What about a lifetime-long supply of non-perishable food? Wouldn't that be a capital asset like a house? And shouldn't you, in the same spirit, pursue the purchase of that hoard? After all, if you don't have such a thing - an OWNED lifetime food supply - the way a renter doesn't OWN a permanent place to live - aren't you perpetually at the mercy of food-producers who may decide to stop selling you food one day?
You didn't even think of that, because the notion that all of the food producers in the world deciding simultaneously to starve you to death is so hilariously ridiculous. I feel the same way about all the property owners on the planet deciding that I should sleep rough tomorrow night. There will always be a free market for living space, in days, months, or years, so the only question is whether I *OWN* a hoard of cash the way you own a piece of land and a building on it.
I trust society enough that I believe the little pile of paper that says I have enough money to rent from them for my remaining days won't suddenly be wished out of existence. Yes, war (and zombie apocalypse) can do such thing, but they're a risk I've decided to bear, the expense of starting a medieval freehold being too expensive an insurance policy. And it would take a medieval freehold that can defend itself, because if society goes so far south that my pension is just wastepaper, then... so will your land-title deed be wastepaper.
You're basically trusting society to the extent that police will continue to defend your right to occupy the home you own; I believe they'll defend my right to withdraw the money I *OWN* from the societal financial system and exchange it for living space, food, and even more importantly, cat food. (For the cat; it's not that bad a pension.)
They don't have a choice. When the government is influenced into passing a legal framework that devolves the market down to an oligopoly, people can hand them money, or not be able to make a phone call and find work.
Proponents of "market freedom" are often only offering the free choice of "Your money or your life" and calling that "freedom".
Societal productivity has been improving steadily for 35 years without it affecting the wealth or working-conditions of 90% of the population. All the new productivity you can imagine will go to the 1% - the vast majority of that to the 0.1% - unless the power balance changes.
If one applies that logic to food, which you actually need more desperately than shelter (in most weather situations) then you are in your concept of "infinite debt" until you own a farm. More than a farm, actually; you aren't free of purchasing SOME needs from the rest of society until you have a medieval freehold (house, farm, livestock, smelter and blacksmithery, forest and sawmill, fiber crops and weaving factory...I could go on). Your viewpoint is made clearer by your insistence on not just owning a condo or shares in a building co-op, but "your own land, free and clear" which is why I brought up the medieval freehold. You are welcome to emulate that with a Unibomber shack and a large garden. Me, I think I can trust society and that a member of it with little pieces of paper that say "actually the world DOES owe me a living, I saved for 30 years and can now pay my rent forever with my pension", has a safer hold on life than the shack-guy.
After Sony, we quickly heard their security was worthless - every VP who wanted to watch some video somewhere could get another hole punched in the firewall. Then the Democrats were "hacked" by.... asking for the top guy's password, which was promptly given! Warning after warning that we aren't taking this seriously. I'd love to make some stupid partisan remark about this ("these are the people who mocked Clinton for a potential data exposure that never happened?!!?") but the fact is that everybody has done incredibly stupid crap like this, are still doing it, and will continue.
Until we get some kind of worse event, I guess. What will it take!?!
Well, the democratic effort has been famous and bragged-about for several years, during which time it's never been described as anything but huge. It's like you're complaining about some story talking about the "Multi-Hundred-Billion-Dollar Russian Submarine program, seen as an effort to catch up with American submarines"...for not stressing for the thousandth time that America spends more on military (including submarines) than anybody. That's real famous, too.
(PS: The Russians do not have hundreds of billions to spare for submarines; that part was very fictional.)
Without heavy government investment in roads that started as soon as the car was invented, the industry would never have taken off.
And speaking of taking off, they also expended vast taxpayer dollars making airports available everywhere so that rich people who owned aircraft (and, they hoped, middle-class people that could rent a seat on one) would have someplace to go.
To this day, federal taxpayer dollars are expended on small rural airports that could never support themselves through user fees. This support is unstinting even at airports that never see a "commercial" flight, that serve only those wealthy enough to own pleasure craft.
>The group says $5.4 million is a misuse of taxpayer funds
Louisville is apparently 3/4 of a million people, so this comes to seven dollars per person. Surely less than 1% of anybody's property taxes. Louisville undoubtedly spends that on road maintenance every couple of weeks. But that's just operating, this is capital. If they're spending less than $54M replacing pavement and wires and pipes every year, the city would be a shambles. This is probably about a 2% hit on one year of capital spending.
I got an engineering degree and certification, then was tossed out of work by a major recession. I went back for a CompSci degree and managed a low-level job in the then-new field of PC support, won a promotion to IT "coordinator" (manager w/o staff, because they were all rented on a project basis from the IT department) with the Waterworks for several years. Then Waterworks remembered my engineering degree after 100 reminders and took me in as a construction-planning engineer, but I found my IT skills were key to the engineering job. I handled the drafting and GIS systems, was a lead on the project to bring in the new work-order system, was developing small solutions (tiny web apps, fancy VBA spreadsheets, etc) practically ever day. Heck, just knowing real SQL rather than trying to coax complex reports out of Business Objects was a vital skill for construction and maintenance management. It wound up being the last 20 years of my 30-year career. I can't recommend this career strategy enough; it's more interesting than either IT or the base profession alone, and more secure than either, too. The hardest thing in IT is getting across the real user needs to the developers - and an IT-savvy member of the customers is always going to be the guy that's either handling the IT specifications, and usually the IT project management from the user side; or just throws their hands up at the IT bureaucracy and develops the solution themselves. (Some of my "small solutions" would up taking weeks of time and growing over years into >1000 lines-of-code; hated to do it, but IT bureaucracy would have taken even longer.) So I tell people interested in IT careers to first become a nurse, accountant, engineer, technician, even lawyer - any profession that USES a lot of IT. Then add in IT, and you are practically guaranteed an interesting and lucrative career.
Clicking on my/.ID will lead to a tiresome repetition of posts like the following going back years, and experience only keeps telling me I'm right: your great career is mixing IT with another profession.
I just retired as a municipal engineer; I had the Eng degree but also CompSci and was the Waterworks IT guy for several years before they remembered by Eng degree and put me back into construction and maintenance work. I only oversaw the development of our Major Systems like the map-drafting and work-order-tracking that were millions each. But I *programmed* last Friday, and nearly every day of my career, and past (last Friday was near the end of a 6-month post-retirement please-come-back contract). No, it was not major, or even minor, applications. It was smart, VBA-enabled spreadsheets with custom SQL queries embedded that did things Business Objects just could not do. It was little Perl programs on the web server, cgi-bin stuff from the 90's, that provided a hundred people with a custom web-page for their project-of-the-month, and a data-entry form for their updates on it.
I got all these jobs because IT wouldn't touch them. They were too risk-averse to write up a program in hours and deploy it the next day...even if they could have written it without weeks of explanations of our business, processes, and needs. We used to have IT people who worked next to us and needed no briefings, and could be talked into such mini-solutions, but IT hauled them all back downtown in 1995 and after that, you got a new, clueless, programmer every time you called them, and whose boss needed 3 preliminary meetings before authorizing a project with all possible tracking and staging, and checks and, oh, just endless "process". So filling that gap was key to how valuable an engineer I was.
Every time career stuff comes up on/., I write this note again, urging people to not be a "programmer". Be an engineer/programmer or a doctor/programmer or an accountant/programmer. The poster above who noted that a metric shitload of modern programming is embedded in some ways, most of it written by the engineers of the car or appliance or other product of embedding, was one special class of this, but some kind of (other-profession)/programmer is, overall, the better career choice by far.
And for that, the language of choice is whatever language works in that very specific situation. The notion that such stuff can be done by "low level AI" is comical. If my colleagues couldn't explain their mini-app needs to a human being in less than a week, how could they explain it to a pattern on a stone?
Engineers already have to learn math, physics, chemistry, organic chemistry, operations research, statics, dynamics, and on and on. They learn whatever they have to in order to manipulate the world to a new shape. It could be anything. You think metallurgy is easier than Java? Hah.
The real cure for this is to make IT a licensed profession like teaching, accounting, medicine, law and engineering. Look back over that list of 5 professions - is there any serious doubt that quality, ethical IT that meets some kind of minimum standards is as needed for modern society as in those five?
But licensing has a second effect that has similarities to unionization. (In some ways, it's the opposite of unions - a state licensing body has to explain to new professionals every year that THEY do not get a THING for their dues, because the organization does not serve THEM...it serves the public trust, protecting the public from bad work) . But by doing that, it also keeps out crappy competition CALLING itself professional, while mainly getting the job by cutting the price in half.
This very news should be telling you that personally supporting local or state governments building the fibre infrastructure, and supporting the GOP in the voting booth, are contradictory positions. You may, on the balance, prefer the GOP despite their Internet Infrastructure positions, because of their other policies; but please be assured with certainty that the federal GOP will never, ever, EVER support public Internet infrastructure. They will always, always support it being built for a profit by private companies, quite without regard to the optimal solution for public costs and outcomes.
Sorry? Calling from Canada, here, 35 million people scattered across a larger country than the USA, and we have had the highest immigration rate in the world (nearly 1% of the population, per year) for over 20 years; a quarter of Canada was not born here. Recently, our major donor nations are not European, but all over Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.
And we rank pretty high on the index - just above Germany, which is over twice our size and now famous for taking in more refugees than anybody; they've had some cultural strains because of it.
But all that has had nothing to do with their transparency and democracy, or ours.
We're sad for you as friends, gleeful as competitors.
This business of States (not people) electing the President has always struck us as dodgy. On top of your system basically a replacing the concept of "King" with "President", where the ENTIRE executive branch of government hinges on a single person, then that decision has rested, over and over again, on the vagaries of a half-dozen of your States representing 1/6th of your population.
What this election has absolutely done is clarify to everybody is that the American constitution that you so revere, is something no democratizing country writing one would touch with a 3-metre pole. (Only you use "feet", like only you think your Constitution is a good idea.)
The American constitution is like the Cathedral model: whomever gets into the papacy designs the cathedral. Parliamentary systems are more open-source, like Raymond's Bazaar model: you need a continuous sense of consensus to keep going forward. If Mr. Trudeau started ranting about Area 51 conspiracies tomorrow, his best friends would push him into resignation by the end of the week, after presenting him with the list of MPs who wanted him to know he's lost their support. It's just stabler system, as things have turned out.
Your Presidential "King" thing is a single-point-of-failure; affect that outcome, and you've hacked the country. And Palin showed nine years ago that utter incompetents with a string of applause lines can get past the outer filters. So it was a natural and obvious line of attack.
The US ship of state is very large, the bureaucracy gargantuan, the economy has enormous momentum; it'll "survive", obviously - but thriving is a whole other question. All Putin could hope for was to limit American advancement and growth to some extent. He's likely to get it, as good government rarely comes from radical voices, even popular ones.
Best of luck with it. Like all radical mutations, there's a chance it'll turn out really well; bold experiments sometimes do. But of course, most mutations turn out badly.
Given what? "Renewables" do not provide base load.
The "battery advances" are exciting for cars, but not for letting a 3 GW wind farm act like a 1 GW base-load power plant. That would take a million PowerWalls. literally.
I'm astonished at many of these comments. This was not some "random question" like "do you support puppy-kicking". It concerned a repeated-stated policy direction of a now-elected high official. The Intercept is not some unknown blogger; it's a billion-dollar news organization that's won major awards.
Calling it "hypothetical" is not just wrong, because of the stated-policy angle making it not remotely hypothetical, but pointless - if somebody calls and asks if you support puppy-kicking, the "hypothetical" aspect doesn't mean that puppy-kicking is not illegal, making the answer obvious. The "Muslim Registry" is unquestionably unconstitutional, the way collecting data on all phone calls was obviously unconstitutional when Clapper lied to Congress about it - the court decision later was routine, as NSA lawyers certainly could have told them when they were developing it - the whole thing depended on secrecy from court examination, which is why even the congressional committee members were surprised to hear about it.
Before the Snowden revelations (by The Intercept, partly) the NSA metadata programs would have been called "hypothetical", so there really is a need to ask about these proposed programs before they are just enacted in secret.
...I don't mean running everything on OpenBSD literally, though it's an idea. I mean, "when do we get really serious about security?" Again and again, we find major hacks that are not the result of super-hackers defeating valiant protective efforts, it's script kiddies defeating idiots who kind of deserved it. The Sony hack came with many stories of multiple executives demanding the network be multiply-holed so that they could watch their favourite videos or whatever, hit their favourite sites.
I'm reading Andrew Ginter's book on SCADA security right now and reflecting on the insanity that there are SCADA systems, of all programming, being written on Windows, at all. There's one place the OpenBSD suggestion is quite serious. But even "OpenBSD" is just a buzzword unless you run your operations with security on your mind at all times. Schnier reduces this "mindfulness" argument to "read your logs", said it in three words.
Most of this stuff is not actually that *hard*...it requires *diligence* and *discipline*, but not nuclear science.
It's cool to read about this stuff, but as I lack the multiple PhDs to really follow the physics, I'm afraid my brute need is to know when to buy. Everybody wants to avoid buying the next Betamax or HD-DVD, obviously, but also you want to not buy in just as the price drops below $3000...and also shortly before it crashes to $999.
I managed to hold off buying a large flatscreen until 1080p was standard, at least (remember the nail-biter of choosing between 720p and 1080i ?) and feel very smart to have grabbed one of the last plasma sets before LCDs more-or-less pushed them off the market; everybody comments on the superior colour. That's not near to wearing out yet at 5 years, so I'm in no hurry to jump ship until I get even better colour, resolution, and anything else they're cooking up.
This may be the Next Big Thing, but it's become a hard call with things like 3D, 4K, high-frame-rate, and HDR zooming in and out of popularity on a yearly basis.
"Automated" is a continuum, not a binary. You can't find any process that's fully automated to the standard of "runs without any intervention for longer than a human lives"...and arguably, if it needs maintenance every 125 years, then it's still not "fully" automated. Maybe the still-unbuilt 10,000 year clock would qualify.
But by more reasonable standards, we're already done. Single families (largish, busy ones) can now farm a 70,000-acre farm themselves, provided the farm machinery stays in service. There was no such thing as a 70,000-acre farm back when there were people on the moon.
Here's a really great example because it involves the plant that put 20 generations through lives of slavery: cotton. In "Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy" Pietra Rivoli backtracked all the globalized industry that gets a T-shirt to her drug store. After working backwards through China and Malaysia and India, it turns out the original cotton still comes from Texas, though labour prices are far higher than Africa or Asia, because it's been so well automated.
She interviews a 80-something farmer who used to pick it by hand, along with the hired Hispanic help, remembers how hot and hard and backbreaking it was, why only slaves or the desperately poor would do the work. And then she traces how many advances have taken place in the intervening years, one task after another automated, and finally centralized onto one giant piece of machinery that practically has a "HARVEST COTTON" button on the dash, and a place to put your book. She notes the 80-something now has time for a nap after lunch.
That may not be 100% automated, but replacing a barracks full of actual slaves with one part-time old guy in an air-conditioned cab is clearly 99% of the job, done.
There needs to be some hashtag analogous to "RichPersonProblems" for military groups. Easy to look up that the $22.5B price tag is for THREE warships. That's like enough money to sort out all the lead water services in Flint and surrounding towns; then all the rest of them in the United States, probably 250,000 of them, delivering neurotoxins directly into the populace (if ISIS were doing it, the money would be there already)....and enough left over for a couple of hundred highway interchanges that would each save a couple of lives per year.
The waste level, if you calculate actual risks and returns, is jaw-dropping.
American's are soooo suspicious about every welfare dollar spent; if you apply for it, a guy comes to your house and snoops in your bathroom and underwear drawer, looking for proof that your boyfriend actually does live with you. But along comes a City Slicker with a laughable story about a superior killing machine, and Americans roll over and spread open their wallets.
Testing? Read "The Pentagon Wars" by Col. Jim Burton (or see the movie; the situation was so awful, they could only make a real-life story about Pentagon weapons system purchasing, into a *comedy* with Kelsey Grammar and Carey Elwes.) They HATE testing. Or any other requirement to prove their snake oil works in the real world.
If France was actually subsidizing 75% of their power production for over 40 years, they'd be broke by now. But the cooking of the books would have been spotted long since; the money they snuck into the electric utility would have had to come from somewhere, by some accounting route.
But in fact, the books of Électricité_de_France, their utility, which gets 64% of its power from the nuclear plants it runs, show a steady 9% profit for some years.
Their money all appears to come from sending people electric power bills. France has a very healthy culture of protest and dissent about government malfeasance and it does have an anti-nuclear movement, (though it is very small and unpopular) and if there were a scandal lurking there in the accounts, I'm sure it would have turned up in the last 40 years.
It's that record of safety and profit that really undercut the main anti-nuclear arguments for me: I always ask those guys: "So what about France?"
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What about a lifetime-long supply of non-perishable food? Wouldn't that be a capital asset like a house? And shouldn't you, in the same spirit, pursue the purchase of that hoard? After all, if you don't have such a thing - an OWNED lifetime food supply - the way a renter doesn't OWN a permanent place to live - aren't you perpetually at the mercy of food-producers who may decide to stop selling you food one day?
You didn't even think of that, because the notion that all of the food producers in the world deciding simultaneously to starve you to death is so hilariously ridiculous. I feel the same way about all the property owners on the planet deciding that I should sleep rough tomorrow night. There will always be a free market for living space, in days, months, or years, so the only question is whether I *OWN* a hoard of cash the way you own a piece of land and a building on it.
I trust society enough that I believe the little pile of paper that says I have enough money to rent from them for my remaining days won't suddenly be wished out of existence. Yes, war (and zombie apocalypse) can do such thing, but they're a risk I've decided to bear, the expense of starting a medieval freehold being too expensive an insurance policy. And it would take a medieval freehold that can defend itself, because if society goes so far south that my pension is just wastepaper, then ... so will your land-title deed be wastepaper.
You're basically trusting society to the extent that police will continue to defend your right to occupy the home you own; I believe they'll defend my right to withdraw the money I *OWN* from the societal financial system and exchange it for living space, food, and even more importantly, cat food. (For the cat; it's not that bad a pension.)
They don't have a choice. When the government is influenced into passing a legal framework that devolves the market down to an oligopoly, people can hand them money, or not be able to make a phone call and find work.
Proponents of "market freedom" are often only offering the free choice of "Your money or your life" and calling that "freedom".
Societal productivity has been improving steadily for 35 years without it affecting the wealth or working-conditions of 90% of the population.
All the new productivity you can imagine will go to the 1% - the vast majority of that to the 0.1% - unless the power balance changes.
If one applies that logic to food, which you actually need more desperately than shelter (in most weather situations) then you are in your concept of "infinite debt" until you own a farm.
More than a farm, actually; you aren't free of purchasing SOME needs from the rest of society until you have a medieval freehold (house, farm, livestock, smelter and blacksmithery, forest and sawmill, fiber crops and weaving factory...I could go on).
Your viewpoint is made clearer by your insistence on not just owning a condo or shares in a building co-op, but "your own land, free and clear" which is why I brought up the medieval freehold.
You are welcome to emulate that with a Unibomber shack and a large garden. Me, I think I can trust society and that a member of it with little pieces of paper that say "actually the world DOES owe me a living, I saved for 30 years and can now pay my rent forever with my pension", has a safer hold on life than the shack-guy.
After Sony, we quickly heard their security was worthless - every VP who wanted to watch some video somewhere could get another hole punched in the firewall.
Then the Democrats were "hacked" by.... asking for the top guy's password, which was promptly given!
Warning after warning that we aren't taking this seriously. I'd love to make some stupid partisan remark about this ("these are the people who mocked Clinton for a potential data exposure that never happened?!!?") but the fact is that everybody has done incredibly stupid crap like this, are still doing it, and will continue.
Until we get some kind of worse event, I guess. What will it take!?!
Well, the democratic effort has been famous and bragged-about for several years, during which time it's never been described as anything but huge. It's like you're complaining about some story talking about the "Multi-Hundred-Billion-Dollar Russian Submarine program, seen as an effort to catch up with American submarines"...for not stressing for the thousandth time that America spends more on military (including submarines) than anybody. That's real famous, too.
(PS: The Russians do not have hundreds of billions to spare for submarines; that part was very fictional.)
Ummmm...yeah.
Without heavy government investment in roads that started as soon as the car was invented, the industry would never have taken off.
And speaking of taking off, they also expended vast taxpayer dollars making airports available everywhere so that rich people who owned aircraft (and, they hoped, middle-class people that could rent a seat on one) would have someplace to go.
To this day, federal taxpayer dollars are expended on small rural airports that could never support themselves through user fees. This support is unstinting even at airports that never see a "commercial" flight, that serve only those wealthy enough to own pleasure craft.
>The group says $5.4 million is a misuse of taxpayer funds
Louisville is apparently 3/4 of a million people, so this comes to seven dollars per person. Surely less than 1% of anybody's property taxes. Louisville undoubtedly spends that on road maintenance every couple of weeks.
But that's just operating, this is capital. If they're spending less than $54M replacing pavement and wires and pipes every year, the city would be a shambles. This is probably about a 2% hit on one year of capital spending.
Ahem.
(en.wikipedia.org)
The Official Secrets Act 1989 (c. 6) is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom...
Been reading Bond this week? Or Howard's Laundry novels?
I got an engineering degree and certification, then was tossed out of work by a major recession. I went back for a CompSci degree and managed a low-level job in the then-new field of PC support, won a promotion to IT "coordinator" (manager w/o staff, because they were all rented on a project basis from the IT department) with the Waterworks for several years.
Then Waterworks remembered my engineering degree after 100 reminders and took me in as a construction-planning engineer, but I found my IT skills were key to the engineering job. I handled the drafting and GIS systems, was a lead on the project to bring in the new work-order system, was developing small solutions (tiny web apps, fancy VBA spreadsheets, etc) practically ever day. Heck, just knowing real SQL rather than trying to coax complex reports out of Business Objects was a vital skill for construction and maintenance management. It wound up being the last 20 years of my 30-year career.
I can't recommend this career strategy enough; it's more interesting than either IT or the base profession alone, and more secure than either, too. The hardest thing in IT is getting across the real user needs to the developers - and an IT-savvy member of the customers is always going to be the guy that's either handling the IT specifications, and usually the IT project management from the user side; or just throws their hands up at the IT bureaucracy and develops the solution themselves. (Some of my "small solutions" would up taking weeks of time and growing over years into >1000 lines-of-code; hated to do it, but IT bureaucracy would have taken even longer.)
So I tell people interested in IT careers to first become a nurse, accountant, engineer, technician, even lawyer - any profession that USES a lot of IT. Then add in IT, and you are practically guaranteed an interesting and lucrative career.
Clicking on my /.ID will lead to a tiresome repetition of posts like the following going back years, and experience only keeps telling me I'm right: your great career is mixing IT with another profession.
I just retired as a municipal engineer; I had the Eng degree but also CompSci and was the Waterworks IT guy for several years before they remembered by Eng degree and put me back into construction and maintenance work. I only oversaw the development of our Major Systems like the map-drafting and work-order-tracking that were millions each. But I *programmed* last Friday, and nearly every day of my career, and past (last Friday was near the end of a 6-month post-retirement please-come-back contract). No, it was not major, or even minor, applications. It was smart, VBA-enabled spreadsheets with custom SQL queries embedded that did things Business Objects just could not do. It was little Perl programs on the web server, cgi-bin stuff from the 90's, that provided a hundred people with a custom web-page for their project-of-the-month, and a data-entry form for their updates on it.
I got all these jobs because IT wouldn't touch them. They were too risk-averse to write up a program in hours and deploy it the next day...even if they could have written it without weeks of explanations of our business, processes, and needs. We used to have IT people who worked next to us and needed no briefings, and could be talked into such mini-solutions, but IT hauled them all back downtown in 1995 and after that, you got a new, clueless, programmer every time you called them, and whose boss needed 3 preliminary meetings before authorizing a project with all possible tracking and staging, and checks and, oh, just endless "process". So filling that gap was key to how valuable an engineer I was.
Every time career stuff comes up on /., I write this note again, urging people to not be a "programmer". Be an engineer/programmer or a doctor/programmer or an accountant/programmer. The poster above who noted that a metric shitload of modern programming is embedded in some ways, most of it written by the engineers of the car or appliance or other product of embedding, was one special class of this, but some kind of (other-profession)/programmer is, overall, the better career choice by far.
And for that, the language of choice is whatever language works in that very specific situation. The notion that such stuff can be done by "low level AI" is comical. If my colleagues couldn't explain their mini-app needs to a human being in less than a week, how could they explain it to a pattern on a stone?
Engineers already have to learn math, physics, chemistry, organic chemistry, operations research, statics, dynamics, and on and on. They learn whatever they have to in order to manipulate the world to a new shape. It could be anything. You think metallurgy is easier than Java? Hah.
The real cure for this is to make IT a licensed profession like teaching, accounting, medicine, law and engineering. Look back over that list of 5 professions - is there any serious doubt that quality, ethical IT that meets some kind of minimum standards is as needed for modern society as in those five?
But licensing has a second effect that has similarities to unionization. (In some ways, it's the opposite of unions - a state licensing body has to explain to new professionals every year that THEY do not get a THING for their dues, because the organization does not serve THEM...it serves the public trust, protecting the public from bad work) . But by doing that, it also keeps out crappy competition CALLING itself professional, while mainly getting the job by cutting the price in half.
This very news should be telling you that personally supporting local or state governments building the fibre infrastructure, and supporting the GOP in the voting booth, are contradictory positions.
You may, on the balance, prefer the GOP despite their Internet Infrastructure positions, because of their other policies; but please be assured with certainty that the federal GOP will never, ever, EVER support public Internet infrastructure. They will always, always support it being built for a profit by private companies, quite without regard to the optimal solution for public costs and outcomes.
very very very very expensive.
How come France can afford it for the last 40 years? Shouldn't they have gone broke by now? Instead, they're selling power.
Sorry? Calling from Canada, here, 35 million people scattered across a larger country than the USA, and we have had the highest immigration rate in the world (nearly 1% of the population, per year) for over 20 years; a quarter of Canada was not born here. Recently, our major donor nations are not European, but all over Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.
And we rank pretty high on the index - just above Germany, which is over twice our size and now famous for taking in more refugees than anybody; they've had some cultural strains because of it.
But all that has had nothing to do with their transparency and democracy, or ours.
We're sad for you as friends, gleeful as competitors.
This business of States (not people) electing the President has always struck us as dodgy. On top of your system basically a replacing the concept of "King" with "President", where the ENTIRE executive branch of government hinges on a single person, then that decision has rested, over and over again, on the vagaries of a half-dozen of your States representing 1/6th of your population.
What this election has absolutely done is clarify to everybody is that the American constitution that you so revere, is something no democratizing country writing one would touch with a 3-metre pole. (Only you use "feet", like only you think your Constitution is a good idea.)
The American constitution is like the Cathedral model: whomever gets into the papacy designs the cathedral. Parliamentary systems are more open-source, like Raymond's Bazaar model: you need a continuous sense of consensus to keep going forward. If Mr. Trudeau started ranting about Area 51 conspiracies tomorrow, his best friends would push him into resignation by the end of the week, after presenting him with the list of MPs who wanted him to know he's lost their support. It's just stabler system, as things have turned out.
Your Presidential "King" thing is a single-point-of-failure; affect that outcome, and you've hacked the country. And Palin showed nine years ago that utter incompetents with a string of applause lines can get past the outer filters. So it was a natural and obvious line of attack.
The US ship of state is very large, the bureaucracy gargantuan, the economy has enormous momentum; it'll "survive", obviously - but thriving is a whole other question. All Putin could hope for was to limit American advancement and growth to some extent. He's likely to get it, as good government rarely comes from radical voices, even popular ones.
Best of luck with it. Like all radical mutations, there's a chance it'll turn out really well; bold experiments sometimes do. But of course, most mutations turn out badly.
Given what? "Renewables" do not provide base load.
The "battery advances" are exciting for cars, but not for letting a 3 GW wind farm act like a 1 GW base-load power plant. That would take a million PowerWalls. literally.
I'm astonished at many of these comments. This was not some "random question" like "do you support puppy-kicking". It concerned a repeated-stated policy direction of a now-elected high official. The Intercept is not some unknown blogger; it's a billion-dollar news organization that's won major awards.
Calling it "hypothetical" is not just wrong, because of the stated-policy angle making it not remotely hypothetical, but pointless - if somebody calls and asks if you support puppy-kicking, the "hypothetical" aspect doesn't mean that puppy-kicking is not illegal, making the answer obvious. The "Muslim Registry" is unquestionably unconstitutional, the way collecting data on all phone calls was obviously unconstitutional when Clapper lied to Congress about it - the court decision later was routine, as NSA lawyers certainly could have told them when they were developing it - the whole thing depended on secrecy from court examination, which is why even the congressional committee members were surprised to hear about it.
Before the Snowden revelations (by The Intercept, partly) the NSA metadata programs would have been called "hypothetical", so there really is a need to ask about these proposed programs before they are just enacted in secret.
Thank you for putting "leader of the free world" in quotes. Can Americans stop using the term altogether? It's getting embarrassing.
Leader, n: one whom others want to follow.
...I don't mean running everything on OpenBSD literally, though it's an idea. I mean, "when do we get really serious about security?" Again and again, we find major hacks that are not the result of super-hackers defeating valiant protective efforts, it's script kiddies defeating idiots who kind of deserved it. The Sony hack came with many stories of multiple executives demanding the network be multiply-holed so that they could watch their favourite videos or whatever, hit their favourite sites.
I'm reading Andrew Ginter's book on SCADA security right now and reflecting on the insanity that there are SCADA systems, of all programming, being written on Windows, at all. There's one place the OpenBSD suggestion is quite serious. But even "OpenBSD" is just a buzzword unless you run your operations with security on your mind at all times. Schnier reduces this "mindfulness" argument to "read your logs", said it in three words.
Most of this stuff is not actually that *hard*...it requires *diligence* and *discipline*, but not nuclear science.
It's cool to read about this stuff, but as I lack the multiple PhDs to really follow the physics, I'm afraid my brute need is to know when to buy. Everybody wants to avoid buying the next Betamax or HD-DVD, obviously, but also you want to not buy in just as the price drops below $3000 ...and also shortly before it crashes to $999.
I managed to hold off buying a large flatscreen until 1080p was standard, at least (remember the nail-biter of choosing between 720p and 1080i ?) and feel very smart to have grabbed one of the last plasma sets before LCDs more-or-less pushed them off the market; everybody comments on the superior colour. That's not near to wearing out yet at 5 years, so I'm in no hurry to jump ship until I get even better colour, resolution, and anything else they're cooking up.
This may be the Next Big Thing, but it's become a hard call with things like 3D, 4K, high-frame-rate, and HDR zooming in and out of popularity on a yearly basis.
"Automated" is a continuum, not a binary. You can't find any process that's fully automated to the standard of "runs without any intervention for longer than a human lives"...and arguably, if it needs maintenance every 125 years, then it's still not "fully" automated. Maybe the still-unbuilt 10,000 year clock would qualify.
But by more reasonable standards, we're already done. Single families (largish, busy ones) can now farm a 70,000-acre farm themselves, provided the farm machinery stays in service. There was no such thing as a 70,000-acre farm back when there were people on the moon.
Here's a really great example because it involves the plant that put 20 generations through lives of slavery: cotton. In "Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy" Pietra Rivoli backtracked all the globalized industry that gets a T-shirt to her drug store. After working backwards through China and Malaysia and India, it turns out the original cotton still comes from Texas, though labour prices are far higher than Africa or Asia, because it's been so well automated.
She interviews a 80-something farmer who used to pick it by hand, along with the hired Hispanic help, remembers how hot and hard and backbreaking it was, why only slaves or the desperately poor would do the work. And then she traces how many advances have taken place in the intervening years, one task after another automated, and finally centralized onto one giant piece of machinery that practically has a "HARVEST COTTON" button on the dash, and a place to put your book. She notes the 80-something now has time for a nap after lunch.
That may not be 100% automated, but replacing a barracks full of actual slaves with one part-time old guy in an air-conditioned cab is clearly 99% of the job, done.
There needs to be some hashtag analogous to "RichPersonProblems" for military groups. Easy to look up that the $22.5B price tag is for THREE warships. That's like enough money to sort out all the lead water services in Flint and surrounding towns; then all the rest of them in the United States, probably 250,000 of them, delivering neurotoxins directly into the populace (if ISIS were doing it, the money would be there already)....and enough left over for a couple of hundred highway interchanges that would each save a couple of lives per year.
The waste level, if you calculate actual risks and returns, is jaw-dropping.
American's are soooo suspicious about every welfare dollar spent; if you apply for it, a guy comes to your house and snoops in your bathroom and underwear drawer, looking for proof that your boyfriend actually does live with you. But along comes a City Slicker with a laughable story about a superior killing machine, and Americans roll over and spread open their wallets.
Testing? Read "The Pentagon Wars" by Col. Jim Burton (or see the movie; the situation was so awful, they could only make a real-life story about Pentagon weapons system purchasing, into a *comedy* with Kelsey Grammar and Carey Elwes.) They HATE testing. Or any other requirement to prove their snake oil works in the real world.
If France was actually subsidizing 75% of their power production for over 40 years, they'd be broke by now. But the cooking of the books would have been spotted long since; the money they snuck into the electric utility would have had to come from somewhere, by some accounting route.
But in fact, the books of Électricité_de_France, their utility, which gets 64% of its power from the nuclear plants it runs, show a steady 9% profit for some years.
Their money all appears to come from sending people electric power bills. France has a very healthy culture of protest and dissent about government malfeasance and it does have an anti-nuclear movement, (though it is very small and unpopular) and if there were a scandal lurking there in the accounts, I'm sure it would have turned up in the last 40 years.
It's that record of safety and profit that really undercut the main anti-nuclear arguments for me: I always ask those guys: "So what about France?"