This got modded +5, Insightful? Good grief, Charlie Brown.
FWIW, the US government wasn't buried in debt or routinely running massive deficits until Reagan/Bush Sr. Then Bush Jr. came along and for the first time ever the government was stupid enough to start wars (which are really quite expensive) with not only no plan to pay for them, but while cutting taxes at the same time. Today, the same people who voted for the likes of Dick "deficits don't matter" Cheney are screaming bloody murder about "Obama's deficit spending" with no apparent comprehension of how surreal this and their other behaviors are.
Meanwhile, Congress (at the behest of the party of "fiscally responsibility") is deciding whether to saddle us with $3.6T or $4.2T of further debt by extending the Bush tax cuts for the next 10 years. The same titans of responsibility absolutely refuse to consider the idea of paying off our debt with taxes, but can't seem to name anything that consumes more than.1 percent of the federal budget when pressed for programs to cut.
(I consider the modern Republican party to be nothing more than a scam that seeks power for the explicit purpose of perverting the United States into some combination of theocracy and corporate plutocracy. I hold the Democrats in marginally less contempt; At least they generally offer the people a reacharound while they're screwing us)
I can at least see the reasons that some people are willing to twist themselves into unreasonable knots for security. I can't understand why anyone would do the same for worthless security theater, which aptly describes everything the TSA does.
Remember: The TSA has never caught a single terrorist. The TSA has never foiled a single terrorist plot. Tests succeed in getting weapons past them more than half the time. But they've made sure people can't get "bombs" in inside water bottles... by putting all the suspected "bombs" into a trash bin 5 feet from the line. Meanwhile, at El Al you won't star in your own porn or be groped and they don't care if you bring a bottle of water or shampoo, yet no flight out of El Al has ever been hijacked in more than half a century.
I've read that they're all basically obsessed with one-upping 9/11 in terms of media glitz, which prevents them from trying anything they might actually succeed at.
The idea of government only preventing someone from directly interfering with the freedom of others sounds great until you realize that (1) everything everyone does affects everyone else, so the only way to actually satisfy this constraint is for everyone to do nothing, (2) not only is it possible to harm people through second-order and higher effects, that's the overwhelmingly dominant means by which people in industrialized countries come to harm today, so relaxing the constraint to not directly harming others is effectively useless, and (3) the relationships between cause and effect are, a large majority of the time, of such high order that accurately and objectively assigning blame/responsibility for harm is effectively impossible. The world is vastly too complex to be effectively managed by an idea so simplistic or black & white.
Absent the availability of a superhuman-class intellect that's both able and willing to solve the optimization problem, we settle for global stability constraints. Stamping out actions whose only tangible effect is to crash whole stock markets so hard the operators hit the big red "Shut. Down. Everything." button sounds like a damn fine constraint to me. Or, "your freedom to be a greedy dick or a panicking moron ends where the viability of the world's economy begins."
Yes, the EPA & OSHA are out to punish businesses for being successful, it has absolutely nothing to do with the externalities of the manufacturing process. If it's profitable to turn entire mountain ranges into mesas, or choke every living thing in a large river with hydraulic mining sediment or casually let workers be maimed by machinery or otherwise make a few little messes, we should do it!
We tried letting business do anything without restriction, then around 1900 decided there's a better way. China will do the same or they won't have anyone left healthy enough to work. Do you seriously not see the barrel we're racing to the bottom of?
No, it's not a good analogy. We can ramp up nuclear any time we choose. We can't ramp up US oil production, because if we could it would've been done. By the time oil is so expensive that it's economically viable to turn the entirety of the Rocky Mountains into the world's largest mesa, it'll be so expensive we'll have gotten off that particularly nasty crack pipe anyway.
The last time oil got so expensive as to spur major interest in oil shales & tars, it was between $100 and $130/bbl and the price of gas was spiralling past $4/gal. The resulting surge in the price of transportation drove one last stake into the heart of the US economy at the start of the "housing crisis" as it was then called.
The US did not reach "peak nuclear" because there's no technical reason preventing increased nuclear output from the US. There's a lot of "cut off one's face" greens who've succeeded in bringing about even more coal burning, but that's not here or there. Nor did we encounter Peak Buggy Whip, the demand simply fell away. We could begin ramping nuclear up any time we wanted, but we'll never produce as much oil as we used to (let alone enough to meet our increased consumption since then) however we try.
And that is what Peak X specifically refers to: An inexorable decline in production & major increase in prices that results as initial easily accessible supplies are depleted.
I too find it disturbing that displays have gone to 2MP and stopped. We were this close to being able to actually read a PDF on 100% zoom without squinting. WTF is going on?
On the other, I can see where you're coming from and I suppose the Internet having read-only access could be lived with given other suitable precautions (boot from ROM, etc) to assure access was read-only.
The problem isn't that they're on the same network as Windows machines, it's that they're on any kind of network whatsoever that's not insulated from machines connected to the public Internet by an air gap.
Once again: Do not -ever- put mission-critical systems on the Internet.
Basically every picture you see from space gets that treatment. They take pictures using cameras with bandpass filters in the optics, then simply assign 2 or 3 channels to colors if there's more than 1 channel. Unless they want an "as it might be seen" picture they won't use R/G/B filters.
Rationalize all you want. Rant about "but they said unlimited" as much as you please. If it will help with your sandy vagina, yes technically you can download crap you'll never watch 24/7 just because.
That does not mean you should because ISPs are tired of a tiny minority of users using half their bandwidth and incurring half the maintainence costs, and if this continues they will institute caps on everyone and people won't be free to use a lot of bandwidth now and then anymore, all because a handful of people can't understand "don't be an asshole and ruin it for everyone."
The idea of things not being explicitly limited is applicable to domains with a noted absence of shitheads who abuse the absence of limits. One might draw analogy to cooperative multitasking, with yourself arguing that just because it's possible for one process to use 100% of CPU it should be a right to use 100% of CPU, when in fact this is manifestly false because it breaks the underlying system.
If you want to protect the theory of nice things, don't be a shithead or they'll be taken away in practice.
"B b but they said 'unlimited internet', how can they complain about me download TB of stuff I'll never watch just because I can!"
"But FedEx said the boxes were free, what do you mean they somewhat expect me to ship stuff via FedEx with them and not take dozens to build cardboard furniture?"
In other news, can we please just shoot the goddamned assholes instead for a change?
Obama failed because he couldn't reverse, in his first year, the effects of 30 years of foolish deregulation and the deregulation itself... and when the effects of that came home to roost at Deepwater Horizon, it proved that regulation is of no use?
That's like buying a car, systematically removing its safety systems, then saying safety systems are useless because you were horribly injured in a crash: The mind boggles.
Make you sit there and learn things you don't really want to because they're important. (this is the biggie)
Reliably connect you with experts who can answer your questions or at least tell you what avenues have been tried before.
Put you in regular physical contact with other people who are learning what you are and are asking the same questions you are. The bandwidth between people who are actually in the same room is almost inifinitely greater than it is on IRC or VoIP.
I'm biased myself because I use them for physics simulations (Gravity solver & MHD) where data isn't once-through. For me, the first method of attack is to break the problem up into working sets that fit in the shared cache... works great until something nonlocal breaks the trivial parallelism.
Slashdot Mirror
Ctrl-F... not a single result for A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer or related terms? This is Slashdot, isn't it?
This got modded +5, Insightful? Good grief, Charlie Brown.
.1 percent of the federal budget when pressed for programs to cut.
FWIW, the US government wasn't buried in debt or routinely running massive deficits until Reagan/Bush Sr. Then Bush Jr. came along and for the first time ever the government was stupid enough to start wars (which are really quite expensive) with not only no plan to pay for them, but while cutting taxes at the same time. Today, the same people who voted for the likes of Dick "deficits don't matter" Cheney are screaming bloody murder about "Obama's deficit spending" with no apparent comprehension of how surreal this and their other behaviors are.
Meanwhile, Congress (at the behest of the party of "fiscally responsibility") is deciding whether to saddle us with $3.6T or $4.2T of further debt by extending the Bush tax cuts for the next 10 years. The same titans of responsibility absolutely refuse to consider the idea of paying off our debt with taxes, but can't seem to name anything that consumes more than
(I consider the modern Republican party to be nothing more than a scam that seeks power for the explicit purpose of perverting the United States into some combination of theocracy and corporate plutocracy. I hold the Democrats in marginally less contempt; At least they generally offer the people a reacharound while they're screwing us)
The nation and the world are slowly getting over the trauma and damage caused by that administartion.
Give it a while.
I can at least see the reasons that some people are willing to twist themselves into unreasonable knots for security. I can't understand why anyone would do the same for worthless security theater, which aptly describes everything the TSA does.
Remember: The TSA has never caught a single terrorist. The TSA has never foiled a single terrorist plot. Tests succeed in getting weapons past them more than half the time. But they've made sure people can't get "bombs" in inside water bottles... by putting all the suspected "bombs" into a trash bin 5 feet from the line. Meanwhile, at El Al you won't star in your own porn or be groped and they don't care if you bring a bottle of water or shampoo, yet no flight out of El Al has ever been hijacked in more than half a century.
I've read that they're all basically obsessed with one-upping 9/11 in terms of media glitz, which prevents them from trying anything they might actually succeed at.
The idea of government only preventing someone from directly interfering with the freedom of others sounds great until you realize that (1) everything everyone does affects everyone else, so the only way to actually satisfy this constraint is for everyone to do nothing, (2) not only is it possible to harm people through second-order and higher effects, that's the overwhelmingly dominant means by which people in industrialized countries come to harm today, so relaxing the constraint to not directly harming others is effectively useless, and (3) the relationships between cause and effect are, a large majority of the time, of such high order that accurately and objectively assigning blame/responsibility for harm is effectively impossible. The world is vastly too complex to be effectively managed by an idea so simplistic or black & white.
Absent the availability of a superhuman-class intellect that's both able and willing to solve the optimization problem, we settle for global stability constraints. Stamping out actions whose only tangible effect is to crash whole stock markets so hard the operators hit the big red "Shut. Down. Everything." button sounds like a damn fine constraint to me. Or, "your freedom to be a greedy dick or a panicking moron ends where the viability of the world's economy begins."
Yes, the EPA & OSHA are out to punish businesses for being successful, it has absolutely nothing to do with the externalities of the manufacturing process. If it's profitable to turn entire mountain ranges into mesas, or choke every living thing in a large river with hydraulic mining sediment or casually let workers be maimed by machinery or otherwise make a few little messes, we should do it!
We tried letting business do anything without restriction, then around 1900 decided there's a better way. China will do the same or they won't have anyone left healthy enough to work. Do you seriously not see the barrel we're racing to the bottom of?
It warms me heart and soul when some petty authoritarian dick gets rudely slapped by reality.
Well, I see it's time to start creating an out for when this latest bit of stupidity invariably proves to be wrong.
No, it's not a good analogy. We can ramp up nuclear any time we choose. We can't ramp up US oil production, because if we could it would've been done. By the time oil is so expensive that it's economically viable to turn the entirety of the Rocky Mountains into the world's largest mesa, it'll be so expensive we'll have gotten off that particularly nasty crack pipe anyway.
The last time oil got so expensive as to spur major interest in oil shales & tars, it was between $100 and $130/bbl and the price of gas was spiralling past $4/gal. The resulting surge in the price of transportation drove one last stake into the heart of the US economy at the start of the "housing crisis" as it was then called.
The US did not reach "peak nuclear" because there's no technical reason preventing increased nuclear output from the US. There's a lot of "cut off one's face" greens who've succeeded in bringing about even more coal burning, but that's not here or there. Nor did we encounter Peak Buggy Whip, the demand simply fell away. We could begin ramping nuclear up any time we wanted, but we'll never produce as much oil as we used to (let alone enough to meet our increased consumption since then) however we try.
And that is what Peak X specifically refers to: An inexorable decline in production & major increase in prices that results as initial easily accessible supplies are depleted.
Obligatory XKCD
I too find it disturbing that displays have gone to 2MP and stopped. We were this close to being able to actually read a PDF on 100% zoom without squinting. WTF is going on?
Think a little more closely about what the result of a cross product is perpendicular to and report back to us.
On one hand, that really scares me.
On the other, I can see where you're coming from and I suppose the Internet having read-only access could be lived with given other suitable precautions (boot from ROM, etc) to assure access was read-only.
The problem isn't that they're on the same network as Windows machines, it's that they're on any kind of network whatsoever that's not insulated from machines connected to the public Internet by an air gap.
Once again: Do not -ever- put mission-critical systems on the Internet.
Heh, perhaps this the OnOff system from Deepness in the Sky...
*cough*War on Some Drugs*cough*War on Terror*cough*War against Iraq*cough*
Basically every picture you see from space gets that treatment. They take pictures using cameras with bandpass filters in the optics, then simply assign 2 or 3 channels to colors if there's more than 1 channel. Unless they want an "as it might be seen" picture they won't use R/G/B filters.
Rationalize all you want. Rant about "but they said unlimited" as much as you please. If it will help with your sandy vagina, yes technically you can download crap you'll never watch 24/7 just because.
That does not mean you should because ISPs are tired of a tiny minority of users using half their bandwidth and incurring half the maintainence costs, and if this continues they will institute caps on everyone and people won't be free to use a lot of bandwidth now and then anymore, all because a handful of people can't understand "don't be an asshole and ruin it for everyone."
The idea of things not being explicitly limited is applicable to domains with a noted absence of shitheads who abuse the absence of limits. One might draw analogy to cooperative multitasking, with yourself arguing that just because it's possible for one process to use 100% of CPU it should be a right to use 100% of CPU, when in fact this is manifestly false because it breaks the underlying system.
If you want to protect the theory of nice things, don't be a shithead or they'll be taken away in practice.
"B b but they said 'unlimited internet', how can they complain about me download TB of stuff I'll never watch just because I can!"
"But FedEx said the boxes were free, what do you mean they somewhat expect me to ship stuff via FedEx with them and not take dozens to build cardboard furniture?"
In other news, can we please just shoot the goddamned assholes instead for a change?
[Mobster Don is gunned down seconds before cops arrest him]
"Amazing..."
"What?"
"She did in 10 seconds what we've been trying to do for ten years."
"What?"
"Put Masucci out of business, permanently."
Obama failed because he couldn't reverse, in his first year, the effects of 30 years of foolish deregulation and the deregulation itself... and when the effects of that came home to roost at Deepwater Horizon, it proved that regulation is of no use? That's like buying a car, systematically removing its safety systems, then saying safety systems are useless because you were horribly injured in a crash: The mind boggles.
You do realize that as a classical field theory General Relativity has nothing to do with atomic decay?
And that GR has been subjected to one experimental test after another for over 90 years now and passed them all?
Make you sit there and learn things you don't really want to because they're important. (this is the biggie)
Reliably connect you with experts who can answer your questions or at least tell you what avenues have been tried before.
Put you in regular physical contact with other people who are learning what you are and are asking the same questions you are. The bandwidth between people who are actually in the same room is almost inifinitely greater than it is on IRC or VoIP.
I'm biased myself because I use them for physics simulations (Gravity solver & MHD) where data isn't once-through. For me, the first method of attack is to break the problem up into working sets that fit in the shared cache... works great until something nonlocal breaks the trivial parallelism.