The experience in the UK is not proof that cameras cannot reduce crime. From the article you linked to:
Often [officers] do not want to find CCTV images "because it's hard work". Sometimes the police did not bother inquiring beyond local councils to find out whether CCTV cameras monitored a particular street incident.
In short: they put up a lot of cameras in the hope it would prevent crime. It turns out it didn't. This, however, does not prove crime won't reduce if you actually start using the camera's.
My guess is that if you could properly digitise all the footage so a computer could automatically track a list of suspects from with the time they left their house to the crime locations you would catch a lot more.
Also important to explain to Americans is that banks here in the Netherlands ENCOURAGE you to overdraft, instead of punishing you for it. For the simple reason that they make money on the interest they charge. (You have to stay below a limit that depends on your credit worthiness)
When I lived in the US no one managed to explain to me why the same business logic doesn't apply there
You don't think 1 full-time farmer per 5 casual players (taking your 20%) is suspicious? Most casual players only play a few hours a week and those 5 would need to spend enough cash on this to keep somebody full time employed.
I don't trust the numbers.
There are about 10 million people playing WoW, and WoW has ~80% market share. That works out to about 1 farmer for every 30 players.
But most of those 30 only play a few hours a day, and they only need to level up once or twice, many choose not to use a gold farmer at all. Farmers work more than 40 hours a week. That does not compute.
So I go 2-3 years with no pay, and then get all my pay in the last years when the company is finally profitable. So, when my income is $0, I pay no taxes at a very low rate. When my income is $500K, I pay maximum taxes (about half my income). So, I actually earn just over $100K a year but pay taxes at the maximum rate.
Funny, my numbers are similar. I have created a legal entity that sits in between me and the companies I own and it just rolls forward the losses for the first years to the money making years so it evens out. I'm not in the US by the way so that may not work for you.
Just out of the blue allowing doping would not realistically be accepted by politicians / sportsmen / the general public in most countries
But I would be in favor of experimenting with it, so my idea would be to create a doping and a non-doping category for a few events and see how it goes. That way you would avoid the problem of athletes having the feeling they are being forced to use doping when they don't want to.
If it were a lot hotter it would be easy to use it for heating, or power generation for that matter.
But to be fair: there are older power plants that aren't as efficient at using heat, and aren't close enough to a residential area or other consumer of heat to make it worth the while, so they need to burn off a lot more.
The waste heat after it leaves the coal fired power plants is about 30 degrees Celsius at best. You loose another 4 or 5 intransport. Not much you can do with it when it gets to its destination. Radiotors would have to be huge to give off any effective heat.
There are actually some nice benefits to be had from switching. For example it becomes much easier to do calculations in your head:
Try to work out how much water bottles a car can carry. (1 liter of water weighs 1 kilo, the load carrying capacity will be specified in kilo)
Try calculating the weight of a 16 page letter in your head without using metrics. (A4 paper has a surface of 2^4 part of 1 square meter, and paper weight is specified in square meters on the package).
And there are probably less contrived example you can come up with by using an example with feet, inches and the twelve hour clock but I can't be bothered
Does anybody have experience with using EC2 as failover? Can it be fully automated?
I operate a regular database backed web site, and have spare servers sitting around in case something goed awry. It would be great if I could avoid that redundancy and set things up so that EC2 instances get fired up if my heartbeat server detects the site is down, pipes the database over (or the latest backup if that's unavailable), and then redirects the load balancer to the EC2 instances. I'd like to do all of this without human intervention (since I hate getting up at 3 AM and I make mistakes a lot)
If this can be done reliably it would be an awesome service, but I have no clue how the business model for Amazon would work, since I would only be really using it for a few hours a year
I've been here for years, have a four digit ID, and have NEVER had one of my stories posted. Your experience is different from mine. I have submitted 3 stories so far, two of which got published. I think the trick is to write your blurb in such a way that the/. editor can just copy paste it.
Screwing over a charity for a what must be a pitifully small amount of profit may benefit shareholders. Or not. I, for one, intend to serious reconsider our server purchasing strategy. We have exclusively purchased Intel until now, alas we are tiny. There only need to be one or two large corporations with a solid ethics charter that decide to switch due to this and any profit they have gained will have evaporated.
read the damn article so you don't look like such an ass
Uhm? Contrary to Slashdot fashion I've read the article before posting here, and even went back to see if I missed something, but the parents point seems very valid to me based on the information provided. So unless you care to elaborate on your statement the only one looking like an ass is you. (Zed, is that you posting as AC??)
DHH tells me that he's got 400 restarts a mother fucking day. That's 1 restart about ever 4 minutes bitches.
If you have happen to have 400 servers it is 1 restart per server per day, which would not be unreasonable for a brand new beta app. I don't know how many servers 37signals (DHH's company) has, but certainly more than one.
Saying that the VVD is conservative, is not very accurate. There are far more conservative parties in the parliament. (The VVD does have a conservative faction inside their party, which has been causing them a lot of headaches lately.) It would be more accurate to say that the VVD are economic liberals, as opposed to social liberals.
I tried to order twice this morning, but got an error during checkout. Now they just put up a text saying "Only US and Canada" which probably explains it: I'm from Europe. This is a shame: with the dollar being so low I know several people that said they wanted to get one at the $400 level (even though we don't have the tax deduction incentive here).
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. You have good points but without conclusive data I'm not yet convinced the Darwin mechanism doesn't work here. My conjecture that English changes slower than Dutch is based, in good slashdot fashion, on a sample of size N=1: I had to read Dutch and English medieval text in highschool and found the English ones much easier to comprehend. But to add some evidence: The Belgian/Dutch Taalunie revises the Dutch spelling every 5 year years, something that would not be practically feasible for English (too bad by the way, English could use it). Also, the way I pronounce English is already much closer to what a native speaker would do compared to how my parents pronounce English, a result of new technology (mass media) evening out global differences.
I think the same process is at work though: aberrations are less likely to propagate if they need to convert a larger installed base. Can you pick up an Icelandic book from the 16th century and read that as easily as you could read Shakespear?
Darwin showed that adaptation is much larger in small isolated communities than in larger ones. English already changes a lot slower than, say, Dutch. If the internet turns the world into one big English speaking community than I wonder of their predictions based on past data hold.
The reported crime clear up rates fluctuated between 21% and 25%, and one of the four burroughs did see an improvement. There are so many different factors involved in this rate, such as the composition of the type of crimes in a neighbourhood and what exactly means "solved" for each crime. I wouldn't be surprised if the reported claim falls outside the confidence interval for a statistically meaningful statement, but the police lack the math to judge that.
The country is relatively socialist by American standards, but this is not an issue in this discussion as it also has one of the most liberal markets (And not just for drugs). It is a good amount of competition that has brought down prices, not government subsidies. One of the companies offering 15 euro per month broadband is an American company by the way (UPC). The reason they have to offer low prices is that every household has access to (at least) phone and cable so there is always an alternative. (It is true that 30 years ago the cable and phone infrastructure were in large part put there by semi-state owned companies)
Also, there are, for example, five different mobile phone operators with 95%+ coverage. I pay about 15 euros a month for my mobile phone bill.
Too much socialism is a problem in the Netherlands, but the telecoms regulation is very liberal.
Soldered does have advantages too. I've been using cell phones for over 10 years now and I have had more than one where the phone kept switching of because the contacts to the batteries got coroded or bent out of shape. I can fix that myself but most other people would have to send it in for repairs.
> It includes Mongrel 1.01 [...]
>This initial 0.1 release doesn't have a Web server
Mongrel is a very good web server, especially for a development environment. (And the ruby package includes webbrick on top of that). Current 'best practice' deployments of RoR applications usually use a pack of Mongrels behind a load balancer (such as mod_proxy or Pound), and/or Apache or Nginx to serve static pages. If you want to completely mirror your production environment in your development/testing environment than including those would the logical choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Often [officers] do not want to find CCTV images "because it's hard work". Sometimes the police did not bother inquiring beyond local councils to find out whether CCTV cameras monitored a particular street incident.
In short: they put up a lot of cameras in the hope it would prevent crime. It turns out it didn't. This, however, does not prove crime won't reduce if you actually start using the camera's.
My guess is that if you could properly digitise all the footage so a computer could automatically track a list of suspects from with the time they left their house to the crime locations you would catch a lot more.
A socialist country is simply one that has understood that there are economies of scales involved...
Agreed, but those economies of scale tend to work much better in a homogenous society than in the melting pot that is the US
Also important to explain to Americans is that banks here in the Netherlands ENCOURAGE you to overdraft, instead of punishing you for it. For the simple reason that they make money on the interest they charge. (You have to stay below a limit that depends on your credit worthiness)
When I lived in the US no one managed to explain to me why the same business logic doesn't apply there
You don't think 1 full-time farmer per 5 casual players (taking your 20%) is suspicious? Most casual players only play a few hours a week and those 5 would need to spend enough cash on this to keep somebody full time employed.
I don't trust the numbers. There are about 10 million people playing WoW, and WoW has ~80% market share. That works out to about 1 farmer for every 30 players.
But most of those 30 only play a few hours a day, and they only need to level up once or twice, many choose not to use a gold farmer at all. Farmers work more than 40 hours a week. That does not compute.
So I go 2-3 years with no pay, and then get all my pay in the last years when the company is finally profitable. So, when my income is $0, I pay no taxes at a very low rate. When my income is $500K, I pay maximum taxes (about half my income). So, I actually earn just over $100K a year but pay taxes at the maximum rate.
Funny, my numbers are similar. I have created a legal entity that sits in between me and the companies I own and it just rolls forward the losses for the first years to the money making years so it evens out. I'm not in the US by the way so that may not work for you.
Just out of the blue allowing doping would not realistically be accepted by politicians / sportsmen / the general public in most countries
But I would be in favor of experimenting with it, so my idea would be to create a doping and a non-doping category for a few events and see how it goes. That way you would avoid the problem of athletes having the feeling they are being forced to use doping when they don't want to.
If it were a lot hotter it would be easy to use it for heating, or power generation for that matter.
But to be fair: there are older power plants that aren't as efficient at using heat, and aren't close enough to a residential area or other consumer of heat to make it worth the while, so they need to burn off a lot more.
The waste heat after it leaves the coal fired power plants is about 30 degrees Celsius at best. You loose another 4 or 5 intransport. Not much you can do with it when it gets to its destination. Radiotors would have to be huge to give off any effective heat.
Dropping incorrect addresses is technical "solution", but not a user friendly way to deal with the problem. It's bad engineering.
Just enforcing SPF by itself would already go a long way to fixing this, and cure a lot of other spam in the process.
Does anybody have experience with using EC2 as failover? Can it be fully automated?
I operate a regular database backed web site, and have spare servers sitting around in case something goed awry. It would be great if I could avoid that redundancy and set things up so that EC2 instances get fired up if my heartbeat server detects the site is down, pipes the database over (or the latest backup if that's unavailable), and then redirects the load balancer to the EC2 instances. I'd like to do all of this without human intervention (since I hate getting up at 3 AM and I make mistakes a lot)
If this can be done reliably it would be an awesome service, but I have no clue how the business model for Amazon would work, since I would only be really using it for a few hours a year
Screwing over a charity for a what must be a pitifully small amount of profit may benefit shareholders. Or not. I, for one, intend to serious reconsider our server purchasing strategy. We have exclusively purchased Intel until now, alas we are tiny. There only need to be one or two large corporations with a solid ethics charter that decide to switch due to this and any profit they have gained will have evaporated.
Uhm? Contrary to Slashdot fashion I've read the article before posting here, and even went back to see if I missed something, but the parents point seems very valid to me based on the information provided. So unless you care to elaborate on your statement the only one looking like an ass is you. (Zed, is that you posting as AC??)
If you have happen to have 400 servers it is 1 restart per server per day, which would not be unreasonable for a brand new beta app. I don't know how many servers 37signals (DHH's company) has, but certainly more than one.
Saying that the VVD is conservative, is not very accurate. There are far more conservative parties in the parliament. (The VVD does have a conservative faction inside their party, which has been causing them a lot of headaches lately.) It would be more accurate to say that the VVD are economic liberals, as opposed to social liberals.
I tried to order twice this morning, but got an error during checkout. Now they just put up a text saying "Only US and Canada" which probably explains it: I'm from Europe. This is a shame: with the dollar being so low I know several people that said they wanted to get one at the $400 level (even though we don't have the tax deduction incentive here).
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. You have good points but without conclusive data I'm not yet convinced the Darwin mechanism doesn't work here. My conjecture that English changes slower than Dutch is based, in good slashdot fashion, on a sample of size N=1: I had to read Dutch and English medieval text in highschool and found the English ones much easier to comprehend. But to add some evidence: The Belgian/Dutch Taalunie revises the Dutch spelling every 5 year years, something that would not be practically feasible for English (too bad by the way, English could use it). Also, the way I pronounce English is already much closer to what a native speaker would do compared to how my parents pronounce English, a result of new technology (mass media) evening out global differences.
I think the same process is at work though: aberrations are less likely to propagate if they need to convert a larger installed base. Can you pick up an Icelandic book from the 16th century and read that as easily as you could read Shakespear?
Darwin showed that adaptation is much larger in small isolated communities than in larger ones. English already changes a lot slower than, say, Dutch. If the internet turns the world into one big English speaking community than I wonder of their predictions based on past data hold.
The reported crime clear up rates fluctuated between 21% and 25%, and one of the four burroughs did see an improvement. There are so many different factors involved in this rate, such as the composition of the type of crimes in a neighbourhood and what exactly means "solved" for each crime. I wouldn't be surprised if the reported claim falls outside the confidence interval for a statistically meaningful statement, but the police lack the math to judge that.
The country is relatively socialist by American standards, but this is not an issue in this discussion as it also has one of the most liberal markets (And not just for drugs). It is a good amount of competition that has brought down prices, not government subsidies. One of the companies offering 15 euro per month broadband is an American company by the way (UPC). The reason they have to offer low prices is that every household has access to (at least) phone and cable so there is always an alternative. (It is true that 30 years ago the cable and phone infrastructure were in large part put there by semi-state owned companies)
Also, there are, for example, five different mobile phone operators with 95%+ coverage. I pay about 15 euros a month for my mobile phone bill.
Too much socialism is a problem in the Netherlands, but the telecoms regulation is very liberal.
Soldered does have advantages too. I've been using cell phones for over 10 years now and I have had more than one where the phone kept switching of because the contacts to the batteries got coroded or bent out of shape. I can fix that myself but most other people would have to send it in for repairs.
> It includes Mongrel 1.01 [...]
>This initial 0.1 release doesn't have a Web server
Mongrel is a very good web server, especially for a development environment. (And the ruby package includes webbrick on top of that). Current 'best practice' deployments of RoR applications usually use a pack of Mongrels behind a load balancer (such as mod_proxy or Pound), and/or Apache or Nginx to serve static pages. If you want to completely mirror your production environment in your development/testing environment than including those would the logical choice.