The problem is that different applications systems have different amounts of stats that must be saved. An RT app usually only has a memory buffer that can be written in a small number of IO's. Many business apps have relatively lots of data, in non-contiguous buffers, that require hundreds of IOs to store. Many business systems have hundreds of such apps running in the machine at the same time. Some systems can have gigs of data, in thousands of buffers, in their write-behind cache. And, some businesses have systems that must not shut down, except for actual emergencies like fire or flood.
How does the hardware designer of a general-purpose computer guess what kinds of apps will run in that machine? He/she cannot.
The external power supply (aka, the UPS) can be configured to accommodate the needs of the application. An application that needs lots of power for a long time can be configured with a big UPS. And, an app that doesn't need it, doesn't have to pay for it.
When filling a box with padding to protect a small item like a sheet of paper, you might be able to reduce the shipping cost if the padding material is lighter-than-air. Instead of using foam peanuts or plastic bags full of air, use plastic bags full of something like helium. The resulting package might weigh less than the empty box.
The purpose of "coding standards", as opposed to "design standards" or "best practices", is to make the code easier to read and understand by making the formatting consistent. But, unique people with specialized education or experience are, well, unique. Each person has unique background, preferences, and habits.
So the meaning of "easier to read and understand" is different for each person who has to read and understand the code. Forcing a programmer to write in a style other than his/her preferred style actually increases errors. And, forcing people to read thing written in styles that they don't like is likely to slow them down.
So the right answer is to allow each person to read and write code in his/her preferred style, and to have a tool that puts code into that style on demand.
We use "uncrustify (http://uncrustify.sourceforge.net/ ). Uncrustify is, basically, a feature-rich, flexible, and configurable "beautifier", that works on several C-like languages. It puts code into whatever style the user likes, based on a configuration file in the users home directory. By using uncrustify, each programmer can read in his/her preferred format, even if it is different from the authors preferred format. This minimizes format-induced errors, maximizes ease of reading and understanding.
It also avoids silly arguments about code formatting, so we can spend our time arguing about more important things, like meaningful variable names.
Of course it's not new. It not only looks like ASN.1, it actually is very much like ASN.1.
But to me it looks more like an extension of rpcgen, because ASN.1 came with a lot of other baggage. Of course, both rpcgen and asn.1 are just the best known implementations of ideas that were developed far earlier. Shannon's book on information theory explains just this sort of prefix code. These kinds of prefix codes have been in use since the 1960s, and code-generators have been around since the 1970s.
I think the reason that some people at google think it's new is because they are all young. Young people are constantly coming up with "new" ideas that are really two decades or more old. The idea seems new to the young person because he/she has not seen it before. That isn't a jab at google, or at young people. It is just a fact that everything seems new until after you have seen it before.
How many different tools do you need?
Is there one tool that is the right tool for every job? Is there even a small inventory of tools that includes the right tool for every possible job? I think the only answer is a resounding NO. Any fixed tool set is sure to omit things that are essential for particular types of jobs. And, any fixed tool set must exclude all newly developed tools, and hence must exclude those future innovations.
I'm sure you have heard the one about the man who has only a hammer. Hammers don't work very well for installing screws. Hammers work even less well for cutting wood. And they don't work at all for cutting steel or soldering copper pipes.
The construction people realized, long ago, that they need carpenters, masons, plumbers, and electricians. Each of the trades has its own set of specialized tools. They just had carpenters and masons for thousands of years. A few hundred years ago plumbing was invented, and that required specialized tools and knowledge. Then, just about a hundred years ago, they invented electricity, and that also required new tools and knowledge. New innovations sometimes require new tools and new specialists.
In software development, we do need specialists. Some of use work on algorithms or protocols. Some work on databases. Some work on presentation or human-interaction. Each area has its own tools. Each has its own specialized languages, libraries, and environments.
And, depending on the task at hand, it is sometimes appropriate to acquire or develop an entirely new tool. Several times, I have developed a new application-specific language extension before starting to develop a big application or a set of related applications. Each on of those extensions was used to generate huge volumes of code that would have been tedious and error-prone to develop any other way.
Now, when you propose to bring a new tool into the shop, it is prudent to consider the costs and benefits. If you use a new language to develop a production application, that new compiler will have to be maintained, and the programming staff will have to maintain the knowledge of how to use it. That adds cost to the enterprise, even if the tool itself is free. So a judgment call is needed as to whether the benefit of the new tool exceeds that cost. Some tools turn out to be silly or ineffective, and others turn out to be extremely useful and cost effective.
The decision to forbid all new tools is just a decision that there cannot ever be a new tool that will be useful and cost-effective. That manager avoids the cost of the new tools, but also avoids the benefits. And he eventually loses his competitive edge over his competition, his staff, and maybe even his job.
I actually know people who really used to think that moving a few extra DNS packets around the network was "too inefficient". Those same people thought that moving even a few extra bytes is "too inefficient", if it was something that has to be moved often, like a host name. That was just a few years ago. Those same people now think nothing about placing the file server for an office site half way around the world, if the rack space, power, cooling, or backup in that office is limited.
When you are buying your first hundred machines, it is tempting to use "cute" names. As you pass a thousand machines, it's not cute any more. When you get to five thousand machines, you really appreciate having machine names that look like inventory tags, and CNAME records that map application-defined hierarchical names into those hardware names.
A major difference between electronic and paper ballots is in the probability that an attempt to change the outcome will be detected. To change one database can be done by one person, by remote access or even in advance, and leaves no physical evidence at all. To change hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper requires multiple people, with physical access, hours of time, and leaves lots of physical evidence.
The second difference is in the security model. Providing verified security for pieces of paper is a well understood problem. Banks and governments have been doing it successfully for hundreds of years. Providing security for bytes on a disk is not well understood, unless you consider the disk as a physical thing to be locked in a vault. If the systems are connected to any network, or if they run any software, all of the vulnerabilities of the network, software, and systems can be used by an attacker.
The pricing of datacom and telecom services has not had anything to do with the cost of the service since the original AT&T monopoly was broken. Pricing is determined by the market, not by the cost of providing the service. This is because most of the cost is fixed, while the revenue is highly usage-dependent.
From the carrier perspective, the only thing that matters is revenue. The new product (whatever it is this year) will always be marketed at premium price. The old products are priced to maximize revenue. If they can gain revenue by lowering the price and selling more units at that lower price, they do. If they can gain revenue by increasing price and selling fewer units, they do that.
Voice minutes have become cheaper over time largely because of competition. SMS messages are currently fashionable, and so carry a premium price. As soon as text messaging starts losing fashion appeal, some carrier will start selling it for lower pricing, or even giving it away, to get subscription revenue. Abusing the customers with ludicrous per-message pricing will make that day come sooner rather than later.
I agree that just sending a solicitation to everyone on the list would be rude, and probably illegal. (I am not a lawyer. Ask yours if you want.)
But you might consider giving some helpful advice to each of those people. Perhaps something like:
I recently received a spam email from otherTravelAgency attempting to sell me a vacation package. I noticed that otherTravelAgency included your email address on the "To" list in that message. It seems that otherTravelAgency has given your personal information to everyone else on that huge distribution list. I don't know about you, but I won't do business with any company that gives my personal information to thousands of people. I deal with goodTravelAgency for my own travel needs. I trust them to keep my personal information safe, and never to give it to anyone. You might want to consider changing travel agencies, too.
Men really do think differently than women. Numerous studies of brain activity, using CAT and similar scanners, find that different areas of the brain are active during similar tasks. Just this week, another study was published showing that the brain activity in gay men is very similar to straight women, and that the activity in lesbian women is similar to straight men, and that brain activity in straight men is very different from straight women.
I work in a system of several million LOC, with a hundred different authors over the course of two decades. I know all of the developers, and I see the difference in the code all the time. Code written by women or gay men is much easier to read, and rarely requires maintenance to fix bugs. Code written by straight men is often uncommented, difficult to read, and requires frequent maintenance to fix bugs. (I don't think we have had any lesbian programmers.) The maintenance frequency shows up very strongly in the reports from the revision control system.
I try to make my code beautiful and clear, in addition to being correct. And verifiable theoretical correctness is better than just passing the test case. The straight men I work with don't seem to be concerned with aesthetic values or theoretical correctness. They just want it to work for the immediate test case. Then they have to work on it again, to fix bugs, usually ten or more times in the first year that the module exists.
If frequency of repair (bug fixes) is an indication of quality, straight women and gay men produce higher quality code, and the numbers prove it. It really is quicker to do it right once than to rush and then fix it later. But, to do so seems to require a different way of thinking.
Perhaps we should go out of our way to recruit women and gay men.
I also fail to understand why microsoft is trying to patent this.
Companies usually patent things to make sure that no one else can make them. Either they want to be sure there will be no such products at all, or they want to control what products are allowed. Altruistic companies sometimes patent evil things just to prevent the evil companies from marketing them. Evil companies usually patent them to increase their own profit or power. I leave to the reader the exercise of deciding what kind of company Microsoft is.
I think we generally agree. Scouting is not the place to discuss sex. Adults simply don't raise the subject, and when boys raise it, they should be told to go to their parents or clergy. And, any scouter who doesn't understand that need to be educated or excluded.
Have you ever seen a scouter, anywhere, greet his or her spouse with a kiss or a touch? Why weren't they kicked out?
When you say it isn't bigotry, that is just not true. It plainly is bigotry. If you were merely expressing your religious beliefs, you could also respect the religious beliefs of others. The fact that you flatly refuse to respect the religious beliefs of others is what makes it bigotry.
The 12th point of the scout law says that "a scout is reverent". The explanation in the handbook has said, for almost a hundred years, that a scout respects the religious beliefs of all other people. Not just of people who believe the same things, but of all other people.
The real problem is that your church has made scouting into something that cannot be used by many other churches, or by any public institution. By requiring all scouting units to enforce your particular interpretation of "moral values", to the exclusion of the interpretations of other churches, your church has made it impossible for public schools and many other churches to sponsor units.
And, in the process, you may have killed the BSA. It isn't dead yet. But if the membership keeps falling for a few more years, it will be.
I think you are right. Unfortunately, the BSA does not agree with your interpretation of those words.
The DRP says that the home (parents), or the organization or group (the church/synagogue/mosque/whatever) should provide the religious training to the boys. The clear implication then is that the adults in scouting should not interfere with that training, or try to set the syllabus. I don't have any problem with that. I am a Christian, though not a "conservative" Christian by any stretch.
The difficulty though is that the BSA publishes policies saying that gay people are immoral, and that all unit sponsors must discriminate. If you are a church, and you want to sponsor a scout troop, you must agree to exclude gay people. I know that many churches do. Perhaps even most. But a church that does not discriminate against gay people cannot sponsor a troop. My own church cannot sponsor any BSA units, for exactly that reason.
If the BSA would just leave the religious training to the parents and the churches, and stay out of it, there wouldn't be a problem. When BSA tries to tell my church what we must teach to our own kids, there is a problem.
I agree, almost entirely. It's a wonderful program. The boys develop independence and self-confidence. They learn the value of being honest and cooperating, and the skills to organize and lead the group, along with a bunch of little skills like cooking and map-reading. I think I could help a local unit to pass those things along to the next generation.
There is just one little detail: I am not willing to lie. In order to register, you have to sign the application form. On that form, it says you agree to abide by the DRP and the bylaws. It is not possible for a gay adult, or an atheist at any age, to abide by those bylaws. They say plainly that gay people and atheists are not eligible for membership.
Now, it is possible for a gay person to join, but only if he is willing to lie. Somehow, I think that adults who are willing to lie are not the kind of roll models that we really want to provide for the kids.
I'm sure that some parents wouldn't want gay adults as roll models, either. But, there are fewer of those with each passing year. Most people under 30 (aka, "parents of kids") now are not prejudiced against gays in the way that most people were just 30 or 40 years ago. In another couple of decades, it won't be an issue.
But the harm to the Scouting organization is likely to be permanent. I'm not sure which is worse. The policy that keeps honest people out and lets liars in, and harms the kids in the process; or the professionals at national council who who made that hurtful and short-sighted policy.
The adults in scouting are supposed to refrain from discussing sex (of any kind) with the boys. There is to be no discussion. When a boy raises the topic of sex, the adult is supposed to say something like "There is no place for sex in the boy scouts. We aren't supposed to talk about sex. You should have this conversation with your parents or clergy. I'm sorry, but I cannot continue this conversation." The great majority of BSA adult leaders do follow that policy. Considering that most of the boys are either prepubescent or in puberty, that is probably a wise policy for unrelated adults to follow. The boys own parents, of course, may say something different.
The question of gay people is separate. Of course there are some gay youth, as well as some gay adult leaders. And, there are some individual troops that don't discriminate. But were not discussing the practice of one troop. The National Policy, published by National Council, BSA, says in no uncertain terms that they must discriminate.
I would be glad to help the Boy Scouts, if they will change their discrimination policy and allow me to register again.
I was a scout, and then a scouter, for more than 15 years before the BSA made the policy that gay people may not be members. I have not registered since.
They don't actually forbid gay people from registering. The actual policy only forbids honest gay people from registering. If a gay adult is willing to lie and stay "in the closet", it's ok. Of course, the actual implementation differs from the policy significantly. Most councils have periodic "witch hunts", in which even closeted gay men are expelled.
Nothing to worry about here, at all. The cleaning crew will fix it just fine.
They way airline cleaning crews work, the lenses of those cameras will be smeared with grease and dirt within just a few flights. If they ever clean them, at all, it will be done by wiping a single greasy dirty cloth across all of the lenses in the whole cabin. With only 15 minutes to de-trash and clean the whole cabin, they probably won't even do that.
When the pilots do the pre-flight check list, they might notice that some of the cameras are not working. But those cameras are not on the essential equipment list for the airframe, so they won't ground the airplane to get them fixed. They will just take off anyway -- just like they do when a coffee maker doesn't work in the galley.
The sharp, clear pictures of the grease and dirt smudges will be analyzed by the software. I doubt it will ever identify any terrorists.
There have been a few reports in the news, presumably published by MS-owned journals, about some web site that leaves an unauthorized cookie or something. But I have never seen an actual attack in the wild.
The reason is, of course, that BSD Unix was developed from the start in a hostile-network environment, by people who took security seriously. The process model protects the kernel, and also protects user processes from each other. There were some unchecked buffer lengths and similar issues in early versions, but those have long since been found and corrected. Most of the bugs in the last 20 years or so have been in IO drivers. Apple benefits from that history.
I worry more about firefox than about os-x itself.
The total energy used in a data center is just the sum of the energy used in the various component parts. The components include the various boxes of electronics, the power supplies, the lighting, and the cooling.
Every data center operator is intensely interested in power consumption. The power and cooling cost real, serious money. Any reduction in that cost goes straight to the bottom line. And, we have finite power and cooling for the building, so if/when the needs of the various boxes exceed those limits, we have to do expensive and disruptive upgrades.
If every component part (computer, network switch, ups, monitor, etc.) were labeled with its power and cooling requirements, data center operators would use that information to select equipment that costs less to operate. In the life cycle of a piece of equipment, the electricity to operate it is a big part of the cost. When we go to buy new equipment, we usually have to choose from among several different units that could fit the purpose. The numbers that determine the operating cost absolutely would be used during that selection process.
A publicity campaign, like "Energy Star" could help us to paint the business "Green". But the numbers are what we really need to make rational business decisions.
The "therapy" that they put those kids through is truly horrific. The handbook reads nicely, almost as if they are lovingly trying to help the young men and women. They force the kids into therapy, as if the therapy will help. But the church leaders certainly know that the therapy harms the youth who are forced into it. It's like using bleach to force a black person to become white.
Every medical and psychological association has determined that sexual orientation is unchangeable, and that attempting to change it does harm to the patient. The question is completely settled.
The LDS church uses clerical authority to force those kids into that therapy. They threaten the kids with excommunication and eternal damnation if they do not change their sexual orientation. But the kids are not able to change. It's no wonder so many of those kids attempt suicide.
There are fundamental differences between the LDS and the OA. I have read both the LDS and the OA documents.
The LDS uses its secret documents to harm people. In the LDS, youth who discover that they are gay are subjected to horrific treatment at the hands of the LDS clergy and lay leaders. The LDS documents in question clearly describe that treatment and the policy of applying it without mercy. Many gay LDS youth commit suicide as a result, and the church officially approves and condones that result. If one life is saved by publishing those documents, it is well worth any inconvenience or embarrassment to the LDS church.
The OA (Order of the Arrow) is a program of the BSA (Boy Scouts of America). The BSA uses "secrecy" in the OA program to benefit the boys. There are actually no secrets in the OA. The documents in question are the initiation ceremonies for each of the three levels of OA membership. Any adult, either parent or community leader, may read those documents. The youth members are told that the the ceremonies contain secrets to get them to pay attention to the lessons that are taught in those ceremonies.
(And, they make it difficult for the youth to get copies of the ceremonies before the youth has gone through each ceremony.)
The lessons that the OA teaches through these ceremones are are: that "cheerful service" to other people makes you happy; and that "leadership in service" helps other people to learn the first lesson.
(As a matter of disclosure: I am gay. I am not a member of the LDS. I am a life member of the OA. I do not register with the BSA any more, because of the BSA membership policy re gay people.)
Wikileaks is mirrored in many countries, so no single court anywhere in the world has jurisdiction over all of them. It is hard to say which if any of those sites is actually the original.
A list of mirror sites is available at each mirror. Save the source of this page on your local host, so you can have access to mirrors after your favorite wikileaks site is taken down: http://wikileaks.cx/wiki/Wikileaks:Cover_Names
The question is not whether Cisco routers have back doors. That has to be assumed. If I was running NSA over the last several decades, I would have my people deep inside every communication equipment manufacturer. The manufacturers management might not even know about it.
The NSA surely has arranged to have one or more back doors designed into virtually every kind of communications switch. The only Cisco employees who would know about them would be the NSA people who work inside Cisco, and some regular Cisco employees who have been cleared. If this has not been done, the NSA senior managers should be fired or jailed.
The real questions are: How many back doors are there? and who has the keys? The (assumed) NSA back door might not be the only one. There is a possibility that the Chinese or Indian chip-fab or software contractors have also installed back doors for their own governments.
With billion-gate machines, a few thousand extra gates would be hard to see. If the extra logic looks like instruction-cache, but just has a little extra code, it would be almost impossible.
I looked at that. The economics just don't work for me. My current LED lights eat 38 watts. 0.038 KW x 10 H/day x 365 days/year = 139 KWH/year. At my cost of $0.125/KWH, that's only $18/year. It's hard to justify several-hundred dollars of capital cost, and a hundred-dollar replacement battery every 3 or 4 years, to save $18/year on the power bill.
The problem in my area (south Florida) is hurricanes. The wind occasionally kicks up to 150 mph and stays there for a number of hours. When that happens, anything on the roof that is not extremely robust will be damaged and/or removed. Solar panels that are extremely robust cost quite a lot more than the consumer-grade stuff that you might be able to use in other places. And, if I understand correctly, some places have higher cost per KWH.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that different applications systems have different amounts of stats that must be saved. An RT app usually only has a memory buffer that can be written in a small number of IO's. Many business apps have relatively lots of data, in non-contiguous buffers, that require hundreds of IOs to store. Many business systems have hundreds of such apps running in the machine at the same time. Some systems can have gigs of data, in thousands of buffers, in their write-behind cache. And, some businesses have systems that must not shut down, except for actual emergencies like fire or flood.
How does the hardware designer of a general-purpose computer guess what kinds of apps will run in that machine? He/she cannot.
The external power supply (aka, the UPS) can be configured to accommodate the needs of the application. An application that needs lots of power for a long time can be configured with a big UPS. And, an app that doesn't need it, doesn't have to pay for it.
When filling a box with padding to protect a small item like a sheet of paper, you might be able to reduce the shipping cost if the padding material is lighter-than-air. Instead of using foam peanuts or plastic bags full of air, use plastic bags full of something like helium. The resulting package might weigh less than the empty box.
The purpose of "coding standards", as opposed to "design standards" or "best practices", is to make the code easier to read and understand by making the formatting consistent. But, unique people with specialized education or experience are, well, unique. Each person has unique background, preferences, and habits.
So the meaning of "easier to read and understand" is different for each person who has to read and understand the code. Forcing a programmer to write in a style other than his/her preferred style actually increases errors. And, forcing people to read thing written in styles that they don't like is likely to slow them down. So the right answer is to allow each person to read and write code in his/her preferred style, and to have a tool that puts code into that style on demand.
We use "uncrustify (http://uncrustify.sourceforge.net/ ). Uncrustify is, basically, a feature-rich, flexible, and configurable "beautifier", that works on several C-like languages. It puts code into whatever style the user likes, based on a configuration file in the users home directory. By using uncrustify, each programmer can read in his/her preferred format, even if it is different from the authors preferred format. This minimizes format-induced errors, maximizes ease of reading and understanding.
It also avoids silly arguments about code formatting, so we can spend our time arguing about more important things, like meaningful variable names.
Of course it's not new. It not only looks like ASN.1, it actually is very much like ASN.1. But to me it looks more like an extension of rpcgen, because ASN.1 came with a lot of other baggage. Of course, both rpcgen and asn.1 are just the best known implementations of ideas that were developed far earlier. Shannon's book on information theory explains just this sort of prefix code. These kinds of prefix codes have been in use since the 1960s, and code-generators have been around since the 1970s.
I think the reason that some people at google think it's new is because they are all young. Young people are constantly coming up with "new" ideas that are really two decades or more old. The idea seems new to the young person because he/she has not seen it before. That isn't a jab at google, or at young people. It is just a fact that everything seems new until after you have seen it before.
How many different tools do you need? Is there one tool that is the right tool for every job? Is there even a small inventory of tools that includes the right tool for every possible job? I think the only answer is a resounding NO. Any fixed tool set is sure to omit things that are essential for particular types of jobs. And, any fixed tool set must exclude all newly developed tools, and hence must exclude those future innovations.
I'm sure you have heard the one about the man who has only a hammer. Hammers don't work very well for installing screws. Hammers work even less well for cutting wood. And they don't work at all for cutting steel or soldering copper pipes.
The construction people realized, long ago, that they need carpenters, masons, plumbers, and electricians. Each of the trades has its own set of specialized tools. They just had carpenters and masons for thousands of years. A few hundred years ago plumbing was invented, and that required specialized tools and knowledge. Then, just about a hundred years ago, they invented electricity, and that also required new tools and knowledge. New innovations sometimes require new tools and new specialists.
In software development, we do need specialists. Some of use work on algorithms or protocols. Some work on databases. Some work on presentation or human-interaction. Each area has its own tools. Each has its own specialized languages, libraries, and environments.
And, depending on the task at hand, it is sometimes appropriate to acquire or develop an entirely new tool. Several times, I have developed a new application-specific language extension before starting to develop a big application or a set of related applications. Each on of those extensions was used to generate huge volumes of code that would have been tedious and error-prone to develop any other way.
Now, when you propose to bring a new tool into the shop, it is prudent to consider the costs and benefits. If you use a new language to develop a production application, that new compiler will have to be maintained, and the programming staff will have to maintain the knowledge of how to use it. That adds cost to the enterprise, even if the tool itself is free. So a judgment call is needed as to whether the benefit of the new tool exceeds that cost. Some tools turn out to be silly or ineffective, and others turn out to be extremely useful and cost effective.
The decision to forbid all new tools is just a decision that there cannot ever be a new tool that will be useful and cost-effective. That manager avoids the cost of the new tools, but also avoids the benefits. And he eventually loses his competitive edge over his competition, his staff, and maybe even his job.
I actually know people who really used to think that moving a few extra DNS packets around the network was "too inefficient". Those same people thought that moving even a few extra bytes is "too inefficient", if it was something that has to be moved often, like a host name. That was just a few years ago. Those same people now think nothing about placing the file server for an office site half way around the world, if the rack space, power, cooling, or backup in that office is limited.
When you are buying your first hundred machines, it is tempting to use "cute" names. As you pass a thousand machines, it's not cute any more. When you get to five thousand machines, you really appreciate having machine names that look like inventory tags, and CNAME records that map application-defined hierarchical names into those hardware names.
You gotta be kidding.
A major difference between electronic and paper ballots is in the probability that an attempt to change the outcome will be detected. To change one database can be done by one person, by remote access or even in advance, and leaves no physical evidence at all. To change hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper requires multiple people, with physical access, hours of time, and leaves lots of physical evidence.
The second difference is in the security model. Providing verified security for pieces of paper is a well understood problem. Banks and governments have been doing it successfully for hundreds of years. Providing security for bytes on a disk is not well understood, unless you consider the disk as a physical thing to be locked in a vault. If the systems are connected to any network, or if they run any software, all of the vulnerabilities of the network, software, and systems can be used by an attacker.
The pricing of datacom and telecom services has not had anything to do with the cost of the service since the original AT&T monopoly was broken. Pricing is determined by the market, not by the cost of providing the service. This is because most of the cost is fixed, while the revenue is highly usage-dependent.
From the carrier perspective, the only thing that matters is revenue. The new product (whatever it is this year) will always be marketed at premium price. The old products are priced to maximize revenue. If they can gain revenue by lowering the price and selling more units at that lower price, they do. If they can gain revenue by increasing price and selling fewer units, they do that.
Voice minutes have become cheaper over time largely because of competition. SMS messages are currently fashionable, and so carry a premium price. As soon as text messaging starts losing fashion appeal, some carrier will start selling it for lower pricing, or even giving it away, to get subscription revenue. Abusing the customers with ludicrous per-message pricing will make that day come sooner rather than later.
But you might consider giving some helpful advice to each of those people. Perhaps something like:
I recently received a spam email from otherTravelAgency attempting to sell me a vacation package. I noticed that otherTravelAgency included your email address on the "To" list in that message. It seems that otherTravelAgency has given your personal information to everyone else on that huge distribution list. I don't know about you, but I won't do business with any company that gives my personal information to thousands of people. I deal with goodTravelAgency for my own travel needs. I trust them to keep my personal information safe, and never to give it to anyone. You might want to consider changing travel agencies, too.
Men really do think differently than women. Numerous studies of brain activity, using CAT and similar scanners, find that different areas of the brain are active during similar tasks. Just this week, another study was published showing that the brain activity in gay men is very similar to straight women, and that the activity in lesbian women is similar to straight men, and that brain activity in straight men is very different from straight women.
I work in a system of several million LOC, with a hundred different authors over the course of two decades. I know all of the developers, and I see the difference in the code all the time. Code written by women or gay men is much easier to read, and rarely requires maintenance to fix bugs. Code written by straight men is often uncommented, difficult to read, and requires frequent maintenance to fix bugs. (I don't think we have had any lesbian programmers.) The maintenance frequency shows up very strongly in the reports from the revision control system.
I try to make my code beautiful and clear, in addition to being correct. And verifiable theoretical correctness is better than just passing the test case. The straight men I work with don't seem to be concerned with aesthetic values or theoretical correctness. They just want it to work for the immediate test case. Then they have to work on it again, to fix bugs, usually ten or more times in the first year that the module exists.
If frequency of repair (bug fixes) is an indication of quality, straight women and gay men produce higher quality code, and the numbers prove it. It really is quicker to do it right once than to rush and then fix it later. But, to do so seems to require a different way of thinking.
Perhaps we should go out of our way to recruit women and gay men.
I also fail to understand why microsoft is trying to patent this.
Companies usually patent things to make sure that no one else can make them. Either they want to be sure there will be no such products at all, or they want to control what products are allowed. Altruistic companies sometimes patent evil things just to prevent the evil companies from marketing them. Evil companies usually patent them to increase their own profit or power. I leave to the reader the exercise of deciding what kind of company Microsoft is.
I think we generally agree. Scouting is not the place to discuss sex. Adults simply don't raise the subject, and when boys raise it, they should be told to go to their parents or clergy. And, any scouter who doesn't understand that need to be educated or excluded.
Have you ever seen a scouter, anywhere, greet his or her spouse with a kiss or a touch? Why weren't they kicked out?
When you say it isn't bigotry, that is just not true. It plainly is bigotry. If you were merely expressing your religious beliefs, you could also respect the religious beliefs of others. The fact that you flatly refuse to respect the religious beliefs of others is what makes it bigotry.
The 12th point of the scout law says that "a scout is reverent". The explanation in the handbook has said, for almost a hundred years, that a scout respects the religious beliefs of all other people. Not just of people who believe the same things, but of all other people.
The real problem is that your church has made scouting into something that cannot be used by many other churches, or by any public institution. By requiring all scouting units to enforce your particular interpretation of "moral values", to the exclusion of the interpretations of other churches, your church has made it impossible for public schools and many other churches to sponsor units.
And, in the process, you may have killed the BSA. It isn't dead yet. But if the membership keeps falling for a few more years, it will be.
I think you are right. Unfortunately, the BSA does not agree with your interpretation of those words.
The DRP says that the home (parents), or the organization or group (the church/synagogue/mosque/whatever) should provide the religious training to the boys. The clear implication then is that the adults in scouting should not interfere with that training, or try to set the syllabus. I don't have any problem with that. I am a Christian, though not a "conservative" Christian by any stretch.
The difficulty though is that the BSA publishes policies saying that gay people are immoral, and that all unit sponsors must discriminate. If you are a church, and you want to sponsor a scout troop, you must agree to exclude gay people. I know that many churches do. Perhaps even most. But a church that does not discriminate against gay people cannot sponsor a troop. My own church cannot sponsor any BSA units, for exactly that reason. If the BSA would just leave the religious training to the parents and the churches, and stay out of it, there wouldn't be a problem. When BSA tries to tell my church what we must teach to our own kids, there is a problem.
The uniform pants are made in USA, by union labor. Or, at least they used to be. I haven't actually checked that detail in a few years.
I agree, almost entirely. It's a wonderful program. The boys develop independence and self-confidence. They learn the value of being honest and cooperating, and the skills to organize and lead the group, along with a bunch of little skills like cooking and map-reading. I think I could help a local unit to pass those things along to the next generation.
There is just one little detail: I am not willing to lie. In order to register, you have to sign the application form. On that form, it says you agree to abide by the DRP and the bylaws. It is not possible for a gay adult, or an atheist at any age, to abide by those bylaws. They say plainly that gay people and atheists are not eligible for membership.
Now, it is possible for a gay person to join, but only if he is willing to lie. Somehow, I think that adults who are willing to lie are not the kind of roll models that we really want to provide for the kids.
I'm sure that some parents wouldn't want gay adults as roll models, either. But, there are fewer of those with each passing year. Most people under 30 (aka, "parents of kids") now are not prejudiced against gays in the way that most people were just 30 or 40 years ago. In another couple of decades, it won't be an issue.
But the harm to the Scouting organization is likely to be permanent. I'm not sure which is worse. The policy that keeps honest people out and lets liars in, and harms the kids in the process; or the professionals at national council who who made that hurtful and short-sighted policy.
The adults in scouting are supposed to refrain from discussing sex (of any kind) with the boys. There is to be no discussion. When a boy raises the topic of sex, the adult is supposed to say something like "There is no place for sex in the boy scouts. We aren't supposed to talk about sex. You should have this conversation with your parents or clergy. I'm sorry, but I cannot continue this conversation." The great majority of BSA adult leaders do follow that policy. Considering that most of the boys are either prepubescent or in puberty, that is probably a wise policy for unrelated adults to follow. The boys own parents, of course, may say something different.
The question of gay people is separate. Of course there are some gay youth, as well as some gay adult leaders. And, there are some individual troops that don't discriminate. But were not discussing the practice of one troop. The National Policy, published by National Council, BSA, says in no uncertain terms that they must discriminate.
I would be glad to help the Boy Scouts, if they will change their discrimination policy and allow me to register again. I was a scout, and then a scouter, for more than 15 years before the BSA made the policy that gay people may not be members. I have not registered since.
They don't actually forbid gay people from registering. The actual policy only forbids honest gay people from registering. If a gay adult is willing to lie and stay "in the closet", it's ok. Of course, the actual implementation differs from the policy significantly. Most councils have periodic "witch hunts", in which even closeted gay men are expelled.
Nothing to worry about here, at all. The cleaning crew will fix it just fine.
They way airline cleaning crews work, the lenses of those cameras will be smeared with grease and dirt within just a few flights. If they ever clean them, at all, it will be done by wiping a single greasy dirty cloth across all of the lenses in the whole cabin. With only 15 minutes to de-trash and clean the whole cabin, they probably won't even do that.
When the pilots do the pre-flight check list, they might notice that some of the cameras are not working. But those cameras are not on the essential equipment list for the airframe, so they won't ground the airplane to get them fixed. They will just take off anyway -- just like they do when a coffee maker doesn't work in the galley.
The sharp, clear pictures of the grease and dirt smudges will be analyzed by the software. I doubt it will ever identify any terrorists.
There have been a few reports in the news, presumably published by MS-owned journals, about some web site that leaves an unauthorized cookie or something. But I have never seen an actual attack in the wild. The reason is, of course, that BSD Unix was developed from the start in a hostile-network environment, by people who took security seriously. The process model protects the kernel, and also protects user processes from each other. There were some unchecked buffer lengths and similar issues in early versions, but those have long since been found and corrected. Most of the bugs in the last 20 years or so have been in IO drivers. Apple benefits from that history. I worry more about firefox than about os-x itself.
The total energy used in a data center is just the sum of the energy used in the various component parts. The components include the various boxes of electronics, the power supplies, the lighting, and the cooling.
Every data center operator is intensely interested in power consumption. The power and cooling cost real, serious money. Any reduction in that cost goes straight to the bottom line. And, we have finite power and cooling for the building, so if/when the needs of the various boxes exceed those limits, we have to do expensive and disruptive upgrades.
If every component part (computer, network switch, ups, monitor, etc.) were labeled with its power and cooling requirements, data center operators would use that information to select equipment that costs less to operate. In the life cycle of a piece of equipment, the electricity to operate it is a big part of the cost. When we go to buy new equipment, we usually have to choose from among several different units that could fit the purpose. The numbers that determine the operating cost absolutely would be used during that selection process.
A publicity campaign, like "Energy Star" could help us to paint the business "Green". But the numbers are what we really need to make rational business decisions.
The "therapy" that they put those kids through is truly horrific. The handbook reads nicely, almost as if they are lovingly trying to help the young men and women. They force the kids into therapy, as if the therapy will help. But the church leaders certainly know that the therapy harms the youth who are forced into it. It's like using bleach to force a black person to become white.
Every medical and psychological association has determined that sexual orientation is unchangeable, and that attempting to change it does harm to the patient. The question is completely settled.
The LDS church uses clerical authority to force those kids into that therapy. They threaten the kids with excommunication and eternal damnation if they do not change their sexual orientation. But the kids are not able to change. It's no wonder so many of those kids attempt suicide.
Here's some more reading: http://www.apa.org/topics/orientation.html http://www.healthyminds.org/glbissues.cfm http://www.ama-assn.org/apps/pf_new/pf_online?f_n=resultLink&doc=policyfiles/HnE/H-160.991.HTM&s_t=homosexuality&catg=AMA/HnE&catg=AMA/BnGnC&catg=AMA/DIR&&nth=1&&st_p=0&nth=1& http://www.youth-suicide.com/gay-bisexual/
There are fundamental differences between the LDS and the OA. I have read both the LDS and the OA documents.
The LDS uses its secret documents to harm people. In the LDS, youth who discover that they are gay are subjected to horrific treatment at the hands of the LDS clergy and lay leaders. The LDS documents in question clearly describe that treatment and the policy of applying it without mercy. Many gay LDS youth commit suicide as a result, and the church officially approves and condones that result. If one life is saved by publishing those documents, it is well worth any inconvenience or embarrassment to the LDS church.
The OA (Order of the Arrow) is a program of the BSA (Boy Scouts of America). The BSA uses "secrecy" in the OA program to benefit the boys. There are actually no secrets in the OA. The documents in question are the initiation ceremonies for each of the three levels of OA membership. Any adult, either parent or community leader, may read those documents. The youth members are told that the the ceremonies contain secrets to get them to pay attention to the lessons that are taught in those ceremonies. (And, they make it difficult for the youth to get copies of the ceremonies before the youth has gone through each ceremony.)
The lessons that the OA teaches through these ceremones are are: that "cheerful service" to other people makes you happy; and that "leadership in service" helps other people to learn the first lesson.
(As a matter of disclosure: I am gay. I am not a member of the LDS. I am a life member of the OA. I do not register with the BSA any more, because of the BSA membership policy re gay people.)
Wikileaks is mirrored in many countries, so no single court anywhere in the world has jurisdiction over all of them. It is hard to say which if any of those sites is actually the original.
A list of mirror sites is available at each mirror. Save the source of this page on your local host, so you can have access to mirrors after your favorite wikileaks site is taken down: http://wikileaks.cx/wiki/Wikileaks:Cover_Names
The question is not whether Cisco routers have back doors. That has to be assumed. If I was running NSA over the last several decades, I would have my people deep inside every communication equipment manufacturer. The manufacturers management might not even know about it.
The NSA surely has arranged to have one or more back doors designed into virtually every kind of communications switch. The only Cisco employees who would know about them would be the NSA people who work inside Cisco, and some regular Cisco employees who have been cleared. If this has not been done, the NSA senior managers should be fired or jailed.
The real questions are: How many back doors are there? and who has the keys? The (assumed) NSA back door might not be the only one. There is a possibility that the Chinese or Indian chip-fab or software contractors have also installed back doors for their own governments.
With billion-gate machines, a few thousand extra gates would be hard to see. If the extra logic looks like instruction-cache, but just has a little extra code, it would be almost impossible.
I looked at that. The economics just don't work for me. My current LED lights eat 38 watts. 0.038 KW x 10 H/day x 365 days/year = 139 KWH/year. At my cost of $0.125/KWH, that's only $18/year. It's hard to justify several-hundred dollars of capital cost, and a hundred-dollar replacement battery every 3 or 4 years, to save $18/year on the power bill.
The problem in my area (south Florida) is hurricanes. The wind occasionally kicks up to 150 mph and stays there for a number of hours. When that happens, anything on the roof that is not extremely robust will be damaged and/or removed. Solar panels that are extremely robust cost quite a lot more than the consumer-grade stuff that you might be able to use in other places. And, if I understand correctly, some places have higher cost per KWH.