Dr. Gurry has been in the thick of IP protection for nearly his entire career, and is currently also the head of the UPOV, which promotes IP protection for new plant varieties. His ilk are the sort wrote the Berne Convention on copyrights (most recently via the WIPO Copyright Treaty of 1996) which first "gave" us life+50 copyright terms.
As far as he and his peers are concerned, there is no true incentive to create without the promise of collecting long term rents... a concept provably false for products with low capital requirements, such as software development and fashion design.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it.wikipedia.org isn't hosted in Italy. Ergo, the authorities aren't in a position to fine or arrest anyone posting "defamatory" material... unless an offending editor resident in Italy drops a bit too much identifying material on their personal page. Seems like more of a PITA than a deal breaker.
Assuming you've got the "normal" selection of tools in your place, just disassemble the drives and use a coarse grit sandpaper on the magnetic surfaces. About 60 seconds of elbow grease on each side should be enough. If extra paranoid, rinse the platters, and if you can still see yourself, do it again. A clamp and power sander would be a neat extra.
As many posters have said, save the actuator magnets. The older the drive, the bigger the magnet. They are more powerful than anything you'll find at a hardware store, enough to draw blood if a couple pinch a fingertip. Neodymium iron boron magnets are brittle, so I'd suggest leaving them on their steel backplates (see here for details).
Trust an assembler? Who wrote it? The closest I've come to creating software of my own hand has been on a PDP-11 test station, and the embedded processor it tested... writing hex values directly into memory. But even while massaging words by "hand", I was still relying on someone else's tools to get my intention from the keyboard to the flip-flops, and thus still suffering from more levels of abstraction than any civil or mechanical engineering effort.
For those who aren't plugged in, the Free State Movement is an attempt by libertarians to form a voting bloc large enough to be a plurality in (as it finally turned out) New Hampshire. If I were a NH resident, I'd be irked. Since I'm not, I think it's an excellent case study of the laboratory of democracy in action, the beauty of a Federal republic.
If they are a smashing success, they'll be the model for the nation. If they screw up royally, they'll only have taken out a minor state, an easy enough fix, and a warning against the siren song of Ayn Rand, Ron/Rand Paul, etc.
The downside (for those outside the US) is that if the GOP far right takes the nation for the joyride to Hell, you can expect them to send quite a few foreigners ahead to scout it out. You think the Christian Zionists were going to let the previous generation of Neo-cons have all the fun? They'll love the smell of burning Semites in the morning. It'll smell like... Armageddon.
Not knowing exactly what level of knowledge you're starting from... One of my first game purchases was Patton Versus Rommel, which included some artificial smarts. The liner notes included a reference to his second book The Art of Computer Design, [PDF] and based on the context, I hoped it might include at least introductory pointers to game AI. Nope. There's also Chris Crawford on Game Design, [Google Books]. It does include some high level designs, which may or may not be what you're looking for.
My preference would be a simplified simulation, that assumed perfectly solid components, eliminated gravity/friction as variables, "merely" counted the gear steps, and tracked lever/axle angles. Sounds like a reasonable MATLAB/Octave laptop implementation to me, although a visualization of the movements might be a bit over the top without distributing the job over a few (silicon) CPUs.
This shouldn't have been news. It's been know since 2008 that the gig was up by 1/1/2012. Yes, it's "only" 70 tons of CFCs a year. But, there are already enough hassles with attempted exemptions and dealing with CFCs that are a by-product of other compounds.
CFCs seemed like a great product. Non-toxic, very useful. Unfortunately, once a cost was discovered for using it, we could either continue externalizing the cost (hello melanoma, good bye rice production), or internalize it (product substitution, or elimination).
You make good points, but I'll offer a small rebuttal regarding the statement "the [US gaming] ban wasn't there there would be no reason to set up fake florists and other companies worldwide to handle payment processing from US gamers."
If a random activity X wasn't unlawful in what ever jurisdiction, no one would need to attempt to circumvent the restriction. This is axiomatic. It goes without saying that such circumventions aren't going to be transparent, because they are a criminal enterprise.
Any financial plan that rests on the growth of the enterprise "kicks the can down the road". Whether it's me investing in Google, or the SSA planning for their future receipts, we're counting on someone in the future generating a bigger surplus we can draw on. Based on over a hundred years of economic trends, it's reasonable for the SSA to plan for a larger tax base in the future. The current growth in retirees as a percentage of population will level off, probably drawing an extra percentage point more of GDP than today. The SSA tries to forecast demographic trends 70 years down the road. Beyond that, who can say? What would someone in 1941 have guessed about 2011?
So yes, the next generation is going to pay back this fucking money, and other generation will cover them, etc. Provided the economy doesn't flat line for a decade or more, it'll be a good enough deal to prevent what used to be the fate of most retirees prior to SS: abject poverty.
With any luck, in a couple generations someone will develop a replicator, and our Star Trek economy of the future will enjoy plenty beyond any stone-age worries about "funding".... provided the replication licensing fee isn't too steep.;)
Yes, you can stick 20% of everything you make under the mattress. However, the current model for virtually all retirement plans depend on compound growth of the investment instrument, whether that's the value of stock, or the taxable value of an economy. At such time as we may shift to a steady-state economy, any retirement plan will fall apart, including the mattress... unless steady-state zeros out inflation.
In the aggregate, private plans wouldn't enjoy any favor over SS.
George W. Bush's plan involved defaulting on the trust fund ($1.6t then, $2.5t now) to finance a huge tax cut for the upper brackets. Everyone else would have had a "private" account, while paying to cover the deficit for current recipients. His estimated 4.6% real rate of return (before taxes to cover the deficit) was optimistic.
Abstract: SS may be currently going into the red, but the basic funding model is sound, after minor tweaks in the current law.
I was speaking of the SSA Trust Fund, which by definition isn't "in the red". Regarding SS as a whole, it is currently running a deficit because Congress has elected to provide a FICA tax holiday for 2011 as an economic stimulus. Beyond that, SS will permanently go into the red according to current law in a few years as retirees draw more than the FICA receipts.
The problem isn't the ratio of workers to retirees, but the regressive nature of FICA, which currently caps at the first $106k of wages. Improvements in productivity mean the GDP has been growing sufficiently to make up for the lower worker:retiree ratio. Unfortunately, all of the wage increases have been going to the higher brackets. Thus, the solution is to uncap FICA. The demographic trends have SS benefits going from the current 5.4% of GDP to 6.5% by 2040, before leveling off as my generation croaks.
Again, this is incorrect... unless the current incarnation of the GOP gets its way. Let's look at how the SSA invests surpluses. They "buy" a special category of Treasury notes, in practice a promissory note between branches of the federal government. The bond purchases help fund federal operations. If the SSA didn't buy Treasuries, the Treasury would secure the shortfall for spending authorized by Congress via other taxes and/or public sale of "normal" Treasury notes. Congress writes the music the Treasury dances to, so the Treasury is going to get the necessary money one way or the other. You can't starve the beast without literally collapsing the national economy... which sounds like seditious activity to me, if that's what Grover Norquist really wants. Alert the FBI.
If not Treasuries, what is the SSA supposed to do with its surplus? Hide it under the mattress? They could do what the government of Singapore - that paragon of capitalist purity - does: buy shares in publicly traded firms, and create a sovereign wealth fund. I'd be fine with that, but I'd guess a lot of people would see Red.
> Except that Social Security money is not invested in anything.
This is incorrect. It is invested in the US Federal Government. Ideally, that government provides a variety of services that maintain and/or enhance the ability of the national economy to grow. If it does it's job well, that growth leads to a larger tax base by which to pay Social Security's obligations. If they fuck it up, which the likely incoming GOP majority is likely to do, a medium term downturn will make funding a hassle, but not crippling. A sustained downturn of a decade or longer would be required to torpedo Social Security.
For a private retirement investment, swap out corporation/proprietor for government and firm for national economy.
The primary, functional difference is that SS beneficiaries don't own shares or certificates... but they are (potentially) voting stakeholders in the overall enterprise that is the Republic.
>> So in other words is exactly like social security, except for the fact that you don't go to jail if you choose not to play online poker.
That's cute, and completely inaccurate.
Any retirement investment method is counting on the gradual growth of the value its investments over time. Most methods assume investment into activities that will result in value-added business from which surplus value can be extracted. Since any one investment has a risk of either under-performing or going completely tits-up, risk is managed by making a diverse group of investments.
The US Federal Government is "invested" in the prosperity of the US. Social Security is therefore diversified over an entire national economy, recovering taxes from a range of activities. The advantages of this "ultimate index fund" are low administrative overhead and risk.
Both private and public retirement plans are predicated on the assumption that there is long term growth in the investments, the basis for the continued function of a modern market economy. If/when this isn't the case, the paradigm falls apart, and members of a cash economy would need to salt away the entire value needed to provide for their post-earning years.
It may seem like a fractional reserve banking system... to those that don't know how a regulated casino is managed. A legitimate casino will always hold sufficient cash to cover all of the chips in play. What ever chips the croupier wins from the players at the point the table closes... only then can the casino take the money to the bank.
Short of sending a probe out there, I think we're as sure as we're going to get that object J002E3 is the Apollo 12 S-IVB, due to a spectral profile that matches titanium dioxide paint.
Until such time as we get the details, this smells to me much like how Nick Leeson's trading in Singapore sunk Barings back in 1995. To rehash: Nick lost big on a trading position, and rather than take his lumps like a man, proceeded to double down with larger and larger trades while attempting to make good his initial loss.
Given the modern day trading culture/technology, this kind of thing is unavoidable.
An near-example of what Max is talking about can be found at the Home Linux Render Cluster. The builder threw six dual cpu motherboards into a small, gutted filing cabinet and Gig-e. Cheap, expandable.
However, if your friend hasn't got a very good idea how much mmmph she needs, the AWS EC2 rental idea has merit.
This is what the biggest USAF compute cluster uses (RH, PBS), the main difference being that it does include IB because MPI support was a requirement (and is used). Otherwise, you'd better hope your users' jobs are almost exclusively embarrassingly parallel. The cluster is based on Dell PowerEdge blades, which provided good mflop/$.
They're playing with full size Tesla GPU cards in one of the blades. I'm not sure what will give you the best bang for the buck: Tesla/Fermi/FirePro cards in-blade, or the Nvidia 1u chassis that'll allow you to share the GPUs among several CPU blades/chassis. As of last year, there was a bit more overhead using OpenCL compared to CUDA on Nvidia h/w, but it does open up your h/w options Nvidia v. AMD.
@pz's post is spot on. It doesn't matter if the two of them are boinking or not. Ultimately, the original post is trying to avoid hassle. What s/he may not (yet) realize is that if anyone in the apartment is party to a file sharing legal action, everyone in the unit is. So, this person needs to weigh the hassle of physically removing one or the other person from the domicile (and, potentially, a relationship) v. the hassle of participating in a legal action.
Were it me, there would have to be a significant, decade long emotional investment in the other person for me to not cut them loose, given the current scenario.
Re: "the full cost of the services"... well, we need to start from the fact that all up and down the various cost centers in US health care, we're paying more than western Europeans. That's on the aggregate, whether we're talking the totally private, but heavily regulated Swiss, or the totally public British NHS. Yet, we're not getting anything more out of it. You might argue the Europeans are free-riding on the advances of our expensive health system, but since most advances are paid for via public funding, I'm dubious.
I'm going to punt and finish with something Matt Yglesias said in August, re: Doctors Say We Need To Pay Doctors More... I sometimes wonder how different health care politics would look in the United States if the AMA renamed itself “the American Doctors’ Union, AFL-CIO” or some such. I mean of course the AMA says that if doctors get paid less the world will end. But will it? Medicare is able to get away with low payment rates because it has such a giant customer base. There are a lot of old people out there, and they consume a lot of health care services. It’s hard to make a living as a doctor without serving those clients. If the rates get cut further, surely some doctors will try to get along without them, but how many will really be able to do so? The basic shape of the problem, however, is just a reminder that health care solutions ought to be systematic. If you cut Medicaid payment rates, providers will try to get by only seeing Medicare patients and patients with “private” health insurance. If you then try to cut Medicare rates too far, providers will try to get by only seeing patients with “private” health insurance. But even the “private” health insurance benefits from hefty government subsidies through the tax code and, in the future, through the health insurance exchanges. By moving toward all-payer rate setting we can cut excess expense while leaving providers with nowhere to run.
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Dr. Gurry has been in the thick of IP protection for nearly his entire career, and is currently also the head of the UPOV, which promotes IP protection for new plant varieties. His ilk are the sort wrote the Berne Convention on copyrights (most recently via the WIPO Copyright Treaty of 1996) which first "gave" us life+50 copyright terms.
As far as he and his peers are concerned, there is no true incentive to create without the promise of collecting long term rents... a concept provably false for products with low capital requirements, such as software development and fashion design.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it.wikipedia.org isn't hosted in Italy. Ergo, the authorities aren't in a position to fine or arrest anyone posting "defamatory" material... unless an offending editor resident in Italy drops a bit too much identifying material on their personal page. Seems like more of a PITA than a deal breaker.
Assuming you've got the "normal" selection of tools in your place, just disassemble the drives and use a coarse grit sandpaper on the magnetic surfaces. About 60 seconds of elbow grease on each side should be enough. If extra paranoid, rinse the platters, and if you can still see yourself, do it again. A clamp and power sander would be a neat extra.
As many posters have said, save the actuator magnets. The older the drive, the bigger the magnet. They are more powerful than anything you'll find at a hardware store, enough to draw blood if a couple pinch a fingertip. Neodymium iron boron magnets are brittle, so I'd suggest leaving them on their steel backplates (see here for details).
Trust an assembler? Who wrote it? The closest I've come to creating software of my own hand has been on a PDP-11 test station, and the embedded processor it tested... writing hex values directly into memory. But even while massaging words by "hand", I was still relying on someone else's tools to get my intention from the keyboard to the flip-flops, and thus still suffering from more levels of abstraction than any civil or mechanical engineering effort.
For those who aren't plugged in, the Free State Movement is an attempt by libertarians to form a voting bloc large enough to be a plurality in (as it finally turned out) New Hampshire. If I were a NH resident, I'd be irked. Since I'm not, I think it's an excellent case study of the laboratory of democracy in action, the beauty of a Federal republic.
If they are a smashing success, they'll be the model for the nation. If they screw up royally, they'll only have taken out a minor state, an easy enough fix, and a warning against the siren song of Ayn Rand, Ron/Rand Paul, etc.
The downside (for those outside the US) is that if the GOP far right takes the nation for the joyride to Hell, you can expect them to send quite a few foreigners ahead to scout it out. You think the Christian Zionists were going to let the previous generation of Neo-cons have all the fun? They'll love the smell of burning Semites in the morning. It'll smell like... Armageddon.
Not knowing exactly what level of knowledge you're starting from... One of my first game purchases was Patton Versus Rommel, which included some artificial smarts. The liner notes included a reference to his second book The Art of Computer Design, [PDF] and based on the context, I hoped it might include at least introductory pointers to game AI. Nope. There's also Chris Crawford on Game Design, [Google Books]. It does include some high level designs, which may or may not be what you're looking for.
My preference would be a simplified simulation, that assumed perfectly solid components, eliminated gravity/friction as variables, "merely" counted the gear steps, and tracked lever/axle angles. Sounds like a reasonable MATLAB/Octave laptop implementation to me, although a visualization of the movements might be a bit over the top without distributing the job over a few (silicon) CPUs.
This shouldn't have been news. It's been know since 2008 that the gig was up by 1/1/2012. Yes, it's "only" 70 tons of CFCs a year. But, there are already enough hassles with attempted exemptions and dealing with CFCs that are a by-product of other compounds.
CFCs seemed like a great product. Non-toxic, very useful. Unfortunately, once a cost was discovered for using it, we could either continue externalizing the cost (hello melanoma, good bye rice production), or internalize it (product substitution, or elimination).
You make good points, but I'll offer a small rebuttal regarding the statement "the [US gaming] ban wasn't there there would be no reason to set up fake florists and other companies worldwide to handle payment processing from US gamers."
If a random activity X wasn't unlawful in what ever jurisdiction, no one would need to attempt to circumvent the restriction. This is axiomatic. It goes without saying that such circumventions aren't going to be transparent, because they are a criminal enterprise.
Any financial plan that rests on the growth of the enterprise "kicks the can down the road". Whether it's me investing in Google, or the SSA planning for their future receipts, we're counting on someone in the future generating a bigger surplus we can draw on. Based on over a hundred years of economic trends, it's reasonable for the SSA to plan for a larger tax base in the future. The current growth in retirees as a percentage of population will level off, probably drawing an extra percentage point more of GDP than today. The SSA tries to forecast demographic trends 70 years down the road. Beyond that, who can say? What would someone in 1941 have guessed about 2011?
So yes, the next generation is going to pay back this fucking money, and other generation will cover them, etc. Provided the economy doesn't flat line for a decade or more, it'll be a good enough deal to prevent what used to be the fate of most retirees prior to SS: abject poverty.
With any luck, in a couple generations someone will develop a replicator, and our Star Trek economy of the future will enjoy plenty beyond any stone-age worries about "funding".... provided the replication licensing fee isn't too steep. ;)
Yes, you can stick 20% of everything you make under the mattress. However, the current model for virtually all retirement plans depend on compound growth of the investment instrument, whether that's the value of stock, or the taxable value of an economy. At such time as we may shift to a steady-state economy, any retirement plan will fall apart, including the mattress... unless steady-state zeros out inflation.
In the aggregate, private plans wouldn't enjoy any favor over SS.
George W. Bush's plan involved defaulting on the trust fund ($1.6t then, $2.5t now) to finance a huge tax cut for the upper brackets. Everyone else would have had a "private" account, while paying to cover the deficit for current recipients. His estimated 4.6% real rate of return (before taxes to cover the deficit) was optimistic.
Abstract: SS may be currently going into the red, but the basic funding model is sound, after minor tweaks in the current law.
I was speaking of the SSA Trust Fund, which by definition isn't "in the red". Regarding SS as a whole, it is currently running a deficit because Congress has elected to provide a FICA tax holiday for 2011 as an economic stimulus. Beyond that, SS will permanently go into the red according to current law in a few years as retirees draw more than the FICA receipts.
The problem isn't the ratio of workers to retirees, but the regressive nature of FICA, which currently caps at the first $106k of wages. Improvements in productivity mean the GDP has been growing sufficiently to make up for the lower worker:retiree ratio. Unfortunately, all of the wage increases have been going to the higher brackets. Thus, the solution is to uncap FICA. The demographic trends have SS benefits going from the current 5.4% of GDP to 6.5% by 2040, before leveling off as my generation croaks.
> ...redirect funds for other purposes...
Again, this is incorrect... unless the current incarnation of the GOP gets its way. Let's look at how the SSA invests surpluses. They "buy" a special category of Treasury notes, in practice a promissory note between branches of the federal government. The bond purchases help fund federal operations. If the SSA didn't buy Treasuries, the Treasury would secure the shortfall for spending authorized by Congress via other taxes and/or public sale of "normal" Treasury notes. Congress writes the music the Treasury dances to, so the Treasury is going to get the necessary money one way or the other. You can't starve the beast without literally collapsing the national economy... which sounds like seditious activity to me, if that's what Grover Norquist really wants. Alert the FBI.
If not Treasuries, what is the SSA supposed to do with its surplus? Hide it under the mattress? They could do what the government of Singapore - that paragon of capitalist purity - does: buy shares in publicly traded firms, and create a sovereign wealth fund. I'd be fine with that, but I'd guess a lot of people would see Red.
> Except that Social Security money is not invested in anything.
This is incorrect. It is invested in the US Federal Government. Ideally, that government provides a variety of services that maintain and/or enhance the ability of the national economy to grow. If it does it's job well, that growth leads to a larger tax base by which to pay Social Security's obligations. If they fuck it up, which the likely incoming GOP majority is likely to do, a medium term downturn will make funding a hassle, but not crippling. A sustained downturn of a decade or longer would be required to torpedo Social Security.
For a private retirement investment, swap out corporation/proprietor for government and firm for national economy.
The primary, functional difference is that SS beneficiaries don't own shares or certificates... but they are (potentially) voting stakeholders in the overall enterprise that is the Republic.
>> So in other words is exactly like social security, except for the fact that you don't go to jail if you choose not to play online poker.
That's cute, and completely inaccurate.
Any retirement investment method is counting on the gradual growth of the value its investments over time. Most methods assume investment into activities that will result in value-added business from which surplus value can be extracted. Since any one investment has a risk of either under-performing or going completely tits-up, risk is managed by making a diverse group of investments.
The US Federal Government is "invested" in the prosperity of the US. Social Security is therefore diversified over an entire national economy, recovering taxes from a range of activities. The advantages of this "ultimate index fund" are low administrative overhead and risk.
Both private and public retirement plans are predicated on the assumption that there is long term growth in the investments, the basis for the continued function of a modern market economy. If/when this isn't the case, the paradigm falls apart, and members of a cash economy would need to salt away the entire value needed to provide for their post-earning years.
It may seem like a fractional reserve banking system... to those that don't know how a regulated casino is managed. A legitimate casino will always hold sufficient cash to cover all of the chips in play. What ever chips the croupier wins from the players at the point the table closes... only then can the casino take the money to the bank.
Short of sending a probe out there, I think we're as sure as we're going to get that object J002E3 is the Apollo 12 S-IVB, due to a spectral profile that matches titanium dioxide paint.
Until such time as we get the details, this smells to me much like how Nick Leeson's trading in Singapore sunk Barings back in 1995. To rehash: Nick lost big on a trading position, and rather than take his lumps like a man, proceeded to double down with larger and larger trades while attempting to make good his initial loss.
Given the modern day trading culture/technology, this kind of thing is unavoidable.
An near-example of what Max is talking about can be found at the Home Linux Render Cluster. The builder threw six dual cpu motherboards into a small, gutted filing cabinet and Gig-e. Cheap, expandable.
However, if your friend hasn't got a very good idea how much mmmph she needs, the AWS EC2 rental idea has merit.
This is what the biggest USAF compute cluster uses (RH, PBS), the main difference being that it does include IB because MPI support was a requirement (and is used). Otherwise, you'd better hope your users' jobs are almost exclusively embarrassingly parallel. The cluster is based on Dell PowerEdge blades, which provided good mflop/$.
They're playing with full size Tesla GPU cards in one of the blades. I'm not sure what will give you the best bang for the buck: Tesla/Fermi/FirePro cards in-blade, or the Nvidia 1u chassis that'll allow you to share the GPUs among several CPU blades/chassis. As of last year, there was a bit more overhead using OpenCL compared to CUDA on Nvidia h/w, but it does open up your h/w options Nvidia v. AMD.
@pz's post is spot on. It doesn't matter if the two of them are boinking or not. Ultimately, the original post is trying to avoid hassle. What s/he may not (yet) realize is that if anyone in the apartment is party to a file sharing legal action, everyone in the unit is. So, this person needs to weigh the hassle of physically removing one or the other person from the domicile (and, potentially, a relationship) v. the hassle of participating in a legal action.
Were it me, there would have to be a significant, decade long emotional investment in the other person for me to not cut them loose, given the current scenario.
Sure, of course, which is why you didn't bother to bullet point them... least they get shot full of holes, ar, ar.
Re: "the full cost of the services"... well, we need to start from the fact that all up and down the various cost centers in US health care, we're paying more than western Europeans. That's on the aggregate, whether we're talking the totally private, but heavily regulated Swiss, or the totally public British NHS. Yet, we're not getting anything more out of it. You might argue the Europeans are free-riding on the advances of our expensive health system, but since most advances are paid for via public funding, I'm dubious.
I'm going to punt and finish with something Matt Yglesias said in August, re: Doctors Say We Need To Pay Doctors More...
I sometimes wonder how different health care politics would look in the United States if the AMA renamed itself “the American Doctors’ Union, AFL-CIO” or some such. I mean of course the AMA says that if doctors get paid less the world will end. But will it? Medicare is able to get away with low payment rates because it has such a giant customer base. There are a lot of old people out there, and they consume a lot of health care services. It’s hard to make a living as a doctor without serving those clients. If the rates get cut further, surely some doctors will try to get along without them, but how many will really be able to do so?
The basic shape of the problem, however, is just a reminder that health care solutions ought to be systematic. If you cut Medicaid payment rates, providers will try to get by only seeing Medicare patients and patients with “private” health insurance. If you then try to cut Medicare rates too far, providers will try to get by only seeing patients with “private” health insurance. But even the “private” health insurance benefits from hefty government subsidies through the tax code and, in the future, through the health insurance exchanges. By moving toward all-payer rate setting we can cut excess expense while leaving providers with nowhere to run.