Re:Too much hysteria from the peanut gallery.
on
ACTA Treaty Released
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I wouldn't call it a review of the draft: It doesn't really say all that much about it. Most of the text is spent insulting those that disagree with the author's views.
Who knows, he might be right, but the text doesn't really resemble a good review.
memtest86 will use your CPU, but it's using a very small subset of what it can do. It's great for memory, but for the processor, you might as well run a screensaver, or a video running OGG.
Prime95 puts the CPU to high load and high temperatures, but it's not very comprehensive: I can overload a CPU with floating point additions, and that will probably make it run hot, but that doesn't really test most of the CPU: It will test some parts very heavily, and it will not test others at all. Prime95 tests more than just a couple of instructions, but it doesn't test most of the CPU either.
AFAIK, there is no consumer geared test that will really be able to clear a core as good. Not even a battery of 5 or 6 benchmark tools will do it. Checking the validity of a CPU is pretty serious business, and only the manufacturers seem to be in the business of testing them out.
Now, can you run a bunch of apps for a while and figure out if, in practice, the processor is stable enough for your desktop use? Maybe, but there will always be a margin of error there, which will be far larger than the margin that the manufacturer's test create.
So, even if the processor passes your tests, and then suddenly starts behaving oddly 5 weeks later, you can't discount the possibility that it's a problem with the core you enabled. And if you are having strange problems, adding one more thing that could be broken is rarely a good idea.
But that's the point: 'limited time to promote the science and the arts'. Our case is that copyrights aren't limited, and that their length, and the retroactiveness of the extensions, doesn't really fit what the constitution states, as a very long copyright term hinders creativity more than it promotes it.
Same thing for patents: What one can do with the same patent term 100 years ago is so much less than you can do now, that in fact keeping the patent length the same is effectively an extension.
For most people, the social aspect is not the crowd itself, but the people they go to the theater with. And in a country with McMansions, a room that seats 6-8 and has a sound and video quality that rivals many theaters is really not that expensive.
Theaters don't make anywhere near the business now than they did a decade ago. So they raise prices, which lowers attendance, all in a spiral that has been going on for a while. They are hoping that 3d movies will bring people back, because as it is, home tech gets too close to comfort.
DVDs and theater prices have made sure I've not stepped into a theater in years, and me and my friends used to go weekly.
Wait until you have to keep 6 separate passwords, changed monthly, and that can't repeat any previous password, ever. Strong-Password-Server-Name-AtomicWeightOfTheNextElementInThePeriodicTable is a royal PITA.
After a 117 months or so, hope for a bunch of new elements to be discovered, or send a resignation letter.
And anyone working for them today outside of system administration will have a ton of trouble getting a new job, if just because the work the rest of them do is not all that useful anywhere else. Spending years dealing with very large amounts of bad code that you can't edit, and doing a lot of work by editing proprietary XML configuration files is not exactly a good reference. The environment is toxic enough that even local companies that they have acquired recently have been losing employees in droves.
That said, networking will get you far further in the St Louis market than head hunters: Some nice places to work in the area already expect that what most head hunters will give them is rarely good material.
It's the fatalities: The accidents caused by a sudden acceleration that ended in fatalities happened to old people. If the accident had no fatalities, or the acceleration didn't cause an accident, it doesn't show up on those stats.
I am sure you can figure out all kinds of reasons why younger drivers might be more likely to survive the accident, or have a higher ability to deal with the problem altogether before a crash even happens.
Now, would the data still look so skewed after taking those factors into effect? It's hard to say.
Yes, of course they don't have to care overseas, because those countries do not tax employer-paid healthcare benefits to their employees, right? It' would never happen in Spain, France, England... all the money you pay to an employee there goes straight to their pockets, since they have no taxes, or if they have taxes, they are extremely low.
Or not, and the only places where your argument is actually true are third world countries and tax havens.
In this case, a former Formula 1 circuit, which hadn't produced a very entertaining race in years prior to its removal from the circus. Soon, Spa-Francorchamps
Then I guess the UK is a complete straggler in that respect, because most of Continental Europe still treats their doctors like crap, and they have over 3 doctors per 1000. Heck, often enough they don't train enough doctors locally, and they have to bring amounts of immigrants covering specialists positions, if just because those specialists leave due to how much better they get paid in the US.
It's still a free market, it just happens to be a market where part of the goods that are sold or bought are intellectual property. Now, you could claim that there are other restrictions, or claim that intellectual property should not be respected in the same way as physical property, but to claim that IP goes against the concept of a free market is a 'true Scotsman' argument. Your argument bases itself on your ability to redefine your terms as you see fit.
IP can be a positive force instead of a negative one in certain scenarios. The problem with the concept is that, in the current situation, with blanket copyright and patent terms that last many years, the harm that is done by the IP laws outweights the gains. The optimal copyright and patent terms, if they have to be the same for all fields, is very close to zero days.
a 3 percent margin is not a bad thing at all when you: 1) Get paid in advance, getting interest from the payments before they actually go to pay a claim. 2) Have great returns of capital. When it comes to investment, ROC is more important than profit margins. Imagine that I sell widgets for a 50% margin, but that the capital required to launch my enterprise is 80 times yearly sales. It might be a nice margin, but as an investment, I'd be better off putting the money on freaking treasuries. Now, If I have a 3% margin, but the capital requirements are a fourth of yearly revenues, then I have a very good investment despite my low margins.
So looking at the difference between revenues and services granted in an insurance company and something like, let's say, a retail chain that has a lot of capital stuck on inventory and real state is naive at best, and downright deceitful at worst.
Come on, it cannot be any sloppier than actual UniVerse: It performs extremely poorly on large files, especially when record sizes vary wildly. I've seen in-memory files in which any insert or update operation took 5+ seconds! In my experience, even Postgres in far weaker hardware just spanks UniVerse even on the simple queries where it should have an advantage. If you ever need to read two or three files, either by hand or through I dictionary entries, UniVerse is orders of magnitude slower. When you add the low quality of the system monitoring and debugging tools that are available for it, it turns into one big stinker.
If Cassandra is any slower, it'd have to lock the system up while idle.
It is mentioned because the household had one of those chinese Wii attachments that makes the Wii controller look quite a bit like a gun. Black too. It's not hard for a 3 year old to think that those two are similar looking items.
Now, would a 3 year old play with a gun laying unattended anyway? Probably. Should the kid have readily access to a loaded gun? Of course not. But people grasp at straws, looking for something to help prevent gun accidents in ways that they can actually control. We just can't stop idiots, or people horribly distracted, like those that have to deal with the stress that a 3 year old can be, from failing to use safe gun handling procedures.
Life with a toddler around the house is a lot different than without. Things that you'd never fail to do properly before suddenly become far more difficult than they used to: I've seen it happen in many occasions. The extra stress will just get to people, and make them fail to hide their gun, keep a bottle of bleach in a place a kid will get to, or not realize that their SO put the baby,sleeping, in their car, leaving him to die in a hot, unattended car.
The fact that a lot of content involves using javascript doesn't really mean that javascript performance is every bit as important as page load: It's not a matter of quantity of content, but of the amount of computation required to render it.
If the javascript is doing an XMLHttpRequest to back to the server, and needs a tenth of a second to do it, while it takes a second do page load, is the javascript performance that important?
Picking a browser for its javascript performance is a bit like selecting a language to serve dynamic web pages by looking at language performance. To serve a web page that takes most of its content from a database, we must use a programming language, but for the most part, the language we use doesn't really affect performance much, because the time it takes to fetch the data makes even the slowest production languages be a small blip in the performance for most of us. We don't end up writing all of our pages in C.
You'd be surprised at which European governments actually support what. For example, the Government of Spain, which call themselves Socialists and everything, are big fans of IP rights, if just because the big media groups help them win elections. They lack the balls to put an actual ban on P2P, but they have no qualms in setting up a rather large tax on pretty much anything that could copy media. Then, they wonder why piracy is rampant over there.
Traditionally, economists have claimed that stock variations were random, as explained in 'A random walk through Wall Street'. Now, further analysis indicates that the changes of value in stocks are not random at all: If they were, the last couple hundred years worth of financial data would be almost impossible, with extreme oscillations that would only happen once in a billion years in a random model occurring every couple of decades.
Instead, what some have proposed is that stock oscillations instead follow power law distributions: It still makes it impossible to know what the market will do tomorrow, or next week, but it makes large oscillations a whole lot more common than in a random model. This makes many of the current models that are used to assess how risky a portfolio is into a pile of garbage. For that argument, you could read 'A not so random walk through Wall Street'
For me, the fact that you have to keep writing XML mostly by hand is the reason I'd not move to iBatis for the parts of my app that must be hand-coded: I thought that 5 years ago we all had figured out that having to change XML configuration files along with code every time we make a significant change was a loss instead of a gain. That's why frameworks like EJB3 and Hibernate started supporting annotations: XML makes a lot of sense as a data format, but more often than not, it's used as something that is so linked to the state of the code that it is meaningless on its own: How often does anyone change iBatis XML files without changing the code it relates to at the same time?
I use the EJB3 interface on top of hibernate for the simple stuff, and switch to hand coded SQL for the reporting queries that must be hand tuned to be even remotely effective: Retrieving a report through hibernate when it has to join a dozen entities to get the data leads to madness
Doctors aren't working for ANYWHERE near average wages: They are extremely well paid after residency. Compare their earnings to what a doctor makes in most of Europe: the difference over some parts of the EU is extremely wide.
The reason people don't become doctors has a lot to do with medical school costs that have little to do with those in Europe. That is why, when many European countries have 3.5 to 4 doctors per 1000 people, the US has under 2.5.
If said kernel developers were actually working in Oviedo, the city where they researched this, 31K is more than most would ever make. Your typical graduate in his first local programming job gets 15K at best. 30K is a top level salary over there. Last summer, no local company ever came close to offering me half of what I make in an affordable town in the American midwest.
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I wouldn't call it a review of the draft: It doesn't really say all that much about it. Most of the text is spent insulting those that disagree with the author's views.
Who knows, he might be right, but the text doesn't really resemble a good review.
memtest86 will use your CPU, but it's using a very small subset of what it can do. It's great for memory, but for the processor, you might as well run a screensaver, or a video running OGG.
Prime95 puts the CPU to high load and high temperatures, but it's not very comprehensive: I can overload a CPU with floating point additions, and that will probably make it run hot, but that doesn't really test most of the CPU: It will test some parts very heavily, and it will not test others at all. Prime95 tests more than just a couple of instructions, but it doesn't test most of the CPU either.
AFAIK, there is no consumer geared test that will really be able to clear a core as good. Not even a battery of 5 or 6 benchmark tools will do it. Checking the validity of a CPU is pretty serious business, and only the manufacturers seem to be in the business of testing them out.
Now, can you run a bunch of apps for a while and figure out if, in practice, the processor is stable enough for your desktop use? Maybe, but there will always be a margin of error there, which will be far larger than the margin that the manufacturer's test create.
So, even if the processor passes your tests, and then suddenly starts behaving oddly 5 weeks later, you can't discount the possibility that it's a problem with the core you enabled. And if you are having strange problems, adding one more thing that could be broken is rarely a good idea.
But that's the point: 'limited time to promote the science and the arts'. Our case is that copyrights aren't limited, and that their length, and the retroactiveness of the extensions, doesn't really fit what the constitution states, as a very long copyright term hinders creativity more than it promotes it.
Same thing for patents: What one can do with the same patent term 100 years ago is so much less than you can do now, that in fact keeping the patent length the same is effectively an extension.
Ah, if Lessig had actually used a decent defense.
For most people, the social aspect is not the crowd itself, but the people they go to the theater with. And in a country with McMansions, a room that seats 6-8 and has a sound and video quality that rivals many theaters is really not that expensive.
Theaters don't make anywhere near the business now than they did a decade ago. So they raise prices, which lowers attendance, all in a spiral that has been going on for a while. They are hoping that 3d movies will bring people back, because as it is, home tech gets too close to comfort.
DVDs and theater prices have made sure I've not stepped into a theater in years, and me and my friends used to go weekly.
Wait until you have to keep 6 separate passwords, changed monthly, and that can't repeat any previous password, ever. Strong-Password-Server-Name-AtomicWeightOfTheNextElementInThePeriodicTable is a royal PITA.
After a 117 months or so, hope for a bunch of new elements to be discovered, or send a resignation letter.
It's not the legal status of drugs in their country that is the problem. It's their next door neighbor that they sell the drugs to.
You'd be surprised at how many 2 year olds can navigate themselves to youtube to look for Dora and Diego videos.
And anyone working for them today outside of system administration will have a ton of trouble getting a new job, if just because the work the rest of them do is not all that useful anywhere else. Spending years dealing with very large amounts of bad code that you can't edit, and doing a lot of work by editing proprietary XML configuration files is not exactly a good reference. The environment is toxic enough that even local companies that they have acquired recently have been losing employees in droves.
That said, networking will get you far further in the St Louis market than head hunters: Some nice places to work in the area already expect that what most head hunters will give them is rarely good material.
It's the fatalities: The accidents caused by a sudden acceleration that ended in fatalities happened to old people. If the accident had no fatalities, or the acceleration didn't cause an accident, it doesn't show up on those stats.
I am sure you can figure out all kinds of reasons why younger drivers might be more likely to survive the accident, or have a higher ability to deal with the problem altogether before a crash even happens.
Now, would the data still look so skewed after taking those factors into effect? It's hard to say.
Yes, of course they don't have to care overseas, because those countries do not tax employer-paid healthcare benefits to their employees, right? It' would never happen in Spain, France, England... all the money you pay to an employee there goes straight to their pockets, since they have no taxes, or if they have taxes, they are extremely low.
Or not, and the only places where your argument is actually true are third world countries and tax havens.
To avoid this, we have to add some explosives to every new car: If it detects an active phone signal in the car during the crash, it detonates!
In this case, a former Formula 1 circuit, which hadn't produced a very entertaining race in years prior to its removal from the circus. Soon, Spa-Francorchamps
Beware, when the spear chuckers (defense 2) are veteran, fortified and on a mountain, they have even odds of beating your tank.
Then I guess the UK is a complete straggler in that respect, because most of Continental Europe still treats their doctors like crap, and they have over 3 doctors per 1000. Heck, often enough they don't train enough doctors locally, and they have to bring amounts of immigrants covering specialists positions, if just because those specialists leave due to how much better they get paid in the US.
With blackjack, and hookers!
It's still a free market, it just happens to be a market where part of the goods that are sold or bought are intellectual property. Now, you could claim that there are other restrictions, or claim that intellectual property should not be respected in the same way as physical property, but to claim that IP goes against the concept of a free market is a 'true Scotsman' argument. Your argument bases itself on your ability to redefine your terms as you see fit.
IP can be a positive force instead of a negative one in certain scenarios. The problem with the concept is that, in the current situation, with blanket copyright and patent terms that last many years, the harm that is done by the IP laws outweights the gains. The optimal copyright and patent terms, if they have to be the same for all fields, is very close to zero days.
a 3 percent margin is not a bad thing at all when you:
1) Get paid in advance, getting interest from the payments before they actually go to pay a claim.
2) Have great returns of capital. When it comes to investment, ROC is more important than profit margins. Imagine that I sell widgets for a 50% margin, but that the capital required to launch my enterprise is 80 times yearly sales. It might be a nice margin, but as an investment, I'd be better off putting the money on freaking treasuries. Now, If I have a 3% margin, but the capital requirements are a fourth of yearly revenues, then I have a very good investment despite my low margins.
So looking at the difference between revenues and services granted in an insurance company and something like, let's say, a retail chain that has a lot of capital stuck on inventory and real state is naive at best, and downright deceitful at worst.
Come on, it cannot be any sloppier than actual UniVerse: It performs extremely poorly on large files, especially when record sizes vary wildly. I've seen in-memory files in which any insert or update operation took 5+ seconds! In my experience, even Postgres in far weaker hardware just spanks UniVerse even on the simple queries where it should have an advantage. If you ever need to read two or three files, either by hand or through I dictionary entries, UniVerse is orders of magnitude slower. When you add the low quality of the system monitoring and debugging tools that are available for it, it turns into one big stinker.
If Cassandra is any slower, it'd have to lock the system up while idle.
It is mentioned because the household had one of those chinese Wii attachments that makes the Wii controller look quite a bit like a gun. Black too. It's not hard for a 3 year old to think that those two are similar looking items.
Now, would a 3 year old play with a gun laying unattended anyway? Probably. Should the kid have readily access to a loaded gun? Of course not. But people grasp at straws, looking for something to help prevent gun accidents in ways that they can actually control. We just can't stop idiots, or people horribly distracted, like those that have to deal with the stress that a 3 year old can be, from failing to use safe gun handling procedures.
Life with a toddler around the house is a lot different than without. Things that you'd never fail to do properly before suddenly become far more difficult than they used to: I've seen it happen in many occasions. The extra stress will just get to people, and make them fail to hide their gun, keep a bottle of bleach in a place a kid will get to, or not realize that their SO put the baby,sleeping, in their car, leaving him to die in a hot, unattended car.
The fact that a lot of content involves using javascript doesn't really mean that javascript performance is every bit as important as page load: It's not a matter of quantity of content, but of the amount of computation required to render it.
If the javascript is doing an XMLHttpRequest to back to the server, and needs a tenth of a second to do it, while it takes a second do page load, is the javascript performance that important?
Picking a browser for its javascript performance is a bit like selecting a language to serve dynamic web pages by looking at language performance. To serve a web page that takes most of its content from a database, we must use a programming language, but for the most part, the language we use doesn't really affect performance much, because the time it takes to fetch the data makes even the slowest production languages be a small blip in the performance for most of us. We don't end up writing all of our pages in C.
You'd be surprised at which European governments actually support what. For example, the Government of Spain, which call themselves Socialists and everything, are big fans of IP rights, if just because the big media groups help them win elections. They lack the balls to put an actual ban on P2P, but they have no qualms in setting up a rather large tax on pretty much anything that could copy media. Then, they wonder why piracy is rampant over there.
Traditionally, economists have claimed that stock variations were random, as explained in 'A random walk through Wall Street'. Now, further analysis indicates that the changes of value in stocks are not random at all: If they were, the last couple hundred years worth of financial data would be almost impossible, with extreme oscillations that would only happen once in a billion years in a random model occurring every couple of decades.
Instead, what some have proposed is that stock oscillations instead follow power law distributions: It still makes it impossible to know what the market will do tomorrow, or next week, but it makes large oscillations a whole lot more common than in a random model. This makes many of the current models that are used to assess how risky a portfolio is into a pile of garbage. For that argument, you could read 'A not so random walk through Wall Street'
For me, the fact that you have to keep writing XML mostly by hand is the reason I'd not move to iBatis for the parts of my app that must be hand-coded: I thought that 5 years ago we all had figured out that having to change XML configuration files along with code every time we make a significant change was a loss instead of a gain. That's why frameworks like EJB3 and Hibernate started supporting annotations: XML makes a lot of sense as a data format, but more often than not, it's used as something that is so linked to the state of the code that it is meaningless on its own: How often does anyone change iBatis XML files without changing the code it relates to at the same time?
I use the EJB3 interface on top of hibernate for the simple stuff, and switch to hand coded SQL for the reporting queries that must be hand tuned to be even remotely effective: Retrieving a report through hibernate when it has to join a dozen entities to get the data leads to madness
Doctors aren't working for ANYWHERE near average wages: They are extremely well paid after residency. Compare their earnings to what a doctor makes in most of Europe: the difference over some parts of the EU is extremely wide.
The reason people don't become doctors has a lot to do with medical school costs that have little to do with those in Europe. That is why, when many European countries have 3.5 to 4 doctors per 1000 people, the US has under 2.5.
If said kernel developers were actually working in Oviedo, the city where they researched this, 31K is more than most would ever make. Your typical graduate in his first local programming job gets 15K at best. 30K is a top level salary over there. Last summer, no local company ever came close to offering me half of what I make in an affordable town in the American midwest.