It matters because when you buy the "leading open-source company", you also buy the programmers, many of whom will go on to work for Oracle. An open-source project without any developers is probably much better for its users than a closed-source project without developers, sure, but it's still a major setback.
Religion and conspiracy theories alike are strongly rooted in the fact that life is probably a lot safer when you have a bias which makes you think that something happening is caused by something than not. If you're wrong, it's probably not a huge deal.
The religion-as-disease meme is way overrated, anyway: you never see any of its adherents trying to provide a nuanced consideration of its actual impact on history. It's disappointing; I'd like to hear someone discussing the pros and cons of religion(s) on the development and operation of society in a reasonably dispassionate, analytical manner, open to the ideas that it may have been incidental or even positive overall. But everyone has got an axe to grind and just wants to reinforce their own personal beliefs. Ironic, really.
I'm no Robert Pike, but I imagine that computer programming as we move to thousands and millions of cores will consist less of telling the computer how to do something, and more of telling the computer what you want to do and having a really smart compiler figure out the details. The more low-level you go, the less chance the compiler has of figuring out what you're trying to do and making it work effectively (and do crazy optimizations like speculative out-of-order execution, and what-have-you).
But this means that the programming languages of the future will be less imperative and more functional. How that will ever catch on is beyond me.
A bunch of investors... like everyone's pension funds? Suuuure. Dow 5000, that's just what Joe Sixpack needs. =b
There is something to the premise (layoffs deliver a harsher impact on the rest of the economy than pay cuts of the same dollar amount) but you neglect all the deleterious effects of trashing the efficiency of the economy. Creating more jobs alone is not a real solution to economic distress if the creation is a drag on the economy. Economic growth is a sounder priority and will drive a more robust recovery.
Whether Childs was ultimately right or wrong, I think the case *did* highlight concerns that "judges and juries are often not technically savvy enough to understand what IT pros do." So. There you go.
I'll grant that the US does bad things, but when you say things like "just as bad" as China you're basically saying "I am viewing the world in an over-stark black-and-white manner and am thoroughly incapable of understanding nuance, and willfully oblivious to any differing *degrees* of badness".
Embedded device? No, it's the control systems. About 6 years ago I did an internship for a little SCADA company, and wrote something which took their existing customizable form structures (stored in databases, displayed in some Windows form framework that looked almost Win 3.1-ish) and made a version in HTML. The technology looked old even then; I'm sure that there are plenty of Windows control systems sitting around.
Two points here. First, that's a pretty broad brush you paint "religion" with there. It may be an accurate description of typical midwestern Protestant religion (who probably you encounter most often pushing the latest in Creationism) but many modern religions have a more sophisticated view on integrating with Reality than that. Even among Christianity, the Catholics are generally quite willing to consider evolution and the Big Bang - heck, Lemaitre was a Catholic priest! I won't even go into the eastern religions.
A more nuanced perspective is in order.
Second, I think that the reason a lot of people react like that is, to take an example, the Guy With The Truth is typically perceived to be not just a guy trying to inform for the sake of Truth, but a guy who's got some ideological agenda to push including a whole suite of objectionable ideas, not just the one, so it's easy to dismiss his statements wholesale. He's probably not just interested in saying "the universe began this way and here's why; interesting, eh?" but he oh so often goes on to make snide remarks about religion and politics and possibly underlying cultural value systems. Just read typical Slashdot comments here and you'll find plenty of examples. Wrap the truth in a turd often enough, and people will think it's smelly.
For example, do you think Disney pays itself to run Hannah Montana ads on its own networks? I don't.
Any second that Disney advertises Hannah Montana, they're not running an advertisement that somebody paid for. It's called "opportunity cost". It means that those Hannah-Montana ads really need to pay off at least as much as running an extra ad slot for "Bratz".
Money is money because people believe it is money. Gold-backed currency needs to have people believing that the government is actually going to turn the currency into gold (and not, say, end the gold standard). And if you trust your government enough to do that, today's system isn't much more of a stretch: trusting the government to keep the value of your currency "relatively stable" without any particular commodity attached to it.
And commodity prices are subject to wild swings too, you know.
Which works great until $serious_spy_agency splices the fiber somewhere and takes over everything.
Air-gap security is all fine and good against casual hackers, but still leaves you with an awfully gooey center. I don't know why Slashdotters keep advocating it as such a panacea.
Investing in stocks (as opposed to day-trading) isn't really "gambling" any more than in the same sense that running a business or a factory is: you pay something up front, and hope you make money off it. More importantly, you don't need to "never lose money" to win at the stock market (or at gambling). In fact, you're guaranteed to lose money sooner or later. The key is that you need to win more money than you lose.
"[G]reen growth... leads the government in strange directions. For example, with public money very tight, the government has halted private-sector, tax-generating airport investments in favor of tax-consuming rail spending. As Spain is discovering the hard way, more green jobs means fewer real ones."
(--Rupert Darwall, "Britain Tries Fiscal Austerity", the Wall Street Journal, 29 Jun 2010)
"'Face, we say in China, is more important than life itself.'"
I've always been more of a "ESSE QVAM VIDERE" fan myself. ("To be, rather than to seem.") State motto of North Carolina. Guess Ah'm just a sample countreh boy aht heart aftah all.
Tesla's innovative organizational structure won't be enough to save them if their cars are a flop, though - and sure, the Roadster is a cool car and could be construed as being ahead of the competition so far, but it's also expensive, the batteries suffer from massive depreciation, and the economy's not looking spectacularly hot right now. Moreover the regular automakers aren't really that far behind (a plug-in hybrid Prius would be a perfectly reasonable substitute for the normal-consumer-oriented version of the Tesla technology).
There's a lot of optimism priced into the stock right now. I wouldn't expect them to go out of business in the next couple of years or anything, and I might pick up a few shares if it gets down to $10-$12 or so, but a $22/share price sounds way too optimistic for my liking. I'd wait for the headline-buzz to fade a little before pouring too much money into it.
Telsa is not GOOG. Automobiles are a capital-intensive business.
The difference is that the Bible Code was all about "by twiddling this code we arrive at predictions about the future!!!" where as this was more "Plato's works are structured in twelfths; it sounds like he was one of those Pythagorean-Secret-Society types who conflated religion and math."
No doubt this will be fodder for more "ooh secret-society" drama and such anyway.
The "code-cracking" seems relatively solid. For instance:
There is a literature, carefully reviewed by Balashov and briefly by Herz-Fischler, on the question of whether the Divided Line in the Republic was meant to be divided at the Golden Mean... Surprisingly, the Republic's discussion of the Divided Line begins at 61.7 percent of the way through the text.[88] By itself, this could be a coincidence, but the other dialogues typically contain allusions to the Golden Mean near 61.8p.
A passage in the Parmenides at the location of the Golden Mean recalls Euclid's language:
Parmenides (61.7-61.8p): The One is equal and greater and less than itself... And if greater and less and equal, it would be of equal measures and more and less than itself... and in number less and more...
The problem is... so what if there's a code? All it means is that Plato indulged in some sort of "numbers are nifty, math is mystical, knowledge is immortality" spirituality, possibly with some secret-society angles, codes, structure, blahblahblah. I'll believe that, and it's an interesting fact, but what does that have to do with the price of gas today? It's just fodder for a little more New Age gibberish, I'm sure.
Slashdot Mirror
Mmm. If you ever happen to encounter any CPT violations, contact your local theoretical physicist, and keep an eye out for rogue muon neutrinos.
What part of "The result was a master template" makes you think that they need a continual supply of eyes?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
It matters because when you buy the "leading open-source company", you also buy the programmers, many of whom will go on to work for Oracle. An open-source project without any developers is probably much better for its users than a closed-source project without developers, sure, but it's still a major setback.
Religion and conspiracy theories alike are strongly rooted in the fact that life is probably a lot safer when you have a bias which makes you think that something happening is caused by something than not. If you're wrong, it's probably not a huge deal.
The religion-as-disease meme is way overrated, anyway: you never see any of its adherents trying to provide a nuanced consideration of its actual impact on history. It's disappointing; I'd like to hear someone discussing the pros and cons of religion(s) on the development and operation of society in a reasonably dispassionate, analytical manner, open to the ideas that it may have been incidental or even positive overall. But everyone has got an axe to grind and just wants to reinforce their own personal beliefs. Ironic, really.
Umm, you mean like Nancy "We need to pass the bill so you know what's in it" Pelosi on health care? Because, I mean...
I'm no Robert Pike, but I imagine that computer programming as we move to thousands and millions of cores will consist less of telling the computer how to do something, and more of telling the computer what you want to do and having a really smart compiler figure out the details. The more low-level you go, the less chance the compiler has of figuring out what you're trying to do and making it work effectively (and do crazy optimizations like speculative out-of-order execution, and what-have-you).
But this means that the programming languages of the future will be less imperative and more functional. How that will ever catch on is beyond me.
Have you taken a look at academia lately? This is hardly news. ;)
A bunch of investors... like everyone's pension funds? Suuuure. Dow 5000, that's just what Joe Sixpack needs. =b
There is something to the premise (layoffs deliver a harsher impact on the rest of the economy than pay cuts of the same dollar amount) but you neglect all the deleterious effects of trashing the efficiency of the economy. Creating more jobs alone is not a real solution to economic distress if the creation is a drag on the economy. Economic growth is a sounder priority and will drive a more robust recovery.
Yeah. Turns out most of the world is salt water.
Whether Childs was ultimately right or wrong, I think the case *did* highlight concerns that "judges and juries are often not technically savvy enough to understand what IT pros do." So. There you go.
I'll grant that the US does bad things, but when you say things like "just as bad" as China you're basically saying "I am viewing the world in an over-stark black-and-white manner and am thoroughly incapable of understanding nuance, and willfully oblivious to any differing *degrees* of badness".
Embedded device? No, it's the control systems. About 6 years ago I did an internship for a little SCADA company, and wrote something which took their existing customizable form structures (stored in databases, displayed in some Windows form framework that looked almost Win 3.1-ish) and made a version in HTML. The technology looked old even then; I'm sure that there are plenty of Windows control systems sitting around.
Two points here. First, that's a pretty broad brush you paint "religion" with there. It may be an accurate description of typical midwestern Protestant religion (who probably you encounter most often pushing the latest in Creationism) but many modern religions have a more sophisticated view on integrating with Reality than that. Even among Christianity, the Catholics are generally quite willing to consider evolution and the Big Bang - heck, Lemaitre was a Catholic priest! I won't even go into the eastern religions. A more nuanced perspective is in order.
Second, I think that the reason a lot of people react like that is, to take an example, the Guy With The Truth is typically perceived to be not just a guy trying to inform for the sake of Truth, but a guy who's got some ideological agenda to push including a whole suite of objectionable ideas, not just the one, so it's easy to dismiss his statements wholesale. He's probably not just interested in saying "the universe began this way and here's why; interesting, eh?" but he oh so often goes on to make snide remarks about religion and politics and possibly underlying cultural value systems. Just read typical Slashdot comments here and you'll find plenty of examples. Wrap the truth in a turd often enough, and people will think it's smelly.
Any second that Disney advertises Hannah Montana, they're not running an advertisement that somebody paid for. It's called "opportunity cost". It means that those Hannah-Montana ads really need to pay off at least as much as running an extra ad slot for "Bratz".
Money is money because people believe it is money. Gold-backed currency needs to have people believing that the government is actually going to turn the currency into gold (and not, say, end the gold standard). And if you trust your government enough to do that, today's system isn't much more of a stretch: trusting the government to keep the value of your currency "relatively stable" without any particular commodity attached to it.
And commodity prices are subject to wild swings too, you know.
Air-gap security is all fine and good against casual hackers, but still leaves you with an awfully gooey center. I don't know why Slashdotters keep advocating it as such a panacea.
3!
...
77! Twelve!
You could implement a better attack by just throwing Arduinos at the presenter.
Investing in stocks (as opposed to day-trading) isn't really "gambling" any more than in the same sense that running a business or a factory is: you pay something up front, and hope you make money off it. More importantly, you don't need to "never lose money" to win at the stock market (or at gambling). In fact, you're guaranteed to lose money sooner or later. The key is that you need to win more money than you lose.
(--Rupert Darwall, "Britain Tries Fiscal Austerity", the Wall Street Journal, 29 Jun 2010)
I've always been more of a "ESSE QVAM VIDERE" fan myself. ("To be, rather than to seem.") State motto of North Carolina. Guess Ah'm just a sample countreh boy aht heart aftah all.
There's a lot of optimism priced into the stock right now. I wouldn't expect them to go out of business in the next couple of years or anything, and I might pick up a few shares if it gets down to $10-$12 or so, but a $22/share price sounds way too optimistic for my liking. I'd wait for the headline-buzz to fade a little before pouring too much money into it.
Telsa is not GOOG. Automobiles are a capital-intensive business.
The difference is that the Bible Code was all about "by twiddling this code we arrive at predictions about the future!!!" where as this was more "Plato's works are structured in twelfths; it sounds like he was one of those Pythagorean-Secret-Society types who conflated religion and math."
No doubt this will be fodder for more "ooh secret-society" drama and such anyway.
The "code-cracking" seems relatively solid. For instance:
The problem is... so what if there's a code? All it means is that Plato indulged in some sort of "numbers are nifty, math is mystical, knowledge is immortality" spirituality, possibly with some secret-society angles, codes, structure, blahblahblah. I'll believe that, and it's an interesting fact, but what does that have to do with the price of gas today? It's just fodder for a little more New Age gibberish, I'm sure.