No, beyond is right. In an ideal world where no one wants to take advantage of others and respects privacy and whatnot, we wouldn't need passwords. You'd just tell the computer who you are so you don't have to deal with everyone else's stuff.
Software would still need to be written well, the common exploitable bugs are still bugs. But security per se would be unnecessary, so no one would take the time to bother with it. Or pay for it. It's a cost of doing business, like locks on the doors are a cost of doing business for a physical store.
The only people who can turn costs of doing business into profit centers are the Phone companies. No one else has enough institutional evil experience.
A four quart pot is really quite small. But if you're concerned, use a skillet, then. I can't believe slashdotters are so far removed from the kitchen that they don't even know what kinds of cookware would be available for the experiment.
Have you ever actually done the experiment? The necessary resources aren't exactly difficult to obtain.
N*1 live frog(s)
1 4-quart pot
N*3 quarts ordinary tap water
1 electric buffet burner
1 standard electrical outlet, connected
where N is the number of times to repeat the experiment.
Regarding ethics: if it's not too cruel for delicious lobster, it's not too cruel for tasty frog legs, either.
if you walk into any hotel or Internet Caffe most will have a LAN connection and very few will have WiFi.
I haven't been to a single internet cafe, bar, or coffee shop that had ethernet instead of WiFi. I've only been to one hotel with ethernet, three years ago. The rest were all WiFi.
NIH shouldn't be funding malaria research, since it doesn't affect Americans, who have access to effective mosquito control. If any governmental entity should be, WHO should be funding the lion's share, though.
The system is not best which funds all diseases equitably. It is best which provides the most benefit to the most people. It must distribute resources between medical research, medical service, and other sectors which are necessary as well. And even on the research side, while there is certainly reason for long-term research into cures for common and even obscure diseases, it also must be balanced against what research can have the most benefit right now. A small benefit to a whole lot of people right now has some weight against a great benefit to a few people an unclear time in the future.
You've discounted the benefit to the millions of people using Viagra, to make the money spent on marketing that drug look villainous. But the money isn't billed against the profits of "more worthy" previous drugs. It comes out of the profits of the drug it promotes. Only if the campaign failed would the money have come from the other drugs, and even then, it would've been cut off much sooner when it became apparent it wasn't effective. Further, at the time, the thing it treated wasn't really talked about very much. The sufferers might not have even been aware that a treatment was available. That's exactly the sort of situation drug marketing is supposed to be for.
There might be a better way to do things, but most of the "solutions" I've heard have thrown about all of the benefits of the current system without really addressing the main issues, anyway. They mostly just shuffle the blame around without doing anything substantive. Some are abysmally naive in their assumptions of how "profit motive" works or is supposed to work.
At the moment, the "last mile" work that the drug companies do is fantastically expensive and fraught with risk (both of liability and of failure). And drugs come out of patent protection relatively quickly after introduction, anyway, due to the length of the approval process. So I really don't see the problem here.
Well, because it's red. Military holograms will be blue, with horizontal lines. Also, they'll be projected into free space by mobile trash-can sized navigation/computation units. And they'll be used mostly for private communications rather than, as you would expect, as tactical displays.
"to me the money spent marketing Viagra/Levitra/Cialis could have been much better spent on trying to help the 0.5 Billion people who suffer from malaria of which roughly one Chicago's worth of people die each year and for which the best drugs have been developed for the cattle that graze in the sub-Sahara."
And again, in that particular case, you're way off the mark. The money spent marketing it is irrelevant precisely because it's a good deal smaller than the profit made from that marketing. That profit might be better spent in the way you say, though. Why don't you see if you can convince the pharma companies to put it to that use, without reducing their (already low as you say) actual research components.
If you want to help the people with malaria, maybe you shouldn't be so keen on preventing pesticide use. DDT might not be effective as it once was, but it would've saved countless more lives if it had been used as extensively as it could have been when it was that effective. But I'm sure you're more satisfied with your coffee table books with dramatic titles getting people all up in a tizzy without rationally thinking things through.
You do realize that Viagra is an exceptionally poor example of the problem you're trying to illustrate. The story is well known, and pretty much precisely the opposite of your claims. Pfizer was looking for heart medications when they stumbled upon it. Realizing its marketability and the amount of suffering it relieves, they chose to market it.
An entirely publicly run research effort may very well have decided that a treatment for ED was a luxury, and ceased any effort beyond a note in a database, or an obscure journal at best.
Certainly, it's not as romantic as curing cancer or Ebola, but it affects a lot of people, who are apparently quite grateful to have it. But if you're arguing that when a part of the body doesn't work right, people should just suck it up if their plight is funny, your compassion could use a little work.
Greatest Common Divisor is easy for small fractions, but when you're talking about fractions of very large numbers, it's not quite so clear. I would assume that a GCD algorithm would be a method for efficiently finding divisors. It would have to be at least as fast as doing the prime factorization of both numbers, another non-trivial problem for very large numbers.
The problem is that 'Lawyering' has achieved critical mass. It's pervasive enough, and effective enough, that if you choose to forgo an advocate in any dispute, you lose. period. The other party is going to lawyer up and in the contest of lawyers vs. no lawyers, you're not going to win. Even if your case is obvious, you're still going to lose because you can't articulate its obviousness in the language of the court.
Therefore, if you know you're going into a situation in which there is a nontrivial chance of a dispute developing, it's unfortunately necessary to consult an expert to make sure you're not exposing yourself to unnecessary risk.
Let me turn that around for you. What price DO you put on life? Should drugs cost only what it costs to produce? Or should they cost what it's really worth? Keep in mind that the drugs only extend your life if they exist to do so.
Obviously, the price should land somewhere in between those values. If you know of a better system that capitalism to decide that number, let us know.
If he was willing to give money freely to that cause, he wouldn't need to be taxed for it, would he? Of course, we'll never really know, since the tax was most likely implemented before he had any say in it, anyway.
I'll never understand why people vote with their fingers what they're not willing to vote for with their wallets.
I gave him nearly full credit, though. The infamous phrase "I took the initiative in creating the internet" is nothing if not technically correct. He also took the initiative in shamelessly taking credit for $ThingThatWasGood. And my point was that by the time he got on the bandwagon, I'm sure that the apocryphal damage tolerance was in many of the briefings.
It might be that security concerns contraindicate computers, but that doesn't mean that they aren't the ideal. The whole point of computers is to automate repetitive tasks, and counting a hundred million multiple-guess choices is exactly the sort of repetitive task they were invented to relieve us of.
Correct, however, do you really think that the myth wasn't on the Great Gore's mind when he took the initiative in voting for the bill which funded the agency that directed the research creating the internet?
The most obvious solution is to just dump the raw digital stream straight to storage. It's already compressed by the studio, potentially using much better compressors than are available to a set-top box, considering the resources of the studio and the lack of a need for real-time performance.
Transcoding that stream may have made sense even a couple years ago, but hundred dollar (retail) 500 GB USB hard drives seem to obviate that need. That disk could hold nearly 30 hours of cable-TV programming or 60 hours of OTA digital programming.
I would be surprised if most of the cable companies were still relying on their legacy analog channels at the set-top boxes, since the only other explanation I can think of for the frequent horrible compression artifacts on the supposedly analog channels on my box is that they're heavily compressed (but using an inefficient, real-time compressor) at the feed to the cable companies.
The reason is obvious. Just ask the Fortran guys why they dropped semantic whitespace in the switch from fortran-77 to fortran-90.
Whitespace shouldn't have semantic meaning because then you're stuck with semantic whitespace that might not be the easiest to read. For example, The following is MATLAB code specifying a 10x10 matrix that could be used for future calculations.
Which one would you prefer to maintain? Suppose you have to occasionally tweak coefficients stored in the A matrix?
Whitespace is just one tool in many to make your code readable by humans, a necessary condition for ease of maintenance. Horrible formatting can make even good code difficult to comprehend, so why would you want a language to restrict you to one way of doing things? Sure, it lets you write truly atrocious code, if you're an asshole, just like perl. But it also gives you the ability to write extremely legibly.
Why is the question always, "What can government spend money on to stimulate the economy" As if government spending is anything but taxation. Inflation is a kind of tax, too, y'know.
So great, another thing for the government to spend your time, effort, and blood on for you. Which if other posts are correct, has already been spent 1x for zero payback? Well, it is an election year, so I guess we have to expect lots of "spreadin' money around" political machine promises.
It's not even the $100 billion that's the problem. If it costs that much to catalog all the existing telco rights of way, determine how much additional cross-sectional area could be added under existing easements without placing extra burden on the property owners, purchasing additional land-rights where appropriate and opening that up for bidding, then so be it. But why should government pay Telcos to do something that is in their own economic interest do do?
You do realize that you only get ~13% more lift out of a hypothetical massless bag filled with "vacuum" compared to that bag filled with helium, and only 6% compared to hydrogen.
Further, the economics don't work. International travel by airship is slow* (compared to current methods) and extremely slow compared to a subway jaunt across town. There simply won't be enough people interested in it, even if airships are the only option, to drive the price down to daily-commute levels.
*Unless you're talking about an "international" trip from Brussels to Amsterdam.
The money pumped into jetpacks is small, and the problems for jetpacks are the same problems other aircraft of similar capabilities or size have, so it's not exactly irrelevant. With regard to "efficient solar panels" (and they're already pretty efficient, the goal ATM is "cheap." It doesn't matter how great the quantum efficiency is if it takes more energy to produce one that you get back during its lifetime) You can't get results quicker just by pumping money into it any more than you can you can get a baby in a month by employing 9 surrogate mothers.
I don't think they'd make a good transportation tool, but quick jumps to rooftops would be great for roofers, antenna installers, chimney inspectors, billboard painters... anyone who needs quick access to a high spot that doesn't have easy stair access.
But it would have to be more convenient than a ladder. If it takes ten minutes to strap the thing on, it wouldn't be all that useful.
Slashdot Mirror
So.. what you're saying is that there was a conspiracy in the reporting of otherwise mundane events? </grin>
No, beyond is right. In an ideal world where no one wants to take advantage of others and respects privacy and whatnot, we wouldn't need passwords. You'd just tell the computer who you are so you don't have to deal with everyone else's stuff.
Software would still need to be written well, the common exploitable bugs are still bugs. But security per se would be unnecessary, so no one would take the time to bother with it. Or pay for it. It's a cost of doing business, like locks on the doors are a cost of doing business for a physical store.
The only people who can turn costs of doing business into profit centers are the Phone companies. No one else has enough institutional evil experience.
A four quart pot is really quite small. But if you're concerned, use a skillet, then. I can't believe slashdotters are so far removed from the kitchen that they don't even know what kinds of cookware would be available for the experiment.
- N*1 live frog(s)
- 1 4-quart pot
- N*3 quarts ordinary tap water
- 1 electric buffet burner
- 1 standard electrical outlet, connected
where N is the number of times to repeat the experiment. Regarding ethics: if it's not too cruel for delicious lobster, it's not too cruel for tasty frog legs, either.Those are for interoffice communications, you insensitive clod. Where would you put the stamp?
NIH shouldn't be funding malaria research, since it doesn't affect Americans, who have access to effective mosquito control. If any governmental entity should be, WHO should be funding the lion's share, though.
The system is not best which funds all diseases equitably. It is best which provides the most benefit to the most people. It must distribute resources between medical research, medical service, and other sectors which are necessary as well. And even on the research side, while there is certainly reason for long-term research into cures for common and even obscure diseases, it also must be balanced against what research can have the most benefit right now. A small benefit to a whole lot of people right now has some weight against a great benefit to a few people an unclear time in the future.
You've discounted the benefit to the millions of people using Viagra, to make the money spent on marketing that drug look villainous. But the money isn't billed against the profits of "more worthy" previous drugs. It comes out of the profits of the drug it promotes. Only if the campaign failed would the money have come from the other drugs, and even then, it would've been cut off much sooner when it became apparent it wasn't effective. Further, at the time, the thing it treated wasn't really talked about very much. The sufferers might not have even been aware that a treatment was available. That's exactly the sort of situation drug marketing is supposed to be for.
There might be a better way to do things, but most of the "solutions" I've heard have thrown about all of the benefits of the current system without really addressing the main issues, anyway. They mostly just shuffle the blame around without doing anything substantive. Some are abysmally naive in their assumptions of how "profit motive" works or is supposed to work.
At the moment, the "last mile" work that the drug companies do is fantastically expensive and fraught with risk (both of liability and of failure). And drugs come out of patent protection relatively quickly after introduction, anyway, due to the length of the approval process. So I really don't see the problem here.
Well, because it's red. Military holograms will be blue, with horizontal lines. Also, they'll be projected into free space by mobile trash-can sized navigation/computation units. And they'll be used mostly for private communications rather than, as you would expect, as tactical displays.
"to me the money spent marketing Viagra/Levitra/Cialis could have been much better spent on trying to help the 0.5 Billion people who suffer from malaria of which roughly one Chicago's worth of people die each year and for which the best drugs have been developed for the cattle that graze in the sub-Sahara."
And again, in that particular case, you're way off the mark. The money spent marketing it is irrelevant precisely because it's a good deal smaller than the profit made from that marketing. That profit might be better spent in the way you say, though. Why don't you see if you can convince the pharma companies to put it to that use, without reducing their (already low as you say) actual research components.
If you want to help the people with malaria, maybe you shouldn't be so keen on preventing pesticide use. DDT might not be effective as it once was, but it would've saved countless more lives if it had been used as extensively as it could have been when it was that effective. But I'm sure you're more satisfied with your coffee table books with dramatic titles getting people all up in a tizzy without rationally thinking things through.
You do realize that Viagra is an exceptionally poor example of the problem you're trying to illustrate. The story is well known, and pretty much precisely the opposite of your claims. Pfizer was looking for heart medications when they stumbled upon it. Realizing its marketability and the amount of suffering it relieves, they chose to market it.
An entirely publicly run research effort may very well have decided that a treatment for ED was a luxury, and ceased any effort beyond a note in a database, or an obscure journal at best.
Certainly, it's not as romantic as curing cancer or Ebola, but it affects a lot of people, who are apparently quite grateful to have it. But if you're arguing that when a part of the body doesn't work right, people should just suck it up if their plight is funny, your compassion could use a little work.
Greatest Common Divisor is easy for small fractions, but when you're talking about fractions of very large numbers, it's not quite so clear. I would assume that a GCD algorithm would be a method for efficiently finding divisors. It would have to be at least as fast as doing the prime factorization of both numbers, another non-trivial problem for very large numbers.
The problem is that 'Lawyering' has achieved critical mass. It's pervasive enough, and effective enough, that if you choose to forgo an advocate in any dispute, you lose. period. The other party is going to lawyer up and in the contest of lawyers vs. no lawyers, you're not going to win. Even if your case is obvious, you're still going to lose because you can't articulate its obviousness in the language of the court.
Therefore, if you know you're going into a situation in which there is a nontrivial chance of a dispute developing, it's unfortunately necessary to consult an expert to make sure you're not exposing yourself to unnecessary risk.
"what price do you put on life?"
Let me turn that around for you. What price DO you put on life? Should drugs cost only what it costs to produce? Or should they cost what it's really worth? Keep in mind that the drugs only extend your life if they exist to do so.
Obviously, the price should land somewhere in between those values. If you know of a better system that capitalism to decide that number, let us know.
It makes even less sense, though because it supposedly references a time when salt was actually a particularly valuable commodity.
If he was willing to give money freely to that cause, he wouldn't need to be taxed for it, would he? Of course, we'll never really know, since the tax was most likely implemented before he had any say in it, anyway.
I'll never understand why people vote with their fingers what they're not willing to vote for with their wallets.
I thought so too, and I remember a figure of 90 days being mentioned, but I can't seem to find the relevant passage in the Constitution.
I gave him nearly full credit, though. The infamous phrase "I took the initiative in creating the internet" is nothing if not technically correct. He also took the initiative in shamelessly taking credit for $ThingThatWasGood. And my point was that by the time he got on the bandwagon, I'm sure that the apocryphal damage tolerance was in many of the briefings.
It might be that security concerns contraindicate computers, but that doesn't mean that they aren't the ideal. The whole point of computers is to automate repetitive tasks, and counting a hundred million multiple-guess choices is exactly the sort of repetitive task they were invented to relieve us of.
How would the GPS tell you it's under the couch and not in the drawer next to the couch? The accuracy of a phone-sized GPS is not particularly good.
Correct, however, do you really think that the myth wasn't on the Great Gore's mind when he took the initiative in voting for the bill which funded the agency that directed the research creating the internet?
The most obvious solution is to just dump the raw digital stream straight to storage. It's already compressed by the studio, potentially using much better compressors than are available to a set-top box, considering the resources of the studio and the lack of a need for real-time performance.
Transcoding that stream may have made sense even a couple years ago, but hundred dollar (retail) 500 GB USB hard drives seem to obviate that need. That disk could hold nearly 30 hours of cable-TV programming or 60 hours of OTA digital programming.
I would be surprised if most of the cable companies were still relying on their legacy analog channels at the set-top boxes, since the only other explanation I can think of for the frequent horrible compression artifacts on the supposedly analog channels on my box is that they're heavily compressed (but using an inefficient, real-time compressor) at the feed to the cable companies.
The reason is obvious. Just ask the Fortran guys why they dropped semantic whitespace in the switch from fortran-77 to fortran-90.
Whitespace shouldn't have semantic meaning because then you're stuck with semantic whitespace that might not be the easiest to read. For example, The following is MATLAB code specifying a 10x10 matrix that could be used for future calculations.
A=[[ 77 210 214 133 228 131 200 223 81 214]; [ 138 165 145 225 50 85 174 3 245 160];[ 38 209 94 44 76 110 118 196 186 34];[ 178 169 179 250 169 57 145 248 105 53];[ 96 87 139 69 72 148 203 253 190 155];[ 220 74 113 64 120 194 15 201 68 161];[ 218 87 177 224 16 135 154 112 112 94];[ 151 136 159 188 253 163 12 127 238 147];[ 127 186 203 34 149 53 106 54 174 115];[ 230 79 244 3 108 97 78 164 54 11]]
or
A=[[ 77 210 214 133 228 131 200 223 81 214];
[ 138 165 145 225 50 85 174 3 245 160];
[ 38 209 94 44 76 110 118 196 186 34];
[ 178 169 179 250 169 57 145 248 105 53];
[ 96 87 139 69 72 148 203 253 190 155];
[ 220 74 113 64 120 194 15 201 68 161];
[ 218 87 177 224 16 135 154 112 112 94];
[ 151 136 159 188 253 163 12 127 238 147];
[ 127 186 203 34 149 53 106 54 174 115];
[ 230 79 244 3 108 97 78 164 54 11]]
Which one would you prefer to maintain? Suppose you have to occasionally tweak coefficients stored in the A matrix?
Whitespace is just one tool in many to make your code readable by humans, a necessary condition for ease of maintenance. Horrible formatting can make even good code difficult to comprehend, so why would you want a language to restrict you to one way of doing things? Sure, it lets you write truly atrocious code, if you're an asshole, just like perl. But it also gives you the ability to write extremely legibly.
Why is the question always, "What can government spend money on to stimulate the economy" As if government spending is anything but taxation. Inflation is a kind of tax, too, y'know.
So great, another thing for the government to spend your time, effort, and blood on for you. Which if other posts are correct, has already been spent 1x for zero payback? Well, it is an election year, so I guess we have to expect lots of "spreadin' money around" political machine promises.
It's not even the $100 billion that's the problem. If it costs that much to catalog all the existing telco rights of way, determine how much additional cross-sectional area could be added under existing easements without placing extra burden on the property owners, purchasing additional land-rights where appropriate and opening that up for bidding, then so be it. But why should government pay Telcos to do something that is in their own economic interest do do?
Large vacuum pockets??
You do realize that you only get ~13% more lift out of a hypothetical massless bag filled with "vacuum" compared to that bag filled with helium, and only 6% compared to hydrogen.
Further, the economics don't work. International travel by airship is slow* (compared to current methods) and extremely slow compared to a subway jaunt across town. There simply won't be enough people interested in it, even if airships are the only option, to drive the price down to daily-commute levels.
*Unless you're talking about an "international" trip from Brussels to Amsterdam.
The money pumped into jetpacks is small, and the problems for jetpacks are the same problems other aircraft of similar capabilities or size have, so it's not exactly irrelevant. With regard to "efficient solar panels" (and they're already pretty efficient, the goal ATM is "cheap." It doesn't matter how great the quantum efficiency is if it takes more energy to produce one that you get back during its lifetime) You can't get results quicker just by pumping money into it any more than you can you can get a baby in a month by employing 9 surrogate mothers.
I don't think they'd make a good transportation tool, but quick jumps to rooftops would be great for roofers, antenna installers, chimney inspectors, billboard painters... anyone who needs quick access to a high spot that doesn't have easy stair access.
But it would have to be more convenient than a ladder. If it takes ten minutes to strap the thing on, it wouldn't be all that useful.