...have been removed for the past 30 years by the Republicans.
Let's not unfairly smear the party that is open in its desire for a dystopian plutocracy; the Democrats almost as craven. Gutting the regulations that kept the system safe was very much a bipartisan effort.
Are you aware that randomly generating a specific protein is much more difficult than that?
I've highlighted the key word: randomly. Specific proteins were not actually generated randomly, but were directed to viable structures via selection.
If there was a way to direct the key search to one of the potential keys that could decrypt the ciphertext into some meaningful plaintext, i.e. selection, then one could break the encryption in a more feasible time frame.
The analogy which springs to my mind is of a person who picks the locks on the doors or windows of your house, but doesn't steal anything.
To my mind, it's more like someone providing you with tools that would let you open your own windows during times that the window manufacturers didn't want you to.
For good or ill, I sense history being made here, folks.
Me too. This is the DMCA all over again.
Basically the multi-national corporations are coming to grips with a global communications system, and is hammering out an accord on how it can be used.
It's a nice idea, but the problem is that in the real world you don't have the ability for technology to create the level playing field required to make it work.
Look at Wikipedia. It relies on HTTP, which relies on TCP/IP. These protocols ensure that anyone connected to the real Internet (not firewalled) can read and edit pages. Due to the decentralized nature of TCP/IP, it is exceptionally difficult to control traffic such that people only see some edits or pages and not others. It can be done with enough money and political will, but it takes an authoritarian regime like China to do it. The rest of the world won't pay the price to do that on a large scale.
Your idea to do the same thing with laws requires its own version of HTTP/TCP/IP to provide a universal read and edit channel. Anyone who can control/corrupt that channel becomes the arbiter of the law itself. The ultimate power for that will derive from the law enforcement sector: police, military, something. Once you introduce that, you need an out-of-band way to control that, and before you know it you have an Iron Triangle centered on law enforcement.
I don't know what the solution is. But every scheme that I've heard or come up with runs into the problem of "who creates a police force, and how is it controlled?" The answer always seems to be "money" or "weapons". Whoever has the most of those gets to tilt the system in their favor.
Since the days of Bill Clinton the federal government's "hand-off" policy has meant Americans had to download encryption code and audio/video codecs from abroad; couldn't use 128-bit encryption to secure financial transactions for several years; could be expedited to the most conservative jurisdiction and jailed for receiving illegal material; could be put on trial for re-publishing publicly-available information; and can now be jailed for drawings.
Maybe this new policy of "we'll finally start regulating the Internet" means they'll finally stop.
However, the profession itself does not want to do so as it would reduce everyone down to near commodity status.
As a fellow engineer myself and former programmer, I think it's more that the profession already is considered commodity status and the employers don't want the salary bar raised by having enforced standards.
Think about the mentoring process of a new hire engineer. They've often got a partner slightly-older-hire plus an experienced mentor vetting all their work. That's perhaps 1.8 full-time salaries per unit of full-time work. When you're talking about a minor miscalculation leading to hundreds of thousands of dollars (minimum) wasted on a failed design, that makes a lot of sense. But for code? How many employers would be willing to pay $65,000 a year for 30 lines a day?
Hey municipalities... you get what you pay for. How's those $25,000 a year IT staff working out for ya?
The flaw is that when a government entity pays for higher quality, people then screech about government waste and inefficiency. "I can't believe they're paying $50,000 a year for IT jobs that are really only worth $25,000 a year."
Ok, then. More rain and snow prove global warming. And drought proves global warming. So..... given that any changes in the weather prove global warming, what would disprove global warming?
I'd like to introduce you to a concept called "pool boiling". You can see "pool boiling" when you boil water in a pot on the stove. Pool boiling has three main regimes:
1) Convective boiling, where tiny bubbles are being formed on the bottom surface of the pot and immediately float to the surface. Increasing the burner temperature will lead to:
2) Nucleate boiling, where little spots on the bottom surface produce bubble after bubble after bubble that immediately float to the surface. Increasing the burner temperature will lead to:
3) Film boiling, where there is a constant layer of vapor next to the hot bottom.
Here is the funny thing: nucleate boiling can produce more vapor than film boiling. If you are in the film boiling region, lowering the stove temperature will lead to more boiling.
So let's re-write your statement about global warming as a statement about pool boiling:
Ok, then. Higher stove temperature prove more boiling. And lower stove temperature proves more boiling. So..... given that any changes in the stove temperature prove more boiling, what would disprove more boiling?
My point is that natural phenomena do not have to be monotonic or uniform. The same rules on a local scale (microscopic forces) can lead to drastic differences on a larger scale. 10 inches of snow in Dallas can indeed result from higher average temperatures elsewhere.
Top tax bracket is 35% of income. Average tax bracket is 25%. Let "x" denote the total taxes paid by the top 1% and "y" the total taxes paid by the bottom 99%. The total tax revenue T is:
T = 0.35*x + 0.25*y
You say: "99% of all taxes are paid by about 1% of the populace."
Let's assume that's true:
0.99*T = 0.35*x 0.01*T = 0.25*y
x/y = (0.25/0.35)*(0.99/0.01)
x = 70.714*y
That would mean the total income of the top 1% is 70.714 times the total income of the bottom 99%. Sounds like that top 1% is paying way more than ought to, if they are responsible for 99% of the total.
But wait: if the entire bottom 99% makes (1/70.714) times the entire top 1%, then a single individual in the bottom 99% makes (1/70.714 / 99 = 1/7000) what a top 1% individual makes.
So...if you are in the top 1%: you make 7000 times more than someone in the bottom 99%, but you only pay 70.714 times more in income tax. Your society gives that top 1%'er 7000 times as many pre-tax dollars for every pre-tax dollar of a bottom 99%'er, but they only pay 70.714 times as much tax as that bottom 99%'er. So in actuality the top 1% should be taxed far more heavily than they already are.
This is your math. You think "99% of taxes comes from the top 1%" means the top 1% is overburdened. Do the math and you see they are dramatically underburdened. You're an idiot.
If that kind of subtlety is important, it can be documented via comment, encapsulated separately via (potentially inline) function, or it can be re-factored so that whatever common dependency i and j have is made explicit. All of which can lead to the same machine code by the optimizer.
Government almost never invests wisely. Government spends money on garbage.
The irony is that you are disparaging government using technology developed by that very same government (the Internet in case you forgot).
I'm sure you've never benefited from such unwise government investments as public schools, state universities, municipal libraries, state building/construction codes, the interstate highway system, or public utilities.
If you want to invest in someone's future, then put some money in a savings account or other interest-bearing, conservative investment.
Like stocks, bonds, money markets, and 401ks? I'm sure the folks who saw 30-50% of their retirement fund vanish will agree with you...
Broken window fallacy. If AGW is not correct but we focus on "green tech" then we will have spent society's resources inefficiently.
Reducing CO2 "footprint" in the existing manufacturing sector isn't a broken window though, it's direct savings. That was my job last year: find ways to manufacture our product at a big energy-intensive chemical processing plant while using less resources -- which include both energy and feedstocks. (Feedstocks and energy are actually interchangeable for us, because we can always burn feedstock to get more energy.) I succeeded in my projects and netted a nice half million dollars for 2009. I wasn't alone though: the dozens of other engineers at work on energy efficiency over the last five years have slashed close to 30% of our energy consumption across all the product lines.
That's a huge win for us: tens to hundreds of millions of dollars every year that we don't have to spend on feedstocks to burn for energy, and can instead spend on expansions, new products, research, and other capital projects (which often open the door to go after even bigger savings later). It was also a huge win for society: hundreds of millions of pounds of feedstocks available on the market to satisfy demand for other users. But we didn't do it for society, we did it because the economics -- even without a CO2 market -- pushed us that way: wasting energy is plain stupid. We remained profitable all the way through 2008 and 2009, unlike many of our competitors.
In my opinion, any manufacturing company that isn't looking to go "green" via better energy efficiency is pissing away lots of dollars for no real gain.
When on separate lines (or as separate expressions like 'for (... ;... ; i++)') they should compile to the same code for C and Java.
They compile to different things in C++ for non-primitive types when operator++/operator-- are defined, such that pre-increment has a (slight) performance gain.
Congratulations on finding one of the few idioms where evaluate+increment in one line can make the code easier to read than inserting a bunch of "i++"'s between lines. Well, if it's C, and the array is already initialized to be big enough; or if it's C++, and operator[]() automatically re-sizes the array as needed. OTOH, if it was Java or D you'd do better with the appropriate collection class.
Can they be abused? Sure. Just like everything.
True, any language feature can go bad in the wrong hands. Go read some old C code that tries to be clever. Try the public domain version of rz/sz for instance; it's not much better than assembly language. It's so bad in fact that multiple zmodem implementations were made later (sexyz, qterm) rather than try to reuse it.
If you are being paid to write code for someone else to maintain, you have to draw the line somewhere between the available language features and the likely skills of the next person in line to fix it.
If you don't grok that, go back to python.
Clojure, actually, where I'd just a write [ "I" "like" "big" "butts" ].
The GP wasn't talking about "evil rich" or any other strawmen arguments, they were talking specifically about taxes and pork.
Just a few articles down the frontpage is talk about Silicon Valley losing its technological edge due to (surprise!) poor public policies. To the folks in Alabama, the historical government investment in Silicon Valley (you know: universities, national laboratories, DARPA's role in starting the Internet, etc.) would be called "pork".
Slashdot Mirror
never let any ISP, Google or whomever to store copies of my mail any longer than it is needed for technical purposes of SMTP protocol.
How do you know they're not storing it?
What constitutes "delivery"?
This sounds to me like the court wanted the emails to be admissible and Made Up Shit to make it so.
...have been removed for the past 30 years by the Republicans.
Let's not unfairly smear the party that is open in its desire for a dystopian plutocracy; the Democrats almost as craven. Gutting the regulations that kept the system safe was very much a bipartisan effort.
Are you aware that randomly generating a specific protein is much more difficult than that?
I've highlighted the key word: randomly. Specific proteins were not actually generated randomly, but were directed to viable structures via selection.
If there was a way to direct the key search to one of the potential keys that could decrypt the ciphertext into some meaningful plaintext, i.e. selection, then one could break the encryption in a more feasible time frame.
and fully successful when it is >99%
In America at least there are zero successful industries by your definition.
The analogy which springs to my mind is of a person who picks the locks on the doors or windows of your house, but doesn't steal anything.
To my mind, it's more like someone providing you with tools that would let you open your own windows during times that the window manufacturers didn't want you to.
For good or ill, I sense history being made here, folks.
Me too. This is the DMCA all over again.
Basically the multi-national corporations are coming to grips with a global communications system, and is hammering out an accord on how it can be used.
FTFY.
I'm pretty sure I'll look back at the 90s/early 00s with nostalgia.
I already look back at the 80s/early 90s with nostalgia.
You're right, my goof.
It's a nice idea, but the problem is that in the real world you don't have the ability for technology to create the level playing field required to make it work.
Look at Wikipedia. It relies on HTTP, which relies on TCP/IP. These protocols ensure that anyone connected to the real Internet (not firewalled) can read and edit pages. Due to the decentralized nature of TCP/IP, it is exceptionally difficult to control traffic such that people only see some edits or pages and not others. It can be done with enough money and political will, but it takes an authoritarian regime like China to do it. The rest of the world won't pay the price to do that on a large scale.
Your idea to do the same thing with laws requires its own version of HTTP/TCP/IP to provide a universal read and edit channel. Anyone who can control/corrupt that channel becomes the arbiter of the law itself. The ultimate power for that will derive from the law enforcement sector: police, military, something. Once you introduce that, you need an out-of-band way to control that, and before you know it you have an Iron Triangle centered on law enforcement.
I don't know what the solution is. But every scheme that I've heard or come up with runs into the problem of "who creates a police force, and how is it controlled?" The answer always seems to be "money" or "weapons". Whoever has the most of those gets to tilt the system in their favor.
hardly anyone nowadays uses 7bit + parity + 2 stop bits or similar setups - devices requiring these have been pretty much phased out
I had brand-new scientific instruments in 2005 that used those types of setups: 7E1 and 8N2. Tiny market, but they are still there.
Since the days of Bill Clinton the federal government's "hand-off" policy has meant Americans had to download encryption code and audio/video codecs from abroad; couldn't use 128-bit encryption to secure financial transactions for several years; could be expedited to the most conservative jurisdiction and jailed for receiving illegal material; could be put on trial for re-publishing publicly-available information; and can now be jailed for drawings.
Maybe this new policy of "we'll finally start regulating the Internet" means they'll finally stop.
As a fellow engineer myself and former programmer, I think it's more that the profession already is considered commodity status and the employers don't want the salary bar raised by having enforced standards.
Think about the mentoring process of a new hire engineer. They've often got a partner slightly-older-hire plus an experienced mentor vetting all their work. That's perhaps 1.8 full-time salaries per unit of full-time work. When you're talking about a minor miscalculation leading to hundreds of thousands of dollars (minimum) wasted on a failed design, that makes a lot of sense. But for code? How many employers would be willing to pay $65,000 a year for 30 lines a day?
The flaw is that when a government entity pays for higher quality, people then screech about government waste and inefficiency. "I can't believe they're paying $50,000 a year for IT jobs that are really only worth $25,000 a year."
Ok, then. More rain and snow prove global warming. And drought proves global warming. So..... given that any changes in the weather prove global warming, what would disprove global warming?
I'd like to introduce you to a concept called "pool boiling". You can see "pool boiling" when you boil water in a pot on the stove. Pool boiling has three main regimes:
1) Convective boiling, where tiny bubbles are being formed on the bottom surface of the pot and immediately float to the surface. Increasing the burner temperature will lead to:
2) Nucleate boiling, where little spots on the bottom surface produce bubble after bubble after bubble that immediately float to the surface. Increasing the burner temperature will lead to:
3) Film boiling, where there is a constant layer of vapor next to the hot bottom.
Here is the funny thing: nucleate boiling can produce more vapor than film boiling. If you are in the film boiling region, lowering the stove temperature will lead to more boiling.
BTW here's a picture of pool boiling: http://wins.engr.wisc.edu/teaching/mpfBook/FIGURES/FIG5-1.html
So let's re-write your statement about global warming as a statement about pool boiling:
Ok, then. Higher stove temperature prove more boiling. And lower stove temperature proves more boiling. So..... given that any changes in the stove temperature prove more boiling, what would disprove more boiling?
My point is that natural phenomena do not have to be monotonic or uniform. The same rules on a local scale (microscopic forces) can lead to drastic differences on a larger scale. 10 inches of snow in Dallas can indeed result from higher average temperatures elsewhere.
None of this changes my basic assertion.
That's because your assertion is:
And as for cost: how do we know they spent the money wisely? For all you and I know, they spent 10 times as much on it as they should have.
You assume the money is spent unwisely because you say so. Everything else is just hand-waving to rationalize your pre-existing notions.
Top tax bracket is 35% of income. Average tax bracket is 25%. Let "x" denote the total taxes paid by the top 1% and "y" the total taxes paid by the bottom 99%. The total tax revenue T is:
T = 0.35*x + 0.25*y
You say: "99% of all taxes are paid by about 1% of the populace."
Let's assume that's true:
0.99*T = 0.35*x
0.01*T = 0.25*y
x/y = (0.25/0.35)*(0.99/0.01)
x = 70.714*y
That would mean the total income of the top 1% is 70.714 times the total income of the bottom 99%. Sounds like that top 1% is paying way more than ought to, if they are responsible for 99% of the total.
But wait: if the entire bottom 99% makes (1/70.714) times the entire top 1%, then a single individual in the bottom 99% makes (1/70.714 / 99 = 1/7000) what a top 1% individual makes.
So...if you are in the top 1%: you make 7000 times more than someone in the bottom 99%, but you only pay 70.714 times more in income tax. Your society gives that top 1%'er 7000 times as many pre-tax dollars for every pre-tax dollar of a bottom 99%'er, but they only pay 70.714 times as much tax as that bottom 99%'er. So in actuality the top 1% should be taxed far more heavily than they already are.
This is your math. You think "99% of taxes comes from the top 1%" means the top 1% is overburdened. Do the math and you see they are dramatically underburdened. You're an idiot.
QED.
If that kind of subtlety is important, it can be documented via comment, encapsulated separately via (potentially inline) function, or it can be re-factored so that whatever common dependency i and j have is made explicit. All of which can lead to the same machine code by the optimizer.
Government almost never invests wisely. Government spends money on garbage.
The irony is that you are disparaging government using technology developed by that very same government (the Internet in case you forgot).
I'm sure you've never benefited from such unwise government investments as public schools, state universities, municipal libraries, state building/construction codes, the interstate highway system, or public utilities.
If you want to invest in someone's future, then put some money in a savings account or other interest-bearing, conservative investment.
Like stocks, bonds, money markets, and 401ks? I'm sure the folks who saw 30-50% of their retirement fund vanish will agree with you...
Broken window fallacy. If AGW is not correct but we focus on "green tech" then we will have spent society's resources inefficiently.
Reducing CO2 "footprint" in the existing manufacturing sector isn't a broken window though, it's direct savings. That was my job last year: find ways to manufacture our product at a big energy-intensive chemical processing plant while using less resources -- which include both energy and feedstocks. (Feedstocks and energy are actually interchangeable for us, because we can always burn feedstock to get more energy.) I succeeded in my projects and netted a nice half million dollars for 2009. I wasn't alone though: the dozens of other engineers at work on energy efficiency over the last five years have slashed close to 30% of our energy consumption across all the product lines.
That's a huge win for us: tens to hundreds of millions of dollars every year that we don't have to spend on feedstocks to burn for energy, and can instead spend on expansions, new products, research, and other capital projects (which often open the door to go after even bigger savings later). It was also a huge win for society: hundreds of millions of pounds of feedstocks available on the market to satisfy demand for other users. But we didn't do it for society, we did it because the economics -- even without a CO2 market -- pushed us that way: wasting energy is plain stupid. We remained profitable all the way through 2008 and 2009, unlike many of our competitors.
In my opinion, any manufacturing company that isn't looking to go "green" via better energy efficiency is pissing away lots of dollars for no real gain.
When on separate lines (or as separate expressions like 'for (... ; ... ; i++)') they should compile to the same code for C and Java.
They compile to different things in C++ for non-primitive types when operator++/operator-- are defined, such that pre-increment has a (slight) performance gain.
Ah, you're an idiot. Carry on then...
Congratulations on finding one of the few idioms where evaluate+increment in one line can make the code easier to read than inserting a bunch of "i++"'s between lines. Well, if it's C, and the array is already initialized to be big enough; or if it's C++, and operator[]() automatically re-sizes the array as needed. OTOH, if it was Java or D you'd do better with the appropriate collection class.
Can they be abused? Sure. Just like everything.
True, any language feature can go bad in the wrong hands. Go read some old C code that tries to be clever. Try the public domain version of rz/sz for instance; it's not much better than assembly language. It's so bad in fact that multiple zmodem implementations were made later (sexyz, qterm) rather than try to reuse it.
If you are being paid to write code for someone else to maintain, you have to draw the line somewhere between the available language features and the likely skills of the next person in line to fix it.
If you don't grok that, go back to python.
Clojure, actually, where I'd just a write [ "I" "like" "big" "butts" ].
The GP wasn't talking about "evil rich" or any other strawmen arguments, they were talking specifically about taxes and pork.
Just a few articles down the frontpage is talk about Silicon Valley losing its technological edge due to (surprise!) poor public policies. To the folks in Alabama, the historical government investment in Silicon Valley (you know: universities, national laboratories, DARPA's role in starting the Internet, etc.) would be called "pork".
A: This solution will get us there.
Q: What is "Separate But Equal" Alex?