state capital comissioned some of the largests desal plants on the planet, which are just now coming online. Thing is, the last two years have been our wettest on record, dams across the country are now overflowing and politicians are now bitching about the contracts they signed and saying they don't need the water.
To the naked eye, the climate in Autralia isn't so much changing as it is intensifying, we have always endured alternating drought and flood due to el-nino/el-nina, as does S.America. The swings are more intense now and consequently the water supply is more variable. I think building new coal powered generators to power desal plants (as we did here in Victoria) is the height of stupidity. However the reality is that we need those plants and in a few years politicians will be congratulating themselves on their "foresight" when things dry out again.
In historical, logical, and pratcial terms your "move elsewhere" solution is equivalent to "let them eat cake".
I was about to say the same thing, I would just like to add that even in free fall there is no "down" that a non-gyroscopic gimbal can detect.
Numerical analysis is where computers shine. Basically NA is used in most real world situations because mathematicians are still looking for the general solution. Another term for NA is "simulation". For a fundamental example, there is no analytical solution to calculate the area under a normal distribution curve. The distinction between analytical and numeric was a lot more obvious when I went to school in the 70's, we used 'log tables' to find common NA solutions, a pocket calculator does the same thing but the look up tables are hidden from view and the look-ups are performed a dozen or so orders of magnitude faster.
In the real universe the things that can be solved analytically are vastly outnumbered by those things that can only be approximately solved numerically. Of course one of the primary reasons computers have proven to be so useful is that they can perform accurate, large scale NA calculations far in excess of what some hairless monkeys can do with pen and paper. Most of this maths was already there prior to computers, what computers have given us is a massive increase in our ability to "crunch numbers", this has allowed us to explore and model reality in much finer detail, which in turn has revolutionized engineering and led to countless scientific discoveries and a global redeployment of a large chunk of the available workforce, all within my lifetime.