Dude, this is like the third time you've posted a wall of links to this discussion. The same wall of links. That's about two and one-third times too many. (I give it an extra one-third because walls of links are actually mildly obnoxious. You couldn't have at least put meaningful text, like the title of the article, in the quote? For bonus points, consider using an unordered list.)
I ask of you as a fellow man: Please attempt to contribute to future Slashdot discussions in a more meaningful manner. Thank you.
This post is flamebait, but I'll respond in case a wider audience is interested in the question:
How dare you or any modern man defend superstition, let alone Catholicism?
Idunno. There's this whole "freedom of thought" and "tolerance" sort of thing going on, and it seems to have worked rather well for society over the past few centuries. If you don't defend the unpopular, you just end up with mob rule. You don't want mob rule; it would be a real pity if we threw away the notion of tolerance and later rational thought landed on the wrong side of public opinion. Also working out rather well: "innocent until proven guilty". And from the bad ideas file: "guilt by association" and "people who don't agree with me are inhuman scum".
In any event, the problem really isn't that the typical Catholic priests is a child molestor. The problem is that child molestors actively seek positions of trust and authority to perpetrate their crimes and the church has been inadequate in its response. Before you exercise your prejudice, think of the children - your prejudice may hide the real danger.
Does possession of child porn constitute "reasonable cause to suspect"?
You'd have to ask the judge and jury.
Also, thank you for thinking about the law instead of jumping on the "hate hate hate + guilty until proven innocent" bandwagon. I'd mod you up if I hadn't wasted all my points for the day.
Top-down control is inadequate for problems of this nature. Security needs to be a priority at the top, sure, but you need to be able to give lower-level people the ability to actually accomplish things, and work with their peers to make things happen. Rigid bureaucracies, command structures, and organizational siloization will hold them back. Combining a "horizontal" problem like security with a vertical organization is a recipe for disaster.
For a similar problem, see safety, and specifically how China's top-down control over their high-speed rail network was inadequate in prevent the signaling issues which led to the recent high-profile crash.
Yeah, reading the field will only get you so far. It's one thing to propose all sorts of hopes and dreams for your first term, but to be re-elected, you need to actually achieve something with your policies.
Make of Obama's record there what you will.
The Clean Air act was about noxious compounds in the air - not traditionally components of the atmosphere, posing an acute hazard to the health and well-being of those who inhaled them. This affair is about carbon dioxide, already a major component of the earth's atmosphere, which poses no such immediate threat to human health and well-being.
Maybe we should be emitting less carbon dioxide, but it's stupid to put carbon dioxide and other sorts of pollution under the same banner.
Shouldn't below-cost Chinese imported solar panels (etc) be an environmentalist's dream? More solar power for less money means more conventional power you can replace for less money.
Or, if you're concerned with jobs and not as much with the environment, why are you bothering with solar panels? From a jobs perspective, choosing solar instead of fossil fuels basically means throwing money away. That's not actually an effective way to grow the economy, as we have recently witnessed with recent "stimulus" spending. (Again, that's not to say that society should never choose to spend money on the environment or solar panels, but rather that it's a drag on the economy, not a stimulus, and we shouldn't lie to ourselves about it.)
Green jobs mean fewer real ones, not more. A job which needs special subsidies and produces energy which is extra expensive means taxpayers and energy-users have less money to spend on things which actually matter to them (energy output isn't one of those, it's a means to an end).
This is not to say that The Environment isn't something which matters to people, or should be disregarded, and that spending on it is never justified -- but rather that it shouldn't be mistaken for a job driver, because it's not.
(And if you ask me, we ought to be fracking the heck out of all the natural gas we can find, because it's cheap, abundant, not from the middle east, and spending on natural gas will probably end up reducing carbon dioxide emissions more than the equivalent spending on windmills and solar. Have your cake, eat it too. Do what you can to watch out for the water-table contamination issue, sure, but treat it as a real issue, not an insurmountable excuse to shut it down.)
I like the "hurting automobile sales, which in turn contribute to layoffs." It's right up there with not breaking windows anymore, hurting glass sales, contributing to layoffs. You monster.
Come on. This is the Internet. Surely we can complain about both!
And while I'm at it, I'd like to complain about: how difficult it is to find an apartment in San Francisco, my income taxes, the price of gas (and auto maintenance), and ants.
Especially those dumb ants. Someone should just squish them all.
Yes, but sometimes it's nice to be able to stuff in another video card or three and get yourself a second monitor or some extra CUDA processing.... without having to completely replace your motherboard. If nothing else, it'll probably run cooler than an older PCI-based video card.
Consider the bind the education system is on. We need improvement. How can we measure improvement? Standardized tests! Well, those actually kind of stink; it'd probably be better if the management could evaluate the teachers based on more qualitative criteria. But the unions would never have that! They bend over backwards to make sure a teacher is never fired without a mountain of paperwork meticulously documenting some evidence against them! And in all honesty, they've got a couple of good reasons. First, you can't rely on the administration to try very hard to evaluate a teacher effectively. They've got no real incentive to do that, and you have to rely on the goodness of their hearts (a weak proposition in a bureaucracy)... and they're the only game in town, so if you lose your job, you need to start looking at other counties or even states - not a really great situation in large swaths of the country.
Of course, there's no good reason big cities with failing schools couldn't deal with a few more charters / school choice / vouchers and the like, especially when the alternative is the miserable status quo.
My worst run-in with an accent was my matrix algebra class, where the teacher quite clearly knew what she was talking about, but you couldn't hear and comprehend a word of it because of her thick Asian accent. Regrettably, I have since determined that there's a whole lot of awesome stuff that you can do with matrix algebra (e.g. approximate nonnegative matrix factorization) and I wish that I'd been able to absorb more of that material.:(
So yeah, there's definitely a spot where a heavy accent becomes damaging to your ability to communicate, and especially to teach. The premise is reasonable -- the implementation, of course, has plenty of room to be suspect.
1. The head of a project takes his bunch of interns into a meeting room to brainstorm random things you could do which have any sort of tenuous tangential connection to the project.
2. Lawyers!!!
3. IBM pays dude a few thousand dollars bonus.
(4. Interns are eligible for bonus if they join IBM, but seek less-dysfunctional workplaces where they don't have to use Lotus Notes.)
Way to miss the GP's point. It doesn't matter if an engine burns hydrocarbons and emits carbon dioxide into the atmosphere if that carbon dioxide came from the atmosphere to begin with.
Unlike traditional pollutants, nobody cares about a little carbon dioxide output at any given point, because it's nothing next to what's already floating around in the air.
You're a FUD-spewing pinko-commie - which is not to say you're completely wrong, but you're missing the point.
It's true that to day-trade, it's all about the high-frequency crazy-fiber stuff. But you know what? You don't need a fiber link to go out and buy a share of McDonald's (today's prices: $87.48-$89.72) and pick up their ~61-cent quarterly dividend. You don't need a billion-dollar real-time system to pick up a piece of Apple ($412.00 - $421.59) and own a fraction of their still-growing revenue stream and cash hoard. You can go out there and place your order for just about as many shares as you care for, for any stock (or your selection of exchange-traded funds which hold hundreds of stocks for a minimal expense ratio), pay about $10, then come back three to thirty years and ask yourself "who fucking cares how fast the HFT traders were trading on 21 June 2011?"
HFT is all about things like spotting a tiny market inefficiency of a fraction of a cent across a half-billion shares on two different exchanges and exploiting it for whatever it's worth. You were never going to play that game; don't kid yourself.
Which is not to say that there aren't people rigging the game to their advantage all over the economy - but "high-frequency trading" isn't really the tool they're using. When you're in the really big leagues, your most powerful tool is The Government. (Bailouts, subsidies, implicit government guarantees, sketchy Solyndra loans, what have you.) Then, the next few rungs down on the latter are all about exploiting the shareholders of your publicly-traded company. That's the sort of thing we should worry about, not the HFT crap.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is not a fund of any sort. It's a market index. It doesn't follow a reasonable investment strategy because it's not an investment - and anyone basing their investment structure solely on its components is doing it wrong.
The Dow is only relevant because it's the oldest general-purpose stock index in the US, and everyone is used to it. (The oldest index was the Down Jones Transportation Index, but that's a little sector-specific.) It's handy for headlines, but not much else. If you want to get a better idea of what the stock market as a whole is doing, use the S&P 500. If you want a better investment strategy, use the S&P 500. If you want to day-trade, maybe a DJIA ETF would be good for you. Otherwise, use the S&P 500.
This. But despite the advantages of a good eyewitness account, one of the advantages remaining for the mainstream media has is enough servers to handle a lot of traffic. *cough* slashdot effect *cough*
A bake-off and a benchmark aren't exactly the same things. Price, ease of configuration and deployment, general vendor responsiveness, and other things may come into play, besides the raw performance numbers.
It's a term the sales droids and CTOs seem to use a lot; not so much other people.
The difference between "investing" and what the government is doing when it spends money on stimulus is this: when you invest $1, you expect to get more than $1 of useful stuff back - and probably more. You want to get the most bang for your buck. When the government spends $1, they go out of their way to get as little bang for the buck as possible, so that they can spend more. For instance,
In one redolent example, a federal contractor said he was told to use smaller, nonstandard tiles that are harder and more expensive to install in order to increase the cost of the project.
I'll give you something, through. It's true that the money is "free" until the world economy actually thaws and people demand interest for their money again. But come on -- what are the odds of that happening?:b
When you actually use spectrum, you have equipment (wireless radios and stuff) that becomes useless if the spectrum gets taken away. You can't just repurpose arbitrary hardware to operate on new frequencies. You need different chips, different antennas, and probably new deployment studies so you know where there's coverage - not to mention the actual work of going out there and reconfiguring or reinstalling everything. Spectrum is much more useful (and valuable) when you can be sure that it's going to stick around for a while.
Besides, at another level, you can convert between income streams and lump sums using the wonders of Economics. A billion dollars in the Treasury is ~$35 million a year in interest charges that the government doesn't have to pay (using recent interest rates for the 30-year Treasury bond).
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, this is like the third time you've posted a wall of links to this discussion. The same wall of links. That's about two and one-third times too many. (I give it an extra one-third because walls of links are actually mildly obnoxious. You couldn't have at least put meaningful text, like the title of the article, in the quote? For bonus points, consider using an unordered list.)
I ask of you as a fellow man: Please attempt to contribute to future Slashdot discussions in a more meaningful manner. Thank you.
This post is flamebait, but I'll respond in case a wider audience is interested in the question:
Idunno. There's this whole "freedom of thought" and "tolerance" sort of thing going on, and it seems to have worked rather well for society over the past few centuries. If you don't defend the unpopular, you just end up with mob rule. You don't want mob rule; it would be a real pity if we threw away the notion of tolerance and later rational thought landed on the wrong side of public opinion. Also working out rather well: "innocent until proven guilty". And from the bad ideas file: "guilt by association" and "people who don't agree with me are inhuman scum".
In any event, the problem really isn't that the typical Catholic priests is a child molestor. The problem is that child molestors actively seek positions of trust and authority to perpetrate their crimes and the church has been inadequate in its response. Before you exercise your prejudice, think of the children - your prejudice may hide the real danger.
You'd have to ask the judge and jury.
Also, thank you for thinking about the law instead of jumping on the "hate hate hate + guilty until proven innocent" bandwagon. I'd mod you up if I hadn't wasted all my points for the day.
Hey, somebody needs to pay 50% of the taxes in this country. :P
For a similar problem, see safety, and specifically how China's top-down control over their high-speed rail network was inadequate in prevent the signaling issues which led to the recent high-profile crash.
Yeah, reading the field will only get you so far. It's one thing to propose all sorts of hopes and dreams for your first term, but to be re-elected, you need to actually achieve something with your policies. Make of Obama's record there what you will.
Flamebait, eh? Looks like I've exposed a convenient fiction of the political-enviro-industrial complex and they're out to get me now. :(
The Clean Air act was about noxious compounds in the air - not traditionally components of the atmosphere, posing an acute hazard to the health and well-being of those who inhaled them. This affair is about carbon dioxide, already a major component of the earth's atmosphere, which poses no such immediate threat to human health and well-being.
Maybe we should be emitting less carbon dioxide, but it's stupid to put carbon dioxide and other sorts of pollution under the same banner.
Shouldn't below-cost Chinese imported solar panels (etc) be an environmentalist's dream? More solar power for less money means more conventional power you can replace for less money.
Or, if you're concerned with jobs and not as much with the environment, why are you bothering with solar panels? From a jobs perspective, choosing solar instead of fossil fuels basically means throwing money away. That's not actually an effective way to grow the economy, as we have recently witnessed with recent "stimulus" spending. (Again, that's not to say that society should never choose to spend money on the environment or solar panels, but rather that it's a drag on the economy, not a stimulus, and we shouldn't lie to ourselves about it.)
Green jobs mean fewer real ones, not more. A job which needs special subsidies and produces energy which is extra expensive means taxpayers and energy-users have less money to spend on things which actually matter to them (energy output isn't one of those, it's a means to an end).
This is not to say that The Environment isn't something which matters to people, or should be disregarded, and that spending on it is never justified -- but rather that it shouldn't be mistaken for a job driver, because it's not.
(And if you ask me, we ought to be fracking the heck out of all the natural gas we can find, because it's cheap, abundant, not from the middle east, and spending on natural gas will probably end up reducing carbon dioxide emissions more than the equivalent spending on windmills and solar. Have your cake, eat it too. Do what you can to watch out for the water-table contamination issue, sure, but treat it as a real issue, not an insurmountable excuse to shut it down.)
I mean, I bought some stocks and the market crashed. Can I go to the prior owner and get my money back? Somehow I think not.
I like the "hurting automobile sales, which in turn contribute to layoffs." It's right up there with not breaking windows anymore, hurting glass sales, contributing to layoffs. You monster.
And while I'm at it, I'd like to complain about: how difficult it is to find an apartment in San Francisco, my income taxes, the price of gas (and auto maintenance), and ants.
Especially those dumb ants. Someone should just squish them all.
Yes, but sometimes it's nice to be able to stuff in another video card or three and get yourself a second monitor or some extra CUDA processing.... without having to completely replace your motherboard. If nothing else, it'll probably run cooler than an older PCI-based video card.
Consider the bind the education system is on. We need improvement. How can we measure improvement? Standardized tests! Well, those actually kind of stink; it'd probably be better if the management could evaluate the teachers based on more qualitative criteria. But the unions would never have that! They bend over backwards to make sure a teacher is never fired without a mountain of paperwork meticulously documenting some evidence against them! And in all honesty, they've got a couple of good reasons. First, you can't rely on the administration to try very hard to evaluate a teacher effectively. They've got no real incentive to do that, and you have to rely on the goodness of their hearts (a weak proposition in a bureaucracy)... and they're the only game in town, so if you lose your job, you need to start looking at other counties or even states - not a really great situation in large swaths of the country.
Of course, there's no good reason big cities with failing schools couldn't deal with a few more charters / school choice / vouchers and the like, especially when the alternative is the miserable status quo.
My worst run-in with an accent was my matrix algebra class, where the teacher quite clearly knew what she was talking about, but you couldn't hear and comprehend a word of it because of her thick Asian accent. Regrettably, I have since determined that there's a whole lot of awesome stuff that you can do with matrix algebra (e.g. approximate nonnegative matrix factorization) and I wish that I'd been able to absorb more of that material. :(
So yeah, there's definitely a spot where a heavy accent becomes damaging to your ability to communicate, and especially to teach. The premise is reasonable -- the implementation, of course, has plenty of room to be suspect.
1. The head of a project takes his bunch of interns into a meeting room to brainstorm random things you could do which have any sort of tenuous tangential connection to the project.
2. Lawyers!!!
3. IBM pays dude a few thousand dollars bonus.
(4. Interns are eligible for bonus if they join IBM, but seek less-dysfunctional workplaces where they don't have to use Lotus Notes.)
Seriously, that's the reason I have my name on a patent which basically says "you could have a weight sensor on a bus, guess the number of passengers, and use that for capacity planning somehow." For bonus points, check out the flowchart.
Unlike traditional pollutants, nobody cares about a little carbon dioxide output at any given point, because it's nothing next to what's already floating around in the air.
You're a FUD-spewing pinko-commie - which is not to say you're completely wrong, but you're missing the point.
It's true that to day-trade, it's all about the high-frequency crazy-fiber stuff. But you know what? You don't need a fiber link to go out and buy a share of McDonald's (today's prices: $87.48-$89.72) and pick up their ~61-cent quarterly dividend. You don't need a billion-dollar real-time system to pick up a piece of Apple ($412.00 - $421.59) and own a fraction of their still-growing revenue stream and cash hoard. You can go out there and place your order for just about as many shares as you care for, for any stock (or your selection of exchange-traded funds which hold hundreds of stocks for a minimal expense ratio), pay about $10, then come back three to thirty years and ask yourself "who fucking cares how fast the HFT traders were trading on 21 June 2011?"
HFT is all about things like spotting a tiny market inefficiency of a fraction of a cent across a half-billion shares on two different exchanges and exploiting it for whatever it's worth. You were never going to play that game; don't kid yourself.
Which is not to say that there aren't people rigging the game to their advantage all over the economy - but "high-frequency trading" isn't really the tool they're using. When you're in the really big leagues, your most powerful tool is The Government. (Bailouts, subsidies, implicit government guarantees, sketchy Solyndra loans, what have you.) Then, the next few rungs down on the latter are all about exploiting the shareholders of your publicly-traded company. That's the sort of thing we should worry about, not the HFT crap.
The Dow is only relevant because it's the oldest general-purpose stock index in the US, and everyone is used to it. (The oldest index was the Down Jones Transportation Index, but that's a little sector-specific.) It's handy for headlines, but not much else. If you want to get a better idea of what the stock market as a whole is doing, use the S&P 500. If you want a better investment strategy, use the S&P 500. If you want to day-trade, maybe a DJIA ETF would be good for you. Otherwise, use the S&P 500.
Congratulations. You've just discovered why there are dozens of S&P 500-based mutual funds, but there aren't really any DJIA mutual funds.
This. But despite the advantages of a good eyewitness account, one of the advantages remaining for the mainstream media has is enough servers to handle a lot of traffic. *cough* slashdot effect *cough*
A bake-off and a benchmark aren't exactly the same things. Price, ease of configuration and deployment, general vendor responsiveness, and other things may come into play, besides the raw performance numbers.
It's a term the sales droids and CTOs seem to use a lot; not so much other people.
(-- Why the Stimulus Failed, in The Wall Street Journal, c.f. also No Such Thing as Shovel-Ready and Did Stimulus Dollars Hire the Unemployed?)
I'll give you something, through. It's true that the money is "free" until the world economy actually thaws and people demand interest for their money again. But come on -- what are the odds of that happening? :b
When you actually use spectrum, you have equipment (wireless radios and stuff) that becomes useless if the spectrum gets taken away. You can't just repurpose arbitrary hardware to operate on new frequencies. You need different chips, different antennas, and probably new deployment studies so you know where there's coverage - not to mention the actual work of going out there and reconfiguring or reinstalling everything. Spectrum is much more useful (and valuable) when you can be sure that it's going to stick around for a while.
Besides, at another level, you can convert between income streams and lump sums using the wonders of Economics. A billion dollars in the Treasury is ~$35 million a year in interest charges that the government doesn't have to pay (using recent interest rates for the 30-year Treasury bond).