So you're saying that the US is so large that the efficiency gains from more centralization are now negative? Well that's no excuse, really. Go split up!
Water meters tend to measure less flow due to inaccuracy.
Unfortunately untrue. If you change flow abruptly, the meter often measures too much. E.g. if you turn on a tap and fill up a glass of water, it will measure significantly more than the volume of the glass. You can avoid that by turning the tap on and off slowly, but considering the price of water it probably isn't worth the bother in most places.
Swap generally does not actually get written all that much. If it did, you would notice that performance sucked (swap to SSD is still dead slow compared to RAM). It is most likely mostly full of stuff which hardly ever gets used.
sar -d on my own laptop shows that I write 90kB/s on average when the laptop is on. Assuming it is active 24/7, that is a measly 8GB/day. A look through older logs shows that some days I manage to reach 170kB/s, or 15GB/day worst case. Try sar and see for yourself.
Obviously it would be different if I did heavy photo or video editing, but if I did those things I would probably upgrade to more than 4GB of memory.
Imagine a typical 500GB drive in a typical PC. Assuming 1000 write cycles and 10 years of life, that is somewhere around 130GB written per day. How many people do you know who write 130GB to their drive every day, and at the same time keep their drives for 10 years?
The write limit is only a problem for small drives, and the only reason that drives are small is that they are expensive right now.
The ISPs have to keep such records for anti-terror purposes. Terror, child porn, piracy, hate speech, libel... It is all getting muddled together, and a method for dealing with one of them is very tempting to use for one of the others, even if it doesn't particularly fit.
Do you seriously believe that the UN has a plan to make people "more-easily controlled, regulated, and monitored"?
I suspect I may have missed a joke somewhere, but if you are serious, you really need to look into the way the UN works. If you want to take over the world, starting with the UN will guarantee that you get stuck in a quagmire.
On a more serious note, the Pax Romana was never particularly peaceful. It just meant that those who let Romans rule over them and paid the Roman taxes got peace in return (and the Romans would then focus their war machine elsewhere). Just like the Pax Americana, except you don't even have to pay tax to the US.
The New York Times apologized for its reporting on the events leading up to the war in Iraq.
As far as I know, no other mainstream media have apologized similarly, even though the lengthy apology would apply to many of them if you just changed the articles references appropriately. Indeed, I would say that a lot of news sources have a lot more to apologize for than The New York Times do.
It is a fine enough article, until you get to the last section with the conspiracy theory. Then it just veers into tin foil hat territory.
"Military analysts note that, curiously, the Libyan air defense systems appeared to be helpless against NATO’s air strikes. The explanation may lie in the friend-or-foe systems that the two stolen aircraft had onboard, the newspaper suggests. This system is used by the military in combat to distinguish their own aircraft."
Yes, sure, it wasn't the fact that NATO could send a HARM onto any radar stronger than a Wifi access point within minutes. No, the NATO forces had to do it by cyber warfare.
"According to the newspaper, the Syrian military believe that NATO took a similar approach again, but failed to properly decipher the codes. This is evident by the fact that the defector pilot managed to send his family to Turkey before stealing the fighter jet, which means the act was probably not done out of a sudden emotional breakdown."
Really, it wasn't sudden emotional breakdown, no, it was a huge conspiracy to get a jet to NATO for analysis. How about it was someone who changed allegiance to the rebels, no because of emotional breakdown or because he had ties to NATO intelligence services, but simply because he did not agree with the government? Apparently he was smart enough to know that his family would be punished if he didn't get them out of Syria; that doesn't mean he was part of a great conspiracy.
There is simply no data linking the pilot defection and the shooting down of the Turkish plane. It is purely an attempt to put the blame on Turkey or (preferably) NATO.
The silly thing is that it is quite possible that the Turkish plane was somewhere other than where it should be, or that Syria made a more or less innocent mistake. These things happen when tension runs high.
I hate Fox News with a passion and I'm about as leftist as anyone, but Fox News is FAR better than RT. I discovered RT a while ago because they somehow end up in Google News, and so I had a look at their various stories. As far as I can tell RT just makes everything up on the spot, without considering any actual information they may have obtained.
The inclusion of fake news sources like RT has unfortunately made Google News a bit useless. Reading it is like eternal 1st of April: you have to triple-check everything before you believe it. This is a healthy approach to news in general, of course, but it is way too time consuming.
Oil prices are strongly correlated with world GDP at this point, with a bit of uncertainty about the Middle East. Predicting oil prices require predicting the world GDP, and if you can do that accurately, you can probably find more profitable ways to spend your time instead of TV appearances.
I wonder what the proper term for "world GDP" is... Surely if we are talking about the whole world, "domestic" does not make sense?
Speculation is what allows to deal with problems before they get REALLY bad. Would you have preferred gas prices to stay at $30 until the moment where demand can't be met, with a sudden jump to $200? Complete with a drop straight back when the Western economy collapses because people can't afford to drive to work?
Speculators make sure that we know of the problem while we still have some leverage to fix it. Improvements in energy efficiency get profitable earlier, and as long as a price hike is only speculative, there are various options for dealing with it. Once you hit the actual production limits, there is not much you can do if you haven't prepared.
To be fair, Marx predicted that capitalism first had to fail by concentrating all wealth into the hands of very few. No such thing happened in any of the countries which turned "communist"; most of them went there straight from a society based on agriculture without significant industrialism. This did cause a number of headaches for the communists in China and Russia, but those governments were very good at maintaining cognitive dissonance and various explanations were invented.
Meanwhile, capitalism succeeded in spreading the wealth among everyone -- not equally of course, but most everyone saw their economic situation improve and they also saw their children have more opportunities. In such an environment, thoughts of revolution are unlikely to take hold. Just like they are not taking hold in China today.
Now, if instead people ended up in a situation where it was clear that there was wealth enough for everyone available, yet their own situation was markedly worse than say 10 years ago. That is what Marx expected to happen in fairly short order in the Western world, but people were smarter and managed to avoid it. Hopefully we will all be equally smart in the future.
But this is fundamentally true! We have an almost-perfect system already, hand counted paper votes. The only real problem with that system is accessibility. Any solution which sacrifices anything which the hand counted paper system provides for a slight benefit to the 1% disabled is unacceptable.
Yes, it sucks that some disabled people need to bring someone with them to vote for them. If we can design systems which only they use, by all means, go ahead. The likelihood of attack on a system which only handles 1% of votes is low and the impact is low as well. Yes, 1% might swing a close election, but if the election is that close anyway, the wrong guy cannot be that bad.
Banding, in areas with subtle colour changes, the compression only assigns a few colours, and so what should be a smooth sky with shades of blue becomes a bunch of areas with specific blue colours. The same thing also happens with explosions, because a DVD just cannot deliver the instantaneous bandwidth that a good explosion requires, even for a few seconds (the DVD production company cannot assume that the DVD reader can read at x2 or higher).
"Sticky pixels" where the compression algorithm turns an area with a bit of noise into a fixed pattern. This is probably the worst problem.
The left tends to have a surprising faith in technology, apart from most of those on the left who actually work with technology. Maybe there's some kind of dream that technology will bring the 60's back?
If your belief is that technology can only make things worse, then you are, by definition, a Luddite.
This is simply untrue. The fact that technology cannot solve one particular problem does not make you a Luddite.
The integrity of voting is built on it being transparent and understood by all. Everything which stands between the average voter and a thorough understanding of the voting process must be eliminated.
You don't really care if you can be heard by sonar if you're doing 100 knots submerged. Torpedoes can't hit you except by dumb luck straight on.
Of course this thing is not completely submerged so you do have a chance against it with guns. Possibly also with a missile, but with no heat signature (it probably dumps waste heat in the water) and low radar signature you will have to get quite lucky.
You will be looking for a long time, sadly, or you would have to pay a high price. The device you propose would sell in very low numbers. Plain SATA is fast enough for consumers and consumers don't bother with slots anyway. That means you are talking about an enthusiast-only product. What is wrong with SATA anyway for your use? Why do you want the drive to be attached to the PCI-E-card?
60GB SATA SSD is cheap, but it will have very few chips on it, so sustained performance will not be very impressive. The easy way to get performance is to add more chips, the hard way is to use faster chips, and so again, you are stuck with enthusiast-only products if you want a small fast drive. If you need the performance, just buy a drive twice the size and leave half of it empty. It was much worse with spinning disks anyway; you could easily end up with a RAID where 9/10ths of capacity was useless just to get decent seek performance.
Slashdot Mirror
So you're saying that the US is so large that the efficiency gains from more centralization are now negative? Well that's no excuse, really. Go split up!
There was an extensive discussion on ing.dk (Danish periodical for engineers). See e.g. Lad vandet løbe og spar penge
Water meters tend to measure less flow due to inaccuracy.
Unfortunately untrue. If you change flow abruptly, the meter often measures too much. E.g. if you turn on a tap and fill up a glass of water, it will measure significantly more than the volume of the glass. You can avoid that by turning the tap on and off slowly, but considering the price of water it probably isn't worth the bother in most places.
Swap generally does not actually get written all that much. If it did, you would notice that performance sucked (swap to SSD is still dead slow compared to RAM). It is most likely mostly full of stuff which hardly ever gets used.
sar -d on my own laptop shows that I write 90kB/s on average when the laptop is on. Assuming it is active 24/7, that is a measly 8GB/day. A look through older logs shows that some days I manage to reach 170kB/s, or 15GB/day worst case. Try sar and see for yourself.
Obviously it would be different if I did heavy photo or video editing, but if I did those things I would probably upgrade to more than 4GB of memory.
Imagine a typical 500GB drive in a typical PC. Assuming 1000 write cycles and 10 years of life, that is somewhere around 130GB written per day. How many people do you know who write 130GB to their drive every day, and at the same time keep their drives for 10 years?
The write limit is only a problem for small drives, and the only reason that drives are small is that they are expensive right now.
Yes, it is. Put them in series.
The ISPs have to keep such records for anti-terror purposes. Terror, child porn, piracy, hate speech, libel... It is all getting muddled together, and a method for dealing with one of them is very tempting to use for one of the others, even if it doesn't particularly fit.
Do you seriously believe that the UN has a plan to make people "more-easily controlled, regulated, and monitored"?
I suspect I may have missed a joke somewhere, but if you are serious, you really need to look into the way the UN works. If you want to take over the world, starting with the UN will guarantee that you get stuck in a quagmire.
On a more serious note, the Pax Romana was never particularly peaceful. It just meant that those who let Romans rule over them and paid the Roman taxes got peace in return (and the Romans would then focus their war machine elsewhere). Just like the Pax Americana, except you don't even have to pay tax to the US.
war against error
Finally! I have waited for that one to start for a long time.
The New York Times apologized for its reporting on the events leading up to the war in Iraq.
As far as I know, no other mainstream media have apologized similarly, even though the lengthy apology would apply to many of them if you just changed the articles references appropriately. Indeed, I would say that a lot of news sources have a lot more to apologize for than The New York Times do.
It is a fine enough article, until you get to the last section with the conspiracy theory. Then it just veers into tin foil hat territory.
"Military analysts note that, curiously, the Libyan air defense systems appeared to be helpless against NATO’s air strikes. The explanation may lie in the friend-or-foe systems that the two stolen aircraft had onboard, the newspaper suggests. This system is used by the military in combat to distinguish their own aircraft."
Yes, sure, it wasn't the fact that NATO could send a HARM onto any radar stronger than a Wifi access point within minutes. No, the NATO forces had to do it by cyber warfare.
"According to the newspaper, the Syrian military believe that NATO took a similar approach again, but failed to properly decipher the codes. This is evident by the fact that the defector pilot managed to send his family to Turkey before stealing the fighter jet, which means the act was probably not done out of a sudden emotional breakdown."
Really, it wasn't sudden emotional breakdown, no, it was a huge conspiracy to get a jet to NATO for analysis. How about it was someone who changed allegiance to the rebels, no because of emotional breakdown or because he had ties to NATO intelligence services, but simply because he did not agree with the government? Apparently he was smart enough to know that his family would be punished if he didn't get them out of Syria; that doesn't mean he was part of a great conspiracy.
There is simply no data linking the pilot defection and the shooting down of the Turkish plane. It is purely an attempt to put the blame on Turkey or (preferably) NATO.
The silly thing is that it is quite possible that the Turkish plane was somewhere other than where it should be, or that Syria made a more or less innocent mistake. These things happen when tension runs high.
I hate Fox News with a passion and I'm about as leftist as anyone, but Fox News is FAR better than RT. I discovered RT a while ago because they somehow end up in Google News, and so I had a look at their various stories. As far as I can tell RT just makes everything up on the spot, without considering any actual information they may have obtained.
The inclusion of fake news sources like RT has unfortunately made Google News a bit useless. Reading it is like eternal 1st of April: you have to triple-check everything before you believe it. This is a healthy approach to news in general, of course, but it is way too time consuming.
That makes an awful lot of sense, thank you!
Oil prices are strongly correlated with world GDP at this point, with a bit of uncertainty about the Middle East. Predicting oil prices require predicting the world GDP, and if you can do that accurately, you can probably find more profitable ways to spend your time instead of TV appearances.
I wonder what the proper term for "world GDP" is... Surely if we are talking about the whole world, "domestic" does not make sense?
Speculation is what allows to deal with problems before they get REALLY bad. Would you have preferred gas prices to stay at $30 until the moment where demand can't be met, with a sudden jump to $200? Complete with a drop straight back when the Western economy collapses because people can't afford to drive to work?
Speculators make sure that we know of the problem while we still have some leverage to fix it. Improvements in energy efficiency get profitable earlier, and as long as a price hike is only speculative, there are various options for dealing with it. Once you hit the actual production limits, there is not much you can do if you haven't prepared.
To be fair, Marx predicted that capitalism first had to fail by concentrating all wealth into the hands of very few. No such thing happened in any of the countries which turned "communist"; most of them went there straight from a society based on agriculture without significant industrialism. This did cause a number of headaches for the communists in China and Russia, but those governments were very good at maintaining cognitive dissonance and various explanations were invented.
Meanwhile, capitalism succeeded in spreading the wealth among everyone -- not equally of course, but most everyone saw their economic situation improve and they also saw their children have more opportunities. In such an environment, thoughts of revolution are unlikely to take hold. Just like they are not taking hold in China today.
Now, if instead people ended up in a situation where it was clear that there was wealth enough for everyone available, yet their own situation was markedly worse than say 10 years ago. That is what Marx expected to happen in fairly short order in the Western world, but people were smarter and managed to avoid it. Hopefully we will all be equally smart in the future.
"Your solution is imperfect, thus unacceptable."
But this is fundamentally true! We have an almost-perfect system already, hand counted paper votes. The only real problem with that system is accessibility. Any solution which sacrifices anything which the hand counted paper system provides for a slight benefit to the 1% disabled is unacceptable.
Yes, it sucks that some disabled people need to bring someone with them to vote for them. If we can design systems which only they use, by all means, go ahead. The likelihood of attack on a system which only handles 1% of votes is low and the impact is low as well. Yes, 1% might swing a close election, but if the election is that close anyway, the wrong guy cannot be that bad.
Banding, in areas with subtle colour changes, the compression only assigns a few colours, and so what should be a smooth sky with shades of blue becomes a bunch of areas with specific blue colours. The same thing also happens with explosions, because a DVD just cannot deliver the instantaneous bandwidth that a good explosion requires, even for a few seconds (the DVD production company cannot assume that the DVD reader can read at x2 or higher).
"Sticky pixels" where the compression algorithm turns an area with a bit of noise into a fixed pattern. This is probably the worst problem.
This would harm free software though, except for free software which is in the public domain.
The left tends to have a surprising faith in technology, apart from most of those on the left who actually work with technology. Maybe there's some kind of dream that technology will bring the 60's back?
Denmark too! In fact, Denmark is so close to being broke that its government bond interest rate has overflowed and gone NEGATIVE!
If your belief is that technology can only make things worse, then you are, by definition, a Luddite.
This is simply untrue. The fact that technology cannot solve one particular problem does not make you a Luddite.
The integrity of voting is built on it being transparent and understood by all. Everything which stands between the average voter and a thorough understanding of the voting process must be eliminated.
You don't really care if you can be heard by sonar if you're doing 100 knots submerged. Torpedoes can't hit you except by dumb luck straight on.
Of course this thing is not completely submerged so you do have a chance against it with guns. Possibly also with a missile, but with no heat signature (it probably dumps waste heat in the water) and low radar signature you will have to get quite lucky.
You will be looking for a long time, sadly, or you would have to pay a high price. The device you propose would sell in very low numbers. Plain SATA is fast enough for consumers and consumers don't bother with slots anyway. That means you are talking about an enthusiast-only product. What is wrong with SATA anyway for your use? Why do you want the drive to be attached to the PCI-E-card?
60GB SATA SSD is cheap, but it will have very few chips on it, so sustained performance will not be very impressive. The easy way to get performance is to add more chips, the hard way is to use faster chips, and so again, you are stuck with enthusiast-only products if you want a small fast drive. If you need the performance, just buy a drive twice the size and leave half of it empty. It was much worse with spinning disks anyway; you could easily end up with a RAID where 9/10ths of capacity was useless just to get decent seek performance.